a robot, i am not

the majestic plastic bag

jritch — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:02:13 +0000

Definitely the best short mockumentary I’ve ever seen,

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Post tags: environment, humor, pollution, video

Lovecraft on youth

jritch — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:37:46 +0000

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”

–from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Celephais”

[via Coilhouse]

what are all these Russians in line for?

jritch — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:54:48 +0000

This line is for the first McDonalds that opened in the former Soviet Union. Other countries are infinitely more patient than the US… but then again a line for a McDonalds sure beats a bread line in a collapsed economy.

exposing the unconscious corporate value system

jritch — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:11:34 +0000

Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff (2009, Random House)

Those who control history control the future and in Life Inc. Douglas Rushkoff makes his mark on our future by detailing the history of Corporate Capitalism as the political and economic reality of the modern world. After evolving over hundreds of years into its current form, Corporate Capitalism is now taken so thoroughly for granted that few even question the basic mythology behind it. Rushkoff was jarred into this revelation after being mugged outside his home and being told by neighbors to keep quiet because it might hurt property values. His fellow homo sapiens were becoming dispassionate economic actors instead of human beings. The unquestioning behavior towards the value system of Corporate Capitalism is compared to waking up with Microsoft Windows on every computer, and every computer you’ve ever known.While nations and economies thrived using alternate models of economic transaction, the course of history has resulted in our particular economic arrangement. Rushkoff succeeds in tracing a clear and coherent history uncovering how arbitrary the rules of the modern economic game truly are.

As corporations gained power in the Colonial era they changed places into ‘territories’ and people into ‘labor’, solidifying the power of the state to grant monopoly power to the corporations. Ultimately, everything and everyone could be colonized for profit, fueling European colonialism and establishing corporatism as the basis for a new continent. This new classification of human interaction created a value system that extended to every aspect of human life. Rushkoff draws a distinction between the division of labor and specialization of labor, in doing so he reveals a major flaw in our valuation of specialization. We would think a society of trained merchants, managers and laborers are more specialized than one of self-taught artisans and inherently entrepreneurial shop-owners but managers didn’t want to hire highly skilled labor which could demand higher wages. The managerial classes standardized processes as to hire the least qualified and most replaceable laborers around. This activity favored generalization instead of specialization: the basis for the modern education system. A modern education system designed by people like Stanford professor Ellwood P. Cubberly created a curriculum to produce “mediocre intellects” for a docile citizenry. The model for this education was one of the factory where, “the raw product (of children) are to be shaped and fashioned according to the specifications laid down.” My own thought is that by creating a population of generalists, we create individuals that have no specific knowledge, no actual ability to create a tangible good or to experience the inherent pleasure of such creation. This is an insecure individual and one with an inherent fear of survival imposed on them by the scarcity in a compounding interest based monetary system.

Even the original American Revolution was one against corporatism, as the Tea Party slogan of “No Taxation without Representation” was primarily about Britian’s tax laws which removed barriers to trade and allowed the East India Company to destroy the colonial economy. The irony is that our modern Tea Party movement shares the same angst as the original one but without the clarity of understanding the connection between Corporatism and their frustration. In the United States, corporatism was held mostly in check until the landmark 1886 decision of Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company. This case established the ability for corporations to claim all the rights of personhood granted under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, a law ratified to ensure the rights for former slaves. Over the next 25 years 307 14th Amendment cases went before the US Supreme Court and 288 of them were brought by corporations. With this as a precedent, money became equivalent to speech, so corporations could obtain their 1st Amendment right to free speech by spending money. Since 1944 when the US set the rules of the global economic game with the Bretton-Woods agreement which established the US Dollar as the global reserve currency, the policy of Corporatism has been international. We’ve dragged the rest of the world along, yielding a race to the bottom as municipalities and then nations competed to offer corporate handouts for attracting major companies. We’ve demolished local economies and land with the scorched earth policy of Wal-Marts and other big boxes.

The corporation has built a mythology so transcendent it has disconnected us from the world of true science, technology, ecology and thought. As Rushkoff notes, “Corporatism depends first on our disconnection. The less local, immediate, and interpersonal our experience of the world and each other, the more likely we are to adopt self-interested behaviors that erode community and relationships.” We become the rational dispassionate economic man the corporations need us to be for their survival, and in doing so we become ever more dependent on their services, confirming in our own minds a subconscious subscription to the ideals of the system. We were told the perfect society is one we could own a stake in, through owning a home and a car and our own piece of suburban perfection. As Walt Whitman wrote, “A man is not a whole or complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.” This was a directed goal because it was the burden of home ownership which, “chained a man to the factory where he worked.” A focus on home ownership drove a seperation of classes and produced much of the wealth disparity in the US today.

Ultimately, the myth that we are all free to compete for the great prizes the free market has to offer prevents us from conferring about the value of the system itself. Divided and conquer, as a people but mostly as a mental environment. And so we are stuck with branding instead of the relationships we used to have with real people and their craftsmanship. We are piled in droves towards others with similar brand loyalties and the public discourse is standardized by using the media to speak to “individuals”. We’ve removed everything of value from its context and in doing so we’ve removed the sense of awe that is a product of its uniqueness. Even the quest to find our place in the world while recognizing the power of being human has been co-opted by a spirituality that is derived from corporate values. From L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz where Dorothy could have whatever she wanted as long as she believed, to the modern obsession with The Secret, we’ve developed the purist spiritual expression of consumerist culture: a disembodied other delivering whatever we want when we want it.

A questioning and curious mind is culled with the depravity of modern intelligensia as dominated by the de-facto standards of a corporate value system. Surely there must be more to this world? Fear not, economists have explored it and found, as in Freakonomics, that maximized utility is surely the primary drive behind human actions. Malcom Gladwell offers spiritual and intellectual comfort for modern persuasion professionals with advice to classify our fellow humans for finding Tipping Points and harnessing snap judgements with Blinks. When we think Wal-Mart succeeds because it is efficient, it only does so because it has access to speculative markets beyond the reach of local shopkeepers. In reality, the Fortune 500 are just names on huge piles of debt. Adam Smith and his invisible hand were regulated by the pressures of neighbors and social values, not abstract speculation on derivatives and demolished trade barriers.

In the modern era corporations became giant externality generating machines, displacing liabilities as fast as possible to increase profits and our natural world suffers. Yet, the primary discourse regarding economies treat them as a natural system, ignoring that it is itself but a man-made system imposed on an ecosystem. Fiat currency has become the operating system which runs this game but has faded to the background so that we no longer think about. We can only think of one system of money despite the existence of many others throughout history. The most valuable piece of Life Inc. are the historical accounts of jealous monarchs which outlawed local currencies based on tangible grain stores in medieval towns to regain power through their coin of the realm.

As the Corporate Capitalist systems which have driven economic reality and moderated human life continue to break down, Life Inc. provides a guide to understanding that our species has survived and thrived in many alternative economic arrangements. This is a powerful book which dispels an unconscious acceptance of the corporate value structure and outlines a path towards returning to authentic human interactions once again.

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Post tags: corporations, economic game, economic growth, economy, history, human beings

being American can be fun!

jritch — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:37:54 +0000

[via Awful Library Books]

“going green” won’t save us

jritch — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:01:00 +0000

A recent article by Washington Post staff writer Michael Rosenwald hits on a great point about the tendency to over-consume after “going green”,

‘Purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors.’ Local home-appliance and building contractors who specialize in green products see examples of such indulgence almost every day. They have begun to warn customers that installing green products in their homes does not give them license to overconsume: Don’t run the plasma TV all night just because you put solar panels on your roof; don’t take endless showers because your water is heated off the grid; don’t do more loads of laundry because your machine is energy-efficient.

Lucas Davis, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a study showing that after getting high-efficiency washers, consumers increased clothes washing by nearly 6 percent. Other studies show that people leave energy-efficient lights on longer. A recent study by the Shelton Group, which advocates for sustainable consumer choices, showed that of 500 people who had greened their homes, a third saw no reduction in bills.

This is one of the key reasons I’m wary to embrace any proposed technological solution to the energy crisis. Substitute energy efficient technologies into the brain of petroleum sapiens and you get the same output as before in an extractive economy. This is just evidence that Jevons’ Paradox is in full swing. Wikipedia defines Jevons’ Paradox as:

Technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements which increased the efficiency of coal use, led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.

Is there a solution to Jevons’ Paradox? Yes and no. If the answer was otherwise, it wouldn’t be a paradox. Using efficiencies enabled by technology to allow people to participate fewer hours in an extractive economy (i.e. work less) actually improves our energy situation. For a full run-down of this possibility, view Conrad Schmidt’s great little short film about it.

Regardless, there are numerous myths widely disseminated regarding energy and society. I had the privilege of skimming through a copy of Vaclav Smil’s newest book, Energy: Myths and Realities and would consider it the ultimate primer on energy issues. To summarize: energy transitions take societies several decades. Given that our society hasn’t started such a wide-scale transition, I’d say we’ve got a few rough decades ahead of us.

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Post tags: behavioral economy, environment, green, rebound relationship

the whole history of science

jritch — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:29:52 +0000

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.” – S. Hawking

all the hilarity of Peak Oil

jritch — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:56:27 +0000

In this episode of The Bugle, John Oliver and Andy Zaltzmann give a great comedic run-down of the problem looming with peak oil. Mainly covering the fact that the stone-age wasn’t that bad, and that painting yourself blue in a post-industrial future will be a lot more socially acceptable.

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Post tags: collapse, comedy, energy, peak oil, podcast

so is it any wonder people are afraid of technology?

jritch — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:17:08 +0000

petroleum man

jritch — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:04:54 +0000

While it is highly unlikely that humanity will go extinct in the near future, petroleum man almost certainly will…

A great video which really gets the point across that Peak Oil is not just about the gasoline we put in our cars, its about all the other things we make from oil. If I could add a scene, the guy’s pantry would empty of all food supplied by industrial agriculture.