TIRE BABY

TIRE BABY!!!!!



Send it to all your friends! Mala Decisión Dinosaurio says SSSSSIIIIIII.

Additions

Added to our list of enterprises to try: Pizza shop.

Arithmatic and class struggle

A provocative title. But this is really more of a discourse on absurdity.

I have recently been playing this wish fulfillment game called ”If I had a million dollars.” After considering various extravagant plans – I want a helicopter! Party in Samoa for all my friends! – I commented, well, maybe I could just live on the interest.

Think about it. A sound but not–particularly–inspired investment might be expected to earn a 5 percent return. (At least before the current financial crisis. Who knows what the cost of capital is these days?) Essentially, I could deposit my million in a bank and, at the end of the year, have earned $50,000 (pre–tax). That is more than I am now earning, and it would require absolutely no work.

So I scaled it up. If I had a billion dollars instead, I could plop it down in a bank and earn a thousand times as much on interest. That would be a $50 million income (pre–tax) that required no creativity, no innovation, no value–creation. A snail could earn that money if given a billion.

It is also a staggeringly huge amount of money. On my current salary, it would take me over 1000 years to make that. And by the standards of most of the world, I am quite well paid. In short, one could live twelve happy, long and reasonably opulent lives off one year‘s worth of interest on a billion dollars.

I am pointing this out because it seems to me that we fail to consider what these numbers all mean. Simply put: A billionaire is someone who has money in excess of any conceivable human needs. Furthermore, they can earn more than they would ever need simply by doing nothing.

Bear this in mind the next time you hear someone telling you that we need to “unleash“ the powers of the “creative class“ by cutting taxes on the richest members of society.

Back from the South

Drank the last of the Obama wine (thanks Mom!), bought another retro suit for $45 (a new record for sartorial expenditure), skipped the perfectly flat stones around Lake Wakatipu, hiked around Queenstown, biked the Dunedin peninsula, inspired by Mala Decisión Dinosaurio to eat a bunch of fried food from Night and Day convenience stores, got on a bus, thought about getting on a century-old steamship, got on a plane, came home to our little flat.

A relaxing experience. I'd begun to take everything so seriously - every deadline, every departure or arrival or decision. Minutes and hours had become laden with pressure. Pressure paralyzes, just as absolute freedom does. But it does so by preventing you from letting a minute pass in contemplation or boredom, rather allowing you to push action off into the ever-distant future.

Anne found the trip wholly remarkable - so many things she had never seen, or expected to see. My unusual childhood inoculated me against the same level of wonder. Where it swept rapturously in for her, it trickled by for me.

But I suppose it allowed me to find the wonderful tiny things, to look for the sublime in the microcosm rather than the whole landscape. When we went to Milford Sound, I was captivated by the rock-faces, the deepness of the glacier-carved harbor, the rainbow formed at the bottom of Fairy Falls (saw the end - no pot of gold!). But then, I suppose that she really liked the seals basking on a few rocks, and they were tiny compared with the scene as a whole.

The phrase that got me from the sleepy start was "tree avalanches". The road into Milford was in the bottom of a steep glacial valley - and of course snow and rocks occasionally avalanched down the sides. The valley-sides were also covered with trees, clinging onto a thin layer of topsoil painstakingly accumulated over centuries. Below was rock too hard to put roots into. And so the trees weave roots together, forming a carpet of vegetable matter.

When a tree dies, or is hit by a falling rock, or is blown over - a thousand different things could go wrong, really - it falls, and rips its companions from the rocks as well. Trees cascade down, cutting a narrow scar through the slope's tree surface forest. What's left is bare rock.

Thanks to the steepness of the fiord's sides, boats can pass within yards of its edge. Our cruise took us up next to the paths of previous tree avalanches. I tried to imagine the sight - trees crashing down the almost-vertical hillside, rushing towards the deep water and floating off or disappearing below the tide. It takes over 75 years for such a wound to be healed - decades pass before enough soil, seeds, and moss accumulate on the naked cliff to mask it in green. Then larger plants slowly recolonize the space.

In wonder at that sort of patience. We build houses that are old after a few decades, design cellphones and computers to last a few years, write business plans for the next 90 days or a year, buy plastic bags and packaging that expires after one use - two at most, flick around memes with a shelf-life of hours. Planned obsolescence is our way of life; it's a big game of hot-potato with global ecological consequences. We live on the edge of a fiord - steep climb above, deep water below, thin film of dirt and our neighbors' roots holding us in place. Would an avalanche discourage us in a way that it doesn't seem to discourage the trees?

Edinburgh to Shadowlands

Dunedin is evidently Gaelic for Edinburgh. It is intensely Scottish and features a statue of Robbie Burns in the Octagon.

Ata Whenua, Shadowlands in Te Reo Maori, is Fiordland. We were there today on a spectacular cruise around Milford Sound. Two bizarre words: Tree avalanche. More later.

Evil Dead!

Many times, you learn to regard the fads and enthusiasms of your youth with disappointment and disillusionment. What was this crap that I once loved? you think. Didn't this used to be awesome?

Retrospectives are seldom kind.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I rented Evil Dead II, the Bruce Campbell altar at which I worshiped as a teenager. (The consummate B-movie actor played Ash in the film.) At the time, it seemed so funny, so gruesomely lively. It was slapstick before I had ever seen Keaton or Chaplin, undead horror before I'd heard of Romero. Frankly, I wasn't sure that it would stand up without a sixteen-year's sense of humor.

[Warning: The following discussion will give away the major plot points, if you can call them that.]

So it was no surprise to find that the dialogue was cheesy (but then, I knew that it was cheesy eight years ago) and that there were plot holes you could march a Deadite army through. The animation was claymation and they apparently ran out of buckets of red gore midway through the movie - having to switch to green and then blue.

In short, the movie was fucking great. I realized while watching it that it's really hard to make a good B movie. I mean, making a bad movie is easy. We learned last weekend that it's the easiest thing in the world to make something incoherent and boring. (See also: Manos: the hands of fate) However, making an unashamedly bad movie that nonetheless holds your attention and entertains you is really hard.

I think it might be impossible to be bored while watching Evil Dead II. There were a few things that worked really well. First, the camera work is actually really excellent. It holds your attention - the director, Sam Raimi, appears to be a master of the suspense-filled pan (to say nothing of the monster cam - if you've seen it you know what I mean).

Second, the blend of slapstick and horror is fantastic. At crucial moments, the film switches between the two, meaning that it avoids both horror and comedy tropes. The decapitated, reanimated girlfriend is a great example - Ash runs to the window, sees her grave tremble and a hand emerge. In a conventional horror film, this would lead to a ghoulish nightmare scene - in Evil Dead II, a claynimated corpse dances a ballet. (Still creepy.) Ash wakes up in horror - it was just a dream, just a dream. Her decapitated head drops into his lap - a switch back to shock horror. A slapstick scene ensues, as he attempts to beat her into unconsciousness while stumbling around in pain.

Then the infamous head-in-a-vice-corpse-attacking-with-chainsaw-dead-girlfriend-pleading-for-mercy scene ensues. The shed light is splashed with blood, casting the scene in a ghastly night.

Third, the movie has a serious undertone of mental disorder - midway through, we are wondering whether Ash is under attack by demonic forces, or just crazy and murderous. He decapitates and saws up his girlfriend, cuts off his own hand, and is just laughing maniacally when the owners of the deserted-cabin-in-the-woods trope come back. After he shoots at them, it's easy to see why they would want to imprison him in the cellar.

Fourth, and perhaps most, Bruce Campbell. He is a totally magnetic personality: whenever he's on screen, he's all you want to watch. His face is constantly entertaining - Anne noticed that I seem to have acquired a few of his expression somehow - and he's constantly at war with his body or surroundings in some sort of weird physical comedy. He plays this sort of overly-curious simpleton who is unaccountably comfortable with guns, axes and chainsaws. Bruce Campbell is like a black hole of campy entertainment: everything in his vicinity is drawn into him, captured by his topsy-turvy logic.

Finally, Evil Dead II delivers a fantastic selection of cheesy one-liners, from "Groovy" to "I'll swallow your soul!" At the end of the movie, when Ash has arrived at his destiny, the camera pans out, showing a man getting smaller in his surroundings. And he's screaming, protesting this fate, crying out: "NOooooOOOOOOooOOOOOOO! NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

At that moment, I realized why Shine Ning and I got into the habit of screaming "NNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!" to indicate displeasure, existential angst, or general existence. I guess there's this: Sometimes the things of your youth seem terrible in retrospect; sometimes they mystify you. And sometimes they make your life make more sense than it has in years.

Yarrr...

This weekend, we learned that whiskey is delicious, started reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, frantically dressed up as pirates in homemade eyepatches and our scarce striped clothing, stole rum, stashed it in a car rental place and returned for it once outside the bar, kicked it at the Watusi, digressed on history, outdrank all the Kiwis around with the help of a Scotsman, woke up disoriented, planned a trip to Dunedin and Queenstown, took a walk to the seal coast (no seals), played several games of chess, and stole a pirate flag from the beach as a memento. Now we arrrrrrr about to watch Evil Dead II.

I also spilled wine on my keyboard, apparently destroying the delete and arrow keys. This is a major catastrophe. I also lost quotation marks and dashes. Fuck!

He switched from rum... to whiskey!

Saith the Murder City Devils.

Saith me: Then switch back to rum, and then to beer, and then to brandy, and then to beer, and then to purloined rum, and then back to beer.

Jesus H.

March into the sea

This was going around earlier, cracking me up with its sheer absurdity: A rich libertarian expresses disillusionment with democracy, proposes moving into the sea.

Libertarians speak this discourse about freedom - but a strange, one-dimensional type of freedom which seems to reduce totally to the rights to (a) commodify everything and (b) to dispose of your personal property exactly as you saw fit. They never acknowledge the distributional problems - i.e. that some people have a lot, while others have hardly anything. In that case, this sort of de jure freedom rapidly becomes de facto unfreedom for most people. (I've suspected for a while that high levels of inequality are, in fact, the true purpose of libertarianism.)

Most people, of course, would define freedom in a much wider fashion - there would be something about the right to have your own stuff, but most of the content would be about voting rights, free speech, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, torture and execution, bodily rights, etc. You know, the rights underpinning any democratic system of government.

This particular man argues that those democratic freedoms have come into conflict with libertarian "freedoms":

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years:

[Usually a bad sign; signifies prolonged adolescence.]

to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.

[He thinks that he'll live forever, in other words. Megalomania: also a bad sign.]

For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible...

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

[In short, he blames women and minorities for the lack of success that his pet pro-inequality policies have had. If they'd never been granted political freedoms - you know, if we were still locking up suffragettes and lynching African-Americans - perhaps rich white males could really be free.

Talk about an intellectually corrupt, gutter-crawling philosophy.]

Fortunately, this guy has a solution:

Because there are no truly free places left in our world,

[Parse this statement. Try and make sense of it. Does your head hurt too?]

I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:

(1) Cyberspace...

(2) Outer space...

(3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans...

Please, march into the sea. I am eagerly awaiting the news report that a pack of rich libertarians have been kidnapped by pirates. You can really only laugh at these sad-sack people: Afraid of (other's) voting rights, afraid of women, afraid of people with less money or more skin-tone. Sitting on a huge pile of money afraid of every uncertainty that may lead them to part with a cent of it.

This guy will probably spend more money in a futile attempt to move into the sea than he ever would pay in higher tax rates.

Really, though, the libertarians aren't worth talking about. To paraphrase Eisenhower, their number is negligible and they are stupid. I wanted to talk about democracy. What is it?

Slavoj Žižek points out, somewhere or other, that democracy as it is today used refers to the existence of a set of rules that allow most people to vote and have their votes counted in some fashion. (For example, the US has an electoral college and Senate that allow people in small states a greater say in the outcome than others in larger ones. New Zealand, by contrast, has a Parliament with proportional representation that allows each party to be represented in proportion to the actual votes that it has gained. Both are considered democracies in spite of the fact that they treat individual votes quite differently.)

What we mean when we discuss this sort of democracy, Žižek argues, is not the emergence of any sort of people's will or collective decision, but the maintenance of the rules themselves. The rules of the game trump any other concern:

Democracy - in the way the term is used today - concerns, above all formal legality: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. [The Universal Exception, p. 53]

[Incidentally, I think that this is one of the reasons that Hugo Chavez is viewed with such suspicion in Western quarters - he has set out to change the rules of the game, to put in place a different set of fundamental principles through democratic means. His successful attempt to change the Venezuelan constitution through a referendum outraged sensibilities more than nationalizations, I think.]

The democracy that Žižek seeks to argue for allows those "antagonisms" - by which he means the potentially chaotic workings-out of a collective will - freer play. Rather than being captured and tamed within an orderly process, he thinks that we need to "overdo democracy". This could entail a number of uncertain outcomes - going far beyond both the neatly unjust libertarian solutions and the rules of the game itself. If democracy is to be worth the name, it must encompass the possibility of nonlinearity, sweeping change, radical discontinuity.

This view is coded within the libertarian's remarks. He recognizes that his ideal dream society (a dream for him; a nightmare for the poor) is threatened by democratic change, even at the glacial pace at which it is occurring under the centrist Obama administration. To preserve his order of things, his celestial spheres of riches, he rejects democracy. I'd choose the opposite, and be happy when disorderly democracy swept away the dust from the surfaces of modern life.

[Note: I am aware that, in good Benjaminian fashion I have also romanticized the dust that I condemn at the above link.)

Skipping out

We're supposed to go and watch the movie that we were supposed to spend the weekend making. Not going.

I think you can tell how that turned out. A catastrophe, really, a ghastly banality. Pointless and confusing plot, hackneyed, disjointed dialogue, no real relationship with the genre (politically incorrect or religious movie), shaky camera-work, and deliberate mangling of what could have been a good minimalist soundtrack. The only upside of it is that I ducked out on Saturday after the planning session on Friday night made it clear that our partners in crime were robbing us... of any chance of having input into the process.

Oh well.

I have been thinking about the Great Depression again. Anne's going back to the US to look for work - she'll have more luck there than here, I think - and the whole thing is reminding me, melodramatically, of the Joads. Lost the farm, out of money, off to California to drink the dregs of the wine made from the grapes of wrath.

Say we end up there again, for real. Wheels of industry ground to a halt, bulldozers stalled, a quarter of the population out of work. Mass hardship.

The upside of it is that it would probably clean the Augean stables of government-finance corruption. But the downside is much bigger for most of us.

How big of a downside, though? The good news, if you can call it that, is that living standards are a lot higher today than they were in the 1920s. Electricity, for example, is ubiquitous, while it took a government program of rural electrification to light up areas of the country in the 1930s. People have more stuff, which means that they have more to lose before they hit rock bottom.

We can cut back on most of our consumer electronics, for example, and most of our fancy clothes before not feeding ourselves. And think of houses and cars - more people (maybe too many people, even) have them now than then. Would it kill us to save costs by carpooling more, renting out half of our oversized homes? And do we need a Kindle, or can we just go to the library or second-hand bookshop instead?

My point is that in the worst-case scenario, average living standards have a ways to drop before becoming dangerous to our health.

There are a few caveats. The first problem is that the most vulnerable populations - inner-city blacks, migrant farm-workers and day-laborers, the service-sector working poor - will be hit the worst. They were already pinching pennies, skipping health-care, and barely getting by. For this to work, upper-middle class incomes would have to fall much further, while lower-class incomes were maintained better.

The second problem is a spatial one. It's easy to cut back on transport costs when in a compact place - you take the bus, carpool, or walk instead. Likewise, it's easier to entertain yourself without buying expensive consumer goods, as there are more people around to do things with. However, development has for a long time been skewed towards suburban growth and spatial atomization. People living further and further apart, and further and further apart from their work, shopping, and recreation. This is a terrain that creates dependence upon electronic widgets and automobiles; once built in on a sufficiently large scale, this pattern may prove amazingly difficult to reverse.

On the other hand, I recently read an article about a Texas bank that was destroying 16 foreclosed houses rather than trying to sell them. Perhaps, if enough overgrown and overpriced exurban houses are foreclosed, we can get whole swathes of suburbia demolished, and restart again in a sensible way... Less cars, less blinking and buzzing widgets, smaller houses, and more people meeting up in the library, on the train, in the park, the museum, the corner bar, and talking about how strange things used to be.

48

Our weekend will be consumed by this: a 48-hour filmmaking competition. Starts tonight, ends Sunday evening at 7.

The (voluminous) list of possible genres makes me want to choke on my own bile. A few highlights:

* African-American [Yes... in lily-white Wellington.]
* Blaxploitation [See above]
* British Empire
* Caper [Really quite easy... make a documentary about capers.]
* Chick Flicks or "Guy-Cry" Films [Errr, no.]
* Demonic Possession
* Desert Epics [Like Dune, right?]
* Erotic Thrillers
* Frankenstein, other Mad Scientists
* Holocaust [Reaction: Stunned silence.]
* Man vs. Nature
* Older-Woman-In-Peril Films ("Psycho-Biddy", aka 'Hag Horror' or 'Hagsploitation') [This is not a real genre.]
* Mountain [This is really not a real genre.]
* Robots, Cyborgs and Androids [I had actually been hoping "Robots" would be a genre.]
* Searches/Expeditions for Lost Continents
* Social-Class Comedies ["Sir, an uprising of the proletariat has just taken over your factory." "Oh I say Jeeves, how smashingly frightful!" "Yes sir, and now I must show solidarity with my fellow workers by beheading you." "Dreadful, dreadful!"]
* Straight Action/ Conflict [This rules out gay action.]
* Sword and Sorcery (or "Sword and Sandal")
* Virtual Reality [We do not have an SFX budget.]
* Women in Prison

Doomsday! (Addendum)

(A follow-up up to yesterday's post on climate change and technological change.)

Although I called for a new type of technology, I did not discuss why and how technological change happened. This is, in many ways, the key ongoing question.

As I mentioned, there are several ways to think of technology. The one is the "Leninist" view in which technology is a neutral, objective force of production that can be turned to either progressive or oppressive ends depending upon the form of the society in which it is used. To put this in other words, technology is a matter of quantitative efficiency - a "better" technology is one that can produce more output at a lower cost.

In this view, it is possible to mitigate (or even end) climate change by continuing to use the same basic technologies while modifying our social forms. For example, we could swap incandescent light-bulbs for CFLs, and minivans for Priuses, essentially preserving our technology by slightly changing our society's attitudes towards conservation.

Associated with this first view is the paradigm of technological progress. If technology is conceived of first and foremost as a matter of efficiency, it makes sense that technological changes will lead (naturally or inevitably) to better use of our dwindling resources. This, for example, animates research into carbon-capture-and-storage techniques, which seek to preserve coal-fired power plants by storing the CO2 they generate in underground reservoirs. (Never mind that we do not know whether stored CO2 will remain "captive".)

In short, the "Leninist" view of technological change allows us to expect that current trends in industrial technology will deliver a solution to our climate change and other ecological problems.

Unfortunately, recent evidence shows that the trend has been towards greater energy-intensity for more advanced technologies, not less:

Techno-optimists believe that we can innovate our way out of the fundamental resource constraints that threaten to strangle the Industrial Revolution. And why not? The record of technological progress over the past couple of centuries -- or past couple of decades -- is astounding. Add a few hundred million hustling Chinese and Indian engineers and scientists to the global mix, and I have no doubt that my children will be just as boggled by what their children take for granted as I am by their own smart-phone/wi-fi/YouTube existence. Solar-powered smart-grid-connected electric cars riding on the California highway, here we come.

But technological progress ain't cheap. In fact, according to the MIT scientists who authored "Thermodynamic Analysis of Resources Used in Manufacturing Processes," published in the January issue of Environmental Science & Technology, (found via Energy Bulletin), the further up the chain of advanced manufacturing technology you go, the more energy you use, as measured by "electrical work per unit of material processed." (US News & World Report has a nice summary of the research here.)

So what we might think of as the classic standbys of old-school manufacturing -- machining, injection molding, metal melting for casting -- actually are less costly in terms of electricity consumption than new school sensations like semiconductor manufacturing and nanomaterial processing. Indeed, write the authors, "It is apparent that electricity use per unit of material processed has increased enormously over the past several decades."

This trend has particularly strong implications for the advanced materials that we expect to dig us out of the carbon hole. Producing computers, which promise cheaper communication and a new virtual economy, turns out to have a massive carbon bill. Solar cells, which promise to end carbon-based energy production, are massively energy-intensive to fabricate. As a result, we could theoretically find ourselves within an energy "bottleneck", in which it is impossible to produce enough energy-efficient technologies to mitigate climate change without drastically worsening it.

So we turn to the second view of technology: The "Benjaminian" perspective, in which technology constitutes our relationship to nature and with each other. If we adopt this view, it becomes clear that technology differs not just in its efficiency but in the type of relationship that it embodies. Technology can be a relationship of mastery or exploitation - or perhaps one of partnership and cooperation.

In this view, technological change is path-dependent. If we start with technology that seeks to exploit or master nature (and humanity) and incrementally improve its efficiency, we will not end up with industries that are qualitatively different. And qualitative difference - i.e. reforging the spear that wounded us - is what is needed. It makes no sense to solve a crisis caused by over-exploitation of our habitat by exploiting it in a slightly different way.

How can we accomplish this "reforging", then? If technology is a relationship between man and nature, and such relationships are by definition social, we see that we must reforge society as well. This leads us into a variety of complex questions. Chiefly: Do changes in technology precipitate changes in society, or vice versa? (My answer would be: Both. Sometimes new technology leads to new models of social organization - for example, the Internet - and sometimes changes to society bring forth new technologies - which is the Marxist account of technological change brought about by proletarianization and factory labor.)

In short, we cannot expect technological change to bring about the environmental results that we need without (a) an unexpected jump onto a different "path" of technology or (b) radical social/political changes that demand fundamentally different relationships with nature and with each other. We can't expect the change we need to simply emerge fully-formed from GM's R&D labs.

Doomsday! (A note on technological change)

The other night I found myself drunkenly rambling to a friend about the movie Doomsday, which was this horrible cross between Mad Max, 28 Days Later, and Escape from New York. Laughably terrible. My brother and I got drunk, persuaded our younger brother to drive us to the theater, and spent the first 15 minutes of the film emphatically growling "DOOMSDAY!!!" at each other.

Anyway.

I wrote a few weeks ago about generational balances of power - I'm starting to wonder whether ours has been royally screwed over by our parents' profligate generation. The wealth has been delivered to them; the debt payments will be paid by us in an age of accelerating economic uncertainty and mass climate change.

Admittedly, I am a pessimist about most things. However, climate scientists are apparently more so:

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?

Earlier, I also wrote about the limits to capital. One of those, a quite important one, is an ecological limit. Any economic system will not survive if it over-exploits the resources it relies upon. Growth becomes impossible once cannot sustainably extract more resources. (Interestingly, that's proving true even for the new immaterial terrain: The Internet's expansion may soon be limited by its power consumption.)

If the grim climate change predictions are correct, we are already over-exploiting our atmospheric resources. If we keep emitting CO2 at the current rate, the planet will warm to a catastrophic degree.

There are two options, really. The first: Reduce the amount of carbon we produce by reducing the amount of stuff we produce and do. This will essentially worsen living standards for most people - moreso if populations continue to increase.

The second: Change the way we produce and do things to be more carbon-efficient. This would entail rapid, massive technological change, and the obsolescence of most existing machines.

I am reminded of Telephus, king of Mysia, who was wounded by Achilles. The wound would not heal, so Telephus consulted an oracle who advised him (in characteristically obscure oracular form) that "he that wounded shall heal". Achilles proved to be no hope; Odysseus reasoned that the spear that smote Telephus may heal him. And so it did.

We are now in the position of Telephus. Industrial and technological change have gotten us to this point, and now we have to rely upon it to solve the problem. (Like Achilles, the wielders of the "spear" - the political and economic elites who have benefited from industrialization - refuse to raise their hands to heal the wound.)

Technology, in short, must be bent to environmentally and socially progressive ends. Consider Susan Buck-Morss's account of the Soviet romance with technological modernization. She notes that "Lenin thought he could import capitalist forms of labor without their exploitative content. ... Assembly line production does not feel different to the sentient body simply because the worker is socialist." (Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 104.)

Although the Soviet experience was distinct, Buck-Morss points out that technology itself is not simply neutral matter awaiting political or economic direction. Rather, technology constitutes a relationship between man and man and between man and nature. She quotes Walter Benjamin:

The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man.
(Benjamin, 1926, from Reflections, p. 93.)

Currently, our technology demonstrates a vicious relationship between man and nature: Exploitative, extractive, polluting, and despoiling. If we continue using it, it will worsen the problems that it has already caused. While coal-fired power plants, strip-mining, slash-and-burn agriculture and the SUV have wounded the planet, we cannot seriously expect them to extricate us from the climate change mess.

Buck-Morss comments that Leninist-Stalinist industrialization led to horrendous human and environmental damage partly due to its uncritical acceptance of capitalist industrial methods. She writes:

Socialism necessitates a totally new relationship to nature. The technology of capitalism will not do to realize its aims. Capitalism organizes the exploitation of nature for private gain. Exploiting labor power is one part of this process, but not the whole. And just as capitalism will not pay for the reproduction of labor power (the social welfare bill) unless compelled to do so by state taxation, it will not by its own volition pay for the reproduction of the forces that it consumes so voraciously. Lenin was wrong to believe that technology is nothing more than the embodiment of objective science, hence value-free. Technology is the material manifestation of human beings' relationships with nature and among themselves. (Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 118.)

The good news, therefore, is that while we cannot rely upon current technology, we do not need to write off technology tout court. As tempting as it is to attempt to revive Ned Ludd and Captain Swing for the postmodern age, we need to develop different technologies (i.e. different relationships to nature and among ourselves) rather than simply smashing everything with a motor. We need to reforge the spear that wounded us before we can be healed by it.

Animal rescue

Last night, we rescued a hedgehog crossing a road at night and moved it into a friend's garden. Its spines were more pettable than expected.

This is only the second hedgehog Anne and I have ever seen.