It's Alive

In my last blog entry I committed blogocide, saying I was going to cease blogging.

The reasoning was that a negative aspect of blogging is its continuum of the last several decades of culture war, and its tendency to gather together affinity groups who believe in the most preposterous or pathological ideologies. While that is obvious Networks and Netwars 101, what adds a more urgent condemnation is my anticipation of social shift towards empiricism, pragmatism, and industrialism in the home or immediate neighborhood..

This new paradigm will hopefully end the endless symbolic culture war Americans have waged since the 1960's. Advocates on the right and left have waged a battle to preserve, entitle, defend or enrich some class or creed, with the prize being Federal dole or favorable laws that direct some of America's centralized economic resources ( tax revenue and free market ) to that class or creed. Alongside siphoning dollars the objective is to get a mythical "official" American culture to declare the group equal ( e.g. homeless, gays, spanish speaking immigrants, white protestants, blacks, "big beautiful" obese whale women ), and we are to scream their "equality" from the rooftops everyday, include them in every popular movie ( Spike Jones idiotically wanting more blacks in a movie meant to be a sensitive treatment of Japanese viewpoint ). The American cultural sensitivity machine has gotten as pathological as any Soviet agenda.

Now we are seeing centralized culture, especially industrial production and money flows, rife with some sort of contagion. The oil tankers hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia without a reprisal carpet bombing campaign, and Madoff hijacking the most wealthy while authorities knew and did nothing, are emblematic of our time -the giant stuff is the weak stuff. I don't say this with any pleasure at all, I like the stuff centralized production makes. No revolutionary desire for collapse on my part. But as a pragmatist I see vulnerability and pathological underperformance in our old way of doing business.

John Robb's Resilient Community thesis is the bright spot on this paradigm horizon. On the exact day I declared an end to aiding and abetting the symbolic culture war, JR posted a blog entry that extended his resilient community thesis: Viral Resilience (please read). Add to that what he says in the next blog entry:

Greed is firmly entrenched among elites on a global scale and unlikely to dissipate (for example, there isn't even a hint of the scandals/public excoriation of excess that occurred during the early years of the 20th Century's Depression). That means that a counter strategy to greed will emerge, as the people not driven solely by greed seek protection against its revealed excesses.

What will this strategy be? We can already see the emergence of it with the shift away from consumerism towards the economic independence of thrift, investment, resilience. Dependence on the larger global economy is being curtailed, firewalls between systemic instability and the local are being set up, and new sources of local and virtual income are replacing older forms. It's possible that we will find the competition between greed at the global level and cooperative resilience at the local will be an evolutionarily stable strategy that will persist for decades to come.

-link to blog entry here.

Cities, and individuals who are early adopters of this paradigm stand to gain pronounced leverage. My next move is not so much cessation of blogging as it is doing more to get Seattle further along with this distributed production, thrift, and viral resilience economy. My mission is to move way from exposing the evils of postmodernism, left-wing social justice and back-to-nature agendas, and on to enabling a local distributed industrialized culture. This will mean countering green luddites prominent in Seattle's civic culture, with the best counter filling the land with modalities the luddites and old style lefties do not understand nor survive in.

I will begin by contacting a number of locals with odd points of leverage, e.g. a prominent journalist and a technologist. My Seattle resilient community progress reporting will probably wind up on another blog, under a different Google username identity.

Wish me luck, if my criticisms of the current paradigm are true, and the next paradigm is as I describe, then my family's living standard hangs in the balance.