Recent posts:
2nd November 2011
Hype, hearsay and hyperbolæ – shale gas and the UK energy economy
I take the first random bus and here I am, within one of the areas that might be soon licensed for unconventional gas production. Is there no sanctuary for the weary researcher? This has been my work for the last few months, and even when I try to get away from it, it won't let me go!23rd May 2011
"Promulgating the Web's calorie controlled diet"
Whilst catching up on a long-overdue chore as I recover from the flu, I muse on the role of "design" within the driving energy and resource trends of information systems, and how we measure such ethereal trends in order to define a process for change.16th April 2011
"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one"
Sitting in a dusky evening, a conjugating map of ideas linking like the linear lattice of the hedgerowed landscape, I mull over the milestone we have reached; and why the mainstream media, political and campaign groups seem to have missed it.22nd-25th March 2011
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
I met George Monbiot many years ago, during the various roads and land campaigns of the early 1990s – not long after the security guards at the Batheaston/Swainswick bypass used "minimum reasonable force" to bust his foot, after which he limped from event-to-event on a crutch. As far as nuclear power goes, George has been sitting on the fence for a while now; this week he fell off, on the pro-nuclear side.
23rd December 2010
When You're Windows are Broken don't be Surprised if you Feel the Cold Draught of Distress
Analysing my annual chore – performing maintenance, upgrading and reinstalling my "critical information infrastructure" – I find that this process reveals how the control and intellectual property patterns of the wider economy impose themselves upon our creative use of information technology; or not, if you decide to opt-out of the exploitative clutches of proprietary control and live in the "free" world.
Firstly, my apologies to those wanting the everyday 'blog-o-sphere'-type brief, digested or vacuous information constructs within the content of these pages; I don't tweet, I don't do sound bites, and I don't insult my own or my reader's intelligence by spouting views in isolation from the ideas that define them. My medium is the word, the argument and the reference, and in these pages I'm going to push that medium as far as I can. If that's "not you", or you strongly object to reading lengthy passages of text, please click here.
There are a lot of good blogs around, but all to often blogs are
a link followed by a short commentary on someone else's point of
view – an endless recycling of present/other people's ideas,
or at worse an iterative recycling, without any effort of
extensibility to new themes or ways of thinking.
My biggest problem with blogs are the technological trends behind their use, and in particular the way that the general expansion of database-driven content on-line (usually termed "dynamic" content, or "Web 2.0") is exaggerating the consumption and ecological impacts of the Internet generally. It's not just that modern information systems – the telecommunications networks and the servers that drive them – are now emitting as much carbon as air transport and that the footprint of the "virtual" world continues to grow inexorably; digital electronics and the current conception of "consumer electronics" are fundamentally unsustainable, in both ecological and physical terms. Technology, rather than the liberating forms of human-created mechanisms conceived by the Futurists in the early 20th Century, has become just another form of commercial exploitation and fashion-driven consumption.
If we look deeper into the present fashion for on-line systems
amongst not just governments but also campaign groups, we can see
that the intellectual and ecological flaws in these technologies do
not make the Internet a transformative tool but an extremely
flimsy, and perhaps short-lived one – albeit a system that's
presently cheap to run because the economic costs of its impacts
are externalised or ignored altogether. We are creating a
brittle
system of human knowledge and interchange that, far from being
generally superior to previous forms of communication, merely
augments older forms of intercourse through its greater
geographical range and automated indexing of content. In contrast, so long as
you can read, a book is always accessible provided there's enough
light to read the text, but once we transcribe knowledge to
digital media then we will always require an external,
technological mediator in order to access and use that
information; that's the power of these technologies, but it's also their
principal
flaw. Perhaps more importantly, the trend for physical disassociation that the
Internet and on-line communications tools create means that
whilst we may network over a geographically larger area, we no
longer practise the skills to organise communication face-to-face
to the same extent with those around us – and ultimately,
with the brittleness of modern technology and its ability to enable
greater interpersonal alienation, society will end up the
worse-off
for this. I do not write these views as a condemnation of digital
technologies, but rather as a call for a more general understanding of what they
represent in order to achieve a greater balance and resilience in the
way we augment human knowledge and interchange through their use.
Please don't misunderstand where I'm coming from on this issue; I
routinely use and am very familiar with the
operation of
information systems and digital technology, but this depth of
understanding also allows me to compare the limitations of these
systems with the more traditional alternatives. We can make
significant improvements on our old ways of working with
information technologies (I still remember my early campaign
using a manual typewriter and a mimeograph machine!) but that should
not mean that we abandon these old technologies altogether –
that point of view is driven purely by the mass marketing of
products that seek to create obsolescence in our lives in order
to drive new consumption.
For many years my discursive media of choice has been email. My
expressive medium is the word; as Gloria Steinem stated, 'writing
is the only thing that I do that, when I do it, I don't feel like I should be doing
something else'. Words are symbols; they contain within them relative
links to ideas, concepts, values and experiences, but their symbolic
significance is given meaning by the individual, not the word. A
person’s own knowledge and experience plays a large part in the
symbolic comprehension of a word, and so the value that one person
might attach to a word is not always the same as another. In
terms of the general response, the way we interpret words and
other symbols has much to do with the way society attaches
meaning to them through our culture, and so in a more general way
our reactions are often framed not so much by a measured
summation of our present understanding but rather by the
political and economic dogma of the last two or three centuries
that enforces the conventional wisdom on a particular issue. In
that sense, if used consciously to achieve certain ends, the
Internet can be as much as tool for pointed criticism and attack
as it can be for amicable discourse. For good or ill, divorced
from the essential visual and non-verbal communication cues of
direct human interaction, the raw power of words can be used to
play upon an individual's or groups views in order to trigger a
certain response – "the word as weapon" rather
than "the weapon of the word".
The power of human culture rests with out ability to communicate
concepts to one another using words as the keys to intellectual
constructs; in a very literal sense, words are the medium by
which I take the electrical impulses in my brain and replicate
them in yours. It is by reading, learning, talking and experiencing life
that we imbue ourselves with a broad range of these cultural constructs,
and thus the more we develop this web of experiential, intellectual
knowledge the greater our ability to impart and receive ideas through
the medium of the word becomes. In that sense the Internet is an extension of
direct human communication, but without the geographic boundaries
that have traditionally hampered free association. However, as
mass consumption simplifies culture to a series of standardised
and stylised cues – from the hyper-reality of branding and
marketing, to the manufactured themes of modern music and the
dilemmas TV drama, to the compressed and meaningless statements
of political sound-bites (recently given a new lease of life in
systems such as SMS and Twitter) – the intellectual purposes for
which we use these new communications tools is in fact
diminishing; we're using more to say less, either through
repetition (e.g. 24 hour rolling news) or the recycling of the
same content across other media (e.g. blogs). Therefore it's
legitimate to raise the question as to whether these technologies
have enabled a new dawn of inter-personal expression, or whether they
merely ape the themes of the highly engineered mass consumer
culture, and so in the process miss the more fundamental aspect
of communication – thought.
Which brings me back once again to the reason why I've put this new board together... As noted above, for many years I've been emailing my thoughts around the globe. Whilst recently I've often been pressed to compile my efforts into the form of a blog I've resisted this step because of my problems with both the technological and cultural forms that the blog represents. What I would prefer is the simpler, more technically lightweight approach of the early bulletin board systems (BBSs) that I used to communicate from the late 1980s. But, as with much of modern technology, what is the given technology today is usually, from file formats to hardware, not backwardly compatible with previous forms of technologically mediated exchange. So, having found the time, I've put together my own! It's a system where the program generates static web pages rather than the dynamically generated content of blogging systems; it produces, like the design scheme for the rest of the FRAW web site, a very lightweight and simple hypertext mark-up format; and in keeping with this general theme, the visual design of the pages also emphasises simplicity in design.
OK, so now I have the means to now compose my own lightweight, simple posts
– but what do I do? How can I encompass what I write in a narrow descriptive
term that can be used to describe the purposes of these posts? Fundamentally, my
interest is the future. From the mid-80s I worked as an environmentalist, first
voluntarily and then professionally; I covered planning,
pollution control, radiation and health, toxicology, waste and
other such issues, from one end of the country to the other and
sometimes beyond. But the more I engaged with these disparate
problems the more I came to see that they were part of the same
problem – energy. Around 2001 I started work on energy
specifically, and in particular the issue of peak oil. But again,
the more I engaged with the energy issue the more I found that
all routes of investigation led to one common route – human
ecology. But as I looked at the problems within human ecology I
found that the common way of looking at all these issues,
economics, stood in opposition to the solutions that can be
described from the basis of human ecology.
It isn't that the ecological and economic viewpoints are directly opposed – in fact they often describing the same issue in very similar ways. The principal reason that the ecological and economic viewpoints of the human system result in such a divergence of views is that modern economics represents a radical simplification of the human system in a way that is skewed to meet certain ideological (predominantly the affluent Western) viewpoints; in contrast studies of human ecology seek to objectively identify and tackle the complexity inherent in the operation of both the human system, and the interaction of the human ecological system with the natural ecology of the biosphere.
If you take an ecological viewpoint of this relationship (often encompassed by the term 'deep ecology'), what you find is that the problems we perceive today, from resource depletion and climate change through to the quality of the natural environment, are the result of the failure to see human ecology as a distinct subset of the natural biosphere. In contrast economics views the biosphere as something separate and subservient to the human system. More importantly the failure of our economic, and thus our political, understanding of the relationship between humans and their environment mean that often we exacerbate problems through our ignorance of the importance of the biosphere, and the finite nature of non-biological (e.g. mineral) resources of the planet, to the human ecological system. Thus the problem with our conceptualisation of human and ecological problems isn't so much the phenomena that which we're looking at, but rather the skewed nature of the observations themselves... well, that's meat enough for any feast of convivial virtual verbiage!
So, how to encompass this idea within in a name that can describe this endeavour? The issue at hand is human ecology, or perhaps just 'ecology', and the problems with the way 'economics' interprets these issues. 'Ecological economics' already has a defined set of ideas that would restrict the range and discussion of ideas a little, so let's contract thing a little further... ecolonomics! A nicely vague term that allows plenty of room to define new ideas, and make connections within the web of knowledge, to find new ways of looking at old problems.
The only problem I perceive with this approach is that it's going to annoy a lot of people – and this possibly includes some old friends from the environment movement. Personally I believe that such responses are the problems of others, not my own, since I can see no validity in the basis from which many criticism of my recent work are made. As John Seymour discusses in his book, The Ultimate Heresy, if you take a more objective view of the human system – that it is an essential part of nature rather than being separate and distinct from it – then many of the traditional ways of looking at old problems cease to apply. By implication, taking a new and more expansive viewpoint must also result in a change in the way we describe and understand the things that we see.
The difficulty is that for many people such a change in viewpoint is scary – precisely because it necessitates a change in patterns of living which, from their present position, are very desirable and comfortable. But what if those patterns of living are not just unsustainable in the long-term, but are in fact wholly unrealistic given the trends that are visible today? This is the debate that we face over issues such as climate change, where the effects will be felt in the future but the solutions must be exercised today, or energy and resource depletion, where the trends present use are likely to be rendered inviable by shortages in the near future. Acting on these problems requires foresight, but the ideas that such foresight creates directly threaten the mainstream political and economic conception of how our world should operate today, and in turn this restricts how we might resolve these problems. I also perceive that, over the next few years, this difference in viewpoints will plague the mainstream environmental and conservation movements as they seek to reconcile the worsening human ecological crisis with the economic delusions perpetuated within mainstream politics.
