All posts by Paul Raven

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Building new communities in burst bubbles

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foreclosed property sale signYesterday Cory at BoingBoing pointed out a story about a small artist’s community springing up in the now-notorious $100-housing districts of Detroit:

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

All of a sudden, you’ve got a little nucleus of people turning the current economic crisis to their advantage; they’re even building their own miniature power grid based on renewable energies, and looking at ways to get by as cheaply as possible. [image by The Truth About…]

Much hay has already been made by commentators far more erudite than myself about the sea-change in public attitudes toward frugality and conspicuous consumption in the wake of the economic collapse, but the story above highlights the fact that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to avail yourself of the basics of modern convenience than it ever has been before… provided you’re willing to forgo your status symbols and think hard about what you need rather than what you want.

Artist communities, communes and cooperatives have cropped up again and again in recent (and not-so-recent) history, but I’d argue that never before has there been such viable potential for them to survive and thrive with a minimum of dependence on the state, nor a situation where the state would be willing to let it happen as a matter of expedience. Now, if Rushkoff is even partly right about the corporatist economy dying off for good, can we consider this Detroit community (and others like it elsewhere, like the squats of Berlin or Brighton here in Europe) to be the first signs of nation-statehood eroding from within?

Obviously the Detroit option is only available to those with enough capital to buy a foreclosed and deeply discounted property, but think about all those abandoned towns and towerblocks sat empty all over the world – how long before people stop waiting for their governments to find them somewhere to live, and start doing it for themselves? And how much in the way of resources will their governments be willing to expend on preventing them from doing so, considering all the other things they have to worry about?

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The economics of fiction

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No, nothing to do with bailouts or closed banks; this video is seven minutes of discussion between two economists, Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson, on the economic value of fiction:

If you’re not too familiar with the language of economic academia (it’s a little opaque, to say the least), Bill Benzon’s summary of their points might be helpful:

It’s about signaling (a term of art in economics). Your preferences in fiction, and the way you articulate those preferences, signal your attitudes, values, and ideas to others. Fiction is a way of “getting people in touch with each other.”

The point is also raised that fiction can in some cases have intrinsic cognitive value as well, but the central idea – that your taste in fiction is an external signal about the sort of person you are – is an interesting one, especially for fans of genre fiction like ourselves. The obvious (and over-simple) response would be a kind of “fans are Slans” argument… but that would be to fail at being properly objective about the whole thing, to ignore the need for a proper examination of what makes genre fiction different to ‘straight’ fiction (which I suspect is, in many respects, a much smaller difference than it may seem from this side of the fence).

But what is it about science fiction that has made it such a socially cohesive artform by comparison to, say, romance novels? Is this simply a function of its minority status in the larger field of literature, or is it something to do with the riffs it tends to repeat, and the way those riffs resonate with readers? Or is it a separate (but related) part of the mindset that science fiction just happens to appeal to?

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The memory switch

MRI brain scanOur relentless mapping of our own grey matter continues, and here’s the latest result:

Researchers have found a telltale mental signature that predicts whether an experience will be remembered. Once deciphered, the signals could be used to help people know when their brains are primed to remember, perhaps using an iPhone app.

It doesn’t sound all that impressive, does it, even with the flippant mention of  JesusPhone compatibility further down the line – it’s easy to become blase about these stories when you collect them every day. Technology that monitors and interacts with the brain is becoming commonplace, but the real implications here are surely far bigger than having a PDA tell you when you’re primed for memory tricks.

Biofeedback, for example. Wire someone up to an EEG, and eventually they can consciously control the lines on the screen by watching them; so, with more complex monitoring systems, think of all the other stuff you could train a brain to do better. With memory as an example, perhaps you could train yourself to be in a highly receptive state at all times – that would be a pretty handy skill for spying without carrying any hardware.

But then there’s the flipside – you could train for forgetfulness too, which might make stories like Marissa’s “Erasing the Map” into reality. And the more we learn about the mind as a ‘black box’ system, the closer we come to being able to simulate one on non-biological hardware – which is one of the steps that Kurzweil and others claim are part of the road toward true Artificial Intelligence and brain uploading… [image by jsmjr]

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Rushkoff on the economy: “let it die”

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restaurant pricing - the credit crunch modelUnsurprisingly, everyone everywhere is talking about the economy. The usual twist on the topic is to ask “how can we fix it?”, but Douglas Rushkoff would like to suggest that the global financial collapse is a blessing in disguise and that we should just let it die, as it gives us a chance to reassess the assumptions that our monetary systems were built upon:

… it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

His point is that, at every level, the system was designed to benefit those who set it up at the long-term expense of everyone else – it’s almost miraculous it’s lasted as long as it has:

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

The biggest wealth generator of all was banking itself. By lending money at interest to people and businesses who had no other way to conduct transactions or make investments, banks put themselves at the center of the extraction equation. The longer the economy survived, the more money would have to be borrowed, and the more interest earned by the bank.

Just in case you think Rushkoff’s a sneaky pinko or something, it’s worth considering that he’s an advocate of local economies and currencies, and opposed to any form of centralised control; even if you don’t agree with what he has to say, he raises some talking points that we’d all do well to at least consider. As he points out, we may not get another opportunity… and you know what they say about life handing you lemons. [image by Cory Doctorow]

But what do you think? Should we build a new world where value is produced by actual effort, or can the financial system be fixed to ensure we don’t all strive for the profits of a few?

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New low-cost webzine – Alternative Coordinates

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Via James at Big Dumb Object comes news of a new science fiction webzine, Alternative Coordinates:

Issue one of new SF magazine Alternative Coordinates is online. The web site looks nice, which has got to be a priority for new webzines. You can read a preview of each story, but full access to the issue costs $2, which I think has to be applauded. The price is low enough to be trivial to many people, yet with volume it means the magazine could make money, probably more than advertising?

Alternative Coordinates - science fiction webzine

James is right, it certainly looks good. The low-price electronic ‘zine model has been tried before, of course, but the economic and techno-cultural landscapes are changing so fast that previous successes and failures are no certain guide to future performance… and if the team behind Alternative Coordinates have made as much of an effort with the magazine itself as they have with the presentation of the website, then US$2 seems a pretty reasonable price to place on six short stories for which the writers have been paid.

If you take the plunge and buy an issue, do pop back and let us know what you think of it!