The Breaking Time

2009!

It's New Year's Eve, also known amongst journalists as Hardest Day to Get Quotes Ever (when oh when will Hallmark start making cards for us!). I will be participating in a Scottish feast in Knoxville. I hope, whoever and wherever you are, that you cut loose and enjoy your revelries.

In the Breaking Time, I focus a lot on conflict, destruction and the breakdown of old systems. The latter isn't always a bad thing. There is tremendous opportunity as well as peril in the coming days. Interesting times may be a curse, they can also be glorious days to be alive.

But look at it this way, for thousands of years, some portion of humanity has predicted the end of the world. So far, they have all been wrong.

Til tomorrow,

David

By the reboots

John Robb has written a brief but interesting call for the Great Reboot, highlighting the need for a "core process" that will jump-start innovative changes and result in a more robust social system better able to withstand the coming times of turmoil.

So, what does this new, better core process look like? It starts at the community level with a wholesale reinvention that makes networked communities: 

* Resilient to rapidly propagating global shocks (an inevitable outcome of a global system that is too large, fast, and complex to control). 

* Highly productive in their ability to produce everything from food to products to energy (they produce wealth). Networked innovation. Extremely efficient and low cost. 

* This stems from: shorter distances, less energy, less space, less time, less mass, and less information (as in, less management overhead required).

Fortunately, all the technological trends are leading us towards radical improvements in efficiency and productivity for doing real things at the micro level -- everything from high intensity small plot farming to personal fabrication to DIY synthetic biology to global tinkering networks to high efficiency local energy production. Even better, the ability to connect these communities via networks means that these new local powerhouses can work together synergistically.

There's a lot of great stuff here. Robb is dead-on both in the call for a reboot and in seeing that increasingly self-sufficient local communities will play an important role in such a revival. He points, juicily, to technology that's increasingly making this more achievable. 

However, there are some problems as well, ones that aren't uncommon to most futurist prescriptions, but ones that anyone thinking about what viable social structures for tomorrow would do well to consider. 

Me in new media (and old)

 

I'm proud and honored to have two of the top-viewed news blog posts of the year over at Mountain Xpress. My reporting on the strange case of eco-fashion business owner Leslie Richard facing a $20 million lawsuit after she blogged about a scam took the top spot, while the controversial story of the infamous Bier Garden Brawl took second.

Take a look at the other top posts and articles too, even if you live outside the Asheville area. The Xpress is a rare gem that's combining new media savvy with old-school investigation and thorough reporting. There's many interesting pieces within. 

I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and travels safely if they're returning home. Regular posting will resume shortly.

Deep down into Derinkuyu

 

My Coilhouse piece on this ancient underground city (a social collapse and wartime refuge with capacity for 30,000 (!) people) is up: 

Massive millstones would be rolled in front of the entrance in time of attack, and there were, reportedly, many attackers, with Derinkuyu’s labyrinthine rooms serving as a refuge for early Christians persecuted by the Roman Empire (including other Christian sects), Byzantine Greeks fleeing Arab raids. Going back much farther, it’s not hard to imagine the site being used by fleeing Hittites in the nigh-total social collapse of the first dark age. 

The sheer engineering prowess necessary to create and maintain something like this is even more incredible when you think about the primitive technology and limited resources available (Cappadocia’s never been a rich place). Derinkuyu had a large church, many separate living quarters, space for livestock, a winery, a religious school, wells, ventilation ducts that doubled for communication purposes (the original system of tubes)

Waiting for the Barbarians

For your Friday dose of Breaking Time poetry. Some things never get old -- and some things speak for themselves.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Constantine P. Cavafy, 1904

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What's the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll make the laws.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city's main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader.
He's even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying their elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
There are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without the barbarians?
These people were a kind of solution.

County cuts coming

 

County prepares for 5 percent budget cuts. Hard times are hitting the once-booming Asheville/Buncombe area: 

“In August, when we were facing increased fuel costs and caseloads, we asked departments to ready for 3 percent cuts. That was mostly done through frozen positions, positions that were already vacated or becoming vacant,” Greene said. “But times aren’t getting any easier — caseloads are still going up — so we’ve asked for 5 percent cuts. We’ve gone to every department and asked them to tell us what they can do, what they’ll have to do cut things down to that 5 percent level.” 

Reports on potential cuts will be done on Jan. 15, Greene said, and then considered by the Board of Commissioners as it crafts the next fiscal year’s budget at a retreat in late April. 

“We’ll be coming to them [the board] with what it takes to do our core services, and asking how we can continue to do our elective services — and why we should continue to do them,” Greene said. Core services are what the county is required to provide by law, and Greene noted that “we’re committed to keeping the same level of quality.” 

But what are technically “elective” services covers a wide range of items as well. 

“We don’t have to do animal control, we don’t have to run an animal shelter, we don’t have to have a childcare center,” she said, listing some elective services. “We’ll be evaluating if some of those services could be contracted out.”

All Tomorrows: "Cat Karina"

The newest edition of All Tomorrows, my weekly Coilhouse column, is up. This week it's focused on the late Michael G. Coney's underrated classic Cat Karina: 

At some unspecified (by our time scale, at least) point in the future, humanity’s starfaring civilization has collapsed, leaving True Humans and “Specialists” (human animal-hybrids originally engineered for colonization) in an uneasy peace. On top of it all, the entire damn planet’s converted en masse to an alien religion called the Kikihuahua Examples, forbidding metal working, fire and killing. In all this, a young “felina” named Karina gets tied in with an immortal race of sorceresses, the Dedos, trying to manipulate possible futures to release their alien god from a reality bomb prison laid by clones of Hitler. 

Got that? 

The result of all the above could have, should have been a complete and utter mess. Instead, Coney pulls off a future shock fairy tale (and parable) for the ages. 

Coilhouse's second issue is on the way even as we speak. More details about that later. For now I'll just say that they're one of the sharpest, gloriously eclectic and downright gorgeous magazines/web sites out there today and I'm proud to be a part of it.

Somatopia

 

Yes, it has happened. A veritable holy host of academics, scholars, psychiatrists and lawyers has come together to argue that we need intelligence enhancing pills now! in the pages of Nature. 

It goes something like this: 

Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin — not to get high, but to get higher grades, to provide an edge over their fellow students or to increase in some measurable way their capacity for learning. 

These transactions are crimes in the United States, punishable by prison. Many people see such penalties as appropriate, and consider the use of such drugs to be cheating, unnatural or dangerous. Yet one survey estimated that almost 7% of students in US universities have used prescription stimulants in this way, and that on some campuses, up to 25% of students had used them in the past year. 

These students are early adopters of a trend that is likely to grow, and indications suggest that they're not alone. In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks. 

This is true. From several college roommates, I knew that the market for Adderall, in particular, was booming: $20 a pill in my salad days, and that was seven years ago. While I never personally used it (enough sleep issues already, thank you) it was quite the drug du jour for the ambitious types that just had to get a degree. 

In and of itself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the approach advocated by Greely & Co. arguing essentially that "we should welcome new methods of improving our brain function." Believing in free minds, souls and, yes, bodies, I generally advocate that people should be able to install or put anything into their flesh that they please, as long as the risks are spelled out clearly in advance and whatever insanity ensues doesn't damage another person's life. 

But this gives me pause. It's not so much that they're wrong, just shockingly naive. Welcome to Somatopia.

Which way home?

View Larger Map

It started like this. In April, Google began mapping Asheville, where I live. They finished this process recently, giving everyone a great street-level view of this city. Last night, over bourbon and wine, my friend Bear and I decided to have some fun with this, and a good time was had by all. "Oh, there's a tourist!" "There's where I work!" "There's my car!"

Asheville proper has just over 75,000 people in it, so it's small enough that one can still make those recognitions. Nonetheless, it is a city and its downtown has one of the largest accumulations of Art Deco architecture around, so it's not surprising that Google got around to mapping it.

But we wanted to find out where it ended. We couldn't. It seems Google had gotten most of the surrounding small mountain towns too.

So we tried our hometowns, as neither of us are from large places. It was there that I saw it.

Google has mapped South Mills.

South Mills, North Carolina is my hometown. It has less than 300 souls and is very, very far from the urban labyrinths that increasingly dominate the planet. On occasions where people ask where I'm from, it goes something like this, beginning with me:
"South Mills."
"Where?"
"Uh, it's near Elizabeth City."
"Where the fuck is that?"
I try to think of a tourist spot.
"It's not too far from the beach around Kill Devil Hills."
"There's people around there?"
"Yes, it's in fucking northeastern NC." Translation: "Yes, human beings actually live outside of large cities you ignorant scrap."

Now, there it all is. The red brick house beside Cartwright's gas station where I spent my younger years, the canal locks where my dad used to take me. The three churches scattered near the middle of town, including the United House of Prayer for All People, with its bizarre night-lit neon crosses. Hell, if you go down Mullen St. and turn left on 17, you can see the high-rise bridge that my child's mind took as a symbol of grand possibility.

So the past is real. This is not always a comfortable insight. Memory has a way of softening things, allowing us to put our own art on where we've been. It helps us to meld it into our own ever-changing identity. So when Google has it all there, crystal clean on the screen, it both is and isn't my hometown. I can recognize the shapes and forms, but my childhood visions will always have a different cast.

Google can't yet bring us the smell of oil around the repair shop in Cartwright's back -- or the conversations the old men have on torn-out bus seats in the front. It can remind me that the woods where, as a boy, I ran an afternoon kingdom are gone forever. But it's my brain that realizes that: to the computer it's just another image on the screen.

I'm glad Google Streets exists, I'm glad it's made the world a sliver more real, that much larger (or smaller). I'm happy that I can share the roads of my past with others. But those all belong to a different self, from years ago, stirred up for a second by old recognition. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can't go home again.

All Tomorrows: "Trouble on Triton"

The first in my series of weekly columns covering some of sci-fi's most relevant and oft-forgotten works is up on Coilhouse, along with a pretty interesting comments thread. This one tackles Samuel Delany's "ambiguous heterotopia" Trouble on Triton

It was a time when society seemed both crumbling and poised for something new. Old barriers fell, including in the very writing invented to consider the future. To the new breed it was now a vehicle to explore endless possible societies, to consider and endless array of tomorrows: weird, wonderful or horrible.

During this period, lasting roughly from the mid-60s to the early ’80s, science fiction went through a sea change like no other. The resulting works tackled issues of culture, society, ethics and sex in ways that make them still fresh today. Some of the writers went on to fame (if rarely fortune), while others remain obscure. However, in this period sci-fi considered tomorrows that involved far more than just bigger machinery. Today, we face some eerily similar questions - and would do well to delve into their possible answers.
--
Now, as for Triton, it struck me upon second glance that it describes a world that for many of us would be close to paradise. There are no such things as alternate cultures on the future society of Triton, ensconced in its domes, because there’s no such thing as a mainstream to begin with. Any lifestyle goes and all basic needs are provided. Dress how you want, live how you want. If you’re unhappy with your flesh, your sex, your body in any way, the technology exists to change it. Hell, it’s not even unusual (more like a surgical oil change). Want to see what attraction to a whole different spectrum of people feels like? There’s a machine for that too. If, after all this, you’re not satisfied with the few laws that do exist, each city has a sector where none of them apply (realizing such places develop anyway). Anything is possible.

Or is it? Look at the title.

Readers of this blog, interested in issues of social fracturing and possible futures are advised to check it out (along with Coilhouse, which you should be reading everything on, natch.)