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diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index a103e87..0793a62 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -2,578 +2,16 @@ Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried. -"The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." -- Wendell Berry, An Essay Against Modern Superstition - -"what you contemplate, you imitate." - -"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution." Igor Stravinsky - -Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. - -"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis - -The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf - -# Scratch - -requirements for property: - -at least 6 acres. Water. existing well or drillable. ability to capture water. Spectacular views. on a slope. good sun exposure. - -Pleasure in the job, puts perfection in the work -- Aristotle's prescription for excellence - -every essay needs a story to hang it on. And an audio/visual podcast of it. - -Is something good because God wills it or is it good because god willed it? - -God is not a being, but being. - -The good and the true are convertible with being, they are fundamentally the same as being but as related to our faculties of reason and will. The good then is simply being as it relates to will. It is being under the aspect of its desirableness. Something is not good because god wills it, neither is it some standard outside of god which he is measured by. God who is the ullness o being simply wills his own goodness, the goodness that he is, he himself is the highest good. he wills himself. - Aquinas. more or less - - -The counter argument is that God should not be constrained by his own nature. Therefore something is good because god wills it. (voluntarism). But this then leads to the idea that Not the nature of a thing, its being goodness and truth, determine reality, but the sheer act of a will. e.g. Schopenhauer. The problem is overemphasis on the will leads here, where we are divorced from the world as it really is. If I decide entirely what is true, then I can decide what is true then I can weigh 600 pounds and declare myself healthy. I can say I'm a cat and force my employer to provide a litter box. - -## 7 years on the Road - -themes: - -crashing communities. the way so many places have welcomed us. excited to have outsiders take an interest in what is happening in their community. - -## Seems Like a Lot of Folks Gave Up or Got Out, Except For the Truly Devote - -Spend a some time in the environment around you, really spend some time. Lose the headphones. Maybe put aside some of the plastic sports gear. Just walk with no plan, no goals, not for your health, your mental health any of that stuff. Find a quiet place to sit, somewhere near you. Sit with the rocks, the trees, the dirt, the sky, the plants, the animals. Then think of all of it, pretend for a moment, that these things are valuable to you like other people are valuable, and more importantly, that you matter to them. That your presence is important to the rocks, to the trees, to the sky, to all of it. Now what sort of life would you lead if you really believed that? Go live that life. - - -We have so little time to engage with the world around us compared to people in pre-industrial times. - - -There is a baseline of financial success you need before you can start to be more spontaneous. - - -I think the view from your window when you’re writing really does inform what you’re writing about quite a lot. I need to stare out of a window whilst I’m writing. That helps me find where I’m going. I was by the harbor, so I could see people coming and going in boats, and I could look out at the sea. There was a fun fair that would pitch up in a field to the right of the restaurant every June, so for a while, I had a fun fair outside my window. I’m sure that contributed in some way to Rid of Me. There was a wonderful collection of furniture and also Russian vinyl 78s. The restaurant owner’s mother had lived there previously — she was Russian — and it was all her furniture and things. Not so long ago, I borrowed the Russian 78s back off the restaurateur so I could record them, because they’d been so much in my memory. I used a sample of one of them on the 4-Track Demos [on “Hook”]. At the time I was listening almost exclusively to those Russian 78s, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits, and the Pixies. I’d also been reading a lot of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I might’ve also been reading [Friedrich Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra. Some light reading. [Laughs] It was a wonderful period of time because I did suddenly have my life back again. That was the period when I was really writing the record. - PJ Harvey - - -## Notecard System - -I don't think anything I've written for Wired has generated so much interest as a throw away comment I made about notecards in our [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards). Every time that article is updated I get more email asking for details. Here are the details. - ---- - -First, lets make sure we're all on the same page: if you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans. - -Not *a plan*, plans are useless. You need *plans*. - -Many plans means you go through the process of planning. That's what's valuable, the process. Planning requires thinking deeply about life, your life, and what you're doing here. What you want to do here, what you were put here to do. - -I can't help you with that part, but after you've made some decisions about what you want do do, where you want to go, it's time to plan how to get there. That requires lists. Lots of lists. Lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for, lists of things you need to do to get from here to there, lists of what you did to get from where you were to where you are, and so on. - -If you step back a bit, you'll see that there are several levels of stuff you need to keep track of -- long terms goals, shorter term projects aligned with those goals, and day to day stuff you need to accomplish to complete the projects that get you to the goals. Life isn't nearly this simple or neat, but at a very broad level that's three things to keep track of: long term things, medium term things, short term things. There's one more important element: a way to record ideas as they come to you. - -I use notecards for two of these four things: to track day-to-day tasks and to capture ideas. Medium and long term planning I do in a notebook (more on that below). - -The notecard system started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in a restaurant, drinking too much, not sleeping enough, never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes, but I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time in this stage, but I digress. - -One of my good friends at the time, who lived more or less the same way I did, nevertheless managed to run a successful business, play in a band, and otherwise be a much more effective person than me. All while doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed get so much done. "I make a list of all the stuff I need to do," he said, "then I do it." - -That this was revolutionary to me tells you everything you need to know about me in my twenties. But it was. I asked him, okay, but like, what do you *do*? It turned out he took whatever paper was handy and wrote down what he needed to do. Then he did it. Naturally I focused on the first part: how he wrote it down. That was the easiest thing to copy. Actually doing stuff? That's hard. - -I wasted a week or so deciding what sort of paper to use for my lists. I chose index cards because they were small, cheap, fit in your pocket, and wouldn't get mixed up with other paper. The fact that they're small also meant my todo list would never get to more than twenty or so items. That's manageable. - -Finally, paper decision behind me, I started writing things down on index cards. Then I had to do them. That was annoying. But there they were, on the list. Needing to be done. It turned out that crossing stuff off the list was fun. Almost addictive. It was like a game in a way. Could I get everything crossed off in a day? I got moderately obsessed with lists. - -One night at sushi with my then-girlfriend and her father (also a very successful person) I happened to mention my notecard system (see, obsessed, as in bringing it up at dinner). "I do that too," he said. "Every night before I go to bed I write down everything I have to do, and all the extraneous things I've been thinking about. I try to completely empty my head. Helps me sleep," he said. - -Notice that he did not say anything about what sort of paper he used. Only idiots like me obsess over paper. Focus on the craft, not the tools. - -This idea made sense to me, so I took this craft and incorporated it into my life as well. I didn't even obsess over what sort of paper to use. I started writing out my todo lists in the evening, along with anything else that felt like it needed to get off my mind, which I also wrote on notecards since I had them around. These cards I threw in a shoe box and, to be honest, didn't do much with them, but they helped clear my head, which was the important part[^1]. - -This system, tracking what I needed to do, and clearing my ideas at the end of the day, was far more powerful than I expected. The notecards themselves are incidental. Use whatever scraps of paper work for you, the point is the craft. The system works. I started getting more stuff done. Lots more stuff. To the point that I ended up going back and finishing college because I realized I had enough time in my day to do that, in part because I knew what I had to do each day. - -Over the years I have experimented with other ways of keeping todo lists, including notebooks of various shapes and sizes, probably a dozen different digital methods, including two I wrote myself. None of them stuck. I keep coming back to notecards. They are the single most effective way to keep track of what you need to do without introducing unnecessary complexity. - -This is a flexible enough system that I've used it as a chef, a computer programmer, a writer, a father, and more. I honestly think it would work for anyone in just about any job where you have to keep track of what you need to do. - -[^1]: When I had kids I kind of gave up on this habit to spend my time reading to them before bed. In practice it accomplishes the same thing -- it clears my head by sticking a story in it -- I just lose whatever ideas might have been rattling around. The only notecards I really use as a filing system anymore are reading notes. - -## The Importance of Notebooks and Time blocking - -There's only so much you can do in day. There is what there is, use it wisely. I have a full time job, three kids, and live on the road. I also manage to not work all the time. In fact I rarely work past 3. It's not that I'm so great at anything, it's that I can focus, and I can focus because I block out time in my day to work intensely rather than haphazardly throughout the day. - -I had been using notecards for years before I encountered David Allen's Getting Things Done, which inspired me to expand my daily system (which was already close enough to his that I didn't change that) into longer term thinking and planning. To me the core benefit of Allen's system is clearing your mind of trivial details so you can thing about the big picture stuff. - -This may also have had something to do with getting older, and it coincided with me wanting to accomplish longer term goals. While notecards are a key part of a big project like writing a book, they aren't enough. I found note cards to be less ideal for longer term planning. It's hard to fit much about a multi-year project on a single note card. For a while I used multiple cards when necessary and kept them all together with little binder clips. That worked, but it was difficult to carry around and hard to see everything at once without a large table, which I didn't always have. - -I bought a notebook and started keeping my projects (to use David Allen's terms) in that, then making my daily lists of things to do for those projects on the notecards. When I moved from freelancing to full-time at Wired, I started evolving this system because most of what I do at Wired is very long term and needs to be broken down into more manageable bits. Most of my planning for work starts at the seasonal level, then moves to monthly, then weekly. If find it easiest to track this flow in a notebook. - -To give a practical example, consider my tent guide. This is something I update every Spring, Summer and Fall, which means it's on three different pages in my notebook. March 1st or so I flip to the spring projects list, review it, note that Best Tents is on there, and move it to my list of things to do in March. Both lists are in the same notebook, but the season lists I don't cross things off or mark them in any way. I revisit the same list next spring. The actual list of things to do that gets crossed off is the monthly list. I review my monthly list at the start of every week, and move whichever things I want to work on that week to a weekly list. Then I break that down by day. That's where the notecards come out. - -I write down what I need to get done the next day in the evening and then the next morning when I brew my coffee and sit down to work, I pick up the notecard and get to work. - -tk - - - - -I rarely buy books. I rely on libraries so just writing in the book isn't an option. Also, writing in the book means to find anything I'd have to do get the book, open it, thumb through it looking for the quote. All I have to do is flip through my note cards, which are archived (VERY loosely) by subject. - - -He gave me some more details about his system, which had simple priority rankings for tasks. And by "file" he meant toss it in a shoebox. Not perfect, but I started to do both things. Amazingly, I too started to accomplish more. - -To this day when I read a book I kept a stack of note cards nearby, writing down things that catch my attention[^1]. I do the same for things I read online, conversations I have, and ideas that come to me though out the day. - -and a way to file stuff that might be useful in the future, for me that's reading notes, story ideas, observations and so on. - - - -The last two became a problem. There was no way to know at a glance which index cards were valuable insights gleaned from a book or meditation and which were just reminding me to get paper towels at the store. This is when I stumbled on extra-sticky post-it notes. They're like regular post-it notes. But they actually stick to stuff. Pretty much forever from what I can tell. They also come in this very attention-getting yellow. So I started writing todos and grocery type lists on these little yellow post its. I know that - -## The Nothing That Is - -> For the listener, who listens in the snow, <br /> -> And, nothing himself, beholds <br /> -> Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. <br /> -<cite>-- [Wallace Stevens][1]</cite> - -Long leaf pine bark is a patchwork quilt of overlapping grays, reds, browns, flaking to leave bluish tinged valleys between them. It reminds me of the canyon country of the Colorado plateau, a miniature world of mesas and canyons turned on its side and drizzled with rivers of sap. - -Some of the same forces of wind and water are at work on the pine as they are in the canyons of Utah and Colorado. An echo of the endless in the finite. - -<div class="cluster"> - <span class="row-2"> -<img src="images/2024/2024-02-26_163406_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3910" class="cluster pic66" /> -<img src="images/2024/2010-07-10_141628_dinosaur-national-park.jpg" id="image-3909" class="cluster pic66" /> - </span> -</div> - -The sound is the same. The rush of pine needles catching the wind. From damp maritime forests to box canyons in the southwest, the under story may change from palmettos to red-barked manzanita, but the over story remains the same. The pines are always singing. - -The breath of the world. Air rushing from one place to another, a force we can only see the effect of, never the thing itself. The nothing that is. - -On cool nights I leave the windows open to hear the wind. When we lived in a house I would sleep on the couch on windy nights. Only a few of our windows opened, the best was right next to the couch. I propped it open with a dowel and would fall asleep to puffs of wind on my face. - -Before dawn, before the birds are up, there is only the sea and the wind. I lay awake in the 5 AM darkness, listening to the pines softly roar. The low music of the pines is joined by the dry rattle of oak leaves, the snap of a towel left out to dry over night. The wind like fingers tracing over the land, feeling their way through our small slice of the world. - -I think of going out into it. It is warm under the covers, but I always think of Marcus Aurelius, "what do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for -- the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" I get up. - -Outside there is already a pink and yellow glow on the horizon. The wind comes in gusts, swaying pines, rattling oaks. I stand facing east, watching the sun. Just before dawn the wind dies down, the temperature drops noticeably, as if the world draws in a deep breath and holds. And then there is light. - - - - - - - -When there is no wind the world is wondrously silent. - - - -Life is about the ineffable presence in the silence of stone. The smell of rain in dry lands. The taste of salt before you can see the water. What you know before you know it. The presence in the absence of everything else. - - - - -[1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90 - -I try to spend some time each day "doing nothing". That is, not working, not writing, not reading, not even meditating, not engaged with anything but the world as it is. To sit and listen. - -This started as a way to get better at birding, listening intently to all the different bird calls that are always all around, but get filtered out -- to stop that filtering and listen consciously to everything, picking out individual sounds, trying to identify them. - - -I found that concentrating this way had a hypnotic effect, it was like gaining access to a new world. I wanted to do more of it, to go further somehow. - - -All my life I have sought these wild, isolated places. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think the -<<< -Draw people in here, and make the language more compelling. ->>> - - -It may be that that's already a part of us if we stop long enough, become still enough and work hard enough to find it. - -We stare at campfires almost every night. - - - - -[3]: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8567 - - - -The 50mm lens forces you to dissect what you're seeing and figure out a way to tell the story you see by combining fragments back into a narrative. It forces you to cut up the story and re-arrange it into your own, which is the beginning of creativity -- the destruction. The narrower field of view of the 50mm lens forces you to sequence and narrate your way into the experience you are trying to communicate. That's what I love about it. You can't contain the story in one shot like you can with a wide lens, you have to go deeper in and see what you can pull out as the essential elements. The 50mm make you work for it. And yeah the 50 part isn't that important, 40, 45, 50, 55, 58, they all have the same effect - -1) Think about framing first. The 50 lends itself to simple direct framing. Figure out what's important in the scene and get rid of the rest. -2) Use depth of field wisely. Don't go nuts with the bokeh. Lenses have f/8 for a reason. I get it, the falloff can be pretty awesome, especially in portraits, but go easy here. -3) Move around. Ansel Adams: A good photograph is knowing where to stand. To dissect a scene you have to move around in it. Like move your body. -4) Think in narratives. The 50 tells stories in pieces, you don't have to get everything in the frame. Be less reactive and more intentional. -5) Think in triptychs: establishing shot, then what's the action, then some detail within the scene. - - - - -## Art - -The past and future of art is patronage. The past is one person giving you thousands, the future, as Kevin Kelly famously put it, is thousands of people giving you $1, but either way, selling direct to your audience has always been the way to support yourself by making stuff. - -The future is unevenly distributed though. We are living in an aberration where a lot of art is not supported by patronage, but instead is corralled on platforms to serve algorithms that turn everything into a popularity contest. - -It won't last. Aberrations never do. But when you are in it, this current aberration is an all-consuming one that seems to be destroying people who are trying to create good, thoughtful, intelligent, disciplined art. That is a problem. - -The solution is to better distribute the future into now, which is why I am writing this. My solution here is not new solution, but I think it's going to take some more people pointing it out to make it catch on. - -### How We Got Here. - -The problem of the current aberration is an inevitable result of the democratization of distribution that happened when the internet came along. There's nothing new conceptually about the internet. It's the Gutenberg press on steroids. It brought the cost of distributing art very close to zero, which effectively means anyone can make art. But not really. Because there is more to it than distribution. Now though everyone has the capability to reach an audience with their thing, whatever it may be. - -That is both the brilliance and curse of a zero cost distribution network. There's no gatekeepers. Yay! But wait a minute. Servers are not free. They're cheap, but not free. There might not be a gatekeeper in the since of an editor sifting through a slush pile of manuscripts, but someone has to keep the servers running. That's the new gatekeeper. Same as the old really, though the close have changed. - -In order to pay for the servers the platforms have to do something. The model that some early efforts stumbled on is to capture viewers' attention and then sell that attention to advertisers. The platform then has a need to always be increasing the number of eyeballs staring at the ads. This is why everything has been engineered to be addictive. - -I know you already know this, I'm only laying this out because it's the next part people seem to miss. The algorithms that serve up your creations on these platforms need your creations to serve their needs. That is, they need your creations to be addictive. Again, this is not new. The patrons supporting art throughout the ages have always had agendas and some of them where pretty shady. - -The problem is that the distribution platforms have turned everything into a competition to see who can get the most eyeballs. Even this is not inherently bad. I don't know about you, but I want to reach as many people as I can. But that quest for eyeballs turns into your quest. Your work exists primarily to feed the algorithm and it's treated as food essentially. - -The way this plays out is that even if people start off making things for the love of it, they get sucked into the world of the platform. Soon people aren't making things because they love them, they're making things because they're hoping you'll love them and that never works. - -Unfortunately, even if you can get past that temptation and keep making things you love to make, even if you really pour all your energy into something, it ends up being eaten by the same algorithm. It ends up on these platforms alongside everything else, no matter if that else is someone's energy and love distilled, or a 30 second flippant rant about tomatoes. - -The modern platform, be it YouTube, Instagram, or whatever is big now, is the equivalent of going to the Louve and instead of curated artwork, the walls are plastered with every scrap of art everyone had ever created. - -At first this would be amazing. You would discover all kinds of wonderful art. Sure there would be some really bad stuff, but look at this one... this is amazing. You would wander in rapture. - -This euphoric discover phase would eventually become overwhelming. You would reach a saturation point. It would be too much to look at another wall of art and try to wade through the hundred pieces you didn't like to find the two you did. You'd retreat to enjoy what you'd already found. You'd look for more by those artists. You'd, dare I say, follow them. You'd begin to encourage them to feed the algorithm. - -### Finding a Way Out - -There are two widely accepted solutions to the overwhelm problem. There's also a less used, more interactive, third option that I think points the way forward, but first let's talk about the two solutions most widely employed: professional curation and machine curation. - -Professional curation kicked off with the relative democratization of publishing back in the late middle ages. As soon as the printing press started cranking out more books than you could read in a year someone popped up to offer suggestions on which ones you should read and which you should skip. Fast forward a bit and you have the professional curator. To my mind this encompasses everything from editors picking works to publish to critics telling the wider public which pieces of art to consume, as well as all the people in between those points. - -It's worth mentioning that I grew up under this system and watched it gradually collapse and fall apart to be replaced by machine curation. I don't completely love either system, both have trade offs. - -The professional system works to a point, after which it becomes cliqueish, ego-driven, and self-defeating. Once it crosses that threshold it tends to be circumvented. In art you get the rise of the gallery to showcase those that can't make it into the museum. Then you get the pop up gallery to circumvent the gallery. Presumably this keeps going though I will admit I exited that scene at the pop up gallery stage because I felt like I saw where it was going. I saw the same thing happen in publishing. In publishing the independent presses circumvented the big publishers until they turned into them, and then the zine makers circumvented the independent publishers until they turn into them. Presumably this would have gone on in these loops forever where it not for the rise of the machine. - -Professional curation is valuable. People who spend their lives thinking about what is good or bad writing, good or bad art, good or bad music, if they do it well, and I have worked with many who do it well, they really do have a better sense of what is working and what is not. They're not perfect. For every Rembrandt that's discovered when they should be there is a Basquiat who is not. This is the downside to professional curation. Everything has its trade offs. - -The main alternative to professional curation is machine curation. This is where we are today. There is too much on YouTube for professionals to curate. This is the realm of the machine. As with the professional, when the machine works for you (as a lover of art seeking it) it works quite well, but even when it works it is feeding the algorithm and potentially killing the thing you are there to see -- the art. - -### What Is Art - -Let's back up, what is "art"? I think what people mean by "art" is when people try to turn scenes, moments of life, into something larger than they are, to be able to communicate ideas to other people. - -To me this is not "art". This is something far deeper and more primeval. This is the basic human need to communicate with each other. To tell people what it was like on the mountain top as it were. You can do this at any time. No one is stopping you. Seek transcendence until you experience it. Rinse and repeat. You don't need a platform, you don't need a patron. - -Now if that transcendence drives you to make something to explain it or share it in some way, that's where patrons come in. Making stuff usually takes at the very least time, time that can not be spent putting food on you table. You either need to have a lot of food on the table already or you're going to have to figure out a way to sell whatever you've made. - -To me this is where the noun "art" comes in. I define "art" as turning the act of transcendence into a paycheck. - -Here be dragons. - -### The Gatekeeper Gauntlet - -I know you think you want to make your living making art. But do you? Do you know what that's going to do to the feeling you were trying to convey? I don't care what platform you put your work out on, be it feeing the algorithm on Instagram or publishing it in Wired magazine, it will not come out the way you want. It might come out better in some ways, but either way, it's not you anymore, it's you and the platform working together. - -I have turned in pieces of writing that were intended to convey one thing that ultimately failed to convey that thing because an editor pushed me in another direction. I still don't know if that's good or bad or neither, but it will definitely happen. And oh, by the way, your ego will shattered into tiny little shards you can maybe collect up when the paycheck arrives. Maybe you never find them, they're still lying there in an office somewhere. I've seen it go both ways. - -I have gone this route and continue to go this route when I think whatever idea it is I am trying to convey is one that will survive the crucible of editing in which the perceived unnecessary is seared away. The truth is editors are often right. Not always, but more often then even I want to admit. - -This is why I don't write about those moments of transcendence for gatekeeper publications. That stuff goes here and makes me no money. That's fine. I have a day job. It's still writing. I write about my experiences with products. My title is Senior Writer and Reviewer, but really what I do is write a string of personal essays, 3-4 a week, about my encounters with the stuff other people make. Sometimes this is fulfilling, sometimes it is not, even when it's not it's still pretty fun. Last week I shot about 300 photographs with $20,000 camera I would never in a million years get to touch in any other scenario. This even I cooked up dry aged grass-fed filets to see what a meat subscription box with like. It's a pretty sweet gig. - -That's great for you Scott, but I have to slave away over TPS reports in a cubical and I want people to by my six dimensional crocheting, how come I can't do that? In a word: because that's not how it works. - - - -The issues of patronage only arises if you try to turn those moments of transcendence into objects of some kind and then you try to earn a living from them. - -What then is so different from turning transcendence into a paycheck and turning a selfie of your lunch into a paycheck? Why call one art and the other content? - -I do think there is a difference. - - - -Once upon a time I followed a great community of photographers and writers on the early web. - - ---- - -One of the horrors of the online world is the way in which it cuts off the senses. - The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order. -"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing"—Helen Keller - ---- - -We're sliding toward a post-political mode of government, in which expert administration replaces democratic contest, and political sovereignty is relocated from representative bodies to a permanent bureaucracy that is largely unaccountable. Common sense is disqualified as a guide to reality and with this disqualification the political standing of the majority is demoted. -- Matthew Crawford Anti-Humanism and the Post-Political Condition First Things Lecture https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pC0bxPbk5nw - - -People need... the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. - -If you don't define success for yourself, you can never be successful. That sounds silly, but it's true. Not defining where you want to get to means you'll never get there. This lack of vision isn't an accident usually, it's actually a clever dodge your subconscious mind comes up with because it also means you can't fail. If there's no target to hit, you can't miss. - -But without a vision of what success if for you, you will never be successful. And that will haunt you and leave you feeling incomplete in vague, difficult to recognize ways. You have to define what success looks like *for you*, lest you always feel like you're failing—whether or not you actually are. - -I submit that it is better to know you failed than to have no idea where you are. - - - -The thing to remember is that your definition of success will have to change and evolve. The dangerous thing is to coast. If you're coasting, you're not adapting, you're not changing and the only thing I can tell you is that nothing in life is static, everything is changing. - - -, even if it's like my definition, which is somewhat nebulous: I want to keep doing those things that I want to do more of and less of those things that I want to do less of. - -The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER - -Technology is a means to an end, not an end - ---- - - -## UG Monk Review - -Every morning I do the same thing. Rain, shine, wind, snow. Doesn't matter. I get up, go outside, and either submerge myself in cold water (if we're near some) or use a bandanna to dowse myself in cold water. Then I do some spiritual exercises, between 200-400 kettlebell swings (depending on the day), and then make some tea and eat breakfast with my family. - -This ritual is a tether from which I rarely deviate, but the rest of my day is not structured at all. My job requires flexibility. Some days I need to sit and write, other days I need to be out wandering around testing cameras, paddle boards, backpacks, and other things. - -To give some additional, useful structure to this chaos I recently added a second ritual at the end of my day, mostly thanks to a little wooden box called [Analog](https://ugmonk.com/pages/analog). - -### Analog, a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list. - -My work day usually starts around 9 AM. I pick up a note card that has the tasks I am focusing on that day and start doing them. I don't have to think about what I should do, spend any time planning what to do, and I don't for the love of god start my day by looking at my email. I don't even open my laptop. I pick up a notecard. At the top of the card today it says, *write UG Monk Analog review*. I start writing. - -I have been doing this for decades. I wrote a [short blurb](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards) about how I use note cards as a "planner" for my friend Medea Giordano's [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/). I was surprised by how much email I got from this little thing I contributed. Eventually I wrote a more extensive guide to [how I use note cards as a planning tool](). This led someone to email me and ask if I had tried something called Analog, from a company with the curious name of UG Monk. - -I wrote [a review of Analog for Wired](), so if you want more on the nuts and bolts of what Analog is and why I like it, read that. What I want to talk about here is something I only mention in passing in the Wired review, that is the potential usefulness of ritual in everyday things. - -Back to the notecard I picked up about 10 minutes ago, the one that said, write Analog review. This notecard which holds everything I need to do, gets filled out in the evening of the day before, when I stop working. - -Before I got the Analog Starter Kit, this process was somewhat haphazard. For someone whose morning ritual is well honed, my afternoons are more chaos. Analog changed that to some degree. The process I go through did not change, but the way I did it and the focus I bring to it now is greater than before. Why? Because I have a beautiful walnut box now. - -Ritual is important because it it makes mundane activities sacred. Eating a cracker is nothing. The ritual of the Eucharistic makes the cracker more than a cracker. - -I would never want anyone to think that going over the stuff you need to do is a religious ceremony, but if you can bring a little of that intensity to other things it can help. Ritual is both a way of focusing, and a way of reinforcing the behavior. Pick the right rituals, the right behaviors, and you can change your life. - -I think ritual is important because if you look at something like Analog, which is $108 plus tax, it might seem like a lot to spend on something for your todo list. But if the money spent, the object acquired, raises the level of respect you have for what you're doing, if it helps bring a ritual aspect that inspires you to sit down and use them then $108 is nothing. - -This is why I say Analog is a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list. - -If you're not familiar with a Japanese tea ceremony it's an extremely ritualized way of preparing and drinking tea (matcha). It started in the 16th century as an artistic hobby of the upper class and warrior elite, and eventually spread to wealthy merchants and others looking for formal ways forge and reinforce strong social ties. The ceremony itself is highly choreographed and to do it right requires years of study. It's usually done in a small room, modeled on a hermit’s hut, with room for four or five people. The point is to pull people out of the mundane world of their busy lives to temporarily focus on the tea and conversation. - -Creating a ritual around a todo list can have the same effect, helping you to withdraw from the busyness of actual doing, and focus on why you're doing anything at all, and what you hope to get out of it. Do you need this for everything? No, there are some things you just have to do and you know why, like the emails you need to send and phone calls you need to make. But then, why are making those phone calls and sending those emails? Uh, because I have a job. Okay, but why do you have *that* job? What do you get out of it that you don't out of any other job? - -These are the sorts of higher level questions that are worth thinking about on a regular basis.Not everyday, maybe not even weekly, but once a month it's worth reflecting on why you're doing what you doing, not just what you need to get done. This is what Analog has made me thing about more. - -### Daily Reviews With Analog - -At the end of the day -- which might be anywhere from 3 to 8 depending on the day -- I sit down with my notecard and I see what I didn't get to that day. I decided if those things are things I am still committed to doing, and, if so, I write them on a card for the next day. I also mark them as deferred by using a >, which I think I stole from bullet journaling. - -Then I pull out the notecard that holds my weekly tasks, another with monthly tasks, and another with seasonal tasks (quarterly tasks if you prefer), along with a notebook that contains my longer term, strategic goals and list of projects. I review all these lists and make sure that tasks are getting done so projects are moving forward. Based on all this I write down my goals for the next day. - -Once I have the next day's todo list filled out, I put it on top of my Analog box and go do something else for the remainder of the day. - -This little review ritual might sound complex, but it's not. It took longer to write it than it does to do it. I spend about five minutes on this each afternoon. Sunday mornings I spend about an hour going through the same process, but at higher level, looking at my longer term goals and figuring out what needs to get done in the next next season, next year, next five years. - -Analog does two things that I think are important. The first is physical -- it gives me a place to put my notecards. I put everything in the box, then I can put it away and my work day feels done. Pull it out again the next morning and I know it's time to focus. It's a good way to bookend my days, which is particularly helpful for people whose work varies from day to day. - -The second is the ritual aspect. I think a lot of times I get caught up in rushing to do stuff without putting in the more difficult, higher level thinking that ought to precede putting items on your todo list. Why am I doing this? That kind of thinking comes out more when you turn your daily review into a kind of tea ceremony, which, at least for me, Analog very much helps to do. Everyone's job is different of course. I'm not sure a ceremonial ritual around my todo list would have been as helpful when I was running a restaurant. But it might have. It might have been a faster way to figure out that running a restaurant wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. So maybe I take that back. Maybe we could all use a little tea ceremony in our days. Whether Analog fits into that is your own decision, but it's definitely working for me. - - - - - -## Yuma scene. - -lemon yellow Volkswagon Dasher. smell of radiator fluid. hot wind. simba on the floor in the only scrap of shade. inside the diner, air conditioned, cool. eating ice cream. laying down in the backseat, the windows wrapping around above me. - -## stoic journal: - -1. Prepare For The Day Ahead: Each morning you should prepare, plan and meditate on how you aim to act that day. You should be envisioning everything that may come and steeling yourself so you're ready to conquer it. As Seneca wrote, "The wise will start each day with the thought, 'Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.'" Or think of Marcus’s reminder: "When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil." - -2. Put The Day Up For Review: Stoicism isn't just about thinking, it's about action—and the best wayto improve is to review. Each evening you should, like Seneca did, examine your day and your actions. As he put it, "When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." The question should be: Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? - ---- - -S.M. Stirling’s characters*. “History becomes myth, myth becomes legend, and legend becomes history [as people act it out in their deeds]. Time is not a straight line. Time is a serpent.” - -*The character was our old friend The Wanderer, here seen as an old mountain man in a sheepskin poncho, making coffee over a campfire – who suddenly, for an instant, is also seen with long black braids, a black Stetson, and the face of Coyote Old Man. - ---- - -In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote: - -Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. - ---- - -As Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, “shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.” - -## advertising - -One of the interesting things about living the way we do is that we're subjected to very little advertising. We don't have a television, we don't go out to eat (and see TVs there), and we seldom drive on interstate highways, subject to billboards. There are some billboards on the backroads we favor—I don't think it's possible to escape billboards completely, save in Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii, all of which have outlawed them—but not that many. I think the main place we encounter advertising is at the gas pump and that's pretty easy to ignore because I don't think I've ever put gas in the bus without having a conversation with someone passing by. - -Despite the gas pumps, it seems safe to say that, living as we do in the bus, we are subjected to very little advertising. This is something I generally spend absolutely zero time thinking about until we come into major American city—something we try to avoid doing—and I am awestruck by how much advertising there is -- it absolutely saturates the environment. - -## What are people for - -a line from Wendell Berry that has stuck with me for a long time: “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines - - -## Collapse notes ---- - -Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary. --JMG - - -Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.) Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture. That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born. - -That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth. (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.) Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other. - -One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries. The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks. --JMG - ---- - - - -## On the Economy of Walden - -Walden is a curious book. Curious because what the world has chosen to remember about Thoreau is that he opted to go live in the woods for a time, renounce in some way the modern world and get fback to nature. But this isn't at all what Thoreau did. Forget the historical context (which is that Thoreau went into the woods to write another book, A week and concord and merrimack river, while at the same time processing his bother's death. Forget that because if you just come to book without any of that there is still no reason to walk away thinking you've read a book about a man who renounced the modern world. He does nothing of the sort, and most of the book isn't nature writing. The first and longest chapter is called Economy. - -Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you should read. Me telling you about it won't mean anything. It is experiential writing. - -This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience. - -In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD. And I also see both your flaws and mine. - -20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's—that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might really want a cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum of desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't need at all and only want because someone else has it. - - -What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan... - -is in many ways a restating of the standard arguments agains - - - - - ---- - -"The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now. Make the best spaghetti sauce you can with what you have and who you are, right now. Make this the best staff meeting you could possibly have, given the circumstances at the moment. While talking with your friend, your spouse, your mom, or your son, make it the very best conversation that you could be having. The best proposal, the best drive with my family, the best performance review, and the best nap." - ---- - -The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien - ---- - -A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope-itself/articles/deep-down-things-in-a-time-of-panic - ---- - -Richard Wagamese’s lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse: - -"Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever." - ---- - -There is an underground movement of people united around a common goal of relocalizing life. Many, probably not all, but the examples I know of anyway, of the people driving this movement have embraced what is sometimes called a front porch culture. That is, a culture of staying in one place all your life, of being a part of your community, and so on. I completely support this, which might seem odd for someone who lives in an RV, but I see what we do as a similar kind of localization. Localization need not be literal, at least not for everyone. Every culture everywhere - ---- - -And stupidity combined with greed and arrogance is frankly more dangerous than deliberate evil. Someone who's evil and smart usually has the common sense to know when the risk of blowback is getting too high, and backs down fast when that happens in order to save his own skin so he can enjoy his nasty pleasures and ill-gotten gains. Somebody who's arrogant, greedy, and stupid doesn't do that, and such people go charging ahead and create major disasters that cause much more suffering and misery, and get dragged down with their victims. - ---- - -Art is the transmission of a feeling across time. The artist feels something that drives him or her to make something and then the viewer experiences a feeling when they see or read or otherwise interact with that thing that the artist made. Those may be very different feelings, the feeling in the artist and in the viewer, but that thing that is making that connection is, I think, art as we define it in western culture. There are different conceptions of art. Even our culture at earlier periods had different definitions. And there are still artists who would probably disagree with this and say that the purpose of art is actually the expression of the divine, but I would still argue that it's the feeling of the divine that drives the artist to create. So it may not be that they're trying to communicate their own feeling, but that feeling is still the driving impulse behind the creation of the thing. And then, like I think of cooking, and I think well, at it's best cooking is exactly what I just described, but then also other times I am just scrambling these eggs so the kids can eat before Corrinne starts work at the table. - ---- - -Working in Crawford quote: - -Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this feeling in a way that no other books I've read manages. Crawford defines this desire, this need to be capable of repair as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence. What he called the Spirited Man, becomes a kind of archetype of the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance." - -In the years since Shop Class was published I have witnessed a convergence of two worlds, the collision of the spirit of inquire that looks to books and the spirit of inquiry that wants to works in the real world, to fix things, to get one's self moving down the road again. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves. - -I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory? - -Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." - -This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. - - - - -Passive consumptions displaces agency. One is no longer masters of one's stuff but a servant of its makers. - ---- - -I don't want to report stories, I want to live them. - -Have your own code. Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work. - -When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable. - -I think after a while the novelty of anythin wears off. even living on the road. or perhaps its that I felt the need to dial back the novelty a little. first we returned to places we'd already been, but that wasn't the answer. Then we went to new places, but moved much slower. settled in a bit. but that wasn't entirely the answer either. it wasn't until we enrolled the kids in juijitsu that i realized, oh, this is what i am supposed to do. i am supposed to look more closely at these places. to befriend the people within in them, to understand them to a greater degree. I do not know why, I just know that this is part of it. i still do not have all of it, it is still not perfected, but every day that passes i get new ideas and things fit more. - -as a spin off of the moving slower idea i came to realize that okay, i have achieved the thing I set out to do. we live on the road. now what? it wasn't until i sat twith this question for a long time in meditation that something like an answer began to form. and a big part of the answer was, now you make stuff. now you write, now you build, now you create, now you fix. now you do all the things you have always done, but you find a way to do them on them within the constraints of how you life now. Fewer tools, less space, in some cases i've added some ttools that seem strange at first glance. - -the answer is to put the art back in. to blend the books and the life and use them to make some kind of art. mechanical, analog art. and digital recordings to supplement it. but that mechnaical stuff needs to happen. it has been missing too long. - ---- - -For Midgley, the post-Enlightenment myths that orient us in the modern world are so potent because they base their authority, paradoxically, on the myth of mythlessness. That is, the Enlightenment project was, among other things, committed to overcoming the restrictive chains of religious dogma, inherited belief systems, and, yes, grand narratives of mythology. But this was only to change one set of answers to our biggest questions for a host of others. We can’t escape myths; we only exchange them. And some of the post-Enlightenment myths by which we continue to live tell a tale of humans as autonomous and atomized beings, of an inert world of knowable laws scrutinized by the detached and disinterested rational gaze, of an environment whose value is reduced to commodification and utility, and of a human species that is on some ineluctable frog-march of progress. - -But myths are not just intellectual abstractions. They manifest in the real. The industrial—and arguably now digital—revolutions and the built world of mass manufacturing, global trade networks of shipping lanes and rail lines and interstate highways, and the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels and the mining of scarce and precious resources in whose name we will even wage international war are, in part, the physical embodiment of this deeply ingrained post-Enlightenment mythology. What we make reveals to us what we love and believe. And over centuries, these lived, incarnated mythologies shape our posture and stance to the world. - -https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/08/what-in-the-world-is-the-world-a-review-of-this-sacred-life-humanitys-place-in-a-wounded-world/ - ---- - -Paul Kingsnorth on solutions: - -Climate change is a great example of that. It’s really interesting to me that we talk about climate change as if it were somehow disconnected from all the other things that are happening to the planet. The industrial economy’s assault on the earth, which has been going on for a couple hundred years, has basically wrecked the health of the planet in all sorts of different ways. And there are a lot of things happening — large rates of extinction, soil erosion, ocean pollution, a changing climate, all sorts of smaller, subtler things as well — but it’s climate change that’s just a one-off, almost self-contained phenomenon that has somehow grabbed the headlines and has become this enormous thing that we somehow have to stop. That’s the problem, so what’s the solution? And the solution inevitably is always technological, because nobody can think about anything else. That’s the way we think in our culture: we’ve created the problem with technology, so we must have to solve it with technology. So the issue has boiled down to, the wrong kind of gas is going up into the atmosphere, so we need a fuel technology that doesn’t put it up there, as if that were the problem, rather than the way we’re living our lives, the entirety of the economy, the value system that it’s based on. It’s the kind of notion that we’re extractive individuals and we just live in a market system. All of these complex things have happened over the last hundred years where we’ve completely retooled the way we live — we’ve disconnected ourselves from nature and culture and community, and we’ve made ourselves consumer individuals living in a machine. And the problem then is seen as, the Machine is using the wrong fuel, so let’s do something else. It’s not going to work, anyway, but even if it did work, what would the solution look like? Is that the world we want to be living in? Are the values correct? Is our disconnection okay as long as it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere? Is it okay to live in this kind of radical individualistic machine world as long as we’re not putting carbon up into the air? - -It’s very difficult to ask the bigger questions because, as you say, relentlessly, as soon as you do, there’s an immediate backlash, which usually comes in completely familiar clichéd language —“So you’re saying we should go back and live in caves?” etc. And there’s not really much you can do with that. - -it’s not neutral technology, it’s only designed for one thing. A gun only does one thing. But a smartphone is not neutral technology. If you use that thing, you are going to get addicted to that thing, you’re going to be taken into a certain way of life, you’re going to be acting in a certain way, you’re undoubtedly going to have your brain rewired by your use of it. Yeah, sure, you could be using it to promote organic farming rather than pornography, but you’re still on your phone all day, and so is everybody else who has to do that, and you’re still pumping carbon into the atmosphere — but more to the point, you rewire your whole life. Nobody has time to go folk dancing when they’re on their phone all the time. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned you are. - -I perpetually would like to get the internet out of my house, but then I wouldn’t be able to earn a penny, so I can’t. So there it is! So we have to make these choices. I would genuinely like to live without the internet, but I have no idea how I would feed my children, so I can’t at the moment. So there it is. But you know, maybe it’s just the process of drawing lines, like it is with anything else. You just say, okay, I’m not going over this line. It’s just a thing I’m not going to do. So I’ve said for a long time I’m not having a smartphone. I’m just not going to have one. And I don’t care what that means. It’s inconvenient for me in all sorts of ways, but I’m just not going to do it, so that’s that. I don’t have to think about it. And that’s one of my lines. There are things I’m just not going to do, that I’m not going to compromise on, and then there are other things I go, Well, okay, I have to do that because we’re all living in the world. So I think that’s probably the way to think about it. - -https://mereorthodoxy.com/following-christ-in-the-machine-age-a-conversation-with-paul-kingsnorth/ - ---- - - -## What Happened to 'How Are You'? - -One used to meet up with an old friend and ask, “How are you?” And get a little recap of how that person has actually been. Today, when we ask how someone is, it’s quite common to get back a “BUSY!” Yes, of course. Busy. - -I’m not asking about the tempo of your life, I’m asking about you. I’m interested in you. Tell me about you. - -We’ve come to somehow equate worth with how harried we are. We are the VIPs of our own little worlds, engrossed in the importance of our serious affairs. Busy! So busy! To me, this busyness is evidence of a mismanaged life. If all I can say to someone when they ask me what’s happening in my life is, “BUSY!” I’m doing a poor job of it. It’s like a thermometer with the temperature climbing, a little tell of something going askew. - -We can have much to do, deadlines and meals and kiddos and never ending tasks, but that doesn’t mean we need to feed the busy monster. We don’t have to allow frenetic energy to drive us into that whirlwind of tasks. It’s not helpful. I’ve learned that my perspective truly does determine how I show up in my life. Who I am to my people. How I experience my time here. By a shift in that perception - say from focusing on the overwhelm to one of gratitude, everything changes. - - -## Gurdjieff Do It By Hand - - -Gurdjieff notion that you should do a task by hand. if you have to dig a ditch you should do it and dig it by hand because there's an opportunity there for spiritual growth. if you're offloading it to a machine you're losing that opportunity for spiritual growth. if we offload tasks to machines we lose the opportunities that they have for spiritual growth and we may not fully understand the consequences of offloading things to technology because we'll never go through it to see what Spiritual Development we might have had if we had done it ourselves - -## Have your own code - -Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work. - -When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable. - - -## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun +every essay needs a story to hang it on. And an audio/visual podcast of it. -People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. +# Scratch # Stories to Tell + ## The Good Life I was recently talking with my editor about my decidedly low ambitions at work. Writers often have trajectories. They start at small publications, write that one big story, then move to a larger publication, write that one big story, then move on to a larger publication, and so on. I have never had any interest in that. I've spent my entire writing "career" primarily at Wired. I've been writing for Wired in one form or another since 1999. In all that time Wired has never rejected a pitch[^1], why would I want to write for anyone else? @@ -617,6 +55,10 @@ The heavy wet snows of spring never last long though and it was soon gone, leavi +## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun + +People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. + ## Growing @@ -887,16 +329,40 @@ It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attenti # Notes -## rules - 1. Stop buying stuff you don't need - 2. Pay off all your credit cards - 3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.) - 4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.) - 5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house - 6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase - 7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack - 8. Get rid of the backpack +## On the Economy of Walden + +Walden is a curious book. Curious because what the world has chosen to remember about Thoreau is that he opted to go live in the woods for a time, renounce in some way the modern world and get fback to nature. But this isn't at all what Thoreau did. Forget the historical context (which is that Thoreau went into the woods to write another book, A week and concord and merrimack river, while at the same time processing his bother's death. Forget that because if you just come to book without any of that there is still no reason to walk away thinking you've read a book about a man who renounced the modern world. He does nothing of the sort, and most of the book isn't nature writing. The first and longest chapter is called Economy. + +Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you should read. Me telling you about it won't mean anything. It is experiential writing. + +This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience. + +In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD. And I also see both your flaws and mine. + +20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's—that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might really want a cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum of desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't need at all and only want because someone else has it. + + +What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan... + +is in many ways a restating of the standard arguments agains + + + + + + +"The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now. Make the best spaghetti sauce you can with what you have and who you are, right now. Make this the best staff meeting you could possibly have, given the circumstances at the moment. While talking with your friend, your spouse, your mom, or your son, make it the very best conversation that you could be having. The best proposal, the best drive with my family, the best performance review, and the best nap." +## advertising + +One of the interesting things about living the way we do is that we're subjected to very little advertising. We don't have a television, we don't go out to eat (and see TVs there), and we seldom drive on interstate highways, subject to billboards. There are some billboards on the backroads we favor—I don't think it's possible to escape billboards completely, save in Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii, all of which have outlawed them—but not that many. I think the main place we encounter advertising is at the gas pump and that's pretty easy to ignore because I don't think I've ever put gas in the bus without having a conversation with someone passing by. + +Despite the gas pumps, it seems safe to say that, living as we do in the bus, we are subjected to very little advertising. This is something I generally spend absolutely zero time thinking about until we come into major American city—something we try to avoid doing—and I am awestruck by how much advertising there is -- it absolutely saturates the environment. + + + + + ## beauty @@ -1065,7 +531,299 @@ I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edge Adding edges to the loops closes them. ----- +## 7 years on the Road + +themes: + +crashing communities. the way so many places have welcomed us. excited to have outsiders take an interest in what is happening in their community. + +## Seems Like a Lot of Folks Gave Up or Got Out, Except For the Truly Devote + +Spend a some time in the environment around you, really spend some time. Lose the headphones. Maybe put aside some of the plastic sports gear. Just walk with no plan, no goals, not for your health, your mental health any of that stuff. Find a quiet place to sit, somewhere near you. Sit with the rocks, the trees, the dirt, the sky, the plants, the animals. Then think of all of it, pretend for a moment, that these things are valuable to you like other people are valuable, and more importantly, that you matter to them. That your presence is important to the rocks, to the trees, to the sky, to all of it. Now what sort of life would you lead if you really believed that? Go live that life. + + +We have so little time to engage with the world around us compared to people in pre-industrial times. + + +There is a baseline of financial success you need before you can start to be more spontaneous. + + +I think the view from your window when you’re writing really does inform what you’re writing about quite a lot. I need to stare out of a window whilst I’m writing. That helps me find where I’m going. I was by the harbor, so I could see people coming and going in boats, and I could look out at the sea. There was a fun fair that would pitch up in a field to the right of the restaurant every June, so for a while, I had a fun fair outside my window. I’m sure that contributed in some way to Rid of Me. There was a wonderful collection of furniture and also Russian vinyl 78s. The restaurant owner’s mother had lived there previously — she was Russian — and it was all her furniture and things. Not so long ago, I borrowed the Russian 78s back off the restaurateur so I could record them, because they’d been so much in my memory. I used a sample of one of them on the 4-Track Demos [on “Hook”]. At the time I was listening almost exclusively to those Russian 78s, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits, and the Pixies. I’d also been reading a lot of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I might’ve also been reading [Friedrich Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra. Some light reading. [Laughs] It was a wonderful period of time because I did suddenly have my life back again. That was the period when I was really writing the record. - PJ Harvey + + +## Notecard System + +I don't think anything I've written for Wired has generated so much interest as a throw away comment I made about notecards in our [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards). Every time that article is updated I get more email asking for details. Here are the details. + + +First, lets make sure we're all on the same page: if you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans. + +Not *a plan*, plans are useless. You need *plans*. + +Many plans means you go through the process of planning. That's what's valuable, the process. Planning requires thinking deeply about life, your life, and what you're doing here. What you want to do here, what you were put here to do. + +I can't help you with that part, but after you've made some decisions about what you want do do, where you want to go, it's time to plan how to get there. That requires lists. Lots of lists. Lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for, lists of things you need to do to get from here to there, lists of what you did to get from where you were to where you are, and so on. + +If you step back a bit, you'll see that there are several levels of stuff you need to keep track of -- long terms goals, shorter term projects aligned with those goals, and day to day stuff you need to accomplish to complete the projects that get you to the goals. Life isn't nearly this simple or neat, but at a very broad level that's three things to keep track of: long term things, medium term things, short term things. There's one more important element: a way to record ideas as they come to you. + +I use notecards for two of these four things: to track day-to-day tasks and to capture ideas. Medium and long term planning I do in a notebook (more on that below). + +The notecard system started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in a restaurant, drinking too much, not sleeping enough, never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes, but I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time in this stage, but I digress. + +One of my good friends at the time, who lived more or less the same way I did, nevertheless managed to run a successful business, play in a band, and otherwise be a much more effective person than me. All while doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed get so much done. "I make a list of all the stuff I need to do," he said, "then I do it." + +That this was revolutionary to me tells you everything you need to know about me in my twenties. But it was. I asked him, okay, but like, what do you *do*? It turned out he took whatever paper was handy and wrote down what he needed to do. Then he did it. Naturally I focused on the first part: how he wrote it down. That was the easiest thing to copy. Actually doing stuff? That's hard. + +I wasted a week or so deciding what sort of paper to use for my lists. I chose index cards because they were small, cheap, fit in your pocket, and wouldn't get mixed up with other paper. The fact that they're small also meant my todo list would never get to more than twenty or so items. That's manageable. + +Finally, paper decision behind me, I started writing things down on index cards. Then I had to do them. That was annoying. But there they were, on the list. Needing to be done. It turned out that crossing stuff off the list was fun. Almost addictive. It was like a game in a way. Could I get everything crossed off in a day? I got moderately obsessed with lists. + +One night at sushi with my then-girlfriend and her father (also a very successful person) I happened to mention my notecard system (see, obsessed, as in bringing it up at dinner). "I do that too," he said. "Every night before I go to bed I write down everything I have to do, and all the extraneous things I've been thinking about. I try to completely empty my head. Helps me sleep," he said. + +Notice that he did not say anything about what sort of paper he used. Only idiots like me obsess over paper. Focus on the craft, not the tools. + +This idea made sense to me, so I took this craft and incorporated it into my life as well. I didn't even obsess over what sort of paper to use. I started writing out my todo lists in the evening, along with anything else that felt like it needed to get off my mind, which I also wrote on notecards since I had them around. These cards I threw in a shoe box and, to be honest, didn't do much with them, but they helped clear my head, which was the important part[^1]. + +This system, tracking what I needed to do, and clearing my ideas at the end of the day, was far more powerful than I expected. The notecards themselves are incidental. Use whatever scraps of paper work for you, the point is the craft. The system works. I started getting more stuff done. Lots more stuff. To the point that I ended up going back and finishing college because I realized I had enough time in my day to do that, in part because I knew what I had to do each day. + +Over the years I have experimented with other ways of keeping todo lists, including notebooks of various shapes and sizes, probably a dozen different digital methods, including two I wrote myself. None of them stuck. I keep coming back to notecards. They are the single most effective way to keep track of what you need to do without introducing unnecessary complexity. + +This is a flexible enough system that I've used it as a chef, a computer programmer, a writer, a father, and more. I honestly think it would work for anyone in just about any job where you have to keep track of what you need to do. + +[^1]: When I had kids I kind of gave up on this habit to spend my time reading to them before bed. In practice it accomplishes the same thing -- it clears my head by sticking a story in it -- I just lose whatever ideas might have been rattling around. The only notecards I really use as a filing system anymore are reading notes. + +## The Importance of Notebooks and Time blocking + +There's only so much you can do in day. There is what there is, use it wisely. I have a full time job, three kids, and live on the road. I also manage to not work all the time. In fact I rarely work past 3. It's not that I'm so great at anything, it's that I can focus, and I can focus because I block out time in my day to work intensely rather than haphazardly throughout the day. + +I had been using notecards for years before I encountered David Allen's Getting Things Done, which inspired me to expand my daily system (which was already close enough to his that I didn't change that) into longer term thinking and planning. To me the core benefit of Allen's system is clearing your mind of trivial details so you can thing about the big picture stuff. + +This may also have had something to do with getting older, and it coincided with me wanting to accomplish longer term goals. While notecards are a key part of a big project like writing a book, they aren't enough. I found note cards to be less ideal for longer term planning. It's hard to fit much about a multi-year project on a single note card. For a while I used multiple cards when necessary and kept them all together with little binder clips. That worked, but it was difficult to carry around and hard to see everything at once without a large table, which I didn't always have. + +I bought a notebook and started keeping my projects (to use David Allen's terms) in that, then making my daily lists of things to do for those projects on the notecards. When I moved from freelancing to full-time at Wired, I started evolving this system because most of what I do at Wired is very long term and needs to be broken down into more manageable bits. Most of my planning for work starts at the seasonal level, then moves to monthly, then weekly. If find it easiest to track this flow in a notebook. + +To give a practical example, consider my tent guide. This is something I update every Spring, Summer and Fall, which means it's on three different pages in my notebook. March 1st or so I flip to the spring projects list, review it, note that Best Tents is on there, and move it to my list of things to do in March. Both lists are in the same notebook, but the season lists I don't cross things off or mark them in any way. I revisit the same list next spring. The actual list of things to do that gets crossed off is the monthly list. I review my monthly list at the start of every week, and move whichever things I want to work on that week to a weekly list. Then I break that down by day. That's where the notecards come out. + +I write down what I need to get done the next day in the evening and then the next morning when I brew my coffee and sit down to work, I pick up the notecard and get to work. + +tk + + + + +I rarely buy books. I rely on libraries so just writing in the book isn't an option. Also, writing in the book means to find anything I'd have to do get the book, open it, thumb through it looking for the quote. All I have to do is flip through my note cards, which are archived (VERY loosely) by subject. + + +He gave me some more details about his system, which had simple priority rankings for tasks. And by "file" he meant toss it in a shoebox. Not perfect, but I started to do both things. Amazingly, I too started to accomplish more. + +To this day when I read a book I kept a stack of note cards nearby, writing down things that catch my attention[^1]. I do the same for things I read online, conversations I have, and ideas that come to me though out the day. + +and a way to file stuff that might be useful in the future, for me that's reading notes, story ideas, observations and so on. + + + +The last two became a problem. There was no way to know at a glance which index cards were valuable insights gleaned from a book or meditation and which were just reminding me to get paper towels at the store. This is when I stumbled on extra-sticky post-it notes. They're like regular post-it notes. But they actually stick to stuff. Pretty much forever from what I can tell. They also come in this very attention-getting yellow. So I started writing todos and grocery type lists on these little yellow post its. I know that + +## The Nothing That Is + +> For the listener, who listens in the snow, <br /> +> And, nothing himself, beholds <br /> +> Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. <br /> +<cite>-- [Wallace Stevens][1]</cite> + +Long leaf pine bark is a patchwork quilt of overlapping grays, reds, browns, flaking to leave bluish tinged valleys between them. It reminds me of the canyon country of the Colorado plateau, a miniature world of mesas and canyons turned on its side and drizzled with rivers of sap. + +Some of the same forces of wind and water are at work on the pine as they are in the canyons of Utah and Colorado. An echo of the endless in the finite. + +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2024/2024-02-26_163406_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3910" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2024/2010-07-10_141628_dinosaur-national-park.jpg" id="image-3909" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +The sound is the same. The rush of pine needles catching the wind. From damp maritime forests to box canyons in the southwest, the under story may change from palmettos to red-barked manzanita, but the over story remains the same. The pines are always singing. + +The breath of the world. Air rushing from one place to another, a force we can only see the effect of, never the thing itself. The nothing that is. + +On cool nights I leave the windows open to hear the wind. When we lived in a house I would sleep on the couch on windy nights. Only a few of our windows opened, the best was right next to the couch. I propped it open with a dowel and would fall asleep to puffs of wind on my face. + +Before dawn, before the birds are up, there is only the sea and the wind. I lay awake in the 5 AM darkness, listening to the pines softly roar. The low music of the pines is joined by the dry rattle of oak leaves, the snap of a towel left out to dry over night. The wind like fingers tracing over the land, feeling their way through our small slice of the world. + +I think of going out into it. It is warm under the covers, but I always think of Marcus Aurelius, "what do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for -- the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" I get up. + +Outside there is already a pink and yellow glow on the horizon. The wind comes in gusts, swaying pines, rattling oaks. I stand facing east, watching the sun. Just before dawn the wind dies down, the temperature drops noticeably, as if the world draws in a deep breath and holds. And then there is light. + + + + + + + +When there is no wind the world is wondrously silent. + + + +Life is about the ineffable presence in the silence of stone. The smell of rain in dry lands. The taste of salt before you can see the water. What you know before you know it. The presence in the absence of everything else. + + + + +[1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90 + +I try to spend some time each day "doing nothing". That is, not working, not writing, not reading, not even meditating, not engaged with anything but the world as it is. To sit and listen. + +This started as a way to get better at birding, listening intently to all the different bird calls that are always all around, but get filtered out -- to stop that filtering and listen consciously to everything, picking out individual sounds, trying to identify them. + + +I found that concentrating this way had a hypnotic effect, it was like gaining access to a new world. I wanted to do more of it, to go further somehow. + + +All my life I have sought these wild, isolated places. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think the +<<< +Draw people in here, and make the language more compelling. +>>> + + +It may be that that's already a part of us if we stop long enough, become still enough and work hard enough to find it. + +We stare at campfires almost every night. + + + + +[3]: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8567 + + + +The 50mm lens forces you to dissect what you're seeing and figure out a way to tell the story you see by combining fragments back into a narrative. It forces you to cut up the story and re-arrange it into your own, which is the beginning of creativity -- the destruction. The narrower field of view of the 50mm lens forces you to sequence and narrate your way into the experience you are trying to communicate. That's what I love about it. You can't contain the story in one shot like you can with a wide lens, you have to go deeper in and see what you can pull out as the essential elements. The 50mm make you work for it. And yeah the 50 part isn't that important, 40, 45, 50, 55, 58, they all have the same effect + +1) Think about framing first. The 50 lends itself to simple direct framing. Figure out what's important in the scene and get rid of the rest. +2) Use depth of field wisely. Don't go nuts with the bokeh. Lenses have f/8 for a reason. I get it, the falloff can be pretty awesome, especially in portraits, but go easy here. +3) Move around. Ansel Adams: A good photograph is knowing where to stand. To dissect a scene you have to move around in it. Like move your body. +4) Think in narratives. The 50 tells stories in pieces, you don't have to get everything in the frame. Be less reactive and more intentional. +5) Think in triptychs: establishing shot, then what's the action, then some detail within the scene. + + + + +## Art + +The past and future of art is patronage. The past is one person giving you thousands, the future, as Kevin Kelly famously put it, is thousands of people giving you $1, but either way, selling direct to your audience has always been the way to support yourself by making stuff. + +The future is unevenly distributed though. We are living in an aberration where a lot of art is not supported by patronage, but instead is corralled on platforms to serve algorithms that turn everything into a popularity contest. + +It won't last. Aberrations never do. But when you are in it, this current aberration is an all-consuming one that seems to be destroying people who are trying to create good, thoughtful, intelligent, disciplined art. That is a problem. + +The solution is to better distribute the future into now, which is why I am writing this. My solution here is not new solution, but I think it's going to take some more people pointing it out to make it catch on. + +### How We Got Here. + +The problem of the current aberration is an inevitable result of the democratization of distribution that happened when the internet came along. There's nothing new conceptually about the internet. It's the Gutenberg press on steroids. It brought the cost of distributing art very close to zero, which effectively means anyone can make art. But not really. Because there is more to it than distribution. Now though everyone has the capability to reach an audience with their thing, whatever it may be. + +That is both the brilliance and curse of a zero cost distribution network. There's no gatekeepers. Yay! But wait a minute. Servers are not free. They're cheap, but not free. There might not be a gatekeeper in the since of an editor sifting through a slush pile of manuscripts, but someone has to keep the servers running. That's the new gatekeeper. Same as the old really, though the close have changed. + +In order to pay for the servers the platforms have to do something. The model that some early efforts stumbled on is to capture viewers' attention and then sell that attention to advertisers. The platform then has a need to always be increasing the number of eyeballs staring at the ads. This is why everything has been engineered to be addictive. + +I know you already know this, I'm only laying this out because it's the next part people seem to miss. The algorithms that serve up your creations on these platforms need your creations to serve their needs. That is, they need your creations to be addictive. Again, this is not new. The patrons supporting art throughout the ages have always had agendas and some of them where pretty shady. + +The problem is that the distribution platforms have turned everything into a competition to see who can get the most eyeballs. Even this is not inherently bad. I don't know about you, but I want to reach as many people as I can. But that quest for eyeballs turns into your quest. Your work exists primarily to feed the algorithm and it's treated as food essentially. + +The way this plays out is that even if people start off making things for the love of it, they get sucked into the world of the platform. Soon people aren't making things because they love them, they're making things because they're hoping you'll love them and that never works. + +Unfortunately, even if you can get past that temptation and keep making things you love to make, even if you really pour all your energy into something, it ends up being eaten by the same algorithm. It ends up on these platforms alongside everything else, no matter if that else is someone's energy and love distilled, or a 30 second flippant rant about tomatoes. + +The modern platform, be it YouTube, Instagram, or whatever is big now, is the equivalent of going to the Louve and instead of curated artwork, the walls are plastered with every scrap of art everyone had ever created. + +At first this would be amazing. You would discover all kinds of wonderful art. Sure there would be some really bad stuff, but look at this one... this is amazing. You would wander in rapture. + +This euphoric discover phase would eventually become overwhelming. You would reach a saturation point. It would be too much to look at another wall of art and try to wade through the hundred pieces you didn't like to find the two you did. You'd retreat to enjoy what you'd already found. You'd look for more by those artists. You'd, dare I say, follow them. You'd begin to encourage them to feed the algorithm. + +### Finding a Way Out + +There are two widely accepted solutions to the overwhelm problem. There's also a less used, more interactive, third option that I think points the way forward, but first let's talk about the two solutions most widely employed: professional curation and machine curation. + +Professional curation kicked off with the relative democratization of publishing back in the late middle ages. As soon as the printing press started cranking out more books than you could read in a year someone popped up to offer suggestions on which ones you should read and which you should skip. Fast forward a bit and you have the professional curator. To my mind this encompasses everything from editors picking works to publish to critics telling the wider public which pieces of art to consume, as well as all the people in between those points. + +It's worth mentioning that I grew up under this system and watched it gradually collapse and fall apart to be replaced by machine curation. I don't completely love either system, both have trade offs. + +The professional system works to a point, after which it becomes cliqueish, ego-driven, and self-defeating. Once it crosses that threshold it tends to be circumvented. In art you get the rise of the gallery to showcase those that can't make it into the museum. Then you get the pop up gallery to circumvent the gallery. Presumably this keeps going though I will admit I exited that scene at the pop up gallery stage because I felt like I saw where it was going. I saw the same thing happen in publishing. In publishing the independent presses circumvented the big publishers until they turned into them, and then the zine makers circumvented the independent publishers until they turn into them. Presumably this would have gone on in these loops forever where it not for the rise of the machine. + +Professional curation is valuable. People who spend their lives thinking about what is good or bad writing, good or bad art, good or bad music, if they do it well, and I have worked with many who do it well, they really do have a better sense of what is working and what is not. They're not perfect. For every Rembrandt that's discovered when they should be there is a Basquiat who is not. This is the downside to professional curation. Everything has its trade offs. + +The main alternative to professional curation is machine curation. This is where we are today. There is too much on YouTube for professionals to curate. This is the realm of the machine. As with the professional, when the machine works for you (as a lover of art seeking it) it works quite well, but even when it works it is feeding the algorithm and potentially killing the thing you are there to see -- the art. + +### What Is Art + +Let's back up, what is "art"? I think what people mean by "art" is when people try to turn scenes, moments of life, into something larger than they are, to be able to communicate ideas to other people. + +To me this is not "art". This is something far deeper and more primeval. This is the basic human need to communicate with each other. To tell people what it was like on the mountain top as it were. You can do this at any time. No one is stopping you. Seek transcendence until you experience it. Rinse and repeat. You don't need a platform, you don't need a patron. + +Now if that transcendence drives you to make something to explain it or share it in some way, that's where patrons come in. Making stuff usually takes at the very least time, time that can not be spent putting food on you table. You either need to have a lot of food on the table already or you're going to have to figure out a way to sell whatever you've made. + +To me this is where the noun "art" comes in. I define "art" as turning the act of transcendence into a paycheck. + +Here be dragons. + +### The Gatekeeper Gauntlet + +I know you think you want to make your living making art. But do you? Do you know what that's going to do to the feeling you were trying to convey? I don't care what platform you put your work out on, be it feeing the algorithm on Instagram or publishing it in Wired magazine, it will not come out the way you want. It might come out better in some ways, but either way, it's not you anymore, it's you and the platform working together. + +I have turned in pieces of writing that were intended to convey one thing that ultimately failed to convey that thing because an editor pushed me in another direction. I still don't know if that's good or bad or neither, but it will definitely happen. And oh, by the way, your ego will shattered into tiny little shards you can maybe collect up when the paycheck arrives. Maybe you never find them, they're still lying there in an office somewhere. I've seen it go both ways. + +I have gone this route and continue to go this route when I think whatever idea it is I am trying to convey is one that will survive the crucible of editing in which the perceived unnecessary is seared away. The truth is editors are often right. Not always, but more often then even I want to admit. + +This is why I don't write about those moments of transcendence for gatekeeper publications. That stuff goes here and makes me no money. That's fine. I have a day job. It's still writing. I write about my experiences with products. My title is Senior Writer and Reviewer, but really what I do is write a string of personal essays, 3-4 a week, about my encounters with the stuff other people make. Sometimes this is fulfilling, sometimes it is not, even when it's not it's still pretty fun. Last week I shot about 300 photographs with $20,000 camera I would never in a million years get to touch in any other scenario. This even I cooked up dry aged grass-fed filets to see what a meat subscription box with like. It's a pretty sweet gig. + +That's great for you Scott, but I have to slave away over TPS reports in a cubical and I want people to by my six dimensional crocheting, how come I can't do that? In a word: because that's not how it works. + + + +The issues of patronage only arises if you try to turn those moments of transcendence into objects of some kind and then you try to earn a living from them. + +What then is so different from turning transcendence into a paycheck and turning a selfie of your lunch into a paycheck? Why call one art and the other content? + +I do think there is a difference. + + + +Once upon a time I followed a great community of photographers and writers on the early web. + + + +We're sliding toward a post-political mode of government, in which expert administration replaces democratic contest, and political sovereignty is relocated from representative bodies to a permanent bureaucracy that is largely unaccountable. Common sense is disqualified as a guide to reality and with this disqualification the political standing of the majority is demoted. -- Matthew Crawford Anti-Humanism and the Post-Political Condition First Things Lecture https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pC0bxPbk5nw + + +People need... the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. + +If you don't define success for yourself, you can never be successful. That sounds silly, but it's true. Not defining where you want to get to means you'll never get there. This lack of vision isn't an accident usually, it's actually a clever dodge your subconscious mind comes up with because it also means you can't fail. If there's no target to hit, you can't miss. + +But without a vision of what success if for you, you will never be successful. And that will haunt you and leave you feeling incomplete in vague, difficult to recognize ways. You have to define what success looks like *for you*, lest you always feel like you're failing—whether or not you actually are. + +I submit that it is better to know you failed than to have no idea where you are. + + + +The thing to remember is that your definition of success will have to change and evolve. The dangerous thing is to coast. If you're coasting, you're not adapting, you're not changing and the only thing I can tell you is that nothing in life is static, everything is changing. + + +, even if it's like my definition, which is somewhat nebulous: I want to keep doing those things that I want to do more of and less of those things that I want to do less of. + +The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER + +Technology is a means to an end, not an end + + + +## Yuma scene. + +lemon yellow Volkswagon Dasher. smell of radiator fluid. hot wind. simba on the floor in the only scrap of shade. inside the diner, air conditioned, cool. eating ice cream. laying down in the backseat, the windows wrapping around above me. + +## stoic journal: + +1. Prepare For The Day Ahead: Each morning you should prepare, plan and meditate on how you aim to act that day. You should be envisioning everything that may come and steeling yourself so you're ready to conquer it. As Seneca wrote, "The wise will start each day with the thought, 'Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.'" Or think of Marcus’s reminder: "When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil." + +2. Put The Day Up For Review: Stoicism isn't just about thinking, it's about action—and the best wayto improve is to review. Each evening you should, like Seneca did, examine your day and your actions. As he put it, "When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." The question should be: Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow? Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with: @@ -1073,8 +831,6 @@ All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that. - - Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule. @@ -1407,7 +1163,6 @@ even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round t away and have found them good, so long as you are with me. ---- From "Valentine" by John Fuller @@ -1440,7 +1195,6 @@ I'd like to be your only audience, The final name in your appointment book, Your future tense. ---- Have you forgotten what we were like then |