Arthur Cordell wrote:
> Any "long jumps" that citizens can initiate? Long jumps that
> citizens can begin rather than respond to.
Hardly any. Assassinate the head of state of a powerful and bellicose
nation? Start a religion that catches on like wildfire? Locate the
single, critical lynch-pin of the global system and manipulate it?
The landscape metaphor (or model) for complex systems is one of
very many dimensions, not the spatial dimensions of science fiction.
Rather it's just
+ a vector of a million or many, many millions of variables,
+ some rule(s) that describe how each of those variables changes
over time and
+ a connection map that shows which of those variables
affects which others as they change.
In that context, a long jump is an event which, between (some
arbitrary) time t and time t+1, changes a significantly large number
of the variables without reference to the rules and dramatically
changes the connection map as well.
That's a large order for an individual. Oh, you can do it on a small
scale. Trappped by school and grownups? Burn down the school house:
it may only cause a ripple or it may so alter and realign the
relationships, attitudes and loyalties in the village as to put the
village on a whole different and previously inaccessible track. Maybe
knocking down a couple of office building in the world's financial
heart has done it, and we're still waiting for a new, stable global
attractor to emerge. Effective, not pretty, with typically
unpredictable outcomes but also not a one-man project nor, I suppose,
one which you'd want to contemplate.
So what *can* individuals or small groups of them do?
The complexity catastrophe isn't new. It's just new as a global
phenomenon. In the past there was -- what shall I call it? --
fallback for individuals or groups fleeing persecution or the law, for
populations ravaged by war, natural catastrophe or plague. That was a
reversion to more or less -- often more -- primitive conditions, what
today we'd call survivalism. Also not pretty, with poor prospects for
survival and worse ones for health and prosperity, but doable.
America had what we called "the frontier" until the late 19th century.
Anything like a frontier probably had vanished a century or more
earlier in Europe but there remained, episodically, deep forests and
lands depopulated by war or plague in which, as a last and desperate
resort one could try to scratch out a living.
No more. There aren't any livable, empty lands anymore. The Sahara,
the Taklamakan, Kergeulen Island. Any takers? The fallback doesn't
exist, not only for that reason but because the wildlife and other
resources and, especially, the skills don't exist. Not one in a
hundred thousand urbanites has milked a cow, raised a parsnip or
amputated a gangrened finger.
I may seem to be wandering here so lets get back, obliquely, to
Arthur's question. Rather than ask what we, as comfortably secure
individuals, can cobble up verbally to reconfigure the system, lets
ask what those people do who are so uncomfortable and insecure that
they feel compelled to punt, to execute their own long jumps into
unknown regions of the system space. Are they implementing a working
"fallback"? Or just taking desperate measures to survive in the status
quo?
Saturday's Globe & Mail had a long piece on Detroit. There's this guy
who came back, 25 years ago, from his stint in the army to his
(formely) hardly upscale but modest, comfortable community to find it
a cross between a slum and a ghost town. [1] He painted vacant houses
in polka dots, covered them with hubcaps, hung junk in trees and did
dribbly art. All stuff you'd probably call hideous and unsightly, just
as the City of Detroit did. But after years win-some-lose-some
battles with the city, it's now a Work of STreet Art, his neighborhood
is proud of itself and, what do you know, other artists (admittedly,
of widely varying quality) are moving to Detroit where you can buy a
house for $2,000 or less.
Another relevant piece showed up on SlashDot: [2]
Stewart Brand writes in Prospect Magazine about what squatter
cities can teach us about future urban living. 'The magic of
squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually
by their residents,' writes Brand. 'Squatter cities are also
unexpectedly green. They have maximum density -- 1M people
per square mile in some areas of Mumbai -- and have minimum
energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle,
rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.' Brand adds that in most
slums recycling is literally a way of life e.g. the Dharavi slum
in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 rag-pickers. 'Of
course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They
concentrate crime, pollution, disease, and injustice as much as
business, innovation, education, and entertainment,' says Brand.
Ah, another Stewart Brand eulogy for the salt of the earth. While the
guy in Detroit is doing whatever he's doing and living there, Stewart
lives on a houseboat in a sort of American Wonderland. One of the
people responding to Brand's article writes:
I unintentionally found myself living (flat broke at 34 years old)
in a slum off Jalan Wahid Hasyim in downtown Jakarta in '94 for two
months. It was the most disgusting, scary, dark, bleak, psycho,
messed up two months a person could have. I'm talking about swarms of
dengue-infected mosquitoes from dusk till dawn, cockroaches slapping
off the walls like flying moccasins nightly, bloated ticks on the
walls, intense heat and 100% humidity always, an auto body shop that
started banging hammers on car panels at 6am 7 days a week, a mosque
on each side of our house, complete with blown-out speakers calling
locals to prayer 5 times daily, a disco behind us thumping on till
7am every morning, rats, dogs, cats all of them wild, mangy,
diseased, flea-and-tick-bitten, puking and hunger-crazed, regular
power failures, single-mom hookers lurking, screaming, pot banging
food vendors day and night, storm-triggered floods of black, stinking
filth, the toxic stench of burning plastic and vegetation always. And
that was just down the alley I lived on.
Walk out into the streets and it was thousands on thousands of
cars, trucks, motorbikes, buses and two-stroke Indian-made Bajai
taxis all jammed up, barely moving, all churning out black and
blue smoke. Fold in rotting, burning garbage piled randomly with
no hope of ever being collected, missing sidewalk covers over
canals filled with what looked like black snot and choked with a
billion plastic bags, coconuts, palm fronds, trees and Christ
knows what else, plus disfigured, heartbreakingly filthy beggars
here and there, the sick and aged homeless selling their trifles
to make ends meet, corruption from the parking mafia on up to the
president, and this wasn't the city's worst slum. Though I went
there too and saw people bathing babies and brushing teeth in
rivers you wouldn't dare throw a lit match into.
Sorry, Mr. Brand. This is the most insane, out-of-touch pile of
white-guilt-assuaging crap I've come across in decades. You have
no idea what you are talking about, sir. Stay aboard your yacht in
Marin where you'll be safe in your delusions. I've also spent time
on a yacht in your marina, and can tell you that that life
couldn't be any further removed from the reality of slum living,
unless you moved it to the moon.
People in the slums hate their lives (no matter how much they may
smile at you as you pass by in your Indiana Jones hat and cargo
pants full of candies for their kids), and for thousands of sound
reasons. There is nothing happy or applicable to be pulled out of
slums other than the knowledge that they are cesspools of tragedy,
misguided dreams, unimaginable filth and evil.
So it sounds like the urban-do-it-yourself-without-resources
alternative is not predictably as good a fallback as, say, living in a
hovel in the wastelands left behind by the 30 years war.
So I've kinda shingled off onto the fog here without addressing
Arthur's original observation:
2. That we [ western capitalist society] have not solved the
distribution problem.
I recently offered unsolicited advice to a friend who is engaged in a
somewhat complicated project. He thanked me and, in fact, took my
comments on potential pitfalls into his discussions with other people,
where he described me as his "resident pessimist". I got into reading
up on complexity and generalized systems less because of my earlier
interest in physiology than because I wanted to see if it was a
possible way to make sense out of the overlapping, often contradictory
and mutually incomprehensible domains of thinking about how the world
works. It certainly hasn't given me any conclusive answers and seems
not to promise to do so even were my grasp of the subject less feeble.
It's left me, however, with an embarrassingly pessimistic belief that
a global population of more than, oh, say, 3 billion or so is destined
for an average standard of living more like the Bombay slums than like
the American industrial heartland in, say, 1955 and governance unlike
anything envisioned by post-Enlightenment statesmen.
[1] See: http://www.agilitynut.com/h/heidelberg.html or google
"heidelberg project".
[2] http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=slums+stewart+brand
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/how-slums-can-save-the-planet/
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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