Remodel

Generally speaking, I find it much more interesting and fun to build new, as opposed to remodeling. But the thing about remodeling - especially when the previous jackass whose work you're remodeling was you - is that it changes the nature of the building process itself entirely, considering that you are face to face not with raw earth, but with something that is already built. It changes your conception of what you build, how you build it, and why. Because sooner or later you might come face to face with it again, especially if you don't have the time and resources to scrap it and start new, and when that happens, it is better to be kind to your future self, lest you become trapped in a downward spiral. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 5

This Uncertainty in the Built Environment series also was a bit of an albatross: the subject matter of these posts required covering a lot of ground, and then I became very sick with Covid and the whole thing lost momentum, until finally stalling out and then just sitting there for some time. This is a huge pain in the ass: you lose your many trains of thought and coherence, and then go back to the thing to try to pick up where you left off, torn between finishing it out less strong, or tossing the thing entirely. 

I was tempted to scrap this shit, but reading it over, I'm seeing that there is still some meat here, and some important themes buried within that I'll be returning to anyway. If you bear with me through this undercooked post, I'll start a little more fresh on the next one and salvage some useful concepts for working through later. 

For the completionist, here is 1, 2, and 3, with 4 following just below. Not everyone has time for that though. I'll try to get the salient points across from here on out. 

Previously in part 4 I painted a bit of an intense picture of what uncertainty in the wilderness looks like. More importantly, we can use that picture to analyze the current state of the built environment, and of course assess the implications of that state. This is an exercise that feels all the more pressing, considering the state of current affairs in the United States especially. 

Here for many, the built environment is beginning to take on the subjective experience of a wilderness, a process that has been well underway for decades, and which is experienced at varying levels of intensity depending on the individual's social, political, geographic, and economic locations. The concept of the wilderness itself needs to be further addressed for clarification, but I'd like to save that for the next post, as I believe we have enough to directly address the subject matter alluded to by the title of this series of posts. 

Now, as we touched on before, the built environment is most immediately represented by the material supports of the urban environment - used in this case in a more general sense - but the phenomena itself is more an expression of a deep need to persist and even flourish at greater timescales, and so from the built environment flows an entire evolving world of ancillary processes such as the medical system, water and energy and waste systems, food distribution, transportation, research, administration, legal regulation, and so on. 

Many of these patterns seek to stabilize and maintain the many life processes on multiple levels, say on the molecular, individual, local, and collective levels, and to establish certain acceptable levels of predictability and certainty for the perpetuation of human life. 

Part of the problem here is that for numerous and deeply complex historical, evolutionary, and even thermodynamic reasons, the process to achieve stability and certainty tips well over into not only flourishing and then a bid at perpetual ecstasy, but also to absolute power and domination, which is necessarily a localized process, no matter how intently its universal conceits are declared. 

With such uneven patterns of development then, the historical regions of certainty and organization are always moving and shifting, and with them - and inextricably bound up with them - the regions of uncertainty and so-called chaos. 

We've been meditating on this process and its nature and consequences here for quite some time, and indeed it is incredibly complex and as a result, difficult to describe as a totality, but then that is what the wilderness metaphor is for: we can provisionally collapse these processes down into the simple matters of access to food and energy and basic survival, and then the subjective experience of such things. One way to illustrate the movements of organization and stability, and their contrasting regions of uncertainty, is to illustrate the basic contrasting consequences and experiences of these phenomena. 

This is getting easier to do now, because the contrast between flourishing and struggling is proceeding to such a stark and sharp disparity between classes of individuals, and then there is the growing polarization of the shrinking wealthy classes and the growing impoverished classes.

One is of a certain class, ticking off the right identity boxes in certain regions of affluence, and everywhere one walks, there is somewhere to instantly procure food, energy, transportation, what have you. You get lost, and you merely need to speak, and soon you'll be on your way. 

Move over to another class, another set of identity markers, and one is regarded with puzzlement and suspicion. One loses the ability to speak, or to be seen and understood, regarded instead as a threat, and one better mind one's step. There is less certainty in the daily furnishing of food, water, shelter, and heat, which at present is increasingly being rationed in accordance with the money system, a rationing that will increasingly become more territorial as the money system is increasingly abused and broken down, as is apparent in the behavior of the rich and powerful increasingly buying up material security in the form of land and natural resources, and of national boundaries sharpening and clarifying under the increasing strain of global trade. 

This uncertainty manifests all sorts of compensatory behaviors which complicate the public sphere and introduce a chaotic, shifting mass of activity that is more difficult for central powers to manipulate and anticipate. Lying, stealing, murder, social threat and domination, addiction, suicide, and so on are examples of the many alternatives available to individuals and then states abandoned to a social and geopolitical wilderness where food and protection are no longer guaranteed, all of which have profound social and political consequences that must be dealt with in turn. 

The many micro-events influence the development of a macro, or structural set of ongoing forces, which produce their own micro-events in turn. At the risk of entering a particular sequence of events mid-stream in the narrative, you had a socially, politically, and economically weakening global capitalist system - which was built for the rapid movement and suffusion of material globally - take up the coronavirus that causes Covid, which rapidly moved through the global population, reproducing and evolving and reinfecting rapidly in waves, doing damage as it went. 

This pandemic was able to bloom into fruition through a growing political economic wilderness in which a populace was increasingly set against itself, and the virus, doing its damage, contributed to a seizing up of global supply chains, and an acceleration of the concentration of capital, among other knock on effects, accelerating the mistrust of collective institutions and even guiding ideologies. We've been covering this growing chaos and uncertainty in the context of the decline of the West, but there are similar issues springing up globally - if in different forms - due in part to the universality of an increasingly unstable global climate. 

Uncertainty and certainty are connected conceptually, yes, but they are also closely connected in practice. Where chaos and uncertainty grows, there grows with them an insatiable hunger for certainty and stability, which pursued in a concentrated and forceful matter, produces more of its opposite in well-proportioned amounts. 

To make better sense of these tangled concepts in tension with each other, I'd like to address the shifting nature of the wilderness and its lessons. Uncertainty is in our present narrative closely associated with the wilderness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. Though the identity of the concepts of "uncertainty" and "wilderness" have been useful to establish a narrative thus far, the concepts themselves will be more useful to us on a practical level when they are disentangled. Next time we can untangle those things and see what is there.  

On Yule

Here we're on the eve of the Western Christmas, that Christian and then commercial graft onto the body of pagan traditions, stories, and symbols called Yule, which circulating and crosspollinating among the Roman, Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic worlds, gelled into the coherent winter holiday we enjoy today. 

Yule myth actually contains some really interesting ideas and phenomena: communication with the dead continues on from Samhain, and as the cold and dark really start to set in, vibrant colors and symbols of vitality are bandied about to buttress the community against the bleak chill pressing in from all sides. Strange and sometimes dangerous spirits wander the frozen landscape out there in the dark, which are best sheltered in from, avoided, and ignored.  Me? I do choose to ignore the unrecognized Timeshare Exit calls that have recently invaded my phone.  

We get some of the residue of those sentiments as winter passes over us in the Western Hemisphere, though the nature of winter itself is changing within my lifetime. One wonders where the myth goes from here. 

I'll have to get more into that later, as family will soon be here, and I'll be quite busy. For a lot of folks, the light and color and food and company creates a welcome warm pocket to push back what cold is left. If that's you, enjoy, and if not, enjoy the quiet nevertheless.     

Damages

One ongoing concern at this here blog is the course and nature of what we could call "damage" sustained on human societies contemporaneously. Though the damage takes place along a spectrum, with more kinetic forms continuing to exist in current war zones, there are also slower, multifaceted, and quiet forms which continue on with a heightened insidiousness, which produce the more kinetic and concentrated forms, which despite their geographically remote and concentrated nature, nevertheless feed back into the less kinetic forms, advancing them all the same. Understanding this damage is crucial to understanding and anticipating the arc of decline in industrial age societies, and we'll continue to get deeper into that subject as per usual. 

In this case, I'm grateful that Ian Welsh has stayed on the subject of Covid damage since the very beginning, as this is a tricky and complex process that is made even more complicated by heavy propagandizing in the press and in our political economy. 

As Ian describes - and the chart he links to is astounding - wave after wave of Covid infection has steadily ground down the population's immune response, among many other things, which results in a grinding merry-go-round of secondary infections, all of which produce additional heavy damage throughout society on multiple levels.  I'd suggest reading this post as well, which taken together with the Covid piece, carries the implication that damage and leadership are related and influence each other, as Ian mentions.

This is personal for me. As I sit here writing, I'm slightly out of breath and quite achey. My Long Covid has largely healed. I've gotten away from the fire, and it no longer actively burns, but the scars are still there, and occasionally they still hurt. I haven't been the same. And like the archetypal burn victim, I'm quite wary of the fire: even distant and suggestive glimpses of it are enough to activate my early defenses and put me on alert. 

Now, roughly 5 years after the start of the Covid pandemic, Covid is everywhere, and anecdotally (with regular observations of national policy and messaging) very few people care to track it or even mitigate or take the slightest precaution that actually works. I still hear people going on with, "Don't worry we've wiped down all the surfaces with bleach and are being really careful." Huh? Not even a year into the pandemic, we knew it was in the air and that you had to clean the fucking air. And that is one thing we refuse to do. 

Even further, here in Southern California, the air quality is worse than I've ever seen it. There is a perpetual build-out and population growth - more cars and wider freeways - and geography and climate conditions have led to a capping effect in which the Los Angeles basin traps all of the smog and holds it in, with the result of lingering garbage air and constant smog alerts and burn bans. Are we doing anything on a large scale about ventilation and sick buildings at the very least? Might not be able to contain those local growth engines, and we might not be able to muster the coordination, trust, and purpose it takes to build out mass transit. Folks have forgotten the lessons of the 60's and 70's and the smog alerts, and all of the heart disease and cancers and cognitive dysfunction and other maladies that come from that. And of course, all of this is also hard on immune systems, bringing on more Covid, which brings on more secondary infections, and we get more and more tired and brittle and hand-wavey about the bare minimum mitigation. 

I get it, bleach is cheap and air purification, ventilation, and HVAC are expensive, and the virus is everywhere and they just aren't trying anymore, so what is the average person to do? But even low-cost mitigation and effort can't be bothered with. We are collectively sleep-walking into the miasma and then steadily ground-down. 

All of the messaging has overwhelmingly downplayed aerosol dynamics and structural environmental mitigation, and emphasized surface cleaning, distancing, and personal responsibility. Here, Fela Kuti's Zombie comes to mind, with anti-police and anti-military messaging that could be readily transferred to a more generalized population group, following orders, or mass propaganda, and marching on, rotting away all the while. 

Setting aside the personalized venting here, I don't necessarily mean for this to be a finger-wagging moral condemnation either. People are exhausted. Large-scale problem solving measures, or even basic mitigation, simply can't be done as a matter of failed capacity and functionality. This is what the damage looks like and feels like on a social and subjective level.  

Visual Arm

So that writing project that I was working on? Yep, I got me a Substack. 

The nature of that project is in the name. I was explaining to a friend of mine that this was going to be the "visible arm" of my writing endeavors, and being of a poetic mind, he promptly replied, "How about Visual Arm? That could be a good name." Yeah, that was the one. I have an affinity for those abstract yet suggestive names that are head-scratchers. 

So, maybe a couple more words on that. 

I've been writing on this here blog - The Faster the Slower - for twenty years now, which is kind of wild to me. Before starting this blog, I was writing on that old blog engine Xanga as a teenager, when that general blogging business as a cultural phenomenon was young. At that time I was pretty inexperienced - obviously enough, being a teenager - and just wrote whatever, reaching out to whomever on there as I went. That blog started to gain traction - in a very small-scale niche Internet community way - as I was pretty friendly and making online buddies and such. 

It was a good outlet for a while, but my inexperience started to catch up with me. The density of my interactions and the reciprocal writing and commenting began to overwhelm me, and I started finding that it was getting harder and harder to write naturally and expressively while experimenting with new forms, as I was writing for others and thinking too much about what those others were thinking about my own writing. And this is an insecurity that was related to a lack of life experience too. So eventually I said my goodbyes and closed the thing down, and then quietly opened this Blogger account, not telling anyone save for a couple of close friends, and left it at that. 

Writing here, I began to realize that I liked the quiet and the obscurity, and could just write for the love of the writing, and develop my own idiosyncratic craft in isolation, which suited me just fine. I knew I only had a handful of readers, and I wasn't too worried about getting my writing out there. Of course everyone does want to be read and understood to a certain extent. Eventually I figured I would get the writing out to a wider audience when it was more developed and refined, but I wasn't in any hurry. 

Well, time passed, and I came to further appreciate the obscurity. My life arc ceased to be about becoming a writer per se, and more just about surviving that space between the cracks that I had fallen into, in search of autonomy and grounded confidence and satisfaction in daily living. The writing was a form of personal meditation, of putting together everything that I had learned in the intellectual sphere with everything I was learning in the practical/material sphere, and that was enough. 

Further, the cultural weather was really starting to turn, more so than before, with a mounting and widespread meanness and cynicism that was making that process of going out into the public ever more unappealing. Earnestness was cringe, and despite my own growing cynicism, I was also quite earnest, and consider myself that way still. Granted, that was only part of the calculus, and there are plenty of wonderful writers out there doing good work and providing online refuge for those seeking it out, offering up a model of how it could still work. 

But alas, I figured I could be OK with toiling in obscurity in perpetuity, as my living conditions became satisfying and rewarding enough in their own right. And I have grown to savor those dark, quiet, candlelit caves and alcoves where I can hide and be in peace, with just enough light to see what I was doing immediately in front of me, babbling to myself in the process. 

Nevertheless, there was always that smoldering ember of wanting to be read, which still glowed under the ashes. And also a little problem was starting to develop: that minor matter of increasing precarity that we are all collectively experiencing more or less. I've been living on the financial knife edge for quite some time, and was able to get a little grace from some remaining institutional resources, and some leg-ups from loved ones from time to time. But that edge gets a little sharper the more things are cut to the bone in the country as a whole. Of course, living the way that I do is also a matter of increasing personal resilience and lowering financial overhead, which does help the precarity factor. But there is also strength in diversifying one's strategies too, to be sure. 

See, there are a number of countervailing forces present in the relative states of obscurity and visibility, with each separate sphere offering its own advantages and disadvantages. Of course, these forces hinge on the nature of the individual too, as there are plenty of folks that thrive in different conditions for different reasons. For me, obscurity and silence offers an intense spiritual place to plow all of my personal resources and concentration into a given craft or practice, where I can develop without distraction or interference. Personally I thrive in such conditions. 

Being less visible and having less public awareness can also be good if you have a certain notoriety and personal noxiousness, so you're less apt to arouse suspicion and/or be attacked in some way. I might not be noxious per se, but I can be stubborn in my...idiosyncrasy. But it also means less social support and social opportunity, and it's not as immediately apparent to others when the invisible are being stepped on and/or are going under. 

On the flip side of this, being more visible means making a lot more connections and having all sorts of opportunities open up that weren't there before. It means putting out the equivalent of a little solar or water collector, attempting to capture a little stream of social resources, so to speak. For me it also means possible overstimulation and distraction and overbooking. And in general, it means opening up oneself to more passing social forces, good and bad. There are always trade-offs. For each additional energy-collecting leaf the tree puts out, that leaf can also be a vector for water loss in the respiration process. 

The interesting thing about this particular juncture is that framing things in this contrasting light provides a way to separate the approaches and possibly develop them independently, experimenting with their various effects. 

What I mean is that splitting off this writing project offers an opportunity to explore those contrasting approaches and develop via different modalities, among many other things. I'm planning on keeping this blog as it is, and then continuing to do in obscurity the more weird and esoteric stuff here, which will of course inform and buttress the more visible and accessible (and somewhat theatric in a way, in the sense of developing a persona) stuff that I'm doing over there. 

And you, dear reader who found this space, can watch both spaces develop and inform each other in their own ways, if that sort of thing is interesting to you anyway. The normal thing to do would be to keep private notes on the one hand, and then a public body of work on the other - and I do have my share of private notes - but I find that having a semi-public experimental sphere and then a separate public experimental sphere could be quite interesting.  

Now, it could be that my Substack never gets off the ground. Perhaps it fails to gain traction and fizzles out as a place of interest, and then it is back to the drawing board. Or eh, something happens. I attempted an early foray into the Instagram world to showcase my photography a couple of years ago, and within a day or two of setting up my account, the account was promptly hijacked, flooding my unsuspecting friends with pornographic images, and so I gave up that venture on the spot. 

That's of course a comical example - I did not have a very strong commitment to the Instagram project - and I don't plan giving up that easily this time, I promise. And it could be that the Substack does gain traction, and through that traction, this place is found, and the nature of both projects change too. Anything can happen. But for now, it'll be an interesting exercise to try to straddle the worlds and develop in different ways in the different spheres, and see how it all pans out. 

The other thing about splitting off this other writing project is to combine its public purpose with a very different set of intentions from the get-go. With Visual Arm - and as with everything else I do it'll change and evolve over time - I intend to more intentionally ground the material in a specific place (or places) and within a certain community striving towards certain ends, as part of a broader project to develop a positive vision of action which is connected to - and results from - the ongoing critique which will continue to take place here. What does one do with one's life, considering that one takes to be true the state of affairs continuously rendered here? Well, I've flipped the switch, and I'm going to get to it. 

I'm also working on a shit-ton of posts on here too; more to come. 

Back At It

Looking at the yearly post counts, I've certainly had one of the least productive writing years I've had in a long time. Hopefully we can finish a little stronger here. 

But there was certainly good reason for that. Or there were several good reasons anyway. You have the baseline intensity and duration of physical labor during the work season to begin with. Living between the cracks, people may discover that you're available for this or that task or project or unfulfilled function, which multiply as things continue to break down in the United States. Or that you are available to visit. And most of this is a positive and enriching side of that status. But the institutions breaking down also offload a lot more time and labor on you as well. 

This is all multiplied if the only bridge leading into your community is permanently closed due to neglect and terminal damage - a shattering event that I have still yet to full process and eventually write about - and the isolated community on the terminal side of that bridge are forced to turn inwards and come together to coordinate greater autonomy. 

Add to all this the improving by still-present baseline of Long Covid to this, and all of the work and energy it takes to work around that, as well as a couple of deaths in the family, and all of the meditation and spiritual work it takes to deal with those things, as well as the much higher baseline of ambient stress and pressure, and quickly the time and energy disappears, and the writing does not come. 

One's life is what it is. One's idealized life on the other hand begins to take on the appearance of a deflating bounce house, the power cut to its inflating blower, and trapped inside, one maneuvers to merely escape its sagging and suffocating confines. 

But now I have some time again, and I'm gearing up for the writing again. Alas, as with any sort of activity that one no longer sustains, one's faculties and familiarity atrophy. With the physical work, this principle is immediately apprehended as one resumes that work: one's muscles are quickly exhausted and one's endurance is found lacking as one gasps for breath. With sustained thought, reading, and writing, initially one's mind is blank and dull, one's head hurts; one's thoughts remain slippery and fleeting, but then gradually the duration and depth and vibrancy of those thoughts return. 

There is a fear and a reluctance to get going again. Can I still do this? Of course, the muscle memory is there. It starts to come back as one gets moving again. I feel sympathy for those rusting gutted cars that sit in people's yards, those unfulfilled fixer-uppers that gather embarrassment as well as dust. I glance at my own unfinished cars littering the yard. Time to get the tool box and get going. 

Trying to Fall

During the bulk of the warmest October on record, you could feel the fall trying to come on in the Pacific Northwest. Higher north, the amount of light in a single day drops off precipitously: the sun passes from east to west much lower in the sky, barely arcing over the tree-line like a deflating balloon, and the day ends quickly. The cold and dark come on hard. 

Yet in the middle of all this, winds kick up mostly from the south and from the offshore currents from the west, occasionally sloshing in from the east due to the geography and dynamic climate of the region, bringing warm air from unseen lands baking in the south and in the interior, which then settle underneath a dense cloud layer. This sort of pattern is to be expected in the early fall, but which has been gradually growing in intensity and duration. 

As I've mentioned before, confusion ensues in the plant and insect life. Animal confusion follows. Human confusion and consternation comes too. The seasonal labor winds down with a feeling of hesitation and frustration. 

Heading south in mid November, I passed through some of those unseen lands. The misty north of Washington and then Oregon gave way to a furnace in California, almost instantly as the border was crossed, the sun shining and the heat radiating like mid summer. The cooling happens much more gradually, ever more so. The slowing and the silence follow that same delayed descent. There is so much to do, and less time to sit. 

Still Kickin'

Damn quite the fallow period this time. From what I reveal every once in a while about the conditions of my life, it seems like it would be possible for my posts to just drop off for good one day and it turns out I just croaked. Nope, didn't croak yet. Still here, but life things have been happening and I've been so intensely busy that I haven't had any time to write at all. Still some things to get through before I'm out of the woods. Till then. 

I Present To You

A series of writings that were feverishly written in the grip of an illness, an illness that happened to force me to slow down enough and isolate for a minute, carving out the time to write the durn things. Good luck!

Gettin It Done

You'd think that out here doing much more ourselves in the woods - free from the so-called red tape - we'd be getting it done right quick. Well, kind of, for certain basic tasks. It depends on what you mean by getting it done though. The more you do locally, the more you try to really pack it in - stacking functions so to speak to maximize the density of work done, maximizing efficiency - which is an important permaculture principle, though permaculture was not the discipline to discover this principle, which is itself a very old principle.

Say you fell a tree for resources. There is a whole lot to that tree beyond just felling it and bucking it up. You might get some lumber out of it, and then use less suitable sections for firewood. And then you get a bunch of branches, which could be used for crude building material, kindling, landscaping and hugelkultur fill, or chipped up to be used as mulch, pathways, and finer fill. The finer branches could be scattered for forest food, or they could be moved to be used for fill, mulch, or compost material somewhere else. 

The type of tree and location of the tree could be selected for getting more sunlight where it is felled, and changing the mix of trees in the area, or opening up a wider flight corridor for birds of prey, which could help control rodent populations in a particular area. What's done with the stump? Is it cut flush with the earth? Is it left to stand for seating or for a table out in the woods? Does the species coppice and will that coppice be managed in the future? Or will the whole thing need to be yanked out to clear for useable space?

All these separate forms of work draw out the process of felling and processing a tree substantially, so the process takes a lot longer, and is much more involved than one initially thinks, and at first glance it doesn't look like much is happening. But these different scattered forms of work also make maximal use of the felled tree, which itself makes for a somber sacrifice and significant transfer of resources to many disparate processes and functions, which will hopefully work together synergistically to a produce a more powerful outcome over a longer period of time. 

And perhaps this is a better meaning for "red tape," that seemingly sticky, constricting bramble that slows everything down to a state of ineffectiveness and paralysis. But slowed down for what purpose? To what end? Regulations tend to crop up through greater guiding visions for larger processes, and those visions can have a tendency to degrade and lose coherence, with various countervailing interests getting involved where there is weakness and vulnerability, and then the regulations can crop up into convolutedness with a dispersing purpose, and then you may really have the fabled "red tape" on your hands. 

My life activity now could be analyzed in these terms. On the day to day, I'm getting a whole lot of little things done, which all relate to certain broader goals. In the short term, it seems like it is taking forever to get anything substantial done, but all of these smaller efforts are hopefully accumulating across disparate functions which will hopefully act synergistically to produce a larger outcome further down the road. The trick is angling all of these disparate functions towards a broader coherent purpose, stacking as many harmonious activities as possible in service to that coherent purpose, and not just dispersing all of that energy out into the ether. 

I guess my point to all this is that the fastness or slowness of getting certain things done is relative and appropriate to what needs to be done, and how. Emergencies certainly need to be handled in a timely fashion, but then there are plenty of other things that should be done slowly and with care, stacking their functions together so that they work well together.

And sometimes slowness is a desired property in itself, as it gives things time to breathe or ferment, and it gives time for deliberation and the proper guiding of larger processes on a longer timescale, processes whose initial velocity need to be carefully managed, as the later velocity of them becomes more difficult to influence as they really get going. 

Dark Age Ahead

Yeah, I know the term has become quite contentious. Dark ages are not necessarily evenly distributed through time, or even space. And their meanings are somewhat relative depending on the observer. Dark for whom? What is the meaning of the "darkness" and is it a bad thing in an absolute sense? As far as the common historical-mythical imagery goes, you typically have a divide in which civilization - or a series of empires - represents the light and order, and then on the other side of that divide, the lack of civilization, or its collapse, represents the dark and the chaos. And these separate spheres can mean prosperity and opportunity for different groups and interests depending on who and where they are in these spheres. 

These are all very interesting lines of inquiry, and I'm going to bypass much of them for now and just use the term "dark age" for its common imagery to make a couple of limited points in the realm of knowledge and ideology. 

Let's begin with some very basic imagery. Light takes a lot of energy to produce. It is energy. The sun, that admired and envied fusion generator out there in space, conveys most of our light, at least directly. Artificial light takes plenty of energy on its own, and it takes work to construct it. And we are largely visual creatures. "Monkey see, monkey do," to put it very, very crudely. The average individual looks at where they want to go, and navigates there with the help of feeling their way along, and hearing and smelling, and then looking at the things they want, and then doing with the help of looking as feedback, all with the help of light bouncing around and entering the eyes, conveying that information. 

Language works kind of like this in perception and communication and imagination too. It takes work to produce a language that describes and accords with the things one largely looks at, according to a certain convention which is communicated through verbalization, and it takes even more work to write that language down, and then even more work to process what is written down and re-combine it and then write that processed re-combination down. If all of this is working right, it bounces off certain realities and enters the mind's eye and illuminates those particular realities, which can be further improved upon or even acted upon. 

And if you take into account this schema in the illuminations afforded by knowledge, higher resolutions of constructed knowledge require larger complexes of written word and symbol, which are not only maintained on various media, but have to be continually refreshed through research, verification, contention, ideological and technological revolution, advances of method and technique, maintenance of tradition through repetition, and so on. 

All of this takes a lot of time, and consumes a lot of energy in the brain. You typically need a decent stable life with decent nutrition to continually do this in a coherent way. So you see the dominance of rational thought - making sophisticated and dense use of symbol and logic, and the general availability of more recorded data - correspond with later stages of development and accumulation of resources, and a long enough period of continuity in a given civilization. 

You see in the ancient world more chaotic and tumultuous periods where the writing output goes dark and we know less about what is going on. The Roman Empire's Crisis of the 3rd Century is a good example of this; there are many others. 

In earlier developmental periods of knowledge production on the other hand, you see something a little different. You see in old myth and religion for example an attempt to convey as much as possible with less, with a large portion of that unable to be expressed in the writing even. Looking at the immediate writing, you can get some of it, but the rest is only hinted at, which you can pick up on through experience and feeling and through understanding what is attempting to be conveyed. 

I think of myth as sort of waving a torch in the darkness, its limited light hinting at what is there, and then you have to feel around to get a sense of the rest. And you have to know how to make and use the torch, without it going out too soon or burning up. Reading myth and getting the most out of it is a little different than just reading it too. 

And it can be pretty nice to have a torch or candle for when the lights do go out. Out here in the canyon, all it takes is for a storm to come through, or even a stiff wind, and then when one of the multitude of leaning trees next to the sketchy power lines falls over and knocks the line down, the power goes out, usually for a couple of days. If you took some time and effort to become a little more comfortable with knowledge, resources, and activities that don't require the power to be on, you don't have to run around with your hair on fire when it does go out. 

And we have a lot of metaphorical sketchy powerlines exposed to metaphorical leaning trees in our society don't we? And there is the matter of those increasingly frequent and increasingly violent storms. I'm not saying though that we have to turn and embrace wholesale some stone age ethic. Having a healthy dose of interest and respect for an ethic like that could be good. But you don't have to give up the good shit either. 

I like my LED string lights just fine, and solar technology rocks. Heck, I even adore the grid and the tube amp it powers. I'm a voracious reader, and I'm grateful for the Internet as it still exists, feeling good and connected to everything out there. It does feel a little more secure, a little more satisfying though, to have a growing knowledge of all those lower tech alternatives out there. As John Michael Greer put it, "collapsing now and avoiding the rush" doesn't have to necessarily mean jumping ship altogether all at once. It just might be good to slowly climb a few more rungs down on the jungle gym as the thing starts getting more creaky.  

Indeed, painting with a broad brush here, but one really unattractive aspect of early Christian ideology - which still survives in various forms - was that hatred and loathing of everything to do with the earthly realm, of carnal needs and desires and functions, of the forces of nature. Certainly over time the ruling elite amplified this message for purposes of social engineering, but you did have a lot of people thinking, "gross, these oppressive pagans with their nature-love and their carnal indulgences, and now everything has come crashing down and what is it all good for?" 

It is easy enough to foresee a deepening technology-hatred which crystallizes into part of a new ideology as everything becomes progressively more poisoned and unstable, with the ruling class pushing high-technology at the expense of everything else, a lot of which will become unusable anyway as the infrastructure breaks down. You can't eat a gatdamn crypto coin. You're already seeing it popular conversation too. 

But the thing about pushing hard on a pendulum and setting it in motion, to get it as far from you as possible, is that eventually it comes back to hit you in the ass. 

Stuck Lever

We're seeing more and more of these sticking points crop up, where the ruling class pushes the contradictory tensions between rhetoric and action so far that the formal logic breaks down, and the mass consent with it. You can spin a lot of this every which way if you don't go too hard, and you can lie to a lot of people through a given crisis, and a lot of people will buy it, desiring to get on with their lives. But what if you do go too hard and its harder to spin away? And what happens when crises like that are more sustained and destructive, and happening more frequently? And then you have more people who can't get on with their lives because their lives are simultaneously falling apart? 

The Ukraine war is really doing this on a higher economic and professional statecraft level, implicating processes like arms manufacturing, military alliances, military doctrine and prowess, global trade and finance, and so on, the effects coursing most powerfully through Europe, but which are being widely observed as well. 

And simultaneously you have the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, doing immense damage to questions of international law and basic issues of morality and modern ethics which have formed a bulwark of our national mythology since at least the World Wars. 

You also have the Epstein fiasco wreaking havoc domestically, with huge swathes of the political spectrum completely inflamed over the issue, casting into sharp contrast the separate tiers of justice and public morality based on wealth and class, gulfs which are only growing and deepening.

Larger and larger swathes of the body politic are no longer accepting the manufactured consensus attempted around these crises, letting the open wounds stand and fester. Or to put it another way, the steel is losing its temper. 

But this is how everything works too. Ukraine was another piece in the grand scheme of the everlasting Pax Americana and the homogenization of the world system under neoliberal capitalism. And Israel was the "aircraft carrier of the Middle East," getting its ethno-state colony purified as part of that deal. And Epstein was one of the multitudes of middle men that emerged in the nexus of global finance and geopolitics, who was able to facilitate the movement and laundering of massive global wealth flows, while maintaining delicate balances of personal and political power, until his monstrous nature caught up with him anyway.   

These were the increasingly desperate and ad-hoc processes put into place to keep the world system running as it was continuously breaking down, forming the masses of duct tape and glue slapped onto groaning forms and wobbling motion that now need to be changed fundamentally, as their pathologies have advanced too far, which the ruling classes refuse to do, if they were even capable of doing so anyway. And now these very processes are doing much of the dismantling as they proceed to their logical end. 

Digital Accumulation

AI, as a very broad technological concept, has a very broad set of applications that will continue to expand and evolve as the technology is developed and applied. However, as a high-value and resource-intensive technology, it lends itself naturally to consolidation and concentration, and as such will be used in certain dominant ways depending on where the economic power and resources are concentrated. 

We have to be careful here though. This doesn't have to mean fully-automated dystopia. There are ways to concentrate power so that power can be intentionally re-distributed in broader and broadly effective ways, which influences how technology manifests socio-politically and economically, and how it is ultimately put into practice. Ian Welsh - one writer I repeatedly return to for his particular gift for distilling complex and challenging subjects into clear and direct pieces, all the while accomplishing the difficult part in the process: getting it right - explains how the technology is developing very differently in China. 

I'm not going to explore here whether these differing historical-geographical developments will lead to their relative successes or disasters, and I won't say that China doesn't have its own unique troubles particular to its historical character, as much as you can isolate that particular character from the greater world system anyway. But it is certainly useful to be able to observe contrasting lines of development and their relative effects and effectiveness. 

I still have this huge piece on AI brewing which will seek to address some of these larger issues, which gets bigger and more complicated every day as the technology continues to develop and more stories come out on it, which is kind of a pain in the butt and an albatross honestly. But for now I just wanted to turn to a particular phenomenon that is pretty interesting. 

In this brief post, I'm going to focus on the Western approach. Here you have all of these wildly varying speculations about what AI can do and accomplish, and then a certain band of dominant applications where it is really displaying its efficacy as it manifests in actually-existing society in the West. 

Structurally, the prevailing pattern in the West has been an intensifying and accelerating process of rolling expropriation, which beginning with colonization, made for continuous acts of robbery which had to - roughly paraphrasing Hannah Arendt again -  continuously be repeated lest the whole process break down. And now the process is indeed breaking down, as there is less and less weak and vulnerable outer to rob which hasn't collapsed into flame and chaos anyway, and the robbers have had to take more of their share from the inner, while dreaming of pillaging the bigger stronger powers in the outer but not actually carrying out that dream, to condense a complicated story into so many words. 

This process came to mind recently because I've repeatedly observed my site being scraped. This is crude inference; I don't actually have the technical skills to inquire as to whether this was actually the case, but there have been a number of instances when I've seen a huge amount of single pageviews for a large amount of posts all at once. If it really was scraped for AI, good luck to the AI in making sense of this stuff; that AI is going to get a bit weirder. 

But it doesn't matter whether my stuff was personally scraped or not. We know that this is happening all over the Internet, and that AI systems are hoovering up all of the data they can get, leading to various problems like fights over digital property, and then a particular kind of garbage in, garbage out issue, where the AI runs out of raw input and begins taking in AI output. Which got me thinking. 

Every next technological revolution we have comes in the context of Western political economy: in which waves of self-interested, state-backed private actors advance contemporary technological suites through a process of expropriation, in which they appropriate first natural and indigenous resources and then later on appropriate collectively produced and public resources in subsequent waves, destroying the integrity of those resources in the process while producing a fresh wave of initially public resources, which are steadily enclosed and captured, socializing the costs and privatizing the gains. 

This is also a telescoping process, in which the window for the even distribution of public resources constricts and shortens in time with each subsequent wave. There was a very brief period when AI tools were more broadly distributed to tinker with, before they were rapidly rolled up, and are now quickly being siloed off into proprietary systems, raising costs socially, while also the sclerotic technical monopolies brute force the additional energy requirements without a more thorough innovation in operating efficiency, so that energy and data requirements are rising steeply. 

There are all kinds of dynamics to be analyzed in there, but what I'm getting at is this limited observation: that we can see the bots scrape our socially produced digital materials, passing by like hungry ghosts, our remaining scraps of digital production stripped away and chucked into the great food processors as more grist for corporate AI slop, to be distributed through highly centralized corporate troughs, a mudslide of content slurry we didn't ask for, giving us essentially nothing of substance in return for our unending time and energy and attention, in compensation for the Internet commons they have been in the process of destroying in the previous wave. 

Passing Summer

Mercifully summer is passing very quickly in our perception here, owed in part to the feverishness of our activity here amidst an eventful year. The average temperatures have been fairly mild this year in the PNW, with lots of rainfall this spring, but the steady attrition of the warming climate - typified by a steady drying-out in the west - has given us a shearing set of impressions in which pockets of surface moisture remain, with slug season being quite long and prolific in the woods this year, while at the same time the streams dry up earlier every year, and the mountain is looking the barest it has ever been at this time of year. 

This drying land loses its capacity to retain water, even as it comes down in torrents in the wet season, and the glaciers don't easily accumulate again after they have melted away, leaving exposed rock darker in color with its own local warming effect. 

At the same time, the deterioration of our political economy has produced a lasting bridge failure, cutting us off from the outside world, which carries with it many contradictory effects, including a protective effect, in which there isn't a steady stream of motor vehicles coming in, producing their sparks and their flammable trash heaps and their undisciplined campfires, among other hazards, so that we may be somewhat insulated from wildfire here, for now, even as dry as the woods have become. 

And the wild, however confused and stressed it may be from the increasingly chaotic climate, becomes more wild itself as the people pressure is lifted, setting free its own inner productive forces and resources. We've seen exploding elk, deer, and bird populations, and the rapid growth of apex predators in conversation with them. And the trailing blackberry (I believe) vines, their toes no longer repeatedly crushed and amputated, discover a newfound imperiousness, and venture out across the abandoned highway. May we live in interesting times. 

This small crop of pieces is all the writing burst I've got for now. It is hot and things are moving and we are very busy, and we will probably remain busy until well into the fall. But I have plenty more coming together and I'll do what I can when I can. 

Memory

Sometimes it can simply be a particular scent, or the chance re-emergence of an old song, or the feeling of a gentle late-summer breeze, or the bubbling up of long-buried images in meditation, which re-awakens old memories that were long since filed away and dormant, bringing back whole worlds to the mind's eye that were temporarily forgotten. 

And that fragility and economizing of energy and focus of human memory betrays the expanse it is built upon and attempts to traverse: that perpetual slipstream of time and space is so vast. So much can happen in seconds, in minutes, in days and months and years. And there is only so much time and energy to witness it. 

Meaning

When you ask the question of "What is this?" or "What does this or that thing mean?" one way to conceptualize that kind of inquiry is to see it as a process of taking in the various streams of experiences, memories, impressions, accepted facts, interests, and even other ideas, and then synthesizing and processing them within oneself, re-assembling them into a new coherent whole, in accordance with one's character and one's knowledge and perceptions. 

To tilt the mirror to the appropriate angle and reveal to you the hall of mirrors within, you could say that this very exercise represents the phenomenon that I'm talking about: my personal re-assembly of the meaning of the concept of meaning, so to speak. 

But there is more to it of course. Individuals don't simply emerge as meaning-assembling and transmitting islands, they emerge out of a spatial and temporal field of matter and energy, in relation to the individuals that birthed and raised and formed them in the context of that field in motion through time. And people typically want to be read and understood in some way, and contribute to their communities and societies, however idiosyncratic and visionary their works are, so that communication is an important part of the process, or a harmonization of existing knowledge bases and languages with that of the novel creation, while "getting it right" so to speak. Meaning relating to being.  

Even the more idiosyncratic weirdos that are perceived as unintelligible to the mainstream, or at least "ahead of their time," are assembling their meaning out of existing languages and concepts that are held in some sort of esteem, however esoteric, and which are favored by the assemblers in question, which can be made out in the novel assemblies, however "new" and "original" they may appear.  

So meaning is not just a fixed thing - though we do endeavor to fix it as such - but a constant flow of moments of production and their artifacts within that which is in existence. 

Impelling Vision

I'm thinking of the energy that is required to build or rebuild the entirety of a legacy construct. What would it take to motivate someone to undertake the difficult and energy-intensive task of building a legacy construct from the ground up, such as a house? One of the simplest examples I can think of, which would contain the necessary motive energy, would be the simple necessity brought about by the destruction of the house. "Necessity is the mother of invention," as the proverb goes. 

Now, there are multiple levels of necessity, which feature lower activation thresholds than total destruction. Necessity can be expressed in simulation exercised in the imagination for example, before the actual material necessity occurs. I'm thinking of a coffee mug placed in a precarious position - perhaps a little too close to the edge of a table - and one glances at it, and is suddenly struck with a pang of concern, coupled with a destructive vision of the mug toppling off of the table and shattering upon the ground. Visions such as these can be informed by knowledge and experience. 

And that vision and the sudden pang of concern can move one to preventative action, using a small amount of energy to get up and slide the mug away from the edge, saving one the energy and distress involved with having the mug fall and shatter, which would bring about a sense of loss, or generate the need to replace it. 

It could be that the mug can remain precariously perched, yet never actually fall off of the table. But going through life with a constant sense of uncertainty and precarity can be quite stressful, and so such distressing visions and their compensatory actions can actually smooth out the trajectory of one's life, simulating various states of destruction in the imagination while guiding one through various preventative and constructive processes in service to the vision, staving off the eventual material destruction and distress. 

The higher the stakes involved, the more spectacular and urgent these visions, which can influence how powerful and totalizing they can be as motivating forces. There are also positive visions of desire and reward, which can contain powerful motivating impulses as well. One desires a dream house for example, and imagines the many blissful possibilities contained in its promise, and so one is fulfilled with the motivation to undertake its construction. 

Questions arise though: what are the intentions and effects of these visions? The compensatory actions of these visions are only as good as the abilities and resources of those entertaining them and putting them to work. How to account for a society that is completely awash in visions of destruction and desire, which are produced in response to real cultural and political-economic phenomena, but which are promptly packaged up and sold back to its denizens, the matter concluded, with nothing of substance actually done to address the vision? What is a society to do that is choking on its own multiplying complexity, as its chaotic productive and destructive forces unfold unaddressed, however much is dreamt and spoken about them?  

Sensational and spectacular disaster movies can circulate in the theaters, with incredible amounts of time and energy put into rendering their visions of destruction, down to the minutest graphical details such as beautifully simulated collapsing skyscrapers and titanic floods and raging infernos, creating positively sublime spectacles to behold. And look: if we don't get a handle on this climate issue, or this geopolitical issue, or whatever else, this little smooshed bug on the big-screen could be you! 

This tendency even extends to real material destruction. The mainstream news media cozies up to you with images of real material distress: "Look...look at this stressful thing, pretty stressful right?" Mostly to get a rise out of you and to nudge you into some type of commercial action, without any kind of intention of addressing the underlying dynamic. 

I'll admit though that this is a highly slanted account that isn't entirely fair; it is only a slice of an image born out of a particular nadir in Western history. There was a time when Western cultural products and news media effected a stronger feedback signal within the body politic itself, leading to broader changes (or edifications) in collective action, depending on the antagonistic (or supportive) nature of a particular message. But that faculty seems to have weakened over time, alongside everything else. 

Though that doesn't necessarily mean a loss of feedback and action altogether; more appropriately, there seems to be a steady inversion of the signal-to-noise ratio, and a dispersal and incoherence of corrective action. Indeed, for every wave of collective listlessness and paralysis, you get accompanying spasms of thrashing and sound and fury in every direction, a complete discharging of the available batteries of conventional thought and action, which only accelerates and deepens the confusion and impotence. Much like one becoming bogged down in mud, spinning one's wheels in a panic, forming and deepening the ruts that were formed by the bogging down in turn.     

So you get this preposterous situation in which fearful imagery is constantly circulating, with the assorted feverish apocalyptic visions continuously accumulating as everything continues to get worse at once, shorn of the collective faculty of mitigation. Within such a society, you get this strange admixture of a visceral and accelerating dynamism, and an excruciating sense of stasis and stagnation. A society increasingly cannibalizing itself and doing violence to itself, while in an increasing state of imaginative distress, feeding paranoia and conspiracy theory, the confusion and impotence of which feeds into the self-cannibalization and self-destruction. 

A fearsome business! But I'll leave with a tantalizing message of possibility, that there are still eddies where those destructive visions give way to positive visions of hope and desire, where better living is still possible, which may very well seed tenacious shoots glimpsing light through the growing cracks. 

Washed Downstream

On the wonderful Inward Empire podcast, Sam Davis describes beautifully a process of ideological succession in which perceptions and conceptions of the American Civil War changed in the collective imagination of the nation over time. This is a pattern you can see emerge in the collective imagination surrounding many great wars (and other great events in general), and you can certainly make it out in the wake of the World Wars, to name one prominent example, with the excellent history podcaster Dan Carlin (of Hardcore History fame, which is a must-listen IMHO) commenting just recently on this very issue. 

To go back to Davis' description, the gist of that succession is this: for various structural and historical reasons, a given war could very easily expand in scope and duration, outstripping anyone's anticipation or expectation or endurance, and grind on torturously, consuming entire societies caught up in them. And as one of those given wars winds down, there is at first an outpouring of expressions and accounts of the raw horror and trauma, fresh in the memories of the surviving soldiers that experienced the war firsthand. 

Over time though, there is a redirection of that immense amount of martial energy and talent into domestic reconstruction and production, which results in an oftentimes manic outpouring of economic growth and progress. After the Civil War for example, there was a vast diversion of labor from the military into heavy industry like the railroad companies and manufacturing, revolutionizing the rate, organization, and intensity of construction and production, injecting particular military qualities of regimentation and work ethic for instance. 

This in turn produces a great wave of prosperity, albeit with its share of overproduction and crashes as well. And over time the ascent of that prosperity amidst the ensuing profound social and cultural transformations encourages a broad cultural forgetting of the wartime era, with a growing romanticism and sentimentality in many of the surviving soldiers, safely ensconced in that rising wave of prosperity. And this is a romanticism and sentimentality that is quickly seized by a mass culture eager for consumption of exciting and flattering war sentiments amidst a rising tide of complacency and boredom on the other side of that prosperity coin, amplified in favor of moving forward and papering over the terrible wounds of that bygone era. Meanwhile the lone voices like those of Ambrose Bierce (profiled in the podcast episode), though treasured for their profundity and quality, are drowned out in terms of collective purpose and feeling contemporary to that particular time.  

To be sure this partially has a protective effect, in which a mass culture interested in healing and forward movement forgets its wounds as the scar tissue bridges what were once dissonant and dysfunctional chasms. There is a deep emotional imprint of that collective trauma and abuse, which bequeaths a cultural legacy that is taken up by the collective culture and upheld with a kind of dignity. But at the same time this forgetting could be conceptualized in the same way that an immune system forgets a pathogen: that collective deliberation forgets the horrors and total ruin of a great war, clearing the ideological and deliberative board for the next one. 

There are a multitude of additional implications and considerations of this phenomenon. This places the myth of our collective deliberation in a new light, which I've done in various ways here already. Instead of traversing deliberately from point A to point B in the name of progress say - which can certainly happen at times - it often more resembles the limited angling of a desperate swimmer, attempting to stay afloat in a raging river while constantly carried downstream, making for an additional complicating layer and challenge when moving through history collectively over longer periods of time, complicating and making more difficult the task of learning from and reckoning with that history. 

Legacy

There has been a lot of talk of "legacy" systems and "legacy" technologies lately, talk which I've taken up and thought about some and worked in here. I thought it might be useful to briefly address that concept and get a better idea of what we are looking at. 

Basic definitions of "legacy" establish it as something received from the past, or bequeathed as some sort of gift, or even given as some kind of special status in terms of social relations extending to the past. Broadly speaking, you could say that everything that exists came about as a sort of legacy of an unfolding from something in the past. But to narrow down the concept, and get at the particular sense of it that has been getting a lot of usage recently, and which is quite useful to our purposes, I want to run through another simple metaphor. 

Let's say someone with some help builds a house themselves. It takes a lot of energy and time and know-how to build that house. The appropriate materials have to be sourced and there are a whole set of conditions that need to be in place for that house to be built to last: a good foundation needs to be laid with knowledge of the proper foundation materials, of grading and leveling, establishment of lines and dimensions of the footprint, and so on. For a modern house in the developed world, plumbing needs to be put in, floors and walls go in with electrical wiring weaved in, door frames and doors, window frames and windows, various layers of roofing, punched through with vents and chimneys, and what have you. There are so many special types of materials that go to particular functions such as waterproofing bathrooms and kitchens that I'm leaving out, but you get the picture. Hopefully if the job is done well, the house will carry out its manifold functions as it should for quite some time. 

So then eventually that builder passes on, bequeathing the home to the builder's children as that builder's legacy. The children grew up in that home, and now as adults establish their own household within the sanctuary of its hallowed walls, assuming the house's many functions to maintain a continuity of the production of their lives, and their lives' eventual reproduction. And this is where things get interesting. 

Over time, environments change and materials undergo weathering and wear and tear. Houses settle, undergoing subtle changes structurally. So when a door no longer closes right, or the roof starts leaking, or a beam develops a crack or starts showing signs of rot, do you tear everything down and start all over again? Hell no! That kind of decision would be considered wasteful and preposterous. 

Instead you address the problems where they occur with localized expenditure, working within the confines of the existing structure, engaging in what we call "incremental reform" in the realm of politics. The nature of the house is such that various parts of it degrade at different rates on different levels, and that for most structures it would be reasonable to assume that the structure itself will stay composed for decades or more, and that the finer and more fragile components of the whole may degrade in a couple of years, in which they could safely be separated from the structure and replaced, and indeed buildings are typically intentionally designed with this purpose in mind. 

With our modern capabilities, you can even replace the more structural, load-bearing elements of the house if need be. Structures could be supported with temporary scaffolding or jacks as whole beams are removed and new ones are inserted in. Lasers could map out correct levels on foundations, with problem areas slowly jacked up and shored up and reinforced. And houses undergo remodeling projects minor and major all the time. Theoretically, you could very well have a House of Theseus of sorts in which most of the substantial components are replaced entirely, piece by piece, over a longer period of time, while the integrity of the whole is maintained throughout. 

All of this is assuming certain ideal conditions though. There are certain foundational and structural issues that are more serious or more difficult to solve. Or various sections or features of the house could be neglected for too long, for reasons of carelessness or lack of resources or lack of time, with the damage becoming more and more severe and extensive as time passes. There are economic concerns, in which the time and resources required for renovating a house may be much more than simply demolishing the house and starting again. Or the house could simply be demolished in a storm or some such. File any of this away under "all things come to an end sometime." 

What else is happening as one lives in a house over time? Our builder's children are enjoying this legacy house bequeathed to them, but unless they are themselves contractors, they didn't build the house, and in their lifetime will probably never engage in such an activity. Remember, building a house takes a lot of time and resources, and not just simply in the actual act of building, but in all of the hours and resources put into practicing the many trades and crafts that together produce housing in its entirety. So those not building the housing have all kinds of time and resources freed up to be doing many other things, and so long as the housing holds up, each subsequent generation can drift away in collective activity from the original iteration of the housing itself, especially as those functions are further contracted out in a widening and deepening division of labor and professionalization. 

A sudden loss of a house in this context then is an incredibly traumatic and shattering experience. One personally lacks the skills to produce another one, and one suddenly finds oneself in living conditions outside of a house, a radical departure from a particular set of conditions which may have held for generations. 

If we start to scale this concept out from our simple metaphor of the house, we can start to see the legacy resource in just about everything, and the more you scale up and out, the more things are connected to that greater resource, and the higher the stakes of that resource's continued functioning, as we saw earlier with the treasury payment system.  

There are urgent conversations taking place about everything from legacy material infrastructure, legacy military weapon systems, and legacy manufacturing systems and products being hollowed out by crapification and financialization, to legacy Internet structures being hollowed out with tech consolidation and enshittification, as described on the brilliant This Machine Kills podcast. They want to inject AI technologies into every aspect of our labor organization and intellectual production for example, like one might squirt glue into the cracks of some failing hunk of timber. But what happens if the same processes of financially corroded political economy - which rotted and hollowed out the metaphorical timber, weakening it and cracking it - are producing the metaphorical glue, which is itself no longer effective a binding agent as it once was? And indeed, the very metaphorical process of injecting the glue into the cracks could itself be inappropriate and inadequate. 

So that a greater society as an organic whole, losing the remaining stores of its collective creative vitality and dynamism as it ages - as Spengler put it - can no longer maintain an entire field of its legacy structures and processes, which are degrading simultaneously at wider and wider scales, until a greater rupture threatens the whole of it. 

We see this in extreme form in the more highly stressed societies, in which an entire array of supporting legacy systems are suddenly compromised at once. This is part of the nature of totalitarianism, in which traditional systems, which may have built up somewhat organically over generations, suddenly start to fail all at once for any number of reasons, and in their desperation, a distressed people must build up radically new structures very suddenly, which appear as alien and alienating entities emanating from a sharply delineated point of power, which must be strictly enforced with brute force and terror. 

We can locate in the historical totalitarian impulse a desire to strip everything currently existing away entirely, with a paranoid suspicion of the corruption and decadence - the rot, the disease; they have many names for it - which has set in at the foundations, threatening to topple the superstructure, and which could be lurking within every inch of the constructed culture, which must be sniffed out and torn out and eradicated wholesale, starting anew and fresh. And how do these projects typically end?

I'll follow Hannah Arendt in drawing metaphysical similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems for example, but then depart from her analysis and follow the contemporary historians of the Nazi and Soviet systems, who say that actually these systems were very different in their specificity and character and were conceived for very different reasons, which had very different effects and consequences. 

But for our immediate purposes, one commonality to both systems was that they contained within them some fundamental tensions and contradictions which made them both ultimately unstable on a shorter timeframe, and which left a bad taste in the mouths of their peoples and the peoples surrounding them after they eventually collapsed, a taste which was memory-holed and suppressed, with the surviving elements of those societies unearthing various legacies and structures that had not entirely disintegrated - while accepting those elements flooding in from the outside to rebuild their societies after the flames of immediate rebirth had died down. 

Nevertheless, over larger scales and timeframes, these cycles of dramatic birth, decline, and rebirth can recur again and again for quite some time. It is hard to say what the decline and fall of the US and the greater West will actually look like, and whether it will look like anything coherent at all really, save for looking back in a century or two through the lens of revisionist hindsight. And that is setting aside the greater decline and fall of industrial civilization as a whole for that matter. But these processes are certainly interesting to look through the lens of "legacy," to be sure. 

On the Horizon

Setting aside all that intense shit I just dumped on you, I do have a new writing project in the works. I've been writing like a madman to get out a bunch of these pieces I've been working on, so I can clear the workspace and the mental space and make some room, and I've got some more of that to do before I'm feeling good enough. But there is a confluence of forces coming together which have led me to this point, which I'll get into more sometime. I've still got a lot of ground to cover before I can launch, and I'll be writing more about what I'm up to later on as it comes into focus. Till then. 

Vaporware

One thing you hear constantly in daily conversation in the US is: "Oh, you just can't plan for anything, it is hard to tell what is going to happen next." This is an attitude and phenomenon that isn't limited to the volatility and capriciousness of the Trump administration either, though certainly the administration is accelerating that tendency. This is something that is occurring on many different levels and scales of daily experience here. 

You're having these huge stock market swings that are just not smart, and are not based on the fundamentals. And the ruling class is responding to these swings and basing substantial decisions on these swings. 

A lot of people are cynical enough now that they just ignore a lot of news and ephemeral events, and just trust that life is going to get a little worse. Gotta feel for those really plugged-in types though, who have to base their lives on the movement of large sums of money. Watching the good stuff slosh to-and-fro, swirling about the drain. 

And then us plebes toiling in the fields, stopping to gaze up vacantly at the death ray as it hits and poofs prominent social supports, arcing its way towards the load-bearing stuff like Social Security.  

And Trump with his doomsday tariffs, and you hear all of these reports of shipping just shutting down, and these huge logistics and supply operations profoundly revising their long term plans, and then Trump blinks and whoop, lowers some of the China tariffs and sprinkles in some delays for good measure. But all of those dislocations are still making their way through the system. 

I mean, dang, I was rubbing my sore neck the other day and realized that I had suffered whiplash from trying to make sense of any kind of structured set of principles in the West. First they wanted to represent the Holocaust as the supreme evil, and it certainly was evil. And now we're supposed to look the other way as the Gaza genocide continues on? I'm sorry, but our necks don't bend that way that fast. 

And what happened to Q Anon? Their whole reason to exist seemed to be based on smashing that secret pedo ring. But now their savior is whole hog for Israel? What do they think Israeli intelligence baits its honey traps with? 

Ah anyway. In general, it is getting more difficult to make any kind of long term plan, but long term planning and predictability and stability are exactly what you need to keep this world running. 

Eventually you do just have to shrug and get on with your day, and plan for poor planning. Living in California, and now living in Washington, I've been exposed to a fair amount of disaster preparedness literature and messaging. There is that massive subduction zone right off of the coast, that sleeping giant that could wake at any time and send a gigantic earthquake and tsunami our way. And then we live right next to an active volcano. 

Picture a colossal earthquake in a region like the Pacific Northwest, that hasn't had a huge quake in centuries, that isn't built out for that sort of thing, which largely runs on hydropower, and is spiderwebbed with a vast network of increasingly fragile bridges, and that's just off the top of my head. The definition of unpredictability there. A switch could be flipped, who knows when, and you're who knows where doing who knows what, and who knows what that we depend on every day is in ruin, altogether at once. 

What all of that disaster preparedness literature recommends is just having some basic supplies and planning ready. Having some clean water, some dried goods, some lights and charging stations and shovels and other appropriate tools, a bug-out bag, some blankets and toiletries, a clear meeting area and a clear escape or safe zone, some cash. Having some of that going on doesn't hurt a thing, and you can just live your life as you would, knowing the very basics are there. 

All Aboard!

So how do you bail from a runaway train? Ideally the train should be stopped or at least moving very slowly, and the faster it gets going without the benefit of brakes, the tougher this problem gets. 

Even worse, what if that train is all there is and that you need to fix it, or even rebuild it as it is moving and now running away? 

This is one way to read the preposterous flailing of the ruling class in the US during the Covid pandemic. There was an initial attempt to half-heartedly and half-assedly fix the thing, but the complexity of the problem - given the corner the ruling class had painted themselves into - produced a complex wreckage that was set in motion during the closures and stoppages, which caught up with them and they had to re-orient and renege on their half-ass platform, opting for reckless and careless neglect instead, and eventually much more damage was done down the line. 

This simplified case study is another instance of one of the driving aspects of modernity: the energy-intensive need for things to move with perpetual and even accelerating rapidity to bridge indescribably massive and complex entities across vast spaces, and those bridges must be sustained without fail. As once a bridge has been built, it must support a constant stream of life flowing over it - the purpose of which necessitated such a huge expenditure of energy in the first place - which must be maintained lest that stream of life be disrupted, which could have serious consequences indeed for whatever is building the bridges. 

If you smoosh the opening train metaphor and this bridge metaphor together, you get something resembling our predicament. To quote Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap."

This is a predicament I've covered plenty of times before, and will describe in plenty more ways in the future. Predicaments may not have nice solutions like their kin, the problem, but like problems, predicaments do add a whole lot of interest and meaning. 

Don't Look Down

So I don't typically do this, but I want to draw attention to another interview with Nathan Tankus, this time conducted by Beatrice Adler-Bolton of Death Panel ("Nathan Tanks the Economy" in the episode list). This particular interview is much longer (two and a half hours) than the one I previously linked to on Trash Future, and though both interviews are worth listening to, this longer and meatier interview is chock-full of some really incredible information in the form of what I would describe as "tells" that come up in the narrative. I'll get into what I mean by this. Funny enough, like the last post, I'm also going to pair this discussion with a different Radio War Nerd discussion to make a greater point, which will be separate but dependent on points made in that previous linked post. Given the current pace of world events, all of this is a little dated now, but the underlying dynamics and stakes covered here are going to continue to be central to world events for some time. 

So here we go, starting with Tankus' narrative. First of all, Tankus is pretty funny. He describes his previous work as kind of dry and boring and nerdy, and then he was suddenly catapulted into a central, high stakes reporting role, and was getting all of this attention all of a sudden. In regard to his previous work being dry and boring, well, yes and no, and it depended on the reader to be sure. I remember when Tankus would make the rounds at places like Naked Capitalism, and his work was often pretty dry and technical to be sure, but also brilliant and highly illuminating, if you knew what you were looking for anyway. 

But he definitely had certain niche concerns in economics and finance, and would really get into the weeds when it came to money and payments. He talks about becoming really interested in the more obscure technical systems involved in the operation of the interacting payment systems of the Treasury and the Fed, and goes into how old and fragile and layered they are, and how they are stewarded by aging civil servants and programmers who are some of the last of those who can really understand the entirety of those systems' idiosyncratic operations, and thus continue successfully to ensure their functionality. 

When Musk and his team came in and started rooting around the Treasury payment system, and information started to come out about what exactly they were doing, Tankus was one of the few people on the outside who really understood the ins and outs of these systems and how they worked, and how potentially dangerous Musk's tinkering with those systems was, and various gravely concerned officials on the inside became aware of this and started to involve Tankus, who was giving off the proper affect given the gravity of the situation, in the hopes that he would gradually leak to the outside this information and spark some sort of organized response, which the officials were unable or unwilling to do. 

And here we approach the first big "tell" I wanted to get at, which is a certain state of affairs implied in the narrative that one can piece together with a combination of the given information and then additional prior knowledge. Here we get a glimpse of the social nature of this underlying payment system, embedded in the larger institutional context. This is a real, material, technical system, which hums steadily away in the background, which the vast majority of the people in the US don't think about or even know exists, but which backstops every aspect of our political economy. The people who are running the actual machinery of the system, and who know how to do it properly, are not the political animals that can fight off attacks from entities like the DOGE team, and due to the changing nature of the greater political economic system itself, their kind is a dying breed, at least as this pertains internally to the reproduction of the institutions that house them, with subsequent waves of newcomers more tooled for social climbing and politicking, and now demagoguing, which now includes the reckless and poorly understood tinkering with the technical systems.

Which brings us to another of the related "tells." I suspect that we're going to be seeing more of this phenomenon, where power suddenly and violently shifts to talented and capable individuals or groups outside of existing power structures - for reasons of political exclusion due to political views, disposition, integrity, etc. - who can come in and help the ruling class actually maintain their failing machinery as their blustering and flailing produces underwhelming results, and then these outsiders might be put in the position of actually making their own interested reforms. And of course, power could suddenly and violently shift to less capable individuals and groups for plenty of other reasons, resulting in many other possible outcomes, as we saw with the sudden public involvement and then exit of Musk and his team. 

I'm going to have to revisit this in a separate post, but I want to emphasize the growing unpredictability and chaotic dynamism of the greater system we are all part of: the Machine begins to oscillate and wobble in weird, new, unsettling ways, and with growing concern and trepidation, we start to watch as it throws off some weird sprocket in one direction, or flares unexpectedly in another. "What the hell was that?" we might ask. And the first person to raise their hand gets ushered up to the hot seat. But the fact remains that the Machine will continue to unwind in newly strange and unpredictable ways as the entropy grows and it gets more difficult to put it back together in the way it was initially instantiated. 

Tankus' affect was another of the "tells." You could pick up right away how pressurized and stressful his new reality was, which he communicated in no uncertain terms. Due to the dynamics of the rapid emergence of this crisis, Tankus was catapulted into the hot seat in playing an integral part in organizing the proper political response in shutting down the DOGE attacks on the payment systems and shoring up those existing systems, due to a combination of his timely expertise and the concern he had for some sort of resolution, without having been previously initiated into the inner workings of these institutions through the course of his life. 

Part of why I'm seizing on this interview - and the emotional valence of it - is because I have had a taste of what pressure like this feels like - albeit at a much smaller scale and with much lower stakes - and what it all means. A couple of years ago I was working with an uncle of mine - may he rest in peace - who was a particularly talented contractor. I would go with him on jobs to these problem buildings, which served as lucrative - if not highly stressful - gigs that would provide recurring work. 

A building can really take on a life of its own, and really suck you in if you are a contractor and develop a relationship with it. We would develop relationships with these high rises in particular, which were built by unscrupulous developers with faulty infrastructure such as thin-walled copper plumbing to save money, which in a short amount of time would develop a constant stream of leaks due to the fragility of the pipe walls, to the chagrin of management and the buildings' many occupants. 

To fix these leaks, you would typically have to drain the entire system, as the water is usually pumped straight to the roof, where it then falls back down through the building via gravity, and the pipes would have to be cleared to refit new pipes and conduct the soldering to seal the fittings and make a lasting repair, placing isolation valves as you go to make future repairs easier (no goddamn isolation valves! because valves are expensive), itself taking a good deal of skill and proper judgement, after which the entire system would be recharged and tested. And draining these systems and then fixing the leaks, and then recharging the systems inevitably serves as a trauma to the system, which can spring more leaks immediately, or cause strains that can lead to later subsequent leaks. 

But this was my uncle's preferred method for fixing leaks like these, which would fix them for good, as opposed to doing half-assed patch jobs that would only temporarily fix the leaks, bringing him more work and money, but more misery for everyone else as the leaks came back. He cared about the buildings and their proper management and quality of life of the occupants, which was why the management of these problem buildings would kick out unscrupulous contractor after contractor, before settling on his services, and then insisting on his work from then on. He would become friends with these people, and eventually go hurtling across multiple states to come out and fix their leaks as they refused to have anyone else touch their buildings, and I suspect it was part of this care that eventually killed him, but that is a story for another time. 

To get to the point, there was one very long night we had at a posh high rise in Hollywood. We were draining the system, fixing leaks, and then recharging the system, finding more leaks, and so on, and we were doing this for 10 hours or so, exhausted, getting ready to go home, when the building manager came to us, white as a sheet, and ushered us down to the basement level. 

Down in the basement, the manager showed us what may as well have been the building's beating heart: the massive piping of the building's water main. Just above the main, on a small pipe junction, was a small pinhole leak, which due to the water pressure and the location, would in a few hours widen into a constant gush.

Now, we had the equipment and spare pipe to fix this particular leak, but due to the connection of the junction to the main, it was entirely possible that our activities would rupture the main. The main itself was a huge and fabulously expensive section of pipe which continued beneath a layer of concrete in the floor. Sourcing a replacement for that pipe could take days or even weeks or more, and would mean tearing up that entire room to get at everything, and the entire building's water system would have to be down that entire time: it was the goddamn main; there was no isolating that thing. 

So we had to once again drain the entire system, and then got to fixing that pipe junction. There was a coupling on that junction that was giving us fits, and so my uncle had to grab the coupling with a pair of channellocks while heating it, and I had to hammer on it while he was heating it. Hit it too soft and it wouldn't budge, and hit it too hard and it could rupture the main. We eventually got the coupling off and fixed the junction, recharged the system, and went home. 

Now that was a lot of pressure. That single point of failure at the base of that high rise, and caring about all of those people. If that procedure had gone wrong, you would have had a lot of people who would have been screwed, without running water in a high rise, at least temporarily. And they really had no idea, apart from the inconvenience of having the system shut down for 20 minutes or so. But those stakes and lead times go up as those materials and the labor to properly affect those materials grow more scarce in time. 

My point here is that these things are real: these basic, backstopping systems that we all rely on, and some of them are very fragile and are probably at the brink of failure, and there are only so many people that can work on them. And it is very stressful to work on them, because typically to be pretty good at it you really have to care, and you have to have the integrity and character to steward that particular bottleneck so that everyone downstream of that crucial infrastructure is not taken advantage of. So not only is the skill and talent in short supply, but will people want to keep working on them, and increasingly be treated like shit by an ignorant, entitled ruling class?  

At smaller scales, we can see these systems fail and we can see the real consequences unfold from them. In the canyon I live, they have permanently closed the only bridge into the region, as it is on the brink of collapse. Deferring maintenance in the 90's might not have felt that acute. That paint on the supports that was peeling off and that rust that was setting in, that could take a while to take its course right? And every time they ran an inspection, sure it looked bad, but it could be a while longer before the bridge really started to fail. But then eventually that support column would buckle, signifying a major and irreversible problem, and then they would have to close the bridge for good, and there we were, cut off from the world on the other side, save for an old logging road that snaked back up through the foothills behind us, which remains locked to the public. That closure and that isolation has resulted in real and lasting consequences that I'll have to get into at another time. 

And what about those really large scale systems? How about the ones that only a small minority are really aware of, and that an even smaller and disappearing minority can properly manipulate and steward?

There is that old cliche that it is impossible to imagine the end of capital. But those dark shadows of doubt we sometimes have, those fleeting leviathans we see passing beneath the rolling waves below: they are real. 

This is part of the "miracle" I've referred to as well. The people working these backstopping systems are well-aware of the stakes, and the people that know what they are doing tend to really care. These apocalyptic scenarios, which may be possible in theory, also elicit a lot of care and attention in response, and the real apocalypse never comes, and life goes on. But there are always limits.  

I want to get to one last "tell" before moving on, which is less of a tell and more an explicitly stated point. Tankus gets to discussing the opposition and the nature of the executive relation to Congress and the "impound," and all of the implications of those things as they relate to the seizure of the payment systems, as well as the other related fits of domestic political turbulence we've had, and then the implications of all of that.

To summarize what comes out of that discussion, fascists want to take over the delicate machine by force to make it do what they want. The crown of the monarch is coming up through the choking tangle of an increasingly dysfunctional mass of legacy systems. But that also risks moving too fast and breaking things which can't easily be fixed.  

We saw this in a way with Hitler, seizing the reins and doing weird and alarming things, and then monstrous and even more alarming things with an increasingly complex, interconnected, and powerful world system that was seizing up, and the Allied powers had to dogpile him and the other fascist leaders and knock them down, along with much of the rest of the developed world in the process. 

Now, I regret blurting all of this out at the end without a proper treatment, as the post is getting a bit long and here we have another can of worms that has just been opened. I've hit two tripwires: talking about "fascism" and contemporary affairs fairly loosely and then mentioning Hitler's regime, and now I'm going to go disappear after my hit and run. This is a subject I intend to handle at greater length in a separate post though. 

I want to close with brief comments on another incredible discussion, this time in the foreign policy realm. On War Nerd Radio, co-hosts John Dolan and Mark Ames interview the brilliant journalist Jeff Stein, making use of Stein's economic reporting on Trump's tariff war to spark a broader discussion on the course and context of that war. 

That interview is also well-worth listening to, but in the course of that discussion, we get several key points. For one thing, the evolution of the US' international sanctions regime and the US' manipulation of the reserve currency and the international payment systems have served as a covert way to continue its ongoing wars, quietly strangling its enemies economically after the spectacular failures (and ensuing blowback) of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. 

Stein gets into how catastrophic the collapse of the Venezuelan economy was, partly as a result of the first Trump term sanctions. And the waves of immigration from that disaster probably helped to re-elect Trump as well. 

But at the same time, Washington is discovering that a tougher target like Russia has not buckled, with those sanctions actually backfiring and harming Europe especially. And China is an even tougher target than that. What's more, the subsequent tariff war and reshoring efforts have been completely incoherent, partially because the US has painted itself into a corner, and partially because the efforts themselves are not coherent and not fully understood. 

There is more going on here than this, but briefly and simply: with tariffs actually harming the US and slowing down global commerce, US treasuries are getting dumped, weakening the dollar, and prompting a walking back of the tariffs. 

Why walk back though? A weak dollar encourages reshoring manufacturing. But weak also sounds bad? And it was the strong dollar that allowed for cheap consumer goods, which some of the administration wants to see continue and some of it wants to see end? And for some in the administration, a strong dollar was preferable as it backstopped financial domination of the world system, among other things.  

And wait, we want to see manufacturing come back but we are tariffing critical inputs and resources? And it is hitting consumers and business owners we wanted to help? 

Again, there is much more to it, but with these brief examples, we can see that we are coming back to these old, iterated legacy systems, this time in the operation and circulation of world trade and world finance, and no one - at least those in the West - seems to understand the entirety of how they work anymore, and they are being recklessly fooled with by people hopelessly steeped in competing propaganda put out by competing interests, resulting in the proliferation of a briar patch of contradictory material action in the practical realm. This is a fractal problem spreading within and without. 

Now, we can take these growing internal and domestic pressures together with the growing external pressures facing a failing hegemon. The United States has been a cruel master and has deceived and kicked around a lot of people in its day, and seems to be attempting to outdo its own cruelty in clutching the remnants of its hegemonic status as it grows ever weaker internally, feeling it, knowing it, but refusing to believe it, as its dragged down by that bad blood turning to stone. Now that is a hell of a lot of pressure. 

But I don't want to end on full apprehension though. Yeah, a lot of this is pretty worrisome, and with growing chaos you don't really know what you are going to get. But as alluded to earlier, all kinds of opportunities can also open up, depending on who and where you are and what you are doing. A great tree going down can act as a bridge of sorts, and open up the skies around it.