My garden was a bit of a disappointment this year; it was largely my own fault, though, as depression kicked my ass and I was unable to plant as early or on as large a scale as I wanted to. My experiment with a 3-sisters field was too heavily interplanted, leading to a paucity of actual harvest; tomato starters were purchased too early in the year and put out too early, resulting in severe frostbite. My entire harvest totaled a few pounds of assorted greens, a few pounds of beans, a few pounds of potatos, assorted scraggly roots and fruits, and all the fresh basil and dill I could figure out what to do with. I fall back on the adage that failure is a learning experience, particularly when attempting to learn a skill so far outside one's accustomed comfort zone. All of the permaculture theory is a poor substitute for genuine spade-in-soil experience.
At Saturnalia, my beloved presented me with a brilliant little book -- The Urban Homestead, an information-packed guide full of practical projects in everything from gardening and livestock-keeping, to preservation techniques and even brewing, to water management and power generation, all presented with the city-dweller in mind. It's given me a wealth of ideas for simple experiments and longer-term projects to try my hand at. I have a sourdough starter fermenting right now, which I'm planning to try baking with tomorrow; I'm itching to try my hand at lacto-fermentation and maybe some dairying, and look forward to the day when I can start seriously planning such ventures as chicken-keeping and aquaculture, greywater recycling systems, or getting into some serious edible landscaping.
All of this is by way of a lifestyle choice. In economic logic, every moment not spent working for wage is the same thing as paying money for your own time. People who think that way don't seem to have had the experience of having very little money and being unable to work for it (not to mention being humans). Though I haven't quite given up the prospect of wage labour, a lot of my efforts right now are focused on replacing the need for an income stream with immediately productive labour which can be done in my home, at my leisure, without the need to socially interact with anyone. In the time I spend baking my own bread, sure, maybe I could work and earn enough to buy twice as much delicious sourdough from a commercial bakery (I'm not convinced). But I don't want to, and I feel like thinking about that abstract difference in utility-values as a "payment" for the privilege of using my time the way I see fit is a perversion of logic. I know what paying for something looks like.
But I digress. Complete self-sufficiency is an idea that appeals to me; it's a pleasant enough dream, to have a little compound where my wife and I (and perhaps a few close friends) can produce all of our own food, generate all of our own power, and perhaps even defend ourselves from marauding looters or the occasional fascist paramilitary squad. But I'm smart enough to recognize that it is both a) an unrealistic aim (particularly for a paerson like myself), and b) considerably less romantic a reality than some would make it out to be. I recognize that life in the post-collapse era will necessarily involve community and gains from specialization through trade, be it a gift economy, a local-soviet ParEcon, a libertopian really truly free market, or some juddering vestige of modern industrial state capitalism.
***
Do I genuinely believe that society is going to collapse around us? Well, yes and no. I spent most of my 20's in a semi-comatose haze of depressive, self-medicated, apathetic resignation. For most of the W presidency, I was convinced to the root of my being that I was seeing the rebirth of fascism in my lifetime; but my calculated political illiteracy and Gothic cynicism made me incapable of responding to it with anything more than an occasional undirected rant and a constant attempt to party my existential dread away. In the later years I imagined that the complete destruction of the world I knew was immanent, and became morbidly fascinated with the prospect of having to survive in a world where none of the ground rules I took for granted applied anymore. My youthful alarm regarding the subject has waned as the years drag on and the catastrophe fails to materialize; and yet all of the signs and trends that inspired that panic in the first place are still there. The lackeys of the plutocracy are still looting the economic wealth and social capital built up over generations. The ecosystem is still being pounded day and night by pollution and resource depletion, and the collective decision-making systems of the world seem to lack the will to even blunt the continual impact. The governments of the world continue to drift ever closer to unbridled authoritarianism, and the occasional victories of progressive movements feel increasingly pyrrhic. The gears grind away.
All of my ominous talk of food security, self-defence, and catastrophic survival plans is now more in the vein of therapy. When I was in the Boy Scouts I was taught to 'be prepared', and I took the lesson to heart. The looming threat of catastrophe caught me unprepared, and I would like to have at least some prospect of being able to survive and protect the ones I love should it catch up with us. I will be ecstatic should it manage to pass us by, but I have a feeling that the paranoid fear that next week everything is going to hell in a handbag will continue to haunt me until the singularity makes all such issues moot.
***
No matter how dire things get, I have no intention of giving up my computer or my internet access until it is torn from my bloody fingers. I lust after the next neat new gadget -- e-readers, smartphones, tablet computers, and whatever this fucking monstrosity is; personal robots, smart houses, 3D printers, and maybe even my very own brain-to-wire interface. Much as I hate how enmeshed these things are in the consumer-capitalist system, and though I understand the way that their manufacture and infrastructure contributes to ecological destruction and social harms, I can't stand the thought of such things being taken away from me. I'm a child of the 80's; and though it may be somewhat declasse these days, I'm still a cyberpunk at heart.
One of my most consistent annoyances with the environmentalist and anti-capitalist movements is a streak of primitivism, luddism, and anhedonic anti-materialism that makes me snarl every time I encounter it. I keep seeing images and slogans exhorting me to 'turn off the TV', to 'embrace simplicity', to 'stop buying shit you don't need'. Well, there's not much I really need beyond a roof, clean water, and a bowl of rice every day; but that's not what I call the good life. I can't stand pearl-clutching over what the internet is doing to our social lives or brain functions, and I don't want to see another piece pointing out a problem with our proliferating technology that doesn't at least include some sort of half-formed idea about how to solve this problem without giving up the technology. Because I will. Not. Give it up.
At the same time, I tend to find myself frustrated with the gee-whiz, uncritical or half-heartedly critical tone of a lot of transhumanist writing I come across. Transhumanism at its best should be dedicated to thinking about how to manage the transitions in our lives that technology is causing in such a way that they create the most widespread benefits while minimizing possible harm. Maybe I'm just not reading enough transhumanist writing or the right writers, but most of what I'm seeing promotes a kind of laissez-faire singularitarianism that seems to assume all of our problems will be easily solved through individualistic, libertopian social praxis and killer apps that have not yet been invented and maybe never will. Runaway industry devastating the climate? We'll just fix it by flooding the atmosphere with sulfur! Creative workers having trouble making a living in a world of one-click copying? Let them eat new business models! Widespread unemployment caused by automation? Products will be so cheap that nobody will care! Super-smart AI taking over? We'll just make sure it's a friendly AI! There seems to be little if any plan in transhumanist circles to deal with the potential concentration of human enhancement in the hands of the capitalist oligarchy, to fight bio-luddite backlash against neo-humanity, or to work toward economic models that don't treat finite resources as something to be 'propertized' and sold to the highest bidder (when they're not just subjected to 'enclosure' free of charge). And the attitude toward longstanding progressive ideas on these subjects seems to be at best amused tolerance, when it's not outright derision.
I'd like to find a way to reconcile these two ideological frameworks, because I find them both valuable ways of dealing with the fears I feel of collapse. I think of this idea as a 'Greenpunk' lifestyle and political ideal. (I make no claim to owning, or having invented, the term -- either in general, or as a descriptor for a form of political thought. Make of it what you will.) Greenpunk is at the same time radically sustainable and technoprogressive, embracing both widespread prosperity and harmony with the environment, combining appropriate technology and self-sufficiency with the possibility of radically transformative change and the possibility of a singularity. And I've become certain that embracing such a way of looking at the world and ourselves is the only way that humanity is going to walk the knife's edge of catastrophe.
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