Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2022-02-04T16:00:45Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com February 4. http://ranprieur.com/#68ee15763a46a19e3df3f98be8314e9b322ace93 2022-02-04T16:00:45Z February 4. So I'm finally reading David Graeber and David Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything. This Goodreads review summarizes some of the main points, and this is how the book summarizes itself in chapter 1:

If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of 'the state'? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The most interesting bit I've read so far is about how prehistoric people were able to move small physical items across continents, without capitalist trade networks. One way they did it was to invest the items themselves with great meaning. People made small works of art and went on long quests to trade them for other works of art.

It's often said that money is the root of all evil, and then someone always points out that the actual quote is "Love of money is the root of all evil." Ironically, the motivation for making that argument, for defending money as not intrinsically harmful, is love of money.

Money is totally intrinsically harmful. Whether or not you love it, money strips the meaning from physical items, from blocks of time, from human activities, and replaces those many diverse meanings with copies of the same meaning: this is a token which can be used to force other people to do shit.

Graeber and Wengrow try to figure out why, in the indigenous societies of northeast America, material wealth did not confer the right to control others, while in Europe it did. I see it as a choice between two social paradigms. In one, you start with some concept of progress, and then force people to get behind it, and it becomes a war of all against all to climb out of the low positions into the high ones.

In the other, we start with the rule that no one shall be subject to anyone else's will, that the workforce shall be 100% volunteers, and then under that constraint, see what cool stuff we can do.

]]> February 2. http://ranprieur.com/#7aafdf10df3919107834345c45e66a863f24f8da 2022-02-02T14:40:52Z February 2. A few links. Canopy "is a game in which two players compete to grow the most bountiful rainforest." I don't know how fun it is, but there's a lot of room to make more games like this.

104 Mesmerizing Mosque Ceilings. Yeah, the people who made these were totally tripping.

And Reality by Consensus is a fascinating thought experiment, about what the world would be like if it filled itself in on the fly, based on our expectations and desires. I like to think reality is already like that, and for some reason we're all in a very sticky neighborhood. This subject reminds me of a quote from Terence McKenna: "It's a delusion if it happens to one person. It's a cult if it happens to twenty people. And it's true if it happens to ten thousand people. Well this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity... We vote on it?"

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