Culture & Behavior

Robots vs relocalists

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Let’s suppose we have two societies; call them, oh, Relocalista, and Singularitaria. The Relocalistas are a nation of vegetarian gardeners and farmers – they live entirely by the produce from their intensive raised bed gardens and fields, which they carefully double-dig with iron spades which they obtain from their village blacksmiths by bartering some of their garden produce with him or her; I speculate that the Relocalistas would insist on having female blacksmiths too. … Meanwhile, Singularitaria is an entirely automated civilization – there are no people at all.
(Reply to John Michael Greer)

After peak oil, are we heading towards social collapse?

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We cannot expect our government leaders to help society transition off of heavy oil dependence on account of their being controlled by “big business” interests. Therefore, it is up to average citizens to create the reforms that lead into localized economic and social development.

How to Drive your Elephant – Dealing with Complex Problems

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One thing that has always intrigued me about elephants is how the people who drive them manage to control the beast without a harness. There have to be ways, since it can be done, but it cannot be simple. So elephant driving may be seen as as a metaphor for controlling complex systems. What you’ll find below is a talk that I gave on this subject at a recent meeting in Italy. It is not a transcription, but a version written from memory that tries to maintain the style and the sense of what I said.

Nana Upstairs, Grandpa Down the Hall: The Extended Family and Its Future

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When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric’s grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa’s generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled – given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous – they’d lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to have.

The twilight of the machine

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It’s as indicative as it is ironic that the most popular ideas for a response to the impact of resource depletion on our gargantuan and increasingly unstable technologies involve building even more gargantuan and unstable technologies

A faceoff between two cultural icons, Rosie the Riveter and HAL 9000, points toward another approach.

Book Review: ‘Solar’ by Ian McEwan

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With the recent exoneration of Phil Jones in the UEA ‘ClimateGate’ kerfuffle, the key lesson emerging from the whole thing is not that the science of climate change is somehow profoundly flawed, but rather that scientists are flawed human beings rather like the rest of us, subject to pomposity, ego, vanity, ill-temper and rudeness.