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Digital Media Tree blogger Jim Louis returned to his house in New Orleans, in one of the neighborhoods not smiled upon by the gods in the recent weather disaster, and has this report. Jim has been living in another state but still owns property in the city; he went back to assess the damage and is there now with his laptop. In a related post he said the water level on his block came to four feet, which is just slightly higher than his floor. My thoughts are with Jim as he surveys the damage in a city he has been reporting to us on for years.
Shoutback Dept., No. 1. Thanks to Marius Watz for his nice post on the Generator.x blog, published in connection with a conference and exhibition in Oslo examining the current role of software and generative strategies in art and design. Check out some of Marius' interactive abstractions here; they are seductive to look at, fun, and actually use the computer's image-making capabilities in way that lets the machine do some of the thinking, as opposed to my low-tech simulacra.
Shoutback Dept., No 2. Thanks to Ran Prieur for seconding my complaint about the Carter "energy sweater" urban myth, which holds that "Nerdy Jimmy Carter Wore a Sweater When Talking About Energy." This is wrong. To reiterate: Carter wore the sweater on many occasions after the '76 election, it was part of his laid-back "man of the people" persona, post-Nixon and his foppish uniforms for White House guards. Yet for some reason, media mavens of the left and right and even bloggers continue to enliven their prose with the image of the "nerdy energy sweater."
I've been enjoying Ran's site, which has many interesting things to say about dropping out and living off the grid that I hope to respond to in the coming weeks. Here's a pearl from his blog:
Notice that every article about energy systems contains the word "needs." How much energy do we need? Our ancestors did fine for two million years, or two hundred million if you count our pre-human ancestors, with energy gathered by plants through photosynthesis, taken into our bodies through eating, and channeled through our muscles. Do industrial energy systems make us happy? Do they give our lives meaning? Then why are suicide and depression rates higher in countries with greater per-capita energy consumption?
The only thing we need, beyond basic survival, is participation in a system that builds itself bottom-up from autonomous action. "Energy" makes us miserable and stupid when and only when it is gathered and parceled out by control systems. The nice thing about oil and coal is that they run out, and that they pollute the air to cause eco-catastrophes, which are far preferable to having our lives managed by the institutions that own the energy. Sustainable, clean energy that you can't cheaply gather in your back yard is the worst technology possible, because it will enable the systems that enslave us to continue forever.
I think behind human history is an evil collective consciousness that wants to crush the spirit of life, and techies are unwittingly resonating with it. After they take care of energy, they'll invent a way to make us immortal, so we can't even get out by suicide. We will become eternal torture victims of the megamachine, just like in Harlan Ellison's classic sci-fi story "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream."