Congratulations. Singularity University demonstrates previously presumed “impossible” technology, able to penetrate the most impervious substance in the known universe: 19th century status quo groupthink bound board room skulls.
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Congratulations. Singularity University …
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Such vivid images of cultural contrasts!…
Such vivid images of cultural contrasts! Such unexpected revelations! Atrocities and intrigue as would never happen in America. Although one commenter does make a good point, is the shopkeeper still safe? Will he be safe in 3 days? 3 years? Then again, if the Rogues ever get into power here, we may be on the verge of asking the same questions here in America.
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The Delectable Dysfunctional Death Diet
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=1149
Yummy, yummy! Let’s gobble down that delectable dysfunctional death diet! Oh yeah, baby! Go right on ahead and take sides with the 18th century industrialist foody fashionistas; or, maybe consider this and this and ask whether MORE HEALTHY YEARS is enough of a motivator to change human behavior.
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LinkedIn Apps
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=980
Blah, blah, blah. LinkedIn has apps. Woo-woo. Yes, the monkey knows how to use sticks to dig for grubs in the nooks and crannies of the proliferating digital tree trunks. Aren’t you impressed? I know I am. Don’t worry if you aren’t trackin’ with this post, it’s only here to show whether the tag thing works. So far, not.
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Total Social Collapse HOWTO
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=921
Stewart Brand’s notes from last night’s Total Social Collapse meet-up and pep rally: Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:10:24 -0800 From: Stewart Brand Subject: [SALT] Managing social collapse (Orlov talk) With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach. Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage:
food, shelter, transportation, and security.
Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies. As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it. The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda. Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus ofmentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient. By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage. [ms; Finally, OUR TIME HAS COME! We the penniless are the New A-Listers! ;-)] –Stewart Brand
The text of Dmitry Orlov’s SALT talk. Slides from 2006 talk, “Closing the Collapse Gap.”
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The Dystopians - featuring Dmitry Orlov (longnow.org)
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Bruce Sterling, Frontiersman
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=848
We were twapping about Web 4.0. Right, yapping; as everything associated with twitter gets a “tw” makeover these days.
From the tweets and blogs I’ve been scanning of late — I actually feel like I’m catching up a tiny bit thanks to the magic called Feedly — the whole Obama thing seems to be sparking a kind of Mass Reverie. So why not join in? I probably should, as I could sorely use the practice at joining in. As a young child I was fascinated, even obsessed, with pioneers; those peculiar humans walking point for society and in some cases the entire human race; you know, like Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindburgh, Ameila Earhart, Madame Curie, people like that. Later, at around age 12, that fascination merged with what I perceived as a kind of ultimate productive pioneer philosophy, when I read Any Rand’s The Fountainhead. Little did I know at the time, my mother was probably experimenting on me to see if she could perform the nifty parlor trick of parading a 12 year old who had read the 645,000 words contained in Atlas Shrugged. She succeeded, and I lived the rest of my relatively maladaptive teen years magically thinking that if I only kept my eyes on my own paper and fully applied myself, I would one day meet the real John Galt and be spirited away to the Colorado Valley, where I could fulfill my destiny as a co-benevolent, co-equal capitalist empire board member. Peer to all mankind; neither superior nor inferior to any, because I’d successfully escaped the fallen world of socialist leeches and morons all around me. I was just a tweeny, so give me a little break, okay? However, it’s not too hard to imagine how this would lead to the experience of feeling like one was surrounded by an entire society that Doesn’t Get It. After all, when I tried to relate to my fellow sixth and seventh graders on the playground with, “Who’s hotter? Dagney Taggart or Dominique Francon?” or, “do you think they are really the same person in different books?” It didn’t exactly win friend and influence people. Well, it did influence them, but not so much in my favor. Toss in a few generations of genetic predisposition to substance abuse, and yeah, well, that’s pretty much a basic setup for an entire life of just not fitting in. What does all this have to do with Bruce Sterling, Frontiersman? I’ll try to connect the dots. After watching Kevin Kelly’s TED talk about the Next 5,000 Days of the web and the Internet of Things, I decided to dig a bit deeper — maybe still searching for John Galt at some vestigial emotional level — and consequently discovered Bruce Sterling. Sigh. He’s not John Galt. However, he did give this talk at Google two years ago and it prompted me reflect upon the most recent decade of life, during which time I indeed accomplished at least some version my Pioneering Dream by working for a decade in the 1990’s and ultimately building the first symmetric Gigabit Ethernet To The Home networks from 1999-2001; promptly after which I finally joined my True Peers, or in Jonathan Livingston Seagull terms, My True Flock, in that soaring mystical realm where pioneers actually most often end up: face down in the mud with arrows in our backs. After a few years of existential convalescence and cognitive behavioral therapy, I realized that pioneering was perhaps not all it was cracked up to be. I know: I’m a slow reader, even slower learner. Maybe I just needed to write a 650,000 word treatise, set on an Asmovian stage, fleshing out the hypocritical failings of objectivism. Nah, too reactionary. Or maybe I just need to find a bar stool next to Reverend Jesse, enlessly reminiscing about back in the day. Nah, too recitivist. Still, after investing forty-some years into a certain way of thinking and being, it’s a little difficult to take a completely new and different approach. Actually, it’s not so difficult personally, but difficult sociologically, because our culture of Industrial Era hyper specialization and interchangeable human parts seriously discourages such change. I mean really seriously discourages it; as in, “you shall now be rendered permanently unemployable and homeless” -type serious. So, the best that I could manage at the time was to backpedal from the pioneering mindset to the frontiersman perspective. A long time loyal friend and ally helped me to find a gig where I could contribute to work on planning for the California High Speed Rail (HSR), which finally recieved a thumbs up vote from California voters. With the encouragement of a great mentor, I helped the City of Fresno to flesh out plans to deploy Smart Cards for their mass transit system; which should eventually plug into the Bay Area TransLink system and HSR, for a truly regional transportation grid. These were great and rewarding projects, but still left me scrapping in the Wage Slave salt mines, far from that mythical Colorado Valley. Not that it would matter these days, I don’t even actually like the weather in Colorado all that much. The people and geology are awesome; but snow? Not so much. This is supposed to be about Frontiersmen, though. Those second-order sociologically innovative souls who follow the trail of blood, sweat, and tears left by the pioneers; who take advantage of the environmental signals left behind by the forgotten and disparaged heroes of yore. Those who seek out shadowy map etchings left on rocks and word of mouth folklore-accepted-as-fact; clues that, though gossamer, do cloak veiled hints about new threats and new opportunities in a new terrain just at the horizon. This is imporant: at the horizon, not over it. Frontiersmen are just too restless and relentlessly curious for the Settler lifestyle. They understand that they are not normal Settlers, yet they constantly seek approval in the form of the satisfaction gained when seeing new wagon trains of Settlers move into a new area and claim it as their own; even claiming that they discovered the place. Whatever. Frontiersmen often name places, things, or trends tentatively and the names don’t often stick. It’s not the names that matter, its more about the process, the progress, it’s about the constant migration toward a New, More Abundant and Sustainable Normal for Everyone. Then, having arrived safely at our Next Big Future, we immediately begin probing the fringes of possibility once again, scanning the skies for circling vultures — icons of ugliness to most, but daemons of progess to us — which point the way again toward those once brave souls, ever face down in the mud with arrows in their back. We hope for even a barely legible scrawled out message, scaps of a not-quite-accurate map, clenched in that now frozen, eternally noble, white-knuckled fist called ultimate persistence and determination. It may be true that constructing oneself as a Frontiersman is still a relatively unwinnable role in terms of widespread contemporary acceptance; after all, even a successful Frontiersman like Sterling was met with a surprising number of blank stares and slack jaws amongst many of the apparently best and brightest at Google. Yet, at least frontiering is a slightly more survivable calling, as there’s more hope for the Frontiersman that the hard work, creativity, and imagination that we bring to bear upon society’s common challenges and opportunities will somehow evolve into something that gets completely past our neologisms and simply becomes “the way we live now,” as Bruce puts it. Wagons, ho.
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