Ran Prieur

June 7.

2021-06-07T19:30:26Z

June 7. Posted a couple weeks ago to Weird Collapse, The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth. Here's a 2008 article on the same subject, Debunking the 'Tragedy of the Commons', and here's how I've explained it before:

If you go out and look, land held in common tends to be managed well, and privately owned land tends to be exploited. But in 1968 a eugenicist named Garrett Hardin pulled a paper out of his ass that said exactly the opposite with no evidence, and the owning classes thought it was brilliant.

Does it matter that Hardin was a eugenicist? Yes, because it's the same kind of evil thinking. To support control of human breeding, you have to be comfortable that the people who will be doing the controlling, are people like you. So you have to be confident that you are a member of a justifiably power-holding class. Hardin also wrote a paper on "lifeboat ethics," again a thought experiment with no evidence, arguing that it's bad to give money to the poor.

Note that the ecological destruction of the modern era is not an example of the "tragedy of the commons," but the tragedy of central control and private property. Related, from 2007: Iain Boal: Specters of Malthus, a smart interview arguing that population only outruns food supply when there's non-local control of resources.

I should also say, to reduce the human population, we only need two things: easy access to birth control, and some way of supporting old people who don't have kids. If people don't need to have kids for economic reasons, and if women aren't forced to be baby factories, then the birthrate drops to sub-replacement.

More negative links. Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie. Basically, by forcing third-party sellers to keep their prices high, and charging them massive commissions, Amazon subsidizes its free shipping. Without illegal monopoly practices, Amazon's business model falls apart.

A lot of pandemic homeschoolers are not going back. On the same subject, by Rebecca Solnit, Abolish High School.

Finally, The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here, because last year in Libya a weaponized drone hunted down a human target without being told to. If we want to avoid the normalization of killer robots, we need a law that explicitly denies robots the right of self-defense. So if you try to destroy a drone, the most it can do is take your picture and use it to bring charges for vandalism.

June 3.

2021-06-03T15:50:04Z

June 3. Right after making Monday's post, I took my annual early summer LSD trip. My supply is low enough that I'm only doing it once a year now, but this time I decided to try a tab and a half. The only difference I noticed was that it came on a lot faster. I've still never hallucinated on any substance -- I see what everyone else sees, but differently.

I should also say, LSD is serious, and the younger you are, the bigger the risk. If you're over fifty, your brain is a rusty old engine, and psychedelics are like whacking it with a pipe to loosen it up. You wouldn't whack a cat with a pipe, and that cat is your sixteen year old brain. And unlike cannabis, LSD can bend your brain so it can't be bent back. Anyway, if you're going to do it, my advice is to stock up on fresh fruit, and go walk around outside.

First I took a walk downtown. I've never liked the metaphor that people are asleep, and should wake up. Metaphors should be based on something that makes sense literally, and literal sleep is wonderful. What I saw on my walk, is that humans are not so much asleep, as we are deeply unalive. I mean, we're getting better. But still, what a delicate balance, to be alive enough to set a good example for others, but not so alive that they kill you.

Then, as I always do, I walked up the river trail out of town. I was reminded of the Wallace Stevens line, "We live in an old chaos of the sun," and the Steven Wright line, "God is a huge amplifier and life is just feedback." Nature is not a temple. Nature is a filthy nectar-dripping riot, and human hedonism is pinched and clunky in comparison.

I don't want to be too ungrateful to be human. We can do a lot of things that no other animal can. We can go deep into our own imaginations and take others along. We can tell stories about the stars. And we can listen to, and create, a huge variety of beautiful sounds.

The next day I went back and filmed a new video. It's for one of Big Blood's trippiest and most challenging songs: Sequins. The structure of the song is nine similar sections of 80 beats, so I took the best bit I filmed, and looped it to sync nine times. So far I haven't used Windows Movie Maker, just Windows Video Editor. The birds are cliff swallows.

June 2.

2021-06-02T14:40:18Z

June 2. The new Firefox update (89) does at least two things I hate. Here's how to fix them.

When you try to search in the search box on the Firefox home page, it moves your search to the address bar. To keep it in the search box: 1) Type about:config into the address bar, and accept the danger. 2) In the search bar that comes up, type handoff. 3) Double-click "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar" to false. "improvesearch"? "Awesomebar"? What is this bullshit?

The other thing is it massively pads my bookmarks. This can't be fixed from about:config. You have to make a userChrome.css file. 1) Find your profile folder using these instructions. 2) Create a userChrome.css file using these instructions. 3) With a text editor (I recommend Notepad++), open your userChrome.css file and copy the code suggested here, but with fewer pixels. I've set all the numbers to 1, and I'm considering 0.

Taking a step back, this is all part of technological collapse. Things that could be simple are made increasingly complex, under the guise of "upgrades", so that engineers can justify their jobs. This complexity makes the practical level of our world less accessible to ordinary users. Stuff that used to be out in the open, is put into black boxes that are hard to get your hands in.

Everything is getting slicker on the surface and more kafkaesque at the core, and we all feel more powerless, and justifiably anxious about things going wrong that we can't fix. When enough things go wrong at once, whole subsystems fall to the highest technological level that people still understand, which might be quite low.