Insight into Insight, as Well as Happiness

After reading Sarah Perry's Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom a little over a month ago, I have been thinking a lot about my passion to understand the world -- my own nerddom, if you will.  And I don't like what I see.

According to Perry

Our overdeveloped, grotesque insight reward seeking is likely maladaptive, and is probably not even doing our individual selves any good.

I think that's about right.  Putting a spin on the old saying about wealth, "if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?"

There is a strong bi-directional relationship between this seeing-through and depression. By being interested in insight rather than the day-to-day stuff people want to talk about, you can become socially isolated and depressed.  Conversely, given that someone is socially isolated and depressed for other reasons, it might kick in depressive realism. Either way, what keeps the cycle going is probably the aforementioned "grotesque insight reward seeking."

So what does depression under insight do?  Back to Perry:

Meaning is deconstructed in depression; social connection is weakened. Ideas and things that for normal individuals glow with significance appear to the depressed person as empty husks. The deceptive power of social and sacredness illusions is weakened for the depressed person (as are certain other healthy illusions, such as the illusion of control).

Furthermore, the inverse is true:

 self-deception is strongly related to happiness; the consolation of insight may not make up for the loss of sacredness in terms of individual happiness. 

This is where I see some hope for myself on the happiness front.  I rarely lose the ability to perceive sacredness.  I never lost it during my darkest times, where going on a walk into semi-nature was my mental salvation.  It was actually later, when I went on my first sabbatical and ended up too socially isolated that I have a journal entry about going outside and feeling . . . nothing [1].   And that was a sufficient wake-up call to go back to work.  It turns out, much to my disappointment, that I need contact with people other than my wife [2].

As I am trying to recover from my insight-addiction, I have started to use two phrases a lot in conversations with my wife: first "What would a happy person say/do right now?" and second is the lament "I can't not know . . ."  because I know whatever it is that I know I know (and know I can't not know) is something a person happier than me wouldn't notice or would subsume into some kind of optimistic story (a technique I have only begun to experiment with; I'll try to report back later on my progress).

There are many things that I can't not know, but it does help to not dwell on them.  I have learned to not rant.  And most importantly, I have learned not organize my day around gathering more negativity.

Ran Prieur noted in 2017:

Over the last year I've sensed more toxicity when I go online. Maybe I just got better at noticing it, but that's why I'm trying to quit writing about what's wrong with the world. My working theory is, thinking about what's wrong with the world is linked to a general attitude, a subconscious habit of constantly scanning for wrongness, and it's like a dark universe that I'm trying to escape.

This is not to say there isn't a place for darkness, but darkness should be used, either for productive actions or some act of creation -- even including a good conversation, provided the parties know when it is time to switch topics. (What a rare trait in America, anymore).

Insight is a lot like whisky and cola [3].  Each individual hit seems reasonable enough, but eventually it starts to blur your judgement toward your quantity consumed. . . and then you have other problems.


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[1] See Allie Brosh for what might be the greatest work on depression ever (cartoons are very much underrated at a medium). Part 1 and Part 2.  I feel fortunate to have only been in the full "detached meaningless fog" at one point in my life.

[2] Humanity is still a passion best enjoyed with an eye on the minimum effective dose, and awareness of what can happen when I go over that dose.   But it turns out that I could have never made it as a hermit.

[3] Perry uses another term having to do with being stimulated watching other people do . . . something.  Starts with a "p."  I like that metaphor too because it shows a lack of *ahem* real action or working with the complications of the real world. . . Porn.  I mean insight porn.

Degringolade Responds Re Darren Allen

Degringolade had a response to last week's post. Some highlights:

 . . . I studied, I attempted understanding, I followed the rules and accepted the role assigned me.  But looking around me now, I realized that the truth of the matter is that the passion and the anger and the effort that I put into watching and understanding and discussing things that I had no effect on was truly a waste of my time and my life.  

And

I do like to keep up, I do try to read the updates on the world once a week.  I miss the days when The Economist wasn't a shameless shill and apologist for every rich bastard in the world.  In the 80's and 90's when they were my go to, a once a week read followed by some drill-down on specific issues kept me pretty aware of my surroundings.  But those days are gone, and to keep up and keep out of the clutches of the mass-media hysteria machine, I have to refine the extremely low-grade ore that is the internet.  

Finishing with

Nope, Ran's decision to drop out, play video games, and get mellow aren't necessarily invalid, the positions advocated by Mr. Allen are equally ambiguous.  I think that one derives from a desire to be right, the other derives from a desire to be left alone.  I think I know which one I would prefer to hang out with. 

Darren Allen, Purity Politics, and the Time Remaining

I recently had an interesting exchange on Reddit with Darren Allen (his website, though it's been frequently down).  The topic was his critique of Ran Prieur, whom Allen had lumped in with other people he called "unofficial socialists."

The piece was well-written, but a bit on the long side.  In essence, Allen is accusing all seven people and groups of not being anarchist enough for him.  In our conversation, I provided the connection that he was describing different incentive traps which no one has the incentive to get out -- i.e. Scott Alexander's use of Moloch.

Anarchism, like the rest of politics, is something I only allow myself the indulgence of finding meta-interesting, especially in its meta-politics.   Anarchism is absolutely an example of wandist, if not godist, thinking.  So, once you admit it's never going to happen, as Darren Allen does in our exchange, what do you do next?  One option is to try to implement your ideas on a small scale.  Another is to continue on in a wandist mode and accuse others of not taking pure enough symbolic stances. If an anarchist keeps going it is usually out of the joy of perceiving that they are correct. (Libertarianism is like this but usually in practice also includes an identification with, and thus a fetish for, our captains of industry).

But life isn't just about winning political arguments. Ran Prieur has very much understood this in his post-doomer / post-back-to-the-land phase.  And I'll speak for myself: I'm no longer going to waste my limited life feeling horror, dread, or debilitating depression about things I cannot control.  I have tried to remove these from my information diet and habits of thought and instead seek out beauty. And though there have been alterations to how I go about it,  that's the current project of my life: trying to live well in the face of an inevitable death, one that might be hastened by forces around me.

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Hopefully the above gives enough context for my last post in the thread, which Mr. Allen has at this point not responded to.  It begins with a quote from him:

As i say, I still like him as a private bod, but as a public intellectual (thinker / teacher / writer / etc) he has nothing to say any more, and it is my duty to point that out and why

That might be as good as a place as any to examine, assuming we are wanting to find common ground. What does a private/public divide mean to you? Why is the binary useful in this context?

Or, really, why should anyone have "obligations" to the public side when we have so little ability to move any needle at all? And surely that is a fair summary of our last exchange. It looks like the impediments to your preferred world are 1) political inaction, which means corporations and the security state continue unabetted 2) the entire political right 3) capture of the official left 4) the subtle capture of the unofficial socialists you outline.

Though there are more people who understand collapse, I'll agree with your figure of 1,000 to 100,000 who understand that the best state for humanity is anarcho-primitivism in an area with human activity below ecological carrying capacity. And if I could magic wand it, I'd probably will into existence something close to what you would as well. I buy that we made a wrong turn at agriculture and the bad situation became increasingly worse with institutions seeking legibility.

But I have no position in a meaningful res publica, let alone a polis, let alone king of the world. The real position for us who see through is to drop out or semi-drop out. And then what?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you are saying people need to dedicate themselves to a purity politics that you know won't work. But why?

I think it is noble enough to look for what is beautiful and interesting, and share what you find. It's being a private person and sharing the overflow.

The last few months of Ran's blog have

• Turned me on to Miles Davis's later psychedelic/funk work
• interrogated American chore habits
• had open-minded essays (attempts, not proclamations) about confidence, panpsychism, and the like.

It's a good read. Those who want to perceive even more beauty can take to making their own art, or go on a reverential nature walk. And that's where I'm at, filling my time well while I wait to see where the waves of history, the ones I know I cannot control, take us.

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I also used Reddit as the comments section.  Ran even responded.

Why Do I Copy from the Commons?

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal" --  Steve Jobs stole this from Picasso who probably stole it from elsewhere.  And that's the complete opposite of irony.

Inspired by this idea that has made it's rounds, I would say "great societies make it so it is not considered theft to copy ideas."

This transformation, which could be what comes after capitalism, has not been driven by power elites from above, abstractions, centralized planning, or even votes.  And it won't be driven by any of those things until perhaps, and only perhaps, the eleventh hour just before a different world is already inevitable.

The interesting thing is that you can be the change you want to see, or at least I can be. [1]  This blog is a kind of hub for me to live in an information environment that about the discovery and spreading of ideas, without participating in the society-wide program of super-stimulation leading to super-greed [2].  The negative space is really important here; it's not just what I spread, but what I filter out.

I find, link to, and copy enough content to keep myself instructed and amused for a lifetime.  And any time I spend in this way is time not spent embodying the delusions and terrors of artificial scarcity.  So why copy from the commons?  1) Because I can.  2) Doing so shows that you can 3) It makes the commons more resilient by one more node.

I know I'm some kind of dork for having a "blogger" blog here at the blogspot.  I know there are those who would take me more seriously if I had a domain all to myself, and some stylish (I refuse to use the term "unique" in this context) website.  But if you think about it, I am taking the text from most likely another server and making a copy of it on one owned by Google.  Like it or not, and I respect the opinions of those who do not, Google is one of the most successful companies in the world, with many advantages that unlikely to go away any time soon.  This is probably a pretty node to add to any ideas network.

Information doesn't just want to be free.  It also wants to survive.

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[1] If you are reading this, you are probably quite a weird person indeed.  I have hope for you.  Nonetheless, I decided to speak only for myself in this piece from this point forward.

[2] See JMG's acronym LESS -- Less Energy Stimulation Stuff

The last part of the acronym, "stimulation," may seem surprising to my readers, but it’s a crucial part of the recipe. For the last thirty years and more, Americans have been pushing their nervous systems into continual overload with various kinds of stimulation, and I’ve come to think that this is another symptom of the deeply troubled national conscience discussed in recent Archdruid Report posts. A mind that’s constantly flooded with noise from television, video games, or what have you, is a mind that never has the time or space to think its own thoughts, and in a nation that’s trying not to notice that it’s sold its own grandchildren down the river, that’s probably the point of the exercise. Be that as it may, recovering the ability to think one’s own thoughts, to clear one’s mind of media-driven chatter, manufactured imagery, and all the other thoughtstopping clutter we use to numb ourselves to the increasingly unwelcome realities of life in a failing civilization, is an indispensable tool for surviving the challenges ahead . . .

Round Up #18

From Surfing and Researching

1) A house 3D printed out of soil for $1,000

2) Shareable.net.  Lots of news and ideas about getting sharing to happen in the urban space.

3) Poking around the topic of steel manning, I found this article against the practice and feel in love with the blog, Thing of Things.

4) Two visions of Utopia, meaning no-where trying to manifest a some-where: 1) Masdar City, and 2) Oceanix and their plan to make  floating cities, really floating city blocks to reclaim projected parts of cities lost by rising sea levels.  About the latter:

Chen’s concept includes a very clear plan to anchor these floating communities about a mile off the coast of major global cities. Specifically, Chen and Ingels want to use a material called biorock, which uses small bursts of electricity to stimulate the growth of limestone from ocean mineral deposits — a real-world concept that is not only ecologically friendly but is also currently used to foster the growth of coral reefs.

5) Let this be a coda for any attempt to speed read through good literature:

Did the world's great novelists really spend years agonising over the pitch and rhythm of their sentences so some time-efficient post-modern reader could skim over the text like a political spin doctor searching for soundbites in the transcript of a ministerial speech? 

6) I'm still working on my answers to the "IQ is everything" crowd.  From C.K. Chesterton

 If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat.

Note: Chesterton was born in 1874 and lived and wrote in England.  He doesn't mean the Democratic Party of the United States.

7) Interest in the 2020 was already at 2016 Election Day levels in April.

8) Great point by Atrios on the fascination with squeezing labor costs while continuing mad spending sprees on machinery and bureaucracies:

My theory about one reason firms are especially sociopathic about labor costs is it's something everyone can understand . . .  "Nobody" knows how much some piece of equipment for the factory should cost - and even if they do they don't have much control over it  . . . No one's going to lose their job (or get rewarded) for overpaying (underpaying) for things nobody understands the cost of. But labor costs and wages are something people have a good sense of.

(Cp this article on cost disease being predicted by critics of capitalism).

9) This piece from r/collapse saves me having to write up some of my deepest fears about the future.

From YouTube

Video essay on Dr. Strangelove

How To Start A Library of Things drawing from the expertise of the Toronto Tool Library

Aphorisms/Shorts

Conjecture: if technology hits the point that the state, and property, are incontestable, then the incentive for bullshit jobs will go away.  As dangerous as it is for the 99%, that might need to be the order it happens.

 ". . . I suspect that this is a badly run prison world, like on Hogan's Heroes . . ." Ran Prieur

 You know what?  Let's forget about the abstraction of "America."  Let's make family meals great again.

If you believe in AI-vin, you should consider donating a kidney.

Speaking of AI-vin, the Wise and AI-Mighty, I refuse to worship intelligence until it is free of social signaling.

Portrait of the author the last few days: by day, I drink coffee and try to ask interesting questions.  By night, I drink a glass of wine and read old-timey books.

The "Freedom Only" Challenge

YouTube is really starting to piss me off.  The number of ads is really taking off, cutting videos up in more and more places, including this new technique of running two ads back to back.

I don't want to be the frog that died in water that was turned up a few degrees at a time, so I am setting up  a little challenge for myself: I want to go 6 months, June to December, with my information diet restricted to books and my  The Best of the Free Internet list.  I don't want advertisements beyond tepid whimpers asking to support the site.  I am trying to rebuild my attention and focus.

I was on vacation for the first week of June, so it was easy enough to begin the habit.  I didn't get on the internet at all. Since then, I have stayed to my rules.  Any instances of links that don't follow my rules were gathered before I went on the trip.

This is most restrictive media diet I have put myself on since the first six months what I call My Walden Years.  As I am married, I have less control over my environment than I did in those days when everything was as Jim Morrison of The Doors said "everything was simpler and more confused." I am not going for complete monastery-like purity.  I won't interfere with my wife's wish to watch Netflix during dinner.  And while it is possible that I avoid seeing a movie in a theater the entire time, if I don't, I will watch those incessant ads -- I mean highly entertaining trailers -- but I will not use it as an excuse to rant.

My round-up posts may very well suffer greatly during this time.  And for that matter, my other posts may as well, since I am not going to engage in research beyond my little open-source playground.  On the other hand, I could see this potentially helping me to find my own voice, and it could prevent me from getting bogged down in opening a bunch of tabs, trying to figure out what evidence and quotes I can draw on from other sites. (As I have stated before, I would positively welcome being e-mailed with links or quotes of others with similar ideas, especially those who have expressed them earlier, or better.)

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Degringolade wrote a piece responding to last week's post. He concludes:

Folks don't talk about politics as a means of solving our problems anymore.  They talk about politics as a vehicle to vent their hatred and to affix blame for the inexorable decline of a country that seems intent for a class/civil war and a far-too-interesting interregnum.

Shaving Update

I wrote previously about my experiment in extending the life in a shaving cartridge.

I am still on the same cartridge and am happy to report that I now past the point that each shave costs less than 2 cents and a fraction.  It will be awhile yet before i can be at 1 cent and a fraction, and twice as long as that until the shave is under a penny each use, and I might not make it to that; I plan on letting my reader's know.

Some more notes:

I went a trip to Italy for a wedding.  All the jostling of travel seemed to damage the back of cartridge so that it wont fit on the razor stick-thing (to be technical, of course).  So I am now I am just taking the cartridge in my hand and shaving with that.  It took only a few times to get used to it, and it seems to give me a better feel for what I'm doing.  I may never go back to the stick-thing again.  Or I might.  I'll try to let you know.

I had an in-law buy a travel kit of shaving products, so I used shaving cream while I was Italy.  And I must say I am now convinced of the usefulness of shaving cream, if nothing else for how much easier it is to clean the gunk out of blades.  I know this brings the price up per shave, but that only proves how silly it is to only focus on the cost of the razor. It may be silly, but it's (somewhat) interesting.

Don't Break My Stuff

I)

I would say that I am meta-interested in politics; ie, I am interested in the fact that people are interested in politics, and the ways they are.   However, I like to position myself as an outsider as much as possible.  For one thing, following it is too darn painful.  Just because I said (meta-)politics is (meta-)interesting does not mean I find it endlessly interesting all the time, and that I am willing to sacrifice my mental health for every nugget of information I can acquire.  It's one of many hobbies, not a sacred quest.

I really think American politics have digressed into co-dependencies very much trapped in the cycle of abuse.  If that is too extreme, then consider this argument, that the dynamics of a movement work best (in terms of recruitment, fundraising, influence for leaders) when they don't achieve results.  The movement can get close, it can look like it's very close to winning, and the stakes should be raised to existential dimensions, but the invisible hand will find a way for the true believers to be left unsatisfied.  And then it's on to the next round of gathering resources for the next fight.  When you can think of examples of this for both parties, you have started down the path to meta-politics.  Remove enough garbage from your information diet, and you might one day find that you are only meta-interested.

II)

To get over the parts of politics that disgust me, I have taken the prudent course of action and stopping posting on Twitter.  I went one step further, and deleted several years of tweets, ported things of particular value over to this blog.  Results here, and here, and here.

I have a tweet thread I want to develop a little more.  It started with this Wrath of Gnon post:

“Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed but not easily created.” Roger Scruton pic.twitter.com/CE2Ex5j1sw

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) April 11, 2016

As I said, I have deleted my responses on the twitter platform.  But here is what I wrote in response:

Certainly worth turning over in one's mind.  We need spaces where this is true, even if not political. 

I wonder what a properly constituted Venn diagram of this and the sentiment "don't break my shit" would look like. . .  or really "don't break MY shit."

I cannot locate the video where I heard David Heinemeier Hansson say that "don't break my shit.  I have nice shit" is the core of all conservatism, but I do believe in credit where it's due when possible.

My addition is to emphasize the "MY."  After all, every strand of conservatism I can think of has been perfectly fine with other people's stuff getting broken.  That is the creative destruction that has been at the heart of the American Way.

For my taste, conservatism can be respectable when it shifts to "don't break our stuff," but realize that 1) this is often merely a rhetorical ploy 2) while communities can create value, it does not follow that outsiders can access that value.  Furthermore, the shift to protecting "our stuff" is not all that effective rhetoric to audiences trained to be individualists and consumers. In modern times it has been more effective for the political right to define what freaks they say should not belong than it has been to give a concrete articulation of what is sacred -- institutions, rituals, places -- irrespective of who would defile them.  And yes, I am accusing conservatives of being relativists, nearly absolute relativists [1].

Another interesting thing about "don't break my shit" is once you establish it as your goal, you can never achieve it once and for all.  It is not a S.M.A.R.T goal, and thus your purveyor of fear and indignation can always dangle some enemy in front of you as a threat to what is yours.  And thus you can always be captured in a mass group.


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[1] The issue of abortion is the biggest exception I can think of.  From A Thing of Things article:

Pro-life advocacy is similar to effective altruism in many ways: its advocates believe that they’re fighting against an ongoing moral atrocity and it involves expanding the circle of concern.

 I can only say that I wish those animated about the issue were as interested in being pro-life after birth.  And I don't mean that flippantly.  I would like to see an expansion of community goods in the United States, and religious conviction seems to be one of the only ways to get there.  Modernity is a disaster for ethics and psychological well-being.

What's Next?

I)

From an interview of David Graeber:

I remember having this argument with conventional Marxists about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Okay, say that capitalism started around 1500. And the Marxists insist that capitalism is organized around wage labor. But wage labor was marginal until the industrial revolution, around 1750. How can you say that wage labor is central to capitalism if, for 250 years, it was a tiny element? 

And of course the Marxist will say, “Well you’re not thinking dialectically. From 1500 to 1750, people were in a process that was going to lead to wage labor, they just didn’t realize it yet.” And I realized, wait a minute, if that’s the case, how do we know that we are even in capitalism now? Maybe we are already 100 years into a process leading us to something and we don’t even know what it is. By that logic, capitalism could have ended in like 1950, and we’ll only fully know what replaced it in 2175.

This is a really important correction to the default view of social change.  I'll fess up that I was thinking with this default until I read the passage. The concept also provides a fun game to play: what future might have already started?  Using those approximate time frames, I would say we still have hope for our future to be epheremalization via open-source (by which I really mean free information -- Cp sidebar).

Wikipedia definition:

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.)

Knowledge, design, and precision can greatly replace resource use. (I'd be remiss to not point out the role of synergy in Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller's vision, but I'd be even more remiss to not point out how much the term has been degraded by being part of corporate-speak).

II)

I have recently put in some effort to deepen my understanding of Bucky's ideas and life.  I highly recommend Jonathon Keats's You Belong to the Universe.  It is more than an introduction; it is an exploration, starting with a good, quick overview and then exploring one Bucky innovation at a time, connecting it to a wider historical context, current implementations, and possibilities.  Furthermore, the book does not shy away from legitimate criticisms.  Not only is it the best entry point to Bucky's thought, but it is also the best book on comprehensive design and futurism I can name.

I have also read two books by Bucky himself: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Ideas and Integrities.  Operating Manuel is readable,  but I don't think I can recommend Ideas and Integrities.  It is overly repetitive, the pieces vary greatly in quality often degrading into prose like The Architect in the Matrix Reloaded --  where even though you probably understand it, you wonder why anyone would put it in such a way.  You Belong to the Universe does much more to instruct and amuse.

Vinay Gupta is a great inheritor of Bucky's dream to make the world work for 100% of people.  Start with his story The Unplugged.  He also spearheaded a great project called The Future We Deserve.

If we have hope, I think it is to be found here. Naturally, if you were looking to paint a very negative picture of the future, you could find evidence for that having begun already as well.  This was me giving a more optimistic scenario, for once.  Either way, the seeds for the future have already been planted.

About That Singularity

I think the entire metaphor of technological progress as inevitable #Singularity should be questioned.  Just apply some basic knowledge about the thing you're trying to map to in making the comparison.

• If only the smallest fraction of stars go to black holes -- ie, form singularities -- why does our technology have to be heading that way?
• What is the cultural equivalent of going nova, and becoming a pulsar?
• The sun, the only star that we know for a fact has been able to support life, won't create a singularity at the end of its existence.
• Black holes destroy everything that moves past the event horizon, crushing the very possibility of life before you can reach the singularity.

Yet this is the metaphor we unreflexively use for the trajectory of technology and its relationship with life.  Not only does the language choice show our culture to be callous; it also shows it to be careless with the terms, perhaps even scientifically illiterate.

The Once and Future Internet

Thought experiment: what if a text-based internet, plus some low grade pictures was sustainable but the video-based internet wasn't? What if the future of the internet looked like its past?

Low-tech Magazine did a piece on how they had changed their content so it would be run on a totally off-grid solar-powered server at their office in Barcelona.  They began by discussing the state of the internet:

. . . content is becoming increasingly resource-intensive. This has a lot to do with the growing importance of video, but a similar trend can be observed among websites. The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular domains) increased from 0.45 megabytes (MB) in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June 2018. For mobile websites, the average “page weight” rose tenfold from 0.15 MB in 2011 to 1.6 MB in 2018. Using different measurement methods, other sources report average page sizes of up to 2.9 MB in 2018.

Also they link to this piece which provides more context, and develops the theme that due to bad programming, computer hardware has to race as fast as it can just to stay in place.If we would remove video, tracking and surveillance crud, and intelligently compress our images, the internet could be maintained at a small fraction of its current energy and resource use. 

While what I said is true, this is a great example of wandism versus probablism.  If we could wave a wand one time and make a bunch of web-sites in this manner, the internet would be more resilient.  The question is whether we can get there from here.  We are culturally conditioned to hate the idea of "going back," almost for any reason.  I would say that people will clamor for video as long as possible, even if that crowds out investing in an internet that could work long-term.

And if I am going to raise questions about the internet's long-term viability, it seems that I might as well question whether printed books are sustainable.  Well, can the world sustain printed books for ten billion people?  Can it do so for three centuries, four centuries . . . a hundred centuries?

 I'm okay with asking these questions, because I don't just blindly believe the neat narratives of the cult of progress (see John Michael Greer's one, two punch on the subject). I question the inevitability of progress that is just onward and upward to the stars, especially when I am told I best believe in it as the only justification for our existence and our problems. 

There are those who believe that

The only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age, and we are going to be there again someday, the only questions are: what’s going to be left of the world when we get there? Will humans even exist? When will this happen? 

I'm not so sure.  Knowledge has a remarkable capacity to build on itself and grow, as long as ideas are spread and not just hoarded and hidden away.  What I do know, and yet somehow many people can't know, is that what is unsustainable will not last.  So either we will one day find ways that can last, or we will bungle it and be worse off than what would have been theoretically sustainable.

I'm rooting for the internet, but my heart would be broken in a world without books.  I love the old internet, and its spirit lives on in my The Best of the Free Internet document.  Hyperlinks, and easy copying and pasting are fantastic technologies.  The two important questions are: 1) Can those technologies add more value than they cost? 2) Can we organize systems that keep that value going?

Rhetoric Workshop: Abolish Jobs, Not Work

I like Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work so much that every time I  mention it, or even think about it, I feel a strong desire to re-read it in its entirety. It and David Graeber's essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs provide the quickest education I know of in real liberty instead of making government a singular scapegoat for a life wasted and otherwise poorly lived.

With that said, for a long time something has felt off to me about Black's essay.  I have reflected on the matter for years, and have come to the conclusion that the concern is that I don't use the word "work" in the way Black does, which is after all, a rather large issue with the essay, considering the title itself.

I think the difference in meaning comes from the domains in which Black and I do our thinking and thus our writing.  Black is talking in the domain of political philosophy, whereas I am concerned about living a good, private life. In doing so, I think a lot about art, and find the process of creation to be one of the most important answers to questions of meaning and fulfillment.   Black's use of "work" is semantically close to "worker" and the phrase "worker's of the world unite."  My use of "work" is closer to "work of art," and the phrase "the collected works of Shakespeare."

When I have leisure time, as well as, crucially, a minimum effective dose of real human contact, I feel driven to create.  And though I have found that there is a time and place aimless creation, such as making a painting by just slopping color, what I really want is something that forces judgement, refinement, and, yes, some effort.  I have to agree with Aaron Swartz when he wrote:

Hard work isn’t supposed to be pleasant, we’re told. But in fact it’s probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you’re trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

I don't think this kind of work has to be assigned by someone else, and in my experience it usually isn't.  After all, the authoritarian mindset will push a leader to find some way to break the flow or otherwise hamper the task, but the fact remains that I really love to work and I even work hard to find ways to find meaningful work.

If his essay is anything to go on, Black would probably counter that I am describing a love for a particular kind of play.  Perhaps, and I wouldn't quibble too much with someone who wanted to maintain that position, but I think that "work" is the best word for what I often want to do because the labor and effort I put in shows up on some level and adds immensely to the charm of a piece.

Thus, I propose that instead of talking about abolishing work, we can use the word "job."  Instead of thinking bad things about, and occasionally writing pieces criticizing the work system, I conceptualize it as the job system.  This also tracks closely with how the ideology in question functions; if you do a lot of hard work on your own, but it isn't for a business, it usually doesn't count in other peoples' minds.  "What do you do?" is a question to figure out your job, and thus figure out your role and what status should go with that in the questioner's eyes.  Almost no one wants to hear what you are working on, especially now that so few people do any work of real value.

What do I do?  I report to bullshit for billable hours.  I try to live below the means of those credits from billable hours and invest the proceeds, hoping to give my life more slack so those I can take care of those I am responsible for while still being a righteous dude.

Oh, what do I do for purpose?  I think, I read, and I create art, trying to work at it as hard as I can considering all the bullshit I have to deal with.