Propogating Road Trip Utopia

Another gem from Ran Prieur.  God Bless that creative commons.  

Just for fun, here's my Road Trip Utopia:: 

It's the year 2116, and the world is finally recovering from the deep economic and infrastructure collapse of the 21st century. High tech never went away, but the old highways are weedy rubble, and nobody drives fast except on race tracks. Long-distance travel is done on trains or hybrid airships, and short distance travel is done by foot, bicycle, mule, or slow solar vehicles. All of these are used by adventurers who spend their unconditional basic income on high-grade water condensers and concentrated food, and travel the old roads through the wilderness and the ghost suburbs. They might use computer maps, but the computer never tells them which way to go, because the point is to discover it themselves.

Propagating Prieur's Basic Income Communities

Archived here.  The site is creative commons.

Ran Prieur:

I've been thinking about how we could have unconditional basic income without everyone getting bored, and I got the idea of reverse jobs: organizations that take your money and give you a life. It would be sort of like what we already do with rest homes for old people, except that people of all ages could sign over their government payout to a third party, who would give them food and shelter with some efficiency of scale, and also give them structured activities. Call them basic income communities.

The activities could be anything cheap, like meditation or gaming, or anything that brought in extra income, like woodworking or plant breeding. And because the workers are paying, the whole system would be turned on its head. What we have right now is an authoritarian labor market, where workers have to compete for scarce positions. There's no incentive for your employer to give you a good environment, because if you don't like it, other people are lined up to replace you. But if activities were competing for people to do them, environments would have to get good quickly.

I imagine that some people would stay independent, and spend their own basic income on their own particular low-budget lifes[t]yle. But eventually most people would try out different basic income communities until they found one that was a good fit. I would totally give up financial independence to live in modest and rustic housing, eat healthy cheap food, and hang out with people who play board games and improvise music all day. That's Utopia, and we're pretty close to being able to pull it off.

==

My rhetorical tweak would be to maybe call them basic income centers, because there are both retirement centers and day care centers.  What Prieur describes is really like adult day care. 

Propagating Prieur on Political Myths

From Ran Prieur:

Are political decisions more myth-based than they used to be? If so, what might be causing this dangerous trend? I can think of two stories. One is that political systems are becoming so complicated that it's both more difficult and more boring to observe political reality, so fewer people are doing it.

A scarier possibility is that we are losing the skill of reality-based thinking, because we have fewer opportunities to practice it. If you're deciding which breakfast cereal to buy, it doesn't matter if you use myth-based thinking, because nothing bad will happen either way. More and more of our decisions are like that, partly because of well-meaning regulations that protect us from bad decisions, and partly because big control systems are making more of the decisions that really matter.

===

For the first possibility, society as more complex and boring, compare with analysis of "legibility," (here is a good place to start noodling around).

For the second possibility, compare with Kurt Andersen.

So I believe both possibilities are correct.  I think they are right now highly mutually reinforcing. One question is whether they had to go together?

Gridbeam Content Relocated

[The following has been de-coupled from an older post, How to Go to Work When Collapse is Near, because it was a bit off-topic]

Another bit of home economy I am working on this year is gridbeam, which allows for completely modular, reusable construction.  I think is the perfect open source technology to spread to make scavenging and upcycling possible in the future -- and I think that scavenging and upcycling is the only way we will have a future.

Video example of a gridbeam project:




And a more impressive demonstration:



I hope of this makes for interesting and helpful reading.  Good luck in building the future.

Ran Prieur

I find it hard to believe I have never ran into the work of Ran Prieur before.  He and I have many of the same interests, outlooks, and even spiritual sentiments (insofar as he is identifies as a Taoist-Pantheist).  It's really cool because though my thoughts are on many of the same tracks of his,  he is much further down the road.  He offers so much to learn, targeted to my key interests.  I am torn between gobbling up as much as I can in a binge and, well, everything else in life.

Prieur is a doomer of sorts, though his thoughts on the matter have been developing over time.  Allowing him to explain for himself:

I used to see collapse happening for physical reasons, like resources and climate. Now I see it happening for psychological reasons, that the tasks necessary to keep the system going, are drifting too far from what anyone enjoys doing.

I used to be a doomer optimist, expecting the collapse of complex society to make a better world. Then I expected the big systems to muddle through the coming disasters and tried to figure out the details. My latest thinking is that the global economy will have a series of stairstep collapses, and nation-states are at risk, but high tech will survive and get weirder.

I used to think rural homesteading was a good idea. Then I noticed that almost everyone who tried it was unhappy and had to drive too much, and my strategy changed to getting a modest house in a city with cheap housing, with a yard for fruit trees. Now I'm improvising more than planning.

It is almost uncanny. Back to the track metaphor: each paragraph represents an important mental path I have been on, up to investing much time in research, experiments, and "bets".  And in each case, Prieur is so far ahead of where I have been stuck -- just grappling with the possibilities--  that he can sum up his ideas in elegant prose that reads like common sense.

Also, he is a master of frugality, or more accurately he used sort-term deprivation to build his nest egg, and then uses frugality to keep himself un-employable (able to not be employed).  A man really interested in workshopping the right rhetoric, he went with "dropping out" to describe what he did, though you can tell from his prefaces that he added later that he regretted that choice as well.  (My dear reader, read his essay carefully).  One of Prieur's most famous quotes on the web comes from that essay, and it deals just perfectly with the the questions of privilege that are wracking the brains of the younger millennials right now.

To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your "success" means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others -- it's as if we've all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first, and then help the rest.

===

Here are some of Ran's best ideas since he switched away from long-form pieces.

Basic Income Communities
On Political Myths
Road Trip Utopia

Examine Other Beauties

Early on in “Romeo and Juliet” Benvolio gives Romeo the excellent advice to “examine other beauties.”  I’m of course aware that Benvolio is talking about meeting other girls as a remedy to obsessing over one rejection.  But I also think the principle can be generalized to great effect.  Rather than getting caught up in one set-back, or worse, wallowing in whatever the culture of fear has put on the menu for you today -- seek out something beautiful from some other domain. 

It also interests me that Romeo and Juliet was written during the period that Shakespeare wrote what some call his lyrical plays, which also included “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Richard II” and “Love Labour’s Lost.”

From Wikipedia:

These four plays are argued to represent a phase of Shakespeare's career when he was experimenting with rhyming iambic pentameter as an alternative form to standard blank verse; Richard II has more rhymed verse than any other history play (19.1%), Romeo and Juliet more than any other tragedy (16.6%) and Love's Labour's and Midsummer Night more than any other comedy (43.1% and 45.5% respectively).[112] All four tend to be dated to the period 1594–1595.

Having read these plays, I think Shakespeare was fascinated with how beauty could work on us, and what it’s limits were.  So I think that it’s possible, even likely that Benvolio’s advice came up because beauty was very much on Shakespeare’s mind as a philosophical concept.

So even if your mopey inner-teenager is telling you there is no way it can work, you might want to try to examine other beauties.

Un-Becoming a Non-Exerciser

If you exercise with great regularity, move along -- there is nothing to see here.

I, on the other hand, am trying to find a way for the habit to stick, and stay stuck until I am infirm, or dead.  I don't even know what number attempt this is, but I am writing this now because I think it might happen.  If I'm trying to be a positive person, I'd just say that I have not failed, I have simply gone through a bunch of ways that don't work.  Here's two ways I have failed in the past:


1) scheduling a day to lift and then giving the correct amount of ample rest (see The Four Hour Body).

Every time I did this, I would eventually stop working out, and then a cycle of guilt and depression would do the rest.   (I am coming to grips with how powerful that cycle has been in my life.  It will probably be an upcoming piece).

2) using Seinfeld's don't break the chain technique with writing as well as exercise.

One of the greatest truths about the human condition, one with the greatest impact, is Jim Rohn's simple observation

What is easy to do is also easy not to do.

And that is what makes the don't break the chain technique one of the best things I can recommend.  It takes a simple habit and gives it increasing weight as you go.  It is easy to skip a day, but I'll at least thing twice before breaking a ten day streak.

To start the year, I bought two calendars at a dollar store, and was going to use one for exercise, and one for writing, making a chain of Xs for each day I did the activity.  In practice, I was only able to follow one at a time.  In January, I did some exercise.  And in February and March I got myself to do some writing, so that now my book ("book"?) I am working on sits at 12,000 words (a dissertation, my wife says).  To do this, however, I gave up on exercising, and in turn gave up on eating well, justifying it with a bunch of pseudo-intelligent but realistically dumb-as-hell reasons.  I was left feeling bad, and knowing I could feel better.

The other possible mistake is that I had both calendars in the garage.  I had worked to make the garage a great workshop and  I thought the area where my wife's car goes in could be an exercise area when the car isn't parked.  This all made the physical calendars a case of "out of sight, out of mind." I now use my google calendar to record my chain.

The Current Protocol 

I am using the Seinfeld trick (again here) and only on exercise.  For a day to count towards my chain, I have go through first a mobility and stretching routine based on the Sunrise Salutation and some warm ups I got from qi gong.  Then I either do cardio or one kind of lift (for example push ups, or kettle bell swings, or a hammer curl).  For the cardio to really count, I am looking for progress.  The strength stuff is just make it so it is an every day habit, with no excuses, which is something it looks like I have to do.

I was at 11 straight days when I wrote the first draft.  I am at 20 days now.

Daniel Norris, Eccentric and Frugal Baseball Player

A more artistic video called Offseason.

From an ESPN.com article:

Why, with seven figures in the bank, did he take an offseason job working 40 hours a week at an outdoor outfitter in his hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee? Would it do permanent damage to his back muscles to spend his first minor league season sharing an apartment with two teammates in Florida and sleeping only in a hammock? Why had he decided to spend his first offseason vacationing not on a Caribbean cruise with teammates or partying in South Beach but instead alone in the hostels of Nicaragua, renting a motorcycle for $2 a day, hiking into the jungle, surfing among the stingrays? And was that really a picture on Twitter of the Blue Jays' best prospect, out again in the woods, shaving his tangled beard with the blade of an ax?

This is his first day of spending as a millionaire:

 On the morning in 2011 when his $2 million signing bonus finally cleared, Norris was in Florida with the rest of the Blue Jays' new signees. All of their bonuses had been deposited on the same day, and one of the players suggested they drive to a Tampa mall. They shopped for three hours, and by the time the spree finally ended they could barely fit their haul back into the car. Most players had spent $10,000 or more on laptops, jewelry and headphones. Norris returned with only a henley T-shirt from Converse, bought on sale for $14. It's been a fixture of his wardrobe ever since.

Searcher's Internet, Feeder's Internet

I think it is useful to draw a distinction between a searcher’s internet and a feeder's internet.  I thought about calling the latter a “consumer’s internet” but 1) I like it sounding close to “bottom feeder” and 2) information isn’t really “consumed” in the sense that it is used up.  Think of that lovely quote by Jefferson :

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Furthermore, if we spend our time and energy propagating ideas, we wouldn't spend as much of our money on other things.  And we would use less resources.

This is the core basis of any optimistic scenario I see for humanity -- for all the ways corruption and wealth concentration works against human welfare there seems to be another force at play, offering potentially exponential increases in our understanding, the stuff of Buckminster Fuller's dreams and pronouncements.  This force is our hope, whereas greed and habits of domination are the threats to all but the smallest sliver of elites.

When I come to the internet to answer some question of mine, making for a searcher's internet, I almost always discover interesting new things, including some of the best websites.  I also feel more alive. However, when I spend my time with the bottom feeding internet, that lovely web 2.0/anti-social media churning item after item down the anxiety-fraught zombie slot machine, I almost never open up new paths.  And I almost always feel less alive than when I started,.

There are some interesting people on, say, twitter, but either they use it one-sidedly, or they have a much stronger sense of self than I do.  But even admitting that, I can never find a way to effectively filter for quality with anti-social media.  No matter what I do, I get too much of what I don't need, including a lot of things I really don't need.

Since I started developing these thoughts and my information diet, I have become much happier with the internet and my world has become a much more interesting place.

Round-Up #15

From Research

Great article on the how Americans might start having to pay the real cost of their waste now that China has restricted importing it.

The same author, Alana Semuels, explains why only 3% of American grocery sales are online and are liable to stay that way.

I was looking for a good post-mortem on Google Glass and liked the site where I found one --it's called The Conversation, and its articles are held in creative commons. I could see this round-up becoming more and more just a digest of The Conversation.  This have I added it to my best of the free internet list.

Aphorisms/Shorts

How sad it must be to live on such a poor information diet, and with so little self control, that you think it is the job of other people to prevent you from seeing spoilers.

Netflix: because you watched a documentary based on research and facts, you'd probably love to watch ten documentaries of nothing but conspiracy theory.

Is it really that difficult to understand that a tax cut when the budget isn't balanced is simply free money for rich people?

Round-Up #14

"We believe in feeding minds, not mindless feeds" A slogan at hackster.io

If you're not familiar with Robert Rauschenberg and his biography, I think you are in for a treat. (I'm not asking if you "agree" with any of it, but rather if it a stream of information beyond the mundane).

Another interesting life: Arthur Crew Inman.  Terrible, but interesting.


Aphorisms/Shorts

It is not enough to leave t.v. (and anti-social media).  You must have t.v. (and anti-social media) leave you.

In Soviet Russia, you don't buy candy; candy buys you. (The streak of being able to replace "Soviet Russia" with "late-capitalist America" in this joke template continues).

The Annotated Guide to Narcissism, Part 2

The first post in the series was the shortest because I just wanted to get the series going.

There are seven html pages that come out for the label “narcissism,” so we have quite a bit of ground to cover.

An Army of Narcissists? No Way  Dec 26, 2006

This piece takes off on the U.S. Army's short lived recruitment slogan "An Army" of one.

 If there was any one organization that I would have thought was in direct opposition to narcissism it would be the military, yet here it is, being specifically promoted.

Again TLP establishes himself as someone who believes our society was (and certainly continues to be) in a state of collapse

 A question for the historians would be whether or not a civilization in decline was aware that it was declining; and if not, what did they think was going on?

 Comedians Tosh, Gaffigan and Hedberg for Narcissism Dec 27, 2006

The thesis of this piece is stand up comedians now often use meta-comedy as a way to placate their narcissistic audiences.

The comedians themselves aren't narcissists; they are tapping into the narcissism of the audience.  The audience is attracted to  these comedians because they get brought in, they get to feel like they are part of the comedy, part of the process, part of the act-- they are behind the curtain, behind the scenes. They're not the performers, but they could be; and at least  their close confidants, and that's a start.

[ . . . ] 

To follow the evolution of this process, go back to the previous leader of comedy: Jerry Seinfeld.  Certainly, his show "about nothing" was about himself, his (feigned) narcissism.  It was the unimportant minutiae of his life blown out of proportion: he was the main character in his own show.  But today's comics play on our desire to be main characters, first in their shows, but of course ultimately in our own. 

If This Is One of The Sexiest Things You've Ever Seen, You May Be a Narcissist Dec 29, 2006

TLP makes it clear that he is talking about a "new narcissism," stating "In the modern times, I think narcissism has evolved."  Thus we need some work on a new definition:

A narcissist isn't necessarily an egotist, someone who thinks they are the best.  A quick screen is an inability to appreciate that other people exist, and have thoughts, feelings, and actions unrelated to the narcissist.  These thoughts don't have to be good ones, but they have to be linked to the narcissist. 

[ . . . ] 

The narcissist believes he is the main character in his own movie.  Everyone else has a supporting role-- everyone around him becomes a "type."  You know how in every romantic comedy, there's always the funny friend who helpes [sic] the main character figure out her relationship?  In the movie, her whole existence is to be there fore [sic]  the main character.  But in real life, that funny friend has her own life; she might even be the main character in her own movie, right?  Well the narcissist wouldn't be able to grasp that. 

As far as I can tell the new narcissism has to do with our modern saturation with images and how that thus compresses our identity into constant image management. (Can it thus be said that narcissism evolved because technology, in particular the media environment, evolved?)

A narcissist looks the same every day; he has a "look" with a defining characteristic: a certain haircut; a mustache; a type of clothing, a tatoo. [sic]  He used these to create an identity in his mind that he will spend a lot of energy keeping up.

[ . . . ]

 Narcissists typically focus on specific things as proxies for their identity. . .  These proxies are also easy to describe but loaded with implication: "I'm married to a blonde."  Saying "blonde" implies something-- e.g.  she's hot-- that might not be true.  But the narcissist has so fetishized "blondeness" that it is disconnected from reality.  The connotations, not the reality, are what matters (especially if other people can't check.)

TLP now develops a bit on the antecedents of becoming a narcissist, which he comments on more in the later piece "What Goes Wrong In A Psychiatrist's Family?" (below).

As a paradigm, the narcissist is the first born (or only) child, aged 2-3.  Everything is about him, and everything is binary.  His, or not his.  Satisfied, or not satisfied.  Hungry, or not hungry.  Mom and Dad are talking to each other and not me?  "Hello!  Focus on me!"  Youngest children don't typicaly [sic] become narcissists because from the moment of their birth, they know there are other characters in the movie.  (Youngest more easily becomes borderline.) Control, of course, is important to a narcissist. If you can imagine a 40 year old man with the ego of a 2 year old, you've got a narcissist.

Ahem.  Also, link to a related piece by Atrios who deserves the hat tip.  I would also like to pull this quote from the "ahem" article to further the discussion of narcissism.  A definition that interacts with what TLP has been developing:

. . . a ceaseless obsession with zero-sum status competition, a desperate Sisyphean pursuit of admiration that is never satisfied, and an unrelenting series of vendettas against those who have questioned his greatness

This Is Not A Narcissistic Injury Dec 31, 2006

. . . the narcissist is the main character in his own movie.  Not necessarily the best, or strongest, but the main character.  A narcissistic injury occurs when the narcissist is confronted with the reality that he is not the main character in his movie; the movie isn't his, and he's just one of 6 billion characters.

This leads to what seems like a large leap in logic, but I would ask anyone to reflect deeply on the narcissists they know to test its veracity.

The violence serves two necessary psychological functions: first, it's the natural byproduct of rage.  Second, the violence perpetuates the link, the relationship, keeps him in the lead role.   "That slut may have had a whole life outside me, but I will make her forever afraid of me."  Or he kills himself-- not because he can't live without her, but because from now on she won't be able to live without thinking about him.  See? Now it's a drama, but the movie goes on.

I've already defended one leap in logic, but let's file the next bit under "interesting claim I am not sure I agree with" or #foodForThought.  Talking about Saddam Hussein and being put to death:

But remaining the main character, he has accomplished the inevitable outcome of such a movie: he has become a martyr.  Even in death, he is still the main character.  That's why the narcissist doesn't fear death.  He continues to live in the minds of others.  That's narcissism.

Not sure how far to take "narcissists don't fear death," It's not like I want to give the nod to some super-power of bravery.  However, it does make sense to say narcissism can short-circuit the instinct for self-preservation.

It is interesting that all of these pieces so far came into being in a "golden month," December 2006.  The insights would continue on heavily for the first few months of the next year.

Borderline Jan 5 2007.

Narcissism- what I believe to be the primary disease of our times-- is one side of a coin.  The other side-- the narcissist's enabler-- is the borderline.

This is important terminology in that it provides explanatory power and moves the discussion to the level of society-wide critique.

Another surprising, but I believe correct, conclusion:

Here's the ironic part: if a borderline was shipwrecked on a desert island with no one around, she'd develop a real identity, of her own, not a reaction to other people.  Sorry, that's not the ironic part, this is: she'd become a narcissist.

An important bonus thought from the comments (which I almost never read, so it's serendipitous that I even saw it).

The DSM is entirely useless for describing character constructs. That's why it seems like narcissism and borderline are two completely separate things (in the DSM) yet I make them out to be parts of one whole. And therein is the problem with psychiatry: reductionism using arbitrary categories.

Neither Is This Is A Narcissistic Injury. Jan 9, 2007.

The narcissist says, "I exist."  A narcissistic injury is you showing him that he does not exist in your life.  Kicking him in the teeth and telling him he is a jerk is not a narcisstic [sic] injury-- because he must therefore exist. 

[. . .] 

But in the latter case where you ignore him, humiliate him-- an actual narcissisitic [sic] injury-- he will want to kill you.

It is here that our author feels a disclaimer is in order (emphasis mine):

And before everyone flames me, I am not trying to give a scientific explanation of the pathogenesis of narcissism.  This is simply one man's opinion of how we can specify what it is, and what it may predict, past or future.  Nor am I suggesting this isn't "treatable"-- anyone can change.  It may not be easy, but it is always possible.

Nearly any American reading this should see things that apply to themselves, not just a mental bludgeon to judge everyone else.  Narcissism has been the gravitational pull of our culture at least since World War II (people who grew up in rural areas were culturally excluded from the roaring 20s).

What Goes Wrong In A Psychiatrist's Family? Feb 2, 2007.

In my experience (see, there's my disclaimer) psychiatrist-parents go wrong in a very specific way. They judge behavior, not the person.  It sounds like a good thing, I know.  For kids, it's a disaster. 

[. . . ] 

If you tell a kid that a behavior is unacceptable, the kid has learned nothing about himself; he's only learned that this one thing is something he can't do. But if you make the kid own it-- make the behavior part of his identity, then he has a chance to change his identity. 

[. . . ] 

I understand the trickiness of this; you don't want to make the kid feel like he is a bad person.  But you do have to find a way to teach him that if he does that thing again and again, then he is a bad person.  Is that what he wants?  Who are you, kid?  Who do you want to be?  This also allows his to take personal credit for doing something good.

The counter-intuitive (at least to a narcissist) subject of motivation is covered in Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards.  It shows that neither punishment nor rewards are the deepest sources of motivation, but that identity is a much better candidate for raising children. 

There's a second lurking trouble: parents' control of their affect.  

The psychiatrist isn't supposed to get mad at his patient; but then he comes home, and tries very hard not to get mad at his kid-- just tells him the behavior is unacceptable, gives him a time out, whatever.  But guess what?  The psychiatrist is exhausted, eventually his patience runs out, and BAM! a tsunami of anger.

This makes what is right and wrong seem arbitrary, up to the person who has the power.  TLP also points out this contributes to the borderline personality type established above.

Lost TV Series: Desmond's Fear and Trembling. Feb 15, 2007.

Talks about an episode of television show Lost and the arc of one of the characters. then at the end gets into Kierkegaard and choosing to believe in something.

It's narcissism done the right way.  And, I suspect, it's the secret to a meaningful life: picking an existence that is of value to more than just yourself, even if that existence defies the logic of reality-- your biology, your environment, and, of course, everyone else.  And once you have chosen who you want to be, once you have defined the parameters of this life, you force it to be true, as real as any gene or social factor.

So we get to conclude here on a possibly positive note.

Update: project discontinued.  I encourage you to read through the blog and the tag "narcissism" for yourself.