Marking my territory with digital feces.
I lived in New York when New York City went bankrupt in the late 1970’s. It wasn’t that much of a surprise; the city had been in a steep decline for a long time.
Now I’m living in California as it too becomes bankrupt. Also not much of a surprise.
I’d move elsewhere, but I suspect the whole USA may be going that way too.
Although, who knows, if we get health care reform passed, with a public option, we may be able to pull this one out of the fire, including California too. I’d sure like that.
Somewhat unintentionally, I produced a blackened fish dish for dinner last night, and had a sudden and very vivid flashback to the late 80’s.
Decorations done with all-black furniture.
Nagel prints!
Ferns!
Blackened everything. Shittake mushrooms. Shitty synth-pop (Phil Collins. George Michael). Trevor Horn and Hugh Pagdham overproductions.
Young Republicans. Bret Easton Ellis.
Skinny ties. Striped shirts with white collars. Suspenders.
Teal.
Bleah.
Odd how a food preparation (which actually didn’t taste bad at all) can invoke a whole era.
That’s it.
I’ve spent a lifetime getting sidetracked into various traps and dead-ends, and now I think I’ve found a way to avoid them.
Doing things for the money– specifically "to get rich"– is a dead end. It can never work out well. It’s either soul-crushing, health-crushing, or– even worse– both of the above, and doomed to failure too, by its very nature. If you’re doing something only to make money, you can’t actually succeed at it. Believe me, I’ve tried, over and over and over again, and I’ve watched way too many people bang their head against that wall.
Doing things to save money is also a dead end. It never works. Being DIY is great, being frugal and efficient is great, but trying to DIY in order to save money is a fool’s game: it never actually saves money– it usually costs more. The "penny-wise, pound-foolish" trap catches anything done only to save money.
In general, doing things out of terror (of being poor, of looking a fool, of being alone, of making mistakes, of danger, of social disapprobation, of the wrath of some person or group of peopel, of losing money, of not making enough money, of conflict, etc.), are all dead-ends, and IMHO the worst kind. I know people who have actually succeeded with this strategy, but it is hazardous and life-sucking.
So what’s left? The only motivations that seem to actually work towards a sustainable, healthy success are:
I haven’t found too many ways to hit all three simultaneously, but any one will work. Really, if it doesn’t fit into any of those, it ain’t gonna work as a long-term strategy.
I’ve been a big fan of community currencies ever since reading "The Future of Money" by Bernard Lietaer, in 2001.
Since then, I tried to get some currency projects going, but the time wasn’t yet right. It was too hard to explain, or get people interested or motivated, or the software wasn’t yet usable, or there were too many other problems, which I’m going to outline below.
Now it seems that there is a lot of activity in the area. The software is definitely ready for everyday users. I’ve been getting involved and trying to help get something going. I’m struck by a few things that are still problems, for currencies in general, and for me in particular.
First of all, the fundamental problem we are trying to solve is to close the gap between two senses of the word "value". The value in the sense of moral and ethical value, and the sense of monetary value. We live in a psychotic society driven mad by the hypocrisy inherent in our money system: it requires us to value things which are abhorrent, and it desecrates things which we value. So the first thing a community currency system does is– at last!– value things which are actually valuable. This is determined by the community which is issuing the currency, and different communities may have slightly different values, based on who’s in them and what they’re doing. That too is a good thing, if we value (in both senses) diversity and freedom.
Secondly, I’m convinced that no community currency will ever be considered "real money" until it can be used to meet basic human needs like food and shelter and transportation and clothing. When I can pay rent and buy food with my good works done for community currencies, then it will be valued. This is the third sense of "value", meaning– to be desired or wanted or needed. There’s no more tangible way to value someone’s good works helping people than to feed, clothe, and shelter them. These are things that everyone needs. A currency has to offer things that humans need in order to be a real money, and not just a way to track volunteer hours. I’ve been told that too many currency projects end up with people racking up hours but not spending them. This is why: their needs aren’t met by things offered by people who accept community currencies for pament. Get apartments and food and clothing and transportation into the system, and it will thrive. Don’t do that, and you have a toy, ivory-tower project that won’t go anywhere.
Thirdly, I’ve found that I have very little patience for theoretical and “ivory tower” discussions of currency and money– and groups that see it as a toy or a theoretical game. I am a musician and therefore I am poor and I live in a world of dirt-poor, near-starvation people. For me the great hope of community currencies are very much a practical affair: feeding people, keeping people in their apartments, enabling people to have time to work on their craft, keeping them from the crushing despair of a system that views us as less than human. I’ve already stepped back from one community currency project because influential people in its steering group are too far up in the clouds and too lost in perfectionism and a quest for elegance.
Fourth, the greatest danger to community currency projects is its corruption by the fiat currency and fiat financial system. I don’t want anything to do with venture-backed, or otherwise fiat-currency-oriented community currency projects. I backed away from one some years ago because they wanted to charge its members in US Dollars a monthly fee to participate. That’s defeating the whole purpose. I backed away from another one soon afterwards, because it was basically just a front to get grant money (in fiat US dollars) and wouldn’t have solved the problem of detaching from fiat system. And I am still seeing today projects that look like little more than "social networking" Web-2.0-type Facebook bubble scams. But at the same time I can’t condemn them; they have to eat! And this illustrates point #2 above, as well, and in a big way. A currency that will let you buy food– that is backed by basic human needs– will drive out all others.
Fifth– and related to the purism I’m revealing in points #3 and #4 above– is that I find that my personality doesn’t suit me well for community. This is a huge irony since I believe so strongly in community currencies. It’s a potentially terminal irony, if the financial system continues its collapse and communities are all that is left for support of human life. I’m a loner. I don’t work well with others. I can’t stand having to meet social obligations, and I hate to place them on others either. I like to learn, to get answers to questions, and sometimes to get help, but I’m very American and somewhat addicted to self-reliance. I like to go it alone. I do not trust people. I am impatient and often contentious. Not a great recipe for success in community currency projects– and yet the whole path of my life (and indeed, I think, the whole path of civilization if it is to continue as a going concern) seems to be leading me to them.
I need to think this all through quite a bit more, but this is the state of my thoughts at the moment.
One of the weirdest contradictions in the modern Republican party and "conservative" (what is it exactly that they conserve? but that’s a different post entirely) movement, is that they can espose a ferverent faith simultaneously in a blind, deterministic, evolutionary "invisible hand", and in a completely centrally-planned, centrally-managed, artificially-created universe.
They will fight tooth and nail against any attempt for humans to centrally manage, plan, or even influence the economy, instead insisting that it must remain free to evolve on its own, and yet fight with even more vigor against anyone who claims that there isn’t any central management or planning involved in biology, geology, cosmology, chemistry, or physics.
How the fuck can they square those two things? Maybe they believe that the "invisible" hand actually belongs to a gray-bearded spooky incompetent father figure in the sky, reaching down to run our economy by divine fiat, just like it put the dinosaur fossils in the earth 6,000 years ago to test our faith in it.
There are surely enough of ‘em who seem to think they have a divine right to wealth, or to rule.
In one of my (increasingly, these days) rare walks through nature today, I wondered why the idea of creationism has become so persistent nowadays, even leeching into the general language. It’s very common for even people who have no interest whatsoever in creationism, to speak of things as having been “designed for that”, or “not designed for that”, or “designed that way”… even when the things most certainly weren’t designed at all, but evolved or adapted instead.
It didn’t used to be this way. When I was a kid, I was very much in the habit of speaking of natural things as having been “adapted for that” or “not adapted for that”, etc. What happened?
The vast majority of things in my world nowadays were in fact designed! But not by any kind of spooky incompetent father-figure in the sky, but rather by very human (and very fallible) engineers.
You see, the natural world is so small a part of my life nowadays– and that of most people too– that it’s become a habit for me to assume that everything around me was designed.
Not always designed well, and, in the case of software, actually a result more evolution than design (although the engineers fancy themselves designers, and occasionally actually manage to sneak some design in), but definitely artificial.
In an artificial world, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that everything was designed– because, if that’s the world you live in, then it was.
When I was a kid, I was a fan of the original Star Trek series, which was in syndication by then. I haven’t paid any attention to the whole franchise since reaching puberty. I managed to miss or ignore its whole 90’s-era re-emergence.
Well, recent websurfing somehow led me to a Wikipedia page about Gene Roddenberry, creator of the series. Turns out he was a LAPD cop; a Los Angeles City paycheck fed his family while writing TV screenplays and pitching series pilots on the side. He wrote a lot of Dragnet and other 1950’s and 1960’s cop-show screenplays, under a pseudonym because he was still an active member of the police force.
As Wikipedia surfing usually goes, I ended up reading the entries for a few of the original episodes. And I quickly noticed a pattern. In script after script, the Enterprise responds to a distress call, or is ordered in to investigate. Wha? They were cops! Roddenbery sold the series to NBC as being "Wagon Train to the Stars" or "Gunsmoke in Space", and maybe it was in terms of overall feel, but that wasn’t the main plot device. Never noticed that isomorphism between cop shows and Star Trek, but there it is. They cruised around the galaxy, like cops on the beat, responding to a dispatch call. Maybe that’s why the Enterprise looked a bit like a donut.
(Heh).
I guess I’m naive, because I’ve been having the same revelation over and over again for over 20 years now. More like 30, actually– I discovered this when I was still a kid.
One of the constant refrains in my life has been getting into some career or area, thinking that there is some integrity or objective reality therein, and then discovering, again and again, that it’s all just made of bullshit. This is especially true of anything that involves money, or making it. Within a short time, I discover that success has nothing to do with actual integrity or competence, it’s all lying, politics, fronting, marketing, wheedling, cheating, and bullshit, all the way through.
I can’t name all the things I’ve tried to do for money, which have been completely corrupted with bullshit; there have been too many. For most of the time I was in the tech business, I was in marketing, so I not only accepted the bullshit but actively embraced it and was paid to perpetuate it. I busted myself back down to private and became a tech grunt again, but it quickly became apparent that my job was little more than show and fronting– bullshit. Some years later, I figured out the bullshit nature of politics when I got involved in it. Just a few months ago, at the very end of last year, I figured out how the music business is made of bullshit (that should have been obvious, in retrospect, it is show business after all– all fakery and the like).
Just today, I just discovered that the tutoring company for which I’ve been doing some part-time work, is funded with No Child Left Behind money, and is basically part of Bush’s attempt to bust up the teacher’s unions and privatize education. And what does one get for one’s privatized contractor dollars? Uncredited, amateur tutors (um, like me), getting paid about half what a real teacher would get paid, and a cut-to-the-bone McSchool, with paltry materials, no curriculum whatsoever, and a startup-like environment of people who appear to have NFI what they’re doing.
Oh and it’s a non-profit too. Kind of. It’s part of a for-profit corporation, but it’s a non-profit. Uh, this smells so bad, I don’t wanna know.
I cannot wait for this entire economic system to come crashing down. It’s so decayed and fetid, the rot infests it so deeply, that the sooner it disappears, the better.
Back in the 80’s, a friend noticed the isomorphism between punk rock and rap. Stripped-down, edgy, violently angry, atonal, lots of yelling. Music for angry young men.
I was very late in discovering both the highly-technical grindcore/death metal styles, and highly-technical IDM like Venetian Snares. I’m noticing now how similar they are/were. Very complex, almost (or in the case of IDM, definitely) impossible rhythms, lots of atonality, and harsh, violent anger. Music that really challenges– almost flips off– the audience. Brashly, unapologetically, and defiantly intellectual, with a “statistical density” (Zappa, the first IDM’er!?) that says, “Just you try and figure this shit out!”. And they both came into popularity at the same time, the mid-to-late 2000’s.
What I found interesting about the rap/punk isomorphism in the 80’s is that one evolved out of the dance/disco scene, the other out of the rock scene, and fairly independently, since the two scenes were fairly antagonistic (and, at the time, racially-divided too). A similar kind of parallel evolution seems to have happened with grindcore and IDM: one emergedout of the dance/disco scene, the other out of the rock/metal scene, and not too much overlap between those two scenes.
Of course, the trends have moved on, and I see parallel evolutions happening in the realm of ambient-noise and metal-noise: noisy non-rhythmic clouds of sound, converging on white noise, but one coming from a group making the noise via computers, and the other from a group making them via guitars.
