Interdependent Temporary Autonomous Zones
Thanks to @theanimal for this article:
Money As Addiction
and
@AH for this book:
Temporary Autonomous Zone
The blog post and book gave me some new ideas about pathological culture aka the culture of separation.
"Money as Addiction" points out that the things I labeled "needs of modernity" are actually not optional. Here's the basic idea (this is very similar to Jacob's ideas about "the lock-in" from the ERE book): We invent a new "time saving" technology. The technology relatively rapidly becomes part of our culture and day to day lives. We adapt our world so that, instead of saving time, technology allows us to "do more." Pretty quickly the "doing more" part of the technology becomes a new baseline state of the world, where one needs to be able to "do more" to get their basic needs met.
The article uses the example of cars. Before cars, traveling long distances took a long time. This limits the options of where food is obtained from, where work is done and social interactions to a comparatively small radius (that never seemed small before cars). Cars come along. Now we can get all of that stuff super fast, because cars are so much faster than all preceding forms of transit. There is no traffic because there aren't that many cars. Everything is close together because of previous slower forms of transportation.
If the technology is adopted, as cars were, they integrate into our lives. It used to take an hour to walk to work that was 3 miles away. It now takes an hour to drive to work 30 miles away. As cars move from convenience to necessity, more and more people have cars, which requires more and more infrastructure, which locks cars into our lives. We now spend a lot of time stuck in traffic, instead of walking or riding a horse.
We spend a lot of time and money traveling in cars, storing them, repairing them and maintaining road networks. What once enriched now impoverishes us. This is similar to Joseph Tainter's idea that societies eventually reach a point of complexity where all resources are spent on maintenance. What I propose is that this happens with technology. The more fervently a technology is adopted, the more of our time and resources go to maintaining this technology. Rinse and repeat over thousands of years. Speed it up by discovering and tapping into vast energy stores of ancient sunlight (a tech that is now VERY locked-in).
We now imagine a deficit in the past. We imagine past people having to walk for 10 hours to go 30 miles, when in reality, there was little reason to do this very often. It's difficult to imagine a world where cars aren't necessary because it's the only world we know.
"Money as Addiction" uses smoking as an analogy. At first the author started smoking to relax, have a social outlet and get a small nicotine buzz. Pretty quickly smoking developed into a habit. What was once something that enhanced his life moving him from 0 to 1, now became something he needed, effectively setting his new baseline to -1. Something that was once a release, an improvement, became necessity, a costly addiction to be maintained.
The article also speaks about interdependence, specifically, local interdependence. Interdependence is relying on other people to meet your needs while they rely on you to meet their needs*. Our current system relies on global interdependence among specialists based on the money system. I do some very niche job with other niche specialists (who are often largely strangers) and I get my needs taken care of by other niche specialists (strangers) I pay.
*A pernicious strain of dependence is codependence, when you rely on someone to meet your needs but become subconsciously convinced that you cannot live without them (anxiety). This generally leads to being "abused" (in the therapy sense, where very small transgressions are abuse). When someone cannot stand up for themselves or detach from their "abuser" they are exhibiting codependence. They believe the other person is imparting boundaries on them, when in reality they are imparting boundaries on themselves. This is a very deep and subtle psychological subject, that goes beyond what I can say in this paragraph, but the type of dependence we seek is the non-codependent variety.
Money is a technology of interdependence that has become locked-in. We are no longer trained to meet our needs in non-monetary ways. Local interdependent networks have disappeared, replaced by the vast global money network.
Money and capitalism are very efficient ways to exchange goods with strangers. We've lost the cultural ability to get our needs met without tapping into the money network. We've lost the ability to not have our needs met by services rendered and goods produced by people we do not know. We no longer meet our needs by producing goods ourselves and by sharing things with a tight knit community of close relations.
The money network is more efficient at mass producing generic goods and services than any of us could ever hope to be in our smaller communities. We gain access to networks of specialists and tap into economies of scale (which are more efficient but also lock-in homogenization). This network catalyzes ever more technological advancement (economic growth can only come from increasing efficiency of existing factors of production or technological growth. As factors of production become maximized, this reduces to economic growth only coming from new technology*) as it is designed currently to seek economic growth.
*GDP can be artificially inflated by taking cultures or goods/ services that used to exist in the non-monetary economy and adding them to the monetary economy
As capitalism and monetary technology became locked-in to our culture, what was once an efficient way to trade a few specialty goods with strangers, became an everyday necessity. Much like the technological lock-in of the car largely destroyed our ability to walk to get the things we need, the technological lock-in of money has destroyed our ability to get what we need from local interdependence.
As the money network was locked-in and local interdependence destroyed, economic growth came to be seen as the most important factor for any culture. The technological advancement process, which had already existed for long periods of human history, was sped up by the efficiency of the monetary system (and its partner technologies, fossil fuel extraction and exploitation).
Enter ERE and FIRE. FIRE takes as a baseline the interdependent money system, but notes that we have built and locked-in several technologies on top of this system which are very expensive to maintain and also unnecessary. The luxury of cars used to be getting somewhere faster than everyone else. As cars became ubiquitous, the luxury became small improvements in the aesthetic and comfort values of cars and their associated social signals of status. As financing, once a tool to access funds for business ideas, became available to consumers, one's ability to purchase things became limited only by their ability to make monthly payments to various creditors.
FIRE notes that a once efficient system has become highly inefficient. Much of the status is a perceived battle in our heads. A very nice luxury car may still confer status, but that status is achieved by it being too expensive for most people. The rest of us now drive "modest" SUVs in the hopes of emulating this status. We still finance them in an everlasting battle to stay almost imperceptibly ahead of the Joneses. While we still must deal with the locked-in car-centric technology of a physically dispersed network, there are several layers of inefficiency we can shake by refocusing on the original goal of a car, which was to get from one point to another quickly. A cheap car can be obtained for the price of a few of the monthly payments on an ultra-truck and a bicycle can be obtained for less than one monthly payment.
FIRE is a combination of strategies for hacking the existing money network, highlighting many glaring inefficiencies that barely serve or actively harm us.
ERE takes this notion a step further, noting that the global distribution network we rely on is fragile to intermittent disruption. It creates new problems while "solving" old ones and is likely to self-destruct from many of its own long-term effects. ERE teaches us to build local resilience, first by using the hacks of FIRE and then by relearning the skills we need to take care of ourselves. ERE generally still relies on the globally interdependent money network, as this tech has become so locked-in that ignoring it is virtually impossible. The money system provides some very real efficiency upgrades to what one can do at home. Discovering these efficiencies becomes as vital a part of building resilience as discovering the inefficiencies (heat from fossil-fuels and cast iron pans we can't build ourselves.... still pretty efficient.... single use egg cookers not so much).
WL6+ ERE seeks to build individual resilience through building skills around the parts of the money system which are inefficient. ERE views the money system through a lens of resiliency, so personal resilience beyond raw monetary efficiency is highly encouraged. As each person thinks differently, values different things and has different underlying talents and already developed skills, this journey is different for everyone.
People often get stuck at WL5, which is the point of maximum personal efficiency in the globally interdependent money system. The money system is often much more efficient at delivering generic goods or services than a personal DIY system is. This is especially true for educated specialists who live in rich countries and earn a high salary, meaning their specialization is highly compensated in comparison to other specialists. This is reinforced in people who are trained from birth to become specialists and in some cases lack the knowledge to meet almost any of their basic needs outside of the money system.
For me, breaking out of WL5 came from two sources of inspiration:
While generic goods and services are more efficiently delivered by the money system, quality goods and services are often not. I can buy a really great meal from a local restaurant for a very high price or I can get a crappy meal from a chain restaurant for significantly less. Alternatively, I can spend some time cooking a better and more nutritious meal at home, though likely not beating the best specialists in their field (not always impossible though). It's the focus on quality that makes cooking at home efficient, but that quality takes some skill.
The second source of inspiration: specialization is fucking boring. Once one gets over the hump of having no skills, it's much more fun and flow-inducing to be one's own personal chef, handyman and maid. It's much more satisfying to sit in a chair one built themselves or eat food one grew themselves than to purchase these products with revenue from a boring, frustrating and controlling job.
ERE is at a point now where some have hit the boundaries of what they can achieve as autonomous or household resilience units. Some projects simply require more man power. Different things emerge when groups of people get together. I think the challenge we face in building even a small ERE group is the challenge of local interdependence. We've figured out how to inspire personal "interdependence" (independence through self-reliance) but have yet to foster local interdependence among personally independent people. The hurdles to overcome are: 1) the general removal of examples of interdependence by the money system; 2) the inefficiency of local interdependence vs the locked-in globally interdependent monetary system and 3) the disincentive towards communal interdependence that will naturally arise from people who are strongly independent AND relative masters of the global interdependence network.
This post is also inspired by the book "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (TAZ). The book I linked above describes TAZs but does not define them. The message of TAZs is building temporary anarchist zones, which by hook or crook are partially or fully beyond the reach of government control. Large scale attempts at revolution leave a power vacuum which more often than not leaves the door open for an even more oppressive governmental regime. Rather than wait for revolution, find ways to subvert the status quo. The impermanence of these solutions makes controlling them all the more difficult.
I like this concept for both me personally and for ERE. How do we temporarily build spaces that are beyond the all encompassing consumer praxis? What would that mean for us individually, in small groups and on the whole as a community?
) and faces one's shit, one isn't going anywhere. This is another reason why someone who's white-knuckling it will eventually give up and fail: the psychology isn't in place. 