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Back from the netherworld

by Paula | 2 December 2009 | permalink | comments [3]
Tags: collapse, recession

Has it really been six months since my last entry??

Like so many others I too fell on hard times this year. I’ve spent the last several months descending to an underworld of Western distress and clawing my way back up to the land of the living. Happily, things have stabilized once again and I now have a new address for both my studio and my home. I have electricity, food, a working vehicle, plenty of personal hygiene products, telephone and internet service, furniture and appliances. It feels like palatial opulence.

Over these last months I’ve gotten a small peek into what Dmitry Orlov means when he says, “Collapse, for you, is likely to turn out to be a deeply personal experience.” Although my experiences pale in comparison to those Dmitry’s long blockquote cites, they did provide me with an unexpected perspective as an outsider looking in on the true heart lurking beneath nice, clean, suburban, Christian America.

I knew it was cold and nearly retarded in its stupidity. I guess I’d hoped it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.

I’ve learned a lot this year, important things that have deeply informed my approach to both life and business. My time this morning is too short to get into detail but I plan to share some of these things as I get back into the swing of blogging again.

For now I’d just like to say it’s good to be back and many thanks to those who continue to stop by on the off-chance I’ve posted something new.

(Sidebar: due to an inordinate amount of spam, comments are now moderated. Rest assured if you post a comment I’ll release it to the blog shortly.)

The entrepreneurial environment

by Paula | 14 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: entrepreneurship, collapse

I don’t normally do this, but I posted an article at my business blog that I thought was important enough to share over here.

———

One of my mainstay blog reads is The Entrepreneurial Mind by Dr. Jeff Cornwall, Director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at Belmont University.

Today Dr. Cornwall blogs about an editorial which ran in the Detroit News:

It seems that the Kauffman Foundation folks are trying to lure venture capital up to Michigan.

As Mr. Gregg rightly points out — the answer to spurring entrepreneurship is not throwing money or support bureaucracies at the
problem.  From Gregg’s editorial:

But in the midst of this enthusiasm about entrepreneurship, we risk forgetting that entrepreneurship’s capacity to create wealth is heavily determined by the environments in which we live. In many business schools, it’s possible to study entrepreneurship without any reference being made to the role played by factors such as rule of law, property rights and low taxes in stimulating wealth-creating entrepreneurship.

I could not agree more! We need to educate entrepreneurs not only to be technically good at what they do, but informed citizens who can speak up about the issues that effect their business ventures.

I have a VC colleague whose hometown is Detroit, and just about a year ago he left for the Bay Area because the entrepreneurial environment in Detroit looks like this:

The problems faced by Detroit, and Michigan by extension, are not unique to its geography. Detroit has always been at the leading edge of industry and entrepreneurship in the US, and I believe it still is — the city is ahead of the same downward curve the rest of the country, and indeed the world, faces for reasons that no one in business (save a handful of investment bakers) seems willing to tackle head-on.

The fact is, the world is running out of the natural resources required to sustain business-as-usual; governments have become so unwieldy as to be totally unmanageable; market structures have grown so large and so complex they defy apprehension by even the most learned scholars and businessmen; supply chains and communications systems are so fragile that even a small disruption can cause havoc in numerous nations simultaneously; erratic weather, financial boondoggling, and diversion to fuel production threatens the global food supply. Add to this an unprecedented level of blatantly obvious high-level corruption and growing unrest among populations, and the future of entrepreneurial environments looks very bleak indeed. Even macroeconomics is subservient to greater forces.

I personally believe that entrepreneurs are the ones who will resolve these intractable problems, but unless folks understand the big picture, i.e., the environment, no one will know to step up to the plate.

I highly recommend anyone involved in entrepreneurship read John Michael Greer’s Theory of Catabolic Collapse. It describes concisely the nature of the current crisis (financial and otherwise) and demonstrates that at this point, further investment can only accelerate decline because our society has reached the level of diminishing returns on investment in complexity.

This is our entrepreneurial environment. The path of the entrepreneur now is very different than it was even 40 years ago: our job is to decentralize what is currently too complex and top-heavy; and to make resilient that which is currently too brittle. The current direction of economic complexity is unsustainable — read: it has reached its physical limits and cannot continue.

If entrepreneurs are too stuck in myopic views of what constitutes entrepreneurialism and reward, the work that needs to be done, and that could in fact produce very nice returns, isn’t going to get done.

Architecture of a wealth transfer

by Paula | 22 April 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: collapse,

An article in yesterday’s Slate contains a concise and clear description of the architecture of the current massive wealth transfer. From The Scary Rise of the Empty Creditor:

But if a lender or creditor believes it can profit more from a complete failure — i.e., if it has an insurance policy that pays off only in the event of utter devastation — that creditor might be more inclined to push a company toward bankruptcy. And thanks to the financial innovations of recent years — the rampant use of hedging and credit-default swaps, the ability of investors to purchase insurance on debt — that’s exactly what seems to be happening. Creditors are acting to protect their economic self-interest by encouraging companies to destroy themselves.

Got that?

This is what the left v. right, liberal v. conservative political nonsense is designed to distract you from. All this tea-party tax protest crap is designed to do is funnel your attention away from Wall Street and keep you angry at the government, lest you wrap your head around what’s really going on and burn down the NYSE.

Eventually people are going to wise up. When they do there will be blood in the streets.

Catching up

by Paula | 20 December 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: news, collapse

I’m back after an insanely busy couple of weeks.

For anyone who’s interested, I’ve significantly upgraded my company’s product — no more open source for Rabbit Mountain LLC, we’re an application service provider now. If you are considering launching a new web business or getting serious about technology for your existing business, we can help you. Check it out »

Also, I’ve added a few more items to the Amazon widget on the right hand side of this page, including a very interesting DVD called The Trigger Effect. It’s a study in the interpersonal chaos that ensues when the power grid goes down… an accidentally prescient mainstream movie.

I’ve been absent from my blog but still keeping up with the news:

Downturn Spurs ‘Survival Panic’ for Some in the US @ CNBC — “Survival panic” in this case is not what many of us would think. Instead, the CNBC article refers to a loss of identity that comes with the loss of shopping ability, since so many people derive their identities from what they buy. Personally, I think the implications of this are far graver than the CNBC article admits. Taking Americans’ shopping ability away is literally on par with destroying some other culture’s ability to practice its religion. The shakeout could easily lead to widespread violence.

End of Work, End of Affluence V: Government—Reinvention or Insolvency @ Charles Hugh Smith’s blog — Government has long milked small business to feed its own vast luxuries. If the milking continues, it is going to kill the cow. Amen, brother, especially when there’s no credit to hand over to the taxman.

The Milwaukee Community Currency Story @ Cryptogon — Kevin tells it like it is:

Oh sure. And what currency will the business owners use to settle up with the maniac fascist tax authorities? Not Humboldt Gold or Milwaukee Cheddar Heads or Eugene Tofu Flake Bucks. If they want to avoid having guns pointed at their heads, they will pay the IRS in Federal Reserve Notes.

So yeah, let it rip with your local currency schemes, if it makes you feel good. Let’s just not get confused about the reality of what’s actually happening here, which is, the Matrix doesn’t care what made up script you use as long as Federal Reserve Notes come out the other end. Devise a system where people are actually conducting commerce outside of the tax framework and watch what happens. The second the Feds get wind of it, look out.

Stories like this are meant to make you believe that once you’re thinking outside the box, you’re out of the box. Actually, what you find outside the box is another box.

All the time, dumbshits accuse me of being negative; not seeing the good side of things. (With this Obama pathology, especially.) If pointing out the underlying nature of a thing makes me a negative person, why are you reading this site? Go away. Please, close your browser window and stop reading Cryptogon. Go drive your Prius to the icecream collective and buy a double hemp seed rebellion cone with your Lick Bush Bucks.

I would suggest working within the food complex first of all. In areas where people raise their own animals, grow their own food and save their own seeds, this happens automatically. These people know that governments are simply running protection rackets for crooked corporate middlemen. There is a very healthy skepticism of government in these circles and idiotic laws are often ignored with contempt and prejudice. If you’re ever lucky enough to buy outlaw meat from an unregistered home kill operator, as I have, drop to your knees and kiss the dirt. Know that you’re in a good place.

And in that great tradition of (ahem) “balanced” journalism, from Guillaume’s Blog comes: Brazilian community currency helps generate local wealth and jobs — “Access credit does not require documents, but only requires that local resident voucher for the loan. In other words, instead of relying on high-tech PhD risk analysis algorithm, CDS, securitization, and the likes, credit risk analysis is socialized.” My question: why is the government, the World Bank, and other organizations with a vested interest in creating poverty allowing this currency to move forward?

My narrative, or, the dawning of ‘homo humilis humilis’

by Paula | 24 October 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: collapse, evolution

As humans we are wired to navigate the world via stories and narrative, and I am no exception. My overriding motivation comes from a very clear narrative that has cobbled itself together in my head over the years, and I want to lay out that narrative here to provide context both for myself and for whoever happens by. I’m sure none of this is particularly original… it’s been very heartening along the way to discover others who’ve come to the same conclusions as me, often long before I ever had.

My narrative is simply this: the project we call “civilization” is an evolutionary dead end for the human species. It is in the process of drawing to a close, and our species’ only available response is adaptation to this reality and evolution into something new.

This view is, at its heart, both primitivist and biblical-with-a-small-“b.” In fact, for me “primitivist” and “biblical” (with a small “b”) are one in the same. Each offers the same set of observations, made by two very different and separate groups of people: one witnessed the birth of the evolutionary dead end as outsiders, and one is witness to its close from within.

Primitivists contend that the narrative of civilization we in Western culture have been taught is the view of those who’ve benefited from it at the expense of those who have not. The story that tells us the advent of agriculture gave rise to science, the arts, and all manner of imperial glory is technically correct; however, it negates the experience of those who provided the fuel for all of this to happen. The leisure time required to develop science and to produce art, and the energy required to build both the infrastructure and the wealth of empires, came at the expense of the vast majority people, most of whom toiled as slaves, serfs, and servants; or who suffered the brutal seizure of their land, resources, and families in the service of those few ruling from the top of some far-off, extreme social hierarchy.

Moreover, agriculture itself was not something people took up because of its obvious superiority over hunting and gathering. It was either a stopgap measure in the face of climate instability, or was a maladaptive cultural mutation born of a new, abstract cognition. The archaeological record clearly shows that when people switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture their health plummeted dramatically, while the quantity and intensity of their labor increased equally dramatically. It is a mystery why anyone would choose such a lifestyle unless he was compelled to do so against his will. This is why indigenous tribes universally resist assimilation into Western colonialization: they have not been inured to the misery of civilization and to them assimilation represents a living hell, a fate worse than death.

This view is substantially identical to the biblical account of the fall of mankind from grace. It is also a good entrance point into biblical considerations stripped of their obscene, bloody religious baggage. Setting aside the racism, sexism, violence, and the legions of atrocities that have been committed under the bible’s aegis, the biblical account becomes simply the oral history of a particular people who later committed that history to writing. It is a cultural artifact that carries a staggering weight for those of us who’ve inherited Western culture, if we can unpack it dispassionately.

The story of the fall is a tale told from the point of view of an observer, a narrator, someone not involved in the events as they unfold. It is the story of something that happened to someone else, and this someone else’s story is, literarily speaking, exactly the same as the story we Westerners tell ourselves about our origins. It was this someone else who once lived as wild tribes; this someone else who took up agriculture; who began to settle into villages, towns and cities; who experienced the rise of deities and kings; who created a system that eventually became the grand empires of the ancient near and middle east. Westerners, and Christian Westerners in particular, like to identify with the biblical observer and to think of this “someone else” as, well, someone else — the pagans of old against whom the righteous God has set his judgment. We fail to see that we are the “someone else;” we are not the biblical observer, we are the observed. The pagans of old are our cultural forebears, and our culture is the continuation of theirs. We are the irredeemably fallen. Our empires are not the shining, crowning achievements of our species; they are instead the manifestation of a deep illness first identified by the biblical observer.

The biblical story symbolizes the moment of our infection in the image of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit: upon eating it, they experienced shame because they were naked. This is not related to sex as the church has insisted for millennia. Rather, it is a fairly simple illustration lost on us today. Shame occurs only in the presence of an other; Adam (the adama or “first man”) suddenly perceived an other where there had been none before. He perceived himself as separate from the living world around him, and, for the first time in Earth’s multibillion-year history, introduced a massive fracture into the unity of our planet’s natural systems.

This is indeed the fruition of a new knowledge, just as the biblical account states. It is also a self-chosen death sentence, again in line with the biblical story: “On the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” No species can survive apart from the natural systems of Earth. And yet all of Western culture’s frenetic empire-building has been little more than an attempt to stave off the inevitable death this separation ensures.

However, the very fact that we Westerners have glommed onto the outsiders’ account of the beginning of our own demise indicates that somewhere in the recesses of our cultural memory, and perhaps coded into our DNA as biological memory, we understand the truth. We do have an idea of what it means to be a part of a living, evolving, unified, organic, self-organizing natural system; we can intuit what participation in such a system would entail, and we can feel in our bones that an animating force really does flow through everything, propelling us to seize hold of life and joy. But in our culture fallen so far from the graces of the natural world, our inclination to join in the rhythm and flow of Earth’s living systems is tragically thwarted without our realization, and instead manifests as free-market capitalism.

Capitalist economies function in ways strikingly similar to ecosystems. Money parallels the solar energy that producers turn into the materials which primary, secondary and tertiary consumers consume, concentrating into denser quantities as it rises up the food chain. Innovation parallels mutation and gives rise to new industries, which parallel species, even to the point of displaying features of punctuated equilibrium. Our drive to accumulate money is ultimately the same drive that propels salmon upriver or that bends a plant in the direction of sunlight — except our fallen culture has perverted this drive into greed. The “invisible hand” of the marketplace bears a far greater resemblance to indigenous and tribal peoples’ conception of an animating spirit-force than to the avenging judge in the sky to which critics liken it. Environmentalists wish to leave ecosystems undisturbed for the exact and precise reason free-market capitalists wish to see economies unregulated: both are dynamic, self-organizing systems that will achieve homeostasis on their own, if only they are allowed to do so.

It is an understandable mistake that economists should think markets are an all-encompassing arrangement larger than ourselves, from which come every last thing imaginable and in which we must compete and cooperate to survive. Humans evolved and are genetically programmed to thrive and grow within such a system; it’s the only thing we know or even can know. Economics has simply mistaken markets for the natural world.

I find great hope in this dim reflection of natural systems we have created. Clearly capitalism in its current state is as corrupt and fallen as the civilization that spawned it. But the proliferation of open-source companies and the drive toward entrepreneurship that the internet has inspired represent a potentially serious competitive threat to those institutions that maintain a stranglehold on the economy as civilization shifts into decline. These massive institutions will either fail or radically change in coming years due to resource depletion, climate change, the loss of government legitimacy, and financial crises; and there will not be enough of any of these left to reconstitute new behemoths where the old ones once stood. Only those decentralized companies based on open-source models and very small individual businesses will be quick enough to maneuver the changes. It is not too far a stretch to envision natural selection operating as both an economic and ecological force in the affairs of humans once again. Those businesses that adapt will by necessity evolve into the basis of truly sustainable economies that emerge from the wreckage of decline.

Thus my hope is that what is now a dim, corrupted reflection of participation with the natural world can serve as a bridge from our evolutionary dead end, across the chasm and back into unity with the rest of Earth’s living systems. I believe that the emergence of the internet and the legions of small businesses it has spawned presage the economic changes to come and are a manifestation of what we all know in our collective unconscious. Homo sapiens sapiens is about to evolve into homo humilis humilis — doubly humble man — and I believe entrepreneurship to be the most likely vehicle to carry us there.

So that is my narrative, for better or worse.