Ran Prieur

August 9.

2021-08-09T21:10:51Z

August 9. When I was a kid I had a dream that the world would end on August 9. Instead, here we are in the slow-motion apocalypse, and I'm trying to say something that's not obvious. Covid-19 has been holding center stage in the Spectacle, but I think at least three things are bigger threats.

Number three is economic decline. It's obvious that the Dow-Jones will continue to rise to record highs, while the number of homeless people also rises to record highs -- yet the big media will keep using the Dow as a symbolic measure of economic health.

The death toll of economic malaise can be hard to see, because the deaths don't fall under any clear category. A good article on this is The Dying Russians by Masha Gessen, who tries to pin down why so many Russians are dying, and ends up blaming lack of hope. I would say, as life gets worse, people take bigger risks, because fuck it.

If it gets to the point where we're going hungry, there will be a big rise in death rates before we're actually dying of starvation. From the 2014 archives, here's a nice bit about famine.

Threat number two is climate change. It's obvious that the world's economies will not make the sacrifices to stop it, even though they could. According to this reddit comment:

Bulk carbon sequestration directly from the air (the most expensive sequestration option) would cost about $100 a ton, even without future R&D to bring the cost down. Worldwide emissions of CO2 are about 36 billion tons a year. So $3.6 trillion a year to get to zero net emissions.

That's expensive, but way cheaper than what's actually going to happen: letting climate catastrophe run its course. Here's a recent John Michael Greer post about what to expect, The Future is a Landscape.

A couple of thousand years from now, in other words, archeologists from one or more of the future nations of eastern North America will travel on muleback through the slowly greening deserts to unearth the fabled ruins of Las Vegas and marvel at the insane bad taste of their ancestors.

Threat number one is internet-aided mass insanity. This subreddit post mentions how the printing press led to witch hunts, and here's a full article, Print and the Persecution of Witchcraft. In the 1930's, An Affordable Radio Brought Nazi Propaganda Home. Every time there's a new information technology, people use it to enhance what the human brain does best: distorting perception to feed the hunger to be part of a story. And all through history, the most popular story has been "kill the people not like us."

August 6.

2021-08-06T18:40:34Z

August 6. Yesterday I finished two projects I've been working on for a while. First, there's a great out-of-print philosophy book called The Psychic Grid by Beatrice Bruteau. Its conclusions are consistent with Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality, and Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned, but all three books take different angles. The basic idea is that the only true reality is the incomprehensible universal, and we filter that down to a tiny perspective that we can work with. Bruteau's focus is on what she calls "conviction communities," and this bit fits our present political situation:

But when a community has a set of experiences, well coordinated with expectation, language and behavior, shared by the whole community in a consistent and coherent way, which are not present in another community, then the two communities have lost their common ground for judgment and can only battle one another.

The heart of the book is chapter 7, What is Real? I've transcribed it and posted it on my readings page.

My other project is a new video for one of my favorite songs. I live in an aesthetic world a long way from public consensus, and most of you will think the song is screechy and the images are cringy: Wireheads - Holiday

August 4.

2021-08-04T16:20:33Z

August 4. I'm mentally sluggish this week, so more links. Continuing on the subject of internet disinformation, Deepfakes are one click away. It's an interview with my blogging friend from the old days, Tim Boucher. While I've been dipping my toes in the breakdown of reality, Tim has been swimming in it, working as a moderator for a large social media site, inventing a lost civilization called Quatria, and writing about hyperreality, "a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins."

New subject, sort of. Alex recommends this video series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. If you don't want to watch fifty hours of videos, there are transcripts.

Ugo Bardi has been one of the smartest doomers for a long time. I haven't kept up on his stuff, but he has at least two good blogs now, The Proud Holobionts and The Seneca Effect.

August 2.

2021-08-02T14:00:27Z

August 2. Some good news links. One Lost Methyl Group = Huge Amounts of Food Production. An enzyme called FTO was engineered into rice and potatoes, and crop yields went up 50%.

The plants' root systems were deeper and more extensive, and photosynthetic efficiency went up by a startling 36%. Transpiration from the leaves was up 78%, but at the same time, the plants of both species showed significantly higher drought tolerance.

My objection to GMO crops is political. If a modification doesn't breed true, and if farmers can't do it themselves, then we are dependent for our survival on big systems that have been designed to increase their power over us through profit.

The best case is, with better design of public institutions, biotech could be used to permanently upgrade the non-human world. If we can make the planet better than we found it, humans will have finally justified our existence.

Related: How organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies.

Instant water cleaning method 'millions of times' better than commercial approach.

New 'mirror' fabric can cool wearers by nearly 5°C.

Flying Only with the Heat of the Sun, with black hot air balloons that use sunlight to heat the air inside them.

How to Unlearn a Disease. Some diseases are just bad patterns in our neural pathways, and "electroceuticals" might straighten them out.

And some DIY health, 5-minute breathing exercise lowers blood pressure better than working out, medication. Supposedly you need a special device, but it seems like you could just cover your mouth and suck really hard.