Recommended reads

Looking for a dose of sanity? Chris Wren's blog is for you.

Elsewhere, Mike Clelland articulates some of my own suspicions and wonders if the Internet (and its attendant telecommunications apparatus) has the potential for sentience:

Is there an evolving giant life form of synaptic fibers emerging within cyberspace? Is it a new set of neurotransmitters, allowing and encouraging an alternative web of synchronistic happenings?

Incidentally, Web-based consciousness is the premise of "Wake," the new novel by Robert J. Sawyer (who hosts "Supernatural Investigator").

The "new poverty"

Cities Deal With a Surge in Shanty Towns

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root -- or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing -- in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

The postcapitalist imperative

Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Does the word postcapitalism look odd to you? It should, because you hardly ever see it. We have a blank spot in our vision of the future. Perhaps we think that history has somehow gone away. In fact, history is with us now more than ever, because we are at a crux in the human story. Choosing not to study a successor system to capitalism is an example of another kind of denial, an ostrich failure on the part of the field of economics and of business schools, I think, but it’s really all of us together, a social aporia or fear. We have persistently ignored and devalued the future -- as if our actions are not creating that future for our children, as if things never change. But everything evolves. With a catastrophe bearing down on us, we need to evolve at nearly revolutionary speed.

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

Wise counsel

Jim Kunstler writes:

Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. "Consumerism" is dead.

[. . .]

No good, in fact, will come of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is exactly what the Obama program is starting to look like. In the folder marked "unsustainable" you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food among them. All these things are over.

[. . .]

It's not too late for President Obama to start uttering these truths so that we can avoid a turn to fascism and get on with the real business of America's next phase of history -- living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture. What a lot of us can see now staring out of the abyss is a new dark age.

Humanity (reloaded)

Juan Enriquez looks past the tumult of the present to an imminent evolutionary reboot:

The fear

How are you coping with collapse-anxiety? (Cory Doctorow)

How do you keep your spirits up? I wrote before Christmas that this is the best time in history to have a worst time -- the time at which our capacity to do things in a way that's outside of traditional economics is at its highest. It's never been easier to come together to have fun, to make stuff, to change things.

I keep reminding myself of that, but it's not easy.

When Jim Kunstler blogs about the future, I listen.

Al Gore outlines five steps toward decarbonizing the US in ten years.

American lifestyle must change, says neuroscientist

According to neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, head honcho of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA the concept of the American Dream is a "biological impossibility."

Personally, I've always thought the much-vaunted "American Dream" is the stuff of nightmares.

Biosphere Bigger than Bailout

Led by a Deutsche Bank economist, the study puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion. A figure that is ". . . not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year."

Three. Trillion. Dollars.



(Hat tip: Information Aesthetics.)

Not only does Peter Watts write damned impressive science fiction, his financial advice is right up my alley.