-
08 Feb ' 11:10
Today I'm going to Burlington, then Syracuse on the weekend, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Oddly, Pittsburgh is sort of a Greyhound dead end. It's hard to get anywhere from there without leaving or arriving at a time when you should be sleeping. If someone in Columbus or Indianapolis can pick me up and drop me off at the station, I'll happily stay a night. Otherwise I'll probably take an overnight bus to St Louis, then Chicago if I have time, and end my bus pass in Ann Arbor, where a reader has offered to drive me to Minnesota, and another reader might drive me all the way back, or I'll take the train.
I'm in New York City, staying with Andy in Brooklyn. Yesterday I walked around Times Square and Central Park. People in Manhattan are nicer than I expected, and also less happy. Everyone can tell I'm a visitor because I'm the only one with a coat that's not black or grey.
. I've had lots of internet time, made three more pies, and bought a thrift store coat to add an extra layer for my trip north.
January 17. I have loads of invitations and limited time, and I'm trying to hit as many as possible without wearing myself out. That means I'm giving higher priority to locations with a bunch of invitations, or locations where transportation is super-easy.
-
08 Feb ' 06:09
February 8. Yesterday I almost speculated about how GPS could be used to make us smarter, if the devices did not give instructions, but just showed a zoomable map and let us do our own navigation. Apparently this is already an option. Erik comments:
GPS is a significant learning augment for me. The 'trick' is that I never use turn by turn navigation, but I study the map and find my own way.
This raises a question for techno-utopians: Which world is better, one where technologies are selected and designed so we can only use them to make ourselves stronger, or one where we are free to use technologies to make ourselves weaker? If the latter, what if most people use most technologies in a short-sighted way, so that on the whole, they make life worse? Never mind utopia -- how does this even count as good? I would answer that the freedom to make mistakes eventually makes us stronger, when we learn not to make the mistakes.
-
07 Feb ' 11:40
February 7. The other day Hacker News linked to a reddit comment with a brilliant rule for self-improvement: start every day as a producer, not a consumer. From there, I'm thinking about the grey area between producer and consumer, and all the computer games where you are consuming the illusion of being a producer. Producing makes our lives feel meaningful, so why would someone choose fake production over real production? I can think of two reasons. The bad reason is ambition and laziness: some people would rather push a button and build a fake castle, than work all day to build a real bookshelf. The good reason is that power has become so centralized that there is little room for autonomous production. Would you rather build a house in Minecraft, working from your own design at your own pace, or work on a stressful construction site building an ugly house for someone you don't know? Also on the self-improvement subject, via the financial independence subreddit, a nice blog post on minimialism:
I like showing up for a group mountain hike where inevitably everyone's wearing specialized wicking techno-clothing, boots that cost more than my monthly rent, carrying giant back packs, and usually someone even has carbon-fiber walking poles. Meanwhile I'm there in my sneakers, cotton t-shirt, with my lunch stuffed into the leg pockets of my cargo pants and a big bottle of water in my hand. Guess who's usually the first to the summit?
The author claims not to be a minimalist because he does it for practical reasons rather than virtuous reasons. I would almost say the opposite: if you reduce your stuff for anything other than practical reasons, you're not a minimalist because you don't really understand it. Also on the subject of more stuff being bad for you, an important argument that GPS navigators make us stupid. The idea is that without the devices, we have to build cognitive maps, which is great mental exercise. I appreciate all the people on this tour who have given me rides using GPS devices, but I would never use one myself. I always go on google maps (or openstreetmap.org) and sketch a map with pen and paper. When you're traveling, the most important thing is understanding where you are. With GPS navigators, I can feel the understanding of where I am being sucked out of my mind and locked away in a computer.
February 7. There are some great comments in the discussion about yesterday's subject of raising kids. Moarbrains writes, "I am a little disappointed that Ran thought this article was worthwhile. How does this parenting style fit into his schema of power-with as opposed to power-over?" That's a good question, because it leads to the important distinction between constraint and coercion. Notice that the article is completely about constraint, setting limits, and not at all about forcing kids to do things they don't want to do. A perfect society or family has no coercion at all, but every universe of more than one person needs constraint. If kids get in the habit of making unreasonable demands and being obeyed, they will turn into adults who use power-over. A power-with system needs members who respect the boundaries of others and can let go of desires and demands that cross those boundaries.
January 11. I've been reading Masanobu Fukuoka's , and my favorite idea in the book is that there's no such thing as progress or regression, only movement toward or away from the center. This is liberating because it disconnects human technological innovation from value, either positive or negative. In practice, what we call "progress" has mostly moved us away from the center, because we're trying new things and making mistakes. But it's equally possible for technological innovation to move us toward the center, if we learn how to do it right.
January 9. Of course it doesn't have to be this way. Christienne, who teaches yoga, points out that postures are only one part of yoga, overemphasized in the west. A good yoga program would integrate the postures with relaxation, body awareness, and a culture of going with the flow rather than striving. Ideally we wouldn't even need to follow poses, because we would all have the skill to improvise whatever exercises we needed at the moment. The farther we get from this understanding, the more we fall into rigid and uniform routines that are inevitably wrong for us. This reminds me of how religion starts with direct experience of the divine, but often hardens into meaningless rules and memorized prayers.
January 7. Gabriel sends an interesting sci-fi story, . It's about a world where omnipotent AI's allow humans to choose their level of excitement and safety, and the protagonist lives in a perpetual action movie with no chance of being seriously hurt. I think we would get bored with this really fast, like a four year old who imagines utopia as a giant pile of toys. Still, I think it would be worthwhile to create this world, and find out what happens after we get bored.
-
06 Feb ' 12:41
February 6. Last night my Plainfield hosts took me to a great sauna potluck, so I missed the Super Bowl. Most years I'll watch it because the game is usually fun and I like to analyze the commercials as a window on the American collective consciousness. This year Kunstler has it covered in a new post: All Screaming Id, No Brains, No Honor. In his analysis of the ads, Americans know the system is collapsing, they wrongly blame outsiders, and they foolishly imagine they will personally thrive. There's also a great bit about Madonna: "Message to American women: be sluts as long as you possibly can because there is nothing else for you in this culture." Kunstler makes a minor mistake on lard. American food is not "lard-laden", but full of hydrogenated vegetable oil, and lard would make us healthier both physically and mentally. I've got a bunch of links stacked up, but for today, just one more, also bashing American culture: Why French Parents Are Superior. I don't endorse the whole article, but a few points should be noncontroversial: 1) It's better to give kids clear boundaries that are consistently enforced, than vague boundaries that are inconsistently enforced. 2) It's good for kids to learn to play by themselves. 3) It's not good if the kids are leading and the parents are always reacting. 4) It's good for kids to learn to delay gratification. I'm not sure how you would follow the last two without following the cruel advice to ignore kids while they "cry it out". This is a subject on which people have strong opinions, so I've made a subreddit link. Setting clear boundaries myself, I will read comments over email but not reply or post them.
-
04 Feb ' 21:13
February 4, late. Thanks John for driving me from Cape Cod up to Plainfield VT, where I'll be staying for at least three more days. This seems to be a great town. When I stay with people who are not happy with where they're living, I invite them to move to Spokane but admit that Portland is the American city with the best culture. Here's a great video from the show Portlandia: The Dream of the 90's
January 31. I really like Manhattan, and I understand why people who have enough money to live anywhere choose to live here. The other day someone had a nice insight about the personality of the city. There are so many cultures here that people can't count on subtle social cues being understood, so they use more direct language.
and explored the woods in Central Park. Tomorrow I'll be talking to Andy's class at School of the Future.
January 19. Last night I stayed with Ted and Alison in Gainesville. Ted loves to talk and told me lots of interesting stuff. For example, on the subject of cow milk vs human milk for young humans, Ted says that the nutritional profile of cow milk is better at growing the body, but worse at growing the brain, so you get a bunch of big dumb kids. You might call them human cattle. Then you could ask what economic or cultural factors lead parents to feed their babies cow milk, and I think you would find feedback, where the weak populations get weaker.
January 17. I have loads of invitations and limited time, and I'm trying to hit as many as possible without wearing myself out. That means I'm giving higher priority to locations with a bunch of invitations, or locations where transportation is super-easy. If anyone lives in Cleveland, stopping with you would be easier than not stopping. So far Austin has been my funnest stay, but my present stay in south Atlanta is the most relevant to the usual subjects. This neighborhood is several years ahead in the ongoing collapse. Chris has garden plots in his own yard, the yard next door, the yard across the street, and at a nearby church. He asked if he could use their back lawn to grow food and they instantly agreed. Most of the houses are vacant, and they typically get all the copper ripped out by scavengers, so property managers might let someone live in a house free just to protect it. At the same time, there are enough rich people in the area that gourmet cooks will pay big money for wild mushrooms. Chris grows salad greens to sell at farmers markets, and diverts bags of produce from the waste stream, which gets made into meals, fed to chickens, or composted. Today we walked through Constitution Lakes Park, where an old brickyard has gone back to wilderness, and someone has been making art out of scrap along the trails. My favorite was a pile of broken toilet pieces, with an inscription that says "Ancient porcelain. Thrones of the gods?"
January 15. Two links from Erik, a frequent contributor to the blog, who I met for a few hours in Austin. Erik has had multiple chemical sensitivity, and has mostly cured it through .
January 8, late. Just finished a 26 hour bus trip. This was my first daytime trip through west Texas, and I was surprised at the vast amounts of land that are still totally undeveloped.
January 7. I have time to say a little more on yesterday's subject. At the Huntington I spent a lot of time in the botanical gardens, which are like a museums of living plants, a near-perfect metaphor for civilization gone too far. The plants are alive, but they're disconnected from nature, over-protected, and completely managed. A botanical garden appears to be better than wild nature if you just see a snapshot, but nature is much better if you understand the relationships.
January 6. Today I went to the
-
04 Feb ' 10:47
February 4. Stray links. Daniel sends an article about fungi that can eat polyurethane in landfills. What about other kinds of plastic? Can we just inject it in landfills, or is it more complicated? And if it is that simple, will biotech come up with organisms that eat synthetic materials we're still using? A more plausible doom scenario: how a solar storm could bring down power grids. And Do The Math covers nuclear fusion. Basically it's potentially abundant, but the technology is so hard that even if we can do it, it might be too expensive to be worth the trouble. Meanwhile we already have a giant fusion plant in the sky: the sun. The author suggests that solving storage for solar might be easier than solving fusion, and that humans are pursuing fusion for psychological reasons. I would say that we want to make our own suns so we can feel like gods.
-
02 Feb ' 17:46
February 1. I've arrived in Cape Cod. Internet time will be tight for the next few days so emails will probably be limited to trip logistics. I expect to go to Vermont next, then Syracuse, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh.
-
01 Feb ' 01:48
January 31, late. Sorry if anyone showed up late to Takashi. There was a 90 minute wait so we went up the street to a Cuban place. The cost for four of us was almost exactly the same as the cost for eight of us at the Ethiopian place last night. I really like Manhattan, and I understand why people who have enough money to live anywhere choose to live here. The other day someone had a nice insight about the personality of the city. There are so many cultures here that people can't count on subtle social cues being understood, so they use more direct language.
-
30 Jan ' 23:35
January 30. I'll be in NYC one more day. Today I walked the High Line and explored the woods in Central Park. Tomorrow I'll be talking to Andy's class at School of the Future, and tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 8pm I'll be having another open dinner at Takashi at 456 Hudson. I'll repeat tonight's plan of waiting outside until 8:15 so we have a better sense of how many people to get a table for.
-
29 Jan ' 11:25
January 29. Patricia makes a good comment on Friday's subject: that in primitive cultures, and among very young humans in all cultures, there is no "I-It". Everything is "I-You", even rocks and manufactured items. In materialist philosophy this is disparaged as "animism", but even if it's not true it still makes us treat "things" better. I think it is true, but in a way that's hard to explain in this culture. As I wrote in one of my zines, it's not that rocks have consciousness, but that consciousness has rocks. Or, if reality itself has the structure of a dream, then everything that exists is an extension of the consciousness of the dreamers.
January 29. Tomorrow (Monday) my host in the upper west side has offered to host an afternoon meeting at her place, from noon to 3:30. Email me at gmail and the name is ranprieur and I'll tell you the address. I think there's a good chance nobody can make an afternoon meeting, so I will also be going out for dinner at Awash Ethiopian, the 947 Amsterdam Ave location, at 7pm Monday. I'll wait outside until 7:15, and I'll be wearing black jeans and a dark green jacket. If someone can't make Monday, and wants to buy me dinner Tuesday, I can go anywhere in the transit system. It looks like western Mass is not in the cards for this trip. On either Tuesday or Wednesday I'm heading to Cape Cod for maybe three days, and then northern Vermont.
Search the Site
