True Post Scarcity Practitioner
Joseph Jackson
http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817
Lives in a cave in Utah; makes good points but not the most
comfortable existence.
Paul D. Fernhout
Issues:
* It takes a village to live safely (and comfortably) in the village.
Getting lonely is an adaptive thing to keep people in networks. He would
likely die of dehydration if he breaks a leg far from water -- something a
village would help with, as he would then in turn help others.
* He likely has abundant physical health, a huge asset he is essentially
mining unsustainably. Raising a family, including educating kids and tending
to their needs, also usually takes a village. Helen and Scott Nearing did
something like what he did (but built stone shelters instead of used caves,
plus owned farmland) but they had no kids. People can have kids while living
simply, but it is much harder, especially without a village. That in turn
probably leads to higher infant and young child mortality.
* Living in a remote area, perhaps the only person for miles, he is using
(renewably, granted) an enormous amount of resources per capita as
infrastructure. The incident solar radiation on those square miles needed to
keep that ecology humming might be able to keep (guessing) a fleet of 747
airplanes in the air continuously. A person living frugally in a city and
eating the vegetarian products of conventional farming would use vastly less
than him in terms of infrastructure and likely be happier socially (assuming
a sustainable society around them). That is why what he is doing is not a
solution for humanity, and 99.9% of the human population would have to just
die to make it feasible on Earth. It is post-scarcity in a sense though --
here he is, using the equivalent energy output of a small nuclear power
plant all to himself to power his personal lifestyle. We may well see that
in the future in space. I'd suggest he is using all that power very
inefficiently though, in several respects (including letting mice crawl over
him -- at least he could share some of that power with a self-replicating
system like a dog to help with that. :-)
* He has had an enormous investment of intellectual capital in him through
his previous education, travels, and work situations. He only accomplished
that through relying on a complex infrastructure. Maybe enlightenment could
be done in other ways, but in his case, it was not. His lifestyle would
prevent enlightenment for many in that sense. Still, the same physical
action done with enlightentment is a different action than the unenlightened
version. Voluntary poverty is different psychologically and socially from
involuntary poverty.
* His life still is based around the detritus of current civilization (his
boots, his lamp) as well as using public infrastructure from a money economy
(the public library for blogging).
* He has no space-based asteroid defenses in place. Look what just happened
to Jupiter a few days ago. So, he is a free rider in that sense.
I give him applause for trying new things. Voluntary simplicity is a big
part of abundance (especially, now) -- but it is not the whole story. While
it's great to do more with less, is there anything that wrong with doing
more with more (if ecology and external costs are accounted for)? Also,
while it is true that many things about modern life are bad for people
healthwise (like white flower, sugar, etc.), he is throwing out the baby
with the bathwater in rejecting it all as opposed to trying for a new synthesis.
Bruce Stirling had a comment about this:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/06/26/reboot-bruce-sterling/
"""
A general principle, painful for a gothic generation like yours: “Stop
acting dead.” You’ve been trained that way; it’s the default for your
generation. Hair shirt green just changes the polarity of the 20th century.
It just inverts it. It’s not really a different way to live. How do you know
if you’re acting dead. The test: The great-grandfather principle. Would your
dead great grandfather do a better job of what you’re intending to do. E.g.,
saving water. Water is indestructible. But your dead great grandfather is
saving more water than you. You can’t save more than a dead guy. Save
electricity. Move into a smaller apartment. [Amusing bullshit.] You’re going
to be dead much longer than you’re alive. So you need to do stuff that you
can do better than your dead great grandfather.
"""
So, compared to his dead great-grandfather, Daniel Suelo is not doing as
good a job as being green. Still, I can honor his statement as a way of
being engaged in the issues of today, even if his specific statement is more
symbolic that a real solution for seven billion people in that sense. His
current lifestyle has pieces of the puzzle though -- voluntary simplicity,
scavenging, reuse, recycling, barter, gifts, spirituality, and so on.
--Paul Fernhout
Paul D. Fernhout
> * It takes a village to live safely (and comfortably) in the village.
That should read: "It takes a village to live safely (and comfortably) in
the *wilderness*."
--Paul Fernhout
Scott Kerr
Thanks,
Scott
Joseph Jackson
like, if it gets bad enough, you can just go live in a cave (which
wouldn't work if everyone did it). This guy has gone to the extreme
of austerity to escape. I do find the concept of "comfortable
poverty" interesting however. One example is in Corey Doctorow's Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Everything runs on wuffie which is a
kind of proxy for reputation or prestige (karma really). The only
scare things, such as priority seating at restaurants--table with a
view--are allocated like this. This kind of attention economy I think
could be meritocratic if properly implemented (could also be gamed).
The problem we have today is that all sorts of people monopolize
attention when they are utterly undeserving of it. The Disney Channel/
Disney machine (ironic given the setting of Doctorow's book) is a
particularly bad perpetrator in this regard. They create a new
"tween" pop sensation every 18 months or so precisely on schedule. I
hope that the end of broadcast media will put an end to this, as many
to many communication replaces one to many. However, current "celebs"
are already grabbing the lion's share of "followers" on twitter. New
social media/blogging also seem to attract and reward certain kinds of
behavior (hyper active posters!). I think that when we all start
videoing and lifelogging, behavior could get even more bizarre. With
a 24 hr reality show in progress, people might start scripting their
lives and trying to outdo one another with outrageous behavior. The
more entertaining you are, the more attention you get.
In my ideal scenario, people would be micro celebrities in particular
niches that they are accomplished in. It would not be possible to
gain mass audiences unless you are doing something with universal
relevance. I do think that importance can be objectively measured in
the sense of impact--certain ideas, discoveries, and artistic
statements capture greater portions of reality than others. This is
why we are fascinated with celebrities. In the movies they portray
characters who instantiate this "greater reality." Unfortunately, the
tabloids now follow their every mundane move. This is a problem
because when they are not doing the dramatic scene they should lose
their claim on our attention--the attention worthy element does not
spill over to endow their every utterance with extra significance.
This also happens a lot even in Science and other areas where people
seek to influence the court of public opinion. An accomplished person
from one realm will suddenly hold an opinion on a hot button issue
(climate change is the one of the day now) and his/her statement
attracts all kinds of reactions even though his/her previous domain
experience may not carry over.
The protagonist in Down and Out, has very low whuffie because he is
somewhat anti-social by the society's standards. Once he gets low
enough, he is stuck in a cycle (like being invisible on a filter
thanks to low karma). So he gets stuck in a reputational poverty
trap. All his basic needs are met, but he is socially impoverished,
which leads to some interesting conflict and drama in the Magic
Kingdom.
On Jul 22, 2:09 pm, Scott Kerr <uwsk...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am new to this list so correct me if I am wrong(in under 3 paragraphs if
> it is doable :) ); True Post Scarcity Practitioner seems like the wrong
> title. Doesn't post scarcity mean there are lots of goods to go around, a
> sustainable over supply if you will? His lifestyle seems very much in the
> realm of scarce.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott
>
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Joseph Jackson
Paul D. Fernhout
http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/
http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
From:
"Your ideas sound nice, but naive. Let's get real. Don't you think, with all
the thieves, the lazy, the mooches & the greedy that a moneyless, free
economy just wouldn't work?"
http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/Home/25--your-ideas-sound-nice--but-naive--let-s-get-real--don-t-you-think--with-all-the-thieves---mooches---lazy---greedy-people-that-a-moneyless--free-economy-just-wouldn-t-work
"""
We can see it in our own society, beginning to happen on a temporary
scale at Rainbow Gatherings. There are lots and lots of moochers at Rainbow
Gatherings, called "drainbows." And "So what?" is the prevailing idea.
It's actually amazing how few thefts and what little violence there is at a
Rainbow Gathering of 20,000 people, especially compared to a town of the
same size. Towns of the same size, which have police and locks and laws and
lawyers, have much more crime. Think about that. The Rainbow Gathering
still miraculously works out, due to the droves and droves of hard-working,
generous people, who don't give a hoot that somebody else might be "taking
advantage." What is taking advantage? The philosophy is to do, expecting
nothing in return. And that philosophy becomes infectious. There is a lot
of rif-raf at gatherings, and a lot of true compassion that overshadows it.
The idea of compassion is to have patience with thieves, mooches, the
lazy, and the greedy, who are people still detoxing from being programmed by
the money system.
When you have been taught all your life that nothing is valuble unless
you get money for it, you will initially be lazy, because you aren't paid.
You haven't yet learned the true reward of doing itself, and the reward of
community with others, which makes money look ridiculous. When you have
been programmed into thinking that possessing and not sharing are virtues,
you tend to steal, and it takes you a while to deprogram from that. The
Rainbow Gathering is a hospital, and those who caretake the hospital have a
natural sense of patience with the patients, giving them all the time they
need to heal. You can only be idle so long before you get sick of being
idle and start wanting to contribute. It might take a while, but it
happens, naturally.
"""
Remind me of Alfie Kohn's points, like in "Punished by Rewards", about the
difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/