Spaceship Earth
Can you see it? Our planet, big and blue and permanently sustaining us is a spaceship. It’s in a orbit around our sun, Sol. Sol is spinning in our galaxy which is one of literally countless galaxies, spinning through the ages in an ever expanding series of ellipses. We are traveling millions upon millions of miles in all directions every second. The universe is beyond comprehension in it’s size. It’s expanding! and it is also arguable that there are an infinite number of universes on top of that, each representing other distinct possible realities.
And here we are, with our tiny little concerns, just plopping along like our lives are so crucial.
Years ago I read this book, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller. When I did a little digging just as I started to think about writing this article, I found out that there’s even a ride at Epcot Center called Spaceship Earth. Interestingly enough, the big epcot dome is based on the Bucky Dome… yup the same domes we use at Burning Man. Yup, designed by the author. It got me thinking, as these things usually do.
Bucky is an interesting character. In 1927, at the age of 32, He’s bankrupt and jobless and on the very brink of suicide. He’s just lost his daughter. He’s deep in the booze. He’s wracked with guilt over his daughter and his failed business ventures. At the last moment, he decided instead to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity”.
He devoted his life to something bigger than himself, and lived a full life of design and greatness. 28 patents, many honorary doctorates, world travel, many books… he lived his life to the benefit of others and died complete. I know his book changed my life. It had me see the world in a totally new way, one where there is a synergy that is possible, and one that could work for everyone.
Which brings me back to Spaceship Earth. I feel that our country and our world is on that same suicidal precipice. We have nearly depleted all of our resources. We’ve lost countless sons and daughters. At times, it seems hopeless. And we can just give up, live life as we have, or take on a new way. We can engage in our own little experiment and for this I am going to steal lovingly from my man Bucky. Let’s take on his unanswerable question.
Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?
It’s going to mean taking on a whole different kind of way of looking at resources, energy and human relationships. The Spaceship Earth model also borrows from the Gaia Hypothesis which posits that our planet itself is an organism that we are just a part of. The planet has everything we need, but hoarding and greed will not work. We need to move more to what Kenneth E. Boulding calls a “Cowboy,” or “Spaceman Economy.” (I obviously LOVE this)
“The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.”
As we wait on the brink of financial upheaval, now is the time to seek out a new and more sustainable kind of monetary system, one that works for everyone without tearing apart large parts of our world. We need to start thinking of how we as a species can start to utilize our unique gifts to forward the Gaian biosphere on this Spaceship and onto others. We must start to think of what humanity will be about, beyond our lifetimes, beyond our nations’ lifetimes, beyond humanity-as-we-know-it’s lifetime.
It’s time to really think about being one world, beyond the obvious, and cliche ideas. Imagine if we really were one organism striving towards survival. We’re jut one little tiny blue spacecraft, ready to blossom.
An interesting perspective, no?
Tech Fail
It’s bound to happen, our technologies fail. Our plans do not go as expected.
While trying to fix my brothers computer, I screwed it up to the point of unusable. I loathe windows machines, such stupid, stupid ornery buggers. So today, i figured I’d get up early and try and fix the dang thing. I couldn’t even figure out how to operate his remote situation… he only has 5 different ones. After a couple of hours of struggling and swearing, I called someone much smarter than I. Zak. Thank goodness for great friends. Zak and I hung out, talked and reinstalled drivers. We got my brother’s computer working at least as crappily as before.
But, so heading back to the house I saw I could maybe make it to the cabin before the freezing dark came to the mountains. Of course, the iphone was being a little punk, too. No calls for spaceman. At my brother’s place, I got caught up in trying to fix his xbox, then breaking it immediately after. Nice one. Red ring. At least it’s as broken as it was when I started. We were pretty excited though for a minute.
So I decided to stay at the parent’s one more night, in order to leave early tomorrow for my favorite place. Hopefully the traffic isn’t deadly (californians are impressed with snow and go to the mountains to ogle it, driving badly). So I popped open my orange macbook to just check email, and the parental’s wifi wasn’t working. At least my fails weren’t just Microsoft. Multiple products and platforms. Whee! I had to just leave and resort to a simpler technology.
Burritos. They got the burrito right.
Sometimes the technology just keeps failing. Those are the days you shouldn’t go onto icy mountain roads and try and install chains on the side of the road. I’m just saying.
Don’t get me wrong there are plusses.
Todd wants to take Zak and I out to a sushi dinner at his favorite place.
On my brother’s media center I found an old plaque from our high school animation program for a film that he made called “Don’t Be Trapped By Alcoholism.” This shows a pretty serious and awesome sense of rony and humor. My brother takes great pride in thinking he’s an alcoholic.
As much as doing tech support for the family can be a pain, they need it and I love them. So why not.
I get to hang out one more night with my family.
I probably won’t drive off any cliffs tonight.
Now I am sitting in a starbucks drinking a triple soy latte and working on my writing anyway. It’s all good.
Failing is part of the game, right?
image taken from failblog.org (I’m subscribing!)
What I Am Loving Right Now
So, as the economy stresses me out, and it seems like next month could be destitute. I thought I would do a little thanksgiving post of my own. my life is pretty damn abundant, amazingly so. In fact, it’s my abundance that has me be concerned about my finances. So here’s what I am loving of my stuff!
1. My new iphone case. Mophie Juice Pack 3G (Black/Green)
2. My Xbox 360 has a new lease on life.Xbox 360 Console
3. I just bought a new bit of software. My old copy of Final Draft stopped working when I got my new Macbook earlier this year. Turns out, old mac programs don’t like the new intel based Macs. So I boughtMovie Magic Screenwriter Version 6
4. Speaking of writing. I am loving my new website, www.spaceman23.com , designed by Brian Shaw and Pho0ka. It still has some details to work out, but I love the look and feel of it. We’re going to work on it after the holiday.
5. I am loving Facebook right now. It’s an impressive social networking platform. In many ways, I see it surpassing tribe, and for all of tribes promises of workability, it just cannot compete. I jsut created two groups today, one a hiring resource for production grips, the other a group for burners who work in the film business. These are the first groups I’ve created, I am excited to see how they unfold.
6. I am really into a girl right now. It has it’s complications, and nothing is certain. But what I am loving is the play and the feeling of giddy joy I get when I talk to her. This one though, is unfolding.
7. I am loving my Skingraft Holster. It’s an incredibly useful item. Gunslinger is the new Tribal.
8. The friends in my life are the best. Seriously. I had such a great time over the weekend, rolling down to San Diego with Wolfie and Jenny, to go see Rebecca, Kyle and Yona. I was blown away by how awesome and powerful those people are. I am so often amazed by how great my friends are. Then I came right back to LA to game with Zack, Adam, Alex, and Scott. Adam has a new game going, and it’s so awesome! I love playing the game!
9. Right this moment, I am loving the awesome sandwich I just have. Noah’s cracked peppercorn bagel, TJ’s Masala veggie burger, fresh parmesan cheese, and spicy mustard. Awesome.
10. Lastly, I got this little lighter on the way to SF Decom. It’s like a little revolver pistol. You light it by pulling the hammer. If you pull the trigger though, you get this vicious shock. When I first bought it, I was like “This is so EVIL, I must have it.” I have been having an incredible amount of fun with it. But I always preface it with “Don’t pull the trigger.” It’s an interesting study in human nature, how many people pull the trigger.
Convergence is Coming
When I just stated college, I got into an internship in what was in 1994 called “New Media” at Sony. I got to work with this really incredible woman, Nicole Miller, who taught me to be an information seeker. remember reading wired, and sitting in on meetings with these people with ideas for set top boxes, seeing the new hi-def TVs, having conversations about how hypercard stacks worked and Moore’s Law… It was an amazing time of my life. It’s a period of my life that never really ended. Although, it seems I became a grip and a blogger rather than a new media executive, which is what I wanted to be when I grew up.
One of the things we would always talk about was that everything was going to come together in one box. They talked about “set top” boxes that would replace cable and television. This was years before the Tivo. This was years before Direct TV. I remember we got an advance Playstation that was stolen by someone at the Sony Pictures lot. It was kind of a big deal. They would talk about these boxes like they were some kind of magic box that could do anything.
In some ways, my laptop fills that role. I use it to communicate, store music and videos, shop, browse the interwebs…. but somehow, it is less of an entertainment device. I still like to watch movies on a bigger screen and sometimes socially. The Xbox360 had long ago replaced my TV for me. It costs as much as a graphics card for a PC and you don’t need to upgrade it every 6 months. I just buy a massive amount of games, I’ll admit it.
But they just released this new free interface update for the xbox. It’s WOW. It’s called the New Xbox Experience (NXE). Not to get too fanboy about it, but holy crap. Basically, it syncs with your netflix account and lets you stream videos live. It creates avatars of you (similar to the miis in wii sports) that can interact in parties of eight online. You ca store games on the xbox 360 hard-drive. You can share pictures with other users. I still will be watching DVDs. And it still plays games. But the cool thing about the netflix streaming is that I can watch CURRENT episodes of TV. I’m not a serious TV watcher, but that is pretty sweet! Now they gotta build a web browser into the thing. Forget “I want my MTV,” they just release every video ever online. Social media is also just at it’s infancy of connectivity.
But I digress. We are entering an era where everything is coming together. My phone, my laptop, my watch, my TV my game console, my mp3 player, my car, my wallet… t is all rapidly becoming one. The smarter scifi writers predicted it: Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick. In their messages were warnings. It is for us to heed the call and not lose our humanity into the machine.
As we get closer, people will talk more and more about the Singularity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity This is all related. Especially in the sense that it will accelerate us forward. All information soon will be available to all people. At least, that is what I am hoping for. That’s the game I am playing for.
Social Currency
As you know, dear reader, I have been thinking a lot about total economic collapse these last few weeks. It’s dark work, being a harbinger of disaster; I am stuck being the guy who is looking at the outcomes and the signs with no answers. I feel like Chicken Little, a paranoid little naysayer screaming about the sky and it’s impending doom (DOOM!). I am finding quite a bit of agreement in the world for my particular world-view. Between the stories I am finding on google reader, watching the incredible Story of Stuff and Zeitgeist: Addendum, and reading Get Back in the Box
The problem I have been having with the idea of economic collapse is that I can’t really see a social collapse along with it. As fun as it is to imagine a Fallout/Mad Max/ Burning Man reality becoming the dominant form, with Spaceman running around with a glock, a battleaxe and a camelback, it really would be a nightmare scenario for everyone (but it would look cool, you must admit). I can get that kind of thing from video games (read Fallout 3
We are moving into this heavily networked era of Humanity. An era where we are connected instantly and powerfully. Think of things like twitter, tribe and facebook. Hell think about this blog and how quickly I am able to get out information to the world. Think about how many of our career lives are connected with those that we are interacting with in social circles. I don’t really know the last grip job I worked that wasn’t connected to someone I thought of as a friend, who I would invite over for dinner. My friend KT is a photographer, (maybe you’ve heard of her) and her business is all based on relationships. There’s a recession on, and she’s doing fine because she has strong relationships. My friends Roxy and Chris, they have an acupuncture/chiropractic business, same thing. The needs we have as people are not going to go away if suddenly the almighty dollar isn’t anything more than fancy kindling for our furniture fires. Our relationships aren’t going to go away, either.
So what I have been wondering, is WHAT are we going to use as a basis for trade? The Burning Man gift economy seems to work pretty interestingly. It is also a meritocracy, where those who give the most, somehow get a much more rich experience. (Did you know that those DPW people, the ones that build the city before you get there, they get a shower truck, and three hot meals per day?) But, it is also centered on abundance, like we all spend a metric shit ton at Target and Santee Alley before we ever get there so we can gift the hell out of that playa. And then there’s trade goods? What would we use as currency? Oatmeal packets, silver coins, Clif Bars, bullets, clothing, pints of gasoline or water? All of these things? I read an article about prisoners in the state prison system using packets of mackerel bought from the prison store as their currency when the system outlawed smoking. What I fear is that it will be force that takes what it wants, as in “I have the uniform and the gun, I will take what I want.” This is the trouble with placing our well being into the hands of a few, who are armed to the teeth. In honesty, it will probably be some combination of these things. When things go sideways, I just hope we have some serious leadership nationally and locally to keep some semblance of sanity.
Our power in times of trouble will be from two sources. It will come from connectedness and social currency. Being networked to our communities is paramount. This means pay your phone bill and keep your internet access going almost above all else. Being able to twitter that you are hiding in your apartment and roving bands of hungry and angry former bankers and insurance salesmen are ransacking your building looking for tasty bites, could be the difference between getting help and being left to those monsters. Being able to know where people you know are gathering, and building new things: Essential. Knowing what resources there are, and where to get access to them, essential. Of course, I am an internet dude. I am biased. But I think the networked reality offered us by the web is probably the most important innovation to human connectedness and communication, yet.
But then there is this thing, Social Currency. What is it? It is an intangible. You have it through interactions with others. It is what you bring to the table in relationships. You may be someone who has a vast music collection and you share it. You may be someone who tells great jokes. You may be a great listener or communicator. You may be that person who can build things, or you may just give great hugs. It is your connection with others, your generosity to others. It is something that is not easily measured, but something that is easy to get. It is sharing. Going back to Burning Man, it is that thing that works with a really great theme camp (like mine this year) where everyone keeps giving and the pool of social currency keeps growing. Everyone is giving and sharing and building it up. The cool thing about social currency is that it, like love itself, is a perpetual motion machine. The more you give, to the more people you give it to, who then give, extending this abundant model. At it’s very core it is participation. It can only work in a networked reality.
A networked reality is our current ability to communicate to many and have instant feedback. It is a natural state. You send out communication and broadcast to everyone. Like this writing, for instance. It hits everyone, and those who it resonates with or effects read it and process it. They then have some social currency in the form of conversations, ideas, memes, new ways of thinking. I also get some social currency for bringing it to the electronic page. It is a zero loss kind of game. Meanwhile thousands of these communications are traveling back and forth through our networks, building up social currency among the community. Social currency can also be lost by being a jerk, or squelching communication, or making really poor choices (Dick Cheney lost some social currency when he shot that guy in the face, even though his friend was okay, for instance). But for the most part, it is an intangible, expanding aspect of our collective self.
So I am in just the very beginnings of working this out. Already, this may be my longest blog essay. But there is much much more. I am just excited that there is a reality I can start seeing that isn’t some survivalist wet dream. With Social Currency and Networked Reality I can start to see my lifelong dream of abundance and innovation for all coming to pass. It fits in with my commitment to the new Golden Age. It is emerging faster and faster, just before I posted this, I found this.
It is for us to work out the details, so please contribute by commenting on the blog or on the facebook feed. Comments = Social Currency.
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
George Bernard Shaw
The End Of Privacy
So, a few months ago, I decided to move my blogging into a more public forum. Tribe.net was a safe haven for my ideas, but their inherent slowness and unreliability had me seek other things. But to get my blog out to the most friends, I had to use Facebook, which is tied to my real name. Now this is a problem if in your head, you are this underground freedom fighter. Because the evil forces of evilness are always going to want to link back to you and your loved ones. I read Spiderman, you gotta have a secret identity.
And then there is the possibility of really making a difference. That is going to come from transparency and acceptance of who you are. That kind of power is going to come from taking full responsibility, radical accountability for your actions and your words. There is standing for something. I’m not saying that this is the most important blog on the internets or something. I’m just saying that it’s me.
We are living at the end of the industrial age. The internet has given us a voice. It is millions of voices, talking right back to mainstream media. In the last age, communication was a top down, lord to serf kind of relationship. TV, News, Magazines, Books… they all came to us and we did nothing but listen. It had been that way for as long as these technologies have existed. Media has always been the world of elites. It has also been the most effective way for agents of change and intelligence to get their word to the masses, at various rare points in history. The Internet made it possible for all. Anyone with a internet cafe can now change the world. Now, they joystick and the keyboard have given us a way to have a conversation back. Blogs and videogames, they are our access to taking control of the stories.
But, we must tell the stories to make the networked system work. By decentralizing the communication sources, by making every man woman and child becomes an editor, newscaster, videographer, humorist, eroticist, priest, magician, political pundit, distributor… and we become the voice. Honestly, if you have even thought about it, you MUST start putting your stuff on the web. get a wordpress.com blog. Open a facebook account, and link it to your videos on youtube. Twitter your whereabouts. Post photos of yourself from your phone. Find me and network yourself to me!
We cannot stop them from watching. The Genie is out of the bottle on surveillance. They can watch and read everything. They can link whatever we write to almost any email or IP address. But by the same token, we can’t stop them from masturbating while watching us either. As we flood the system with chaff, we become more invisible. In an age of reality TV, the only thing more cameras is going to achieve is to make me think I am even more a rockstar than I already know I am.
Networks communicate from every node. The radical thing I am suggesting is to tell everything. Be wholly yourself without reservation. Of course, that is easy for me, I work in Hollywood, and don’t have to answer to corporate masters. But ultimately, your corporate masters or the various tentacles of the American Law Enforcement Community will be able to find anything about you anyway. Wait until the tagging facial recognition software comes out for the public. Be smart out there, but express yourself fully and don’t hold back.
The system is in a state of upheaval right now, and everything is changing. It’s painful for the system too. Change is coming, and we are on the fast first wave. Be free.
edit: this just in: naked pics of yourself can be trouble.
Some say invest in gold. I say invest in you.
Everywhere I go, there is this intensity of apprehension. It’s like this buzzing of fear in the background. Peoples’ portfolios are tanking. The bailout, and the prospect of the american taxpayers footing even more of the bill for corporate and government corruption. The bald face lying, the naked short selling, the outraged finger pointing. You hear things… Like when the IndyMac Bank failed, the regular depositors, people like you and me, got on $.50 on the dollar. How the hell would you deal with that? If your bank lost half of your money and the FDIC insurance just was for 50%? Wow. You talk to people who’s homes have lost 50% of their value and they are now stuck owing 3x what the home is worth (I know. it doesn’t make sense to me either). The one thing I really remember about high school history’s simplified causes of the Great Depression is that it was buying on margin that caused the Crash. That is exactly what all of Wall Street has been doing. And the experts are just as afraid that it’s too late. Hell in times before rapid inflation, it’s better to spend that credit while prices are low, because you will pay off that same money with the new inflated $100 bill you use like $20s. But then that’s more buying on margin, isn’t it. As a friend coined in a song, the fit is about to hit the shan!
It is times like these that my short sighted, slap-shot financial style may just work out for me. I have no assets beyond what gear I can pack in my element, a low car payment, low rent from a friend in a depression proof industy (gaming) and my family is nearby. I’ve been thinking a lot about support systems.
Back in 2001 when 9/11 hit the world with the last big fear wave, we all talked about if a serious terror attack happened, going to and gathering at Abundant Sugar over at the Brewery. There were people there who made things happen, and we were all just kids. But now, I feel like it is us who must stand and make the difference. We need to look at the hard choices and make some real plans. I’m scared. It really could be another Great Depression.
I’m not ready to make the plans yet. But I want to open up the conversation.
The good news is, it probably won’t all fail at once. The internet is designed to take a nuclear disaster, but tribe is definitely a victim of not having enough money to keep the doors open. So look to decentralized networks and have backup for your communication. Civic wifi will be up for a while hopefully. Starbucks won’t fail for a while, hopefully. (a hack at starbucks: buy a giftcard, register it at starbucks with a lappy, you now get a login with free wifi). If massive foreclosures happen, look at squatters rights. If enough people are losing their homes, there will be no way for them all to be evicted. Stand your ground. Keep your car hidden from the repo man (have you seen that movie lately? too close to home, its about a post economic collapse america). But ultimately, surviving an economic collapse is going to come down to community, only together will we be able to weather this storm.
Some say invest in gold. I say invest in you.
Look at your skill set. Survival is a technology. Can you survive? Do you even know your neighbors? What do you bring to the table as a member of the community. Do you have tools and can you fix things? Can you make clothing, or mend clothing? do you have technical knowledge that can help your community. Are you the kind of people that get along with people? Can you love your neighbor? Are you the kind of people that can repel bad people who want to take your survival from you? Can you fight? Are you the kind of extraordinary human being that will come out of all this to usher in that golden age?
Like I said, hard questions. And I really hope it doesn’t come to any of this. Except the golden age part, that would be pretty sweet.
image source: Fallout 3. Consider it training.
also check out Mother Eagle LLC www. for preparedness tips, he’s far more knowledgeable than I. Also look at what our friends at Homeland Security have to say about it they have specific tips for staying in business.
Nomophobia
I woke up at the crack of dawn, ready to download my new iphone 2.0 OS. I have been really excited about it. The new App Store means that the iphone becomes infinitely more useful.
Theoretically.
Unfortunately, installing the software crashed my computer and my phone. We had to leave so I spent the drive back to LA in a bit of anxiety. I have a serious case of Nomophobia, a fear of being without cell service. I have previously said it was about being a freelancer and needing to know where my next job is coming from. But, to be really honest, I am completely addicted to my phone and my phone based internet.
I feel real fear and discomfort when I can’t check my email or get calls. If I am on set, and bars are small, I wander around, looking for better signal. I am constantly sniffing wifi for a faster option. I feel dangerously out of touch when I can’t get my messages.
Around 1pm, I was able to get my phone working when I got home. I got my twittetrs, my texts and one message. Big deal.
It’s kind of embarrassing.
Working on the Blog
How Meta is this. I am blogging on how I have been working on my blog. Neat.
Last night I did a little time travel, I went back into my old tribe blog and started archiving all my old posts. I saved them all into a web archive format so that I could access them online. The pictures aren’t gonna be perfect, and the links might not all work, but at least the content will be there. I now need to post date all the posts and paste them into my WordPress system.
Art has been doing some amazing work on the new skin for the View From Space site. Brian Shaw has been programming and setting up my web hosting. I feel like I have this amazing team. I am looking to roll things out very soon. It will bring together my writing, my carton projects that are developing, pictures, and video from my mad adventures, social networks I am a part of, my twitter feed, and my google reader feeds. It should be really cool. Art has also been helping me with tags and categories for my blog. I am so excited about finally having a good website for myself.
I am also experimenting with a program for Macs called Blogo. It has a cute bunny icon. It is an offline text editor that automatically posts your blog. It can’t post to multiple blogs at once, which would be nice. But it can handle tags and categories. It likes drag and drop pictures and video, which is key for me. The web interface of wordpress can be a little wonky from time to time. So far, first post, I like it. When I hit send, a twitter should be automatically generated. Neat.
I am also going to have google ad-words and an Amazon associates account attached to the blog. If anything I mention sounds interesting to you, please go ahead and check it out. I get pennies, but if I make a cent on this, I’ll be happy. Hand over fist cash would be nice, too. My next step is to expand an audience. How on earth am I going to get more people to read my blog? I keep hearing the words aggregator and pings… I should probably figure out what those mean.
Going back in the history of my blog was really interesting. My blog goes back years. There are like 250 entries in there. What’s kind of cool is that I get to see all the spaces I have gone through in the last few years. I get to see who was regularly in my world. I got to see who I was.
I like who I have become.
spaceman23
