Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report appears to have hit a nerve. That didn’t come as any sort of a surprise, admittedly. It’s one thing to point out that going back to the simpler and less energy-intensive technologies of earlier eras could help extract us from the corner into which industrial society has been busily painting itself in recent decades; it’s quite another to point out that doing this can also be great fun, more so than anything that comes out of today’s fashionable technologies, and in a good many cases the results include an objectively better quality of life as well
That’s not one of the canned speeches that opponents of progress are supposed to make. According to the folk mythology of modern industrial culture, since progress always makes things better, the foes of whatever gets labeled as progress are supposed to put on hair shirts and insist that everyone has to suffer virtuously from a lack of progress, for some reason based on sentimental superstition. The Pygmalion effect being what it is, it’s not hard to find opponents of progress who say what they’re expected to say, and thus fulfill their assigned role in contemporary culture, which is to stand there in their hair shirts bravely protesting until the steamroller of progress rolls right over them.
The grip of that particular bit of folk mythology on the collective imagination of our time is tight enough that when somebody brings up some other reason to oppose “progress”—we’ll get into the ambiguities behind that familiar label in a moment—a great many people quite literally can’t absorb what’s actually being said, and respond instead to the canned speeches they expect to hear. Thus I had several people attempt to dispute the comments on last week’s post, castigating my readers with varying degrees of wrath and profanity for thinking that they had to sacrifice the delights of today’s technology and go creeping mournfully back to the unsatisfying lifestyles of an earlier day.
That was all the more ironic in that none of the readers who were commenting on the post were saying anything of the kind. Most of them were enthusiastically talking about how much more durable, practical, repairable, enjoyable, affordable, and user-friendly older technologies are compared to the disposable plastic trash that fills the stores these days. They were discussing how much more fun it is to embrace the delights of outdated technologies than it would be to go creeping mournfully back—or forward, if you prefer—to the unsatisfying lifestyles of the present time. That heresy is far more than the alleged openmindness and intellectual diversity of our age is willing to tolerate, so it’s not surprising that some people tried to pretend that nothing of the sort had been said at all. What was surprising to me, and pleasantly so, was the number of readers who were ready to don the party clothes of some earlier time and join in the Butlerian carnival.
There are subtleties to the project of deliberate technological regress that may not be obvious at first glance, though, and it seems sensible to discuss those here before we proceed. It’s important, to begin with, to remember that when talking heads these days babble about technology in the singular, as a uniform, monolithic thing that progresses according to some relentless internal logic of its own, they’re spouting balderdash. In the real world, there’s no such monolith; instead, there are technologies in the plural, a great many of them, clustered more or less loosely in technological suites which may or may not have any direct relation to one another.
An example might be useful here. Consider the technologies necessary to build a steel-framed bicycle. The metal parts require the particular suite of technologies we use to smelt ores, combine the resulting metals into useful alloys, and machine and weld those into shapes that fit together to make a bicycle. The tires, inner tubes, brake pads, seat cushion, handlebar grips, and paint require a different suite of technologies drawing on various branches of applied organic chemistry, and a few other suites also have a place: for example, the one that’s needed to make and apply lubricants The suites that make a bicycle have other uses; if you can build a bicycle, as Orville and Wilbur Wright demonstrated, you can also build an aircraft, and a variety of other interesting machines as well; that said, there are other technologies—say, the ones needed to manufacture medicines, or precision optics, or electronics—that require very different technological suites. You can have everything you need to build a bicycle and still be unable to make a telescope or a radio receiver, and vice versa.
Strictly speaking, therefore, nothing requires the project of deliberate technological regress to move in lockstep to the technologies of a specific past date and stay there. It would be wholly possible to dump certain items of modern technology while keeping others. It would be just as possible to replace one modern technological suite with an older equivalent from one decade, another with an equivalent from a different decade and so on. Imagine, for example, a future America in which solar water heaters (worked out by 1920) and passive solar architecture (mostly developed in the 1960s and 1970s) were standard household features, canal boats (dating from before 1800) and tall ships (ditto) were the primary means of bulk transport, shortwave radio (developed in the early 20th century) was the standard long-range communications medium, ultralight aircraft (largely developed in the 1980s) were still in use, and engineers crunched numbers using slide rules (perfected around 1880).
There’s no reason why such a pastiche of technologies from different eras couldn’t work. We know this because what passes for modern technology is a pastiche of the same kind, in which (for example) cars whose basic design dates from the 1890s are gussied up with onboard computers invented a century later. Much of modern technology, in fact, is old technology with a new coat of paint and a few electronic gimmicks tacked on, and it’s old technology that originated in many different eras, too. Part of what differentiates modern technology from older equivalents, in other words, is mere fashion. Another part, though, moves into more explosive territory.
In the conversation that followed last week’s post, one of my readers—tip of the archdruid’s hat to Cathy—recounted the story of the one and only class on advertising she took at college. The teacher invited a well-known advertising executive to come in and talk about the business, and one of the points he brought up was the marketing of disposable razors. The old-fashioned steel safety razor, the guy admitted cheerfully, was a much better product: it was more durable, less expensive, and gave a better shave than disposable razors. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the kind of profits for the razor industry that the latter wanted, and so the job of the advertising company was to convince shavers that they really wanted to spend more money on a worse product instead.
I know it may startle some people to hear a luxuriantly bearded archdruid talk about shaving, but I do have a certain amount of experience with the process—though admittedly it’s been a while. The executive was quite correct: an old-fashioned safety razor gives better shaves than a disposable. What’s more, an old-fashioned safety razor combined with a shaving brush, a cake of shaving soap, a mug and a bit of hot water from the teakettle produces a shaving experience that’s vastly better, in every sense, than what you’ll get from squirting cold chemical-laced foam out of a disposable can and then scraping your face with a disposable razor; the older method, furthermore, takes no more time, costs much less on a per-shave basis, and has a drastically smaller ecological footprint to boot.
Notice also the difference in the scale and complexity of the technological suites needed to maintain these two ways of shaving. To shave with a safety razor and shaving soap, you need the metallurgical suite that produces razors and razor blades, the very simple household-chemistry suite that produces soap, the ability to make pottery and brushes, and some way to heat water. To shave with a disposable razor and a can of squirt-on shaving foam, you need fossil fuels for plastic feedstocks, chemical plants to manufacture the plastic and the foam, the whole range of technologies needed to manufacture and fill the pressurized can, and so on—all so that you can count on getting an inferior shave at a higher price, and the razor industry can boost its quarterly profits.
That’s a small and arguably silly example of a vast and far from silly issue. These days, when you see the words “new and improved” on a product, rather more often than not, the only thing that’s been improved is the bottom line of the company that’s trying to sell it to you. When you hear equivalent claims about some technology that’s being marketed to society as a whole, rather than sold to you personally, the same rule applies at least as often. That’s one of the things that drove the enthusiastic conversations on this blog’s comment page last week, as readers came out of hiding to confess that they, too, had stopped using this or that piece of cutting-edge, up-to-date, hypermodern trash, and replaced it with some sturdy, elegant, user-friendly device from an earlier decade which works better and lacks the downsides of the newer item.
What, after all, defines a change as “progress”? There’s a wilderness of ambiguities hidden in that apparently simple word. The popular notion of progress presupposes that there’s an inherent dynamic to history, that things change, or tend to change, or at the very least ought to change, from worse to better over time. That presupposition then gets flipped around into the even more dubious claim that just because something’s new, it must be better than whatever it replaced. Move from there to specific examples, and all of a sudden it’s necessary to deal with competing claims—if there are two hot new technologies on the market, is option A more progressive than option B, or vice versa? The answer, of course, is that whichever of them manages to elbow the other aside will be retroactively awarded the coveted title of the next step in the march of progress.
That was exactly the process by which the appropriate tech of the 1970s was shoved aside and buried in the memory hole of our culture. In its heyday, appropriate tech was as cutting-edge and progressive as anything you care to name, a rapidly advancing field pushed forward by brilliant young engineers and innovative startups, and it saw itself (and presented itself to the world) as the wave of the future. In the wake of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution of the 1980s, though, it was retroactively stripped of its erstwhile status as an icon of progress and consigned to the dustbin of the past. Technologies that had been lauded in the media as brilliantly innovative in 1978 were thus being condemned in the same media as Luddite throwbacks by 1988. If that abrupt act of redefinition reminds any of my readers of the way history got rewritten in George Orwell’s 1984—“Oceania has never been allied with Eurasia” and the like—well, let’s just say the parallel was noticed at the time, too.
The same process on a much smaller scale can be traced with equal clarity in the replacement of the safety razor and shaving soap with the disposable razor and squirt-can shaving foam. In what sense is the latter, which wastes more resources and generates more trash in the process of giving users a worse shave at a higher price, more progressive than the former? Merely the fact that it’s been awarded that title by advertising and the media. If razor companies could make more money by reintroducing the Roman habit of scraping beard hairs off the face with a chunk of pumice, no doubt that would quickly be proclaimed as the last word in cutting-edge, up-to-date hypermodernity, too.
Behind the mythological image of the relentless and inevitable forward march of technology-in-the-singular in the grand cause of progress, in other words, lies a murky underworld of crass commercial motives and no-holds-barred struggles over which of the available technologies will get the funding and marketing that will define it as the next great step in progress. That’s as true of major technological programs as it is of shaving supplies. Some of my readers are old enough, as I am, to remember when supersonic airliners and undersea habitats were the next great steps in progress, until all of a sudden they weren’t. We may not be all that far from the point at which space travel and nuclear power will go the way of Sealab and the Concorde.
In today’s industrial societies, we don’t talk about that. It’s practically taboo these days to mention the long, long list of waves of the future that abruptly stalled and rolled back out to sea without delivering on their promoters’ overblown promises. Remind people that the same rhetoric currently being used to prop up faith in space travel, nuclear power, or any of today’s other venerated icons of the religion of progress was lavished just as thickly on these earlier failures, and you can pretty much expect to have that comment shouted down as an irrelevancy if the other people in the conversation don’t simply turn their backs and pretend that they never heard you say anything at all.
They have to do something of the sort, because the alternative is to admit that what we call “progress” isn’t the impersonal, unstoppable force of nature that industrial culture’s ideology insists it must be. Pay attention to the grand technological projects that failed, compare them with those that are failing now, and it’s impossible to keep ignoring certain crucial if hugely unpopular points. To begin with technological progress is a function of collective choices—do we fund Sealab or the Apollo program? Supersonic transports or urban light rail? Energy conservation and appropriate tech or an endless series of wars in the Middle East? No impersonal force makes those decisions; individuals and institutions make them, and then use the rhetoric of impersonal progress to cloak the political and financial agendas that guide the decision-making process.
What’s more, even if the industrial world chooses to invest its resources in a project, the laws of physics and economics determine whether the project is going to work. The Concorde is the poster child here, a technological successbut an economic flop that never even managed to cover its operating costs. Like nuclear power, it was only viable given huge and continuing government subsidies, and since the strategic benefits Britain and France got from having Concordes in the air were nothing like so great as those they got from having an independent source of raw material for nuclear weapons, it’s not hard to see why the subsidies went where they did.
That is to say, when something is being lauded as the next great step forward in the glorious march of progress leading humanity to a better world, those who haven’t drunk themselves tipsy on folk mythology need to keep four things in mind. The first is that the next great step forward in the glorious march of progres (etc.) might not actually work when it’s brought down out of the billowing clouds of overheated rhetoric into the cold hard world of everyday life. The second is that even if it works, the next great step forward (etc.) may be a white elephant in economic terms, and survive only so long as it gets propped up by subsidies. The third is that even if it does make economic sense, the next great step (etc.) may be an inferior product, and do a less effective job of meeting human needs than whatever it’s supposed to replace. The fourth is that when it comes right down to it, to label something as the next great (etc.) is just a sales pitch, an overblown and increasingly trite way of saying “Buy this product!”
Those necessary critiques, in turn, are all implicit in the project of deliberate technological regress. Get past the thoughtstopping rhetoric that insists “you can’t turn back the clock”—to rephrase a comment of G.K. Chesterton’s, most people turn back the clock every fall, so that’s hardly a valid objection—and it becomes hard not to notice that “progress” is just a label for whatever choices happen to have been made by governments and corporations, with or without input from the rest of us. If we don’t like the choices that have been made for us in the name of progress, in turn, we can choose something else.
Now of course it’s possible to stuff that sort of thinking back into the straitjacket of progress, and claim that progress is chugging along just fine, and all we have to do is get it back on the proper track, or what have you. This is a very common sort of argument, and one that’s been used over and over again by critics of this or that candidate for the next (etc.). The problem with that argument, as I see it, is that it may occasionally win battles but it pretty consistently loses the war; by failing to challenge the folk mythology of progress and the agendas that are enshrined by that mythology, it guarantees that no matter what technology or policy or program gets put into place, it’ll end up leading the same place as all the others before it, because it questions the means but forgets to question the goals.
That’s the trap hardwired into the contemporary faith in progress. Once you buy into the notion that the specific choices made by industrial societies over the last three centuries or so are something more than the projects that happened to win out in the struggle for wealth and power, once you let yourself believe that there’s a teleology to it all—that there’s some objectively definable goal called “progress” that all these choices did a better or worse job of furthering—you’ve just made it much harder to ask where this thing called “progress” is going. The word “progress,” remember, means going further in the same direction, and it’s precisely questions about the direction that industrial society is going that most need to be asked.
I’d like to suggest, in fact, that going further in the direction we’ve been going isn’t a particularly bright idea just now. It isn’t even necessary to point to the more obviously self-destructive dimensions of business as usual. Look at any trend that affects your life right now, however global or local that trend may be, and extrapolate it out in a straight line indefinitely; that’s what going further in the same direction means. If that appeals to you, dear reader, then you’re certainly welcome to it. I have to say it doesn’t do much for me.
283 comments:
For those that don't want to click, here's his list of requirements for replacing an older technology with a new one. I, for one, am on board with this thought process (although I admit I'm typing this from my laptop - which I haven't figured out how to get rid of yet).
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
I'll just assume that Wendell doesn't use a disposable razor...
2/18/15, 6:32 PM
Kutamun said...
In the case of relativity ;
Television , nuclear power and armanents , GPS sat- nav systems
In the case of quantum theory ;
Lasers , transistor ie personal computers , peds , mobile phones , by extension , the internet and social media such as this google blog ....
These technologies , of course , imply the subsidy of an underlying energy / industrial system to make them happen , and it is this which is now at risk . I feel it is entirely posiible that these equations have been known to past civilisations , lost and recapitulated by ours , with similarly disastrous effects to giving a four year old with ADHD the keys to the family BMW ....
What would the Grand Unifying THeory of Everything which links relativity to quantum mechanics ( the relationship between the four forces ) enable us to invent ???
Fusion springs to mind , also it has been suggested the ability to transcend space and time , together with the realisation that all things are linked , that we are wave forms springing from a unified field ..,
The ability to upload ourselves to a hard drive , email ourselves to a habitable planet in a parallel universe where a version of ourselves may then be 3- D printed ? ( i may already be there with these trippy thoughts , ha ha ) .
I think it is these matters that the folks at CERN with their Hadron collider are furiously pursuing , no doubt aware that we are , with our relativistic political , social and economic structures currently devouring the planet at a furious rate and inevitably headed toward civilisational collapse ..
Lets hope we dont succeed and let the four year old unsociable primate with serious behavioural problems loose in an ever expanding universe of Pure Abstract Potential !
Hawking himself has lately said he doubts this equation exists , though even the suggestion of it existing seems to have brought the possibility of God back from his relativistic demise
Check out Cloud Atlas for an excellent portayal of these quantum possibilities ...
Cheers mates
Kuta '
2/18/15, 6:46 PM
Lili said...
Other news in creative regress: 3 shaving establishments (as in a place where a gentleman can get a proper shave with a cut throat razor) have opened within a half mile of my apartment in the last five years and they are thriving, Harris Tweed, which nearly went extinct, is back with a vengeance. And just lately custom tailors shops are springing up in disused second floor locations around the neighborhood. All of which I consider progress.
2/18/15, 6:50 PM
Violet Cabra said...
Something that likewise made me spitting mad is the fact that a) pharmaceutical companies aren't even developing antibiotics anymore because they are too effective and used only short term versus pharmaceuticals used to manage chronic conditions and b) the United States isn't researching the efficacy of herbs at all, except to mostly debunk them. Countries like Nigeria, are however, using their resources to learn about the subtleties of various herbal preparations. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that someone is doing this vital work, but am deeply troubled that it isn't considered credible in my country.
Progress does indeed appear to mean "where someone's vested interests lay" rather than "the greatest good for the greatest number." Unfortunately the definitions for "progress" and "utilitarianism" seem to be switched in too many people's minds.
On a related note, in the spirit of pastiche, I've switched over to using herbal supplements to manage my health, keeping western pharmaceutical medicine at a distance. I'm about 6 weeks into it full bore and so far so good. Not only do I feel significantly better but I also feel deeply empowered, and engaged much more intimately with my health and my life. "Progress" doesn't offer that, "progress" only really gives dependance on someone else's vision, someone else's truth and someone else's bottom line. No thanks.
2/18/15, 7:01 PM
Avery said...
Take a very time-consuming technology you've brought up here, for instance: cutting weeds with a scythe. An objector would say to this, "You must have a lot of leisure time to be able to train yourself in using a scythe. Why aren't you at work?"
The deep underlying assumption is this: true "work" is not an activity that benefits you directly, but is something you do in order to get yourself some money, which can then be used to buy things you need/want. The end goal of your spent time is acquisition.
But the fellow buying the scythe needs to have a completely different view of things: time is not money, because time is life itself; and labor is not a means to acquire money but is itself a way for you to live. Training yourself in an outdated technology can be both work and pleasure.
("Time is life" is a quote on loan from Michael Ende, in his amazing book Momo)
2/18/15, 7:13 PM
Repent said...
I'd quickly turn off my computer and discontinue my internet if I had the opportunity to have more family picnics, family barbeques, more spare time to swim and look for frogs in unpolluted creeks. And I'd go to the beach more if it wasn't for a 2 foot ooze of algae slime everywhere. Sadly most of the family connections went over time as well. At this point I'd have no community outlet except for the internet. What went wrong?
http://youtu.be/eNPbXa1ncoc
At work they recently introduced a 'new' computer system. The new system uses literally 3 times as much paper as the old system. Myself, and many other coworkers argued in vain to management that the old system was better and we should go back to it.
The exact phrase you used above 'We can't turn the clock back on progress' was used by management at my company to defend the change. My department now uses literally 5,000 sheets of paper a day every day. This paper has to be bought, photocopied, processed, stapled, signed, returned, processed again, scanned back into the computer to capture the signatures, then filed. The files have to be stored off site by an outside storage firm. (Too much paper to be stored in our building) Also according the legal 7 year govt storage laws, we can't get rid of it anytime soon.
Another full time position had to be created just to assist with all of the additional paperwork procedures- this is progress?
I look forward to a simpler life; I feel despair when I think about business as usual continuing for much longer.
2/18/15, 7:15 PM
Shane Wilson said...
2/18/15, 7:17 PM
druiddisciple said...
2/18/15, 7:17 PM
jcummings said...
They have an energy wing and an agriculture wing. As a new small farmer, looking to ditch the industrial at model, I have found appropriate tech to be invaluable both by providing pragmatic tools with which to meet our "crash now, avoid the rush" type goals, and also as a guiding philosophy.
I guess I interpret some of this weeks and last weeks posts as - figuring out what are the best and most appropriate tech solutions to meet the needs of our day to day lives can be fun. I certainly think so.
Before discussing the awesome of picking up a safety razor or slide rule, we must, of course, assume that we can see a problem with business as usual ( in nutrition that's known as SAD: standard american diet - apt yes/no?) And second that we've been through the mental exercise of deciding said day to day needs are really necessary or whether we could live happily without them. (Re: luxurious beard...)
2/18/15, 7:25 PM
michael pulsford said...
What's hard in that environment, I think, is getting a large segment to do anything, or to do it for long.
2/18/15, 7:46 PM
Vultwulf said...
Many software companies exist by having the institutions, that use the software, pay maintenance fees for upgrades, bug fixes, and the like. So the addition of features makes the software more generally usable, while simultaneously increasing its complexity. At some point, complexity increases to the point at which the software can no longer be fully tested. This situation is, of course, the old dilemma of diminishing returns. What has made the less efficient software possible to function has been the increased power of the hardware. But at some point, the limitations imposed by miniaturization in conjunction with quantum mechanics will be reached. This is in addition to the increased energy requirement to produce this hardware. Now x-ray technology is being used to produce smaller chips; a process that is more energy intensive that the earlier processes using lower energy wavelengths of the spectrum.
I have seen many "next big things" come and go, as I am now in my 50's. I recognize the fundamental limitations. Even back in college, we read about the appropriate technology movement as assigned work in some of my classes. My father was in the marketing field before he retired, so the observations that reader Cathy made about marketing are true. I suspect that as resources become scarcer, older values such as durability, reliability, and functionality will become more important, and that the throw away culture we have adopted will go by the wayside.
2/18/15, 7:49 PM
August Johnson said...
From the Dust Jacket:
“Consumption for consumption's sake... is rapidly being exalted into a virtue of its own right... through the capacity of America's productive system to produce more than we need, resulting in the increasingly frantic effort of industry, its promoters, marketers, and merchandisers, to persuade the buyer to waste more and more.”
I also have his other books, The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers and A Nation of Strangers.
I don't think many modern day Ham operators appreciate just how much of their own equipment the early hams made. Here's a 1914 book by Alfred Morgan, Wireless Telegraph Construction for Amateurs. This was already the third edition of the book! You made everything for your station, transformer, capacitors (then called condensers) , detector, coils, etc, from scratch, just bought or salvaged steel or iron strips and wire and a few other simple things. It's presented as you build these things and you will communicate this far. This book is a fascinating read. I have a reprint.
Yes, this was the day of spark and, get this, silicon detectors, but it worked and just about anybody who was somewhat mechanically inclined could build a radio receiver and transmitter that could communicate over significant distances.
2/18/15, 7:55 PM
Dylan said...
Today is the beginning of the season of Lent, and I've taken the plunge of going without email until Easter.
I've been curious for a while about why so many people of my generation (mid-twenties) fear phones and prefer texting/emailing each other. I find all the typing to be a lot of work.
Although I'm quite glad to have the use of a personal computer with internet access, for the next month and a half I'll be testing my hunch about the 'progressiveness' of email. Telephones are really the more complex technology; they allow for a much higher quality of communication as well as real-time feedback rather than shot-for-shot messaging. Email and texting are really just a re-invention of the telegraph, with the bonus of sidebar advertisements.
Since I use a cellphone but mostly leave it at home, I think I can say that today I've reverted to 1980's communication technology. One small step for man. (Still hoping that one of my friends will pen me a real letter and complete the 'great leap for mankind ;)
2/18/15, 8:01 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
"The popular notion of progress presupposes that there’s an inherent dynamic to history, that things change, or tend to change, or at the very least ought to change, from worse to better over time. That presupposition then gets flipped around into the even more dubious claim that just because something’s new, it must be better than whatever it replaced."
That observation doesn't just apply to technology. It also applies to biological evolution and cultural practices as well. When I observed Darwin Day last week, I posted two cartoons showing how dinosaurs evolving into birds may have been a winner in terms of surviving the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, but it was a loser in terms of being the dominant group of land animals, at least in terms of size and position in the food web. The result was that the genes benefited, but the individual suffered. Progress? Not if you started off as one of the raptor dinosaurs and ended up as a chicken.
Ambiguity over what constitutes progress also applies to food practices. The American political movement that seems to be most supportive of traditional ways to grow and prepare food consists mostly of people in what passes for the Left in the U.S., who style themselves as progressives, along with some libertarians, who are "the other kind of liberal," while people on the right oppose them and are championing industrial agriculture and processed food, the new ways of doing things. No wonder you call them pseudoconservatives. That phenomenon makes no sense if liberals are in favor of the new and conservatives are in favor of the old. It does make sense if liberals, or at least, the Left, which is not exactly the same thing, is in favor of what benefits the average person, while the pseudoconservatives of the American Right are in favor of protecting and supporting the already rich and powerful. At least some on what passes for the U.S. Left appear to recognize that the old ways are better for the average American.
On a different subject, one of your readers asked you about K-waves last week and you replied that you should read up on the topic in preparation for writing an entry about economic cycles in the future. I have a recommendation for you, the writings of Michael Alexander, in particular his 2002 book "The Kondratiev Cycle: A generational interpretation." Not only does Mike write about K-waves, but all the other economic cycles running from the standard 4-year business cycle to up to the 40-year stock cycle. Full disclosure, I was his proofreader. On the one hand, I'm not completely objective about his book. On the other, I read the book in great detail several times, so I can vouch for the subjects my friend covered and its comprehensiveness.
2/18/15, 8:03 PM
Matthew Casey Smallwood said...
For $25 dollar beer kit, with a few supplies I won't have to buy again, and three hours of time, my wife and I made 70 bottles of beer or thereabouts. It was fun, and the beer tastes good. Folks, the modern world is a huge RACKET. Wanna sell your home? It'll cost you half of what it's worth to hire gutter professionals, electricians, plumbers, concrete workers, decorators, and carpet men to fix things up "to standards" so the next couple can feel good about their turn to be fleeced by the parasites who "specialize" so well in what they do that they make five times an hour what you do. Wanna keep purifiers in your home? Be sure the FDA hasn't listed them as potentially "of concern", or your kids can be taken from you. It just goes on and on....for those who are younger, the RATE OF CHANGE of PROGRESS has sped up considerably - kind of like an orgiastic frenzy, as the vampire tries to suck every last drop of blood out of the victim, who is going into the death throws.
2/18/15, 8:13 PM
oilman2 said...
Bless my mess but I so agree with you. The ONLY currency humans have is time - whatever we choose to do, we expend life-currency doing it. If we work to get money to buy things - sure, we are working. But we are just trading time for cash - the transaction is that simple for every one of us.
Last night, I had to visit my 82 yr old Mom in hospital. It was a 3.5 hour drive. I spent some life-currency taking the backroads instead of the interstate. I stopped in deep Malofia, turned down a dirt road, switched the engine off and simply laid back in the grass and looked at the stars wheeling overhead. Without city glare, incessant noise and light pollution, it sets the soul flying if you can let go and tune in.
Yes - I spent yet more of that precious life-currency and smiled the rest of the way to the hospital. Then I just had to laugh when my grandkid told me I should Tweet about it. Think next time she goes with me...
2/18/15, 8:16 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
Among my friends (admittedly we are the old fogies now) there is a lot more discussion about "new fangled" versus the old way, and most folks are not impressed with the new... but now the meme is "what can you do? you can't stop progress" (meaning we don't get a say in the upgrades and new models - which is true). Youth seems to love novelty, and accepts the new gadgets without looking at the downsides (the way we are all vulnerable to hackers is appalling! We don't have to be online - our medical, banking and tax records are!)but the older folk, who remember the simpler tools, are more pessimistic. And yet - it's such a struggle to back off without losing the ability to participate (The Seattle TV station KOMO has shut off the online comments section - you have to go to their Facebook and/or Twitter account to comment on their stories - and accept the privacy (!) terms of those services). But I'm still backing off, dropping one appliance after another as I see they are just expensive junk. (My house has only one thin rug and it can be swept with a broom, as can the wood floors).
One thing that stops many people is the maintenance issue. Sadly, most people I know would rather junk something or pay an exorbitant cost to an "expert" rather than be capable of fixing the various things they use. I have friends that would never touch a leaky sink, let alone replace a toilet gizmo. Heck, I've replaced a whole toilet - but most see the "ability" to let others do the work as a sign of personal "progress"... I see it as learned helplessness. They seem proud that they can't cook, don't do dishes, can't change a light switch, let alone make soap or raise their food. I'm not sure how that hypnotism can be overcome... I hope you’ll address that issue sometime.
2/18/15, 9:05 PM
pyrrhus said...
2/18/15, 9:06 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Sara is clearly perceptive if she can enjoy the smiling face of a wombat! They are the most pleasant of all of the creatures in this part of the planet and also have the largest brain to body ratio of all the marsupials. Their only real hassle is motor vehicles at night, because people refuse to slow down. Incidentally, you can let her know that the word on Wombat Street is that the wombat collective are quite looking forward to the effects of peak oil on pointless and unnecessary night time vehicle activity.
Quote: "because it questions the means but forgets to question the goals."
I suspect that I'm a bit of a nuisance sometimes because I'm involved in a local garden group. My involvement isn't the nuisance bit, as I always provide a lot of energy and laughs; it is just sometimes that I question the goals of the group.
They sell plants at the local market and I ask them - and have been doing so for years - so what do you intend to do with the money that you are collecting on plant sales?
They always say every single meeting, "we'd like to get more people to join the group". So I always ask them why do you want more people to join the group - and the other hard question: how do you want to go about achieving that particular goal.
I'm going to be brutally honest here: all I've ever received from such questions are either silence, embarrassment or even incoherent mumbling answers.
It is a bit embarrassing too for people that have actually bothered turning up hearing that they want more members, because you have to ask the hard question: what about the people that are actually here and present? Needless to say that: their numbers are dropping like flies.
The problem isn't even specific to that particular group - it is a notable pattern in every single community group that I've been involved with across many years.
The only conclusion I can draw from that is that there is a sickness gnawing away at the core of our culture.
On a slightly different note, we were chucking around some ideas this week here about starting up our own group with clear goals and clear benefits for members. It is an interesting idea because many of the community groups that I have been involved with are co-ordinated and managed by older people and they are, to put it bluntly, stale and lacking in zest and membership is declining. What would be your opinion on that idea?
cont...
2/18/15, 9:29 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Fortunately he is an older guy and I could easily take him out if I had to (hehe!), but it left me wondering whether other people - looking for possible scapegoats - think the same sorts of things?
Still advance warnings of trouble can give plenty of time for an appropriate course of action or planned response.
Incidentally, I just finished part 2 of your story. It is a real page turner and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. You have certainly hammered home the unpleasant realities of pursuing business as usual and the book is very consistent with the themes raised in this blog. I also note that the loss of local manufacturing capacity is certainly a sign that the end of empire is nigh. I was really surprised at the extreme level of specialisation of all the different units and the inherent inability to alter tactics to reflect changing conditions on the ground. Also Sun Tzu would have been appalled at the apparent lack of knowledge of the enemy.
Sometimes, I wonder whether our intelligence services concentrate far too much on data collection and not enough on analysis. There was a push here recently to get the population at large to pay for the collection and storage internet metadata for the usage of the intelligence services and people have been generally appalled at the cost (it aint insignificant). Apparently it is of some importance, but to me it is indicative that they're fixated on data collection as a goal as distinct from analysis i.e. the sort of things that we talk about here. A bit sad and pathetic really.
I think I'm rambling...
Cheers
Chris
2/18/15, 9:29 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Ooops! In all of that long rambling I completely forgot to mention my recent blog post about maintaining stuff (a good job for hot weather), spiders, (you'll like this one) gap filling in external walls, steel stairs are now installed, celever tree frogs, blue wrens and their roles in the garden eating all of the bugs and finally blackberries! All good stuff and lots of photos: The Fourth R
PS: Spare a thought for the northern part of Australia which is currently being hit by not one but two cyclones (with the city of Brisbane in the firing line):
Tropical Cyclone Marcia
They're big storms...
2/18/15, 9:36 PM
Gardener Green said...
You want to be safe from credit or debit card fraud? Pay cash.
Bought a Italian marble mortar and pestle today. Nice feel, solid, heavy and stable and does a far better job then a spice mill (electric or mechanical). I can get exactly the amount of grind I want and it looks beautiful sitting on my counter. Oh; and it only cost $17 compared to $30 or $40 for a good quality spice mill.
JMG a great piece. Thanks again.
2/18/15, 9:40 PM
Myosotis said...
2/18/15, 9:47 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Kutamun, notice that you're assuming that a unified field theory is possible, and that we'll find it. People have been trying to craft one for most of a century now, without success. No law of nature guarantees that such a theory will be found at all, much less in our time. Thus counting your technologies before they hatch may not be a useful habit just now...
Lili, thanks for all these bits of news! I call 'em regress, and am delighted by them.
Violet, glad to hear it. Over and above the other benefits -- such as not getting toxic drugs that were approved by the FDA even though they have horrific side effects, a detail that happens more often than not these days -- anything that puts you in charge of your own health, rather than surrendering it to some for-profit business, is a source of strength.
Avery, good. Thing is, people I know who use scythes tell me that it doesn't take any more time than using a powered weed-wacker, not if you keep your blade sharp and know what you're doing.
Repent, that's progress. Meaning that it's precisely that sort of mindless worship of whatever's new that is sending industrial civilization "progressing" right off a cliff.
Shane, for heaven's sake, why feel guilty? I'd suggest instead feeling aggrieved that you've been deprived of a real shave, with hot lather and a good razor, for all these years, and let that motivate you to get a safety razor, a cake of shaving soap, and the other tools you need to remedy that state of deprivation. Of course, you could also try growing a beard... ;-)
Druiddisciple, my experience suggests the same. At this point, with the collapse of quality getting as blatant as it is, it might just be possible to get that message across.
Jcummings, yes, that's a large part of what the last two posts have been about. The notion of deliberate technological regress is a tool -- a very useful one -- to help get outside the one-way street of progress for its own sake.
Michael, true enough. The new factors in the equation are, first, that the quality gap is becoming so blatant, and second, that the ability of the system to keep on loading new layers of complexity is beginning to show signs of serious strain.
Vultwulf, we're of the same generation, and I've seen the same thing. My guess is that the culture of disposability will come to a halt just as soon as getting replacements starts to become problematic...
August, Alfred Morgan! There's a name I revered in my misspent childhood. The public library system had volumes 1-6 of "The Boy's First (through Sixth) Book of Radio and Electronics," which were all about how to take oatmeal tubs, lengths of wire, random household scrap, and the very occasional piece of old electronics gear, and turn out radios and other electronics gear with them. If somebody were to reprint those on acid-free paper, I think there might be quite a market -- I'd be first to order a set!
2/18/15, 10:13 PM
Ruben said...
One of the things I noticed is that, while safety razors are cheaper and shave closer, they are harder to use.
And that is their best feature.
We have built a world in which most of us don't know how to do anything our grandparents would call important. We are adept at selling mobile phones from a kiosk in the mall, but can't plant and harvest a potato.
There are cars that parallel park at the push of a button. There are espresso machines that automatically make your coffee. Sewing machines have buttonhole attachments. Spell checkers, letter templates, and pre-made meals.
Anything that requires skill has relentlessly been removed from our lives--we have given the craft to the machine, and kept for ourselves the role of pushing the button or pulling the lever. And we wonder why so many people are on anti-depressants...
The safety razor takes skill. It keeps you firmly in the moment with the constant threat of that cold heat that leaves a hairline of blood. You have to study how your hair grows and map the route the blade takes over your face. You have something to look forward to, as you are challenged with the coup de maitre--the Master's Cut--under the nose.
I think the growing numbers of people embracing things from a better time shows that we may have reached Peak Meaninglessness. People are tired of it, and are taking up things that feel real.
2/18/15, 10:17 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Matthew, now if you can just communicate that to the rest of your generation...
Cathy, I'm coming to think that the sort of basic handyperson skills that allow you to fix a faucet or do other general household repairs may be a meal ticket, and possibly also the beginning of a lucrative career, in the very near future. If you can build a network of friends who know they can call you if something goes wrong, and you'll fix it for some sort of barter or what have you, you may be set. I trust others are listening...
Pyrrhus, I'd be interested in seeing some number crunching to show whether the increase in life expectancy is caused by the decrease in smoking, or simply correlates to that. Statistics are tricky things.
Cherokee, oh man. I've seen that in far too many places. An organization that focuses on trying to recruit new members, instead of making sure that new members have good reasons to join, is doomed. And yet so many organizations do exactly that, because it's easier than asking the hard questions about why people aren't eager to join or stay around once they've joined.
I'd encourage you to see if you can get something going with clear goals and clear benefits. Add a clear organizational structure that makes rights contingent on responsibilities, and make sure your organization can function if it doesn't get lots of new members in a hurry, and you may be able to accomplish something.
Gardener, sound advice. Thank you!
Myosotis, glad to hear it. If conversations like that get going more generally, there's a lot that can still be accomplished even this late in the day.
Ruben, maybe it was just youthful exuberance, but I didn't find a safety razor any harder to use than a disposable, and cuts are one of the hazards of any razor-based shave -- a block of alum in the medicine cabinet takes care of those instantly. Still, I hope you'll put up that post. As for "peak meaninglessness," that's a keeper -- would you mind if I used it, with credit, in an upcoming post?
2/18/15, 10:28 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Many thanks for the excellent advice. Yes, it is an all too common problem. This is about the fourth community group that I've seen it in too.
As an interesting side note, after moving on from the first group that I became involved with, I've avoided active participation in the management of any group as I considered it to be a wholly dysfunctional system. I thought that it was just that particular group, but unfortunately it is just so common and repeated...
Much to think about as usual.
Benefits have to go both ways is my thinking.
Cheers
Chris
2/18/15, 10:47 PM
Unknown said...
1. When I make coffee, I use a measuring cup to put the right amount of coffee into a filter paper, and the paper rests within a filter cone. I heat water in the kettle till it whistles, and pour the water into the filter cone. Within a minute or two, I have a big mug of strong, black coffee.
All of this is a far cry from the notion of single-serving packaged coffees, made with the aid of a device that costs several hundred dollars. Why on earth would I want to go the modern route? Why would I want to pay much more (capital and operating costs) for less coffee?
2. Vacuum cleaners .... somehow, I ended up with a "cyclone" vacuum cleaner that has to be disassembled in 4-5 steps to be emptied and cleaned after each use. And the manual says to wash (and let air-dry) the various filters and canisters in the vacuum. Whatever happened to the vacuums that used bags? I used to to empty the bag when the old one got full, replace the bag, and the vacuum was OK for weeks to come. No disassembly or parts washing needed.
Lee
2/18/15, 11:34 PM
Unknown said...
Lili, is Harris Tweed the sort with random flecks of contrasting colors in it, and no obvious pattern in the underlying weave? My mother had a dressmaker sew me a skirt of that when I was a girl. I have been searching years for more. There was none to be had at Britex, the big fabric store in downtown San Francisco, nor at Stonemountain and Daughter in Berkeley, nor in Scottish gift shops, nor anywhere I could think of online.
If it's coming back, where is it coming back to? For the longest time I've been wanting a cape made of brown or forest green Harris Tweed.
2/19/15, 12:18 AM
Indrajala said...
This reminds me of Tainter's study. He suggests that almost no society in history has voluntarily reduced their complexity. The one exception he does cite is the Byzantines who simplified their state and army after losing much territory and resources. Any thoughts on that?
2/19/15, 12:25 AM
Odin's Raven said...
Here’s not just one, but a cage full of squirrels for the Archdruid. Not all are corporately Grey, some are militantly Red. Perhaps one or more may amuse you as well as me.
2/19/15, 12:33 AM
Mickey Foley said...
But it's still much easier to stay on the conveyer belt of Progress and jump through the hoops it throws up. Ironically, the growing failure of the status quo is what holds so many of us in thrall to it. Escaping the assembly line requires time, energy and hope, resources that the vampiric Establishment is sucking out of us with increasing speed and appetite.
I'm convinced that what really keeps us in lockstep with Progress, though, is emotional dependence on the mainstream. We've lost the deep personal relationships with friends and family that can overcome our culture's materialist ethic. Instead of seeking emotional connections, we try to fill that void with sensuous pleasures, believing they are safer and more reliable than inconstant humanity.
For more ideas of this ilk, check out my blog, Riding The Rubicon.
2/19/15, 12:50 AM
ed boyle said...
Whatever the result in the end if god forbid a JMG figure is Prez and the world is saved and brainwashed, convinced, of the proper way of seeing things then the underground dissenterswill chafe at the bit. It all goes in circles. After a while our cherished ideals will be bastardized beyond recognition. I recall the story of Sri Aurobindo. He was a prominent revolutionary but recognized that people never change and devoted himself to spirituality.
I imagine once our side has won as PO is inevitable we will decry this as progress, i.e. as preordained fate, by the gods no less. The word progress=fate, we just renamed as science is the new name for religion. Life gets lost in translation. We think we are different from our parents and one day we look in the mirror and see a long forgotten face. Einstein is Jesus. Spengler and Toynbee talk about synchronous points in historical cultures. Don't get too caught up in your own propaganda.
Anyway, end of being downer. I liked article about old ways of heating body not air at that other PO eco blog whose name I forget. Keep enthusiastic. Concrete reality and helping people get through now with hope is great.
2/19/15, 1:22 AM
Spanish fly said...
bikes. I showed him my new bike, customized to my taste. However, he noticed that modern mountain
bikes were outdated in several technologies...For instance, brake pads and derailleurs are pulled
by, oh my god, towropes made of steel, instead of whatever remote controlled device.
OK, I said, towrope works without batteries; it's an advantage if you are cycling in the wild
and/or shops are closed...
Remote control? What distance between handle bars and rear/front brakes?
This nonsense reminds me the carmakers obsession for filling cars with a panoplia of electronic
fetishes. pretending they are making better and newer products.
2/19/15, 1:56 AM
Rhisiart Gwilym said...
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1424344507.html
Hwyl fawr! :)
2/19/15, 3:18 AM
Phil Harris said...
Ah… shaving…
It is 60 and more years ago, but our dad used a safety razor with a blade that he re-sharpened using a leather strop which hung on the handle of the airing cupboard next to the basin. The razor assembly was hinged, and opened to hold the blade in both the cleaning and stropping modes. Each blade had a single sharp edge, but came with the other side protected by a thin sleeve of metal that helped in the assembly. When finally the blade could be stropped no more, it still made a useful fine-cutting tool; the protected edge directly held and pressed by fingers.
Then he cycled to work as Chief Clerk at the bank, arriving home again after the bank had balanced the ledgers at the end of each day.
But we relied entirely on lots of coal for heat and hot water – and coal served also to make the town gas that mum used for cooking and made the electricity for the lights, radio and the ‘hoover’. And then there were the million miners, but in my childhood they could have been as far away as China. Our Thames Valley smogs nevertheless sometimes crept under the door having closed down all travel including walking; every bit as bad if not worse than Beijing is nowadays. And our half-tech (modern) local sewage system had already killed the chalk stream beloved of Victorian Nature writers and painters. The Great Wen of London stretched as far to the east as my imagination in those days could comprehend.
So the cutting-edge alternative technologies came in the 1960s like sun-up with hope and promise for the soul. So it goes. I guess it was sometime in early Thatcher-Reagan that I finally stopped shaving. ;-) I wish now, however, I had looked after Dad’s shaving kit, though we keep a pair of high quality durable scissors that with luck will more than see me out.
best
Phil H
2/19/15, 3:25 AM
Michele said...
2/19/15, 3:47 AM
Stein L said...
Consider electrification. It came to the mountain valley where I sit now about 100 years ago. I read in a book about the valley that in one farm house, the grandmother hid in a cabinet under the stairs, as the electrical light was switched on in the kitchen. She was certain it would bring doom upon the house.
You'd be hard pressed to find people who are against electrification these days - we should still consider the lengths we're willing to go to in order to secure electrical power, and we should also question the extent of its use.
The other day, I came across an interesting fact: electric lighting is killing an enormous amount of insects. Instead of resting at night, they are swirling around outdoor lamps until exhaustion. In the German city of Kiel alone, street lighting is killing many hundreds of millions of flying insects each season.
Why care? Because birds and other creatures rely on a supply of insects. Because the insects perform a number of necessary "first economy" tasks that we can't afford to perform ourselves.
Migrating birds are also at risk. Their paths cross areas where there are large oil platforms, and the flocks are attracted to the bright lights in the night. They begin circling the platforms until they drop into the sea from exhaustion. Platform operators have begun switching off the lights when a circling flock is detected, this sometimes sends them on their way again.
My point being: today, progress races along on many fronts, and tremendous changes happen almost as a matter of course, without any real forethought as to the consequences. JMG has mentioned slide rules a couple of times. I can remember getting my first electric calculator back in 1975 - little did I know that forty years later, the ability to do simple sums mentally would all but disappear, as people stopped calculating in their heads.
That's a minor consequence. But the electrification of information, and the delivery of same, has also had other pernicious effects for us. We have become sedentary, seated, immobile, in front of screens. Instead of traveling to information and community, we have information brought to us, and pretend to be parts of communities.
The consequences are huge. All that sitting is literally killing people, and adding huge burdens to health care.
And it's making people very unrealistic about continued access to vital information.
We are becoming increasingly dependent upon the supply of electricity in order to maintain a highly complex information interchange society that fractures the moment the supply is interrupted.
David Byrne, the musician, reflected upon watching hordes of Manhattanites wandering the streets looking for somewhere to recharge their devices after Sandy. He called them Recharge Zombies, and it was a very apt description. When your life revolves around having information brought to you, and your sense of community being online, you literally become a Zombie when your "lifeline" is cut.
If the level of technology we are taking for granted is unsustainable; highly precarious because of complexity; and very likely on the wrong side of Overshoot, then it would be madness to rely upon the continued maintenance of that state. Yet we forge on, driven by magical thinking into believing that "something will come along that will fix things."
That's a dangerous strategy when complex, interconnected systems are operating on today's planetary scale, where you can't isolate yourself from the downstream negative effects.
We're all downstream today.
I have no doubt that we will regress to a less complex, more sustainable, more repairable technological state. Whether that process is forced upon us by circumstances or something we voluntarily begin working towards, remains to be seen.
2/19/15, 3:55 AM
Rhisiart Gwilym said...
Also - as demonstrated repeatedly - hypnosis and acupuncture can provide fully effective, maybe even more effective, anaesthesia for major invasive surgery; as good as the currently-used artificial-coma-inducing drugs and gases.
These days, instead of going anywhere near the Angiotensin Converting Enzyme Inhibitors and Statins from which the Big Pharma crooks are reaping big financial rewards, supposedly to 'control' - though never to cure! - my high blood pressure and blood-lipid levels, which my harassed GP would try to get me to take, if I saw him more often, I use instead a suite of homoeopathic remedies prescribed by a homoeopath who is also a good friend; together with home-grown and home-extracted pure cannabis-oil, taken in lentil-sized quantities by mouth twice daily. (Never been interested in cannabis as recreational drug, because I never liked being high)
My health, particularly in the hypertension and arthritis departments has been noticeably better since I made the shift. Though of course, every case is uniquely particular. But that's been my personal experience. I also use doses of two or three grams - sic! - of vitamin C, taken at about four hourly intervals, to help my immune system fight back any time I feel under attack from an infectious illness. That seems to help with some considerable muscle too. Naturally, despite my age, I have no truck at all with the alleged Winter flu 'immunisation' vaccines which have been fraudulently 'tested' and aggressively marketed recently. Worse than useless, as the whistleblowers are now revealing.
Cheers Violet!
2/19/15, 4:26 AM
Kenaz Filan said...
At some point I may even invest in a shortwave radio and see about getting the requisite licenses. Having an emergency means of communication is a Good Thing and I agree with your contention that shortwave radio is more likely to survive post-Peak than the public Internet.
And I'd also like to start encouraging those who have land to plant Papaver somniferum. Opium poppies are not illegal if they are used for display and if you have them around it's a trivial matter to extract morphine from them. While morphine is most famous today as a drug of abuse, it's still the gold standard for pain relief and one of the strongest treatments for diarrhea you can find. (There's a reason why 19th century physicians used the abbreviation GOM -- God's Own Medicine -- when prescribing morphia or opium).
Given the complexity of today's healthcare system I'm guessing that crash is going to be an ugly one. Consulting a 19th century pharmacopeia or two and setting up a medicinal garden might prove very useful when the inevitable strikes.
2/19/15, 4:48 AM
Tony f. whelKs said...
I think the first time I came across the idea that 'progress' (TM) wasn't an inexhorable and inevitable force of nature was in one of John Seymour's books back in the '80s, probably 'The Ultimate Heresy'. He explained quite cogently that if you're about to step off a precipice it isn't really 'progress' to keep going in the same direction, but in fact it's time to turn around and find a different path, even if it means retracing your steps.
One of the worst aspects of 'progress' is that prior technologies can fall into abeyance. One particular failure of 'progress' here in the UK has cheered me considerably, namely the roll-out of digital radio broadcasting. It just hasn't gained traction in the listening public, so there is talk of even abandoning the technology. This seems sensible to me, because I had visions of all the old AM and FM radios being discarded just in time for the collapse of industrial civilisation. In my post-crash visions of future tech, I could easily imagine the old VHF FM and SW AM receivers still being available and small-scale, local broadcasting could continue to some extent with home made transmitters. But if the listeners only had digital sets, well, the putative post-crash broadcasting sector would be strangled at birth. Anything that prevents the older AM/FM radios being dumped has to be a plus. TV here has now gone totally digital, but I don't really care for TV ;-)
On another front, I totally endorse Cathy's point about 'learned helplessness' when it comes to repairing things (which reminds me, I must get around to fixing the boiler, the shoddy plastic filling tap broke. Luckily, I had a eureka moment in the bath last night, and now know my junk box contains what I need to repair it better than it was before...) It has become so much the accepted norm that something 'better' will be available soon, so why not just ditch the old and 'upgrade' when it breaks down? Mind you, I am a bit ambiguous about this, as some of my income derives from fixing things that other people have learned to be helpless about.
These last three posts on ADR have been particularly pertinent, and I believe 'As night closes in' is the real 'money shot' for the whole project to date, to the point that if someone asked which one post to read, it would be the one I'd recommend. Anyway enough waffle, time to apply some heat to my 100-year old frying pan...
2/19/15, 5:00 AM
jonathan said...
consider wendell berry's list of requirements for a new technology via tj above. every one of his 9 requirements can be summarized as a new technology should create less externalities than the technology it is intended to replace.
external costs, those costs such as waste disposal, air and water pollution etc. are costs that the producer avoids by dumping them on the public. larger and more centralized producers create more such costs than small, diffuse producers. the large producer can therefore reduce it's costs dramatically and compete more successfully economically.
the foolish and short sighted push for ever more progress can be understood as a continuing shift of costs from the producer to society. they are then ignored until it's too late to do anything about them.
2/19/15, 5:17 AM
mr_geronimo said...
2/19/15, 5:20 AM
Professor Diabolical said...
Something like clear corrugated cardboard, they are light, strong, structured, and relatively inexpensive. Although not as long-lasting as glass, they are also not breakable, far larger, lighter, and allow big savings on the frame. Old market gardens were littered with broken cloches, panes, and pots, which is not economical.
What would one use them for? Greenhouses, obviously. Chicken coops or tractors (who need maximum light to lay). Far larger cold frames. Porch enclosures. Large dehydrating racks. Light-passing weather-buffering garden fences. Small "tents" or shacks in the woods. Whatever you like.
What's needed to make them? Well, orgo chemistry of course, and lots of energy. Extruding equipment with very fine temperature control. Oil or gas as feedstock at the moment, but really these are not very high challenges and I'm sure a motivated regional manufacturer could overcome them, as the resulting collected solar is a net energy gain for the region. Could probably be made with converted corn plastic and a steam engine with a sintered-cast nozzle on a blacksmithed machine. But we don't face those problems yet. Go ahead and look and use a few at home.
That and the passive solar, self-raising wax pistons that open greenhouses. Or chicken coops. Or hot attics. Or over-steamed hot water collectors.
http://www.farmtek.com/farm/supplies/cat1a;ft_corrugated_sheets_panels.html
http://www.farmtek.com/farm/supplies/ProductDisplay?catalogId=15052&storeId=10001&langId=-1&division=FarmTek&productId=31805
2/19/15, 5:23 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
Another great example of this trend is a product called the swifter. Basically, some marketing people decided they could make money if people constantly had to buy disposable parts for their brooms and mops. All they had to do was convince them of their convenience, or something. I never understood them.
I find the questions you pose, as well as those from the Wendell Berry essay important when comparing technologies.
Lastly, a scythe can be quicker than a weed whacker. As shown by this short video of them side by side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsfIHiBB6xE
2/19/15, 5:24 AM
gwizard43 said...
On the subject of shaving, a safety razor is a great choice; however, I'd suggest those interested look into using a straight razor. Not only do you have the advantage of not needing replacement blades, but a good one can last generations, becoming a father-to-son heirloom.
In addition, like the safety razor shave, one can create a simple ritual when shaving with a straight razor, and I have found that, in this process of regression and simplification, consciously choosing our rituals - instead of mindlessly performing the banal or even pernicious ones common to our culture - can be a very beneficial thing.
Either way: Happy shaving!
Note to JMG: some of us were not blessed with the ability to grow a decent beard, let alone a luxuriant one! For us, I suppose, some solace in a simple shave must needs suffice! :)
2/19/15, 5:26 AM
gwizard43 said...
2/19/15, 5:32 AM
trippticket said...
I've really enjoyed the last few posts, and I wanted to comment last week, but got busy chopping wood, or planting fruit trees, or some such thing that I'm not supposed to enjoy, but do anyway.
I just want to say that one of the most thrilling aspects of our low-tech life is the slow recognition, friend by friend, get-together by get-together, that our life isn't miserable. Shocking, right? In fact most of them would rather come to our place than any other friend's house. Why? I don't know, maybe because it's quieter, looks more hand-made (because it is), the food is better with interesting ferments and preserves to try out, the lighting isn't as garish (all 22W of PV lighting that we employ, plus oil lamps and candles), there are 1000 books to read, the firepit is incredible, carefully built out of chunky local rock, guests are less often completely absorbed by their Jesus phones, and so on. Its more real I think.
Our family's health and general sense of well-being may play a subtle psychological role as well. Despite all the "backwardness" of our lifestyle, and the "obvious hardship" it should provide, my wife and I are14 years deep into our relationship, and more in love every day, while our friends' marriages are disintegrating one by one, year after year.
My mechanic is fascinated with us, after picking me up to get my car after a day's garage work, and learning about how we live. "Did you know their bills are less than $300 a month?" Used to be less than that. We've been indulgent lately!
It's fun having this effect on other people. And it's a blast to live this way. And I really appreciate your comments on this thread.
Cheers.
2/19/15, 5:53 AM
Robert Carran said...
For quite a while now, I've been tending to think more aesthetically than environmentally "ethically". As in the shaving example: I'm not trying to save the planet by reducing plastic use, it just seems more sensible and pleasant to use a straight razor. I have a relationship to the razor because I care for it and sharpen it. It's something to do rather than something to get done and out of the way.
Seems like so much of modern technology is based on getting things done and out of the way rather than to have a pleasant time and truly relate to the task or the tools used in the process. This is how I think of technological regression - it's finding the processes that can provide a connecting experience. The reason we are so able to trash the planet and each other is that we have lost these connections.
Thomas Edison said that necessity is the mother of invention. He was a capitalist pig trying to make loads of money. It's the other way around... invention is the mother of necessity.
2/19/15, 5:56 AM
trippticket said...
2/19/15, 6:03 AM
Chris Farmer said...
I've always tried to point out that the word "progress" by itself is simply an incomplete concept. The complete concept would require the speaker to say "progress toward xxxx" and thus to actually name the specific goal toward which they are trying to move.
This is similar to another English word that also gets used as an incomplete concept - "consciousness". I have too often heard people say that some shift in "consciousness" is right around the corner. I have always asked "consciousness of what? Consciousness of where our food comes from? Consciousness of our impact on the world?"
"No", they sometimes say. "Consciousness of how we are all connected."
As if the source of our food and our impact on the world isn't part of our connection to everything.
Oh well.
2/19/15, 6:11 AM
SweaterMan said...
A delightful post this week that has direct application to my current dilemma!
Our library is beginning to look at a possible conversion to RFID’ing all our materials. Adding an RFID tag to each item will (theoretically) allow faster check-in processing of items by staff, easier inventory and finding of materials, and faster check-out by patrons.
As the IT guy for the library system I should be 1000% behind a project like this, right? Curiously, I’m ambivalent about the whole idea after sitting through several demonstrations from vendors. While I do see some benefits, I’m just not convinced that we really, really need to do this; not to mention that it’s an ambitious and costly ($500 K) project to boot.
Of course we could do it cheaper and in phases and reap less of the benefits initially, but then the whole project takes longer to complete, and bollocks up our workflow during any transition.
Oh well, “waiting is”, to use a famous quote, and I’ll continue ruminating on it. With your permission I’m going to definitely send a link to this week’s post to members of our team, and emphasize the … the … ephemeralness of the efficiency that we’re trying to achieve with this project.
And as for shaving, I just returned to it after cutting off my beard (gasp!). Purely vanity on my part – virtually everyone told me it made me look much older since my beard came in entirely grey and didn’t match my brown hair! But I learned the art of shaving from my grandfather and have been hooked on safety and straight razors ever since I started growing whiskers. An additional bonus (for travelers, anyway) is that a good bar of shaving soap is much easier to take through security systems than a can of goop that may arouse suspicions and mark one out for more scrutiny.
2/19/15, 6:14 AM
HalFiore said...
I don't, however, use a "safety razor." I remember too many lacerations from back in the day when that was the only option.
My non-disposable razor might as well be called disposable. It is a cheap plastic handle to which expensive, and very disposable 3-bladed cartridges are attached. Shaving roughly twice a week, giving the blades time to recover between uses, means that I can make a blade cartridge last for over a year.
Lately I have grown a beard. Not sure if it will last, but it at least means I will get even less use on the blades for trimming. When the time comes to replace, an old-fashioned safety razor might do the trick quite well.
But on that, I noticed that the "progression" in blades was not linear. I made the switch to double-blades probably in the 70s. It was a definite improvement over the single as far as the loss of blood was concerned. When the triple came out, I scoffed, but my son, who was just learning to shave at the time, went out and got one. I tried it and was sold. Just a much closer, comfortable and safer shave for me. So naturally, when someone came out with the quadruple, I had to try it. It was worse than the original single.
2/19/15, 6:14 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
Cardinal Richelieu once famously said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." How much easier to hang a man if you have not just six lines, but all his heedless email and on-line posts?
2/19/15, 6:23 AM
Andy Brown said...
What strikes me about the conversation around this blog is what it says about the "appropriateness" of technology. At this historical moment there seem to be two, often parallel issues when it comes to the value of alternate technologies.
The more obvious one is the technologies of getting things done - the value in the toolkit for accomplishing stuff. When people think alternatives it might be better in the here and now, like a safety razor - or better on the down-slope like vacuum tube radios - and so on.
The second one might be called the technologies of extrication. (You note that many of our technological suites will fall away whether we will it or not, but you are doing more here than trying to preserve fragile tech heritages.)
Much of the excitement among people actually weaving the awnings for your Butlerian carnival - has to do with using technologies or the mastering of technologies of extricating themselves from a highly unsatisfying (if still seductive and insistent) dominant culture with its out-of-our-control technologies and religion of progress. Same goes for the cognitive habits you develop here and the spiritual practices people bring to it. At this moment the value and appropriateness of "regression" are one part the tech of getting things done and one part the tech that helps us to extricate ourselves. I think there's a wonderful synergy there, and I intend to think on that some more.
2/19/15, 6:29 AM
Steve Maxson said...
I have reset my eating habits to those of a bygone era as well, having gone "paleo" or grain free, very careful about the types of fats I eat, etc. There is a lot of hard scientific evidence in support of this type of diet--from the biochemists and emerging medical literature. Think reverting 10,000 years in your diet!
I am still something of a futurist, in the sense that I think that in the fullness of time we will go into space in a significant way. But the Challenger disaster showed us that conventional rockets are probably not the way to do this on a big way. But, perhaps with the Theory of Everything, or whatever they call it then, we will find a way to "hum" from planet to planet without the roar of any dangerous rockets. The energy and materials economy of that era will be vastly different than most futurists can imagine today however. I think this view is wholly compatible with your ecotechnic visions of the future--and of course the existence of a future for us all depends on us not blowing ourselves into extinction in the turbulent times of the near future.
An aside on the life expectancy thing. The British 1850 census and modern censuses indicate that if you lived to 50 back then your descendants today would only have a couple of additional months life expectancy today at age 50. Mostly we did away with childhood illness (or almost, in the case of measles), and so on, so that more people make it to 50 today. Chlorinating water was the big step in that direction by the way--most of the kings of England, for instance, died of some form of diarrhea, which we can infer was from bad water. The third leading cause of death in the 19th century was pneumonia, and I have had my shots. It would not take a lot of residual technology to overcome the leading causes of death in the 19th century. Incidentally, childhood cancers did not occur back in 1850, not ever! They are a byproduct of modern pollution.
2/19/15, 6:34 AM
Yupped said...
At the same time, I'm aware that dialing my life all the way back to that of an over-worked 19th century farmer is probably going to make me miserable in a different way. So there's a balance to be sought and we're each going to have to do that in our own way, in our own location. Because I'm mostly simplifying my life right now, technology decisions are fairly easy: which ones can I stop using?
But thinking about how to use technology to save time and labor is a more difficult decision-making process. How to cut grass is a good example. Years ago I assume my ancestors grew food and plants on what would become a "front-lawn". Then at some point they were able to buy more food from the store, so they now had a "lawn" to worry about, which they may have scythed or borrowed a sheep to graze or something. Then maybe my grandfather bought a push reel mower and later upgraded to a very basic gasoline mower. Then my Dad upgraded to a hover mower, then a self-propelled push mower and finally to a mini tractor-mower. What was the "right" place to stop at? My current mindset says keep more garden space, use a push reel mower on the paths and let the rest grow to meadow. But I confess to a nagging feeling that if I was my overworked grandfather that power mower would have looked quite tempting. Although without the cheap energy sources, the temptation wouldn't have arisen.
2/19/15, 6:43 AM
Nastarana said...
For all tailors and sewers who might be reading this, Harris Tweed fabric is available from Harris Tweed Hebrides in a nice selection of colors and plaids for 40 pounds sterling/about $US60.00 per yard. 4 yards would be $240 for a winter coat that might last you a decade, even adding @20 for the interior construction materials--you have been buying those as they turn up 2nd hand, naturally--and $20-%50 for lining, a coat made by someone else at bought at a dept. store or fancy boutique would cost twice as much and last half as long. Harris Tweed is a heavy fabric and might not be the best choice for a full length coat, but for jackets and capes I venture to say there is nothing better. BTW, the plaids are not traditional tartans, so no one is going to call you out for pretending to be of Scottish heritage if, like me, you are a Heinz 57 of vaguely English and German descent.
Lili, I wonder if revival of tailoring means we might have local fabric stores again sometime.
Violet Cabra, the doctor can't cure the cold or flue, "because it is viral", but my bottle of elderberry syrup can. And even the fancy, schmancy bottle from the all-organic, we onlu use wildcrafted company costs less than one Dr. visit. Go figure.
2/19/15, 7:19 AM
AntEater said...
There's quite a bit involved in his thoughts, but you can do the calculations in your own life to see how much this form of progress is actually costing you. To get your actual rate of travel, you need to add up the time invested in labor to acquire the money necessary to purchase a motor vehicle, it's maintenance, the legal requirements and funding the necessary supporting infrastructure. All of that goes on top of the actual time you spend in motion. When you divide that into the number of miles traveled, it turns out that often you're actually moving much, much slower than you could with the time budget involved in bicycling the same distance. Progress in speed comes with many, many other negative social impacts which are detailed in his essay, such as the exploitation of others.
As I grow older I'm finding more and more of our progress may not have yielded a true net improvement in life, at least not for the majority and not when considering some of the changes created in our society as a result. Often the negative outcomes are delayed, externalized, hidden, denied and/or simply ignored outright.
Back to lurking now.
2/19/15, 7:44 AM
D.M. said...
I can draw parallels in the IT industry when a new piece of software comes out, especially a new operating system, always touted as better then the previous ones on the market, but inevitably it is not all that great due to bugs, incompatibilities with older software and an overall change to how the operating system is used. These things take about 6 months to a year before everything is ironed out into a solid piece of software. Heck Windows XP was out for a while before it was replaced, but is still being used in many places with China being chief among them. This all just goes to show how disruptive new technologies and the like can be, and not in a way that people normally react to change, and then eventually adjust, sometimes there is no complete adjustment, and it just get worse from there.
2/19/15, 8:00 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
Actually every piece of mail is now photographed as it goes through the machines - so they are tracking to/from at least (similar to tracking cell phone calls)... the PO is getting "modern"...but I still agree with your advice.
2/19/15, 8:03 AM
Zack Lehtinen said...
I recently requested and received for Christmas a corn/ grain hand-grinder, and hope to own a scythe one day soon...
I study and now finally own a property on-which I can practice and experiment with permaculture, and have been growing (doubled by the second year, then grew by another third last year) my garden each year, and have an orchard of eight young trees thus far (two each: pears, peaches, apples, plums)...
As you with this 'blog, JMG, I embrace current internet technology for its properties of connecting people virtually cost-free (to the user), and wrote my recently-completed book on my iPhone and laptop in combination (yes!, my iPhone!)-- yet I engage a critique of newfangled "progress" that has me agreeing-with your last two posts, and most of what you communicate in your 'blog which I have been reading consistently (weekly) for around (over?) two years now...
I have recently completed a novel, self-published via CreatesSpace/ Amazon (another perk of current technology which I appreciate for its accessibility to those who want to communicate but are not yet "established" or wealthy), very much describes and embraces the opportunity of embracing simpler technologies-- Schumacher's "Intermediate Tech"-- and attempts to weave a story which showcases how positive/ enjoyable/ simply-good it can be to adjust in this way.
Echoing much which you have written, as well as much by Charles Eisenstein, about the value and importance of creating "new stories" to live-into, and about the value and importance of "green wizardry" and "ecotechnic" approaches, I have delved-into my own background as an English BA and NYC-trained screenwriter/ actor to put a priority on contributing "new myths" to assist in the necessary Transition(s)...
I don't claim that I have (successfully) abandoned the techno-industrial "middle class" American standard of life, and I am aware that I take much for granted and don't make all of the shifts that I see and belive to be urgently necessary... But I hope to improve in these areas, and in the meantime to make as significant a positive contribution as I am able. Especially with three children of my own, my concern about their future has been front-and-center for me ever since my (first) daughter was born back in 2002-- and I am frequently shocked by the preponderance of what you describe eloquently, JMG, particularly surprised when exhibited by fellow-parents of young kids: the unwillingness to even acknowledge, respond to, these sorts of issues or communication about them.
A free sample of the opening of my novel can be read at:
http://worldofwoundsnovel.blogspot.com/2015/02/world-of-wounds-opening-chapters-sample.html
-Zack Lehtinen
Reach farther. Dig deeper. Seek truth.
2/19/15, 8:06 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
Pro Se Means You're SOL
And my post decline novel (about regress, intentional or otherwise) continues at:
www.cathymcguire.blogspot.com
2/19/15, 8:15 AM
Tony said...
Heres hoping for enough such people looking in enough places.
As a grad student working in metabolism research I find myself in my dayjob thinking that biotechnology already allows all sorts of interesting things good and bad and that over the coming centuries it could spawn some interesting durable easy things. No guarantees, but its good to have as many angles covered as possible.
2/19/15, 8:15 AM
Zack Lehtinen said...
"But the fellow buying the scythe needs to have a completely different view of things: time is not money, because time is life itself; and labor is not a means to acquire money but is itself a way for you to live. Training yourself in an outdated technology can be both work and pleasure.
("Time is life" is a quote on loan from Michael Ende, in his amazing book Momo)
Very inspiring sentiment: time is life itself.
2/19/15, 8:25 AM
GHung said...
Passive solar: Ancient technology requiring only glass, a stone floor (or other thermal mass), proper solar orientation, designed for seasonal variation, and thick curtains for cold weather. Not much to go wrong there, and the best investment I've made. It just works.
Lots of insulation, offset framing to prevent thermal bridging.
Passive cooling; again, very old technology: Operable windows, including windows high in the structure to naturally vent warm air; screens, and the common sense to open/close windows when needed. Windows oriented to make use of prevailing winds.
Gravity flow water; pumped from a spring to a tank buried on the hill above the house. Currently solar-pumped, but could be pumped using wind, a tramp, or other methods, even by hand. Water flows back to the house providing a constant 35 PSI. 2400 gallons storage, total; enough to supply days/weeks of water needs, if pump fails.
Ceiling fans (early 20th century?) I bought the basic, robust fans without the fancy circuitry and remotes. Operated by wall switches; reversible by flipping switch on fan motor.
Large (1600 liter) hot water storage tank, heated with solar and wood. Provides domestic hot water via a coil of copper pipe in the top. Also supplies hydronic radiant heat to floor - zoned; again, very old/simple technology. I remodelled a home built in the 1920s that had heat pipes in the plaster walls; still working, and the Romans had warm floors.
Wood heat to supplement solar; around as long as we've been playing with fire. I saved my parents' old soapstone unit, pre-EPA, and added a simple copper heat exchanger to the top of the fire box which circulates water to/from the big hot water tank using a small pump. Will also thermo-syphon if pump fails. Non-pressurised system! (Never put a closed-loop, pressurised system on a wood stove.) A welcome side effect is that the heat exchanger condenses unburned wood gasses which drip back into the fire to get burned. Keeps the emissions down and stove pipe very clean. This strategy, of course, requires a constant supply of wood, which we have on the property.
While we do use modern technology to control some of these functions (pump controllers, etc.) virtually all of these systems can operate manually, with a bit of human intervention (the horror!), and someone paying attention. I've intentionally avoided 'set-and-forget' systems that can get one in trouble or give one a false sense of security (see modern home security systems vs. having an alert dog).
Participating in the functions of the homestead is greatly rewarding; making things work, reaping the benefits; knowing that if I built it, I can maintain and repair it, and that I'm not utterly reliant upon complex, top-down systems and supply chains. Perhaps not as 'efficient', but not a lot to go wrong. In my world, good enough beats the heck out of diminishing returns, especially when ongoing financial inputs can be avoided. It's the financial thingy that's going to bite most folks in the rear.
2/19/15, 8:26 AM
Matt said...
A search of the web demonstrates clearly, though, how even simplification can become a vehicle for selling more stuff - sites full of variations on the same safety razor, at premium prices.
But there are alternatives. I picked up a 70s Gilette safety razor from feeBay for just a few pounds.
There are also good some good videos on shaving with a safety razor, if you would rather not trust entirely to trial and error.
2/19/15, 8:27 AM
Brian said...
When I moved out on my own, I bought a simple mechanical can opener. I've had the same one for decades and it's never once failed to open a can, needed to be replaced, or not worked because the power was out.
2/19/15, 9:05 AM
Brian said...
http://gizmodo.com/42-visions-for-tomorrow-from-the-golden-age-of-futurism-1683553063
2/19/15, 9:06 AM
Jon said...
I grew up at a time when my parents and grandparents remembered the depression. My mother made some of her own cloths and my father could repair anything. And often did. I just assumed that simple was better and things were there to use until they broke... then you fixed them. I remember the first time I had one of those new fangled VCR's that broke down. I brought it to a repair shop, had it fixed, and then something else broke on the way home. The shop basically said it was a piece of crap anyway and couldn't be fixed. Something inside of me died that day.
To paraphrase Smedley Butler, progress is a racket
I think we've also reached 'Peak Longevity.' In the nineteenth Century, human life expectancy increased by about 100 percent. That was do mostly to sanitation, clean water and healthy food. Since then medical advances have only contributed an additional 20 percent or so.
Jon.
2/19/15, 9:15 AM
Angus Wallace said...
I got rid of my electric shaver about 5 years ago (they're an even bigger racket than disposable razors) and bought a double-edge razor. Partly for environmental reasons and partly for thrift. I love it, and would never go back. I usually shave just after showering and don't bother with lather, etc. Very simple.
Hi August,
Thanks for the reference to Wireless telegraph construction. I found this link to a complete online version (including a pdf), which others might find useful:
https://archive.org/details/wirelesstelegrap00morgrich
Hi Cherokee Chris,
Thanks for the comments re garden group. I've passed them onto someone who'll find them helpful.
Funny, I've always thought of the DINK (double income no kids) as a category not a pejorative! ;-) Of course, there are many ways of passing things onto the next generation -- having kids is just one of them (and by itself doesn't count for much ;-)
--
I've been putting more insulation up in the roof this week. Now there's a task that is harder than it sounds! I keep coming back to it, but I do love the phrase "easier said than done" -- there's so much meaning in those four words!
Cheers, Angus
2/19/15, 9:27 AM
Harry J. Lerwill said...
We implemented a similar electronic system a few years back, but managed to integrate electronic signature capture so actually reduced paperwork! It only costs about 1,000 times the original pen and paper system, and provides an excellent income stream for our vendors via licensing!
I find myself in the odd position of producing a very energy-efficient and sustainable product --an old fashioned telephone directory of local businesses --whilst relying on the modern smartphone to make the advertising sales. What's even more ironic is the smartphone, with instant web search, is used to argue that the telephone book is obsolete.
I see the Yellow Pages as an icon of appropriate technology: a suite of technologies from the printing press to the traditional telephone, that can facilitate trade on a local level, on a very small energy footprint.
I assess new technologies to see if it provides at least the same return on investment as our telephone directories. I have yet to recommend we sell an electronic advertising product - none have shown anywhere near the cost advantages of a hundred-year technology - and that's not taking the energy and carbon footprint into consideration.
2/19/15, 9:34 AM
Edward said...
When computers were first marketed to the masses, they were saying that computers would lead to the "paperless office." What really happened is that computers allow us to use more paper, faster.
2/19/15, 9:37 AM
Johannes Roehl said...
However, the "Fall" was in some respects the introduction of the safety razor more than 100 years ago because it made men dependent on a supply of blades! Of course, shaving with a straight razor was difficult enough that almost everyone who could afford it would rather visit a barber.
I am somwhat clumsy with my hands so I never tried a straight razor but there is a growing community going back to and cultivating this even older (and more sustainable) method! Although some razors are luxury items there are still comparably plain ones made and sold and if one learns to handle, strop and sharpen them they will keep for a lifetime and more.
2/19/15, 9:40 AM
Rashakor said...
I find them both appropriate to the discussion.
The way interpreted the first was always that evolution will follow its own path, winding, without much direction, some thing will improve, others will go bonkers. In french at least the sentence is always pronounced with a wry sarcastic tone and a roll of the eyes.
The second sentence attributed to Rabelais, is to remind that man is always part of the equation of science/knowledge/technology and that forgetting that only leads to ruin both of the soul (whatever that is) and apparently of other things too.
Ps: a new dream job opportunity is moving me west to Oregon. The only thing making me hesitate is your departure and apparent repudial of that area.
Would you be willing to remind us what lead to your departure from the PNW?
2/19/15, 9:43 AM
william fairchild said...
It is heartening that you took on the advertising industry. They are a key component to understanding why this culture is locked in the myth of progress and pointless consumerism. If there was a devil in human form, I think a good candidate would be Eddie Bernays who applied his Uncle Sigmund's understanding of manipulating the mass subconscious to making money and invented the ad industry. Goebbels later applied it to the furtherance of the Third Reich, and this is not a coincidental connection in my mind.
There are more examples of an unneeded product being hyped to the public than I can count. One example: Lysol. In the 20s Lysol ran a series of ad campaigns promoting a Lysol douche as a way to correct "feminine odor" that might cause her to be an old maid. Others promoted a Lysol douche as birth control. The razor business ran ads featuring a fetching lass in a summer dress with her arms raised and pointed out that their razors could get rid of "unsightly hair". Dixie Cups were marketed as sanitary, replacing personal, folding, reusable cups. The porn industry is directly responsible for the fetish of men and women shaving and waxing the nether regions.
I used to run a vacuum repair and sales shop. So I can tell you that (with the exception of those who are overly sensitive to allergens) the HEPA filtration is a marketing gimmick. The more layers of filtration you add to a vacuum system, the less the airflow, the less the cleaning power. Add to that, they lock you in to buying $60 plus filters every six months at the least. As most of the newer units are all plastic, the lifespan of the machine is a few years at most. Oh, and "amps" are used as another marketing racket. The size and design of the fan (again- airflow) is far more important, but it ain't sexy.
The much maligned Kirbys and Electrolux are far better, although I recommend the older models. Kirby went self-propelled with a transmission (prone to failure) and the Lux went to a plastic shell (prone to breakage) Royal however, still makes its all-metal units. It is the same basic design since the 40s or 50s, is easy to work on, and virtually indestructible.
I once rebuilt a 40s Kirby model 505. When the elderly lady brought it in, it still ran, although the bearings screamed and the carbon brushes arced) When I was done, it was good for another 30 years.
I have repaired friends and neighbors machines many times. I have often thought of going back into the business (and appliances) as a plan B.
But I suppose the day will arrive when the electric grid is unstable, and wall-to-wall carpet will be replaced with wood and throw-rugs. Maybe I need to coppice some ash and hickory and plant broom-corn as a plan C. Regression indeed.
2/19/15, 9:52 AM
Glenn in Maine said...
One resource your readers may appreciate is the Lehman’s Hardware online catalogue: https://www.lehmans.com/ for all sorts of old-timey tools, gadgets, and supplies (Amish-oriented), if only for ideas and inspiration to hunt down original equipment at a flea market.
2/19/15, 9:53 AM
Edward said...
As far as the moving parts, many of them are not servicable any more. Wheel bearings use sealed cartridges instead of cup and cone bearings that can be taken apart. The old style bearings require overhauling about once a year, with new grease and a new set of loose ball bearings. Total cost is a couple dollars. While the cartridge bearings do last longer, when they wear out, they need to be replaced at considerable expense. Chances are, the manufacturer changed the design and you have to buy a whole new wheel hub.
It produces a lot of satisfaction to take a 30-year old bike apart, clean and lube the parts, put it back together, and know that it will last another 30 years.
2/19/15, 10:07 AM
Ed-M said...
Two back-to-back posts that are your best ever! I particularly liked the example of the safety razor. Those things were durable. But now? It appears one must go to a men's specialty store in a gentrified row of women's shops which all used to be run-down stores that catered to the population of a Negro or White [Underclass] slum. Assuming it's still there and not replaced by yet another women's boutique. Here in New Orleans that shop would be Aidan Gill. Come to think of it, I haven't seen ads for the store in the local alternative weekly.
Such are the vicissitudes of the Great God Progress. (HA!)
Hi Chris!
Missed you guys last week, but I just reviewed last week's post and the start of the comments thread. What you're saying of a 30% burden of taxes and required insurances is, for us in America, is getting off lightly! Here one can shell out over *half* of one's income on federal income tax, old-age tax (soc security and medicare), state tax, county and city taxes, car insurance, home owner's insurance, and now PRIVATE health insurance. Those of us in the 50th to 75th percentile get to enjoy the highest burden and reliably vote Republican, and never get relief from these actual and quasi taxes! Not that they would get relief if they voted Democratic, either... jess' sayin'.
2/19/15, 10:13 AM
omerori said...
2/19/15, 10:18 AM
Johannes Roehl said...
But the safety razor with double edged disposable blades only takes a little more skill than the modern plastic ones. I think the main problem is that one has to unlearn some habits acquired when being used to the modern light plastic ones.
2/19/15, 10:20 AM
Jeff Williams said...
I’m a long-time ADR reader, first-time poster who’s enjoyed The Archdruid’s various writings--particularly The Wealth of Nature and Green Wizardry. Those books and forums like this are helping me come to terms with LESS, and take small steps toward that goal. So thank you, all.
The snippet regarding ebooks in last week’s “Butlerian Carnival” resonated with me, as I’ve worked in book publishing for almost two decades. Part of my job these past seven years has been to accept ebooks as the inevitable march of “progress,” while simultaneously I’ve despised them.
Although I don’t broach the subject often with colleagues, I’m met with incomprehension or guffaws when I say that a century from now people will most likely be using some sort of mechanical typesetting to create printed works, but we’ll need to preserve that technology now. Maybe it’s high time I backed away from the screen and contributed to doing just that.
This week’s post reminded me that the obsolescence and shoddiness of products, planned or otherwise, is directly tied to the fallacy of an infinitely expanding economy. Appropriate tech makes complete sense in a sustainable, steady-state economy, but is inadequate to fuel a growth model based on compound interest, quarterly profits, increasing consumption, and geometric human population growth.
I procrastinated, hemmed and hawed past the deadlines for the ADR short story contests, but was determined not to miss The Great Squirrel Case Challenge of 2015. I’m pleased to submit my entry, which can be found here: radioactiveants.blogspot.com
Best regards.
2/19/15, 10:25 AM
RPC said...
I think the mistake our society makes is that it assumes the goal is our present situation; therefore all the more or less random changes that led to our present state are by definition progress!
2/19/15, 10:25 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
2/19/15, 10:40 AM
Paula said...
One caveat about safety razors, though, is the fact that they are 'unforgiving', as my husband put it, and downright hell on your shins and knees. You can't rush a safety razor.
And in the interest of saving money and carbon, we ordered a box of a hundred blades, which should probably last us the rest of our natural lives...
2/19/15, 10:46 AM
onething said...
Everyone wants to solve problems at the outer level, when the real problem is that people are idiots who don't think.
Says Cathy, "They seem proud that they can't cook, don't do dishes, can't change a light switch, let alone make soap or raise their food. I'm not sure how that hypnotism can be overcome... "
It'll be overcome very quickly, once somebody does their thinking for them and passes it down the meme chain.
Says Pyrrhus, "An interesting factoid, courtesy of Nassim Taleb in his great book Anti-fragile, is that the entire increase in life expectancy in the US can be shown to be derived from the decrease in smoking rates. So much for medical technology...."
Well, naturally I am willing to hear him out, but on the face of it, a little thought tells me this is cherry picked data. What about the decrease in child mortality that began over 100 years ago? How is that affected by smoking? The increase in longevity is already leveling off and will continue to plummet. Today's 80 and 90+ year-olds got the max benefit. They were born during a time when nutrition was high as was sanitation and some basic medical care. But America is now a sick nation, smoking or no. Today's kids and youth don't have a chance to match the longevity of their grandparents. It's already too late for them, even if they were to change their ways, which isn't really even possible.
2/19/15, 10:50 AM
Paula said...
2/19/15, 11:03 AM
william fairchild said...
I always remember my Dad saying "K.I.S.S. keep it simple, stupid" He used a safety razor for years and years.
2/19/15, 11:05 AM
kayr said...
2/19/15, 11:21 AM
I R Orchard said...
Repent: It was clearly a VERY badly designed computer system. It's axiomatic that a good system reduces, even eliminates paper use. Who-ever employed that bunch of turkeys needs a rark up.
2/19/15, 11:23 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
I inherited it from my great uncle. He gave it to me when I started to shave. Some company (Gellette?) gave them away in the thousands to WWI soldiers. It's brass with a nice bit of green patina in spots. Comes in it's own little case. It's just so elegant. You twist the bottom and two wings open at the top to insert the razor. I have also discovered that the blades last just about forever if I wipe them off after use and keep them dry. They can also be sharpened if you rub them, back and forth, on the inside of a glass. It gives me such pleasure to use it.
@Cathy - Unfortunately, my rental came with a lot of carpet. Shag, no less :-). And, three dead, rather high tech looking vacuum cleaners. Pulling them apart, giving them a good cleaning ... one needed a belt replacement (available hanging on a rack at my locally owned hardware store) and voila!. Two perfectly good working vacuums.
What drives me crazy about modern plumbing is that you used to have a leaking faucet? Remove one screw and replace a washer. Now? The new improved washerless faucet. Which has to be entirely replaced. Talk about planned obsolescence. I have a friend who's a lot handier at that job than I am. I swap him eggs for that task. Lew
2/19/15, 11:33 AM
Neo Tuxedo said...
There's a third possible reaction: the claim that these technologies would have fulfilled their promises if they'd been funded properly, but they weren't funded because they wouldn't put enough money in the pockets of the people doing the funding. (Cf. the story of J.P. Morgan refusing to fund Nikola Tesla's broadcast-power experiments because he wouldn't be able to put a meter on the broadcast.) At its extreme, this leads to the notion put forward by Waves Forest (most elaborately in his SubGenius pro-fiction "Bob" and the Oxygen Wars) that these technologies are being deliberately suppressed by THEM, whoever or Whatever THEY ultimately are. But that might be more suited to the Well than to a blog nominally concerned with the phenomenal world.
2/19/15, 11:33 AM
Lynford1933 said...
It is nice to move back in time in the fall. One gets an extra hour of sleep. The move in the spring is terrible and the lack of sleep is noticed most on Monday morning, the worst possible time. I suggest doing away with the spring part of that ritual and in a dozen years it will be light all night long and think of all the electricity we can save. For the much too serious here I better mention, that’s a joke.
We will do modern things until we can’t. Then we will make accommodations to maximize happiness and minimize effort. We are a lazy bunch at best. I am an old guy and remember well how to live in the ‘50s and before. My grandsons are smart enough to pick up on growing food as I have them working in my garden between texts and tweets.
I’m sure the irony is not missed that we are using the Internet for an intellectual discussion about going back to living at an earlier time. It should be noted that we have twice as many people in the US to feed and entertain as we did in 1950. “If half you people would go away, we would get along fine.” I will certainly be in the half that is to go away, but now I have work to do in the shop. Cheers. Lynford
2/19/15, 11:35 AM
CoCargoRider said...
2/19/15, 11:46 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I usually sleep very soundly, but last night I decided to put some quality meditation time into the whole "groups" problem and spent several hours in cogitation. The outcomes from that meditation are:
- People who are clearly unable to accept the concept of limitations will no longer be able to bend my ear about their financial problems. I will simply cut them off. Nuff said;
- I'm going to head in towards the big smoke and join a few groups there to see if any of them are actually well managed. I basically need more experience before setting up a group. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd certainly appreciate them? and
- It seems as though a thorough reading of Roberts rules of order may be time well spent.
One of the commonalities that struck me was that in all of the various groups, the leadership clearly lacked the ability to lead and yet at the same time were unable to recognise that fact and let go of that role. The groups in turn become senile (is that the correct word?). Yes, after summer comes winter is my thinking, before another summer rolls around.
One of the guilty pleasures that I enjoy, is that after my earlier experience with the big end of town, I now solely work with small business. That is where the leaders are in the community as those people live week to week by their decisions and they hold themselves accountable for the actions of their businesses as do I. It is very inspiring and a breath of fresh air after the la la land of the big end of town.
PS: Please spare a thought for the people of Queensland as the cyclone coming in from the east has been upgraded to Category 5 and will make landfall this morning. The winds are estimated to be up around 295km/h (183 miles/hour) - that is not good and is about as big and nasty as it gets: Tropical Cyclone Marcia: Storm strengthens to category five off Queensland, evacuations ordered
Cheers
Chris
Hi Angus,
Well done. Only those that do, know. Yes, that is a hard job - I used glass fiber batts and they work well.
I hadn't thought of it as a pejorative either but I'm only usually caught off guard once...
2/19/15, 12:09 PM
daelach said...
Shaving soap isn't just cheaper, it works better because it is real soap, i.e. alkaline. So it softens the hair to be shaved, something canned foam doesn't do. Canned foam is to shaving soap what winter strawberries are to real strawberries, a surrogate.
On the other hand, the safety razor was indeed a better product that the razor knife - the proof is that men were able to shave themselves with the safety razor while it took a specialist (the barber) to get shaved with a razor knife.
An interesting side-note: Why did so many men suddenly turn to shaving at all? Well, because beards didn't work well with gas masks, and the latter turned out to be a necessity in the chemical warfare of WW1. Before, soldiers usually had beards.
@ Shane: Actually, using a safety razor is really easy. There are just some things to pay attention to:
- decide whether you want an open or a closed style razor. Open ones look like a comb, closed ones have a solid ridge. Open ones are better suited if you may have to deal with some-days-beard, and they don't take away all the foam by the first brush. Closed ones are a bit safer. I have always been preferring the open style.
- use hot water (soak a flannel in it and put it on the face) for about a minute. Meanwhile, use the brush to make soap foam. Apply the foam to the face and let it soften the skin for half a minute or a minute. Hint: take a hot shower (start with your face), then shave.
- Do NOT press the device onto the skin. NEVER. This will result in some bleeding. If you think you have to press it down because it doesn't work, either your blade is blunt (hint: avoid W*lk*nson blades) or you have to proceed to the next point.
- you must find the right angle between device and skin yourself.
- do NOT shave across the grain, at least not in the beginning. Shave with the grain first, then in a 90° angle to the grain.
- clean your face after shaving using cold water.
- stop possible bleedings using an alum stick (I did need it initially some times, but that will pass with more training).
- disinfect with aftershave.
2/19/15, 12:22 PM
Mike in Cincy said...
2/19/15, 12:46 PM
Gwaiharad said...
For millenia, music had been built around a single "keynote", or tonal center ("do", for anybody who's ever sung in a choir, or watched The Sound of Music). Composers, from Hildegard von Bingen and Josquin des Pres through Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven et al., down to Stravinsky and Debussy, followed the basic idea of having one note that is "home", that the music spirals out from and then returns towards.
In 1908, along came Arnold Schoenberg. He threw out the concept of the tonal center, and gave all 12 notes of the chromatic scale equal importance. Revolutionary! Truly this is the music of the future! What, you don't enjoy listening to it? Then you must be an un-cultured, un-educated Luddite! (Or a Nazi, or a Communist, they didn't like it either.)
In Schoenberg's footsteps, composers like Alban Berg and John Cage started writing works that can only be described as "weird". (4'33", anyone?)
Meanwhile, other composers (notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sergey Prokofiev, Aaron Copland) kept the ideas of tonality and melody. Guess whose works are more performed today?
Also, guess what works composed in the last ten years sound like? The vast majority are tonal, in one way or another. It's not a complete throwback - there are a lot of new styles and techniques being incorporated - but the idea of "progress" in the direction of atonality ultimately failed to pan out.
Today, most composers seem to draw inspiration from whatever they happen to like, and then try to combine those elements into something they hope will speak to others. Pure innovation is not so much valued anymore, at least not outside very academic circles. And composers borrow un-ashamedly from "pop music" and other sources.
The whole thing is a rather apt (if abstruse) metaphor for technology, IMO. Segways might be the innovative personal transportation of the future, but I don't see people riding them around campus. I do, however, see bikes with LED lights on them, and occasionally carbon-fiber frames. Or I could use more examples from music, looking at the instruments themselves - laminated soundboards, various composite materials, new alloys, onboard pickups for electronic amplification, better key configurations, etc. But the bicycles, and the musical instruments, do pretty much what they've always done. Old technologies, new embellishments.
2/19/15, 1:09 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Lee, I don't drink coffee -- it gives me migraines -- but if I did, I'd do it the simple way, and not waste the time, money, etc. on the fancy machines either.
Indrajala, Tainter's quite simply wrong. Look at China's deliberate abandonment of a maritime empire in the 15th century, Japan's abandonment of firearms and withdrawal from international trade in the Tokugawa period, Britain's relinquishment of its empire after the Second World War -- well, I could go on. Scaling down complexity is a step that a great many societies have taken in the past; it's only unthinkable to those who refuse to think about it.
Raven, fair enough -- you're in the contest.
Mickey, I think there's more to it than that, and will be discussing the matter further as we proceed.
Ed, it's easy to insist in advance that nothing can be done, and that also makes an effective self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't find such things useful, but if that's your drink of choice, by all means.
Fly, that sort of thinking just makes me shake my head. "Who cares if it works? It's not brand new enough!!" Gah.
Rhisiart, thanks for the link!
Phil, unfortunately it was the wrong set of alternative technologies. There are good ways to heat water, etc., that don't require devastating the biosphere, or the local streams for that matter.
Michele, that's bizarre. I suppose they don't bother to evaluate the technology and find out whether it actually helps with the process of teaching...
Stein, good. What I'm suggesting -- or more precisely, the point toward which I'm working in this series of posts -- is that if we start the process deliberately now, it's going to be a lot easier on everyone when regress becomes a matter of necessity.
2/19/15, 1:51 PM
Carnegie said...
My mother and I were meeting at the coffee shop and talking about coffee and dictionaries.
She had gotten a Keurig for Christmas, and now she is wondering what the point is. It takes no longer to brew a good pot the other way, and anyway the machine was relatively expensive and dependent on some sort of microprocessor she cannot repair. K-cups are a right silly concept. There aren't single-serve at all. There's concentrated-enough coffee in them for two or three cups (in fact, the first cup always seems too strong), but the machine doesn't have an option to use the cups for a pot, so you end up making multiple single cups, re-boiling the water each time, or (gasp!) throwing away a perfectly good cup of coffee after only one cup.
Similarly, at the coffee shop, there was a COLOSSAL unabridged Webster's dictionary. I'd only seen one at libraries and never gotten to hold on before. It was absolutely fantastic, with all manner of illustrations, footnotes, and keys for reading. Sort of like a combination dictionary-encyclopedia. However... it was near one hundred years old, and I made a couple tiny tears in the yellowed pages simply by turning them. I thought, "oh no! And they're out of print! And the Oxford ones just stopped printing as well!"
Are there any colossal dictionaries still printing? My future children are unlikely to be interested, but it could certainly be a worthwhile end-of-life comfort.
People who are re-learning the Press: I hope you give these grand books some consideration. How wonderful they are to hold and read -- much like a paper Wiktionary or Wikipedia!
2/19/15, 1:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
2/19/15, 2:10 PM
Kathleen Quinn said...
2/19/15, 2:15 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Tony, that's a Seymour book I hadn't heard of -- will have to chase it down. His books on organic gardening are among my treasures.
Jonathan, that's a fascinating theory. If I understand it correctly, what you're suggesting is that the driving force behind much of what gets labeled progress is the ease with which complexity allows costs to be externalized -- loaded onto the community or biosphere as a whole -- in order to increase profits. Hmm, and hmm again. That's going to want some close study and thought, but if you're right -- and the concept passes the initial sniff test -- that may be absolutely crucial.
Mr. G, if that's the style of retro that appeals to you, by all means!
Professor D., be careful -- when you say that polyethylene is more economical than glass because glass breaks, are you factoring in the entire supply chain of both products? If not, your analysis isn't useful in the kind of whole systems assessment that needs to be done.
Greg, that's a good point.
Gwizard, of course -- and for those who simply prefer beardlessness, too, a safety razor and soap is a blessing.
Trippticket, you do realize, don't you, that having fun with less technology is far and away the most radical thing you can do in today's society? Congratulations, you dangerous subversive. As for the relationship between insanity and progress, did I say they were two different things?
Robert, that's a good point -- technology in the service of getting things out of the way. One problem with that attitude, of course, is that if you take it to its natural extreme, being alive is one of the things you get out of the way.
Trippticket, glad to hear it. Discursive meditation, to give it its proper name, really is better suited to a lot of Western minds, which is why -- until the Theosophical Society popularized Asian mind-emptying meditation in the West -- nearly all Western spiritual traditions used it.
Chris, excellent! You get today's gold star for engaging in the taboo practice of thinking things through. You're quite right, of course; "progress" implies a "toward what?", just as "consciousness" implies an "of what?"
Sweaterman, by all means send it around. I'll be interested indeed to hear how many members of the team recoil from it like a vampire being offered a plate of garlic aioli.
2/19/15, 2:26 PM
sgage said...
" But I confess to a nagging feeling that if I was my overworked grandfather that power mower would have looked quite tempting."
Of course it was tempting. That's why we're where we are now. We know what our grandparents did not.
2/19/15, 2:44 PM
Phil Harris said...
"Phil, unfortunately it was the wrong set of alternative technologies. There are good ways to heat water, etc., that don't require devastating the biosphere, or the local streams for that matter."
That was actually my point. We can't go back to the Britain of my childhood that ran on coal, whatever the many virtues of mum & dad and some well made tools and radio programmes. I think that was why Schumacher's alternative approach in the 60s and 70s got such a hopeful response from so many, including me. It felt like some kind of answer.
I knew I could manage on my bicycle roaming the countryside and trying rough apple cider in remote country pubs. Some of the low cost domestic vernacular buildings I visited needed their walls rebuilt only about every 800 years.
BTW - can I put in a good word for the Shakers? Some of their achievement especially furniture seems one of the high points of our civilisation - or of humanity over the millennia come to that. A different but perhaps comparable appeal to say the Lascaux cave art, of which Picasso said of his own and modern achievement: "We have discovered nothing".
best
Phil
2/19/15, 2:48 PM
avalterra said...
Well, did it. I know I am way behind a lot of people on this blog but better late than never. The wife and I have moved from a city of 650k to one of 8k. Little farming community. I have a solid job in the area and my wife can continue to do her's telecommuting.
Next step integrating into the community and starting the garden. Also I am going to look at making my own Mead.
Woot! This is very exciting!
AV
2/19/15, 2:49 PM
Shane Wilson said...
I wonder if you envision the powers that be and their supporters getting ever more punitive in efforts to "enforce" progress upon people, by law or other means of force, the way Communism got punitive as it became apparent that the "glorious workers paradise" was not going to be.
2/19/15, 2:51 PM
sgage said...
And as for having a beard, people talk about 'growing a beard' as if it's something you do. It is not - it is something you allow - it grows by itself. NOT having a beard is something that you do.
On an amusing note, I got a small cut on my forehead somehow while playing with my dogs in the very deep snow here in the NH woods. When I went to the corner store this afternoon the cashier lady (a friend) asked me what happened. I (who have had a full beard these past 40 years) said "oh, I just cut myself shaving".
It took her a while to process this before we all had a good laugh...
Men, consider just letting your beard grow. So easy! You can keep it neat and trim if you need to with just a pair of scissors.
2/19/15, 3:00 PM
william fairchild said...
With all due respect, the free market has several goals. The ability for entities and individuals to buy and sell goods and services without interference by govts., social institutions, communities, or democracy. The conversion of the natural world into products and then profit. The transfer of wealth from the populace to the elite. The enclosure of any remaining commons to facilitate all of the above. To channel Wendel Berry, a free market is a collection of individuals and corporations who sold their moral allegiance to a pile of money. The markets goal is to become a bigger pile of money by any means necessary. Another thing straitjacketing this culture is the deified status of the free market. If it is not a market solution it is verboten.
2/19/15, 3:01 PM
Yupped said...
On groups: about 10 years ago I spent a good bit of time working with various small community groups. I was coming out of my intense corporate career years and decided I wanted to do some "giving-back". Seems embarrassing in retrospect, but anyway I spent time with three small groups, doing local environmental stewardship type projects.
I was a project manager by trade, and can get quite goal-oriented and specific and directing. At first the groups loved this, thinking I was going to help them get things done. They usually stayed with me through the phase of me writing up detailed goals and plans for particular projects, but then mostly edged away from me when it came to me asking them to do things, and more so when I complained that they weren't doing said things. At first I tried various methods of asking nicely. But when this didn't work, I usually ended up trying to do the activities myself, with the eventual result that I had to get out of that space after a few years, exhausted and a little embittered.
Recounting the experience to a wiser colleague a few years later he opined that small community groups are often full of collegial and friendly personalities who are interested in the fellowship and community, and who aren't really there to get things done. Or if they are they want the process to be very smooth and consensual. My driven style was just not going to work there. OTH, I would expect larger, higher profile groups to be much more interested in getting things done, and would have a higher contingent of personality types that can handle a more structured and driven process.
Looking back on my experience from the distance of a number of years, I now realize it was a good for me, helping me to realize that there is a great deal of benefit in just slowing down and vegging-out sometimes. So I guess it's all about the style of people in the group, not so much the goals of the group itself.
2/19/15, 3:39 PM
Kyoto Motors said...
Thanks as always for the great post. I'm still only halfway through, but I thought I'd chime in before the list hits 200+
(-;
You've hit the nail on the head, once again. I've been pointing out to people for some time now that
it is a habit of free market corporate ideology to proclaim that it's the people who decide whether a product, technology or development is better, and therefore representative of progress [This is part of the "invisible hand" malarkey...] Then they'll turn around and pour billions through Madison Ave and do whatever it takes to influence the "objective consumer". Progress is obviously a construct of the dominant players in the market place.
2/19/15, 3:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Robert, that's possible -- but I wonder how much of it is simply the common mental tic these days that leads people to pay more attention to collecting data than to understanding it.
Andy, "technologies of extrication" is a fine coinage, and a concept worth contemplating. Thank you!
Steve, two things I've learned about diets, mostly from living in a society (ours) that's profoundly neurotic about food, is, first, that different people thrive on different diets, and second, that making any serious, sustained change in diet, no matter what the change might be, makes most people feel better for about six months or so. If the paleo diet makes you feel great, wonderful; you might revisit it toward fall and see if it's the diet itself, or simply doing something different and being more conscious about food.
Yupped, the crucial thing to my mind is treating it as a decision you can make, rather than just doing what you're told to do by the media.
AntEater, excellent. Yes, that's a crucial point, and it's also a good example of a broader issue, which is the whole-system cost of any given technology in terms of any variable you care to name. If it's cheap to buy the initial unit but you pay buckets for supplies, it's not cheap; if it's fast to use but takes lots of time to clean and service, not to mention to earn the money to pay for it, it's not fast; if it's green and sustainable in terms of its effect in your home and yard but requires huge amounts of pollution and resource depletion elsewhere, it's not green and sustainable. Getting that through some people's heads takes work!
DM, I've got Windows XP on both my computers now -- that's the standard software that the techs at the local used-computer shops load onto reconditioned machines, for good reason. Enjoy your soon-to-arrive safety razor!
Zach, congrats on the publishing project, not to mention the rest of it. At this stage of the game, all (or almost all) of us have to have a foot in both worlds; the point to watch is which way you're shifting your weight.
Cathy, oh, granted. I wonder how long it will take before some enterprising young legal assistants set themselves up offering "we can translate out of legalese" services in storefronts, to provide exactly the kind of services that many lawyers provided before the industry got so greedy.
Tony, excellent! You get tonight's gold star for catching on to one of the next steps in the discussion well in advance.
Ghung, exactly. It's already biting a lot of people in various sensitive locations, and the teeth are clamping down more tightly every year.
Matt, glad to hear it!
2/19/15, 4:02 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
@ Raskashor: When you get to OR, be sure to contact the Pacific NW Green Wizards group! I, personally, wouldn't be anywhere else but OR.
:-)
@Lewis: Yes, I found that out about the old/new faucets when I replaced my kitchen one - I specifically asked for metal, but it's a piece of crap plastic w/"metal look" - and guaranteed to break in a year or two. I need to get up to Rejuvenation Hardware in Portland and get a real one.
2/19/15, 4:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Jon, I hope that what died inside you that day was blind faith in the mythology of progress!
Angus, well, there you are!
Johannes, I tend to clumsiness -- very common with Aspergers syndrome -- so never had the courage to try a straight razor back in the days when I shaved. I don't expect ever to need a shave again, but should that change, I plan on trying a professional shave from a capable barber at least once.
Rashakor, the very short form is that the left coast was (a) very expensive to live in, (b) increasingly crowded, and (c) deeply invested in (or infested with!) a hypocritical faux-green self-righteousness that I found overwhelmingly tiresome. Oregon was one of the two places I used to see gargantuan SUVs bearing bumper stickers saying "Live Simply That Others Might Simply Live," and it's also where I walked past a house with a lavish solar panel system on the side of the roof facing the street, which happened to be the north side, so that everyone could see it as they drove past in their overpriced hybrids. Those are only two small details out of a much broader cultural milieu. Of course the fact that I could buy a house where I live now for 10% of what an identical house would have cost me in the Portland area had something to do with it as well!
William, in your place, I'd definitely start planting broom corn, and learning to make brooms the traditional way. Did you know that producing fine handmade brooms can be a tolerably lucrative craft already?
Glenn, well, there you are.
Edward, I'm glad to hear that there are still firms making good sturdy steel frames!
Ed-M, back in the day, a lot of people shopped by mail -- might be worth trying that as an end run around boutique culture. I'm told that good standard safety razors can be had easily from a number of mail-order houses, on and offline.
Omerori, that would be shooting fish in a barrel! You're right, though, that as an example of a technological revolution whose time is never going to come, that one's hard to beat.
2/19/15, 4:46 PM
Ruben said...
And please do use Peak Meaninglessness. I look forward to seeing where you go with it.
2/19/15, 4:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
RPC, okay, that one deserves one of my very rare second gold stars in a single evening. Excellent! And quite correct, too -- akin to the bizarre way that evolution gets redefined as progress, so that what's a random process of adaptation to circumstances suddenly becomes a teleological movement toward "the better" -- than what? Nobody says.
Justin, there you are!
Paula, I was hoping we'd hear from the distaff side as well. Good -- and of course natural deodorants also don't include large doses of aluminum, which has been implicated in Alzheimer's.
Onething, thank you for "Everyone wants to solve problems at the outer level, when the real problem is that people are idiots who don't think" -- a fine summary of the problem! I'd encourage you to get someone to put that on the business end of a branding iron and apply it liberally to those who need to learn it.
Paula, as I mentioned to another paleo-eater above, I've noticed that any dietary change seems to make people feel better for around six months. I've also noticed that the more forcefully people evangelize for a diet, the more people seem to have serious problems if they stay on it -- the pale, gaunt, gets-every-cold-that-comes-through-town vegan who's constantly pushing the vegan diet on everyone he or she knows is a tolerably familiar type these days. I hope the paleo diet doesn't attract the same sort of behavior!
William, your dad was a smart man.
Kayr, it's definitely something that takes practice, and sustained development of the skills of self-knowledge as well. After all, if it were easy to see through the myths of industrial society, would we be in this mess at all?
Lewis, doesn't seem over the top to me at all. A good tool deserves affection!
Neo, oh, granted -- I should have included the paranoid response as well.
Lynford, true, but if some of us stop using modern things before we have to, it's going to make it easier to have non-modern things, and people who know how to use them, around to pick up some of the slack.
2/19/15, 5:00 PM
Shane Wilson said...
Regarding empire, the U.S. seems to be choosing the "stomp on the gas for maximum impact/effect" route. I'm reminded of what you wrote about escalation in Twilight's Last Gleaming. Out with a bang, for maximum effect, I guess
2/19/15, 5:12 PM
Shane Wilson said...
2/19/15, 5:35 PM
The other Tom said...
My mother used to volunteer at the polling place in the small town where I grew up in Connecticut. After the 2000 election with the hanging chads they had to "do something," so legislation was passed to pay for electronic voting equipment. The mechanical lever machines were scrapped after at least 60 years of flawless service.
I just went back and reread TJs comment with Wendell Berry's nine requirements to be met before replacing old technology with new, and the electronic voting machines fail every requirement. The old machines were easily understood and fixed by someone local, but try finding a software expert on the premises at 5:00 A.M.
I remember pointing out to people that we were solving a problem that didn't exist and the usual response was that the old machines were so obsolete they were embarrassing.
I think the words "well, we have to do SOMETHING" are a kind of corollary to the Religion of Progress.
2/19/15, 5:58 PM
olduvaiguy said...
The "progressive" version consistently requires more embedded energy.
This seems to be true of shaving kits and financial instruments.
Whether or not one can pick-and-choose what to keep of wildly different levels of embedded energy [Odum] is not at all obvious to me. Rather, I think otherwise, that a simpler society will shed items and processes according to their embedded energy. At least over a decade scale. Societies tend to processes and technologies running at the same emergy.
Nor is it obvious to me that the 1/10 of 1% will get to play with their SIVs and CDs when ATMs and the internet start to fail.
Some of the complexity requires scale. The big banks will give way to the Jimmy Stuarts and the loan sharks.
My guess is the technology of downslope will not permit a much wider range of embedded energies than the upslope.
The politics of the downslope will certainly exacerbate the disparities, but not enough to keep the ATMs lit when homes go dark.
How that plays with surveillance, the NSA, the mass media - probably lots of fear to manipulate. Which is why already anyone stepping outside the conventional mainstream is a terrorist. From the POV of the hive or the NYPD, that is certainly true.
Hedges writes of the "monastic option" (or Asimov of the 2nd Foundation) - the dying empire won't tolerate that.
2/19/15, 6:55 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, up until the 1960s you could still find books in the US about how to run a meeting, how to get ready for your one-year term as head of a lodge or club, how to organize clubs, etc. Might be worth seeing if you can find something of the sort on your side of the planet. As for Queensland, ouch -- not good at all. I hope everyone in harm's way has done the smart thing and evacuated.
Daelach, I didn't even think of the sanitary dimension, but of course you're quite right.
Mike, if you're ready to do that, do it. "Collapse now and avoid the rush" is still the best strategy I've found.
Gwaiharad, the entire notion that art "progresses" deserves to be mocked by an Irish bard until the earth opens at its feet and swallows it once and for all. The Iliad was not rendered obsolete by Beowulf, nor is a painting by Leonardo outmoded because of Rembrandt -- and of course that's equally true about music. As fas as Schoenberg et al. are concerned, I've long admired the satiric book on culture that noted that orchestras play 20th century avant-garde music when they want to dispense with the inconvenience of having an audience.
Carnegie, have you considered getting into printing yourself? If something you value is going to happen, it's probably going to happen because you did it, you know.
Kathleen, excellent -- long live the cursive revolution!
Phil, okay, I missed that -- though I could certainly handle a bicycle tour drinking local cider. I found myself quite unexpectedly developing a taste for Somerset scrumpy while visiting Glastonbury last June. As for the Shakers, no argument there!
Avalterra, congratulations! That's got to have been a big step, as well as a very important one. BTW, I owe you an apology, and a public hat tip -- when I was putting together the Squirrel Case Challenge, I didn't remember off hand who'd suggested it and couldn't find the comment you'd made -- admittedly I was in a hurry, due to page proofs on two book projects that had to be done at the same time. I'll remedy that when the results are announced.
Shane, in some areas it's already happening -- look at the legal persecution of organic gardeners, alternative health care, and so on. I expect it'll accelerate for a while, and then collapse as other problems become far more pressing.
Sgage, no argument there. And -- ahem -- ladies, no need for you to practice the same bizarre habit either, you know.
Kyoto, I've noticed that. A year ago, I was still getting maybe half a dozen comments Wednesday night before I went to bed -- now it's 20 to 30. BTW, "Progress is obviously a construct of the dominant players in the market place" is a very nice, terse summary -- thank you.
2/19/15, 7:23 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Shane, the publisher and I sweated all the way through the process of getting Twilight's Last Gleaming onto the bookshelves, since half the things I was talking about seemed about to happen! As for the paleo diet, yes, I've seen a certain amount of the same strident intolerance for disagreement out of the paleo scene that's made the whole issue of vegan diets so dreary; my wife has celiac disease, and half the online celiac forums are swamped with paleo trolls who go in for hate-filled personal abuse the moment anyone fails to follow their dietary dicta.
Other Tom, excellent -- yes, that's a good one to keep in mind. "No, we don't" is often a very wise counsel!
Olduvaiguy, it's a complex issue. A society may choose to keep one technology with relatively high embedded energy going while letting a lot of others drop, because the one it saves fills an important economic niche and can't be replaced without major discontinuities. A society may also scrap technologies that it could theoretically save, again for social reasons. As for the monastic alternative, there I think you're wrong; the elite is just as bad at systems theory as the rest of us, and once the shrinking of the pie of goods and services becomes too obvious to ignore, my working guess is that the elite will be delighted by neomonasticism and the like, thinking -- however mistakenly -- that this means that there'll be more for them.
2/19/15, 7:32 PM
Kaitain said...
Oregon was one of the two places I used to see gargantuan SUVs bearing bumper stickers saying "Live Simply That Others Might Simply Live"
Would the other place happen to be Seattle? I live in a small town in Washington State and where I live Seattle liberals are hated almost as much as their California counterparts, which is not surprising given their well-earned reputation for hypocrisy, self-righteous posturing and know-it-all arrogance...
2/19/15, 7:36 PM
Ruben said...
I—like Paula—found safety razors to be a steeper learning curve than you have had. To this day, after shaving with them for years, I find a lapse of attention is quickly punished.
2/19/15, 7:46 PM
Mark said...
Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
Wendell Berry called it "desecration".
2/19/15, 7:48 PM
bdy1 said...
2/19/15, 8:21 PM
SunsetSu said...
2/19/15, 8:30 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I like this printing press conversation, my skills are not well suited for bringing anything to market, at this point in time, but I will start studying the issue when I am not up to my arm-pits in mycology and biodynamic research. A couple of folks I know have skill enough to put together a http://www.excelsiorpress.org/kelsey.html, if only I could find the right motivation.
Also look here, fellow printing press interested people! Its a good topic to start thinking on.
http://www.thefossils.org/horvat/aj/lowcostpress.htm
2/19/15, 8:49 PM
Mark Rice said...
Verschlimmbesserung
2/19/15, 9:09 PM
Mark Rice said...
A classical example is Intel touting about how their new chip has 10 times as many transistors as the old chip. But the new chip does very little extra for this 10x increase. This is not something to brag about.
2/19/15, 9:16 PM
william fairchild said...
"If that abrupt act of redefinition reminds any of my readers of the way history got rewritten in George Orwell’s 1984—“Oceania has never been allied with Eurasia” and the like—well, let’s just say the parallel was noticed at the time, too." This made me smile. That you would insinuate our leaders, country, us ourselves, could be guilty of "doublethink". Shocking indeed!
Oh and if anyone doubts that "the market", the ad industry, this culture (industrial civilization) has become anything less that parasitic, or cancerous- two words: planned obsolescence.
2/19/15, 9:56 PM
Crow Hill said...
Dear JMG, thanks for shining your weekly light on contemporary events.
2/19/15, 11:00 PM
KL Cooke said...
"I've been curious for a while about why so many people of my generation (mid-twenties) fear phones and prefer texting/emailing each other. I find all the typing to be a lot of work."
I'm not of your generation, but I know why I prefer texting. The voice quality of a cell phone is very poor compared to a traditional handset. The issue is not with the the phones themselves, but rather the transmission technology. The sound is mechanical, difficult to understan, and very harsh and grating to my ear.
When people call me and want to chat for any length of time, I find it a taxing experience.
2/20/15, 12:04 AM
KL Cooke said...
http://www.harristweedhebrides.com/collections/harris-tweed-fabric-and-cloth
2/20/15, 12:30 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Ahhh. I know some of those out of the way dusty second hand book shops where the stock stays the same decade after decade. They are where I picked up some of the more difficult to find Jack Vance books so that the collection is now complete. Old pulp fiction like that is as rare as hens teeth and it is in surprisingly readable condition.
I will check them for that particular instructional book over the next couple of weeks and let you know what the outcome is. Incidentally - and I see there is more to your comment than meets the eye - why the 1960's? There is a cultural meme in there somehow?
Hi Deborah,
I'm not sure whether it is a down under thing, but I just checked ebay here and you can buy the Harris Tweed by the metre here. It is listed under: "Harris Tweed - Curtain / upholestry fabric". But brace yourself, it is expensive stuff.
It was very common back in the day for men's hats here. Gaffer's hats is what I believe Tolkien would have called them and I was going to pick one up myself until Brad Pitt started wearing them...
Make that cape lassy!
Cheers
Chris
2/20/15, 12:52 AM
Gloucon X said...
2/20/15, 2:32 AM
Scythe of Relief said...
That is my excuse anyway. ;-)
2/20/15, 3:08 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yeah, Queensland's doing it tough today: Tropical Cyclone Marcia: Central Queensland towns devastated as storm tracks across state
and photos: Cyclone Marcia in pictures
The wind gusts were measured at 205km/h (127 miles/hour). The photos were pretty telling of the damage.
Thanks for your thoughts for them. It is a long, long way from here and they reckon by tomorrow morning the cyclone will be downgraded to a tropical low.
Cheers.
Chris
2/20/15, 3:16 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Many thanks for your experience. Avoiding the passengers whilst still getting things done is a tough gig.
PS: Thanks for your larger background story too. Interesting stuff. And I wonder to myself whether you have considered a succession plan for your homestead / farm / small holding? The previous issues seem to be of some value to that question. Dunno.
There has to be a way to get buy-in for members in a group, so more research in both the field and in books is clearly in order.
The process has already begun and it is yielding interesting results.
Cheers
Chris
2/20/15, 3:26 AM
Dagnarus said...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/11399677/Samsung-SmartTV-customers-warned-personal-conversations-may-be-recorded.html
(short story the TV records your conversations and sends them to a third party)
The thing is that immediately after reading about them it occurred to me, why would you want a smart TV? Even assuming you both don't mind having your private conversations recorded and want to watch television, why would you want a "smart" TV, what does this buy you over remote control?
It then got me thinking about "smart" grids, which as far as I can tell, the only smart thing about them is that they do there metering moment by moment, so if the wind dies down for an hour the electric company can immediately jack up the price. Of course I think there meant to be some other stuff about making the grid more stable, but I get the impression that a lot of that is a red herring, in order to sell the thing to environmentalists. I would also assume that hackers would probably disprove the new smart grids reliability if they so chose.
2/20/15, 4:54 AM
Thirdeyerune said...
"Peak Meaningless"! Indeed! I couldn't agree with you more. This sums up a lot for me about the world we're in and how I'm reacting to it.
2/20/15, 4:54 AM
Thirdeyerune said...
I'm old enough to remember using a safety razor from my grandfather's cabinet. I didn't like shaving under the nose. Given the razor's dementions, it was a tough area. I hope the straight razor will be more effective in this area.
I have to say that I'm feeling frustrated by having to learn so many regression skills on my own. Both of my grandfathers have past and my dad just doesn't care. The past ways are rediculous to him. Now I wish I had cared more when the folks (grandmothers too) were still alive.
2/20/15, 5:11 AM
Tye said...
http://www.reuters.com/video/2015/02/19/fashion-meets-function-with-robotic-zipp?videoId=363243206&feedType=nl&feedName=Technology&videoChannel=6
2/20/15, 5:13 AM
Stein L said...
According to the instructions, that wasn't a problem. Two pushes of a button on the alarm-control on my keychain, and I would be set.
But the immobilizer wouldn't deactivate, and the engine wouldn't crank.
Late in the day, getting darker, cold outside. I placed my daughter in the car, sat down to read instructions using my headlamp.
OK - under the hood, there was supposed to be some buttons to be pushed in a specific sequence, on the alarm unit itself.
Nope. That didn't work either.
In the end, I disconnected the wires to the battery poles, hoping this would let me regain control. Fortunately, I had the appropriate tools.
That worked. So it was a kind of "have you tried switching it off and on again" solution.
This happened in the late 90s. The next day I went straight to the garage that had installed the alarm and told them to rip it out, telling them why.
"Yes, there have been some problems with the CPU. Sometimes it doesn't accept the override."
After that experience, I have been very critical when it comes to products with computer control of functions. At the farm, I like to keep things basic, and repairable by me.
The other day I read that the top models in the Mercedes brand have twenty million lines of code for the navigation, climate and entertainment center. Twenty million lines of code ...
It's not a question of whether we'll regress to a more sustainable and repairable level of technology. It's a question of when.
2/20/15, 5:27 AM
Leo Knight said...
2/20/15, 6:07 AM
Denys said...
Our favorite time at the furnace events was just prior to opening at an event when everyone was busy walking around in their historical garb, children barefoot running in the grass, and the smell of cooking fires in the air. It is truly special to step back in time like that and live it, if only for a few days a year.
2/20/15, 6:39 AM
Denys said...
Is this the kind of thing you are talking about when you talk about going back? My children are 14 and 12 now and it would be endlessly entertaining at least to me to turn back the clock on them. We homeschool so the opportunities are endless.
2/20/15, 6:44 AM
Shane Wilson said...
2/20/15, 7:21 AM
David said...
I'm not caught up on the comments for this post as yet, so I'm not sure how this will fit into the general thrust of current discussion, but I saw this "story" posted in the financial pseudo-news and felt it ought to be shared with the group.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/shake-your-middle-class-status-stat-211915756.html
My immediate (mental) response to the writer/speaker was, of course, "how about living differently?" But no, the "answer" is to work harder and double your salary so that you can make it into the elite class and be saved. (Until the pitchforks come, then you're not...)
This is what passes for thought these days.
2/20/15, 7:23 AM
Ed-M said...
2/20/15, 8:08 AM
Chester said...
Lots of cross-over between this week's post and a book I'm currently reading: Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn.
While much of the book is focused on how the strategic and legal framework for "targeted assassinations" came to be, the author also casts a critical eye on the way that technologies like the Predator drone rose to prominence in military strategy.
He describes a military in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that is so eager to embrace a new vision of combat that they never stop to consider whether the new technologies they are rushing to implement are even of value. The Predator, as the obvious example, is a deeply flawed weapon system that fails utterly in the face of even moderate weather, has targeting systems that he likens to "looking at a battlefield through a straw," and that completely undermines the chain of command by allowing on-the-fly meddling in battlefield tactics from the upper echelons sitting back at base or even in the U.S.
He describes Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan where the commanding officers continue to make flawed strategic decisions based on the belief that the Predators offer them God-like awareness of the battlefield, even when offered conflicting strategic observations from a pilot observing the battlefield with his own eyes in an AC-10 Warthog. Not surprisingly, this strategic tunnel vision results in the deaths of several American service members.
To me this highlights an even more fundamental conflict than that of appropriate tech vs. the junk of progress. That is, the conflict between so-called "advanced" technology and human beings themselves.
As Cockburn says: "The ensuing battle featured almost all aspects of the remote-control high-technology approach to war, notably the abiding faith in remote sensing as a substitute for the human eye. The results were instructive, if tragic."
I'm looking forward to picking up "Twilight's Last Gleaming" next to check out your vision of how this plays out in our next non-asymmetrical field of battle.
2/20/15, 8:11 AM
Karl said...
At the time I first saw this criticism come up, I thought it was false; but I didn't think through why the author of a book (Paleofantasy by Zuk) would think that it is a telling criticism to make.
Thinking about it some more today, the thought occurred to me today that re-enactment involves a type of re-enchantment.
And so any type of perceived "re-enactment" is going to trip the circuit of people who are sensitive to re-enchantment, even if they don't understand what type of magic is going on.
Does that make sense?
2/20/15, 8:30 AM
Shawn Aune said...
It is my belief that the search for the unified field theory or an equation to describe it is being severely hampered by the fact that consciousness isn't considered a fundamental force along with gravity, the strong force and the electro-weak force.
2/20/15, 9:09 AM
Scotlyn said...
Avery & Oilman - I have been playing around with different ways to price treatments in my acupuncture clinic. Money is losing its cache, though I still need some. Also, people around me, who would appreciate a treatment are often both too poor to afford full price & too proud to accept a reduced price (a sort of whiff of "charity")... And of course that denies me opportunities to practice my art.
This morning I was musing that it would be equally fair if I offered an hour of my time for as much as that person can themselves earn in an hour (leaving the determination of that amount entirely in their hands). Putting that in the frame ye suggest, "time is LIFE," would make it much easier to explain no charity is involved. It stands to reason that the dollar it takes ten minutes to earn is worth so much more than the dollar that was earned in ten seconds. (Or euro, but they may not be sticking around long...). Thanks for the thought!
2/20/15, 9:24 AM
Peter Robinson said...
New technologies may be better than the technologies they replace or they may be worse and, as so many are, driven entirely by the greed for profit. However, don't under-estimate simple incompetence. An engineer who designs a weed whacker that needs 9 hours of recharging for 15 minutes of work is incompetent. As the old saying has it, never attribute to malice that which may be adequately explained by stupidity.
Which leaves me with a load of weeds to whack and I'm thinking of learning to use a scythe. However, my original idea of wearing a large black hoody while doing so has been criticized as likely to cause concern to senior citizens out for their morning walks.
2/20/15, 9:43 AM
Nastarana said...
Pinku-Sensei, I am an organic gardener, for about 20 years now, and avid farmer market shopper. I also participate on internet food and gardening fora. I can tell you that the follks who care about food sovereignty and local resilience are coming to the painful realization that the far left and the Democratic Party are no friends of our movement.
Under a Democratic admin, USDA remains, for all practical purposes, a wholly owned subsidiary of Monsanto Corp. The label GMO initiative lost in Oregon by 800 or so votes, where it was conspicuously not endorsed by that state's popular senator, who handily won reelection in a Republican wave election year. The shocking abuses documented in the film Farmageddon seem to occur as often in Blue states as in Red, and one could go on.
2/20/15, 9:48 AM
jonathan said...
i think you have the essence of the idea exactly right. for example: large food producers routinely are the source of nasty disease organisms, salmonella, e-coli, shigella etc. there has never been any response other than voluntary recalls and wrist slap fines. imagine what would happen to a restaurant that served food causing illnesses. actually, there's no need to imagine. try a search for "restaurant forced to close".
there are at least two reasons why this occurs.
1. blackmail. why are coal companies allowed to slice off mountain tops and dump the debris into the valley below? they say: if you make us stop it will cost jobs. the same refrain can be heard anytime any large organization is pressed to raise wages, reduce pollution or act in any socially responsible way.
2. diffusion of responsibility. when something terrible results from a failure in large institutions you can always expect to hear some variation of "mistakes were made". note the passive voice. no individual has been prosecuted as a result of the massive financial and housing meltdown of 2007-08 despite clear evidence of fraud and forgery. no general motors employee has been charged despite unmistakeable evidence that failures of the ignition switch were known and covered up for years. the examples are endless.
in sum, size and complexity encourage destructive behavior since it reduces the costs to the enterprise by shifting them to the public. will there ever be a carbon tax which would shift some of the costs associated with hydrocarbons back onto the producers of coal, oil and gas? my magic 8 ball says "outlook not so good".
2/20/15, 9:55 AM
Glenn said...
JMG seems to have lived in areas with a high proportion of people with excessive income and foolishness. (I lived in Ashland, OR 1978 - 1980 while attending college) This is not universal in the PNW. Also, his job is very portable as he is a self-employed writer.
We live in a very nice rural community outside Port Townsend WA. We are surviving below the Federal Poverty level on my Coast Guard enlisted pension. We have followed the no debt, large garden strategy, and still spend about $540 USD a month on groceries for 3 people.
Our land cost $57K in 1999 for 8 acres, it is currently assessed at $115K. We could have got more land for the money in say, Idaho. But I've lived inland, and have to live where I can smell salt water. Likewise, my wife can't stand to live in town, any town, however nice, or we'd be in PT. So we have paid a premium to maintain our sanity.
Unemployment here is running between 9% and 10%. Still, my brother manages to make a modest living as a carpenter (as I do, when we need money for improvements).
My point is, do not be dissuaded by the experiences of other people unless you know all their circumstances and how they may or may not relate to your own.
YMMV
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
2/20/15, 10:25 AM
Clay Dennis said...
As a Native Oregonian who has lived here all but 4 years of my life I can agree with some of what JMG has to say. Todays Oregon is a very diverse place with very different geographic cultures. JMG's experiece in Southern Oregon is typical of that area ( Bend Also) which is influenced by California Transplants on big budgets. The mid valley ( Salem, Albany) is essentially midwestern in character. Then there are the old logging towns which are much like appalachian resource extraction towns and then there is Portland. Portland within itself is culturaly diverse with the crowd JMG's dislikes occupying the Southwest Suburbs, while North and North East Portland is poplulated with a growing population of young people actively returning to crafts, food, art, etc of an earlier era while attempting to go car-free. But one thing that JMG has right is that Portland has become expensive , but such is the price of it's current trendiness. I figure it won't take much sliding down the curve of collapse to flatten housing costs. But, mother nature does seem to be favoring us as the climate changes. No Polar Vortex Here.
2/20/15, 11:11 AM
Violet Cabra said...
2/20/15, 11:17 AM
Bright City said...
This is my first comment, though I have been reading your blog devotedly for several years. It has transformed my world view and made me feel like an alien in the company of nearly everyone I know, all of them bright, knowledgeable believers in progress. I live in the center of the universe, Silicon Valley, where the streets are full of people with their heads bowed over their iPhones. I am very fond of my computer, but I have refused to get a "smart phone" of any kind, because they give me what I don't want (constant availability) and don't give me what I do (good sound quality and simplicity). I like the idea of choosing older and better technologies, but it seems to get harder all the time. I've heard recently that the phone company is thinking of phasing out landlines since "nobody uses them any more."
Quite a few people in this area have big rooftop PV systems, all of course tied into the grid. I like my small, portable, all-in-one (battery and inverter included) solar panel. Charged up by a few hours in the sun, it will run my laptop for more than nine hours. I know it depends on high-tech materials for its manufacture, but its simplicity and effectiveness make it feel like something that conforms pretty well to Wendell Berry's nine rules, posted by this week's first commenter. You can see it here:
http://laserhacker.com/?p=92
I look forward every week to your smart, wise, entertaining essays. Thank you.
2/20/15, 11:30 AM
RPC said...
2/20/15, 11:42 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
I've been using story telling to convince people of the truth of our time. Turns out traditional fables are much more compelling than the trash dished out by Hollywood, and New York. Score one for the old roads of progress!
Chris,
I hope you're doing okay I'm Queensland. I heard you guys got hit by two bad typhoons recently.
Regards,
Varun
2/20/15, 11:49 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
I told my Spanish teacher once that I do have trouble sometimes taking in information through my ears and asked how you said that in Spanish. He said "Estoy un poco sordo."
2/20/15, 11:57 AM
beneaththesurface said...
That line made me think of my public library workplace. The library profession prides itself on its values of intellectual diversity and anti-censorship, yet quite ironically--so often silences and is hostile to viewpoints that question contemporary technological trends in libraries.
I'm currently having a dilemma of how to deal with one of four work goals I'm required to complete this year, which I will be evaluated on. It's entitled "New Technology." I am required to pick a technology on a list, learn in depth about it (how it is used and would enhance library services), write a report on it, and then do a project-based program that incorporates or promotes the technology. I looked at the list of technologies, all of which I thoroughly despise, think are making the library a worse and less resilient place, or at best, am simply not passionate about: Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), ActivTable (this large iPad-like table that has recently invaded and debased our children's section), 3-D printer, electronic resources (e-books), mobile apps, etc. I do have the option of proposing a new technology not on the list to do instead (but it would have to be approved by my manager). It annoys me that general programming (such as book clubs, story times, etc.) do not even count for my performance evaluation this year, yet this one kind of program will.
I don't believe the implicit cultural mythology underlying this goal. I'm thinking about how to complete it in a way that is true to my values. Several ideas:
1) I could think of a technology not on the list that might enhance library services, and not the kind one usually thinks of as "new" technology--something lower-tech. I'm not sure what that would be. When I see the word "technology," my anthropologist-self thinks of a wider definition than the popular connotation: a paper book, fork, and wheel are all just as much technologies as a computer or mobile phone.
2) If I somehow get stuck with having to do something on the list, I could complete the goal in a subversive manner. For example, it greatly annoys me how much hype occurs around 3-D printing at the library. All the library programs and articles promoting it give a very one-sided view. If the public library is a place that truly tolerates intellectual diversity and debate, then there should be room for dissenting opinions about 3-D printers. Perhaps I could do some sort of program that counters its endless hype.
3) If my manager is inflexible in whatever ideas I come up with, then I can be courageous and refuse to complete the goal (risking getting the lowest evaluation score for it). There's no reason I need to go along with it all.
If any of you have any fun ideas of how I should respond to this work task, please let me know! I'm still trying to figure out what I should do. There may come a time when I decide I'm better off leaving this library system to more freely pursue deindustrial library goals, but in the meantime, I at least want to be true to myself while I continue to work here.
2/20/15, 1:12 PM
Annette Simard said...
I hope to meet you soon when we have our green wizards meeting tjis spring.
Annette
2/20/15, 2:12 PM
Scythe of Relief said...
My normal response is. "No, You can't stop progress from destroying itself, and maybe us with it".
But maybe I could come up with a better come back using these words of yours. Even though it is most likely fall on deaf ears.
"“progress” is just a label for whatever choices happen to have been made by governments and corporations, with or without input from the rest of us. If we don’t like the choices that have been made for us in the name of progress, in turn, we can choose something else".
And by the way, I know I may have been pushing it, with some of my comments to your blog. Sorry, I have a sense of humour, that may sometimes offend without me being totally aware of it.
Cheers.
2/20/15, 2:48 PM
team10tim said...
I like the anecdote about the advertising guy promoting an inferior product. I once heard advertising described as the art of creating a need or manufacturing an inadequacy. If someone comes along and builds a better mouse trap then they don't need advertising and marketing because the product will sell itself.
If, on the other hand, the product is expensive, marginally effective, has numerous and dangerous side effects, like some pharmaceuticals, then you need to advertise it heavily. And not just to the market, you also need to promote it to the doctors or they will go with an older and cheaper product with an established history.
Since the goal of advertising is to circumvent the rational mind and manipulate the target audience into needing something they never needed before, the best defence is to actively understand the nature of the manipulations. There is a great game for this called "THE PROPAGANDA GAME" from the 60's and it basically teaches about fallacies of logic through examples from marketing, politics, used car sales men, etc.
Link:
http://www.gamesforthinkers.org/the-propaganda-game/
Thanks,
Tim
2/20/15, 2:55 PM
Dwig said...
@Heather,
In reply to a comment of mine in the "As Night Closes In" post, you said:
I would love to discuss this topic with you, with Phil H, who posted last week about the possibility of children corresponding with a post-collapse character (possibly via ham radio), and with anyone else who would be interested in sharing ideas. I am going to the Green Wizards forum right now to try to find an appropriate spot to start a thread.
I'd enjoy that discussion too. I'm on GW as "Dwig" (surprise); drop me a message. (I tried sending you one, but there are several "heathers" there.)
2/20/15, 3:34 PM
Ruben said...
As with so many ideas here, they all assume a man of leisure with ample time and space, not the real existence of chaotic Americans...The regrettable result: progress triumphs.
Gloucon, if your real existence is chaotic, I have taken one of the core messages of this blog to be change your real existence.
An incredible idea I know. But, simplification is not optional, whereas joy is.
2/20/15, 3:39 PM
chubasco said...
2/20/15, 4:37 PM
Shane Wilson said...
I'm also reminded about what JMG said about the misunderstandings about evolution, namely, that Hunter/gatherers are "less evolved", "more primitive", "arrested in time" humans. That Hunter/gatherers are just as evolved and modern to their societies as we are to ours. A friend sent me an article about a guy who performed a fecal transplant with a San bushman, hoping to reset his gut biota 10,000 years. All I could think about reading it was, "how could you explain what you were doing and why you were doing it to the San bushman who's poop you'd unknowingly swapped? You supposedly want to return to the lifestyle of a guy who would find your actions totally baffling and incomprehensible." Granted, I know fecal transplants perform very useful functions for people with gut problems, but I'm not sure that returning your gut to Eden is a solution to a medical issue.
2/20/15, 4:57 PM
heather said...
Both the re-enactment and the blog sound interesting and useful. I'd definitely read it, and maybe subject my own kids to some re-enactment re-enacting. :)
--Heather in CA
2/20/15, 4:58 PM
changeling said...
I was thinking of this post and post "mentat wanted, will train.". As you know from your's other blog I picked some exercises and practices that vastly improve focus and control over one's attention.
And this happened: one of the lecturers during previous semester basically told or implied all questions that appeared on the exam. Yet, something around 1/3 of all students failed the first time they were offered this test.
So, I wonder - how far even attention or basic learning skill (like paying attention) are damaged by modern technology? I know some school teachers that are complaining about drastic drop in attention spans of children with smartphones.
Ps. Yes, I'm a millennial who doesn't own a smartphone. Never liked them.
2/20/15, 5:10 PM
latheChuck said...
"INTO the crawl space?" he was horrified.
"OK. Then just sit down and wait for me to get there." Ordinarily, it takes about 30 minutes, but because we were starting to get significant snow, it took me an hour. To make a long story short, I showed him where his service cut-off valve was, in case the pipes leaked when they thawed. I explained why his garden tap should be open, and that line shut off from the crawl space, so as not to trap freezing water between two valves. I re-installed the foam- board insulation that was supposed to line the concrete-block foundation. I located a disconnected sanitary drain that was dumping raw sewage into the crawlspace! And the heater(s) eventually thawed the pipes. It took an hour or so.
"How can I ever thank you enough for coming out in this storm, and rescuing my house?"
"I'd like to take one of your antique inkwells."
"That's ALL?!? I'd have given it to you just because I know you'd use it."
"And I'd have crawled under your house anyway, just because I knew you needed it."
It's a very nice inkwell, a cube of crystal with beveled corners, and a faceted hinged lid. And it does have a little less ink in it now than it did when I first filled it, because I've been keeping my ham radio logbook with a dip pen.
2/20/15, 7:10 PM
Mike T. said...
As it pertains to diets, form follows function. It reminds me of a garden, or a building, or just about any other design…as long as you design for function, good form will almost always follow. A lot of diets are geared toward form…”I need to lose weight.” Eat things that are farmed, raised, fermented, and processed responsibly and health will follow. You won’t be 120 pounds soaking wet, but you will feel good and likely live with more energy, which by the way, helps with the farming and raising of good food. Oh, and also, tending the garden and raising the animals is often significant exercise to burn excess calories, should you need to shed the weight. This should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer…even Blind Freddy…
2/20/15, 8:45 PM
Screaming Sardine said...
As to health, I try to be proactive. I don't care for allopathic medicine; it has always made me sicker. Like others have commented, I prefer herbs. I also make sure to drink kefir and apple cider vinegar everyday. It helps keep the doctor away. ;)
Thanks for your blog, JMG.
Cheers,
Tracy
2/20/15, 8:46 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
LOL! Yup; live here; know that well!!
BTW - we're waiting on your input as to when to hold the PNW gathering - check out the forum or check your email!
2/20/15, 9:10 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mark, thank you. Prine's always worth a listen.
bdy1, it can be a useful way of thinking!
SunsetSu, sorry to hear about the surges! I don't know what's available these days, but there used to be shops in Seattle that reconditioned and resold old appliances -- one I patronized a few times, up on Capitol Hill, had the engaging name "Reasonably Honest Dave's" -- and that might be a place to look for a washer with a simple mechanical timer.
Ray, I'll be discussing printing presses at more length in an upcoming post. If somebody were to go into business manufacturing a good sturdy basic tabletop printing press that could handle 8.5"x11" paper, for a reasonable price, my guess is they'd be swimming in orders pronto.
Mark, the German language is great that way! As for complexity as a sign of "progress," too true. "Ten times as many things that can go wrong!"
William, no argument there!
Crow Hill, and the two have much in common...
Cherokee, good. In the US, it was in the 1960s that young people stopped joining lodges, clubs, and other voluntary organizations, and so the sort of handbook an aspiring Freemason, Jaycee, Garden Club member, or what have you would need to learn how to run a meeting, etc., lost its market. I may see if I can track down a good book or two along those lines and see about getting a small publisher with access to the Masonic market interested -- we're getting a lot of young members these days, and they could use it. BTW, glad to hear that apparently nobody died in the Queensland storm.
Gloucon, with all due respect, those may be the lamest excuses I've heard yet. Put a cuphook into the bathroom wall and buy a tin cup to hang from it, if that's really what concerns you.
Scythe, current notions of "healthy weight" are mostly a product of fashion, plus a diet industry that makes billions of dollars a year convincing people they're too fat. The human body is good at storing away calories for future reference, and yes, a few more pounds can make hungry times easier to live through. (BTW, if you want me to put your other comment through, please delete the abusive language about fat people, and resend it. I know you may not have meant it that way, and that sort of language is very common, but this blog doesn't allow hate speech about body weight, any more than it allows the same thing aimed at race, gender, or anything else.)
Dagnarus, I prefer no TV at all, but if you have to have one, one that isn't straight out of 1984 is probably a good idea!
2/20/15, 10:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Tye, I want to see what happens when the robot's little onboard computer crashes while somebody's wearing the thing. I notice it was designed by a guy from MIT, which just kind of figures.
Stein,
Twenty.
Million.
Lines.
Of.
Code.
What a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
Leo, I hear stories like that all the time. It's one of the reasons I think progress has passed into the point of negative returns -- for everybody but the shareholders, that is.
Denys, where's the site? It sounds like the kind of place I'd love to visit. As for the blog, my guess is that you'd have a large and appreciative readership as soon as the word got out. Yes, that's the sort of thing I had in mind, and I think your children will thank you when they're grown for having that kind of upbringing!
Shane, delighted to hear it. Yes, sometimes it's really shooting fish in a barrel.
David, and of course nobody's supposed to notice that everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and there aren't enough positions for more than a small fraction of the current middle class. As people do notice that -- and they will -- things are going to get interesting.
Ed-M, to each his own. I never had a problem with raggedy edges!
Chester, thanks for this. I'll have to read the book -- it sounds like a very solid case study in what happens when people forget that it's not enough for a new technology to be progressive, exciting, avant-garde, etc. -- it also has to do the job it's supposed to do...
Karl, it does indeed make sense. Reinventing a past that never was can be a very useful strategy, if it's done deliberately and with a cold eye to the downside; if it's done for emotional reasons by people who can't keep the fantasy separate from the reality, it's a reliable source of ghastly consequences.
Scotlyn, glad to hear it. With regard to your acupressure skills, have you explored barter as a possibility, exchanging either goods or labor? A lot of people do that these days.
Peter, that sounds about right! You might also look for what's called a brush whip or grass whip -- it looks vaguely like a golf club with a serrated cutting head on the business end, and can take out weeds, grass, and light brush quite effectively, when swung in your best Arnold Palmer imitation.
2/20/15, 10:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Glenn (if I may), of course! Rashakor asked about my reasons, and I gave them; I hope he's also asking people who like the Pacific Northwest and plan on staying there, so as to get a balanced view.
Bright City, many thanks. While I have my doubts about PV as a long-term solution, for the time being, it's a good choice -- and a simple, small, portable system like the one you've linked to sounds like an even better one.
Varun, delighted to hear it. Traditional fables are traditional for good reason -- they teach things worth learning, and as you note, they're also much more interesting than the shoddy modern product.
Beneath, I wish I had something to suggest. As long as library science remains locked into this bizarre technofetish, I suspect you'll be stuck having to fight tooth and nail to hold onto any scrap of what libraries used to be -- which is something considerably more useful to the future than what they're being turned into. I'll have a response to that to propose, down the road a bit, but I don't know that it'll help you much.
Scythe, good. Blind faith in the invincibility of progress is right down there at the core of the modern mind, and getting anyone to shake off the trance is a real challenge, but it's worth the attempt! (BTW, no, I wasn't offended -- I know that the old-fashioned rules of discourse on this comments page take a lot of getting used to.)
Tim, thanks for this! A fun game for the whole family...
Chubasco, and that's also an option!
Shane, no argument there; a lot of fancy restrictive diets are lifestyle accessories of the privileged. Use a mirror to look in your mouth sometime and you'll see the classic dentition of a full-time omnivore: generic incisors in front; carnassials for tearing meat just behind them, where herbivores all have a gap with no teeth at all; low-crowned molars with rounded cusps for grinding the widest possible range of plant-based foods. Ours is a very flexible species, right up there with rats and cockroaches, and like rats and cockroaches, we eat -- and thrive on -- anything that doesn't run away too fast.
Changeling, that's certainly been my impression -- a huge number of people these days literally can't follow a sequence of clearly described steps, because too much e-technology use has given them the attention span of a gnat.
2/20/15, 11:09 PM
onething said...
We buried her on her land, way up in the hills, next to her husband. Except, it isn't really her land now. She got too frail to be there herself and took a subsidized apartment in town a couple years back, and sold her land to one of the guys there.
When we checked out the hole which had been dug yesterday, it was a bit too small, so a couple guys went down with picks and struck at the frozen sides till we shaved off a few more inches.
There were no officials around. I said that I would rather dispense with even a coffin, and just be buried in a shroud to compost as quickly as possible. Others a greed, and so we joked about it, saying since no one is here watching us, why even use her coffin? Why not save it, pretend to bury one another in it, and then reuse it, since they're expensive.
I thought a coffin was a legal requirement, but now I am not sure.
2/20/15, 11:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Mike, and you may discover in the process that stamina and strength actually have less to do with thinness than our current cultural habits of thought presuppose. This gentleman is the great Louis Cyr, one of the strongest men who ever lived -- the guy could, and did, pick up a draft horse on his shoulders and walk around with it perched there. (He also pushed a loaded railroad car up a grade, and a variety of other classic strongmen stunts.) You'll notice that he wasn't exactly thin!
Sardine Tracy, thank you! I had the same experience repeatedly with mainstream medicine, for what that's worth -- like a lot of other people, I got into the alternative health modalities because I was tired of getting sicker from prescriptions than I'd been when I went to the doctor.
2/20/15, 11:34 PM
Scythe of Relief said...
I think it may pay to have a little bit of redundancy built in.
"Back in June of 1965, a Scotsman weighing 207 kilograms, described as "grossly obese" and hereafter known only as Mr A B, turned up at the Department of Medicine at the Royal Infirmary in Dundee.
He was sick of being fat and wanted to lose weight by eating nothing and living off his body fat. He told the hospital staff he was going to fast flat out, whatever they said, so they may as well monitor him along the way.
He ended up fasting for one year and 17 days — that's right, he ate no food at all for over a year. He lived entirely off his copious body fat, in the end losing about 125 kilograms of weight."
http://www.abc.net.au/sci.../articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm
I do think the 'paleo deit' does have some merit if you are not too fastidious about it.
It is basically a low carb diet. And the low carb diet seems to have some good research behind it.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/extras/special_editions/
You don't have to give up dairy with low carb. I could not give up my kefir milk. It is so good for 'gut health' (the research on gut health is going exponential BTW)
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4067184.htm
Kefir is also good way to keep milk without a fridge, and we use it to make bread & pizza.
Anyway, I think 'paleo' is not a diet for serious downshifters. Lol
2/20/15, 11:47 PM
Scotlyn said...
"time is life"!
btw, thank you for acting on an awareness of fat shaming, which in my experience is extremely damaging to those at its receiving end, and is rife in the healing professions, too. In my opinion, it is no part of a healer's work to add to a person's suffering with stigma or shaming.
Onething, shroud burial is part of the Muslim tradition,and I believe Ireland has recently made a change in its ordinances to facilitate these. A move also welcomed by a different eco-burial constituency.
2/21/15, 12:46 AM
Kevin Jarvis said...
2/21/15, 12:54 AM
YCS said...
I think it's pretty apt to link this:
www.sciencealert.com/i-could-sow-the-seeds-of-a-new-civilisation-mars-one-hopeful-s-vision-of-a-stellar-future
Like Salman Rushdie's prophet indeed.
YCS
2/21/15, 2:05 AM
Kutamun said...
I looking at The Vitruvian Man and all i could think was "the kingdom of god is within you " ... I am sure the TOE is being well guarded by a fair few ornery wizards and i hope it remains undiscovered to our civilisation as collectively we have not the wisdom to handle such power ..it fascinates me that much of our technology has in theory at least sprang from some meditating physicists intuiting certain numerical and algorithmic sequences ...ironically once the rubble of our unsustainable trajectory has stopped bouncing people will have more time to contemplate the portal to the unified field that this planet of which we are an appendage represents ....
2/21/15, 3:11 AM
Denys said...
@JMG - the site is Joanna Furnace and their website is haycreek.org The 1790-1820 reenactment weekend is the weekend after Labor Day each year, so Sept 11-13 this year, all day each day from 8am-5pm. If you want to experience it fully, you could set-up a tent on the hill and demonstrate an old-time skill. By the way, if you drive 10 miles down the road you are in Mennonite/Amish country and can shop in stores that still have handwritten price tags.
2/21/15, 4:07 AM
daelach said...
There's the good old engineering concept of "KISS" - keep it simple and stupid. A story from a Russian aircraft manufacturer who was constructing a fire extinguishing aircraft: It should fly over some water surface, e.g. a lake, take in water and automatically shut off when the reservoir was full. The engineers tinkered with sensors, actuators and stuff, which in the end would have cost as much as a whole wing. "Too expensive", the management said, "go back to your whiteboards and figure out something cheaper".
So the engineers came up with welding a u-shaped tube onto the top of the reservoir plus a rearview mirror for the pilot, so when the reservoir got full, water would splash out of the tube, the pilot would see it and go off to the fire place. No electronics, no actuators, no maintenance items, just simple physics. Russian technology usually lacks the refinement of Western products, and under good conditions, Western products are mostly superior. But under harsh conditions, the Russian things keep operating while Western stuff just fails.
Now when I had completed my wool blanket poncho, I found out that in winter, the forearms got cold. I thought about sewing some arm warmers, but elastic tissue would not keep the wind off while rigid tissue would not go over the hand AND sit tight. A buttoned solution would make me stick with the other clothes.
In the light of what I just told, I sat back and asked myself "how would a Russian solve this?". Then I remembered that the Russian military did not have socks for the soldiers until 2013; instead, they used foot bandages. Easier to manufacture, one-size-fits-all, can be cooked in boiling water if made from appropriate material, the wear can be split to different points because it can be wrapped around the foot in several orientations. The drawbacks are that you must carefully wrap them or else you run the risk of rubbing, plus that they work only when combined with solid shoes.
So I got some loden panel, cut it to stripes of about 10cm by 145cm (4" by 57"), wrapped them around the forearms and put the upper end under the last-but-one winding. Problem solved.
Mikhail Kalashnikov (yes, THE Kalashnikov!) once said: "Everything relevant is simple, and everything complicated is superfluous."
2/21/15, 5:09 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
I would go the subversive route and do option number 2. Use the criteria in this blog post and from the great Wendell Berry essay from the first comment here to take a look at 3D printing or ebooks from a whole systems perspective. Make the case that librarians need to think critically about technologies and communicate this to the greater public, rather than passing on unexamined hype. You might get some resistance, but you might also convince some people. Though I know this is a long shot given my experience with average public library supervisor/administrator who wants to color within the lines.
You could also do a very tongue-in-cheek promotion of a technology. Perhaps nobody would notice, like when a major news source links to the Onion.
You could also do either option and structure the program in a way that highlights the shortcomings of the technology.
2/21/15, 6:03 AM
Tye said...
My old Maytag finally reached the point of massive breakdown. I looked at used machines with mechanical timers but they were almost as expensive as some new ones. So at Home Depot I found simple Hotpoint for $350 with a mech timer--one of the last I could find anywhere sans computer. It has no bells or whistles but the timer will be replaceable in 10-15 years (if they are available).
When I was a kid I read a book called "Travels With Charley" that described The author's (John Steinbeck) camper trip across America with his little dog--Charley. His solution to clothes washing was to fill a bucket with water and soiled clothes and a little soap. At the end of a day of bumpy roads, viola, clean clothes!
2/21/15, 6:11 AM
Moshe Braner said...
- I disagree. It's a viable compromise, given the (questionable) goal of designing a battery-operated "weed whacker". They could easily sell the thing with a faster charger, but that would reduce the battery life even further than the 15-minute discharges already do. They could lengthen the battery life (both in minutes and in years) by using a larger battery - but that would make this handheld device significantly heavier.
Batteries have their limitations, the current loud cheerleading chorus for electric car vaporware nonwithstanding.
Re: computerized washing machines. I really don't need a "smart" refrigerator or light bulb, but I love my (European front-loading) computerized washing machine. Its smarts make it far more efficient, e.g., it only fills with as much water as the load needs. It may not be sustainable in the long run, but it's one of the best things we can do with the technology at the moment. If and when the electricity supply gets too intermittent and with damaging surges, the thing to do is to unplug the "smart" (and other) appliances when not in use, to protect them from damage.
Re: "smart TVs". The Samsung model that "listens" instead of using a "remote" is a special case. The "smart" part is not that, it's the (now common) feature of recent TVs, being able to show videos that are streaming from the internet. If your TV does not do that by itself, you can buy an add-on device for $50 that does that. I have a jaundiced eye about the wanton waste of bandwidth that is now in vogue, but if one picks contents carefully, streaming videos can be informing and entertaining in a good way, while the broadcast contents of non-"smart" TV is uniformely rubbish.
Re: a zillion "lines of code" in a car: Somebody bought a Chevy Volt (plug-in hybrid car) and took it apart - search online for the resulting article with many photos. They found that it has about 100 (!) separate computers (microcontrollers) scattered throughout the car.
2/21/15, 7:05 AM
heather said...
I've started a discussion thread on the Green Wizards forum under the Twelfth Circle, Critical Thinking. Hope you will join us there!
@beneaththesurface- Perhaps you can start a program which uses the iPad table in the children's section as a technology for suspending a blanket, underneath which the children can have a "story fort". Works every time at my house. Maybe add the additional technologies of a beanbag chair and battery-op (solar?) lantern- they'll be lining up to get in! The computer embedded in the tabletop can be used to manage the signup list, and maybe as a timer for beeping when it's time to switch fort users. (Sorry for sounding flip- I really do empathize with the rotten situation you are in.)
Thanks to whoever suggested the Propaganda Game (sorry, I can't find the comment at the moment for proper attribution). I'm going to check it out.
--Heather in CA
2/21/15, 7:41 AM
Wolfgang Brinck said...
In any case, I would guess that if we plotted progress by whatever metric we chose, against time, we would get a curve very much like the Hubbard curve. The Hubbard curve is of course the plot of oil production vs. time and resembles a nice bell shaped curve.
As Ugo Bardi has pointed out, the Hubbard curve might not be entirely accurate for total world energy production. Bardi has proposed the concept of the Seneca cliff. The idea is that growth of energy production is more gradual than decline of energy production and will be a lot more rapid on the way down than on the way up.
The correlation between progress and energy consumption might be questioned, but if there is a correlation, then we could expect progress to peak somewhere near the peak of oil production and decline afterward, giving us peak progress.
Absent energy, progress stalls. But progress as in the religion of progress is expected to be ever increasing. And in Ray Kurzweil's sect of the religion, progress will even go through something like the rapture of the Christians, something he calls the singularity.
Peak progress like peak oil does not mean the end of progress, it simply means that there will be less progress every year with less cheap energy available to fuel it.
Believers in the religion of progress will object that progress does not need energy to move forward, that isolated individual in garrets or garages or basements can still be moving progress forward. But at what rate will they be able to do that. Lone individuals in garrets will not build Hadron colliders or space programs.
Regardless of what progress means to people, it might be useful to define it is such a way that it is measurable and can be plotted vs. time.
2/21/15, 7:48 AM
Shane Wilson said...
2/21/15, 8:31 AM
Doctor Westchester said...
Expanding on Jonathan's points a (hopefully useful) bit:
1) The corporate organization has always been about dealing with fobbing off externalities. Originally it was created to limit the liability of funders to only their investment; at least that is the standard story. Now it often means that no one is a part of one has any personal liability or risk except being fired, if the corporation is big enough.
2) A lot of "progress" is being driven by attempting to fight the jaws of diminishing returns. There is no other way to maintain these large corporate structures that have been designed to exist on growth. However diminishing returns is of course winning and in response there goes more and more middle class (corporate) jobs.
I don't remember you that have written something centered directly on the concept of the corporation and it implies in terms of what our stories are, although much of your work touches on it, in many cases rather strongly. This might be a good topic for a post, especially if you have (as usual) a good fresh take on it, or even a old take that has been forgotten (also as usual).
2/21/15, 8:52 AM
pg said...
Well done!
2/21/15, 9:03 AM
Iuval Clejan said...
2/21/15, 9:39 AM
pg said...
2/21/15, 9:57 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
You hear quite often these days that children in school seem to be having an increasingly hard time learning anything at all, and that, for a significant number of people in industrial civilization, the ability for any kind of sustained effort is greatly hampered by their own lack of attention span. Whenever this is brought up, what always seem to be left out of the discussion is the very nature and purpose of the education that their industrial society insists on putting its young ones through. The cultivation of insight, skill and the ability to actually think is being systematically eliminated, and education as such pretty much amounts to enforcing mindless consumption of whatever narratives that can be relied on to make people into the dolts that contemporary western society needs them to be, while bleeding their purses to pay for an increasingly arrogant and useless academic superstructure. But then of course, the students would not want it any other way. During the time I spent in college, a recurring theme was that whenever a teacher or class was geared toward teaching some actual skill, that would reliably offend the bejesus out of the students, whose whining would inevitably take the form of progress rhetoric, insisting that skill had been rendered obsolete by technology, and in many cases they petitioned to have the teacher fired for his or her audacity. As with so much that is going on around us, the ego's wholly disproportionate sense of entitlement that you accurately mentioned in response to a comment I made on your other blog a while back seems to be calling the shots here too.
On another note, being inspired to seek out a proper shave, I sought out an online store I knew could be counted on to stock high quality shaving equipment, and was surprised to learn: “All items out of stock. We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but the popularity of traditional safety razors is so high that manufacturers cannot possibly meet the demand.” The wind is indeed blowing in different direction...
2/21/15, 11:25 AM
Jon from Virginia said...
And don't get me started on Ancel Key's classic (1952) Biology of Human Starvation...Oh, ok, I'll say one thing from it--Don't diet, it makes you crazy and your weight rebounds bigger.
2/21/15, 11:41 AM
Kaitain said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhx2GKqOdHo
2/21/15, 11:58 AM
PatriciaT said...
Some suggestions re incorporating new technology into your work goals as a librarian:
(1) For example, high school students working on a science project or maybe even a history project, could do traditional research, use e-books, and come up with a design that could be printed on the 3-D printer. The kids would know more about the technologies and could clue you in. Might make it easier. (2) Groups/Clubs of interest (including literary societies, volunteers, reinactment groups!) - practically all of the technologies you mentioned could be used here. Social media for obvious reasons. (One website that is a example of pulling together related yet diverse interests is http://www.janeausten.org/ - maybe that will help with some ideas for using the different technoloties). (3) Come up with a (better) plan for getting e-books to the home bound. Incidentally, e-books can be useful for the visually impaired who can use the technology to magnify the size of the font. (4) Coordinating volunteers, setting up classes to explain and use these technologies . There are lots of people who NEED to learn this stuff (practical or not), as it's practically a requirement to get/keep a job these days. It might even help to informally ask around what would be useful.
The key, I think, is to serve more people and improve services with the same number of employees. I just hope they aren't thinking about using these technologies as an excuse to cut back on staff. If this is the case, come up with a plan that is wonderful sounding but impossible (as in funding would/could never be approved, one hopes), so obviously expensive (purchase, maintain, upgrade, etc.) that it would be regretfully turned because the present system works so much better; kind of a squirrel challenge for librarians. For example: the homeless could use, with training, the 3-D printer that would print out pieces that could be assembled into a tent (from water proof materials).
Good luck!
2/21/15, 12:10 PM
latefall said...
I skimmed over the comments and thought I might bounce a few things off your head and shoot a few comments from the hip:
If you look for marginally tech critical "tech people" check the EFF, they also intersect with public libraries in some issues, such as these:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112856557#
more https://www.eff.org/search/site/library
On new and old hardware - is there a chance libraries could stock uncommon but sometimes necessary tools like these:
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Parts/Pro-Tech-Toolkit/IF145-072-1
Perhaps also some other book-sized durable tools that you can't really have collecting dust in a down town (car less) apartment?
On 3D printing. I agree it is hyped but it is not all bad. It gets the foot in the door with making things yourself and finding out how well you can fail. That is a very important lesson I think. It also gets you off the sofa a tiny bit. I prefer more manual stuff but there's a limit to how often my wife will let me turn the living room into a wood work shop. Each good piece of furniture gets me +1, each bad piece -2. Also, I am running out of places to hide my tools and materials in. If I imagine I'd had to get to the point I am now, starting with the shabby tools I could get my hands on in my parents place (also no work space to speak of) in more or less dense urban housing, while doing it on a hobby basis, it probably would not have worked out. I'd be sitting in a bank or ad office. If 3D printing gets you to a place where they have decent hand tools, I say more power to it. Regarding the hype I would be interested how much plastic they sell over the years for each printer they sold. I don't think it is much. Then do a tiny survey and check what were the last 10 things typically printed and you'll probably get a more realistic picture of consumer level impact. I haven't heard Bayer, BASF, DOW, and the likes getting all excited due to increased plastic sales...
Bottom line: I'd say libraries are not the first choice of places for 3D printers. I do think they have their places, but I'm generally not terribly verbose on that as people hype them more than enough.
Now for an "electronic resource" thing: I could imagine libraries somehow partnering up with librivox.org.
Again, perhaps you could provide the tools (or space?) for making a decent audio recording (ideally of public domain material). One could also team up with "books for the blind". The lib I go to also has readings relatively often - those could be put there as well (I have to ask if they already do this perhaps).
There is an app so perhaps that is enough for your manager to be convinced it is "new tech".
That's all I have time for at the moment...
Tell me if you want to discuss further.
2/21/15, 12:39 PM
EnonZ said...
Your comment that there is no one thing called technology but rather suites of technologies reminded me of something C. S. Lewis wrote in his great scholarly work, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century:
"But words, said Bacon, shoot back upon the understandings of the mightiest. Where we have a noun we tend to imagine a thing. The word Renaissance helps to impose a factitious unity on all the untidy and heterogeneous events which were going on in those centuries as in any others."
I see examples of this all the time. There is no single thing called 'Islam' although many imagine there is because we have the singular noun. There is no single thing called 'Christianity' - the Quakers and Southern Baptists have very little in common; the beliefs they nominally share are interpreted very differently. Thank you for adding 'technology' and 'progress' to my list of examples of this phenomenon.
2/21/15, 1:03 PM
SLClaire said...
http://livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com/2014/11/off-with-their-heads-mowing-and.html
While we're discussing appropriate technologies, allow me to put in a good word for a good snow shovel. Many of us in the eastern US, myself included, have had opportunity to use this recently. We keep ours on the porch all winter long so it's there when we need it. The blade on ours is shaped like a snowplow which makes it very easy to use. I push snow with it to the edge of the walkway or driveway, only lifting the least amount needed to remove the pushed snow. I've used it to shovel close to a foot of snow at one go though it's best to do intermediate shovelings every time a few inches fall if you're getting that much snow (we rarely do in St. Louis). It works way better than a snow blower in most kinds of snow we get around here, which tend to have sleet mixed in, as did yesterday's storm. Plus shovels are quiet and shoveling is good exercise (don't overdo it; do a little, rest, then do some more if you have that much snow).
2/21/15, 1:06 PM
Agent Provocateur said...
Re. Total Costs
Indulge me in a few war stories then I'll get to the point.
Not so long ago, “Total Cost Accounting” (TCA) was all the rage in government. Of course, only money “costs” were accounted for. For awhile, this led to extreme tightfistedness to keep “costs” down. It got to the point that if you were on temporary loan with another section, the only way to obtain paper was for your own section to fax it to you! No, I'm not kidding.
I worked for the UN for awhile. In one mission I was on, if you required batteries for say a GPS, a special helicopter flight would be laid on to deliver them to your team site … exactly 2 AA batteries. Of course, a GPS was required because the map section didn't give maps until authorized by the regional accounting office (a three month process).
These true stories says everything about false accounting and false economy even on the very restricted terms of just looking at money.
If we were to broaden costs to include all true costs to the environment and society, and not be allowed to externalize them, my guess is that just about any large industrial enterprise (or those activities reliant on them) would not be viable.
I'll go even further to hazard that externalizing such unacceptable costs, and centralizing the benefits to a select group of humans (that may not include any of us), is what industrial society has been all about from the start. Hiding the true costs and benefits is the foundational lie of our civilization. “Progress” has been the most successful way of marketing this lie. Its been all the more successful because, like any good lie, its partly true. Some of the benefits have been very real.
2/21/15, 1:37 PM
latefall said...
Try here if you are located in Europe: http://www.manufactum.com/shaving-c193649/
I feel like online this shop is only half the fun, but I like it still. The price tags are not low, but that is to be expected. If someone owed me big and couldn't think of something (and couldn't make anything) but had money - that's where I sent them. The prices in the kitchen section still make me cringe, but on the other hand, if you are careful most of the stuff lasts ages.
2/21/15, 2:30 PM
Peter Robinson said...
2/21/15, 2:48 PM
. josé . said...
This week there's been a lot of discussion about food. In the past, you had a discussion of how the mental "health" racket was used to support slavery and women's submissiveness in the past, with the creation of fabricated named "illnesses".
Here's a new one: orthorexia nervosa. That's the desire to eat real food instead of the manufactured products that corporate industrialism wants you to eat.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/officials-declare-eating-healthy-a-mental-disorder/5431992
In the end, I go back to Michael Pollan's suggestions:
1) Don't eat anything your grandmother (or in the case of young people, great-grandmother) wouldn't recognise as food.
2) Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
2/21/15, 4:17 PM
Shane Wilson said...
Lots of studies have demonstrated the negative effects of the internet and screen devices on concentration and attention span. Apparently, screens encourage scanning and jumping around rather than deeper contemptation I think a lot of this was summarized in the book The Shallows. Apparently, the effects are more pronounced the younger one is introduced to screens. Youth today who have grown up online literally have different neural wiring than pre internet generations. Offline teaching methods like Waldorf have lots to recommend as they keep screens out of the hands of vulnerable youth. Maybe in an ideal world computers, tablets, and smartphones would be age restricted products kept behind lock & key like cigs and booze? One can hope.
2/21/15, 6:25 PM
latheChuck said...
There is a large feather of a turkey vulture on my shelf of wonders (with a mass of quartz crystals, a telegraph pole insulator, a bunsen burner, a box of microscope slides, and a slide rule-like metric units converter built into a pencil can). When I get the inclination, I may try to carve it into a quill pen.
2/21/15, 6:59 PM
jonathan said...
the story about faxing paper from one government section to another is a) absolutely hilarious and b)a work-around worthy of joseph heller.
a good part of my world view was shaped by reading catch 22 long ago. heller was way ahead of his time in recognizing the insane behavior of large organizations and the evasion of personal responsibility they encourage.
doctor westchester:
it has often been noted that the behavior expected of corporations: single minded pursuit of profits, ruthless cost reduction, resistance to law etc. would be labelled sociopathy if engaged in by individuals. events like oil train explosions, catastrophic automobile design failures and earthquakes caused by fraccing are not "accidents" in the sense we usually mean. they are the results of a conscious decision making process that measures the probability discounted costs of paying damages after an event against the costs of avoiding the event. the results are predictable.
2/21/15, 7:35 PM
Bret said...
"If I understand it correctly, what you're suggesting is that the driving force behind much of what gets labeled progress is the ease with which complexity allows costs to be externalized -- loaded onto the community or biosphere as a whole -- in order to increase profits. [...] -- that may be absolutely crucial."
Yes! I might substitute "pollution" for "costs", but yes. So then -- what is going on, what big picture does that suggest (because I get bored thinking about shaving too long)? At the risk, among others, of being deterministic, I guess for me it starts to feel like: homo sapiens unearths the boon/bane of earth's black blood....could've been a ring of power -- what it does is it both amplifies and changes our role in the system. What do we end up doing, when all is said and done?
Seems like we end up... unearthing more stuff, accelerating the process just as fast as our ring of power will allow. So assiduously as to make our friendly competitors the termites and worker ants stamp their little feet in shame, we uproot Earth's mineral bones, appropriate the rest of the biosphere (not just the black blood but the living skin too) to fuel our endeavor, and we reshape the world we found into "our" world of alloys and plastics and SKUs and acid oceans and carbonized skies and some level of mass extinction.
Ok. So what has happened? What's happened is we've been converted by the earth -- by being touched by its black blood -- into a catalyst, an agent, in a reaction that in essence, I suppose, functions to render a portion of the earth's relatively simple, dense mineral/chemical composition out into various new sorts of molecules strewn throughout the biosphere and atmosphere. There's been a mining and exhaustion operation going on, and the biosphere has in effect been recruited by earth itself to perform it.
Maybe we even take an industrial-scale stab at albedo modification and end up getting quite a lot more of what was formerly in the corpus out into the surroundings. So the earth has, in short, undergone a self-catalyzed decomposition operation. The profit motive, in this view, is thus nothing more than the means of catalysis -- the path taken by the black blood to animate us to play our role. Call us brilliant captains of industry or brain-dead zombies, we do what we do and the oil makes it happen.
(continued)
2/21/15, 7:55 PM
Bret said...
... so at the end of the day, all that looks to me like thermodynamics (to the very modest degree I understand it at this point) just, well, doing its thing. Spreading out whatever is solid and substantial and full of embedded "potential energy" into dispersed, cold atoms. And given that thermodynamics, as I understand it, also gives "time" and "directionality" whatever meaning it has, that's as close as I am able to come to something I see as approximating the universe "expressing its will" -- or, at least, "unfolding".
I'd be excited to hear JMG's or anyone else's reaction and whether he or anyone else sees the story, told that way, as a basis for any sort of spiritual posture. I for one seem to be drawn to think in terms of a sort of fatalistic/stoic posture by this story, i.e., if the story has some sort of resonance -- some sense of being "true" as far as we can make out -- then doesn't it follow that, for instance, laying one's self across the track where the oil sands pipeline is to be laid is futile because, hey, it's all in service of heat death, heat death is "what the universe wants" and if heat death is the end of the rainbow -- if it's destiny -- then it's also rest and resolution and, in that sense, nirvana, or maybe Valhalla.
Eh? Eh? Any takers? Church of Maximum Entropy? Is it monistic or dualistic? If the latter, who or what if anyone/thing is its Satan? Less tediously, any thoughts on how our host's multilateral animism (which I love) can fit into the thing? I guess the spirits and so on occupy various niches in the overall entropy-directed "ecosystem" and there's plenty of room for their personalities and other traits to vary accordingly (and entertainingly). Pretty reasonable universe, pretty fun. OK!
2/21/15, 7:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Scythe, I hope they were monitoring his heart. Extreme dieting often causes serious heart damage -- since body fat doesn't store protein, the body begins extracting protein from its own muscles, and can strip the heart to the point that it stops working.
Scotlyn, fair enough -- I figured you'd probably gotten into barter arrangements already, but I've encountered a surprising number of people who haven't thought of it. Calibrating in hours might well be a good approach. As for fat shaming and the like, my wife is unfashionably large due to an inherited disease -- she eats rather less than I do -- and I've seen the kind of crap she has to put up with from self-appointed weight police.
Kevin, nice, but those seem a bit pricey!
YCS, yeah, I expect to see bubbles rising sometime soon.
Denys, thank you! A couple of Druid friends are moving to Pennsylvania soon, not far from us, and there'll probably be some road trips in the future; we'll certainly keep the Joanna Furnace in mind for that.
Daelach, you've just inspired a new acronym: WWMKD? Yes, that's "What Would Mikhail Kalashnikov Do?"
Moshe, a hundred separate computers, to do what was done with perfect grace by a few simple mechanical controls thirty years ago. I rest my case.
Wolfgang, good. One of the things that constantly gets evaded when "progress" comes up for discussion, as somebody noted earlier in these comments, is "progress toward what?" Before you can quantify progress in any meaningful sense, in other words, you have to have a conceptual definition that means something, and in this case, that requires getting past the vague "we're progressing!" and grappling with the suppressed "toward what?"
Shane, the mass media's been pushing that meme very, very hard in recent years. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why?
Doctor W., I'll certainly consider it. Just at the moment, though, it's the equation of progress with the production of externalities that has my mind racing.
PG, thank you. That story reminds me of the scene from Hermann Hesse's novel Peter Camenzind, where the carpenter, when it becomes clear his little daughter is dying, goes down into his workshop and begins carefully, patiently selecting the best boards he's got to make her coffin.
Iuval, I'm not at all sure I agree with that centralizing analysis, but it'll take at least an entire post to discuss that point. I'll see what I can do.
2/21/15, 8:02 PM
FiftyNiner said...
Andrew Jackson, who deserves eternal scorn for the way he treated the Indians, got one thing right, however.
He hated the corporate form. He said of corporations that "they have not a soul that can be shamed, nor a hide that can be whipped."
2/21/15, 8:48 PM
Gauk said...
For a while I lived in a city suburb and had to mow a back lawn the size of a large room, so I would borrow the rental company's reel mower, later getting my own and learning to sharpen and adjust it. One day I was mowing and my neighbor's children came and asked me what I was doing, and I replied that I was cutting lawn with a lawnmower that didn't use any gas. After the incredulous expressions and utterances, I let them try it themselves, which they were just barely able to do by putting both their weights into it. They both seemed to be particularly excited that grass could be cut without gas. I hope I was able to dent the myth of progress within their minds, to open a crack into which appropriate technology might worm its way in. I also hope that my stories provide some hope for JMG's readers - there are a great number of young minds that have not yet been indoctrinated into Progress. Even after exposure it doesn't always take within each one - particularly as Progress' claims gets more and more difficult to square with observed reality.
2/21/15, 9:15 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
What I would really like to see is a standardization in the cartridges, like the old rubber washer valves, such that you could replace just the wear parts in them. Perhaps as the metals become more rare and valuable we'll see a move to that.
2/21/15, 9:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Jon, excellent. Yes, I'm familiar with both of those -- and we could spend a long time talking about how the diet industry rakes in billions a year convincing people to pursue a "weight loss" strategy that guarantees they will gain back any weight they lose, and then some. Talk about a captive market...
Kaitain, I lived next to Wallingford, shopped there, and used to walk through it all the time on my way to the University of Washington libraries to do research -- I don't think anything a TV show could portray would have been as parodic as the simple reality of it. (Though a short bus ride and a ferry could get you places even more bursting at the seams with unintentional satire...)
EnonZ, good. It's hard to find a word these days that isn't used as a thoughtstopper in that way.
SLClaire, snow shovels are indeed worth a kind word. I've used an inexpensive one from the local grocery store so far, while researching better styles; take it easy, rest as needed, and it's not a bad way at all to get some exercise on a snowy day.
Agent, those are great examples -- thank you! As for the broader point -- yes, those are among the points I've been brooding over. Stay tuned for next week's post.
Peter, thank you! That's too funny.
Jose, I'd just heard of that. Yep, it sounds like drapetomania and housewife syndrome have a bouncing baby sister, just as mendacious and corrupt as they are.
Shane, fortunately, once it becomes impossible to meet the whole system costs of the internet and its associated technologies, all that's going to go away. I pity the people who've never learned to think -- or, more to the point, have learned not to think -- who will be left blinking in the sunlight, tapping frantically at the screen of a dead dumbphone, because they literally can't figure out the first thing without one.
LatheChuck, now that is a fine pen. Congratulations!
Bret, late at night when sleep is far away, I sometimes wonder if the sole reason humanity evolved in the first place is that Gaia got tired of ice ages and decided to nudge the thermostat up a couple of notches.
Gauk, you'll need a brush and a mug -- you put the cake of soap at the bottom of the mug, splash in some hot water right out of the tea kettle, and use the brush to whip soap and water into a thick, hot lather. It really is an experience worth savoring. I concur about electric razors -- they don't even shave, they just shorten the stubble a bit.
2/21/15, 10:13 PM
Scythe of Relief said...
Ancel Keys was a fraud.
He published a study about different countries that made it look like heart disease was associated with fat intake.
But the truth was that he started out with 22 countries and just tossed out the ones that didn’t fit his hypothesis.
When other researchers analyzed his data using all the original countries, the link between fat and heart disease totally vanished.
The 'health authorities' used his study to demonized saturated fats and cholesterol.
And we now know that saturated fats and cholesterol are not responsible for heart disease.
It was the frauds of the 'health authorities' that opened up my eyes to, let me say to all the frauds of 'progress'. If they do not care about the health of people, what makes them care about anything else.
2/22/15, 1:16 AM
Jo said...
And if we lived next door to the person paying the price of his health or his life in connection with mining rare earths for our smart phones, then we wouldn't stand for it. Well, I hope we wouldn't. I am an idealist.
Globalisation and progress walk hand in hand (although nowadays I expect they fly first class). It is easier to exploit people or habitats far away from the person who buys the shiny new widget. Because the person who buys the shiny new widget believes in magic, akin to urban children who believe that food comes from the supermarket. Widgets come from shiny, clean factories, which are providing jobs for some people in some far away place somewhere. How marvellous to be stimulating the economy in such a fun way!
I want to buy the necessities of life from my neighbour if I can't make them myself. That way, if she messes up the local waterways with her cottage industry waste, I will be the one to suffer, and I will be the one to have to stand up and fight about it. I think that is the only fair way..
2/22/15, 2:13 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
2/22/15, 4:59 AM
sgage said...
I can never think of electric razors without this image coming to mind.
Electric Razor
(From the strange mind of Frank Zappa...)
2/22/15, 5:38 AM
William Lehan said...
I wrote a response a few days ago that was not published, the gist of which was I had my doubts about when the oil would become scarce; I wasn't certain it was happening now. But,since don't think we ought to wait for the demise of oil to simplify our lives, I won't belabor that.
2/22/15, 5:42 AM
Unknown said...
JMG, one reason the Chevy Volt has a lot of computers on board is that it has a complicated propulsion system. The Volt and other vehicles of its type have an electric motor, a battery to supply the motor with juice, a gasoline engine (or two) to recharge the battery, plus regenerative braking to turn the kinetic energy of the car's forward motion into current by reconfiguring the electric motor as a generator that recharges the battery while slowing the car down.
In order for the vehicle to be energy efficient despite the extra weight of these redundant systems, the operation of these devices has to be blended and coordinated through varying rates of acceleration and deceleration with precision and quickness. One could conceivably develop the muscle memory to do this manually while paying attention to the road, but it probably would take an airplane pilot's level of training and still wouldn't do the job as well as computers can. Given that the average American driver prefers an automatic transmission to a stick shift, and can't do double clutching, this would be a niche market indeed.
Obviously you can build a electric powered automobile without a computer--some very early cars were electric, as are golf carts. You can build an internal combustion engine auto without a computer. You can't build a practical hybrid car without computers, which is why there weren't any until a few years ago.
2/22/15, 6:06 AM
Shane Wilson said...
It certainly seems like a plausible, parsimonious explanation, that industrial agricultural/food and industrial lifestyles have negative effects on health, and that junk food could be addicting. I think the hidden issue is the decline in smoking rates that's taken place at the same time. Basically, trading one vice for another. The worker who smoked at his/her desk all day long while maintaining a "healthy" body weight 20-30 years ago is now a worker who eats junk food at his/her desk instead. The biggest issue that's not addressed is from a systems standpoint: the industrial sedentary lifestyle and industrial food systems. It probably ties back into the theme of externalizing costs. A big part of the industrial food system are diets that, like you said, end up making people bigger than before they began, when all is said and done.
2/22/15, 7:27 AM
Nils Peterson said...
2/22/15, 7:35 AM
Shane Wilson said...
2/22/15, 8:08 AM
daelach said...
The basic and most important trick is to drop anything sugared (permanently!): sweets, soft drinks, fruit juice, processed sugared food. If that isn't enough, reduce the carbs further, ditching also corn products (like bread). Avoid too much fruits and go for vegetables instead. Pay attention to eating enough protein - but you don't need expensive protein powder. Simple real food like trouts will do.
Sounds easy, huh? It isn't. Sugar acts as a drug, and withdrawal causes severe symptoms; feeling depressive, weak, or instable aggression among them. Not to mention circulation problems with the blood pressure.
That's not a sign of a weak mind! There are hard bio-chemical facts behind: mainly that the brain, addicted on sugar, needs two or three weeks to re-learn making an enzyme to process the ketone bodies and to take part in the fat metabolism again. Basically, that is the reason for the "Atkins flu". Usually, it is only unpleasurable and not harmful, but especially with very much overweight, medical supervision can be necessary. Preferably by a real doctor (as opposed to salesmen for the pharma industry).
First basic question: A healthy human with normal weight has enough energy to survive a month without food, and with overweight, even more. But after 12-18 hours without eating, people collapse. Does anyone think that humanity would have made it through the harsh periods with such a malfunctioning body?
Next basic question: when (when, not if!) access to food becomes intermittent, how will people fair who collapse without three meals per day?
Besides going down to normal weight, there's another bonus for people with migraine problems: migraine and sugar are closely related. Get your brain back to take part in the fat metabolism (on ketone bodies), and your migraine attacks will either stop completely or at least get greatly reduced both in frequency and severeness. Be prepared, however, that while there is success waving at the end of that route, the way there can be bumpy, attacks can be expected.
It will be much harder in case you have been treating your migraine with triptans - which work well in the short term, but worsen the underlying problem. That's why migraine patients on triptans often notice that they got attacks more often and more severely, leading to taking more triptans (implying more and permanent profit for the pharma industry). Don't use them.
2/22/15, 10:01 AM
Donald Hargraves said...
http://estephenmack.com/manifesto/aum00017.html
Also known as The Carbonist Manifesto. Up there with The Abolition of work as one of the peak of the internet, IMHO.
(The Abolition of Work: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm)
2/22/15, 10:10 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
2/22/15, 10:22 AM
onething said...
++++
JMG, you said to Shane that the media is pushing a meme about weight, but I didn't quite get what meme you mean. The idea that people have become obese from eating junk food? And what would be their motivation? Or the meme that the problem is lack of exercise?
2/22/15, 10:49 AM
LegaliseFreedom1 said...
2/22/15, 11:13 AM
onething said...
I should think your querry will get some response! And here is where I think you have gone wrong:
It's not all about entropy. I think there is a blind spot that probably comes from the materialist reductionist worldview. Since it is obvious that there is something causing the increase in order and complexity in the world, what is it?
From a philosophical view, I see entropy as a beautiful and natural component of a dual system. It's the sort of thing that cries out for its natural opposite, as this is the way so many things function in our dualistically running universe.
I had proposed a week or so back that the opposite of entropy is consciousness, with its will, desire, intention. Matter is utterly without will or preference, which is why you can build a universe out of it. All living things possess consciousness, freedom, desire and have a life cycle.
Your body has its life cycle, and to say what you say about the body of the universe could be compared to saying that since your body has a trajectory that ultimately ends in dissolution, it is the best expression of your body's desire and will to damage your own health as quickly as possible to bring about this natural end even sooner.
But entropy and heat death are not the desire of the universe, even if it is its fate. Rather, consider that if matter did not exist in its condition of utter willingness (lack of preference) it could not be subject to mechanical laws and be predictable material with which to have a logical world, subject to our scientific investigation. Entropy plays a crucial role, for if there were not energy gradients down which to step (as all organization involves a concentration of energy), then everything would be frozen in place! Entropy seems like a real drag to us, but without it everything would be altered in a useless direction. A kaleidoscope that doesn't move. To have a drama of, according to the Hindus, 23 trillion years duration, (an incarnation of Brahma, i.e., the manifestation and dissolution of a universe) we must have entropy PLUS its opposite, the life force, the organizational force, the mind of God, call it what you will. All entropy does is break things back down into the simplest constituents so that they can be reused. Now, it may very well be that over very long periods of time not everything can be neatly recycled and that ultimately there is more and more unusable stuff. That could be compared to the old age of the body of the universe.
Do YOU have any purpose whatsoever in the time you have been given, other than to await your death or bring it about more quickly? Why did the universe bother to bring forth life if all it wants is to die? Is there anything else of import going on, other than your death, such as wisdom, compassion, ethics, learning? If so, you might want to lay on those tracks...although I do advise picking your battles carefully.
And then, too, as an afterthought, isn't it odd that you can even consider such a philosophy of death? It might be a natural outgrowth of our current culture of scientism, material reductionism, and peak meaninglessness.
Is it monistic or dualistic? It is monistic where it should be dualistic. As an advaitist, I see everything as ultimately nondual, but the first distortion of reality is from the one into two, and duality is the engine of the universe, at least on a material level.
2/22/15, 12:09 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...
http://constantgeography.com/2015/02/09/radio-shack-and-the-era-of-tinkering/
2/22/15, 12:21 PM
A.S. said...
This post and its subsequent comments have reminded me of a passage from Carl Jung's autobiography:
----
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breeched, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognise that everything better is purchased at a price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est-all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.
Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly timesaving innovations.
Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1961
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Post Continued...
2/22/15, 12:37 PM
A.S. said...
Now, instead of taking the 15 seconds to search for this Carl Jung passage on the internet, I decided to wait until I got home to dig it out of the boxes of old notes that lay sleepily in the basement. This process took a good 20-30 minutes, not because my notes are a mess, but because I got lost in the delight and memory of the treasure trove of written material that I had mostly forgotten about. Notes from books I've read, notes from workshops and gatherings, old interviews and poems that struck my fancy.
But it wasn't the written words themselves that I enjoyed the most. Leafing through the physical pages, noticing the stains, the smudges, the crinkles, these imperfections told a story of their own. They took me back to the place and circumstance of their origin. A hand-written interview with Murray Bookchin brought me to my first internship on an organic farm seven years ago. I sat at the enormous wooden dining table on our only day off, copying out these radical ideas that so impressed me at the time. The aroma of tomatoes cooking on the stove wafted into the room, and the soft chatter and laughter of half a dozen resting farmers found its place among the equally sweet chorus of birdsong.
And so on, page after page.
So I begin to wonder, these new technologies may give us tremendous speed and power, but what experiences do they rob us of in the process?
2/22/15, 12:38 PM
peacegarden said...
The point made about culturally significant food is a good one…I am making a version of Colcannon for supper tonight, and listening to Mary Black sing about it. Potatoes, onions and kale with lovely duck eggs poached in “pockets” made with a ladle, oh my!
One thing I have learned is that our bodies are wonderfully made, needing a sensible (and gentle!) approach to diet, exercise and general health practices. For me, being in the presence of nature as much as is possible and trying to be mindful (no multi-tasking for me!) are central.
I am loving the last two posts! Inspiring! Thought provoking! Oops, I’m afraid I am sounding like one of those Madison Avenue types! But really, great thinking and writing, JMG!
Peace,
Gail
2/22/15, 12:53 PM
Unknown said...
@Daelach--There is some reason to think that wheat consumption acts as a drug for some people. After skimming a book called Wheat Belly, I decided to cut back on foods containing wheat. I discovered that when I did so, my desire for wheat products and grains in general declined, and so did my desire for sweets. This made the moderate weight loss diet I was on easier to stick with.
I see no reason to eliminate wheat altogether. My ancestors ate wheat (though their wheat had a different genetic makeup), and I seem to be able to digest it. Substituting fruits, vegetables and nuts for some of the wheat cuts down on my obsessively hunting for sweets or obsessively resisting the urge for them. That feels more balanced to me.
I have also found JMG's observation about the effects of the first six months of any special diet to be true. Time will tell.
2/22/15, 1:47 PM
Unknown said...
@Jo--On the weekends I sometimes watch a cable channel that features historians giving talks about their latest books. Last night I happened to watch a lecture by a German historian who has written a book that supports your argument. It's called Empire of Cotton.
I'm summarizing my recollection of the historian's summary of his book. His thesis is that demand for production of cotton as an export commodity predates the Industrial Revolution, under what's usually called the mercantile system and he calls Warfare Capitalism. Cotton production was a major driver for the imposition of capitalism on the entire world through a partnership of private enterprise and state sponsored violence.
My guess from listening to the talk is that the author somewhat underestimates the centrality of fossil fuels in enabling industrial capitalism, but that his analysis of how it works as a coercive social system and what drove the shift from previous economic arrangements is pretty sound. The patterns that were established by cotton production still prevail, minus the large scale use of slave labor.
2/22/15, 2:16 PM
August Johnson said...
Even back in the good days, the salespeople were hired for their ability to push people into buying and absolutely no consideration for their knowledge of anything about electronics or even electricity! When I was in high school in the early 1970's I had become good friends with a manager of the only Radio Shack in the city of Tucson that actually made sure his employees knew something other than just sales, his store was always stocked far better than any of the other stores in town. This did cause him problems though, all the other store managers in town knew that if they were out of something (happened a lot), they could just write up the sale, do an ICST (Intra-Company-Stock-Transfer) and send the customer over to my friend's store to pick it up. He didn't even get the credit for the sale, but did have to do the work to re-stock! I actually worked at that store on weekends doing repairs of customer equipment while I was still in High School.
This was very different from the early days of the 1940's that my dad told me about when Radio Shack was just one store in Boston and had big ads for all sorts of surplus equipment and radio parts in the Ham Radio magazines.
2/22/15, 3:16 PM
August Johnson said...
2/22/15, 3:22 PM
Bruno B. L. said...
2/22/15, 3:51 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=89tJ7UPpl1Q
2/22/15, 4:22 PM
Andrew Kieran said...
Anyhow, I don't know about American sources, but I got my loom training at a company called Holland and Sherry in peebles, they're a fabric merchant who sell a lot of Harris tweed to tailors the world over. They ship any quantity, a great deal of their business cones from single suits and such. It may be an expensive business, but if you have a fabric sample or a good idea of what you want and know a decent tailor or can make it yourself, there's no reason you couldn't get any tweed you want, there are literally thousands of patterns available
2/22/15, 4:32 PM
Yupped said...
Interesting question about succession planning for a homestead. Our last place was in the downtown section of a New England coastal town. When we bought it 15 years ago the area was pretty run down, but the good thing was we were able to take the 2 acres of yard and do a lot with it - few neighbors really cared. So we gardened extensively, had chickens and bees and rabbits, put in lots of fruit trees/bushes and at the end we were growing and preserving some crops for sale, mainly medicinal herbs.
Problem was, the neighborhood gentrified in the last few years, mainly New York money coming in for the walkable downtown location. So it was getting a bit more difficult to keep doing what we did, and we decided to sell up and move into the country a bit more, get a couple more acres, and keep it going. Sad thing is, though, the new buyers, despite saying they loved the gardens and raised beds and greenhouse and stuff, then decided it was too overwhelming for them and asked us take it all away when we moved. So we now have all the infrastructure of a two acre urban homestead sitting in a storage container waiting for us to land somewhere (don't worry, we got new homes for the 18 chickens). I'm just hoping the new owners don't take it all back to turf, which would be a pity.
So I guess it's the skills (as well as the portable infrastructure) that are really the succession plan. I'm looking forward to getting a new place up and running as soon as we can.
2/22/15, 5:17 PM
peacegarden said...
Bravo! I am glad you are an idealist…and no, we probably wouldn’t stand for it. It’s just another example of externalizing the costs along with our collective inability to think things through.
Lead by example; modeling the thoughtfulness you so deeply feel cannot help but inspire others. You inspired me, and for that, I thank you.
Peace,
Gail
2/22/15, 5:54 PM
Gauk said...
Insulin has vasoconstrictor effects that increase blood pressure, and metabolizing the fructose from sugar has the byproduct uric acid which has also been associated with increased blood pressure. When transitioning to a sugar or carbohydrate restricted diet it is important to intake adequate sodium to maintain a healthy blood pressure or undesirable headaches, dizziness, and fainting can occur(I'm speaking from personal experience here :/ ). Optimal sodium intake for adults is between 3 and 7 grams a day(3,000 to 7,000 milligrams), even for people with high blood pressure. Depriving people with high blood pressure of salt does lower their blood pressures, but does not lead to improved outcomes for the patients.
2/22/15, 6:48 PM
Wilton Granger said...
Re progress/growth: here is a link I found in the comment section of this week’s blog posting on Resilience.org:
http://www.gold-eagle.com/article/looking-economic-growth-kilowatt
The author presents an interesting metric to use to follow “growth/progress” - electric power demand = EP. I couldn’t access the info when I went to Barron’s site - but I don’t subscribe to it either.
The author shows that EP has plateaued and is declining. How much of this is due to the work on increasing energy efficiency and/or conservation isn’t clear.
The author feels that it show that the economy isn’t growing/progressing, despite the rhetoric that it is. That makes some sense to me.
Annoyingly, the author also claims the plateau and the chart on summer EP use for air conditioning shows that “global warming” hasn’t occurred. I think that means that he doesn’t understand that climate change means that there may or may not be “global warming”, at least in the short term.
And there is global warming - ex., here in West Central Maine, ticks carrying Lyme disease are moving progressively north.
And robins! We’ve never had robins here in February before - scroll down through the pictures at this link to see some chilly robins. Poor things - did they over winter here or fly north early? No one knows.
http://www.dailybulldog.com/db/features/a-fabulous-february-song/
Eileen
2/22/15, 7:32 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sgage, now there's a blast from the past. Many thanks.
William, one of the reasons I don't use an iPad -- well, other than that I don't need one, don't want one, and have better uses for my money and time -- is that it makes it a lot easier for me to talk to people about walking away from technology. Your earlier comment, btw, was off topic -- if you want to read up on the economic limits to fossil fuel production and how we know those are getting close, there are plenty of other places online to do that.
Unknown Deborah, I could certainly see having an onboard computer to do that, but a hundred of them?
Shane, there's a good deal more than that involved. You might want to look up sometime how many commonly prescribed medications have progressive weight gain as a side effect. Hint: antibiotics and most of the popular antidepressants are among them.
Nils, thanks for this!
Daelach, as usual, the "simple explanation" drastically oversimplifies the issues involved. Diets normally fail because the human body did not evolve to adjust its metabolism to fashion. When it doesn't get enough food, as a result, the reactions that are triggered are those that used to keep people alive during famines -- and those include turning down the basal metabolic rate and stashing every spare calorie as body fat. That change never completely reverses itself. Repeated dieting thus teaches the body that it has to be ready for famine at any point, and it becomes extremely efficient at storing calories, with obvious results. It's educational, if you ever get a mind to do this, to calculate how many calories a day it would theoretically take to keep a morbidly obese person at their current weight, and then compare that to how much morbidly obese people actually eat (about as much as anyone else -- yes, that's been checked repeatedly in controlled studies). Their metabolisms have become so efficient, typically through repeated diets from childhood on, that they can maintain their weight on a modest fraction of the calorie intake that would theoretically be required.
Onething, the idea that there's an obesity epidemic, and it's all caused by people's behavior. In point of fact, the average American weighs about 25 lbs more than in 1950; the average American is also an inch and a half taller, which adds to body weight, and if you subtract the effect of the extra height, the additional weight amounts to seven more pounds on average. The horror! As for the reasons why the media might want to convince people that they have to rush out and spend billions of dollars every year on diets (that don't work), medications (that don't work), and a galaxy of other weight loss nostrums (that don't work), why, I'm sure I can't imagine why that would be a, shall we say, profitable gimmick...
Legalize, there you have it -- another good example of "progress."
Lewis, thanks for that. Radio Shack hasn't been useful for tinkerers for decades, but it's probably asking too much to expect the media to notice that.
2/22/15, 10:22 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Peacegarden, thank you. I didn't know that they'd identified a steroidal basis for the six months of feeling wonderful that any new diet creates -- that's fascinating. I've just noticed over the years, from watching people in a society that's basically psycho about food, that everyone who goes on a new fad diet, no matter what it is, feels wonderful for six months or so...and then the effect goes away.
August, I know the feeling. I've gotten some wonderful books at library book sales, for pennies on the $20 bill, and am always torn between delight in the new purchase and horror that the library got rid of something that good.
Bruno, or maybe we're an art project -- Gaia decided that when the current sea beds get raised up into mountains fifty or sixty million years from now, all that plastic will make rocks turn interesting colors.
Eileen aka Wilton, it impresses me, in a wry sort of way, that so many people are so desperately trying to find reasons to insist that the climate isn't out of whack. Flattening out climate change into "global warming" is a common strategy -- and of course they had plenty of help from careless climate activists there, too. As for the more important point, electric power demand might make a workable proxy for "progress," but of course the first thing to do is figure out what the word "progress" means in the first place. Progress toward what goal?
2/22/15, 10:33 PM
Jo said...
There is a website somewhere that calculates how many 'slaves' we in the so-called 'developed' world use via our cheap imported products and energy use every day. However, they are invisible slaves, so we think we have actually earned every penny of work we get from our dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, and that $5 t-shirts are our god-given right.
@Deborah, I am sorry to say that cotton is still produced with forced labour. One of the world's largest cotton producers is Uzbekistan, which uses forced labour and child labour to harvest cotton. The largest importers of Uzbekistan cotton are China and Bangladesh, which of course is where the bulk of our cotton clothes come from. So I imagine that you and I are both wearing t-shirts made with child labour, the cotton for which is sprayed with defoliants which cause birth defects in the children of women working in the cotton fields.
As you can imagine, I am a very jolly dinner guest.
I wonder if Capitalism (which is working admirably for the 1%) could indeed continue to thrive without the 99%, and a planet which has so far put up with us plundering her for treasure?
I find it very difficult to live ethically in our society, and I am only just beginning to discover the worrying way our society ticks. I wonder how far I would need to scale back my life in order not to profit from someone else's misery? That's partly what Walden was doing in his cabin in the woods, but he had to quit after two years and go back to work to pay off his debts..
I'm sure it's the way madness lies, but Mr Archdruid, you piqued my imagination when you mentioned in a comment some weeks ago about living in the interstices between the monolithic institutions of modern society. I want to find those places between and live there too.. I think that's the only way forward for me as an idealist, because there is nothing in mainstream society that I have found that I can give my allegiance to. But it is a bit worrying. I mean, how far do you go with that project? St Francis started by throwing off all his clothes and running off to live in the woods.
Ah well, at least it is summer here in the Southern Hemisphere..
2/23/15, 4:06 AM
John W. Riley said...
Budweiser had a super bowl ad that got quite a bit of attention in the craft beer world, because it essentially assailed anyone drinking good beer. You can view it herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siHU_9ec94c. It's a baffling advertisement given that AB Inbev, the corporation that brews Budweiser, has recently been buying up craft breweries and ramping up production of the acquired flagship beers. AB Inbev is the world's largest brewery with assets in the $150B range. What are they doing attacking small craft breweries? For me, craft beer represents a form of deliberate technological regress to something better, and there's a thin line between "craft beer" and "local beer". Like all beer lovers, I'll drink beer from anywhere in the world, but nothing beats drinking a good beer in the very building in which it was brewed. Even an aged imperial stout, which had plenty of time to travel the world, tastes better local. What exactly is AB Inbev attacking?
Then there's this MacDonald's commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHKznhffxig. I don't know of a good way to describe the movement toward better food involving things like Greek yogurt and kale... let's just call it "craft food"... but wasn't MacDonald's trying to jump on that band wagon? What about the vast selection of "fresh" salads, the local, "sustainably sourced" ingredients, the fruit cups?! I'm confused. Again, the recent "craft food" movement is tightly connected to the "local food" movement. Foodies eat locally sourced foods. So what exactly is MacDonald's attacking here?
It feels schizophrenic. It feels like lashing out. Do these massive corporations really feel suddenly threatened by the little guys? Not sure what it means but it strikes me as new.
2/23/15, 6:02 AM
Tyler August said...
This may be the first sign that your prediction of marxism returning in force to North American politics is coming true.
Unlike the first round of marxism on this continent, this one is very explicitly pro-First-Nations and anti-colonialist. Indeed, one of the demands of the group's prominently displayed manifesto (along with eliminating tuition fees, etc.) was requiring an "anti-colonialist aspect" to every program. My wife and I had a good laugh trying to figure out what anti-colonialist physics or mathematics would look like, but that too may be a sign of times to come. Barring a large increase in immigration/volkerwanderung, demographics are going to give this part of Northern Ontario back to its Native Peoples sooner or later-- and I think they're starting to figure it out.
2/23/15, 6:47 AM
patriciaormsby said...
I told them that JMG's blog has been attracting so many comments that I really could not point them to Jonathan's in particular, so I gave them a brief summary of the discussion, including JMG's response.
I put the gist of it this way: "'progress,' the shibboleth dividing 'smart' citizens from the 'backward,' could be reasonably defined as 'methods of increasing the externalization of costs.'”
One replied: "Technology the Servant has made Mankind the Slave. Most of the "Food" we buy in the store is not made to provide Nourishment but the maximum profit. Fruit & Vegetables have been modified to provide maximum durability in shipment & "Shelf Appeal"!Tomato slices firmer than the Meat Patty and just as tasteless as the Lettuce leaf!"
Another said: "I think there's something to it. Under the current system of predatory capitalism, it's certainly considered good to make someone else pay your costs.
For example, if a corporation announces the introduction of robots and attendant job cuts, its stock will typically rise because to the company and its investors this is a form of progress. Meanwhile, the sacked workers become a burden on society until they find new jobs. At this stage of advanced (read "much progress has been made") predatory capitalism, however, many of the sacked workers won't find new jobs, or will find lower-quality jobs which keep them partly dependent on public benefits.
A Japanese academic of my acquaintance pointed out to me that in fact this is how the low-wage job system works. Corporations lock in low-wage, no-benefit jobs, forcing their employees to get state subsidies to survive. In this way, businesses can externalize a large portion of their labor costs. All in the name of progress..."
A professor wrote back at length, saying: "The idea of exactly how progress "externalized costs" wasn't entirely clear to me at first, but after reading ***'s e-mail, I started to get the picture. The introduction of "new and improved" products allows the companies to profit while externalizing all the costs associated with additional resource consumption, having to deal with garbage, pollution, and waste, and also shifting onto society the burdens of taking care of people whose jobs have been replaced. One point to add, though I'm sure everyone's already aware of it, is that "new and improved" products not only enable companies to make cheaper products and sell them at a higher price, but also allow companies to use planned obsolescence as a strategy for selling more products. It's not just disposable pens or products that break soon and have to be replaced, but also entire systems. " He has written back with a long list of examples of such externalities.
The fourth, Tony Boys, who introduced me to the hard realities of peak oil, wrote: "I read some of the conversation about externalities. If you or the others have not read it yet, you should read "Sacred Economics" by Charles Eisenstein - it's available free on the net. Lots of good insights and thinking there."
I.e., they all agree wholeheartedly with Jonathan. Now what will be interesting is to take this to people who do not understand peak oil and its related issues and see what they say. I think that many people just have not been able to put a finger on what is going wrong in their lives, but they are depressed.
Then there are those few who are still benefiting, perhaps deliberately from "progress." The ultimate "smell test" may be how much bluster and name-calling we attract from certain quarters.
2/23/15, 7:17 AM
Jon from Virginia said...
http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/12/22/the-truth-about-ancel-keys-weve-all-got-it-wrong/
Again, the main point of my comment was that it's normal and healthy for younger people to be thin and older people less so, and the second point was that dieting by calorie restriction was madness. Can you refute either point?
2/23/15, 8:09 AM
RPC said...
What a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?"
Did you see the parody Toyota T-shirt for sale a few years ago? The slogan read, "Once you drive one you'll never stop."
2/23/15, 10:39 AM
RPC said...
Carpenter, eh? You wouldn't happen to know Michael Rivers (carpenter and singer/songwriter) over in Port Angeles? I recorded some demos for him back in the 80s.
2/23/15, 10:54 AM
Shane Wilson said...
There is a certain amount of pretentiousness and elitism running around a lot of the local foods movement that does it no good in trying to relate to and change the eating habits of average, working class, non-intellectual folks. Perhaps that's the exclusionary point. Maybe this is what the big companies are exploiting the same way the GOP exploits this politically. The fact that a lot of people into this treat it as their Jesus, full of wild eyed evangelism for their source of salvation, turn off a lot of "non-believers" who might otherwise be open to the message if it weren't presented in such religions terms. Perhaps this backlash is what the big companies are exploiting.
2/23/15, 12:33 PM
1ab9a86a-8991-11e3-899b-000bcdcb8a73 said...
some points regarding the article:
http://www.gold-eagle.com/article/looking-economic-growth-kilowatt
1. climate denial folk often make misleading statements about graphs; sometimes they go to the trouble of doctoring the graphs to accord with their claims, but quite often they don't even bother. They rely on most of their readers just uncritically accepting their claims and failing to actually look at the graph.
In this case, the claim is made that "ever since the summer of 1995 (when EP’s summer demand peaked at 30% above its 52Wk M/A), peak-electrical demand for EP has been declining".
But a glance at the charts shows that this is not the case in absolute terms (top chart) where peak demand has handily exceeded '95 levels. Notice that in the statement above, the '95 peak is quoted in "% above moving-average" terms. But the following claim that "peak-electrical demand for EP has been declining" neglects to mention whether it is in "% above moving-average" or absolute terms and it is clear that it is only true in % terms (lower chart).
If a number is quoted without using the "%" qualifier, readers will (correctly) assume that it should be interpreted as the absolute value, not a percentage. So the phrasing is misleading, whether by accident or accidentally on purpose I leave for you to determine. (Hint: exactly this sort of mislabelling etc happens endlessly in these sorts of articles).
Also, note that the '95 peak they have chosen as a reference point is an outlier is % terms relative to nearby years. This kind of pathetic cherry-picking is a standard denial tactic.
2. The source is a gold-bug investment site; generally these folk know even less about science than standard investment folks, which is already not much at all (to be generous).
3. For a long time, China watchers used electrical demand figures to get around the doctoring of official economic numbers. But then the Chinese wised up and started doctoring the electrical numbers too.
4. Er, these numbers are for US demand. So how can a conclusion be drawn about "global-anything"?
2/23/15, 1:03 PM
Scythe of Relief said...
Well that was very convenient for the 'industrial food industry', so they could sell more of the real causes of heart disease.(seed oils & sugar)
John Yudkin & his book 'Pure White and Deadly', may have been a better person to listen to.
I think Keys involvement was a bit more insidious, than simply getting something wrong.
2/23/15, 1:40 PM
Unknown said...
@Andrew Kieran--Thank you for posting and telling us details about your looms. Scotland did a sensible thing by restricting the name "Harris tweed" to cloth woven by hand in Scotland, so that mass-produced knockoffs cannot benefit from its reputation.
On further inquiry, I think that the fabric I remember from my girlhood was a Donegal tweed. Ireland has not put any legal protection on the name, which makes it harder to find.
I have kept my mother's tweed coat from the nineteen-fifties. It is of heavy wool in a herringbone pattern of reddish brown and cream, overlaid with large flecks of green, red and cream. I recall that my circa 1962 skirt was of orange tweed flecked with turquoise and other contrasting colors, in a weave without any obvious directional pattern. I'd be pleased to find a considerable amount of new cloth like that in dark green or chocolate brown, but no luck so far. Getting someone local to make up the cape for me would not be a problem.
2/23/15, 3:28 PM
Unknown said...
@Jo--I have thought about how difficult it would be for an ordinary person living in central parts of the Roman Empire to avoid buying any goods or services produced by slave labor. It would be pretty hard to do, given that metals were mined by slaves and a lot of grain was grown by slave labor on plantations.
Doing the equivalent today is even harder and probably can only be approached by degrees. Thoreau lived on land from which the original inhabitants had been run off, and so do I. I purchase a few imported luxuries like coffee and chocolate from fair trade sources. I don't buy goods containing palm oil without an idea of where the palm oil is coming from. I could buy more used and local than I do. I could just do with less, as JMG recommends.
There's also the question of whether the effort expended to avoid taking advantage of other people's misery might be spent instead on political activism to help those people directly. I don't have an answer to that.
2/23/15, 3:49 PM
FiftyNiner said...
Reading through the comments on this post I realized that there were several references to "slavery". I remember several years ago watching a documentary on TV about oil and one of the experts had calculated the amount of work that the human race has been able to glean from all this oil, and the number he gave was the equivalent to the peoples of the earth having 22 billion slaves working around the clock. That is the equivalent of each person on earth having at least three slaves, but we know that most of the people wouldn't have any. I know it is almost unthinkable, but have you given much thought to the impulse to actually physically and legally re-enslave billions to keep the millions in the style to which they have become accustomed?
Early in the first term of the current Alabama governor this state did everything it could to banish the largely Mexican migrant farm workers who harvested the produce. On a political photo op to a tomato farm in south Alabama things went a little wrong for the governor when the farmer asked him if he liked tomatoes. Of course the governor said that he did and with that the farmer handed him a five gallon bucket and told him to help himself.
Of course the governor declined the offer but the importance of the incident was lost on no one. Why aren't things like that telegraphed around the world by the liberal media?
2/23/15, 5:39 PM
jean-vivien said...
I am not living in the USA but I am still a little scared to see this making the headlines on Reuters.com as if it were business as usual...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/23/us-usa-congress-security-idUSKBN0LR1M920150223
Basically, the Govt does not have the financial means to pay for "border patrol, port inspection and airport security agents" ? Maybe I did not understand the articl ecorrectly, or...
"A new $39.7 billion budget for the department is stalled in Congress over Republican-authored provisions to block any spending on Obama's recent executive orders that lift the threat of deportation from millions of undocumented immigrants.
Republicans who control the U.S. Senate will try for a fourth time to advance the measure later on Monday, but it was expected to fall short again of the needed 60 votes as Democrats reject it. Even if it were to pass, Obama has threatened to veto the measure unless immigration restrictions are stripped."
This seems to be a political crisis of some sorts, but it is still could be a symptom of deeper spending issues, no ? Maybe the political struggles will be one of the key factors accelerating Decline with a capital D... When does the political game stops playing out as just a game and becomes a figment to hide the more dire truth of state poverty ?
2/23/15, 5:57 PM
Wilton Granger said...
Thank you for your input. This kind of feedback is one of the many things I appreciate about the comment section of this blog. That and the sense of community I get from it.
I tried to find the original data at Barron’s to check the info but couldn’t find it. I’m also not as perceptive as you in reading these charts.
I expected that the type of site it was would give it a bias, but I hoped that the data he used would minimize any misinterpretation. Clearly that didn’t happen.
Eileen
2/23/15, 6:52 PM
Glenn said...
Glenn,
Carpenter, eh? You wouldn't happen to know Michael Rivers?
I'm afraid not, sorry.
Glenn
2/23/15, 8:07 PM
heather said...
2/23/15, 9:06 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
@Nastarana, you don't have to tell me that our politicians both Republican and Democratic are Monsanto Men (and women, as Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly prove to be if she takes office in 2017). That's a bipartisan failing as I'll point out to my students this week when I show them Food, Inc. On the other hand, calling the Democratic Party "the far left" makes me raise my eyebrows. Some of the rank and file may be "far left" (and I know they tend to support local food) but not the leadership. They're pretty centrist and pro-corporate, regardless of now their opponents paint them. If you want real far left in U.S. politics, how about the Green Party, Peace and Freedom Party, and the various socialist parties? Are they hostile to your cause? Or is it just the Libertarians who support you? Maybe you should look for a "Green Tea" coalition of the Greens and Libertarians to counteract the pro-industrial farming major parties.
2/23/15, 9:39 PM
Jo said...
You are all very welcome to pop over and share ideas and angst at All the Blue Day - look forward to hearing from you:)
@Deborah, these are questions that bother me as well. But a)I am not a political activist, mainly because I would rather gnaw off my right arm than go to a meeting, and b)I really don't believe that what I say should be different to what I do.
LESS is important, not only because it is expedient for those of us who think that it is the best way to meet the future - the beauty of it is that what is good for the planet is also good in a social justice sense and ALSO seems to point the way to a more satisfying, truly human life.
I am such a rank beginner at steering this course though. My useful skills are mostly non-existent; I am your average suburbanite, green-lite, optimistically hoping that the world will magically remake itself without me having to do anything drastic, and then that pesky Archdruid kept responding to my comments with the question, 'And what are YOU going to do about that?' Ye gods, he's annoying! But persistent. And consistent. And it all makes sense, doesn't it? So here I am, beginning a journey which will lead me who-knows-where..
2/24/15, 3:03 AM
latheChuck said...
It certainly has been a conversation piece.
I was talking with the driver of my carpool this afternoon about the importance of individual action. "Whatever we do, it's insignificant. Why bother?" he said. "We need policy changes from the top."
"No", I said, " the effect scales linearly with participation. When everyone is insignificant, everyone is equally significant. We need to choose whether to be a good example, or a bad example (just in case anyone else is watching.) And look at the fuel we've saved with this carpool!"
2/24/15, 5:28 PM
latheChuck said...
2/24/15, 5:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
As for living in the interstices of the system, that's a complicated issue, and depends a great deal on local conditions and personal needs and talents, so I'm not at all sure how much help I can offer you.
John, yes, they're lashing out. They're terrified. McDonalds is losing market share steadily in the younger consumer demographics, and AB InBev fears nothing more than the proliferation of independent craft breweries and home brewers. In both cases, the marketing model of offering a cheap tasteless product to the mass market and using saturation advertising to convince people to buy it anyway is faltering, and they have no idea how to do anything else.
Tyler, thanks for the heads up! Yes, this is about what I was expecting.
RPC, I didn't -- funny. Many thanks.
FiftyNiner, it's not unthinkable at all -- slavery is still very much with us today, even though it's de facto illegal. Thing is, slavery on a large scale only makes economic sense when you have labor shortages, in specific industries or in general. If you have more people than jobs, it's more economical simply to hire "wage slaves" and spare yourself the cost of feeding, housing, and guarding them. In the sort of future we can expect, where economic contraction leaves billions of desperate people out of work who will do anything for enough food to postpone starvation for another day, slavery's hopelessly inefficient; put up a sign saying WORKERS WANTED: WILL FEED and you'll have more labor than you can use.
Jean-Vivien, it's part of the latest round of "chicken" between the two parties here in the US. The scare headlines are being used by both sides to try to whip up voters to pressure the other guys. No matter what happens, the guys with the guns will still get paid.
Pinku-Sensei, good. You're in the contest!
LatheChuck, I'd like to believe that, but I've talked to too many left coast limousine liberals whose attitudes are very neatly summed up by the SUV with the sticker. Thanks for the details on the pen!
2/25/15, 12:06 AM
daniel said...
As the classic Tragedy of the Commons so eloquently demonstrates, the desire for individual profit always involves externalising costs onto society - that is where the profit comes from.
Modern capitalism has simply defined progress as increase in profit.
2/25/15, 1:54 AM
Unknown said...
It's an Irish comedy group's music video. I don't want to spoil it.
2/25/15, 7:33 AM
Nastarana said...
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
I second the correspondent's recommendation of You Tube University. I picked up some good ideas from YTU recently when I began hand quilting again after a 40+ year hiatus.
2/25/15, 7:46 AM
HalFiore said...
http://magazine.good.is/articles/portland-pipeline-water-turbine-power
I would like to suggest that whenever you publish, in whatever form it takes, the winners of the contest, you also include some of the ideas that weren't submitted as entries, along with a very elementary explanation of why the idea is ridiculous. It could actually end up having some educational value above the obvious entertainment.
2/25/15, 10:03 AM
HalFiore said...
Back in the 80s a radical environmental group sold bumper stickers designed to be surreptitiously placed on behemoth vehicles that read "If your (male organ) was as small as mine, you'd need a monster truck, too!"
2/25/15, 10:38 AM
Marlow Charles said...
Bret (of the any takers?): Yes, big time.
What you talk of is the position I get to every time when quite and my thoughts run deep. Every time.
Where and how these thoughts intersect with the subtle 'mysticism', of which our host so gently and beautifully speaks of, is source of unending intrigue and 'comfort' to me.
(Thanks, too, to so many of the thoughtfull (& inspiring) commenters that contribute so much to my understanding (& doubt)).
2/25/15, 11:07 PM
Tye said...
Well said. I'm with you dude.
3/3/15, 7:25 PM
Jody said...
In addition to the failings you discuss in you post, I would also add that science suffers from over-specialization. It is difficult for scientists to communicate with scientists outside their discipline. This creates tunnel vision and makes it very difficult to see the big picture!
And then there is the pressure to publish. Twenty years ago as a graduate researcher in science I found professors writing abstracts for research not yet done because the deadline for papers to be published required it. I always thought that would make objectivity a problem!
PhD is short for Doctorate of Philosophy, yet few scientists ever study philosophy or any of the “soft” sciences. When we study the history of science we trace our roots back to naturalists and medical doctors. Such people were often keen observers. Thus, the scientific method begins with observation and deep thinking, eventually to be followed with experiments to prove ones hypothesis.
Natural philosophy is about looking at the world objectively, thinking deeply about what you see, and eventually arriving at some state of knowledge of how the world works. After many years of careful observation if one is fortunate she may arrive at wisdom. Many naturalists were not only knowledgeable about their favored subjects they were also very accomplished artists because they had spent so much time looking at them they wanted to reproduce them with art.
I’m glad I had the opportunity to go to college and to study science, because having a background in science has made lifelong learning so much more adventurous! It also makes me a good citizen because I know I can think for myself about the problems we face!
Cheers,
Jody
3/19/15, 9:59 AM