Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. The first news story followed the official announcement that the official unemployment rate here in the United States dropped to 5.5% last month. This was immediately hailed by pundits and politicians as proof that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never went away are finally here again.
This jubilation makes perfect sense so long as you don’t happen to know that the official unemployment rate in the United States doesn’t actually depend on the number of people who are out of work. What it indicates is the percentage of US residents who happen to be receiving unemployment benefits—which, as I think most people know at this point, run out after a certain period. Right now there are a huge number of Americans who exhausted their unemployment benefits a long time ago, can’t find work, and would count as unemployed by any measure except the one used by the US government these days. As far as officialdom is concerned, they are nonpersons in very nearly an Orwellian sense, their existence erased to preserve a politically expedient fiction of prosperity.
How many of these economic nonpersons are there in the United States today? That figure’s not easy to find amid the billowing statistical smokescreens. Still, it’s worth noting that 92,898,000 Americans of working age are not currently in the work force—that is, more than 37 per cent of the working age population. If you spend time around people who don’t belong to this nation’s privileged classes, you already know that a lot of those people would gladly take jobs if there were jobs to be had, but again, that’s not something that makes it through the murk.
We could spend quite a bit of time talking about the galaxy of ways in which economic statistics are finessed and/or fabricated these days, but the points already raised are enough for the present purpose. Let’s move on. The op-ed piece comes from erstwhile environmentalist Stewart Brand, whose long journey from editing CoEvolution Quarterly to channeling Bjorn Lomborg is as perfect a microcosm of the moral collapse of 20th century American environmentalism as you could hope to find. Brand’s latest piece claims that despite all evidence to the contrary—and of course there’s quite a bit of that these days—the environment is doing just fine: the economy has decoupled from resource use in recent decades, at least here in America, and so we can continue to wallow in high-tech consumer goodies without worrying about what we’re doing to the planet.
There’s a savage irony in the fact that in 1975, when his magazine was the go-to place to read about the latest ideas in systems theory and environmental science, Brand could have pointed out the gaping flaw in that argument in a Sausalito minute. Increasing prosperity in the United States has “decoupled” from resource use for two reasons: first, only a narrowing circle of privileged Americans get to see any of the paper prosperity we’re discussing—the standard of living for most people in this country has been contracting steadily for four decades—and second, the majority of consumer goods used in the United States are produced overseas, and so the resource use and environmental devastation involved in manufacturing the goodies we consume so freely takes place somewhere else.
That is to say, what Brand likes to call decoupling is our old friend, the mass production of ecological externalities. Brand can boast about prosperity without environmental cost because the great majority of the costs are being carried by somebody else, somewhere else, and so don’t find their way into his calculations. The poor American neighborhoods where people struggle to get by without jobs are as absent from his vision of the world as they are from the official statistics; the smokestacks, outflow pipes, toxic-waste dumps, sweatshopped factories, and open-pit mines worked by slave labor that prop up his high-tech lifestyle are overseas, so they don’t show up on US statistics either. As far as Brand is concerned, that means they don’t count.
We could talk more about the process by which a man who first became famous for pressuring NASA into releasing a photo of the whole earth is now insisting that the only view that matters is the one from his living room window, but let’s go on. The other news item is the simplest and, in a bleak sort of way, the funniest of the lot. According to recent reports, state government officials in Florida are being forbidden from using the phrase “climate change” when discussing the effects of, whisper it, climate change.
This is all the more mordantly funny because Florida is on the front lines of climate change right now.
Even the very modest increases in sea level we’ve seen so far, driven by thermal expansion and the first rounds of Greenland and Antarctic meltwater, are sending seawater rushing out of the storm sewers into the streets of low-lying parts of coastal Florida towns whenever the tide is high and an onshore wind blows hard enough. As climate change accelerates—and despite denialist handwaving, it does seem to be doing that just now—a lot of expensive waterfront property in Florida is going to end up underwater in more than a financial sense. The state government’s response to this clear and present danger? Prevent state officials from talking about it.
We could look at a range of other examples of this same kind, but these three will do for now. What I want to discuss now is what’s going on here, and what it implies.
Let’s begin with the obvious. In all three of the cases I’ve cited, an uncomfortable reality is being dismissed by manipulating abstractions. An abstraction called “the unemployment rate” has been defined so that the politicians and bureaucrats who cite it don’t have to deal with just how many Americans these days can’t get paid employment; an abstraction called “decoupling” and a range of equally abstract (and cherrypicked) measures of environmental health are being deployed so that Brand and his readers don’t have to confront the soaring ecological costs of computer technology in particular and industrial society in general; an abstraction called “climate change,” finally, is being banned from use by state officials because it does too good a job of connecting certain dots that, for political reasons, Florida politicians don’t want people to connect.
To a very real extent, this sort of thing is pervasive in human interaction, and has been since the hoots and grunts of hominin vocalization first linked up with a few crude generalizations in the dazzled mind of an eccentric australopithecine. Human beings everywhere use abstract categories and the words that denote them as handles by which to grab hold of unruly bundles of experience. We do it far more often, and far more automatically, than most of us ever notice.
It’s only under special circumstances—waking up at night in an unfamiliar room, for example, and finding that the vague somethings around us take a noticeable amount of time to coalesce into ordinary furniture—that the mind’s role in assembling the fragmentary data of sensation into the objects of our experience comes to light.
When you look at a tree, for example, it’s common sense to think that the tree is sitting out there, and your eyes and mind are just passively receiving a picture of it—but then it’s common sense to think that the sun revolves around the earth. In fact, as philosophers and researchers into the psychophysics of sensation both showed a long time ago, what happens is that you get a flurry of fragmentary sense data—green, brown, line, shape, high contrast, low contrast—and your mind constructs a tree out of it, using its own tree-concept (as well as a flurry of related concepts such as “leaf,” “branch,” “bark,” and so on) as a template. You do that with everything you see, and the reason you don’t notice it is that it was the very first thing you learned how to do, as a newborn infant, and you’ve practiced it so often you don’t have to think about it any more.
You do the same thing with every representation of a sensory object. Let’s take visual art for an example.
Back in the 1880s, when the Impressionists first started displaying their paintings, it took many people a real effort to learn how to look at them, and a great many never managed the trick at all. Among those who did, though, it was quite common to hear comments about how this or that painting had taught them to see a landscape, or what have you, in a completely different way. That wasn’t just hyperbole: the Impressionists had learned how to look at things in a way that brought out features of their subjects that other people in late 19th century Europe and America had never gotten around to noticing, and highlighted those things in their paintings so forcefully that the viewer had to notice them.
The relation between words and the things they denote is thus much more complex, and much more subjective, than most people ever quite get around to realizing. That’s challenging enough when we’re talking about objects of immediate experience, where the concept in the observer’s mind has the job of fitting fragmentary sense data into a pattern that can be verified by other forms of sense data—in the example of the tree, by walking up to it and confirming by touch that the trunk is in fact where the sense of sight said it was. It gets far more difficult when the raw material that’s being assembled by the mind consists of concepts rather than sensory data: when, let’s say, you move away from your neighbor Joe, who can’t find a job and is about to lose his house, start thinking about all the people in town who are in a similar predicament, and end up dealing with abstract concepts such as unemployment, poverty, the distribution of wealth, and so on.
Difficult or not, we all do this, all the time. There’s a common notion that dealing in abstractions is the hallmark of the intellectual, but that puts things almost exactly backwards; it’s the ordinary unreflective person who thinks in abstractions most of the time, while the thinker’s task is to work back from the abstract category to the raw sensory data on which it’s based. That’s what the Impressionists did:
staring at a snowbank as Monet did, until he could see the rainbow play of colors behind the surface impression of featureless white, and then painting the colors into the representation of the snowbank so that the viewer was shaken out of the trance of abstraction (“snow” = “white”) and saw the colors too—first in the painting, and then when looking at actual snow.
Human thinking, and human culture, thus dance constantly between the concrete and the abstract, or to use a slightly different terminology, between immediate experience and a galaxy of forms that reflect experience back in mediated form. It’s a delicate balance: too far into the immediate and experience disintegrates into fragmentary sensation; too far from the immediate and experience vanishes into an echo chamber of abstractions mediating one another. The most successful and enduring creations of human culture have tended to be those that maintain the balance. Representational painting is one of those; another is literature. Read the following passage closely:
“Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.”
By the time you finished reading it, you likely had a very clear sense of what Frodo Baggins and his friends were seeing as they looked off to the east from the hilltop behind Tom Bombadil’s house. So did I, as I copied the sentence, and so do most people who read that passage—but no two people see the same image, because the image each of us sees is compounded out of bits of our own remembered experiences. For me, the image that comes to mind has always drawn heavily on the view eastwards from the suburban Seattle neighborhoods where I grew up, across the rumpled landscape to the stark white-topped rampart of the Cascade Mountains. I know for a fact that that wasn’t the view that Tolkien himself had in mind when he penned that sentence; I suspect he was thinking of the view across the West Midlands toward the Welsh mountains, which I’ve never seen; and I wonder what it must be like for someone to read that passage whose concept of ridges and mountains draws on childhood memories of the Urals, the Andes, or Australia’s Great Dividing Range instead.
That’s one of the ways that literature takes the reader through the mediation of words back around to immediate experience. If I ever do have the chance to stand on a hill in the West Midlands and look off toward the Welsh mountains, Tolkien’s words are going to be there with me, pointing me toward certain aspects of the view I might not otherwise have noticed, just as they did in my childhood. It’s the same trick the Impressionists managed with a different medium: stretching the possibilities of experience by representing (literally re-presenting) the immediate in a mediated form.
Now think about what happens when that same process is hijacked, using modern technology, for the purpose of behavioral control.
That’s what advertising does, and more generally what the mass media do. Think about the fast food company that markets its product under the slogan “I’m loving it,” complete with all those images of people sighing with post-orgasmic bliss as they ingest some artificially flavored and colored gobbet of processed pseudofood. Are they loving it? Of course not; they’re hack actors being paid to go through the motions of loving it, so that the imagery can be drummed into your brain and drown out your own recollection of the experience of not loving it. The goal of the operation is to keep you away from immediate experience, so that a deliberately distorted mediation can be put in its place.
You can do that with literature and painting, by the way. You can do it with any form of mediation, but it’s a great deal more effective with modern visual media, because those latter short-circuit the journey back to immediate experience. You see the person leaning back with the sigh of bliss after he takes a bite of pasty bland bun and tasteless gray mystery-meat patty, and you see it over and over and over again. If you’re like most Americans, and spend four or five hours a day staring blankly at little colored images on a glass screen, a very large fraction of your total experience of the world consists of this sort of thing: distorted imitations of immediate experience, intended to get you to think about the world in ways that immediate experience won’t justify.
The externalization of the human mind and imagination via the modern mass media has no shortage of problematic features, but the one I want totalk about here is the way that it feeds into the behavior discussed at the beginning of this post: the habit, pervasive in modern industrial societies just now, of responding to serious crises by manipulating abstractions to make them invisible. That kind of thing is commonplace in civilizations on their way out history’s exit door, for reasons I’ve discussed in an earlier sequence of posts here, but modern visual media make it an even greater problem in the present instance. These latter function as a prosthetic for the imagination, a device for replacing the normal image-making functions of the human mind with electromechanical equivalents. What’s more, you don’t control the prosthetic imagination; governments and corporations control it, and use it to shape your thoughts and behavior in ways that aren’t necessarily in your best interests.
The impact on the prosthetic imagination on the crisis of our time is almost impossible to overstate. I wonder, for example, how many of my readers have noticed just how pervasive references to science fiction movies and TV shows have become in discussions of the future of technology. My favorite example just now is the replicator, a convenient gimmick from the Star Trek universe: you walk up to it and order something, and the replicator pops it into being out of nothing.
It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for the way that people in the privileged classes of today’s industrial societies like to think of the consumer economy. It’s also hard to think of anything that’s further removed from the realities of the consumer economy. The replicator is the ultimate wet dream of externalization: it has no supply chains, no factories, no smokestacks, no toxic wastes, just whatever product you want any time you happen to want it. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that lies behind Stewart Brand’s fantasy of “decoupling”—and it’s probably no accident that more often than not, when I’ve had conversations with people who think that 3-D printers are the solution to everything, they bring Star Trek replicators into the discussion.
3-D printers are not replicators. Their supply chains and manufacturing costs include the smokestacks, outflow pipes, toxic-waste dumps, sweatshopped factories, and open-pit mines worked by slave labor mentioned earlier, and the social impacts of their widespread adoption would include another wave of mass technological unemployment—remember, it’s only in the highly mediated world of current economic propaganda that people who lose their jobs due to automation automatically get new jobs in some other field; in the immediate world, that’s become increasingly uncommon. As long as people look at 3-D printers through minds full of little pictures of Star Trek
replicators, though, those externalized ecological and social costs are going to be invisible to them.
241 comments:
As you may recall, I work at a middle school as a design teacher. In our second year, someone gave us a 3D printer. For a while I taught classes and workshops on how to use it, but I found myself spending increasing amounts of time trying to fix it; and at the same time my students were going un-taught. I'd turned from the actual humans in my charge, into a servus robotici — a servant of the robot, which is really what a 3D printer is, a CNC plotter capable of moving in X and Y dimensions, and a limited Z range of motion, attached to a feedstock of plastic wire and a heating element.
For all its vaunted technological efficiency, the 3D printer produced a lot of the product which bears the technical name "spaghetti" —a partly-complete model with some sort of code-bug in the middle of it which caused the print head to veer wildly, creating mass amounts of loops and whorls of... cheap plastic garbage. For every "clean print" of a model, I got five or six garbage ones. Some of this was the result of the 3D modeling skills of the students (and their teacher, me, I'll admit).
When the machine broke, I didn't replace it. For one thing, it was expensive to operate, both in terms of my available hours to fix it and set it up for each print and prep it for the next one, and feedstock to keep it ready to generate more cheap plastic junk.
But for another, it didn't teach the students enough for the cost. Sure, they learned some 3D modeling skills. But the printer did not reward care and attention and deliberate action. A sloppy, crude model was likely to print fine, while a carefully-executed and planned model would fail for unknown reasons that could not be determined. The machine rewarded slip-shod design, and threw up obstacles to deliberate care.
Someone gave us the money to buy a new one. And so I persuaded them to let us build a wood-shop with the money instead. Some power tools, to be sure, but mostly hand tools for measuring, cutting, drilling, smoothing, and shaping wood. Imagine: A whole woodworking shop suitable for teaching 3D shaping, for the price of one machine that can do nothing but create junk already ruined for the landfill!
Now someone proposes that I spend the budget I have on LittleBits — premade toys for teaching electronic circuits. With an eye-roll, I point them to the soldering irons and the full case of tiny drawers of electronics parts we already have...
3/11/15, 7:54 PM
D.M. said...
3/11/15, 7:58 PM
Mister Roboto said...
3/11/15, 7:59 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
In Star Trek, I don't believe I've ever noted what they actually did with the replicated products. A starship - much like a planet - is a very closed system. 3D printers are rubbish – nuff said. When they can do resilient and strong metalwork, I’ll be impressed, till then they are a toy.
PS: The views here are distant, the mountains gently undulate, even when they reach above 6,000ft. The country is worn down by age. Depending on the season the colours are different too. Winter is green and grey, whilst summer is blue and grey. Scars in the landscape are generally distinct and red/brown, with the occasional yellow. The skies are a rich blue, which turns deeper when the day is at an end. Heat brings on the unmistakable smell of eucalyptus oils which hang in the air like a blue haze and obscure distant detail. Every four or five years, the trees will flower and the entire mountain range smells of honey and the buzz of insects reaches its peak. Summer days bring on the drone of grasshoppers and cicadas - it is an unmistakable sound. The birds call in the morning and at the evening, whilst at midday only the fast moving small birds take advantage of the hot lull and you can hear their chirps as they dart amongst the shrubs seeking shelter and feed. None of the birds here sing, but many have lonely and beautiful calls that strike your heart with a depth that is surprising and can’t be easily forgotten. The nights are alive with bats, gliders, rodents and and hovering above all are the owls.
Cheers
Chris
PS: This weeks blog Aerials in the sky covers a DIY antenna, autumn weather closing in, commencing the wood shed project, refurbishment of the overlocker, replacing the intended strawberry bed with a cottage garden, usage of woody mulch, usage of mushroom compost and the commencement of the house construction. Plus lots of cool photos!
3/11/15, 8:00 PM
Cethlenn Miles said...
Retirees, Self-employed individuals, and full time students are not separated from this figure. The 47% estimate, based on that article, is not precisely accurate.
Mind you, I don't believe that it is 5%. I think it's more around 15% in my area of California, but that is a rough guess.
3/11/15, 8:01 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
That reminds me of a story from three years ago when a group of legislators in North Carolina tried to essentially outlaw honest estimates of sea level rise because they would be bad for real estate values. My response to that was I didn't know Canute was the King of North Carolina. The difference is that the real King Canute knew better; he just wanted to make a point about the limits of his power. A better analog would be Xerxes, who ordered the sea be given 300 lashes, fettered, and branded after a boat bridge across the Hellespont was destroyed by a storm.
As for the irony of Florida doing this when the state has been warned it needs to prepare for climate change, I've seen signs of climate chaos there first-hand. When my wife and I went to Florida to see our daughter for Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, we drive down Route A1A, the coastal highway between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. The northbound lanes were closed because they were covered by sea water, as the waves had eaten away the beach and the seawall. The odd part was there was no onshore wind and no storms offshore. I knew that climate change had a part in it, but it took months for me to find out that the sea had risen about a foot because the Gulf Stream had slowed down. That's exactly the kind of thing that could happen as the temperature gradient flattens out.
As for the economic damage that is being hidden, in addition to unemployment, there is zombie real estate, which consists of all the foreclosed and abandoned homes that the banks have left to rot, dragging the rest of the surrounding neighborhoods down with them. The housing bust may be over, but its corpses still need to be buried.
Finally, as a reminder of the externalization of environmental damage come home to roost, today as I type this is the fourth anniversary of Fukushima triple disaster, earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown. It may be halfway around the world from the U.S. but the radiation and refuse has been reaching the Pacific coast of North America for years.
3/11/15, 8:05 PM
pyrrhus said...
As to global warming, when just the annual increase in Chinese coal plant output creates more CO2 than 3 billion Ford Expeditions, talking about American actions is simply a waste of breath...
And really, what civilization ever listened to its Cassandras even when doom was obviously approaching...they didn't and the West won't either.
3/11/15, 8:14 PM
marxmarv said...
When Brand talks about decoupling economic activity from resource usage, I suspect he's talking about rents and the control of access to knowledge. It's flip of him to fantasize about broad-based artificial scarcity in knowledge when we haven't even started to examine what artificial scarcity has done for basic human needs, let alone real scarcity. Apparently, there must be an economy shaped very much like the one we have now forever, because progress. Sigh. A blivet E won't save the nation but it will keep us just entertained enough...
3/11/15, 8:22 PM
John Michael Greer said...
DM, true -- but consider also the way that the phrase "politically correct" has been used by the right as a way to stigmatize any attempt to talk about certain common social problems. All sides participate in the language game these days...
Mister R., would the family member possibly be adolescent? That's a common failing of the age, best cured by a face-first collision with the reality of having to earn a living.
Cherokee, that's another way that Star Trek mirrors the fantasies of the era in which it emerged. Where real spaceflight demands moment-by-moment monitoring of inputs and outputs, supplies and waste, on board the Enterprise, stuff materializes from nowhere when wanted and vanishes without a trace thereafter. Thanks for the word picture of the Australian mountains!
Cethlenn, I didn't say that everyone out of the work force was looking for work -- just that a lot more than 5.5% were.
Pinku-Sensei, that's what I'd heard -- Florida's basically screwed at this point, but nobody wants to admit just how much of it will be underwater within a lifetime or so.
Pyrrhus, even if modern industrial society was willing to listen, it's too late to make the necessary changes -- not enough time, and too few resources left. That's why I've been pointing to other options for the last nine years.
Marxmarv, no doubt. The delusion that enough knowledge will make up for the absence of other necessities is one of the most common and most lamentable logical howlers of our time -- right up there with the notion that if you have enough money, the resources are obligated to show up.
3/11/15, 8:56 PM
John Roth said...
I’ve held my peace long enough on the “unemployment rate” thing. Let’s start out by saying that the unemployment rate is not calculated by counting people who are collecting unemployment benefits.
From the FAQ: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.faq.htm
6. Is the count of unemployed persons limited to just those people receiving unemployment
insurance benefits?
No; the estimate of unemployment is based on a monthly sample survey of households.
All persons who are without jobs and are actively seeking and available to work are
included among the unemployed. (People on temporary layoff are included even if
they do not actively seek work.) There is no requirement or question relating to
unemployment insurance benefits in the monthly survey.
(end of faq extract)
It’s calculated from two nationwide surveys, conducted monthly, called the Household Survey and the Establishment Survey. The first is of 60,000 households, the second is of approximately 143,000 employers. The official definition is: “Each month the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program surveys approximately 143,000 businesses and government agencies, representing approximately 588,000 individual worksites, in order to provide detailed industry data on employment, hours, and earnings of workers on nonfarm payrolls.”
Here’s where to find the official press release: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm . Note in the first paragraph that “mining” includes oil field workers, and it is, as expected, down.
The “marque rate,” that is the rate that’s usually quoted, is officially called U3, and is one of six different rates calculated by the Bureau of Labor statistics. The official definition is people who are out of work and have actively looked for jobs in the past four weeks. It’s calculated from the “Household Survey,” which is a survey of 60,000 households, and measures unemployment according to the International Labor Organization (a UN bureau) definitions.
While U3 is the “marque rate,” that is the one that’s trumpeted, U4 (includes people who have quit looking,) or U6 (includes people who would like full time employment but are part time employed) might provide a better picture. That’s in table A15 of the official press release. U4 is currently 6.0%, U6 is currently 11%. A number of people think this is low, since it doesn’t include, for example, people who are incarcerated.
3/11/15, 8:59 PM
Kutamun said...
I suppose for me the Large Hadron Collider is the ultimate attempt at Imaginary Prosthesis .... It looks like an eight pointed Fylfot with Shiva at its centre , and the grunting hominids that operate it recently erected a statue of Shiva , Lord of The Dance outside the CERN facility after reading the Vedas and conceding the ancient Hindoo had it nailed long ago . Of course , the solstices and equinoxes of the wheel of the year are the best particle accelerator there is , and i bet most of the scientists who approach the quantum field in any meaningful way end up flouncing around Geneva in brightly coloured kaftans and rose coloured sunglasses . Reminds me of when world renowned dolphin researcher Dick Alpert tuned in , turned on , went down to the docks and released his dolphins .
The Gruen Transfer in Australia noted in their book that the average punter is bombarded with something like 4000 images in the average day ..what hope do the kids have . Of more concern to me (as my partner is in social work ) is the prosethesisation of sexuality and the alarming spike in paedophilia and sexual abuse in families , coinciding with the mainstreamisation of porn , which has any number of pederastic memes embedded within it . Still , trashing the planet surely must be linked to trashing the body and the loss of normal sexuality i suppose . No sex no spirit...
Have we become an amphisbae that is unable to reconcile its Archetypes to its Actuality ?
Abysmal
3/11/15, 9:01 PM
Repent said...
http://www.lake-district-guides.co.uk/walksmountainimages/marywelsh/redpikefromhighstile470.jpg
As beautiful as this appears, you are correct that the authentic experience of being there would be much better.
As mentioned previously, my psychedelic experiences with Ayahausca are intense. You literally can't put into words the visual and out of body experience that takes place with an Ayahausca trip. I've searched and searched, and I can't find anything, in picture form, or in animations that even remotely resembles my authentic psychedelic experiences. Fractal art is somewhat close, but the actual experience is of living changing fractals, with an immense knowledge download, and other sensations such as joy all intertwined in a tapestry of creation.
I find modern life so boring, dull and bland as to be almost intolerable. I'm no fan of the collapse of civilization, however I can't wait to 'authentically' be alive again...
3/11/15, 9:15 PM
SIRPAT said...
I did wonder though......does reading "lots" fall under the same catergory as the brain killing t.v or computer??? assuming one is not reading things like the adventures of daffy duck or suchlike???
3/11/15, 9:21 PM
Greg Belvedere said...
The hype around 3D printing is very transparent. It is the gross fast food burger, the Star Trek replicator is the commercial with smiling people. Current printers can only really build with one material, not the multiple materials that most products people would want to print require. The cost, complexity, and waste of such a product is staggering.
Speaking of prosthetic imagination, the other idea that gets mentioned with little thought to whole systems by techno utopians is a benevolent AI that will solve all our problems and relieve us of the need to think at all. For many people this will not be a big change.
3/11/15, 9:30 PM
Candace said...
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
Puts unemployment at 23% ish.
I work at a Food Shelf processing intake paperwork for clients. Today a woman from a family of 4 applied for services. Two parents and two teenage children. All of them were students. One of the teenagers works part-time. Just an anecdote, but I've seen a few other families surviving on student loans. I hope that they do pass a law that will allow student loans to be part of a bankruptcy.
The report of the 5.5% unemployment makes me so angry. They use that number to pretend there are living wage jobs. It is so unfair to the people who have been struggling to find work.
3/11/15, 9:37 PM
Ruben said...
I engaged in a protracted argument about 3DP, which was excerpted at 3D Printing in the Home: Fad, Fantasy, or the Future?
If anyone is a glutton for punishment, the full comment thread is linked in the article.
3/11/15, 9:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Kutamun, as Vico pointed out a long time ago, every society begins in harsh necessity and ends in madness. Ours is no exception.
Repent, if you want a more authentic life, what's keeping you from one? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way.
SIRPAT, as I noted in the post, literature is a way of mirroring back your experiences to you with varying emphasis; it can be used as an evasion of life, but it doesn't have to work that way. As long as you have a life, and not just a reading list, you should be fine.
Greg, whenever people start yammering about AIs, I can't help but think of one of Theodore Roszak's comments about computer banks suffering from chronic electropsychosis. I'm far from sure AIs are any more likely in our future than fusion power, but if they do happen, what do you think are the odds that the present computer industry could manage to make sane ones? I'm not too sanguine about that...
Candace, thanks for the reality check.
Ruben, I'd expect a trained industrial designer to be skeptical of the whole 3-D printing business, just as the sharpest critics of cornucopian claims about oil supplies came from trained petroleum geologists and the like. You know what actually has to be done to get something useful out of the process, so you can't just sit there daydreaming of replicators.
3/11/15, 10:07 PM
Curtis said...
If you used the real numbers, you would need real policies of some sort to deal with the issue. With fictitious numbers, you can pretend fictitious solutions work.
I think Mr. Greer has mentioned this several times, but we have a rentier class living off other people; nearly every real solution of every stripe of left, right, and centre at this point risks challenging them.
3/11/15, 10:09 PM
Pongo said...
Kidding aside, at the Los Angeles casting studio where I work - and where 95% of our business comes from the casting of television commercials - it’s not uncommon to see hordes of people trying to snag a very limited number of audition spots. I remember there was one casting director who had one day to cast a video game spot, and had enough time in that day to see a hundred people. To fill those hundred audition spots, he received something like 5000 headshot submissions.
What is more interesting is when you have callbacks and the director/producers/ad agency people all show up, and when you actually get a chance to listen to how a lot of these decisions are actually made, and I will tell you that the prosthetic imagination certainly works both ways, for the people making these decisions are themselves operating from a perspective where their own imaginations have been heavily manipulated. One of the sadder examples is a situation that comes up reliably every six months or so, where the production/ad agency team will decide they want to do something “new” and “edgy” by doing a commercial with an interracial black/white couple, something they’ve exposed to plenty of times in the media but probably not very often in person. And what starts to happen almost every time is that, when they see two actors of different races being all kiss and lovey right there in front of them in the audition, they start having second thoughts, because something about the real experience - not the manipulated media one - but the real experience of watching two people convincingly interact like that makes them feel uncomfortable in a way they didn’t anticipate.
3/11/15, 10:22 PM
Snoqualman said...
JMG, maybe it is just my imagination, but I seem to recollect a few gentle swipes from you in the past at the belief one occasionally sees, that the Northwest is somehow exempt from the problems that afflict everywhere else. As well as how the hyperconsumptive lifestyles of the elite here are often regarded as "environmentalism." I hope we see some more of that in future.
And what a great description of your interesting corner of our planet, Cherokee. Here in the land of silent forests, one often forgets that most, or at least many, forests are not quiet at all.
3/11/15, 10:22 PM
Jo said...
The image that sprang to my mind on reading this post was from Farenheit 451 - the huge TV screens in every house which kept the population docile and drugged on entertainment while their young people were sent off to fight in carefully under-reported foreign wars.
How immensely prescient of Mr Bradbury.
The other effect of electronic media is that it is MASS media. It is too easy to market a product to the whole world, or have an entire population distracted from unpleasant realities by amusing them with the electronic equivalent of a Roman circus.
Reading a book is such a solitary endeavour, with such uncertain consequences on the individual mind, that no wonder it is frequently found to be subversive and subjected to burning by all the most thorough totalitarian regimes..
3/11/15, 10:26 PM
onething said...
So, I knew better than to watch the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings movies. I'm told they are well done. I will have no part of it. Those books were precious to me, and I (re)read them all out loud to my children, long after they were old enough to read. My son was in high school when I finished the last book. Never much of a reader himself, I was surprised that when he was 6/7 he sat through the entire Little House On the Prairie series.
I've studiously avoided looking at any images of the Lord of the Rings movies, but once while out walking I inadvertently saw a poster outside a theatre, with a hobbit and Gollum. They were awful! And I am vindicated. God forbid I should ever see what they have done to Gandalf.
3/11/15, 10:44 PM
Derv said...
I was actually going to mention shadowstats before I saw that Candace pointed it out. Great site. What he does is really quite simple; he has a record of all the "adjustments" to calculating GDP, unemployment and the rest that the government has made in the last 30 years or so. He then just backs them out. You can then see unemployment as it would have been reported under, say, Ford. It's not a pretty picture.
The sheer amount of statistical tomfoolery is mind-boggling, to say the least. But the entire edifice now rests upon it, truly. The only way we can continue to service our debt is through financial repression. That requires treasury rates to be below inflation rates. But high official inflation rates would be politically untenable today, especially given all the money printing nationally and internationally in the last 6 years. Yet a lowered inflation rate means a higher "real" GDP number. And just like that, you have the "recovery." It's a simple product of our chosen debt management strategy.
Never mind the fact that GDP prints have error bars of +/-3% anyway, and growth has averaged less than that. This means, even by the government's own admission and figures, that it's entirely possible the last twenty years have been a recession (overall, barring the fluke quarterly spike). Moreover, downward revisions after prints now outpace upward revisions by like ten to one. It's because the models they use to conjure up numbers for jobs and GDP et al. are all based on a "normal" growing economy, which we no longer possess.
It's incredible to see the knock-on effects when a complex civilization's operations and measurement standards depart from the underlying reality. There is literally an entire profession (economists) built upon terrible forecasting using simplified models, that never worked, that fail doubly so nowadays, that have no rational foundation, that have never reflected reality, to explain away why the government numbers which do not reflect reality match their models, and so are actually reflecting reality.
You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried!
3/11/15, 10:48 PM
jean-vivien said...
In the meantime, our collective past is being destroyed in Irak for the greed of a few collectors. As for the future, you nailed it nicely. As for our children? They will be grateful for those few parents who have the courage to look coldly and realistically at our collective wet dreams. Remember that bunker in Berlin ? They sacrificed their children first, out of fear that these might prove them posthumously wrong.
You should do a series on parenting one of these days, cause it won't be the easiest occupation to take on.
3/11/15, 10:59 PM
Toro Loki said...
Tom Bombadil... Good reference. I notice that the LOTR movies,good as they are,have left out this important figure.
I can only hope that our postmodern "society" may possibly be awakened by such a figure..
Not much of a hope, but then,who would have predicted that an Archdruid would rise to such heights after the slaughter at Angleslee in AD 60?
3/11/15, 11:18 PM
Toro Loki said...
Do druids have a different way of counting the years? Just curious.
3/11/15, 11:27 PM
9anda1f said...
3/11/15, 11:28 PM
team10tim said...
RE: Unemployment:
The government statistics for inflation, GDP, and unemployment have been changed several times since their inception. Generally speaking, each change has been done in such a way that it makes the headline number look a little better at the time. The cumulative effect of numerous favourable revisions is a statistic that no longer has much meaning.
The website http://www.shadowstats.com publishes what the stats would look like if they had not been revised using the same methodology. Shadowstats gives an unemployment figure of ~23% from http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
From the link
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
Thanks,
Tim
3/11/15, 11:34 PM
Val said...
Last month a local magazine did a piece on promoting the maker movement in schools, and as is drearily familiar with all such articles I've seen to date, by far the greatest play is given to robots and 3D printers. I now understand more fully why robots have always left me cold, and am coming to positively loathe the very notion of 3D printers. These prosthetic obsessions appear to me to be the greatest impediments to people in the maker movement learning to, you know, actually *make* things - like, with their hands, for instance.
The replicator from Star Trek reminds me of a proposed device described by Nigel Calder in his book "Spaceships of the Mind," published in the 1970s. It makes any artifact or consumer product you want by molecularly reorganizing bits of moon rock or asteroid or whatever else happens to be handy. It's called a Santa Claus Machine. How exactly it is to work was left a little vague. The same book contains a photo of a young man whose t-shirt is blazoned with the motto "Lunar Mine by '89," an exciting development that I am sure we all await with baited breath.
RT has reported that the singer Sarah Brightman will be giving a concert from the International Space Station. In the interview, she enthused about being involved in something so representative of the future. I've nothing against Ms. Brightman, a fine vocalist, but as she is a very famous and therefore - I infer - wealthy individual, this tends to confirm my impression that privilege generally insulates people from noticing unpalatable realities that conflict with their preferred beliefs.
I've been noticing with increasing perturbation the effects of a great deal too much television watching on the mentality of my family members. Their degree of emotional engagement in this unproductive, downright detrimental activity has grown increasingly disturbing. It would be simply catastrophic if the antenna cable or the power cord were to be, say, imperceptibly perforated by tiny pins or needles... They couldn't cope, and would probably have a melt-down.
3/11/15, 11:55 PM
Karim said...
JMG wrote: "Human thinking, and human culture, thus dance constantly between the concrete and the abstract"
Would it be inaccurate to say that magic is, amongst other things, to be aware of this dance between the abstract to the concrete and to be able to set one's mind in between both, like a dial, in accordance to what the magician attempts to do?
It is valid to say that for systems thinking, one must think more in the abstract whilst meditative work for instance may require the mind to be set more towards the concrete end of the spectrum?
3/12/15, 12:16 AM
Andrew Crews said...
I've been putting some thought into the origins of this absurd blindness to whole systems western society faces. I think the blindness itself is another hidden externalize created by increasing layers of complexity of both society and technology. We are essentially drowning in our own abstractions.
I somewhat blame the control systems of the modern household for giving us the illusion of simplicity. Lightswitch on/off, oven on/off, faucet water on/off. I fear that being raised with so many mindlessly simple control systems and sheltered from the inter workings, wiring, elements, valves/pipes, we have left ourselves with an immensely strong habituation of looking for an on/off switch. The mindless drivel surrounding climate change and the environment has us literally looking for a on and off switch. We are not looking for solutions, we are looking for a button to press.
The way someone who has grown up raising chickens on a family farm and someone who has grown up microwaving a bag of pre-breaded chicken tenders have two very different ideas of where chickens actually come from. For the latter person the chicken comes from a bag in the refrigerator. The parents may have to buy the bag of chicken in a grocery store, they are privy too a deeper layer of complexity of chicken production than the child, however they are completely ignorant of the chicken processing plant and transportation warehouse network. For each layer of complexity we have placed we cover the concept of "chicken" in another mental shroud. eventually the number of mental shrouds separating the abstraction chicken from the actual chicken approaches the limit of what short term memory can muster. Each layer of complexity and technology throws the original meaning deeper and deeper into abstraction until it is divorced from anything meaningful. Perhaps there are many negative externalities like this that we are by and large completely unaware of because they are not quantifiable.
Then again this is basically what Vico suggested when civilization reaches the "Barbarism of Reflection". I am not sure if he also noted that the death by abstraction was the principle reason most civilizations were too paralyzed to do anything about their own tragic fate. Is systems blindness really a symptom of the barbarism of reflection?
3/12/15, 12:27 AM
FiftyNiner said...
I'll be brief--something I realize I have trouble with--but this essay is brilliant. The paragraph about the Impressionists gets an A+! I studied Ninteenth Century art history intensively in college and was amazed by the act of will and the mental processes that were required of Claude Monet to turn out the masterpieces of his later life, after the cataracts were robbing him of his sight. His achievement is no less astounding than the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven written after he hearing was completely gone. I am not yet willing to grant any American artist the same level of achievement. If I did it would have to be in literature and not in the visual arts.
3/12/15, 12:36 AM
Martin B said...
Your account of the Impressionists reminds me of the great ichthyologist Louis Agassiz's teaching methods. He would give a student a specimen or a pile of bones with instructions to see what they could make of them. Day after day they would stare at the same thing, thinking they'd seen all there was to see after a couple of hours, only to realise as the days went on they were seeing finer details, more patterns and connections, and gaining far deeper insights than the first cursory glances afforded.
3/12/15, 1:10 AM
Bogatyr said...
Cherokee Chris, let me add to the praise of your description of your landscape!
I probably need to go back and read the LOTR again, this time more carefully; as Jo mentioned in a previous comment, I speed-read them during my teens, and didn't pay enough attention to the word-pictures. Also, of course, I didn't have the life experience needed to flesh them out.
As a comparison, I've just finished re-reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer; my recent experiences of being broke and insecure add a lot to my interpretation of that book this time around.
I'm lucky to have landed a good job. It's taken an age to sort out, but I'm off to Beijing in a few weeks. My old friends there tell me that the Great Firewall is much more efficient than when I was there last, and that access to non-Chinese websites is very difficult. I'm actually looking forward to this enforced digital detox, and having more time to practice tai chi, and sit with people and just talk...
PRiZM, are you still in Dalian?
3/12/15, 1:19 AM
Scotlyn said...
Your riff on the Lord of the Rings brought some good memories. My dad read the whole of the Lord of the Rings to us four girls, night after night, keeping us spellbound, imaginations on the go. And you are right, Tolkien is a landscape word painter.
It so happens my own childhood landscape was the circle of mountains around San, Jose, Costa Rica, rather sharp and very green. When, as a peripatetic adult I finally settled, it was to be cradled by the softer, more rounded, more russet-toned hills of Donegal, Ireland. Which I know have shaped my sons' sense of place as powerfully as Costa Rica's shaped mine.
3/12/15, 1:30 AM
John Graham said...
One of the movie posters depicted one of the characters (I'm going to guess Elrond), perusing something which I suppose had a runic inscription he was deciphering.
The set-up for the picture gave an unmistakeable and distinct impression - I don't know how subliminal or obvious this was to others. Elrond was using an iPad. I mean obviously he wasn't, but the configuration - this was the element that a 21st century person could identify with, that was being evoked. Gaze at the screen, that's the work this world hinges on.
Just wanted to share.
3/12/15, 1:41 AM
Gloucon X said...
3/12/15, 2:05 AM
ed boyle said...
On an individual level denial, living in a fantasy world. If society is healthy this will be treated by caring family, friends, professionals or called eccentric.
On a societal level denial, fantasy is more dangerous the larger the society and the greater the distance between actual reality and distortion.
Life expectation vs. actual experience in society could be termed 'Hope Gap'.This will be cured by reality distortion adjustment(RDA) by the MOT(Ministry of Truth) relative to the HG proportion to psychosocial neccessity. In certain social classes like on Wall Street the RDA will be large, in printed paper, yachts. Lower classes receive infotainment injections via Youtube, Hollywood, govt. statistics propaganda divisions.
I don't want to know the truth. 'Ask me no questions I tell you no lies'. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. New ideas become accepted only once the old scientists(politicians, philosophers) die off. You only accept reality that doesn't interfere with your paycheck(paraphrase).
My time at the local MOT taught me self distortion of perception is the best way to distort perception of others. If you believe your own lies everyone else does too. In Hollywood they say'if you can fake being genuine you've got it made'. The so-called mass media and advertising, as well as the govt. and industry reports to our MOT offices to coordinate Newspeak adjustments to expressive phraseology. We receive instructions from above. The Plan and Reality are completely separate entities. I wonder myself how far the RDA has drifted since my childhood but since old records are eliminated upon reality adjustments to the 'Ever Present' no one knows. Tomorrow will be different. I am uncertain if my marmelade is less sweet due to sugar rationing to be concrete, if I am really so old or if the calendar is being manipulated. Perhaps the MOT is just not told everything,or at least not my division. It is better to believe the RDAs if one is to remain in Acceptable Perceptual Boundaries(sanity). Some of our workers became distorted in perception and were taken off in straitjackets. Sad.
3/12/15, 2:09 AM
John Graham said...
I think it's brilliant and some smart people I know think it's brilliant. Excerpt <a href="http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Zengotita%27s%20Mediated.htm>here</a>.
And my local library had it.
3/12/15, 2:15 AM
Steve storm said...
3/12/15, 3:17 AM
Luke Devlin said...
3/12/15, 3:19 AM
Damo said...
On a similar note, here in Australia, since a conservative government changed the rules in ~1998, our official inflation rate *excludes* house prices. That's right, the single most expensive purchase for most Australians is simply omitted like it is not a thing. Coincidence this was implemented just before the largest property boom since the gold rush times of 1890 (and from which the subsequent crash real house prices took nearly 100 years to recover)?
3/12/15, 3:30 AM
ed boyle said...
'The impact of a truth is always different than its tendency. In the world of facts truths are means, as far as they rule the spirits and thereby determine actions. Not if they are deep, correct or even just logical but rather if they are effective decides their historical importance. If onee misunderstands them or cannot understand them at all is completely indifferent. That lies in the description slogan... Alone slogans are facts; the remainder of all philosophical or social ethical system is not considered in history.'
So during our era ads, movies, images make reality for the masses. If a cynical Richelieu manipulates that in the background for his ends is another matter. Eco foods, climate change are charged political concepts. A few understand reality behind this but how it changes politics is important. Unemployment, inflation, middle class prosperity are slogans. American Dream perhaps great global slogan.
3/12/15, 3:31 AM
M said...
This also creates that duality of thinking you have looked at in the past, the either-or, for us or against us kind of thinking that simply doesn't allow for nuance, or much of reality. So even when people react against these untruths, they often simply run to the exact opposite side of the room, and start shouting across, making any real notion of figuring out what might be a good course of action to take virtually impossible. Of course this works just fine for those disseminating the prosthetic images--in fact it could be considered an added bonus.
3/12/15, 3:39 AM
Marc L Bernstein said...
One experience that I have had more than once involves some family with 1 or more small children. As I show and describe to a particular child a tidepool organism (such as a sea anemone, a limpet, chiton, hermit crab, sea urchin, etc.) a slightly nervous parent interrupts me and starts to explain to the child how this tidepool organism is similar to a figure from a television show, a movie or (for all I know) a video game.
It's as if the parent does not think that their child can appreciate the actual reality of the tidepool organism, but can only relate to it by comparing it to an imaginary figure from a fantasy show.
Another experience I have had involves the rock formation (the San Onofre breccia) that visitors to the tidepools stand on while looking at the tidepools. On several occasions a naive visitor, usually an adult (!) , asks me if the rock formation was man-made. As soon as I hear that question I have to go into a diplomatic, dumbed-down mode of explanation.
We now live in a culture in which man-made objects and imaginary figures from television and movies are quite often more real to people than the actual natural world around them.
3/12/15, 3:41 AM
MP said...
Naturally they glossed over how that would really work. I've been to one of the poorest countries in the world (Togo) and a complex machine that can't handle dust and has plastic inputs from China is the last thing they need. Like - how do you fix something that was produced from a 3-D printer? Well, the assumption seems to be that you just print again. How do you fix this glorious machine that will be sent to each village? Nothing. This would end up like the library they had at the village that was built and donated by some Southern US Christian charity - the charity had sent English language books. To a country in French-speaking West Africa. So it sat there unused. Because no one asked the villagers and their leaders what they wanted to do with their village. They just assumed...
They also glossed over something very fundamental - who the hell is supposed to design things? All they could do is show the 3-D printer as something that anyone could replicate things with. But what about original design? What about the waste? What about the fact that this is all oil based? Nothing. Total silence. And no historical context at all as to what it would mean for society nor how production of goods is changed by and changes the very societal context in which it is produced. It was such a wankfest, I actually had to leave. I was livid.
A few days later, I went to the V&A. There was an old hidden dusty part of the vast V&A (old school design museum) which discussed the changes of industrial production over the past 250 years and the impact on society that this had. You could read quotes from great thinkers over that time and understand the direct impact that this massive change in production had on society. It was moving.
And on a similar note, did you see this hilarious article about Google Ventures? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500 The article is called "Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality". It is as bad as it sounds. We must change ourselves as humans and use technology since - “It will liberate us from our own limitations.” These people really hate being human. I truly believe it is one of the great illnesses of our age...
3/12/15, 4:22 AM
Odin's Raven said...
Here's a story about someone who has developed mushrooms which eat pollution and excrete a nice environment. They also eat insect pests from the inside out.
God knows what they'll do to humans.
Stamet
3/12/15, 4:24 AM
Tony f. whelKs said...
I do still listen to the radio, where, someone once said, 'the pictures are better', but I find it easier to maintain a distanced viewpoint from what I'm hearing. It somehow seems less prone to complete domination by the corporate agenda, or at least that agenda becomes more transparent, and the nuances of strict definitions (such as 'jobless rates' etc etc) become clearer.
One advantage to all this is that I can report that I don't actually know which fast food outlet uses 'I'm loving it' as a slogan, although I do harbour something of a guess as to its identity ;-)
So Florida is to be renamed 'Submarine Base 2' perhaps, to match my homeland's status as 'Airstrip 1'? Has the chocolate ration been increased from 30 to 20 grams per week also? One of the founding tenets of Newspeak is that the unspeakable becomes unthinkable. The unthinkable then becomes impossible. I wonder how long it will be before Florida unilaterally redefines the sea-level datum point rather than admit the actual level is rising?
Slightly more tongue in cheek, about the reconstructive nature of our visions from literature, I should point out that my native soil is in the EAST Midlands, which is OBVIOUSLY Tolkien's model for 'The Shire' - and my experience of the WEST Midlands (as a student in Birmingham) casts that region as the model for Mordor. Though to be fair, I did reside a while in Elgar Country near the Malvern Hills, which I grant could be an annexe of the Shire.
Much to chew on in this week's post, so I'm going to reread it over my second breakfast....
3/12/15, 4:38 AM
Lance M. Foster said...
As to Brand and people like him, there is an exchange in the movie "Salt Lake City Punk" between a son and his father:
Stevo: "Wait, time out. I just wanted to ask real quick, if I can. You believe in rebellion, freedom and love, right?"
Mom: "Absolutely, yes."
Dad: "Rebellion, freedom, love."
Stevo: "You two are divorced. So love failed. Two: Mom, your a New Ager, clinging to every scrap of Eastern religion that may justify why the above said love failed. Three: Dad, you're a slick, corporate, preppy-ass lawyer. I don't really have to say anything else about you do I dad? Four: You move from New York City, the Mecca and hub of the cultural world to Utah! Nowhere! To change nothing! More to perpetuate this cycle of greed, fascism and triviality. Your movement of the people, by and for the people got you... nothing! You just hide behind some lost sense of drugs, sex and rock and roll. Ooooh, Kumbaya! I am the future! I am the future of this great nation which you, father, so arrogantly saved this world for. Look, I have my own agenda. Harvard, out. University of Utah, in. I'm gonna get a 4.0 in damage. I love you guys! Don't get me wrong, it's all about this. But for the first time in my life, I'm 18 and I can say 'F----- YOU!' "
Dad: "Steven, I didn't sell out son. I bought in. Keep that in mind."
And art is a great venue for thinking about the culture we are living in and how we see "reality". Magritte for example:
"The Treachery of Images (French: La trahison des images, 1928–29, sometimes translated as The Treason of Images) is a painting by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, painted when Magritte was 30 years old. The picture shows a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe.", French for "This is not a pipe."
"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!"
(Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images)
3/12/15, 4:43 AM
Phil Harris said...
I have friend Bob who collects striking images with stories to tell. The story of the USAAF nuclear-powered plane project was one such. The reactors needed to be slung well outside the crew compartment for obvious reasons, so hey presto, you have the blue print for the trekkers' Star ships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HTRE-3.jpg
We do need to get serious about the USA way-of-life. While you get away with it, we in Europe will follow. Kids looking for paid work? Ouch! http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/08/minority-ethnic-workers-more-often-unemployed
UK Guardian suggests unemployment is very high for British ethnic minorities: “DWP figures show jobless rate of 45% for young black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers with white figure at 19%”.
best
Phil
3/12/15, 4:49 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
Nobody considers that an AI might have its own will and might just want to surf the internet and look at the computer equivalent of pornography all day.
3/12/15, 4:51 AM
Bill Blondeau said...
Well done, and well considered. One thing I would hasten to add, though: contrary to your information, these movies are not well made in any meaningful sense. Peter Jackson and his crew seem to be so strongly dedicated to contemptible Hollywood tropes that they felt justified in defacing the movie with them pretty thoroughly.
In terms of box office receipts, they were probably correct to do so. Still, whatever personal love any of the people involved may bear for the books has been corrupted beyond redemption, I'm afraid.
(One partial exception to my detestation of the entire project: Ian McKellen, laboring under the distortions imposed by the screenwriters, actually made an excellent Gandalf.)
Attempting to discuss these movies is one of those topics that makes our host's profanity policy a grievous burden for me. Perhaps this honest sentiment can slip through:
Peter u bagronk sha pushdug Jackson-glob búbhosh skai!
3/12/15, 4:57 AM
Aenn Seidhe Priest said...
There is a bunch of reasons why the industrial civ will keep on running until it exhausts itself - the first one being that it makes money for the privileged few. Meanwhile, human sanity is being gradually reduced by all the conscience manipulation, which is just a modern-day replacement of the likes of church-imposed manipulation in medieval ages...
So if you look carefully at it all, the first task really is proper education, formation of people's consciences. There is a lot of corruption and general faux-thinking patterns left over from previous times, and more accumulating now, and worst of all is, people do get ever more daft than, say, 40 years ago or a century ago. They can't much think for themselves, not just the commoners, but also those who are meant to be the reference/guidance for the crowds. So the big question really is, how can it all be healed? And won't they, the masses, just crash themselves into a wall (together with the industrial civ) regardless? That's what looks bound to happen...
3/12/15, 5:18 AM
Juandonjuan said...
The other response is, "Stop, my brain is full! To which the response is"maybe you could make some room by junking the false programming cluttering your SoftDrive. Scrapping the television improves the Signal/Noise ratio tremendously.
I still couldn't pick a Kardashian out of a lineup.
Editing Question?
"The impact on/of the prosthetic imagination of/on the crisis of our time..." assuming of...on, but it works 3 out of 4 ways.
John and Candace already touced on this, but I'm surprised that you hadn't seen John Williams' work at ShadowStats before. Year+ old data and analysis typically free, but current reports by subscription.
3/12/15, 5:19 AM
ando said...
Well said. This reminds me of the non-duality folks who say that they do not exist. The Zen master says,"Run head first into that wall, and tell me you don't exist."
3/12/15, 5:29 AM
Lawfish1964 said...
"A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young."
If only he could have envisioned the 3D printer.
3/12/15, 5:37 AM
donalfagan said...
http://econbrowser.com/archives/2008/09/shadowstats_deb
Apparently Williams responded:
http://econbrowser.com/archives/2008/10/shadowstats_res
Hamilton claims Williams told him:
"I’m not going back and recalculating the CPI. All I’m doing is going back to the government’s estimates of what the effect would be and using that as an ad factor to the reported statistics."
As commented the U6 does include higher numbers than U3, but as described in the link below, since 1994 it does not include those, Not In Labor Force, who have supposedly "given up" looking for work.
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/lance-roberts/unemployment-u3-u6
Gallup has their own measure of underemployment, currently over 40%:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/125639/gallup-daily-workforce.aspx
Regarding Star Trek, while it was sold to TV execs as Wagon Train to the Stars, Roddenberry thought of it as Hornblower to the Stars - which to an Aubrey/Maturin fan is not a bad concept. Yes, it did sink to the level of network TV, but it (and Space 1999) offered a few glimmers of forward-thinking scifi here and there. It wasn't as paranoid as UFO or The Invaders.
3/12/15, 5:41 AM
Ed said...
(Be careful not to mix up emptiness and meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is just another "empty" concept.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
The Prajna-paramita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutras taught that all entities, including dharmas, are only conceptual existents or constructs.[13][14]
Though we perceive a world of concrete and discrete objects, these objects are "empty" of the identity imputed by their designated labels.[15] The Heart sutra, a text from the prajnaparamita-sutras, articulates this in the following saying in which the five skandhas are said to be "empty":
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form
Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness
Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.[16][note 2][note 3]
Not seeing this clearly, leads as you say to not seeing cause and effect clearly which leads to bad effects sneaking up on you.
3/12/15, 6:05 AM
Clifford Dean Scholz said...
3/12/15, 6:24 AM
RPC said...
3/12/15, 6:27 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
This sums up nicely what Situationist Guy DeBord called the “spectacle” – as in The Society of the Spectacle, his most famous book. The Spectacle is not just the three-ring circus drawing the masses under the big top (eg. The Superbowl, the Oscars, or even just a blockbuster movie). No, it does not stop there: it manifests itself – indeed, insinuates itself – into daily life. Regular experience, like eating lunch, is spectacularised by those who have something to gain by manipulating your imagined experience of eating lunch. And they’re loving it!
From what I have come to understand about modernity (industrialism, specialisation, and the creation of a consumer society), the Spectacle is a function of the petroleum-driven economy; it is one way in which established powers have learned to maintain a degree of control in a world of increased freedom and education.
3/12/15, 6:32 AM
Bruce Turton said...
3/12/15, 6:46 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
Anyway, it’s one of those technologies that belongs in the bin marked “never gonna happen – sorry”
As you quite eloquently pointed out in the past (perhaps it was in “An Elegy for the Space Race”?) not all sci-fi dreams and “prophesies” are destined to come true.
I suspect 3-D printers are about as close to teleportation as we will ever come, and to the emotional appeal is bound to be strong: the fantasy persists. So many people I know, who possibly spend too much time in “cyber space”, have very little understanding of basic practical matters when dealing with, er, matter. I suspect this feeds their inability to grasp the inherent (and obvious) limitations of even the most fully functional 3-D printers.
Clearly a case of excessive complexity, and diminishing returns…
3/12/15, 6:49 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
I'm looking forward to reading JMG's thoughts on education. I remember watching a lecture he gave that turned up on youtube ( I think it was at the red room) where his answer to the question of how he would have educated his children got cut off in a video edit. Personally, I will send my kids to public school, but will try to supplement their education as much as possible. I try to teach my 17 month old as much as I can on my own and he is never in front of a screen.
I have considered writing about my experiences as a stay-at-home dad (SAHD) in the context of deindustrialization. Many men find their wives working, because our economy is more geared towards the kind of service jobs women do, while the kind of jobs men traditional do have become more scarce. At the moment the blog and potential book would concentrate more on doing the most with the home economy, as my son is young and I don't feel I could give any direction in parenting beyond his current age. But eventually I would incorporate parenting. It would concentrate on cooking, gardening, herbal remedies, entertaining kids without electronic gizmos, and the reasons for doing those things. I think a resource like this, especially one geared towards SAHDs would be welcome. Though I'm sure it would be useful to those outside that target demographic. If I can find time I might start the project soon. Currently reading up on gardening and making plans my garden for when this snow melts.
3/12/15, 6:56 AM
Matt said...
Don't know if it's just coincidence but your musings on vision, Impressionism and snow have been the topic of much debate of late in discussions of "that dress": http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/27/colour-dress-optical-illusion-social-media
This seems to be many peoples' first realisation that we are all not simply seeing what's out there.
Matt
3/12/15, 7:00 AM
Leo Knight said...
I applied for unemployment. Because of the dispute, the State says that I did not work or receive income for the last 25 years. I therefore cannot receive unemployment benefits. Fortunately, I have some savings, and my boss gave me a decent severance pay. I can survive for a while. I hope that I can find paying work soon, or things will get very desperate indeed.
Regarding Star Trek, the replicators are supposed to recycle everything, chairs, clothes, poop, etc., back into basic elements, and remake new objects on demand. Unlike 3D printers, the fantasy realm recycles.
This morning, the Today show had a segment on kitchen gadgets "you can't live without." One actually seemed clever, a toaster with clear sides so you could see how brown your toast is. Most of them "sync up" with smartphones to do various things a smart human used to do, such as mix drinks. They had an automated bartender, which you must fill with feed stocks of booze, mixes, etc. It made a drink for the hostess, but she found it too strong. I wonder if there's an app to make the drink to your liking?
They had a "smart food sniffer," a wand-like device which, with your phone, will tell you if food has spoiled, and a "smart pan" which tells you if your food is cooked. Who would want to actually sniff food or watch a pan themselves? There's an app for that!
3/12/15, 7:17 AM
Brent Ragsdale said...
to a few friends and family. It's a 12-minute video posted by Paul Beckwith, who studies and teaches climate science at the U of Ottawa, which I found highly informative (especially if you like data visualization like I do.) After repeated negative reactions to such emails, I'm usually quite reticent. But such blatant denial compelled me to speak my truth. I'm posting the link here to reach a larger audience of receptive folks who might also share the information. Thanks again for you blog and books. They have taught me a lot.
3/12/15, 7:20 AM
Peter Jones said...
This week's post made me recall one of the most remarkable I've ever read-David Abram's "The Spell of the Sensuous". I'm sure many here are familar with it, but for those who aren't, I can't recommend highly enough.
3/12/15, 7:21 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
BTW Having mis-spent my teenage years in exactly the area where Tolkien used to live I'm sorry to report that there are no visible mountains. The nearest mountains would probably be in Snowdonia, over 100 miles away, and you can't really see these until you get quite close to them (the highest peak is 3,560ft).
3/12/15, 7:29 AM
Allie said...
Five or six years ago, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties openly discussed the need to drill more municipal water wells along their western borders b/c the ones along the coastline were slowly becoming inundated with salt water due to sea level rise.
The south western corner of Miami Beach was also regularly flooded during high tide when I lived there. Not significantly but the water did come up from the storm drains and a few inches or more were on streets such as Alton and West ave. Talking to locals who had lived there much longer than me, it was a common occurrence for me to hear that this tidal flooding wasn't the way things used to be. Years and years ago, the streets would only get flooded like that due to storm surge or very rarely a full moon high tide.
I moved away about three years ago and since that time Alton road has undergone a major construction project to raise it and improve drainage. I guess they did that just because they wanted to spend money and not b/c of climate change induced sea level rise...
Raising West Ave is next on the construction agenda I hear.
3/12/15, 7:33 AM
Mister Roboto said...
3/12/15, 7:34 AM
Mister Roboto said...
3/12/15, 7:42 AM
k-dog said...
I find this beautiful but I imagine it scares to death anyone who delights in abstracting themselves as being the center of the universe. All those lost in abstractions of power.
Lots of writing recently recently about manipulation of unemployment statistics. Regarding that subject ignorance is a choice. For those who care not to make that choice the answer is simple. Think and learn.
3/12/15, 7:43 AM
Ceworthe said...
3/12/15, 7:53 AM
GHung said...
Moving on to this Report sent something of a chill up my spine, with the same link I just abandoned angrily, and your LOTR reference. Being not-so-prone to supernatural and spiritual tendencies, I still have to wonder if this event is indicative of some underlying abstractive process I'm ignoring (or perhaps not abstract at all?).
As for the uncounted unemployed, I fall smack into that category. Prior to 2008, my wife and I held four jobs (two each). Now we have one (officially) between us. Not that I haven't had some fairly pitiful opportunities to return to the roles of the officially employed, but after multiple evaluations of cost vs. benefits, it became apparent that whatever opportunities were available amounted to a net loss, all costs considered. Since we were already making other arrangements, mine outside of the formal economy, we decided to stick with what was working, although on a lower level, financially. Seems there are real benefits in the 'gray' economy, and from producing one's own goods and services (avoiding intermediaries and externalities) that the formal economy doesn't want us to even consider. Harkens back to the days of single-income families that has been so abstractly (and concretely) erased from most folks lists of possibilities.
It would be interesting to hear about what other arrangements readers here have made; how many others have decided to shun the formal economy, such as it is. How's that working out?
That that economy is failing certainly isn't an abstraction to those paying attention. The trick is to find that knife's-edge between what is and the quest to weather the storm of what's to come. Just another tricky day I suppose, out here in the nether-lands, avoiding the traps of modernity.
3/12/15, 8:08 AM
HalFiore said...
The smaller number makes relative change look a lot more significant than it is. So they can trumpet a few percentage points change (in this case, from 5.7% to 5.5%). This gives the illusion, and provides some sort of mental gratification, that changes are occurring. Now apply that change to the U6 number, and it doesn't look nearly so impressive.
My second thought is that, from what I've read, that fast food burger actually does provide something that gives it more appeal than your description of the tasteless atrocity that it, without doubt, is. That particular combination of grease, salt, simple carb rush, and who knows what other psycho-active chemicals delivered in the disgusting package is the result of extensive physiological and psychological research. Whole university departments are dedicated to that sort of research. (At my alma mater it as called "Food Science and Technology," which should tell you all you need to know.)
So, yes, the advertisement is indeed selling something other than the actual experience had when eating the product. But they have you pretty well hooked by the product, too.
3/12/15, 8:09 AM
Radoje S. said...
"It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?"
Reading through the various pros and cons in the 3d printing article Ruben linked, was the people touting 3d printing kept going on and on about the artisitc things one could make, but never really answered the question about how many things you actually NEED that could be made with one. I mean really, if you look around your home how many things are there that I would need to replace often enough to justify a 3d printer to make replacements. It pretty much insures a continuation of the modern disposable mentality. Jevons paradox would likely come into play as well. I can eaily envision the owner of the 3d printer simply filling their house with 3d printed junk because they CAN. And how this is different than filling their house with Chinese plastic junk from Walmart is never addressed.
I wonder why the "prosthetic imagination" has gained such a hold. I go back and forth in a "chicken and egg" fashion. Does the prosthetic imagination take the place of something we are lacking as a people, as a culture? I mean, we have enough of a cultural patrimony that you have to wonder why they get any traction with creating false images. On the other hand, I can't deny that fortunes are made through the crafting of the prosthetic imagination. Following the money is usually a safe bet. Still the question remains, why have we impoverished ourselves to the extent that this prosthetic imagination (a great term by the way) as able to fill the vacuum?
3/12/15, 8:19 AM
481f30de-c8cb-11e4-b0ce-c3eb277ff7bc said...
(this is about the 2004 situation but the general idea still applies):
"The popularly followed unemployment rate was 5.5% in July 2004, seasonally adjusted. That is known as U-3, one of six unemployment rates published by the BLS. The broadest U-6 measure was 9.5%, including discouraged and marginally attached workers.
Up until the Clinton administration, a discouraged worker was one who was willing, able and ready to work but had given up looking because there were no jobs to be had. The Clinton administration dismissed to the non-reporting netherworld about five million discouraged workers who had been so categorized for more than a year. As of July 2004, the less-than-a-year discouraged workers total 504,000. Adding in the netherworld takes the unemployment rate up to about 12.5%.
The Clinton administration also reduced monthly household sampling from 60,000 to about 50,000, eliminating significant surveying in the inner cities. Despite claims of corrective statistical adjustments, reported unemployment among people of color declined sharply, and the piggybacked poverty survey showed a remarkable reversal in decades of worsening poverty trends."
So it seems that by excluding long-term discouraged workers, the effect achieved is similar to excluding those who exhausted their unemployment benefits, since those groups will largely coincide.
Interesting that the phrase "netherworld" is used, not exactly standard econo-speak. The virtue of shadowstats is that he just calculates things they way the Govt used to calculate them, which makes it a bit hard to argue with.
3/12/15, 8:20 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
No one could see the color blue until modern times
I agree that people are using modern media instead of imagination, and often it's horrifying to see it in action; how they are crippled if I give them something to think about that is non-standard. The "Better Homes and Credit Cards" magazines have imprinted a certain type of living arrangement, which they then use as some kind of proof that this is the "normal human aspiration" for living!
It’s interesting to see people struggle with the first cracks in the system, becoming aware that government/media are dead wrong about something that touches their lives, but having huge difficulties with whether that means govt/media is doing the same thing everywhere (yes). Most people look over that cliff and flinch away. I worry that crippled imaginations will doom many folks into not getting through the bottleneck. I’m working with some of that in my novel, which is about a third posted at this point. (I just wrapped up Chapter 36, and it looks like the end. Chap 12 posted.)
In other news, as I posted yesterday, after comment 287, it looks like we'll have about 10 for our first PNW GW meetup in Portland on March 21st. Even though Hopworks doesn't take reservations, the plan at this point is for those who are closest (hopefully including me, August & Debra from Sweet Home) will get to the restaurant at the 11am opening, and grab a table for 10/12. I've temporarily mislaid your email - please contact me again - sorry!!).
About 4 blocks from Hopworks (which is about 29th & SE Powell) is a large-ish park (26th & Powell), so if there's good weather we could carry our meeting there and continue until we get tired of gabbing.
3/12/15, 8:28 AM
Chester said...
Beyond the more immediate concerns I have with the place, including rampant crime and terrible schools, the prospect of purchasing a home there feels like the kind of folly one can see 100 miles away. Not that our current place in the nation's capital is much better in that respect, but at least nearby Virginia and Maryland are well-suited for long-term habitation.
I wonder what it would take for South Florida to officially succeed from the rest of the state? The myopic "old South" attitude that pervades in Tallahassee seems destined to sink the more vulnerable parts of the state, both literally and figuratively.
3/12/15, 8:37 AM
Zack Lehtinen said...
Fortunately, you still wield your wit and sense of humor and irony as sharp as a blade-- right out of the gate, in the first paragraph: "proof that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never went away are finally here again." Because your insights are devastating and so incontrovertibly substantiated, the accompanying lightness of tone helps "the medicine go down."
I love the way you've built-upon last week's discussion of prosthetics, and slowly, clearly built your case in this essay with those three excellent examples (shame about Mr. Brand's love affair with ignoring externalities and worshipping at the altar of Whiz-Bang Ever-Upward Final-Frontier-ism... And Man, that Florida governor! What an easy target!, yet such an unfunny cascade of consequence he's trying to ignore into nonexistence. Through a mirror darkly...).
Your discussion of seeing, of our automatic and unconscious reference to abstractions even in the processing of something as everyday as a tree, stimulated a particular impression/ memory for me. A had a stepsister (RIP, she succumbed to cancer) who had suffered a serious eye infection which forced its surgical removal; in your description of our unconscious processing of things we see before us-- a tree-- you mentioned that one automatic/ unconscious process we engage is that of determining the viewed objects' distance from us...
I recall from my experiences with my stepsister, and from things I've run-across on this topic, that depth perception-- judgment of distance-- is greatly-to-totally impaired in using/ having only one functioning eye... As I understand it, our mind engsges in automatic, basically mathatical (speaking of abstractions) calculation of distance by "comparing" the two eyes' perspectives... I think trigonometry plays a role...
Anyway, sort of tangential, but it came to mind as another element of what our minds always/ automatically do without our conscious awareness... That theme of mental mediation and abstraction of the concrete, and how "hidden" from us our own astonishing processes/ processing can be.
When these complex, astonishing processes are intentionally "hijacked," manipulated by Orwellian "interests," it is a frightening thing indeed-- as well as so-frequently nauseating.
When one hasn't watched cable/ commercial-filled television in a long time, the falsity and obviousanipulation of not just McD commercials but almost all of what passes as "news" can leave one with a quickly-induced hangover.
I want to mention to your readers, just one additional mention (I made reference once in a previous week's Comment), that I am excited to have completed and self-published a novel (my first) which I hope and believe your fellow-readers might appreciate and enjoy.
I have made the first chapters available to read, free, at this blogspot address:
http://worldofwoundsnovel.blogspot.com
Thanks as always for being here, JMG. They are just abstractions, but I'm sure im not alone in stating that your words make me feel less alone, less hopeless (particularly for my children and future generations, to whom I've dedicated my novel), and considerably nourished in a time of so much intellectual-equivalent-of-"mystery meat."
I'm Loving It!
3/12/15, 8:42 AM
KidCharlemagne said...
"Pray God us keep
From single vision & Newton's sleep!"
The entire scientific project and its Frankenstein child technology, has been spellbound by this single vision. They would have us believe that single vision is Reality. It has allowed modern civilization to be hijacked by a rentier class hell bent on remaining the primary beneficiaries of its strange fruit.
3/12/15, 8:51 AM
D.M. said...
3/12/15, 8:52 AM
Dagnarus said...
http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/181469/big-lie-unemployment.aspx
3/12/15, 9:20 AM
Laylah said...
@Snoqualman if you get to any of the farmers' markets around Seattle, talking to the farmers who've been working the same land for a few decades can give some good perspective there - the orchardist I asked about this last fall says he's seen a massive change in rainfall pattern & amounts in the last twenty years or so (almost double the annual rainfall recently), and less predictable winter chill hours (which are vital for some trees to set fruit). It'll hit us a little differently than Miami, but it's definitely not leaving us alone.
Also yeah, the "I'm driving my carbon-offset hybrid SUV to my cabin in the mountains and bringing packaged organic foods to eat" style of self-congratulatory mock-environmentalism needs a good skewering pretty often. Congratulations on your BuiltGreen(TM) brand-new million-dollar houses, guys, you are still part of the problem.
3/12/15, 9:22 AM
Clay Dennis said...
Where most people run off the rails in promoting 3d printers is in forcasting the amazing and usefull things they will be able to do in the near future. One of the most common mistakes of Techno-optimists is in miss applying Moores Law. They assume that the rapid reduction in cost and increase in speed of microprocessors that has occured in the recent past applies to all technological fields. Thus the huge numbers of people who proclaim that in the near future that batteries will be cheap and have huge capacity, Drones will deliver packages to our homes and 3D printers will make replacement brake rotors for your car right in your own basement.
The leap from a 3D printer that can squirt out a plastic "happy meal toy" to one that can make a working brake rotor is immense and involves real materials, energy and old school manufacturing technologies like machining and casting that are not getting any cheaper.
Most people do not realize that they have had "3D Printers" that can make metal parts for several years now. They are called CNC Laser Sintering or other such names. I was involved with a manufacturer who had some laser sintered parts made for a new product. The machines that do this cost upwards of $500,000 and use lasers to melt and bond high tech metal dust together. In addition to the need for a powerfull laser, these machines have a working compartment that is heated to nearly 900 degrees because even the expensive lasers used can't melt the metal dust at room temperature. Then this working area has to be flooded with inert gas so melting metal dust does not react with oxygen in normal air. None of these things ( energy, powerfull lasers, or inert gas) or the technical suites that make them possible is getting cheaper. So the future of being able to make brake rotors in your basement is not coming. It is just imagination.
3/12/15, 9:38 AM
Matthew Casey Smallwood said...
3/12/15, 9:59 AM
peacegarden said...
I have a practice I use to get “in between” the actual physical sense data and the mediated template. It is called 180 degree looking. You stand or sit out in nature, hold your hands out to the sides as far back as you are able, then soften your focus and bring in your hands until you are barely seeing the movement. Then drop your arms and be present…it is amazing how multidimensional your surroundings are…you are able to experience the whole while being part of that whole…not an observer so much as a participant. This is one of the techniques used to teach tracking and is especially useful as the vernal equinox approaches. Everything is coming into vibrant “there-ness” right now as the snows are melting…the snow melting has a song that is wonderful to hear in concert with the birds, insects, and susurration of the wind through even the smallest branches and grasses. Enchantment, magic, full-bore being. Even hours later, my attentiveness is at a higher pitch.
@ Cherokee organics
Thank you or the beautiful descriptions of your surroundings…quite poetic!
I am so grateful for this blog and on-line community…my deepest appreciation to you all.
Peace,
Gail
3/12/15, 10:19 AM
David said...
Taking the discussion of prostheses to (perhaps) a more extreme application, would one not be able to say that writing itself is a prosthetic for human memory? In oral cultures, stories are told, rather than read, and the story-telling is a communal act, not an individual one. Moreover, the stories themselves would evolve and change over time, whereas the act of writing freezes a story in stasis...
Not that I am advocating the abolition of literacy! :)
3/12/15, 10:35 AM
daelach said...
A possible solution would have been to freeze the living standard, reduce the working hours and deviate from paid work so that the goods produced by the machines would have found their way to the people anyway. Instead, our society popped up the amounts of produced goods so that we still had use for the work force and didn't have to change the allocation mechanism, at least while the resource mining rate could be raised accordingly.
But hey.. that's capitalism: The stores are full of goods, but the people are poor because they lack the money to buy them. In socialism, by contrast, the people are poor because they have lots of money, but the stores lack the goods.
In that way, Star Trek combined capitalism with socialism: People prosper because they have the allocation rights and the stores are full.
In reality, we're going to do the blend in a slightly different way: People are miserable because they lack money, but that doesn't matter because the stores are empty anyway.
3/12/15, 12:03 PM
daelach said...
Short version: You people can rightfully bash the consumer crap, but you are wrong in that this is all 3D printing has to offer.
Longer version: The consumer machines are cheap crap, of course. You get what you pay for, that has nothing to do with the technology. E.g. you can buy a new tent for $20 - which will not be waterproof and is likely to come apart after just one festival weekend. However, you can't conclude that tents are no good because if you are willing to pay $400, you can get a decent, waterproof and lasting tent.
Some professional machines even can use metal powder through laser sintering, which of course lacks the strength of forged metal, but is still good enough for quite some applications. According to several aviation journals, the door handles in the Airbus A350 are manufactured using 3D printing, which takes advantage of the fact that you can make objects with inner structure (like bones). The result is that the door handles are as stable as before, but the weight was reduced by 30%.
Other printers can use input material consisting of roughly 40% wood powder and some glue for the rest. By controlling the temperature of the printing head, you can even fake wood texture like annual rings. You can saw, drill and grind the result. But despite the considerable amount of wood in it, it is special waste, due to the glue.
The obvious drawback is that such professional machines are not affordable to the end customer. However, there are already companies for 3D printing "on demand", and since they combine many individual customers' orders, they can afford more expensive 3D printers. Economy of scale. That has been the same with large colour 2D prints where buying a colour laser printer capable of printing A1 or even A0 paper sheets would be prohibitive to an end customer who may want just a dozen printouts.
3D printing can have a viable business - not only spare parts (saving logistics and stockpiling), but also prototypes and mock-ups. That saves the expensive tool forms, especially for prototypes where later changes to the forms have to be expected. Or, at least for plastic parts, you can even generate the tool forms using 3D printing - that saves quite some money.
3D printing is an option even for industrial manufacturing if the desired or an equivalent material is available for 3D printers and if the production volume is not that high - like with aircraft, see the initial example, or with components for ships and yachts.
So you are right that 3D printing isn't Star Trek replicators, and that we are not going to print out our goods at home anytime soon, if at all. 3D printing will not replace other production methods either, but it is already complementing them. But although 3D printing has been overhyped, there is some real potential in it nevertheless. Especially if you don't lump together consumer and enterprise application, which are two very different domains.
Gardner's "Hype Cycle" currently sees consumer 3D printing at the "peak of inflated expectations", already plunging into the "trough of disappointment". The "productive plateau" is expected in 5-10 years. Enterprise 3D printing is different in that is as said disappointment phase already behind it and is approaching the productive plateau, which it is expected to reach in 2-5 years.
Of course, such current industrial developments don't take the looming deindustrialisation into account. But that's a wholly different matter which btw. applies to conventional industrial production as well and thus isn't a counter argument specifically against 3D printing.
3/12/15, 12:03 PM
Mark said...
CNC routing and milling, on the other hand, are mature technologies and widely applicable. I find both much more compelling than 3D printing in its current form.
Don't get me wrong, I can't decide whether easy access to technologies like CNC routing/milling/printing are good or bad on the whole. On the one hand, they enable more folk to build their own stuff, and perhaps free them to solve their own problems in novel ways. Democratizing design and manufacturing seems like a good thing. Moving manufacturing closer to the consumer (ie. right into their home), should make the externalities more obvious and eliminate many trips to the store. On the other hand, making it easier for folk to make stuff could push up consumption.
My latest project involving CAD design and CNC manufacturing is bee hives. It will cut the cost of my hives by about half, allow me design to my needs, and the raw materials are locally available. I can see negatives in my choice to build hives locally using CNC, but not enough to outweigh the positives.
I hope the conflict I feel is coming across. This is something I wrestle with on a daily basis and I'm happy to discuss it.
3/12/15, 12:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Snoqualman, you do indeed recall such comments -- the left coast sense of entitlement and the faux-green attitudes were among the things I was glad to leave behind when I moved to Appalachia.
Jo, your children clearly chose a good mother. ;-) The experience of having a story like that read aloud will remain with them for the rest of their lives, and so will the story.
Onething, good for you. You didn't miss anything. I did go see them -- I also saw the atrocious Ralph Bakshi object back in the 1970s, as well as the late Leonard Nimoy's most embarrassing video appearance, The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. There were a few good moments in the Jackson item, but most of it was cheap cinematic cliches and remarkably bad acting. Your own images can't help but be better.
Derv, Bertram Gross pointed out a very long time ago that economic indicators were already being turned into "economic vindicators," meant to justify policy choices rather than providing information. Since his time, it's just gotten more blatant.
Jean-Vivien, as I'm not a parent, it would be presumptuous in the extreme for me to do a series on the subject. I'd certainly encourage those of my readers who have children, and want to explore the topic of parenting on the brink of the deindustrial age, to get writing!
Toro Loki, most of us use the civil calendar for convenience; the old Druids, as far as we know, didn't worry about numbering years, since each year was a subset of the only time that matters, which is "now."
9anda1f, thanks for the tip; I'll take a look at it as time permits.
Tim, thanks for the data!
Val, those tiny pins and needles do get into the darnedest places. ;-)
Karim, it would not be inaccurate, and it would indeed be valid!
Andrew, Vico doesn't specify the exact forms that the barbarism of reflection will take, but historical examples suggest that the core of it is the failure of anything to mean anything any more -- and a collapse of the ability to think in whole systems or to draw logical conclusions from premises would certainly be a part of that.
FiftyNiner, thank you. My wife has a degree in art history, so I've had the advantage of conversations with her about the Impressionists among others.
3/12/15, 12:42 PM
Carl said...
3/12/15, 1:07 PM
daelach said...
Oh, and web pages load considerably faster without the ads, tracking mini pictures, embedded Facebook or Google spy scripts and the like.
3/12/15, 1:24 PM
Mettrodome said...
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-hollywood-tricked-you-into-hating-poor-people/
Probably not anything you haven't already thought of yourself, but it is interesting that a comedy site targeting millennials and pop culture is interested in the same topics as green druids.
3/12/15, 1:47 PM
JML said...
I really appreciated the part about how the media is spinning employment statistics. I had a feeling that they were using statistical spin but I didn't know exactly what concept they were using to do it. Can you give me a source so I can confirm that the official US unemployment rate is based on how many people are receiving unemployment benefits?
3/12/15, 1:59 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Forgot to mention that without those super nifty dilithium crystals the starship Enterprise would be like a giant torch in the sky which would burn in a blaze of glory and then suddenly splutter out. What I mean is that no matter how good the insulation is, that machine would leak heat, light and energy into its very harsh surrounds - and then that energy would be gone. Energy is a flow and you can access a bit of it on its way to somewhere else, but that really is about it. Thanks for the nice words. :-)!
Hi Snoqualman, Bogatyr and Peacegarden,
Many thanks! A person is never alone here as there is always something alive and lurking not too far from where you may be standing.
Newcomers turn up all the time, like the black cockatoos, but they're generally cleared off by the families of birds and animals that live here, unless they can fight it out. Very few birds and animals here are migratory because due to the usually mild temperatures there is usually something for them to eat all year around and both day and night. When they get hungry, they eat my citrus trees....
Incidentally, you can tell when a wombat is not far away because at night their movements are silent, but their eating habits are not. Rip, rip, munch, munch, munch, scratch, scratch, rip, rip... And repeat. They love eating the dandelions and native yams (which are really just a massive dandelion).
Cheers
Chris
3/12/15, 2:15 PM
Peter Robinson said...
I remember hearing of isolated tribes who had never before seen two-dimensional images being unable to recognize highly-realistic photographs of familiar objects as depictions of these objects. It seems that the ability to interpret a two-dimensional image is an inherited ability or a learned skill.
This leads me to wonder how the skill was first acquired. How could the talented artists who first drew the magnificent cave paintings of animals do this if they lacked the ability to see them as depictions of reality?
3/12/15, 2:23 PM
Ed-M said...
Well I must say, it's another interesting article you've let out. Concerning those government statistics and the Florida edict (plus the one by North Carolins related by Pinku-Sensei), it really is all about keeping up appearances, isn't it?
Well speaking of Keeping up Appearances, the British sitcom of that name, the main character, Hyacinth, is always presenting herself as being of good middle-class stock and in each episode becomes utterly mortified whenever something happens that causes her working-class roots to be exposed.
Unf
3/12/15, 2:34 PM
Ed-M said...
Unfortunately, our politicians and other officials who are busy keeping up appearances are, unlike Hyacinth from that British sitcom, will likely to be comfortably ensconced in a cushy retirement when reality intrudes upon their appearances!
3/12/15, 2:38 PM
peakfuture said...
Yes, 3D printing does some neat stuff, and for applications like dental crowns, specialized things, mold making, it can be helpful. But it does require a complex supply chain as JMG has mentioned in the past.
I'll agree that CNC machining is far more useful and ubiquitous these days; did CNC machining also go through a hype cycle?
I've brought concerns over 3D printing to some tech folks, and they come back with "we can make the feedstock with corn!" and (quite literally) "it can give folks in Africa a way to have things built without having to get them shipped."
The latest in 3D printing with embedded electronics is here - www.voxel8.co ; neat idea, but it makes debugging/replacing things next to impossible, and of course, recycling is another hassle. Cell phone manufacturers will love this - embedded electronics, making things even less fixable and more throwaway. My take on 3D printing has always been a bit of "this is the same stuff that they said about the computer and the 'paperless office'". 3D printing doesn't help you with design, durability, usability if you don't know those things; a color laser printer won't let you draw a nice portrait, and at best, will let you print (waste) lots of paper and toner.
RPC - On LittleBits - yes, that's why I want to teach a course in basic electronics and tubes!
3/12/15, 2:46 PM
Myriad said...
You can order a hardcopy for $50 or view the entire book online. But the organization is also soliciting proposals for how one would use a grant of three to ten free advance copies of the book to "raise public and media awareness of global population issues." In other words, they're not really sure how their book will actually help, and so are trying to crowdsource solutions.
My proposal is to make a video of burning three or four copies of the book to boil a gallon or two of contaminated water into potability, to demonstrate the real nature of one of the eventual consequences of overshoot. (To wit, things you might value highly for their abstract qualities will likely be sacrificed to sustain more basic needs.) At first I thought that idea was just the smart alec portion of my brain (never dormant since being honed to perfection by twelve years of public school) doing its usual thing, but I've reluctantly concluded that that's the best use I can think of, except for using the book to bash certain deserving people over the head with. (That, the organization couldn't possibly approve, for liability reasons).
In a way this illustrates the phenomenon you discuss in this week's post. GPSO is looking for abstract approaches to resolving a predicament that's very physical in nature, and quite likely having difficulty understanding why they're hard to find. My proposal, while still abstract itself, at least refers to a portion of the relevant physical reality. (The head-bashing one would be less abstract still. Hmm; maybe worth another look.)
I doubt they'll approve the proposal, despite explicitly requesting "outside the box thinking and provocative ideas." But I'll keep you posted!
3/12/15, 2:46 PM
librarian@play said...
3/12/15, 2:48 PM
Mark Sebela said...
How the food industry hooked us on unhealthy products
http://www.cbc.ca/books/2013/03/how-the-food-industry-hooked-us-on-unhealthy-products.html
3/12/15, 3:41 PM
Dan the Farmer said...
3/12/15, 3:49 PM
Random Man said...
For example, if you have a job in which you bank a million dollars in a year, vs. a job in which you make 10,000, both of these are counted as jobs. However, the latter individual could work for 30 years, save all of their income, and still come out with 300,000. Less money than the former individual made in one year.
Do you see my point? Much more important in my mind are measures of income, however imperfect they are. And these measures clearly show that incomes are stagnating except for the very rich.
For the vast majority of us, jobs are no longer a way to build intragenerational wealth like they may have been in the early and mid 20th century for some people. They are just a way to keep a roof over our head, food in our tummy, and away from the prison or ghetto.
There is no meaning to any of our jobs or activities and most of us know this. They neither further the human race or civilization nor do they give us much wealth.
I don't denigrate work, but let us be honest that the industrial system has basically captured all of us to stay on this treadmill forever.
3/12/15, 3:53 PM
Curtis said...
I have similar problems with the sharing economy as a term. It has some positive developments, but is a misnomer in many cases. If someone pays you to get a lift, this is a rental. And of course the reason why we have so much "sharing" like this is increased desperation.
3/12/15, 4:36 PM
JABA said...
I feel compelled to pile on a bit here, though I mean no offense by doing so...
The 92,898,000 Americans that are not in the labor force includes retirees and others that have voluntarily left the labor force (stay at home moms & dads, people going back to school, etc.)
I couldn't dig up the total number of retirees in the U.S., but it is the biggest group of persons not in the labor force. The best I could do on the spot was to get the number of U.S. persons that are 65 and over that are "not in the labor force" - that figure is estimated to be 37,273,000 as of February, 2015. This substantially impacts the numbers you cite in this week's blog (though I do not believe it affects your overall views).
I have been enjoying your blog for several months now, and only point this out to help you to prevent people from ignoring your words of wisdom due to some misinterpretation of labor statistics. These stats are readily available for anyone to download at the bls.gov site.
3/12/15, 6:47 PM
Bob said...
Thank you for these last several essays. I have a fun health-care related story about externalities and how effed up the system is (FYI; I'm a nurse).
Perhaps you are aware of Jon Huntsman? He is a high standing "businessman/philanthropist" in the Utah and national political/social scene. He is also the owner of a major chemical company (google Huntsman Chemical).
His son was governor of Utah and ambassador to Singapore and China.
His "philanthropy" is on full display as the "Huntsman Cancer Institute", which, funny enough, was created when his *wife developed cancer.
I'll just politely acknowledge the irony...
Make people sick, get rich doing so. Donate to make them well, get called a hero.
Sad.
(Sorry if this is a re-send. Can't tell when things are accepted.)
3/12/15, 7:00 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
I've temporarily mislaid your email - please contact me again - sorry!!) of previous post was aimed at Glenn from Clackamas, who contacted me about joining the gathering...
Also, I found a funny set of images about 3D printing mistakes:
Spectacular 3D Printing Failures. I simply can't imagine any home-printing uses for this nonsense, though I could understand it being used in a lab or engineering prototype facility.
Some of the comments posted today about folks not seeing reality were chilling... not a hopeful sign!
3/12/15, 7:03 PM
Dennis said...
I remember when I first started reading this blog, you made mention of how one of the reasons why 'environmentalists' have trouble getting traction with proposals is that they don't truly live the lifestyle that they espouse. That was very insightful, and your discussion of Mr. Brand reminded me of it.
A relative of mine, a self-proclaimed Environmentalist, serving on boards of non-profit enviro orgs was stunned that I frequently dry my clothes on a rack in my living room, saying, 'But, I like my clothes soft and warm out of the dryer'. He's very pro-recycling, which is great, but not willing to make statement by giving up creature comforts. (Full disclosure, I do sometimes use a dryer for underwear and socks, but usually hang up jeans and shirts to dry. I'm no angel...)
I have also thought part of the fascination and postive press for 'green' electric vehicles comes from that they are considered to be futuristic, not that they have any substantial environmental benefits when the industrial systems needed to provide such vehicles (both the material for manufacture and source of electricity) are taken into account. I have a friend that has converted a car to electric power, and lot of his interest has been the 'look' of it, the electronic gauges inside, etc., ignoring how nasty the pollution is that produced said
electronics for the gauges, etc. As an aside, the cheering for photovoltaics, which are produced like computer chips, bugs me too. Someone is drinking the industrial effluent from the processes that produce those things. My point isn't
to bash the technologies, just the wilful ignorance of not thinking through implications of producing them.
Another thing that I find strange is how in most recent popular articles on environmental concern anymore seem to fixate solely on greenhouse gas production of various activities or products, so as to ignore all manner of the rather acutely toxic chemicals produced as a result of our electronic consumer products fetish, not to mention packaging waste, off-gassing of fabrics, etc. It is as if the flux and circuit board etching compounds, plastic enclosures, and rare-earth heavy metal production and endocrine disrupters that go into them don't cause pollution in countries that the production facilities where those items are produced were moved to (to reduce externalities here, of course). I don't know if it is just easier to think in terms of a side effect you don't think you can control ('more CO2 from buying this product, but what can you do?') versus 'this produces toxic sludge from the plant, which would make me evil'.
Also, I remember watching some cable tv show (maybe HGTV or a home show) where the discussion was about 'green' or environmentally friendly department store window displays. I thought, maybe not having one at all to display your wares would be the most environmentally friendly statement.... Admittedly, not a good strategy to attract advertisers.
3/12/15, 7:47 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
new Smithsonian Channel docu-series, BOOMTOWNERS
NEW YORK – March 11, 2015 – The oil boom that has been drawing thousands of workers to the Bakken shale region of North Dakota and Montana is the subject of a new Smithsonian Channel docu-series. BOOMTOWNERS, comprised of six one-hour episodes, will debut Sunday, April 26 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT.
… The series chronicles the daily lives of people who live and work in the Bakken region, the epicenter of the area’s oil boom. Oil was originally discovered in the area in 1951, but the recent development of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rapidly transformed the Bakken into one of the world’s leading oil-producing regions.
Oops! I guess you take too long to make a movie these days - and it's already ancient history. As some wag at the Peak Oil Barrel said, "maybe they should call it Bust Town"
3/12/15, 8:11 PM
Gloucon X said...
The people who make 3d printers have minds full of big pictures of profits. Externalized ecological and social costs will always be invisible to those who make their living producing them. Externalized costs are a function of power. Our society has always allowed the powerful to make profits by brutalizing the ecology and brutalizing people. Think ante-bellum chattel slavery in the US: enormous profits were made by a few, and enormous social costs were paid by the rest of the country. Even today, the country as a whole is still paying those social costs. Obviously externalized ecological and social costs can result from low-tech activities too.
3/13/15, 1:08 AM
Scotlyn said...
One of the lead authors, H R Maturana, later coined the term "autopoeisis" (to describe the decidedly non-random self-assembling nature of living things) and proposed that to be alive is to engage in cognition, that life and self-awareness cannot be separated.
3/13/15, 1:18 AM
ed boyle said...
Toral wage and salary income as % of GDP sinking. Rich get richer. Interest on interest. Robots, computers, intrnet making people superfluous for production and management. Only jobs for which a person is neccessary is waiter, barber, cleaning. So even in china Foxconn putting in 1 million robots. Mass unemployment globally. Revolution would mean seizure of means of production, income and production distribution. Otherwise factories are going broke anyway as demand falls as low wage or automation model kills demand. Capitalism commits suicide 25 years after communism just in time for peak oil. Then we all become self sufficient. The two solution theories to industrial reality fail one after the other.
3/13/15, 1:38 AM
ed boyle said...
'It belongs to the class ideals of the lower class the repect for large numbers, as in the idea of the equality of all, the inborn rights which further is expressed in the general right to vote as also in freedom of speech, above all fredom of the press. Those are ideals, but in reality to the freedom of public opinion belongs the processing of this opinion, which costs money, to the freedom of the press belongs the possession of the press, whch is a question of money and to the right to vote belongs voting agitation, which is dependent upon the wishes of financial backers. The representatives of ideas of ideas only see the one side, the representatives of money work with the other. All concepts of liberalism and socialism were at first set in motion through money and in the in the interests of money...and here was discovered with the ideal of freedom of the press simultaneously also the fact that the press serves those who possess it. It does not spread but rather produces the 'free opinion'.'
This guy was a hardcore realist. Would have been at home as blogger, muckraker.
3/13/15, 2:13 AM
skintnick said...
I just wanted to post this animation for you all http://bit.ly/1x13eHt not because it will tell you anything new but it does have a very nice presentational style.
All the best, Nick.
3/13/15, 5:37 AM
Tye said...
Too funny. That Bloomberg is confused should be no surprise to your readers given it's worldview and precooked data that doesn't account for true unemployment and job insecurity.
3/13/15, 6:35 AM
Denys said...
Collapse for us would be moving to a house half the size, locating the house within a few miles of work (right now we are 40 miles from it), and then doing all the work at the "new"house that we did here - insulation, permaculture gardens, etc.
I am listening to one of your interviews on the Extra Environmentalist and JMG you said "there is nothing American's fear more than the appearance of loosing wealth" and I think that might be at the heart of our difference here.
Any help from this community is appreciated!
3/13/15, 6:51 AM
Laylah said...
And they usually did have a point, but that point was usually outweighed in the popular imagination by the greater ease of transmission allowed by the new method.
3/13/15, 7:26 AM
Michael Stephenson said...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/lucrative-new-oil-extraction-method-involves-drill,38028/
3/13/15, 8:53 AM
Moshe Braner said...
Re: radio has been killed by ads. Commercial radio, well of course. To my sorrow even "public radio" (in the USA) has a fair number of what I would call ads, although they think of them as acknowledging commercial "donors" - with words that include the location of the donor business and what they sell and sometimes even their catchy slogan. For that reason I have stopped donating to our local public radio station. I've told them that they should only broadcast what can be paid for via members' contributions, and accept neither commercial nor government money. But they think they need to "grow".
3/13/15, 9:11 AM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
That logic doesn't make much sense. After all, culture, mass media and technology are created by humans in the first place, so there's no way putting faith in them will free anyone from what they perceive to be flaws of human perception and thought. It just enriches the pockets of those selling them consumer lifestyles.
I'd also like to take a closer look at the example of the Sun and the Earth, because I've seen it used by others as a fallacious argument. The argument often goes something like "Mere observation shows that the sun revolves around the Earth, and we know that to be false, that's an example of why your own perceptions and observations are often best ignored." The problem is, nobody perceives the sun revolving around the Earth, we perceive the sun rising in the East (often north or south of East depending on the season), making its arc across the sky and setting in the west, then coming up again the next day. Going from that to "the sun revolves around the Earth" is an abstraction, it would be an easy one to make if we didn't know better, but it's still an abstraction, not an observation.
3/13/15, 9:19 AM
Professor Pan said...
So off it goes into the toxic scrapheap—a pile of plastic, wire, metal bits, and chemicals. Gotta love planned obsolescence!
As for the relation of words and things, it takes one moderate dose of a classic psychedelic to open those particular doors of perception.
3/13/15, 9:23 AM
Denys said...
3/13/15, 10:38 AM
Roger said...
Just think about it: swathes of the continent denuded of industries, cities and towns disintegrating, asset bubbles and busts (energy, tech, telecom, derivatives, real estate) the 2008 banking collapse, TARP, QE, ZIRP, NIRP, pedal to the metal money printing, prices of oil and other commodities soaring and then crashing, foreclosures by the millions, the cost of food, medical care and education skyrocketing.
And we're required to swallow the absurd story that during all this mayhem, the Fed has the control and mastery to regulate inflation at the official placid, moderate pace. What a joke. Where do they get such gall?
3/13/15, 11:15 AM
Robert said...
ATLAS SLUGGED
Hercules outsmarts Atlas with feet of clay
Leaves him trap snapped shut in the corporate cage he constructed for himself
And Hercules
Comes down from the mountain
Bearing the grief of the world
On his shoulders
Our Rangers will take down the liar Galt
He creates nothing by himself
The intellectual property from us he stole
The Anonymous fraternity of the common Craft
Our purpose to raise up humankind
Not to serve for corporate gain
3/13/15, 11:25 AM
Mickey Foley said...
Insofar as "occult" means "hidden," you could say that consciousness of the externalities of the economy has become occult knowledge, with all the transgression that connotes. Ergo, it should come as no surprise that an Archdruid is bringing it to our attention. As we have become more removed from the natural world, knowledge of our effects on the environment has become more subversive.
We've also resorted to sentimentalizing Nature, worshipping it in lieu of helping it, as if it were already dead or beyond saving. Of course, industrial society is the lost cause, no matter how much our culture would like us to believe that Nature itself is endangered. Our ecological niche faces the greatest danger. Progress has convinced many of us that Nature can’t survive without us, when the truth is just the opposite.
I remember being disappointed as a kid when we went on vacation, because the sights never looked as good to me in person as they did on TV. Television inflated their aura. I never understood why restaurant commercials would trumpet their “homemade” cooking. To me, “store-bought” or “industrially produced” beat “homemade” any day of the week. As I see it, the problem for we post-Boomers is not that we confuse the prosthetic experience with the physical, but that we prefer the prosthetic.
I didn’t start eating organic food until my mid-20’s, and only now, at the age of 37, can I say I’ve almost completely overcome my fondness for fast food. Obviously, there was a physical component to the shift in my palate, but I attribute most of the change to an emotional recovery. I no longer need junk food to summon the safety I felt in childhood.
Real Life has been drained of possibilities by the electronically-mediated alternatives. iPods didn’t destroy street socialization with strangers; that technology emerged to fill a void that had already been created by TV and video games. Even we Gen-Xers find it awkward standing next to strangers in silence at the bus stop. Smartphones relieve that anxiety.
The Virtual Reality of TV, video games and the internet is a safe zone with all consequences externalized. It can only meet our needs on a superficial level, but it will never reject us. The Real World offers no such guarantees, and, as people have increasingly opted for artificial activities, there are fewer chances for real human connection. The Real World thus provides less motivation for people to leave their electronic cocoons.
I posted a new essay, "The Dustbin of History," on my blog, Riding the Rubicon, this week.
3/13/15, 11:36 AM
Dan Stoian said...
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31872460
My gripe being those last few words: "...without a major economic downturn." Why are we so blind? Why do we mistake numbers on a computer screen for real wealth?
3/13/15, 11:53 AM
Jeff Walker said...
First, as Luke Devlin tried to point out, your repeated attribution of the article to Steward Brand is incorrect. Mr. Brand is simply summarizing a talk given by Jesse Ausubel. It appears Mr. Brand writes the summaries for all The Long Now Foundation's monthly seminars. I am sure that he does not equally endorse the views of all the talks he summarizes. While Mr. Brand, as the host of the seminars and President of the Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation, certainly has a large role in selecting speakers, that does not make the ideas his own. Mr. Ausubel would be rightly offended that you are attributing his work to other people.
I encourage you to watch the talk being summarized at http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/jan/13/nature-rebounding-land-and-ocean-sparing-through-concentrating-human-activities/ You'll find much of it a well thought out and researched position. Though your interpretation of the facts and predictions based on those will likely be different. That is more a reflection of your knowledge of things such as peak oil and resource depletion that are not well understood or believed generally.
Finally, The Long Now Foundation certainly doesn't share our view of the future, however, I think it is mis-characterizing their views to claim they are trying to avoid confronting "the soaring ecological costs of computer technology in particular and industrial society in general". They are attempting to "foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." Based on other material I've seen from them, I'd like to think that they would welcome other well thought out views of the long term future such as your own. Furthermore, I think their fascinating project of the 10,000 year clock (a clock carefully designed in the hopes that it might be able to run for 10,000 years) bears a resemblance to magic as you have discussed it.
I think if you sat down with Mr. Brand you would find the two of you had much in common in your thinking though with import points of disagreement.
3/13/15, 12:04 PM
The other Tom said...
I've been thinking how, in light of your essay, the daily landscape in so many places, especially suburbs and industrial "parks," has been turned into a prosthetic landscape, where they've denatured nature. The "landscaping" replaces anything that wants to grow there with something alien. I know the native plants and trees in my area, and in a lot of suburbs I don't see a single native species anywhere. It has always made me uncomfortable, being in these places and your essay helps me understand why.
I think it would be possible to grow up in a landscaped neighborhood knowing nothing about where you are from, or in other words, not be from there, or anywhere. All places are the same, they are completely abstract, they are empty. In a sterile environment, people don't form the habits of observation, of living through the senses that we need to live like human beings. Really, in a lot of places the people look dead to me, no passion or real enjoyment.
In a place where every part is interchangeable, where a Japanese red maple is no different than an Acer rubrum, nothing really matters and we're all just parts in a Henry Ford auto plant. When the landscape is irrelevant it becomes a vacuum that needs to be filled, an ideal situation for selling entertainment or propaganda. Nature is always somewhere else, probably an experience you pay for.
All the life around us should be intimate and treasured. It should be known by everyone, for free.
Everyone needs to be from somewhere, or else they are homeless in the deepest sense.
The Frodo Baggins description made me think of the Berkshire hills.
Thanks to Chris for the beautiful description of your home.
3/13/15, 12:39 PM
exiledbear said...
I'd like to just shorten it to something that Gordon Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares liked to exclaim occasionally - "You've given up, haven't you? I can't help you if you won't help yourselves."
3/13/15, 1:13 PM
exiledbear said...
Did you know that the Apollo 11 landing (well all of them) were done mostly automated by computer? And that the Apollo 11 computer had to reboot 2,3 times during the powered descent? Fortunately, they designed it to recover after having to reboot and to continue flying the descent module (and there are stories about them constantly and randomly rebooting the guidance computer over and over again in the simulator and fixing anything they could until they could fix no more). It's one of those little facts they don't really tell you too much about. I had to actually go look up what a 1202 alarm actually meant, that's how little any of the official media would tell you about it. I think Armstrong switched over to semi-manual landing guidance (where he was manually feeding requests via joystick to the computer) and that took enough load off it so it stopped crashing. People can argue that it wasn't the computer's fault, but it was crashing and rebooting, and when you're trying to land 250000 miles away, I don't think you really care whose fault it is :) And you wonder why pilots don't trust computers too much.
My take (coming from the technical world) on automation in general is that it isn't a cornucopia, you're making a tradeoff. You're giving up something to gain something else. Generally what you give up are the little emergencies, having to have someone watch something all the time, or the requirement to hire teams of people to watch over one thing. You can instead hire one person to watch it all by herself, or one person to watch a whole bunch of things.
What you get in exchange are great big emergencies that happen much less frequently. The big emergencies generally need much more intelligence, creativity and skill to solve than the person you employ to watch over the whatevers generally has on hand. Depending on how automated whatever it is, it could require Einstein level intelligence and creativity.
So they're going to deploy lots of robots and AI - what I'm going to be watching and waiting for is the Big Boner, where someone left off a semicolon in the code which subtly changes its meaning and it doesn't get caught for months or years until some corner case triggers it and then Hilarity Ensues and doesn't stop ensuing for quite a while afterwards.
Or my vision of what would happen with the Robot Future(tm), is they would hire a few smart people to design, build and set up the Robot Factories(tm) and then fire all their asses to Save Money. Then the factories would run unattended for decades, until they encountered some condition that they couldn't handle. And then everyone would go back to the stone ages, because they had fired all the people who knew anything about fixing them, and those people had gone off to I dunno, prepare for the inevitable collapse?
3/13/15, 1:37 PM
Nm Mm said...
What's triggering all this defensiveness? Guilt, in part, I think; all my efforts to disconnect notwithstanding; I am mired to the neck in industrial society. My homemade herbal remedies and home-cooked meals don't offset driving to work everyday in my car (and to the grocery store, and to visit friends and family...); nor do they offset attitudes like this one; at least until I figure out an alternative way to make filbert milk, you are not prying my blender out of my hands. Guilt for selfishness, accompanied by defensiveness. A feeling of being trapped in this mire, with many of the available choices highly unpalatable, and a sense that, however much I do, it's never enough. But, as long as I don't think too hard, overall, am reasonably happy...
On second thought, maybe it isn't surprising that I haven't liked them much. This is not comfortable.
And having worked through that, guess I'd better spend some time considering prosthetic imaginations. The Other Tom's comment on that point, about suburban landscaping, was thought-provoking.
It seems to me that a prosthetic imagination might be something of a survival requirement in an industrial society, along with a considerable sense of numbness. Because otherwise, being trapped among too much plastic, concrete and steel, surrounded entirely by meaningless artificiality, is suicide-inducing (I mean that literally, not flippantly).
3/13/15, 1:38 PM
August Johnson said...
One interesting development:
German Radio Amateurs Breathe New Life into “Orphaned” Shortwave Channel
02/25/2015
Some radio amateurs are frustrated broadcasters, and when German national broadcaster the Deutsche Welle closed down a 500 kW shortwave broadcast transmitter near Munich, an entity headed and operated by hams applied for and was granted the vacant channel of 6070 kHz in the 49 meter shortwave band. DARC Radio — which has a business association with the Deutscher Amateur Radio Club (DARC) but is privately owned — now has a 10 kW broadcast station, branded “Channel 292,” up and running, and a new Amateur Radio DX program will debut next month.
Another interesting thing found on the shortwave bands is so-called "Pirate Radio". Seems to be experiencing a revival these days.
3/13/15, 2:29 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Today evening (friday) my 4-year-old nephew came home feeling a little sick. I found him sitting in front of his ipad playing some lame game. His mom asked me to try and cheer him up so I asked him to come with me. I took him to the seeds we had planted last week, he planted a sugar-snap pea plant. His plant and five others had started sprouting. He helped me water the plant and was re-energized, we spent the last 45 minutes running around play fighting after that. The same thing is happening with my friends. I've took them to the gardening store last week and will be taking some more this week. They're all losing interest in the prosthetic world. It takes the energy of our entire civilization a life time to build this wall around our souls, it takes nature literally days to break them down. It is no wonder our would be leaders fear the power of nature.
Regards,
Varun
3/13/15, 2:36 PM
Kyoto Motors said...
More recently I noted Charles H. Smith referring to "simulacrum democracy" with a certain insight and aplomb.
By extension, I have been toying with the term “simulacrum economy” in the age of QE ad nauseum.
Now, it occurs to me that both “simulacrum” and “prosthetic” are two attempts at describing some very closely related phenomena, and are very nearly interchangeable. After all, “prosthetic democracy” and “prosthetic economy” both describe features of a society limping its way down the far side of Hubbert's Hill!
3/13/15, 3:08 PM
Curtis said...
(I wonder, too, in the near future how many prosthetics will be turned into tools. I recently read an article where a man turned one of those gosh-awful elliptical machines into a home grain grinder.)
Although I do have to admit that I have not been turning the compost very much since it froze solid. :) I'm still learning the ins and outs of it with my recently found copy of Let it rot and a few other resources. Even so, it seems more prudent to let the compost defrost than to shell out for a gym membership...
3/13/15, 3:39 PM
FiftyNiner said...
As to Mr. Brand and his views regarding the productivity of tree plantations: He is dead wrong when it comes to the southern long leaf and loblolly pine, and I would assume other species as well. In a college biology class over 40 years ago I had a professor who spent an entire lecture describing the wasteland, that borders on desert, that is a pine plantation. I had never really thought about it although I live in a part of the state where much farmland had been given over to forestry. Dr. Mount had said in his lecture that a pine plantation is a much a monoculture as any you will see and functions the same way. With the small mammals, reptiles and amphibians gone, even the awesome timber rattlers and Eastern diamondbacks have to leave. Left behind is the ravenous pine bark beetle, who when he is found has to be fought with everything that logger man has in order to be defeated. I would suggest to Mr. Brand that he come to the deep south in August, find a safe shoulder of the road to park, walk one hundred yards into the pines and spend fifteen minutes just absorbing the experience--and absorb it he will. The air in there is thick with the fumes of the pine resin and at those temperatures makes it almost impossible to breathe. Loggers are supposed to wear respirators when harvesting the trees, and Mr. Brand will understand exactly why. Add to this the fact that at most the land will be able to produce no more than three successive crops of trees--ninety to one hundred twenty years--and you really are left with sandy soil desert islands pocking this verdant landscape. Not a pretty picture, nor a 10,000 year plan.
On the other hand, I certainly hope there is toilet paper here at least for duration of my life!
3/13/15, 4:53 PM
Agent Provocateur said...
“Nature exists as little more than wallpaper in most people's lives … At best, we are sometimes so taken by a scene … that we pause for a moment to admire the wallpaper … The real world, as people experience it, is the world of people and culture … It is when you stop to say “Hello” to this old friend [a flower you recognize], that the plot thickens, and you notice something new … This is my trap to draw you in one flower at a time, to entice you to wander off the beaten track and into the wallpaper, meeting friends and neighbours as you go … Years later you may find yourself in a meadow of wildflowers and wild life … surrounded by friends you have seemingly always known, only to realize how far you have come … There in the distance is what you once called the real world … But now seems like a house of smoke and mirrors … full of self-importance but empty of substance. The real world, you discovered, was the wallpaper all along.
Like colours, you need a name for your “neighbours” (denizens of the natural world) to truly recognize them. Like exploited humans or the unemployed, whether these are not recognized because they are not considered worth it, or because it is too threatening to do so, the social slight of being externalized is clearly unwise. Consistently maintained nonrecognition (externalization of the mind) means these potential friends become enemies.
Nonetheless, I am persuaded those doing the ignoring and distracting basically know the negative consequences of their actions or just don't care one way or the other. It is a mistake to assume those paid to have an opinion speak their own minds let alone the minds of those who pay them. Perhaps there is a little self deception going on; but, basically, those paying the piper just don't care. Their sense of self must be so limited; otherwise, they would not be engaged in the game of privatization of profits and externalization of costs in the first place.
3/13/15, 4:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Bogatyr, thank you. Congrats on the new job; 73 people have read this blog in China over the last 24 hours, so there's at least some reason to think you can get it there.
Scotlyn, I know it was a typo, but "mass megia" is worthy of Lewis Carroll -- a useful combination of "mass media" and "mass magia"...
John, I haven't even seen that image, having less than no interest watching Jackson wreck another Tolkien work -- can you imagine the mess he'd make of Farmer Giles of Ham? -- but it makes perfect sense.
Gloucon, aren't currently reported payroll figures fed through a "birth/death model" that allows the BLS to estimate (i.e., make up) how many jobs were created during the reporting period? I seem to recall something of the sort.
Ed, I suspect somebody's soma ration will be increased from 300 to 200 cc a day shortly...
John, thanks for the tip; I'll put it on the get-to pile.
Steve, thank you.
Luke, hmm! Thanks for the correction; my mistake.
Damo, so noted.
Ed, ads make reality for the masses until the gap between the advertisement and the reality becomes too vast to ignore. We may be close to that now.
M, I think it's central to the whole strategy to put people in enough of a state of cognitive dissonance that they can't handle any questioning of the official reality, since they're already uncomfortable with the gap between that reality and what they actually experience. The defensiveness generated by cognitive dissonance is a useful protection for the system.
Marc, I wonder if the parent is the one who has to use the animated figure as a cognitive crutch...
3/13/15, 5:35 PM
FiftyNiner said...
What you are saying is so true about this time leading up to the real collapse. Even the children now here in the rural South are essentially indoor people. I never see kids organizing camping trips to the river or building tree houses or just romping in the woods. Even for the older ones who are involved in hunting large game--mostly deer--the experience is totally mediated by the commercial suppliers of hunting gear.
I was born at a time when virtually everyone I knew had a vegetable garden. Now almost no one does. I feel that our re-acquaintance with nature will come with us all being enrolled in a survival class that we will not be able to cut. Being able to eat will depend on it.
3/13/15, 5:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Raven, fungi have been doing those things for millions of years. Paul Stamets, whose work I admire, is just figuring out which mushroom does what, and suggesting that using their natural proclivities probably makes more sense than trying to manufacture something to do the same thing.
Tony, excellent! My guess is that they'll simply leave sea level where it is and insist that the sea isn't rising, along the time-honored lines of Hy Brasil.
Lance, Magritte is a good starting place for this sort of discussion, no question. No, it's not a pipe!
Phil, that's stunning. You may be right -- the world's must hubristic aircraft project as the prototype for the world's most famous starship...
Greg, exactly. My guess is that even if an AI could be built, getting it so that it could experience the world in anything like a sane fashion would take something close to an evolutionary time scale.
Bill, yes, you can swear in Orcish if you like. In the case of those execrable movies, I'll even second the motion.
Aenn, well, of course; even if there was any chance of getting the sort of views discussed here accepted generally, it's thirty years too late and the time and resources needed to turn industrial civilization away from the long bitter arc of decline and fall no longer exist. The question at this point, as I've noted here repeatedly, is simply what we do with the time and opportunities we have.
Juandonjuan, aren't the Kardashians those aliens out of Star Trek?
Ando, exactly. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain -- and in all three cases, you can fall to your death from its steeper slopes.
Lawfish, yes, I recall the song.
Donalfagan, one of the reasons I didn't cite Shadowstats is precisely that there are disagreements about the methodology, and there are people -- not all of them trolls -- who get very shrill when Williams' site is mentioned.
Ed, true enough -- and I'm quite familiar with the Heart Sutra, as it happens, having learned at one point in my peregrinations to chant it in Japanese.
Clifford, thank you -- nicely summarized!
3/13/15, 6:03 PM
Dan the Farmer said...
Now I'm thinking I should move into the garage apartment I've been working on for two years, scavenging as I go, and rent the house out. Crashing now...
3/13/15, 6:12 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Bruce, I know earwigs who would be insulted by the comparison!
Kyoto, exactly. It's not the people who actually work with 3-D printers, by and large, who spoon up the delusion with really big ladles; it's the ones who simply read about them, confuse them with replicators, and use that as an insistence that progress is unstoppable.
Greg, I'd strongly encourage you to write that blog, and let it become the raw material for that book! I think it would benefit a lot of people.
Matt, I somehow missed "that dress." If it's taken until now for people to notice their own role in constructing their experiences, er, a lot of people have failed to pay attention to much of anything...
Leo, ouch! I hope you can get that straightened out promptly. Thanks for the additions to the list of absurd technologies. I saw one in an ad in a magazine at the laundromat the other day: they were pushing an electronic toothbrush with Bluetooth connectivity, so it can track your toothbrushing habits and tell you how clean your teeth are. I wish I was making this up...
Brent, thanks for the link!
Peter, thank you. I'm hoping that the results of establishing a troll-free space will encourage other blog writers and forum hosts to try the same thing.
Jason, my guess is that the view Tolkien had in mind was from one of his many walking tours -- he and his friends used to go for long rambles across the English countryside, staying at country inns. I'm pretty sure I stood on the original of Minas Tirith last June, for that matter.
Allie, a farm in eastern NC sounds like a very sensible place to be just now, especially when compared with the Sinking Lands of Florida...
Mister R., ouch; I'm sorry to hear that. Not much you can do, unless reality applies its Great Big Baseball Bat of Wisdom with considerably more force than usual. As for the unemployment rate, I simply assume that I don't have any way of knowing it, and look for proxy measurements less vulnerable to fudging.
K-dog, I suspect that one of the reasons so many people find their role in shaping their experience of the world terrifying is that facing that forces a confrontation with the cognitive dissonance that pervades contemporary life.
Ceworthe, true enough!
3/13/15, 6:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
HalFiore, the unemployment index would be informative if it weren't being jiggered on a regular basis. Me, I'm far from sure that its variations from quarter to quarter aren't better explained by who has what political agenda in mind than anything else.
Radoje, there's no mystery about chickens and eggs -- eggs were being laid by reptiles millions of years before the first protochicken! Still, you're spot on to pay attention to both sides of the issue. The impoverishment of the inner life has proceeded in parallel with the mediation and externalization of the outer life, and the various feedback loops between these two processes (or two aspects of a single process) are crucial to understanding the whole.
481f, thank you for this! That may be the origin of the claim, which I've read many times, that the permanently unemployed don't get counted in the unemployment stats.
Cathy, congratulations! Do you have a publisher lined up yet for the print and e-book editions?
Chester, it's a reasonable dread. If you do have to go back there, maintain connections with friends on higher ground, and hope that your family and in-laws will be willing to see the writing on the wall before crunch time actually arrives.
Zach, congratulations also! I'm glad to see more people writing in the field of post-peak fiction -- there's no shortage of interesting stories waiting to be told about the future we're facing.
KidC, exactly. "Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic moving by compulsion each other" -- Blake, as usual, had it down stone cold.
DM, gotcha. I've had to respond to so many people who see only the other side's redefinitions of reality that filling in both sides is practically a Pavlovian reaction of mine at this point.
Dagnarus, fascinating. Thanks for the link.
Laylah, the raw absurdity of it almost tempts me to write a novel set in half-drowned Miami in 2060 or so, in which the city's elite continues to inhabit a dreamworld of ever-increasing real estate prices, while the real estate they buy and sell so enthusiastically is inhabited only by fish...
Clay, exactly. Of course the technology has actual applications -- the gap I want to discuss is the one that lies between the reality of the technology and the fantasy of the replicator.
Matthew, I know I need to get to him one of these days.
3/13/15, 6:59 PM
Donald Hargraves said...
1: For a place with high unemployment, it's amazing just how many jobs seem to sit unfilled for months, if not years. I've long had the impression that those jobs were never meant to be filled – especially since these companies seem to be doing well without these "positions" being filled. Especially since these positions seem to require skills from two different skill-sets picked because they don't really seem to relate in any way.
2: Many of the companies who ARE hiring are lowballing their offers, offering what would be considered High School pay for stuff requiring heavy-duty training complete with massive student loans for many. And, of course, they want people with tons of experience to take the pay of a newly-hired person.
3: My present job includes taking quite a few "failed" truck driver trainees to a bus station to that they can head home, as well as some trips with people still training to be truck drivers. Between the stories of reasons dug out of thin air to "fire" some of these trainees to firing quotas and comments about how many people "get tossed out of training," I wonder what's REALLY going on with the trucking business.
4: Then there's the issue of the people we're supposed to be training as our fellow employees. The last two were busts – the last one didn't even put forth an effort to look busy, and the one couldn't find his butt without a GPS to guide his hands.
So I don't consider the unemployment numbers to be real, or even have any links with reality.
3/13/15, 7:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
David, writing can be used as a prosthetic, and it becomes harmful when that's done. That's why meaningful systems of education include a great deal of memorization, to keep the memory functional, and make writing a tool for expanding human capacities rather than a prosthetic for replacing them.
Daelach, oh, granted. It was an article of faith in science fiction many years ago that the natural result of automation would be a world where everyone had everything they wanted. Of course things didn't work out that way. As for 3-D printers, no question, they have their uses, but they aren't what the current round of cornucopian geek fantasies think they are!
Mark, exactly. Those who treat 3-D printers as replicators are precisely those who don't use the technology -- they read things on the internet and spin fantasies from there.
Carl, fair enough.
Daelach, I do much the same thing. The fewer ads, the better -- and you'll notice that the only ads I permit on my blogs are sales links to my books, so that people who want to know what else I've written can check 'em out.
Mettrodome, it continues to amaze me that what was the lamest of lame humor magazines in my childhood has metamorphosed into so smart and funny a humor site!
JML, as that's been questioned, I'd encourage you to do your own research and find sources you trust.
3/13/15, 7:15 PM
WW said...
Suspiciously like the society (well, one of them- we are clearly the one with the explosions about magnificent Tamsours) in Vance's Night Lamp?
3/13/15, 7:16 PM
August Johnson said...
3/13/15, 8:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Peter, the first known artworks date from before our species evolved -- some of the earlier hominids engaged in decorative patterns and very basic representational art. Our species has been making art since it first evolved, which was most of a million years ago. The golden age of cave painting in the Magdalenian was 15,000-10,000 years ago, so it had hundreds of millennia of artistic expression and innovation before it, and there's every reason to believe that the Magdalenian artists did in fact see what they were doing as representations of the world, just as modern representational artists do.
Ed-M, it is indeed about keeping up appearances. The veneer of prosperity must be maintained, no matter how desperate conditions become behind it.
Myriad, I think your proposal is brilliant, and would certainly encourage you to submit it. Of course they won't accept it, but I hope that one or two of the people who read the proposal might begin to grasp the possibility that producing big glossy books about our problems doesn't do much to solve them.
Librarian, it's on the get-to list!
Mark, maybe so, but the advertising is critical -- otherwise people might notice that it's much cheaper to make their own greasy junk food at home.
Dan, I can't speak to that, never having seen the newer version (and having rolled my eyes and giggled at occasional glimpses of the earlier one).
Random Man, and yet I know a substantial and growing number of people who are extracting themselves from the treadmill in one way or another. There are alternatives.
Curtis, oh, granted. A "maker culture" where nobody actually makes things, but they all sit around watching a machine make things, is a consumer culture under another name. Makers actually roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.
JABA, several people have already brought up sites showing that if you keep calculating joblessness the way it was calculated thirty or forty years ago, the figures are much higher than they are today. Have you noticed the recent flurry of articles wondering why nobody's spending money when there are all these new jobs out there? I'd suggest that this is fairly good evidence for the claim that job numbers are being jiggered.
Bob, par for the course. I wonder if it's ever occurred to Mr. Huntsman that his chemical company is part of the reason why so many people, including Mrs. Huntsman, are coming down with cancer these days.
Cathy, thanks for the printing failures link! Now imagine an economy wholly dependent on 3-D printers, a bug in the software, and stuff like this starts coming out all over the planet...
3/13/15, 9:03 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cathy, funny. Hang onto your hat, by the way -- the fracking-related bankruptcies and debt defaults are beginning to pile up.
Gloucon, I'm not talking about the people who make 3-D printers. I'm talking about the people who go around on the internet insisting loudly that someday very soon 3-D printers will solve all our problems by making consumer goods basically for free, and who inevitably bring Star Trek replicators into the discussion, thus showing what they've got stuck sideways in their brains.
Scotlyn, thanks for the link!
Ed, industrial capitalism and industrial socialism are slight variations on the same theme: in one, the corporations are the same as the government, and in the other, it's exactly the other way around. Of course the one that happened to claw its way to the top is following the same trajectory toward failure as the other. As for Spengler, no argument, he'd have made a ferocious blogger -- sitting in his sparely furnished apartment, books piled around him, hammering at a keyboard, crafting next week's post on how the EU is making all the same mistakes as the Ming dynasty, or what have you.
Skintnick, thanks for that. Very elegantly done!
Tye, thanks for this! It's a great example. "Our bogus figures insist that everything is fine -- why aren't people behaving accordingly?" is a common plaint of elites as they slide down the greased slope into oblivion.
Denys, ouch. I wish I had an answer; I'm very fortunate to be married to a woman who gets peak oil and the predicament of our time as thoroughly as I do, and learned the skills of getting by from parents who grew up during the Depression! I've seen quite a few marriages torn apart by this sort of thing, so compromise, and a willingness to leave the subject alone, is probably necessary. Beyond that, I don't know what to say.
Michael, the Onion is a treasure. Yes, I saw that -- they just go from one direct hit to another.
Moshe, at this point, when somebody says "But we need to grow," you can take that as the expression of a death wish and act accordingly, and by and large, you'll be dead on target.
Ozark, excellent! In fact, you get tonight's gold star for pointing out a crucial issue. If human thinking and perception is flawed, are abstractions concocted by human thinking and perception going to be less so? How about manufactured products and a built environment made by human beings on the basis of their flawed thinking and perception? How about a virtual environment from which everything but the direct product of human thinking and perception has been removed? If you want to move away from the flawed aspects of human thought and perception, going deeper and deeper into their products may not be the brightest idea...
Professor P., true, but I prefer less chemical means. A healthy dose of philosophy or a bit of meditation will do the same thing.
3/13/15, 9:19 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Roger, no argument; these days it's not uncommon for me to hear edged jokes on the order of "Yeah, inflation's under control, but prices keep going up anyway."
Robert, I don't normally welcome poetry here, but the thought of Heracles decking John Galt with one blow from a heavily muscled Hellenic fist is too good to pass up.
Mickey, that's a fascinating concept: knowledge of externalities as a form of occult knowledge. Here's my question: what abilities to shape the universe of our experience do you gain by embracing that form of occult knowledge?
Dan, because if people let themselves realize what's actually happening, and how close we are to real trouble, they'd run screaming out into the night. Especially for those who've invested everything they have in the fantasy of perpetual business as usual, crunch time is getting very, very close.
Jeff, so noted; I was mistaken. I took the piece as Brand's, partly because it was presented as such in the websites where I first encountered it, and partly because it resonates so closely with the ideas Brand himself promoted in his recent book Whole Earth Discipline and elsewhere. I took the time to watch the video, by the way, and I don't consider it a well thought out and researched position -- quite the contrary, to my mind it's yet another example of Bjorn Lomborg-style cornucopian cherrypicking, of which we have quite enough already, thank you. As for sitting down and finding common ground with Brand, finally, no, there you're quite wrong; as just noted, I've read his Whole Earth Discipline, and with any person who could write that book, I have no intellectual or ethical common ground whatever.
Other Tom, excellent! I'm going to give out one of my very rare second gold stars in a night for that -- you're quite correct, of course, and the manufacture of denatured "natural" environments is a critical piece in the externalization of human thought and imagination.
Bear, it's more than just a refusal to do anything about our problems, it's the flight into a prosthetic reality in an attempt to pretend that the problems don't exist. Your image of the robot future is all too plausible, btw -- you might want to consider that as the basis for a piece of fiction sometime!
Nm Mm, I think another large part of it is the impact of cognitive dissonance, which is extremely uncomfortable for the human psyche. One of the core gimmicks of the prosthetic imagination is to keep people caught in a series of doublebinds that generate cognitive dissonance, since that makes it easier to get them to distract themselves with the media, or what have you; talking about the kind of thing I'm talking about here makes the congnitive dissonance all too apparent, and people get angry and brittle as a result.
3/13/15, 9:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Kyoto, good. The term "simulacrum" has its own virtues, since it stresses the way that what you get from the prosthetic economy isn't what you're told you're going to get, but an imitation or representation of it. That's a core part of the strategy, since you remain dissatisfied and so ready to buy something else to meet the unmet need -- and of course it's just a simulacrum, too, so the dance goes on.
Curtis, of course! Down the road, you can look forward to exercising in freezing weather by chopping wood for the wood stove, you know. ;-)
Agent, thanks for the book tip! I'll have to look that one up. As for the people who promote the prosthetic economy, I think you underestimate -- or, shall we say, "misunderestimate"? -- the human capacity for self-deception and acquired stupidity. People can convince themselves of some amazingly brainless things if they think they can get something from doing so.
Donald, thanks for the reality check from the trenches! As a self-employed author, I don't have a lot of direct contact with the sort of things you've described, but what I hear from friends and lodge brothers certainly seems to point in the same direction.
August, thank you! I'm frankly startled by the number of predictions of mine that have scored a hit recently -- though I'm glad to say not all have done so; that the world got off its backside and did something to slow down the Ebola epidemic is an immense relief, for example.
3/13/15, 9:53 PM
Caryn said...
Denys said...
"So when one spouse wants to "collapse now and avoid the rush" and the other spouse …"
Denys; I am in the same boat as you in that respect. In other respects, I'm pretty sure our situations are very different, but hopefully still helpful to relate.
We are US expats living in Hong Kong for the past 16 years. Our now teen sons are absolutely thriving in an exceptional international school, far more than we could hope to give them anywhere in the US. We stay here primarily for that. We did a massive shrink/collapse starting a few years ago when my husband lost his job and our finances drastically decreased - It was hard, but in a lot of important ways, it was a blessing in disguise.
The furthest I've gotten in bringing the husband along in properly collapsing is an agreement that in 3 years, when our youngest graduates high school, we can move back to the US and go for it. The one security we were able to keep is our home in very rural Wyoming, so an off-the-grid collapse would be very do-able. This course of action will of necessity be sped up if his current job here in HK ends, or anything else out of our control forces our hand.
In the mean-time, there IS something to be said for tweaking / incrementally collapsing-in-place to prepare one for such a big change.
From our Western culture, my husband finds change to LESS dubious and hard to swallow, I'm a change, collapse, go-native maniac and even I'M finding only possible to integrate incrementally). But done incrementally, We've both been able to see and mentally process the costs and benefits of adopting new LESS (in our case, traditional Chinese) methods. I suppose in light of JGM's essays - willingly, even happily shedding our prosthetics, piece by piece, as opposed to having them stripped from us in one big rip.
All of this personal story in (a probably ham-fisted way of) explanation to suggest that maybe your spouse would accept a timeline of such a bigger change as moving house, (or changing to a closer job?), and in the mean-time, continue implementing ways, in-place, to LESSen your load?
This week's essay is spot-on in this question - so much of our ability and probability of enduring any societal upheaval depends on our mental/emotional flexibility. IMHO, incremental changes flex the muscles of mental/emotional adaptability. I truly think this is the biggest hurdle to overcome.
Also, I wanted to acknowledge your post from last week in which you described the hostility and aggression in your neighbors and colleagues - as I've noticed this sharply as an outsider only coming back to the US sporadically over the past years. In my limited visits, I think you're right, there is a palpable aggression and discontent, a feeling of almost panic that seems to have grown. You said you are exhausted, but Kudos to you for mediating and helping them through their own (whether they realize it or not) prosthetic stripping transitions.
Best Luck to you and yours,
Cheers,
3/13/15, 9:53 PM
John Michael Greer said...
3/13/15, 9:56 PM
John Michael Greer said...
3/13/15, 10:01 PM
N Montesano said...
Yes, I think you're right; had not thought of that (honestly, I seem to be barely intelligent enough to read this blog), but I can feel my mind turning away, wanting to avoid the topic. An odd experience. Guess I'll have to work harder at focusing on the topic anyway.
3/13/15, 10:12 PM
N Montesano said...
3/13/15, 11:06 PM
Jo said...
The second is where your partner is not willing to engage with your ideas at all, which argues a high degree of disrespect for you as a person, a situation which led to my own divorce eighteen months ago. In our case, we married young, straight out of university, and I stayed home and raised a bunch of children and read a lot of books, started gardening and made a lot of jam, while he climbed the corporate ladder and spent a lot of time in business class and plush hotels.
He is, of course, part of the demographic that has the most to lose from LESS - his wealth, his career, his identity - and I am the demographic who has the most to gain - with no established career I can dabble freely in green wizardry practices which gives me the option of living on very little.
Do you remember the 70s TV show 'The Good Life'? Tom decided he wanted to live a more meaningful life, so chucked in his job and became self-sufficient in Surbiton. And lucky for him, Barbara was right behind him. But what if Tom had been married to his posh neighbour Margo? Or Barbara to the sybaritic Jerry? Well, that is the trajectory our marriage took..
My ex-husband and I still like each other a great deal, but have no common ground on which to exchange ideas. Our roads diverged..
But interestingly, we started out with similar values. And I really do think that the relentless pace of the executive life and the rarefied atmosphere of the of a life lived in boardrooms insulated ex-hub from the realities and values of life as lived by ordinary people.
And it is a terrible pity, because once he was an immensely practical hands-on person who could fix or build absolutely anything. And now he lives on the tenth floor in an immaculate apartment and only uses his hands to tap out countless emails..
3/14/15, 12:40 AM
Andy Brown said...
3/14/15, 4:46 AM
Tony f. whelKs said...
On the whole concept of AI = particularly the belief that a genuine, self-reflective consciousness can arise - I am highly sceptical. I cannot offer a properly argued rational case for this, but I do have a very strong gut feeling about what will ultimately prevent its occurence.
Put simply it is this: I do not believe a self-reflective conscious can be developed that is not embodied. Without a physical body that interacts with the wider world, I suspect no self-awareness can emerge and without this there can be no self-purpose. In effect, all an AI can amount to is an extremely complex machine bound to its initial 'training', remaining incapable of conceptualising an 'I'. I also suspect that the mortality of a body is also a significant factor, and - although I hate to use the term - even if we mimic intellect in a machine, can we ever create a 'soul' in one?
As I said, I can't really put a solid foundation under this belief, and it is tantalisingly shrouded in shadow. I'd be interested in others' viewpoints, though I suspect it may be more suited to the Well than the Report.
3/14/15, 5:25 AM
ed boyle said...
3/14/15, 6:29 AM
Thomas Prentice said...
Fossil Fuels Will Save the World (Really)
Wall Street Journal / REVIEW section, p. C 1
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fossil-fuels-will-save-the-world-really-1426282420?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories
The Saturday Essay / Weekend Edition, Saturday,14 March 2015ce
Assembled with proud incredulity by thom prentice thomprentice (at)[gee] mail (dot) comma
[The first authentic self-deconstructing - and rather long - story in the history of deconstruction. M. Derrida would be proud.]
EXCERPTS:
“Fossil fuels reversed deforestation saved whales and let us grow more food on less land.”
“The argument that fossil fuels will soon run out is dead, at least for a while…. The shale genie is out of the bottle…And the shale revolution has yet to go global.”
P. 2 Subhead: The Bright Future of Fossil Fuels
“That fossil fuels are finite is a red herring. The Atlantic Ocean is finite, but that does not mean you risk bumping into France if you row out of a harbor in Maine.”
[A call in to my crack dealer has not yet been returned; I intend to advise to cancel orders for the next seven months; instead I’m going to read everything I can by the author of this piece, “Matt Ridley”, author of “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” and a member of the British House of Lords. Hence the quotation marks around the name “Matt Ridley”. Plus “Matt Ridley” is an owner "of land in northern England on which coal is mined" but who applauds displacement of coal by (fracked) gas in recent years.”]
MORE EXCERPTS:
“Fossil fuels gave rise to the West’s ‘Great Enrichment,’ vastly improving lives.” [Of the One Per Cent and their courtiers and courtesans.]
“…fossil fuels were a unique advance because they allowed human beings to create extraordinary patterns of order and complexity – machines and buildings – with which to improve their lives.” The next time somebody at a rally against fossil fuels lectures you [rather than the crowd] about her concern for the fate of her grandchildren, [why is it “HER”?] show her a picture of an African child dying today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoke fire.” [No accompanying picture printed by the WSJ.]
“As American author and fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein points out in bravely unfashionable book, “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels,” the use of coal halted and then reversed the deforestation of Europe and America.”
"Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic.”
“Arctic sea ice has decreased but Antarctic sea ice has increased.””…14 peer reviewed papers, published by 42 authors, many of whom are key contributors to the reports of the IPCC, have concluded that climate sensitivity is low because net feedbacks are modest.”
“…the warming rate has never even reached two-tenths of a degree and has slowed down to virtually nothing in the past 15 to 20 years. A turning point to dangerously rapid warming could be around the corner, even though it should have showed up by now.” [Whaaaat?!]
“We should work on ways to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, by fertilizing the ocean or fixing it through carbon capture and storage.”
Recommended additional WSJ reading:
“Wine Headache? Chances Are It’s Not the Sulfites” by Lettie Teague, [with heavy emphasis on the “Chances Are” as opposed to, like, evidence]
OFF DUTY Section, p. D7
http://www.wsj.com/articles/wine-headache-chances-are-its-not-the-sulfites-1426250886
3/14/15, 6:51 AM
heather said...
Thanks for the mention of the kid-friendly botany book. I checked it out and the artwork is beautiful, plus I liked the story excerpts I saw highlighting the teaching and learning relationship between the child and her grandparents. I'm ordering it to read with my kids (and learn from myself). I will also mention the book over on the Green Wizards forum in the discussion thread on collapsing early with kids on board.
Denys and Caryn-
I too am in a "mixed marriage" as far as awareness of the decline goes. We allow each other a fair bit of space- I garden and can, he plays his computer games and watches TV- and we meet in the middle around the less controversial shared interests like the kids. It's not his fault that I have changed over the course of our marriage- had my "awakening"- and he has not yet. I keep working on the ideas with him as gently as I can. Every news story and purchasing decision is an opportunity for discussion, but one has to be careful- JMG is right that it's very threatening to always be chipping away at your spouse's faith in the religion of progress. We just had a very disheartening (to me) conversation around space exploration that showed me that he really still hasn't given up that belief that humankind is meant for the stars. Sigh. At least with our host's insight about Progress as a religion, I can respond more sensitively, realizing that I am challenging some very important core beliefs in someone for whom they have worked fairly well so far. As usual in marriage, I'm attempting to employ patience and kindness and persistence, but also just to let things be and do my own thing, and leave him the right to do his. I don't have the right to choose his worldview for him, but I can try to share mine as the opportunity arises. I really hope that the dawn of his understanding won't be too late, but that's not within my control. I can be as prepared as possible myself, however, and be ready to be the rock if his worldview is forced into an abrupt change by outside circumstances. Good luck to you and yours.
--Heather in CA
3/14/15, 7:33 AM
JABA said...
You're right about this of course, but it is tangential to the issue that I raised and actually kind of illustrates the problem that I was trying to point out: Things are bad enough without posting wildly inaccurate claims such as, “Still, it’s worth noting that 92,898,000 Americans of working age are not currently in the work force—that is, more than 37 per cent of the working age population.”
Unless of course you consider my 83-year old mother-in-law “working age”.
I’m not trying to be provocative. I’m just pointing this out because it could potentially raise questions about your credibility for newcomers to your site.
Personally I think there are some positive aspects to seeing the drop in labor force participation. After all, if one were to adopt your LESS approach there’s pretty good odds that at least one family member would drop off the official roles and either work off the grid or focus on household services. For all of her faults, Elizabeth Warren did marvelous work on the “two-income trap”.
3/14/15, 7:34 AM
Travis said...
This essay reminds me of an idea I used to play with. If there was a continuous hum, even a loud hum, started before ones conception, could one become aware of the hum? I guess culture could be considered such a hum. Thanks again! (sorry if this post's twice)
3/14/15, 8:26 AM
RoseRedLoon said...
I am a long time reader and I am thrilled with the brilliant comments lately. What a wondeful salon this is, and I'm finally motivated to chime in.
I am a professional data modeler, meaning I create abstract models of the who, what, when, where, and how facts about business systems, with the end goal of creating computer systems to run them. It is a difficult job, involving a lot of interpersonal dynamics and politics, because I must analyze and articulate the business, reflect it back to them, and guide them towards consensus. On the other end, I must turn these conceptual models into technical specifications and database designs. This is an activity that no one enjoys, but I stress to them that if they don't make decisions, then some random guy in a cube somewhere will make it for them when they implement the lines of code that automate their business processes. What strikes me as funny is that those lines of code are referred to as the "physical" part of the system, because they are so much less abstract than the upstream conceptual models we use to communicate with the business. Within the computer systems themselves are the seven layers of the OSI model, ranging from graphical user interfaces to the physical wires connecting the machines.
If I do my job well, I hope to contribute to mnemonic, easy to use interfaces to the systems that represent the true intentions and requirements of the business. The reality, however, is that most decision making is really done by the programmer, because everyone shies away from the hard work of examining and constructing the abstractions. If they are lucky, the programmer is intelligent, dedicated, and has the necessary business knowledge to make this happen. There are many such heroic programmers out there, but I don't recommend it as a way to run a business.
As satisfying as my job is when the models are elegant, at the end of the day, it is the sensual, material world that delights me. It is time for some serious gardening, and my muscles are still sore from the ballet class Thursday night. I have recently added high quality chocolate powder to my morning coffee (how I shall I miss coffee). As it does every week, this blog, our host, and its lively commenters will go on my morning gratitude list - written by hand of course.
3/14/15, 9:16 AM
Carnegie said...
It seems there are as many people clinging to their prosthetics as there are folks abandoning them. Perhaps my optimism for the current generation of young people is not misplaced.
3/14/15, 10:25 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
Delete this if you must, but it's a quote from Twain. "Lies, Damned lies and statistics." Seems to cover what we've been talking about, this week. Lew
3/14/15, 10:44 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
I'm going to start writing and get a few posts ready before I put them up. This way I can have a buffer that will let me come out with a blog about every week, even if life makes it hard to make deadline one week. I plan to have something within a month.
I plan to have commenting guidelines similar to the ones here. I love the kind of polite diverse discourse that happens in this comments section. I recently commented on an article about the NHMRC homeopathy study and was quickly reminded why I have not commented on an online magazine in years.
Speaking of the great community here, thank you to peacegarden for the 180 degree looking exercise. I will have to try that when the rain lets up.
I have no shortage of things to write about. Now I just need a decent name. Which is tougher than I thought. So far I'm thinking something along the lines of:
SAHD economics, homestead dad, de-industrial dad,
I'm not really crazy about any of them. I will have to think about this further, or just go with the first one. Suggestions from all are welcome.
3/14/15, 10:52 AM
Jason Heppenstall said...
I also read that he was an avid early motorist, tearing off on adventures in his open-topped car. He later regretted this when he could see the damage cars and their infrastructure was having on the landscape.
3/14/15, 11:07 AM
Curtis said...
Me and my partner are on quite different pages, too. If we were to put people on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most "Greer," I would say I'm about an 8 while my partner is about a 4. (By the way - someone should propose what we can call a 1 - who is the most photo-negative of Mr. Greer's views? :) )
But what makes a big difference is that he is willing to support my efforts and does things, outside of the context of preparing for collapse, that still help. He's helped cut back expenses, gotten insulation in, biked more, driven less, spent less, supported businesses that are going to be useful (local organic gardening) and the like. Also, when I sat down to finally talk to him about my recent mental issues--I'm struggling with peak-induced anxiety/depression--he did not deny my emotions, say I was crazy, or otherwise try to invalidate what I said. It was a huge relief - I realized I ultimately have a spouse in my corner even if he isn't on the same page.
I think if I were in your position I would be most concerned if your partner opposes your efforts or tries to deny what you're going through.
As an aside, you sound like a very thoughtful, lovely woman. If we could renovate our home so that our basement was turned into a lovely apartment, you sound like the kind of person I'd like to have as a "collapse co-houser." :)
3/14/15, 11:15 AM
Myosotis said...
I don't have the time to search around and find it friends arriving soon, but I distinctly remember a botany study from a few years ago that surveyed the plants found in different US metro areas and surrounding countryside.
One was Phoenix and the others were not desert, so not just a close cluster of cities. The conclusion was that the plants found within cities are more similar to other cities than to the areas around them. I found that very surprising. Then I moved to a big city.
I'll look around for the article. Later.
3/14/15, 11:36 AM
Curtis said...
Granted, I don't have usable wood trees on my own pathetic 1/8th of an acre lot, but growing up rurally, I learned how to chop and pile wood, and am more than ready to do it again.
In the meantime, the thermostat stays at 60F most days. The next two co-goals of mine are to learn to use a sewing machine (used of course!) and to make some simple insulated window coverings.
3/14/15, 11:38 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
This is something I've been thinking for years, but always found it rather difficult to articulate effectively, especially when trying to communicate it to others who often ask me about certain philosophical or spiritual matters. Thank you for putting it so plainly. With regards to the “thinker” vs. “the ordinary unreflective person”, though, it is my observation that the latter category quite frequently gives birth to a third as those who merit that description aspire to act out the image society has given them of what an erudite person is, and what he or she is supposed to do. It's not pretty. It goes as follows: Take the normal habit of unconsciously, yet compulsively, relating to the world through the mental abstractions you happened to inherit, shift it (very self-consciously) into overdrive, while at the same time seek to accumulate (preferably from the internet) as much of other people's mental-abstractions-run-amok (and the results thereof) as you possibly can. Now make it your mission in life to educate others... I coined the term “belief sponge” a while back, and so far it has done a pretty good job of summing it up. I've noticed that people most prone to it are those who are into giving some form of instruction, sports coaches for example. Examples galore comes to mind. Freshest one was a couple of days ago, during brake from sparring in the dojo, when one instructor didn't like the silence and started giving a lecture about the reason human beings were able to experience joy was because their bodies contained lithium, and went on about it and why people actually did things like being outdoors was really just to get more lithium and on and on... Managed to control the urge to ask him whether he had figured this out himself, or had had this tremendous insight bestowed upon him by the internet. As I sat there quietly finishing my tea, I couldn't help wondering if I was the only one who could hear how dumb this sounded, or if everyone else was also being awkwardly quiet for the same reason as I.
3/14/15, 11:45 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
Alas, in Albuquerque, there are two such bookstores left, one in the North Valley (7 mile drive from where I live, near the University), and the other, in the Far Northeast Heights, a 10 mile drive.
University Bookstore? It is to laugh. Ignoring the textbooks upstairs, half the store is given over to Lobo-themed consumer goods; the rest is heavy on such topics as "Psychology and Self-Help", "Business and Marketing" etc ... many of the latest best-sellers, and, granted, a good deal of Southwest-themed and Native-themed literature, much of it from UNM Press. So - to burn the gas and support your local independent booksellers? Or to throw up your hands and order online? Which I do, and will do directly from the publisher from now on.
3/14/15, 11:51 AM
hapibeli said...
I watch a lot of movies ( they come free...but, sssshhhhhhh, don't tell anyone)
I can't see paying for what is mostly dross. The 2 or so out of 10 can be wonderfully entertaining. This too will go away with the internet.
Many the books I read from our library system aren't much better.
What I've been learning is loving kindness, compassion, generosity, humor, and most of all gratitude. This brings me an acceptance of our predicament.(Thanks JMG for all of your insights and solutions)
Thinking harshly about anything only brings harshness back to you.
Build community, learn skills to live without cheap energy, as those times come closer, keep a clear head and heart, and try to inspire as you live your life within today's parameters.
Otherwise you live in the imaginarium of the current paradigm.
As the old saying goes; be in it, but not of it.
3/14/15, 2:50 PM
latefall said...
"I would bet that most members of our society would put us living on the Moon and Mars within a few hundred years. I think they would be shocked to learn that the experts largely disagree."
- See more at: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/10/futuristic-physicists/#sthash.mnLGpONk.dpuf
Re 3D printing, I'll keep it short (had written on this before):
Thanks Ruben, saved me a lot of time - but I would want to emphasize again:
a) techs aren't all about consumer products, even though it is relatively hard to get your head around once you got rid of most industrial production as a society.
b) thinking in tech suites gets you further. Will a plastic 3D printer compete with mass produced injection molding? You can see (polymer) 3D printing as a subset of polymer extrusion that has been massively scaled down/consumerized (maxed inefficiency). There are very few tasks where one can assume they'll beat other manufacturing methods, just based on the physical the physical limitations that come with the above. Rapid prototyping is another (important) matter. Also if you look at the method as just one more way of additive manufacturing it puts things in a more useful perspective I'd say.
Also there is potential in very complex/organic/inhomogeneous/biomimetic applications I would assume. E.g. if you can't get the whole product done in "biological cell factories" maybe your can still do some of the sub-structures (if you can place your stuff well enough in XYZ). You won't be casting "complex growy stuff" into molds most of the time, as it would not give you enough control.
In other news my "Overshoot"s arrived, in paper :). It is really good, thanks for the advice! I'll let you get back to pulling apart 3D printing and get away from the screen.
Oh, just one more thing since topics included LongNow and abstraction. This image stood out like a big fat target to me:
http://d3ct8f39dj9jhs.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/darkages.gif
featured on
http://blog.longnow.org/02014/04/19/the-knowledge/
which has a couple of nice (looking) recommendations for books, notwithstanding. Maybe a little light on the ecological side of things. Hmmm.
3/14/15, 3:06 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Firstly: thanks. It is both a privilege and responsibility to live here.
Secondly: If I found a dilithium crystal during one of the excavations here - I'm working on a wood shed site, in fact this very morning - I'd quietly bury it back over again, intuitively recognising that the outcomes for the area would not be good.
Other Tom raises an excellent point. Of course standardisation of the built environment is a key feature because our culture views people as economic units. It is in fact the very polar opposite position of disenssus. Even those people whom lead different lives from the cultural norms have been absorbed into the dominant culture. The built landscape was the easiest way to achieve that. Force everyone to live in similar arrangements and they will conform - because they have no other choice. I've always considered that the need to dominate is actually a sign of the underlying brittleness of a culture, because if it was acceptable to the majority, the culture wouldn't need to dominate.
I was having this very discussion last night about the imminent shut down of the car industry here. Not only is it sheer dumbness from a strategic point of view – Sun Tzu and Wu Tzu would have something to say on the matter – but it will put 250,000 people out of work and they are not economic units, despite what the ideology of our culture like to paint them as.
You can see this process in action this week as our Prime Minister berated Aboriginals for wanting to live in remote communities as: A lifestyle choice. Read between the lines and what he is threatening is for them to conform to the dominant culture or risk losing their government benefits. In addition to that he is threatening the vestiges of that Aboriginal culture which derives meaning from the land itself that the tribes are associated with. But the legal system as it stands blocks access to that very land which was once theirs. The comment was deeply disturbing.
Anyway, no better instruction could be found on the matter than the city of Canberra - which because of the sheer homogeneity of the built landscape - I find to be personally quite unsettling. It really is a bizarre place. Apologies to all of the readers that live there.
Cheers
Chris
3/14/15, 3:16 PM
thriftwizard said...
And if you have ever driven down the flanks of the Cleveland hills to see the chimneys of Middlesborough belching filth into the dark-stained sky, you've seen Mordor...
3/14/15, 3:23 PM
Dave Stoessel said...
http://[email protected]
3/14/15, 3:40 PM
Mark Rice said...
An alternative theory of cycles in history:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-130315.html.
The idea is humans fall into 4 categories. We have the religious, warrior, merchant and worker. We had a time the religious were in change, then the warriors. Recently the merchants have been in charge especially in the west. Resistance to this is in China and Russia. Eventually the religious will be in charge again.
3/14/15, 4:55 PM
onething said...
"Put simply it is this: I do not believe a self-reflective consciousness can be developed that is not embodied. Without a physical body that interacts with the wider world, I suspect no self-awareness can emerge and without this there can be no self-purpose. In effect, all an AI can amount to is an extremely complex machine bound to its initial 'training', remaining incapable of conceptualising an 'I'. I also suspect that the mortality of a body is also a significant factor, and - although I hate to use the term - even if we mimic intellect in a machine, can we ever create a 'soul' in one? "
I've thought about this, too. The thing is, I can only ask questions. What is it that animates a body? Is it the consciousness, or is there a life force that is a different thing? I tend to think there is definitely a something which animates. But I am not sure it is the soul. If we are composite beings, of how many basic parts are we composed? As Rumi asks, "What is the soul? If I could taste one sip of an answer..."
I do not think we can ever make a machine that approaches the complexity of a body, and even if we could, I do not think that the mind (consciousness) arises spontaneously out of physical complexity. Nor do I think consciousness can ever be manufactured.
If we could create a viable physical body, what about the life force? And if we had that, while I don't think we can create consciousness, it is possible that a conscious entity could come inhabit it.
The author of the book My Big Toe proposes that there can be no such thing as consciousness without free will. I believe he is right. Motivation itself is the divide between animate and inanimate things. Every living cell acts with motivation.
I have wondered if our own bodies are extremely complex machines, although that seems unlikely. I am not sure it is really possible for our bodies to be running on autopilot. It seems there ought to be a governor. Then, too, there is an interface between that which is not really physical such as the emotion of hope or despair, that then impacts the body, such as the immune system.
It's amazing how little we know, and people speculate according to their preferences.
3/14/15, 6:24 PM
oilman2 said...
In my former business we manufactured high tech diamond drill bits for the oilfield. These required: a designer, an NC programmer, a mold machinist, a parts machinist, a mold assembler and a mold loader. Each of these jobs were in excess of $75k per year in salary or wages + OT.
Using a 3D printer to print these complex molds works effectively, as I have actually done this repetitively. The net result is the designer prints the mold, and the mold loader loads it. Thus the NC programmer, mold machinist, parts machinist and mold assembler are permanently asked to leave the building. I know - I was instructed as engineering manager that I had done a "great job" - now go lay those guys off.
That is 4 jobs on 2 shifts or eight $75k per year jobs gone from the system due to 3D printing 'efficiency' when correctly applied.
Cui bono? Well, I didn't get a raise, and the overhead was decreased by 66% which went directly to the bottom line, not to mention selling off over $2,000,000 of used equipment that was no longer needed.
The funny thing is, as machinesand 'expert systems' replace us, they are not taxed, so again, cui bono? These "excess employees" seem to be another externalizing of business costs when you boil it down. But as the robots and 3D printers and software and computers are NOT TAXED, the digital wave washes a lot of folks out into the frothing unemployment sea, sans paddle or even raft.
No - I no longer work there, but we were the first to execute it correctly and it will happen in other places too. Efficiency only benefits the few, not the many, IMHO. Might be simply due to population density, but it is the world we are moving into as long as oil is cheap enough.
3/14/15, 6:48 PM
Gloucon X said...
We could spend quite a bit of time talking about the galaxy of ways in which economic statistics are finessed and/or fabricated these days.”
JMG, how far do you want to take this idea that all the economic figures are made up? We could apply that logic to other categories of data, like energy. All the energy data is released by corporations and governments and so it too could be faked. There are no green wizards in Riyadh working at the Ministry of Petroleum to verify the data for us. Yet these are the sources of the data on which our peak oil concerns are based.
3/14/15, 10:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Andy, German is a marvelous language!
Tony, have you read The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose? He makes a strong case for the suggestion that AI research is basically barking up the wrong stump.
Ed, adaptation in place is basically the name of the game at this point; I've noted already that the way things seem to be shaping up, those who haven't yet moved out to a rural farm probably won't have time or opportunity to do so.
Thomas, yes, I've seen it. I probably should have included that in there among the examples of prosthetic reality, as it's a corker.
JABA, I don't recommend using the "you need to do X so that people don't dismiss you" argument -- it makes you sound rather like a concern troll, you know. If my occasional mistakes keep readers on their toes and remind them that they need to think and do research for themselves, all the better.
Travis, "the George Carlin of Druidism" -- now that's a new one! Thank you.
Loon, the thing is -- as you know -- abstractions also have their beauty. It's the use of them as a flight from the concrete that's the difficulty here.
Carnegie, the thing I've seen is that people start out all gung-ho over the 3-D printers and so on, and then notice that they're just pushing buttons and waiting for the thing to work, while the guy over there at the lathe is having all the fun wielding the cutting tool and sending shavings flying. Pretty soon they're off the 3-D printer and learning how to use the lathe.
Lewis, no argument there -- and I'll let the Twain quote pass, because it's Twain.
Greg, I'd encourage you to choose a name that doesn't need to be translated -- SAHD doesn't communicate much to the acronym-challenged.
Jason, good heavens, no need to apologize! I'd heard about his driving also; according to one bio, he used to go blowing through intersections without slowing down, shouting "Charge 'em and they'll scatter!" After a few such experiences, his wife Edith talked him into getting rid of the car...
3/14/15, 10:52 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sven, yes, and that's a good point. The amateur pedant, the faux-intellectual who thinks that reciting data is a workable substitute for thought, is even more common now than in the past.
Patricia, well, there you are. In that case, yes, the publisher's probably your best bet.
Latefall, that chart is stunningly dishonest -- no one with the least background in the intellectual history of the Middle Ages would agree with such a claim (and you'll notice how casually the chart erases the Muslim world, India, China, etc., all of which had very different trajectories). If I wanted to do another post on the way that the myth of progress has been used to falsify the shape of the past, that graph could be exhibit A.
Cherokee, the more I hear about the way things are going down under, the more I shake my head. It almost makes me wonder if Australia has become convinced that if it wants to be an important country, it has to act like the United States, right down to the clueless head of state...
Thriftwizard, I know it's not what Tolkien had in mind, but I saw Mordor up close the first time I went past an oil refinery. Vast black towers with flames rising from the summit, the fumes, the general air of desolation and biocide -- it's shaped my imagination of the Plateau of Gorgoroth ever since.
Dave, do you recall the good advice of the old-time stock market player? "The market can remain insane longer than you can remain solvent." The same is true a fortiriori of the money system. Hang onto it while it's still useful; it may still be useful for longer than you expect.
Mark, Ravi Batra was talking about that in the late 1980s, as I recall.
Oilman2, exactly -- and you've noted some of the perverse incentives that make it profitable for companies to replace employees with machines. I'll be talking down the road a bit about how those could (and should) be reversed.
Gloucon, people in the peak oil scene have been talking about the make-believe numbers on oil reserves coming out of Riyadh and other Middle Eastern capitals since the late 1990s. The whole world these days is a gigantic poker game, and everybody's bluffing about what they have -- that's simply the hand we've been dealt, to push the metaphor a bit further. That's why there's so much attention paid to proxy measures and other roundabout ways of gauging who has what and who's doing what, which are harder to fake.
3/14/15, 11:14 PM
ed boyle said...
been reading spengler and that is why it is so slow going and fundamentally challenging. He is like a guy who has to program a robot for common sense. First you got to understand what you understand.
@onething
spengler said free will is a western idea. Magical arab early christian culture saw god as oversoul and we are all one consciousness -part souls-without free will, guilt, fault or punishment and even asking about god's plan was sin. Jesus thought like this he says. Free will is northern european individualism post ca. 1000.
3/15/15, 1:48 AM
Denys said...
I think this struggle is real for most people and if I had a magic wand if would be spouting out compassion for all of us.
JMG would you like some reports from the field?
Went to a different Home Depot yesterday - one in the rich home area - and there was a representative from Makerbot there demonstrating their 3D printer called the Replicator http://www.makerbot.com It was oozing out colorful plastic figurines. It sells for the low low price of $2,899.00 And there are 12 different colors of plastic you can use to make your trinkets. Bright garish plastic, but hey won't that look good somewhere on the mantel?
Had a friend go to the Adobe software conference last week. The chief marketing officer for Coca Cola was there and her presentation was on how Coke doesn't sell soft drinks, they sell........(drumroll)......happiness! Everything they do is to make people feel happy. She gave many examples of their past marketing on this. Coming soon their push button machines where you can mix all their products together to customize your own drink, will work with an app on your smart phone so you can save your drink recipes and share them with friends! The machine will know your soda choices and you can bluetooth link your phone and the machine to have it dispense automatically! Oh, the possibilities are endless.
Lastly, in rural PA school districts, there is a new initiative called 1 to 1. This is a great name, no? It means 1 iPad to each child and the child has unlimited use of the iPad all day and zero paper textbooks. Everything is done on the iPad. This starts in Kindergarten. In other school districts, the expectation is children bring their own devices and they can use them all day including at recess and lunch. Well, haven't the school staff made the management of children so much easier? When this technology push started a decade ago, I said to a teacher friend that teachers should be pushing for how children need people, not tech and how teachers can teach skills that tech can not. If the teachers went along with all this tech, then their jobs would be eliminated because the classroom would just need monitors/babysitters, and the tech would do all the teaching and tracking of scores. My friends response was "Well that is a dark thought.". Yeah, well, classroom monitors at $15/hour are cheaper than teachers at $80K a year so it will be done for cost reasons soon, I'm sure.
Thank you for you generosity in sharing your thoughts with us!!!
3/15/15, 5:36 AM
Clay Dennis said...
In fact we have acheived an "Alice in Wonderland" employment world where the further removed a job is from real work, the more highly rewarded in money it is. One only has to compare an Organic Farmer to a professional athlete, financial analyst or reality television star to see the reality of this statment. Where the resources come from to compensate folks who work in un-usefull jobs is of course a huge topic that is covered at length by many authors and this blog in particular. But I believe this is one of the biggest tricks of all, that millions of people can go to work each day and curate twitter feeds, analyze sports, or be full time high school athletic directors, and in aggregate that can make up a real economy. In reality the jobs most people do in America are no different than the homeless guy who stands at the freeway offramp with a cup, except they are better paid, and the homeless guy is not fooled about his situation.
3/15/15, 9:09 AM
N Montesano said...
3/15/15, 11:28 AM
dermotmoconnor said...
Dermot.
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/gods-philosophers-how-medieval-world.html
3/15/15, 11:44 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
http://www.katu.com/news/local/Travelers-say-so-long-to-iconic-PDX-carpet-289542681.html
…There seems to be a certain sentimental connection to the PDX carpet, which has inspired a social media phenomenon with travelers - dropping their carry-ons to snap a picture of their feet. The carpet acting as a backdrop for the journey ahead, or the first steps back into Portland….Some companies are paying tribute to the carpet in the form of merchandise. Rogue ales recently rolled out their “PDX Carpet” India Pale Ale.
PDX’s “Made in Oregon” store, according to Szymanski, has had a hard time keeping the carpet pattern apparel in stock, “case in point right now, we have about three pages of back orders on the PDX carpet socks.”
…What will happen to the old PDX carpet? The airport plans on handing large sections of the carpet over to third party retailers, who will then sell or disperse pieces to the public.
Insanity... total insanity... with a healthy dose of merchandising.
3/15/15, 12:20 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
I grew up with those, passing them every time we drove from NJ to visit family in Long Island... the stench was literally nauseating. And I remember when one blew up - I was babysitting and an ungodly roar outside got me to the window - the entire night sky was red, like the end of the world. A very scary thing for a 12 year old alone in a stranger's house with a stranger's kids! Some tank in Elisabeth had exploded (it was in the 70's)... mordor indeed!
3/15/15, 12:28 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...
3/15/15, 12:49 PM
AlnusIncana said...
A very nice post!
It's good to get a nice pat on the back sometimes (I haven't had a TV since I moved away from home 12 years ago.)
Unrelated, I have personal reasons for celebrations!!
Today is the last day on my cubicle work.
After a youthful mistake of going into a career that wasn't for me, and 5 years of toiling away to recover from that mistake, I am now in position for a second change.
I look forward to all the extra time to spend on my Green Wizards projects enormeously.
3/15/15, 1:00 PM
Unknown said...
@Ed Boyle--Jewish theology has had free will and personal responsibility as its bedrock for more than two thousand years. If you read the Tanach (Bible) in approximately the order in which the books were composed, you can see a gradual transition from collective responsibility and generationally inherited divine rewards and punishments to complete individual responsibility. The Prophets argue both sides of the question.
By the rabbinical period (after the canon was closed) the triumph of personal responsibility was pretty complete. Hillel would have been horrified at the assertion that human beings do not choose their actions.
Jewish tradition generally regards "God's plan" as being part of the revealed part of the religion and therefore beyond argument, but the Bible contains several stories about people who disputed or bargained with God about the details of the plan's execution and were not punished for doing so. One might make the case that Job's troubles came about because he didn't question enough. If Job hadn't been so upright and obedient, the Satan would not have chosen him for a test case.
3/15/15, 1:31 PM
Gloucon X said...
If our intention is to reduce the overall destructive impact on the ecology of this planet, then focusing one by one on privileged individual’s lifestyles while ignoring the lives of the mass of humanity is not going to get us there. A better way would be to focus on rebuilding communities so that everyone can move towards the kind of LESS lifestyle that helps all people and the environment. A focus solely on individual lifestyle is a romanticist lone-cowboy approach -- it is a delusion to ignore the fact the we all live in community. It isn't a very holistic approach.
3/15/15, 3:36 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
**No offense to the writers of historical romances, many of whom really do their research. Though many who do, run into the roadblock of "But the publishers insist you give the reading public what the publishers think they want."
3/15/15, 3:36 PM
weedananda said...
I have had the great privilege of being an devoted ADR reader from the very beginning...can't recall how I got turned on to it but it was in the first few weeks of its existence. For nine years now my week practically revolves around it and I almost go into withdrawal when you take your periodic vacations! I'm eternally grateful for your deep wisdom, erudition, humor and life-changing insights and perspectives. Thank you.
Shortly after reading this week's post and the numerous comments about 3D printing, I came across this tidbit at Alternet in an article titled 8 Surprising Reasons Why Now Might Be the Worst Time in History to Buy a Home:
"Thanks to the volatility in the economy and real estate market, as well as the emerging green trends exploding onto the scene, this may be the best time in the world to wait to buy. Here are eight reasons why it's worth holding off.
1. 3-D printed homes. While this is an idea that is still in prototype, the potential of this technology is staggering to consider. Not only could it significantly reduce building costs and construction time, it could also create design opportunities that have never before been possible.
The 3-D printing process for homes is emerging in a couple of different ways. One idea on the drawing board right now is to use a huge 3-D printer that is brought in by semi-trucks and set up on the building site. Cement trucks would then be used to load the printer with building materials. A second possibility currently being researched at MIT would involve much smaller printers working together as a 3-D printing team to print the building in concert (which frankly sounds much more practical).
Whole article here: http://www.alternet.org/economy/8-surprising-reasons-why-now-might-be-worst-time-history-buy-home
I must also give a shout out to Curtis for his comment describing quantitative easing as some "terrible, futuristic laxative". it still makes me laugh every time I think of it. Best to all and many thanks for the outstanding commentary.
3/15/15, 3:51 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Clay, oh, granted. An industrial society could probably work just as well with a guaranteed annual income, so most people didn't have jobs at all -- just those who wanted more, or had a passion for the work. The vast majority of work done in America today would be better off left undone.
Montesano, keep us posted!
Dermot, I think it's a slight exaggeration to say that that chart is the stupidest thing on the internet ever -- but only a slight one. It compares with real history the way the Flat Earth Society's output compares with real cosmology. Thanks for the link, btw -- a very thoughtful blog.
Cathy, true enough; if people are so starved for meaning that an airport carpet will do, things are pretty dire. As for Mordor, no argument there. I was 19 when I first saw a refinery, up north of Bellingham, WA -- I was in a VW minibus with friends, on our way to buy a goat for the farm where we lived -- and if a Nazgul on a pterodactyl had come out of the clouds to perch on one of the fractionating towers, the scene couldn't have been more sinister.
Alnus, congratulations on your escape!
Gloucon, now show me where I said that individual lifestyles are the only thing that matter. That said, if none of the individuals that make up a community is willing to use LESS, there's no way the community as a whole is going to do so, you know.
Weedananda, oh bright gods. Just when you think they can't get any stupider -- sure, let's condemn tens of millions of construction workers to permanent unemployment and beggary, so that we can have big machines vomiting out houses with all the craftsmanship and uniqueness of any other lump of industrially extruded plastic!
3/15/15, 5:45 PM
Curtis said...
1. I don't think Mr. Greer ever said individual solutions are enough. But we live in a context where we are unlikely to get top-down effective change. In this context, individuals doing something is better than nothing.
(Correct me if I'm wrong on this portrayal of your comments, Mr. Greer.)
2. Individuals' behaviour and actions can spread through diffusion. If a person does something successfully and can teach others, sell it to others, give it away to others, etc., then it could quickly become a larger movement. Experimentation plus diffusion at this point seems to be our best way forward. That might be a community change, but it might not.
3. Being the change you want to see removes from your opponents the ability to charge hypocrisy. Most of us recognize the tu quoque fallacy. Example:
A - Using less is great!
B - But you don't use less, therefore your argument is invalid!
...Is fallacious logical reasoning but points out a huge moral reasoning problem. I'd also add since environmentalists are a smart bunch that they should recognize that people will use the charge of hypocrisy to disarm the movement. That's what critics have done to Gore. For all its failings, his documentary should have had an effect, but didn't because of this reason.
I agree that big changes would be excellent. The fact that we in North America don't have straight forward carbon taxes with set increases, or a Roosevelt inspired mass retrofit program, makes me grind my teeth at our collective stupidity.
3/15/15, 5:46 PM
Curtis said...
As someone with sympathies on the left, QE was probably one of the most idiotic things we could have done to deal with the crisis. Funny enough, I suspect a lot of people who are real conservatives - not fake ones like we have in Washington or Ottawa - would say exactly the same thing.
3/15/15, 5:56 PM
Denys said...
We love our immediate neighbors around where we live and our home. The power regularly goes out for 3-5 days at a time, once or twice a year (fallen trees on power lines), so its a great way for a neighborhood to bond ;-)
Once we drive into town or go about our local errands, it is not pleasant - short tempered people are in high supply. The local hospital is awful, the school is ranked 232/504 in the state, and the good paying jobs are scarce. It is very common for people to drive 30 miles or more to work.
So this has been the debate for so many years - do we move closer to work and will we even find a home that we can afford. We have to get something half the size to afford it. Good news is taxes would be half too so that's a bonus. Or do we just stay where we are and keep trying to cut expenses. Gas goes to $5 a gallon and we are in deep trouble. I heard a story on NPR with an interview from a shale company that they are saying that is going to happen by end of year, so guess so.
I've spent the last three weeks painting rooms, cleaning out and staging things and the realtor comes Thursday to tell us what are chances are of selling. Homes here have been on the market two years or more before they sell. We don't agree 100% that selling is what is best. Wish I knew magic words to say to tip the balance.
So easy to see how relationships fall apart through this stress. My mind spins with possible futures and worries. Wish I had a crystal ball.
3/15/15, 6:01 PM
latheChuck said...
When the chief executive of a big troubled company says "Drastic measures will be needed to survive, and therefore I will take a salary of $1 per year until we show a profit", it's not because his salary is going to make the difference between failure or success. It's because he wants to show Leadership.
There's a vast difference between Leadership and Management, though managers often prefer to be called leaders.
When a man looks at the evidence of sea-level rise and relocates from a progressive-minded seaport to a crumbling post-industrial transportation hub in the mountains, that's Leadership, whether anyone follows or not.
3/15/15, 6:49 PM
Gloucon X said...
Right, you did not say that. Now would you care to make an estimate of the number of posts and comments on your blog focusing on individual lifestyle matters vs those focusing on a community or societal approach.
“That said, if none of the individuals that make up a community is willing to use LESS, there's no way the community as a whole is going to do so, you know.”
I’m sure that there are at least some people in many communities who are practicing LESS and have been doing so for many years. This is certainly true of your old stomping grounds in the NW. But you said yourself that this had little impact -- maybe it’s time to try and figure out why.
3/15/15, 8:02 PM
Unknown said...
I'm bloodyminded enough to acknowledge that when refineries are lit up at night, I find them beautiful, impressive and mysterious.
We can all agree on the "impressive" part.
A thing can be beautiful even if we know that it represents something horrible. Ideas about what is beautiful are also culturally taught. It's my understanding that the Alps were not considered beautiful until the Romantic era. With the exception of bridges (Hart Crane wrote a poem "To the Brooklyn Bridge"), we aren't taught to find beauty in industrial construction, and so we usually don't.
Anybody can admire a horse, but when I moved to Twin Peaks in SF, it took me five or six years to make up my mind whether the Sutro Tower was the ugliest thing I ever saw or a magnificent piece of modernist sculpture. Seeing it draped in fog like a dancing nymph finally decided me on the side of great site-specific monument to the Triffids.
For health reasons I wouldn't want to live next door to a refinery (even if they didn't catch fire so often). Judging from the price of houses in Richmond, California, which has splendid Bay views, interesting freighters pulling into the refueling jetty daily, good weather and plenty of transportation, not many people do.
3/15/15, 8:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Gloucon, there are scores of other forums and websites that discuss community and societal approaches; there are very few that talk about individual action -- and if there are hordes of people using LESS in their own lives in the Pacific Northwest for any reason other than poverty, I somehow never managed to mee them. Thus talking about individual action and individual responsibility seems useful to me. If you don't find that a subject that interests you, hey, no problem -- as already noted, you can easily find more congenial reading somewhere else.
Unknown Deborah, de gustibus non disputandum est. (Blecch.)
3/15/15, 9:13 PM
Janet D said...
I recently heard the relatively famous farmer/author Joel Salatin (via the internet) respond to question "where would you look for land right now?". His answer was, (basically, I'm paraphrasing) - "Wherever I already was familiar with the land/climate and where I had personal contacts. Those things are enormous advantages and take time to build up." He also said he's much rather have a smaller farm closer to a metropolitan area than 200 acres three hours away. The point being that, as JMG has said many times, adapting in place may very well be better than being on the rural farm.
@Denys, re: reluctant spouse. My husband is not sure how "on board" he is with "all this", but he supports me in doing/purchasing what I've done for preparedness (books, tools, gardening & permaculture training, ER supplies, etc). At times I've been frustrated with the fact that I'm the one doing the majority of the work on any & all preparations, but I'm grateful for the fact that we can talk about it, that he sees what the risks are & that he thinks it's worthwhile to prepare. He's just not sure it's going to happen in the next decade, so it falls to me now....
I think we "Prepper" types can be very happy with a spouse who maybe isn't "all in" but who is supportive. If you don't have that much, not sure what to tell you. If you have kids, divorce doesn't accomplish much in this scenario (IMHO).
3/15/15, 9:31 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
I did have an encounter with one, when one client had placed their 3D printer in the lab where I worked. It only got occasional use but spent far more time being repaired, usually for a leak of its plastic resin, which typically drove everyone out of the lab.
3D printers have their place (as others have mentioned) as a high cost, quick prototyping tool. Not for production but as a test for the drafting behind the part.
That 3D printers have become the rage, with thoughts of them replacing manufacturing and other means of making things just exposes the ignorance of the population as to how things are made and why.
Even with all the complaints about how shoddily things are made these days, people seem anxious to rush to a new magic box where you could download a file, press a button and out pops some gadget. No thought about what sort of quality this new contraption will produce or the costs.
Even funnier is the thought that people who have trouble programming a new phone number into their cell phone or activating a feature on their computer will have no trouble importing the cad drawings for say a fuel injector for their car and assembling them so that they will "print" properly.
It is perhaps the most delusional meme I have heard in a long time...
3/16/15, 4:06 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yes, well things have certainly taken a twist and turn towards the truly bizarre in politics Down Under. Incidentally, it is however being noticed and spoken about, so who knows whether this is the new normal or merely an aberration?
The present federal government here is certainly one of the first to pursue the policies of its supporters at the expense of all others. It is a strategy of sorts, I guess, and possibly appears quite valid to them. Anyway, they've forgotten that 95% of the eligible population turn out on voting day to have their say (or people get fined - it is compulsory to vote after all). The interesting thing to note is that the party that forms the federal government (i.e. the majority of the lower house) are slowly losing the governments in each state one by one. I believe that there is another state election in NSW shortly.
All that aside, what really interests me is that in the upper house, 18 of the 72 senators (each state equally gets 6 senators and each mainland territory gets 2) represent either minor parties or are independents. Interesting times indeed to see the major parties losing their grip on the middle ground. Watch this space!
Also, you may be interested to note the state of play in coal seam gas (fracking) here. It was covered in an excellent article:
Coal Seam Gas more trouble than it is worth for AGL
To save you a bit of reading trouble, I recommend zooming in on the quantum of the write downs (and talk of walking away) and reported geological issues going on for the two main players in the market AGL and Santos.
The final quote is a true gem: "Is BTEX (an acronymn for the apparently carcinogenic Benzene, Toluene, Etyhlbenzene and Xylenes) an issue for AGL? No" so says the GM for Santos Energy NSW. He may indeed be correct because AGL may in fact be long gone by the time it actually becomes a problem for the people living there, so you can't say the guy isn't speaking the plain truth.
Cheers
Chris
3/16/15, 4:30 AM
Dagnarus said...
3/16/15, 8:05 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
3/16/15, 8:38 AM
MP said...
It's about a presentation that Arthur Berman gave which includes a full slide pack. There was a Q&A with geologists as well. Some big takeaways (that you will not be surprised by):
- The bullish EIA projects that US oil production will peak in 2016
- Shale gas production is falling for all US plays except Marcellus, and that is estimated to peak in 2020
- Mr. Berman also notes that prospects for US shale gas operators are not so good. He uses the term "toast" to describe most of them...
3/16/15, 9:05 AM
Janet D said...
She also said something that applies to far more than CAFOs; it could also be said about our entire system:
"The power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated.
Amen.
3/16/15, 9:37 AM
The other Tom said...
I can't speak from experience about broaching this topic with a spouse since I am single, but when I speak to single women the conversation goes a lot further if I present myself as a frugal and practical person and leave out the ethics or politics unless they bring it up.
Like a lot of ADR readers, I suppose, I've evolved through phases of being radically outspoken and also more subtle approaches of expressing the same beliefs.
Really, in talking to anyone, I'm trying to avoid the abstract these days, because abstractions sound suspiciously like bs to anyone of a different background.
If you're on the left you don't want to hear about trickle down or the miracle of the free market, and if you're on the right it's those government regulations that drive you up the wall.
When I tell people I walk to most places I focus on how much cheaper and more pleasant it is, without going into my belief that it will soon be a necessity, that people who have to drive everywhere are in for a very rough time. I've had conversations with people who are quite Republican about the hidden costs of cheap gas, like aircraft carriers and endless wars, and they to some extent agree with me if we talk about just money and not something completely abstract to them like climate change or Hubbert's curve.
In my area of southern New England a lot of people are gradually going off the grid because there is no other way, they are poor. At my local watering hole most of us grew up in small towns and many of us are gardeners or hunters or foragers, etc. The other night we talked about getting more organized, combining our skills into a small bartering network.
I'm thinking that as this way of living spreads, new political or social abstractions will follow, and that in the meantime there is little point in arguing.
I can only imagine what it's like for people with kids in school, in an age when your kids entire future, the difference between homelessness and success is supposed to be getting them into the right preschool, and the idea that we will all have to be more self educated is anathema. It seems to me that all the focus in education is on the competition for scarce jobs, and nothing about how to live for the majority that won't have those jobs.
3/16/15, 10:18 AM
Dan the Farmer said...
She advises me that this will free me up to find someone more in line with my goals of LESS, although she doesn't use the acronym. I can't say she's wrong, but it's not the easiest thing for me to do to help her load without some grumpiness.
3/16/15, 12:15 PM
peacegarden said...
I came to knowledge of peak oil and collapse long before my husband; I felt lonely as I travelled up and down and back and forward through the stages of grief, yet knew that my beloved was not yet ready to be onboard.
He came from a background of “doing it right, following the rules, working hard and a good life will be had”. It worked for him; his life followed a trajectory to a position of middle-class comfort.
As things began to unravel, especially the debacle of 2006-2008, he started questioning his belief system (a 40% drop in the 401K helped that along!) The promise was broken, or was it the spell? He couldn’t get enough of books about the financial meltdown. I watched him evolve and was there to support him as he made that difficult crossing.
I am glad I had made that crossing a few years before him, as I was able to be compassionate and accepting as his world view changed. He had a partner for his own trips up and down and back and forward.
We are now working together…it wasn’t a flip from black to white, but a gradual taking control of our future with eyes as wide open as possible. Getting out of debt, deciding to adapt in place, growing more of our food reliably, brewing beer and mead and studying herbal medicine has been an adventure. We slip a lot, but get up and get going again. Our motto is “The perfect is the enemy of the good enough”, otherwise known as the Sistine Chapel Syndrome…I recently offered to build him a scaffold if he was going to spend any more time re-plastering the bathroom ceiling and we had a good laugh. Collapsing now and avoiding the rush is what we are doing, one baby step at a time. LESS, especially stuff!
I don’t know if this is at all useful for anyone else, but I would like to offer my experience as one way it can work out; there are as many ways as there are people, I know, but it just might help.
Peace,
Gail
3/16/15, 2:17 PM
Myriad said...
Replying to: "I think your proposal is brilliant, and would certainly encourage you to submit it. Of course they won't accept it, but I hope that one or two of the people who read the proposal might begin to grasp the possibility that producing big glossy books about our problems doesn't do much to solve them."
Thanks for the encouragement! I did submit it, the same day I posted my comment, and I had the same hope in mind. Best case is if it gets passed around or inspires some discussion among the reviewers.
I do have to be prepared, though, for the unlikely event they do accept it. (After all they're only offering a few free copies, relatively cheap for them, not project funding). I have a script ready, but if I agree to perform it, it will stretch my comfort zone. To me, burning a book is a profanity. It'll take clear careful intention to make it a useful communication.
3/16/15, 3:13 PM
Justin said...
I am guessing you may already have seen this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/16/the-melting-of-antarctica-was-already-really-bad-it-just-got-worse/
3/16/15, 3:52 PM
oilman2 said...
I think it may be that the advent of the industrial revolution, oil (as fuel and feedstock) and then the digital revolution (yet extant) - several things - have transpired to make the current economies "impersonal". One does not know who made any one thing which is bought, or if it was a machine or a group of people making widgets in a 4th world sweatshop. This has especially extended into what we eat, where there now exists a poultry muscle group called the "nugget", which people eat similar to a gizzard or liver.
Before and even during the initial stages of the industrial revolution, one knew the watchmaker, shoe repairman, butcher, dairy farmer, etc. (or at least the distributor of their wares within the city). Today, products are built across the globe (thanks to cheap oil) by faceless corporations with public relations and marketing departments whose job it is to "put a face" on the corporation, ie 'branding'.
Sole proprietorships have a brand already - the owner - but are penalized tax-wise - hence their rarity. So there are huge, global industries today that make a living trying to make the general public believe that a corporation shares virtues/values/personhood with their customers. In effect, to anthropomorphize the corporation due to the disconnect and resulting cognitive dissonance that corporations have by virtue of their being an artificial construct. A cobbler does not have this issue nor the disconnect - he is what he says he is, and it is apparent to all.
That being said, as the world inevitably swallows cheap oil and is left with only the caviar equivalent, this more expensive energy cannot support these anthropomorphizing industries, or globalism or many other things considered 'normal' today. And these same 'normal things' would be viewed as insanity by most people from the late 19th century, IMHO.
I just imagine a farmer from 1895 encountering a box of chicken nuggets or watching a commercial for beer or ED or any number of 'normal' things - the word "incomprehensible" doesn't do his expression justice, most likely.
3/16/15, 5:04 PM
oilman2 said...
I think this is happening more than many people realize. Here in Texas, one of the burgeoning enterprises is the "RV Park", where one can pull in their RV and get water, sewer, electric and cable internet for $350-500 per month. With many unable to make the $1500+ per month cost of suburban housing and monthly tax escrow, these RV Parks are growing immense within an hour or so drive of many cities. This is very much a transition from more to much less.
I also think that many today have reached saturation point in terms of technology (I-phone crap comes to mind here, where nothing has really been new or substantially better since the 3G I-phone rollout). My kids don't use electric can openers or buy self-warming seats in their cars nor do they choose McMansions - opting for simpler and smaller from both practical and economic rationales. I personally have thrown out scads of cheap chinese widgets and gadgets in the last 15 years - simply easier to crank it by hand than to spend 3 hours trying to understand the poorly written manual, illogical control panel or even the impossible assembly of many "essential gadgets" ostensibly purveyed as "labor saving".
My children believe I was severely short changed by paying for their college educations - uniformly, they say that their education, while helpful to a degree, did little more than teach them to memorize effectively. After viewing the things they were taught, I agreed. Yet there are no alternatives to college that are less expensive. Apprenticeships are non-existent and every job requires some type of government "certification".
Both red and blue voting stalwarts sense that the machine is broken or at least the cogs are out of whack - but there are only red and blue allowed as choices, with the occasional blue masquerading as green or the occasional red masquerading as white. The payoff in politics is just too lucre-filled to attract altruistic people.
The red/blue game is having attendance issues (note resurgence of George Carlins POV lately).
Less is making a comeback sans Ned Ludd, by either necessity or choice.
Hypercomplexity is beginning to perplex and confound many.
It takes a while for people to let go of their paradigms, especially when the next set are not quite visible.
3/16/15, 5:28 PM
Tasha T. said...
I've just finished the months long voyage through the ADR and WoG backlog and I'm siting in the arrival lounge thinking, "All that learning and I know even less than when I started."
You're one of the best teachers I've ever had, and I've only read the syllabus.
I don't know how to thank you.
- - -
This most recent essay reminds me of my trip to Niagara Falls. Rather than take pictures, I made sketches of scenes that stood out to me. Just a few minutes of drawing forced out details that I might have never noticed in a photograph.
And in a literal sense of 'as above so below', as my vision blurred due to water in my eyes, the pictures blurred due to water on my paper. I love those smudged, winkled pages.
3/16/15, 7:17 PM
Unknown said...
I really like The other Tom's latest comment. I think Tom's method for finding common ground with people who have different pictures of the world is very practical. I'm also heartened by his description of the first stirrings of an informal community of exchange and support. It cheers me because it sounds like the way Americans, going back to the time of de Toqueville, used to recognize a shared need and cooperate with their neighbors to fill it. It's probably no accident that this report comes New England, where old ways of grassroots organizing are not forgotten.
I wanted to link to a story about a different style of cooperation on the Left Coast. Today's San Francisco Chronicle has an article about the keepers of the Lands' End Labyrinth (under City Exposed in section C). Unfortunately I no longer have the physical paper to refer to, and the online version is paywalled. I'm summarizing it to illustrate two points: the emerging religious sensibility that JMG wrote about a while back, and the fact that people are still looking for ways to connect with others and make a contribution, but the ways they do it are sometimes different from the past.
Circa 2005, a local man laid out a large (about 35 feet across) labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral pattern on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Land's End in San Francisco (northwestern corner of the city, customarily a free zone for benign quiet outdoor activities). He gathered rocks at the site to mark the lines. A couple of times people moved the rocks or chucked all of them away over the cliff, and he laid it out again.
When he moved away, a woman who liked to hike there took over maintaining the labyrinth, which amounted to moving back the rocks into the original pattern when people rearranged them. At one point after someone messed it up thoroughly, a complete stranger who liked to walk it announced a work day on Facebook to repair it. About twenty people showed up and by the time the regular keeper arrived, the work was nearly done. She recently went on vacation, and on returning discovered that someone had turned the labyrinth into a maze. She put the (eighteen inch wide) paths back.
All this labyrinth making, walking and repairing has been completely unofficial. There's an older rock labyrinth of comparable size in a park in the East Bay hills, but it doesn't have a view of the ocean.
3/16/15, 11:21 PM
Tammh said...
As an Australian suburbanite, I actually think some suburbs could be a good option for collapsing in place, at least during the first couple of steps of the decline, especially if you’re well set up and have a good neighbourhood community. For us, moving costs including taxes would be $40,000+ and then all the infrastructure to get set up again, and we might run out of time. Also, community will be just so important and can take a long time to rebuild if people in the new location aren’t interested.
Not sure about you but our 800m2 block is enough to self-supply (off-grid) all our own water, solar water heating, solar electric and most cooking needs. I think decline will happen slowly enough that I’m more worried about malnutrition than calories. We have cruddy soils but I produce enough food for at least 8 people to avoid serious malnutrition on an otherwise grain/dried legume heavy diet and even supply a chunk of our calories. A small inner city block would be much more restrictive. Suburbia’s main problem is lack of woodlots for space heating (and houses which mold when unheated) but the inner cities are no better and we’ve used our saved moving money to absolutely minimise our space heating needs.
The size of a suburban home as well as the block can be an advantage– in a collapse scenario, room for plenty of food stores to cover temporary shortages, a small library, rooms for boarders, and storing tools all seem to be efficient uses of space. Boarders in particular can help pay bills and it is more efficient to cook and heat communally than in several separate dwellings. In our area, very few people carpool at the moment but I think carpooling will make it affordable to travel into the city for as long as the jobs last. As the jobs go, the garage will come in handy for running several home businesses.
The final scenario I’ve contemplated is Detroit – lots of empty foreclosed houses and not enough people even to support small home businesses. However, even then I’d still rather be in the suburbs where I can ‘adopt’ the yards of a few foreclosed houses rather than dependent on shaky government services in the inner city where most of the ground is concreted. Eventually there may be serious problems with roaming gangs in the suburbs, but I figure that is where having a good neighbourhood community comes in.
3/17/15, 1:07 AM
Thomas Reis said...
3/17/15, 3:03 AM
Scotlyn said...
@Greg - your project sounds great! Some name suggestions - probably lame, but may spark something with you: GoodFathers, The Thrifters, Breaking Dad, Paternalia...
@anyone discussing the marriage angle re collapsing in place... no big advice, but I definitely am on the side of communicating via practicality and positivity.
I have done the sums for our own achievements of the past 2-3 years (some energy use reductions are in the "have to" category, some in the "chose to"). In 2013, our average domestic power usage was around 30kwh/day... We're now running at around 12 kwh/day. In 2013 our car was doing around 40km/day, now its doing around 24km/day. (if you apply the withouthotair.com guesstimates, thats a drop from about 32kwh/day to around 19kwh/day).
These drops (which can be improved on) reflect conscious behavioural changes, but also savings - a clear, satisfying positive.
And there is the fact that what we then salvage, make, fix, barter instead of buying makes us feel resourceful and capable, and that is a great feeling that can be (IMO) contagious. It especially counters the destructive feeling of helplessness that pervades so much of modern life.
We don't talk a lot about collapse, but we do congratulate one another daily on small accomplishments like these... and that feels good and encouraging.
3/17/15, 5:54 AM
The other Tom said...
That is very interesting, to hear about the RV parks springing up as affordable housing. I have wondered if that would happen.
As a cheaper version of this, I have noticed people who are "stealth camping" in vans in my area. The idea is to use a plain white van that looks like any contractor van, so they can park anywhere, and nobody has to know it is their home. I talked to one guy doing this who is an engineer. He could afford an apartment but he thinks housing costs are ridiculous, and he is trying to set himself up for a more difficult future. He joined a gym, where he can use the shower for something like $20 a month.
3/17/15, 10:00 AM
Nastarana said...
Dear Denys, A house which already has gardens, insulation, permaculture in place strikes me as a pretty sound investment. Just how secure is the job 40mi. away? If the job you mention is in a down town,or just outside of a town, you might we well placed if you are in a perimeter location. Is there no public transportation to the job, or possibility of ridesharing? Maybe your spouse would agree to do all the family shopping on the way to and from work, a pretty serious sacrifice to ask of a tired spouse, and agree to park the car on weekends. As for any hostile neighbors, have you tried sharing fresh tomatoes, fruit from the trees, hand made donations for local charity raffles? The sources of hostility might not be what you think they are.
3/17/15, 10:20 AM
Nastarana said...
American critics, it goes almost without saying, cannot be trusted. For a good example, look up the gibberish Lionel Trilling wrote about Mansfield Park, a flawed tragic masterpiece with a tacked on obligatory happy ending which I doubt any serious reader has ever believed, notwithstanding all Miss Austen's genius.
For an American impressionist whose work might be in its own way as good as Monet, consider Childe Hassam, especially the later watercolors depicting the Eastern Oregon desert.
For a great American composer whose symphonies and other compositions merit inclusion with the greatest of European masterpieces, listen to some of the works of William Grant Still.
3/17/15, 10:40 AM
Curtis said...
I just started reading Donnella Meadow's book "Thinking in Systems." Only one chapter in, and I can already tell it's a great book. Systems thinking must be one of the best antidotes to many of the problems this post discussed. It also gives you a sense of how destructive misleading information in a system is, too.
It annoys me though that with two degrees in sociology I was never exposed to it.
3/17/15, 11:26 AM
Denys said...
Your honesty in your experiences and your perspectives leave me feeling less alone. It seems that when we read about the economy, peak oil, climate change, etc, we all hear "danger danger" and want to react accordingly. Other people around us hear something else. I often wonder if those of us who have ears to hear have been sprinkled throughout the population as a way to help keep it from completely collapsing into chaos?
I wonder a lot of things these days but I have to say that I have more hope than I did when I first started down this path 8 years ago. This is such a thoughtful considerate community JMG has developed and if it can live here in this corner of the internet, then it can live elsewhere too.
Back to painting.....
3/17/15, 12:44 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
There are people camping in the local Barringo picnic ground every single night now. Just sayin...
Cheers
Chris
3/17/15, 2:05 PM
FiftyNiner said...
As to Detroit, there is the rest of the story. Beginning way back in the Great Depression Blacks and whites from the South who had migrated north looking for work and found themselves unemployed took to planting vegetables and fruit on vacant lots. It is a tradition that has continued to this day and has blossomed greatly in the past few years. Check out TakePart.com. Their article says that as much as 200 tons of produce is produced annually on these urban farms. I've actually read somewhere that it is much higher. The city is apparently on board because it is helping the property values in the affected neighborhoods. We always hear of poor Detroit as a cautionary tale, but just maybe they have something to teach us about "collapsing in place."
3/17/15, 4:28 PM
Moshe Braner said...
"The United States has urged countries to think twice before signing up to a new China-led Asian development bank that Washington sees as a rival to the World Bank, after Germany, France and Italy followed Britain in saying they would join."
3/17/15, 6:57 PM
onething said...
I'm not seeing a clear advantage to selling and moving. It sounds like you would pay the same for less house because it is more expensive closer to the center? But in that case, why would your taxes be less?
Selling and buying right now are a bit dicey too. I would look hard at things like comparing the interest rates and not giving up equity. If the only advantage to moving is saving on gas, I don't think it is worth it.
3/17/15, 10:38 PM
Tsthoggua Hastur said...
Since we're talking about Stewart Brand and the bright greens' movement, would this article count as favoring neoliberal mainstream economics, bright green economics, or neither ?
3/18/15, 2:26 PM
latheChuck said...
3/18/15, 4:14 PM
Unknown said...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/jesse-ausubel-nature-is-rebounding/id186908455?i=332320564&mt=2
The basic gist of the talk was that we are using far fewer natural resources to get the same consumer goods because things are lighter, use less energy to produce, etc.
The real benefits will come when more companies move towards--or are forced by competition--to use what nature has already figured to produce the same goods with non-toxic processes that use tremendously less energy. (Sorry can't remember what this field of chemistry is called.
I like the Long Now Foundation podcast--though not every speaker--and esp. like the older Bioneers talks (esp. if you can locate the full presentations, not the heavily edited versions they put out in a podcast.)
3/19/15, 7:15 AM