The Realest Shit Anthony Robbins Ever Wrote

Source:
Unlimited Power


It's important to remember that emotions like depression do not happen to you. You don't "catch" depression. You create it, like every other result in your life, through specific mental and physical actions. In order to become depressed, you have to view your life in specific ways. You have to say certain things to yourself in just the right tones of voice. You have to adopt a specific posture and breathing pattern. For example, if you wish to be depressed, it helps tremendously if you collapse your shoulders and look down a lot. Speaking in a sad-sounding tone of voice and thinking of the worst-possible scenarios for your life also helps. If you throw your biochemistry into turmoil through poor diet and excessive alcohol or drug use, you assist your body in creating low blood sugar and thus virtually guarantee depression.

My point here is simply that it takes effort to create depression. It's hard work, and it requires specific types of actions. Some people have created this state so often, though, that it's easy for them to produce. In fact, often they've linked this pattern of internal communication to all kinds of external events. Some people get so many secondary gains -- attention from others, sympathy, love and so on -- that they adopt this style of communication as their natural state of living. Others have lived with it so long that it actually feels comfortable. They become identified with the state. We can, however, change our mental and physical actions and thereby immediately change our emotions and behaviors.

DJ Vlad Has No Patience for Your Excuses

Source: DJ Vlad's Twitter

1. If you make a deal with someone and try to change the deal after work has started, you're wack.

2. If you say something about someone, and then get mad at the person who told them, you're wack.

3. If your crew keeps fucking up and you think it won't affect you, you're wack.

4. If you're an artist and you keep staying in your area even though you're not making any money there, you're wack.

5. If you approach a known person to do some work for u, and don't have a firm budget or start date, you're wack.

6. If you try to convince someone to work with you by telling them a sob story about how hard your life is, you're wack.

7. If you think you can control what get said about you on the internet...

8. If you give your song to a DJ, he doesn't like it, and then you try to 'convince' him to like it, you're wack.

9. If your plan to blow up is 'just waiting for the right person to listen', you're wack.

10. If you think the main reason you haven't blown up is because you don't have a good manager, you're wack.

ALL OF WHICH RAISES THE QUESTION: If you're a rapper or producer who hasn't blown up yet -- WHY? Why do you think it hasn't happened for you? Are there reasons that make sense to you?

Terry McBride on Building Music Brands

Source: PBS MediaShift interview

Terry McBride: We've found in the digital space, that you will sell anywhere between 25% to 50% of your volume from your catalog upon release of any new albums. So you are layering intellectual property. In the digital space, where you don't need to buy shelf space, if you create the right metadata behind what you're doing, and market it in an effective way -- you're not marketing the new album, you're marketing the brand. By the time you make it to album three, you are selling as much of the catalog as the new album, but you don't have the cost with the catalog and everything starts to make sense.

So I had to get people here to believe in this, and stop people from having a heart attack over the equity we were tying up, which we had no ownership in. But proving the model that you have have an artist like State Radio, which is a great example of an artist who makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year from intellectual property, which will help finance the next album.

Chad [Urmston of State Radio] just played to 2,800 people with a $25 ticket price in New York on the weekend. He's marketing a brand, he's not just marketing intellectual property. Now it all makes sense. He's happy, he owns his future, his audience has grown with him really well. Now everything makes sense to him, where initially he was unknown and had to work from the ground up.

The Internet marketing team and his manager did a spectacular job of understanding who his tribe is and would be. Out of the eight artist imprints that we launched, seven of them are very profitable, but it took time and selling the managers on the fact that there were no commissions to be made to a certain point. If they signed an artist to a major label there was instant commissions. And it took the lawyers years to get their heads around it because they just didn't believe in it. It's taken time, but now the managers are looking at a very steady cash flow, and the artists aren't fighting for their creative freedom but actually using their imagination -- and those are two very different things.

Q: For the marketers of music these days, how has their job changed? It used to be about talking to radio and retailers. Now is it about search engine optimization (SEO)?

McBride: Search engine optimization, the ability to write basic code, understanding how social networks and blogs work together, how to connect that interaction back to the sale of music or monetization of behavior or crowdsourcing music. It's understanding all of those things, and having a very imaginative marketing plan around the artist vs. around a product. It's really brand marketing. What are the artists' causes? Are there cause alignments? Are there other brands we can hook up with to align our causes? And if the other brand is bigger, can we give them free music and get exposure to their audience because it's like-minded tribes?"

Read More: PBS MediaShift interview

Intelligent, Visionary Horror Movies (v. 1.0)

The fact that Last House on the Left got remade is a personal insult to me. I've been growing increasingly pissed at the torture porn direction horror movies have been taking, and this list represents the antidote: dark, surreal, and most of all, intelligent horror movies.

Unfortunately -- it's a short list, you know? There's dozens and dozens of films that reach for this but fail due to bad acting, worse scripting, or -- most commonly -- really shitty special effects. If you're into Jodorowsky and David Lynch, then these are all titles I'd highly recommend. Let's begin:

1. The Devil's Backbone

One of the most perfect films I've seen in any genre. Every frame, every character, every scene, every twist: perfect. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, this film is every bit as visionary as his recent triumph Pan's Labyrinth, which I'm not including on this list because you should have seen it already.

2. Cube

Compelling and unique, this is a simple movie with serious staying power. Cube is one of the best examples of making something powerful with a small budget and serious constraints. What's remarkable here is that the end result doesn't suffer at all: the special effects and cinematography are flawless, creating a puzzle box that works on multiple levels. In the absence of a clear explanation or resolution, what remains is a dreamlike horror movie that lends itself to weeks of speculation and reflection.

3. Intacto

It could be argued that this film isn't horror at all, but that's exactly why it's on the list. This is what horror should be like: ambitious, perfect, and thought-provoking. Intacto walks a razor's edge between building a totally consistent internal logic while still leaving dozens of questions un-answered. Intacto is dark, haunting and beautiful, and yeah, I'm deliberately avoiding a plot summary so that the movie can have the full impact it deserves.

4. The Descent

A mainstream, bland-looking genre piece, I know. I was skeptical about this one, too. Fortunately, the actual film is almost nothing like the generic previews and promo made it out to be. It's remarkable for two reasons: first, an entirely female cast full of strong characters, and second, the intelligence and the ambiguity of the story itself. The minimalist setup would be mere laziness in the hands of most screenwriters but Neil Marshall (who also directs) pushes the premise so far it becomes art. In other words, this was awesome.

5. The Abandoned

Another hidden gem ruined by it's own promotion, The Abandoned was a very sophisticated and truly adult horror film. The most common complaints are that it's too slow and too confusing, but then again, we're in a Saw/Hostel era where character development is alien and scary for American audiences. Although this is basically a "ghost story," the only comparisons I can reach for are the bleak and beautiful Russian sci-fi work of Andrei Tarkovsky. (The room full of friends I watched this with also felt it was similar -- and superior -- to Session 9.)

6. Butcher Boy

Probably the closest thing to a nightmare in movie format I've seen, this is miles away from traditional horror...and that's a good thing. Directed by Neil Jordan, who is famous for The Crying Game and Michael Collins but deserves mention here for his other surreal horror masterpiece, The Company of Wolves. Both films are extremely good, but I'm focusing on Butcher Boy because it's so much more emotionally compelling, historically rich, and flat-out beautiful.

7. Jacob's Ladder

Although it's getting dated these days, this remains one of the best examples of "smart horror" as a genre. Unforgettably weird and deeply creepy, what really sets this film apart is the quality of the acting. Even the most bizarre sequences are believably human. Jacob's Ladder would have been a notable film just on the visuals and the plot alone, but Tim Robbins makes this movie great.

Unfortunately, this is due for a hollywood remake, which will probably have much better special effects and none of what made it great in the first place. (Then again, I was skeptical about the remake of Dawn of the Dead and it wound up being one of the best zombie films ever, so let's keep the Hope alive.)

8. The Cell

Eye candy meets brainfood in a movie so solid, not even Jennifer Lopez could fuck it up. The level of visual detail here is something only matched by big-budget recent works like Pan's Labyrinth or Silent Hill, which is coming up next. Even with the stunning costume, set and makeup work, the real star here is Vincent D'Onofrio, who delivers the most intense human monster since Hopkins was wearing a Hannibal Lecter facemask. I have absolutely no idea why this film isn't more famous and widely known.

SIDE NOTE: Tarsem's follow-up movie, while not horror, gets 10/10 from yours truly. It's called The Fall
and it's so gorgeous, complex and amazing I have absolutely nothing to compare it to. Hopefully that's recommendation enough to get you to check this gem out. Unreal.

9. Silent Hill

Yep, it's "just" a video game movie, but it's also the high-water mark for CGI work in a horror film. The nightmare landscapes that populate this movie are so gorgeous I'm out of adjectives, folks. The characters and the plot are in the back seat here -- the premise is thin and the resolution is just plain weird (thankfully) -- but this movie is 100% worth viewing strictly for the almost non-stop visual art.

10. Dead Ringers

There's no way I could make this list without at least one Cronenberg title. Deciding on which to use was harder than compiling the rest of the list. His version of The Fly still stands as one of the creepiest bad dreams in movie format, and his adaptation of Naked Lunch is a perfect marriage of horror and surrealism. But I went with Dead Ringers because it's the most haunting and intellectual film Cronenberg has done, and bear in mind I'm saying that as someone who's missed Spider, so I could be wrong. Dead Ringers is so unrelentingly weird that I'm still kind of amazed it ever got made.

More Suggestions:

Another great Cronenberg film was Videodrome, which was decades ahead of it's time and serves today as a parody/counterpoint to the torture porn of Hostel and Saw.

The director's cut of THX 1138 is an absolute must-see, but it's more dystopian than horror, so I didn't include it on the list here. I've also omitted the best sci-fi horror crossover film in recent memory, Event Horizon which suffers from an over-blown ending but builds beautifully up until it falls apart.

For feverish and slightly goofy visionary horror, I'd recommend a trio of criminally under-rated movies: Killer Condom, Severance, and Murder Party. All three of them are smart, gory, and black humor hilarious.

Film buffs will notice an obvious lack of Japanese horror films. I was tempted to include Audition, but that movie is more brutal than smart. It's perfectly acted, paced and shot, and one of the most truly shocking films I've seen in the past 10 years -- but not really the kind of material I'm going for here.

Currently downloading and waiting to watch: Timecrimes, Moon, Vinyan, Sheitan, and Ravenous.

One final mention: it's bleak, hideous, ugly and gory, but Calvaire is also one of the best shot "beautiful ugly" horror films I've seen. I wouldn't accuse it of being intelligent, but there's a black humor undercurrent that David Lynch fans would appreciate.

IN CLOSING, PLEASE ADD SUGGESTIONS.

Dmitry Orlov's Simple Suggestions for World Designers

Dmitry Orlov is a card-carrying Doomer for sure, but I felt this was strong, short and excellent so I'd like to share it here:

"Forget 'growth,' forget 'jobs,' forget 'financial stability.'

What should their [the government's] realistic new objectives be?

Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless.

If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified."

Further Brainfood:

1. Making GIS Data as Powerful and Accessible as Possible

2. DOING THE MATH: How Much Food to Actually Feed a Community?

3. Vinay Gupta on "Infrastructure for Anarchists"

Urban Evolution: Open Invitation

Psyched about the clarity this has brought me, energized by the momentum it's been gathering. Research jam session, extended World Design Party, and also a forum. The biggest thing I'm looking for isn't experts, it's just questions you've had in your head for awhile. You can also ask those questions in the comments section here if you don't want to register for Urban Evolution...but please do, you know?

How Much is Enough?

Five billion dollars, in this day and age, is nothing.

It's also the sum of $50,000 being paid out to 100,000 groups around the country. Do I have the math right on that? Because that's a mighty fertile thought, right there. $50,000 isn't a ton of money by any stretch, but it is enough for some quality remote acres. It's enough to set up a whole block with rooftop gardens, enough to set up a municipal compost center to convert biowaste into quality soil and redistribute that. Etc.

Another way to phrase this: $500,000 grants for 10,000 lucky applicants. Half a million dollars is enough money to build a group farm that can provide huge bioremediation utility and capacity. I'm not talking LEED certified architechno, but something that works and something that's survivable.

Not everyone wants to go start a farm -- that takes a rare breed of crazy, but those people tend to be the best investments, too.



Has anyone been running the numbers on this in their own heads? How much is enough? At what approximate $ point would you feel like you've got the capital power to get set up with land, infrastructure, shelter and equipment and get a food farm operation going?

Any thoughts appreciated -- and remember: this Monday is Yours.

I'm Going to Get Published a Lot This Year.

Yep, that's what I just decided. Having worked out a lot of efficient and effective methods for Content Farming™ and Hi-Speed Journalism© this past year, I'm thinking the best use for these skills is making money. Of course, most of the publications I'd like to show up in probably don't pay very well, but this is about getting published, not getting rich. (I do that by manufacturing LSD in Brussels, like any sane businessman would.)

I'm sure there's a great deal of advice I could compile about "getting published" -- and as Pizza SEO readers know, I swipe templates all day. For this, however, I'm operating on a very simple formula that's served me very well in life: overdeliver what matters.

There is very little that needs to be said in any human interaction. What are you writing about, how much copy is needed, how much will you be paid -- done. As Confucius once remarked, brevity is the soul of GTD.



This humble Saturday morning muse is a sigil of sorts: a declaration of intention placed where the spirits can read it. It's also an open call for suggestions on strategy and target publications. I've grudgingly accepted that MIT Tech Review and IEEE Spectrum will probably not accept unsolicited science journalism from a hick without a degree, but think about how much that sounds like the next NYT business book bestseller.



In related news, in 2019 I'd like to have a TV show where I sit down with Tony Robbins and do thirty second rounds, where I would try to calm him down, then he would try to charge me up. We'd both be hooked up to biofeedback machines that would display onscreen for the audience at home. It would be judged like a boxing match, where certain biofeedback thresholds would qualify as knockdowns, and knockouts. Rounds would go non-stop, because that just how that man rolls. College kids will make this into a drinking game and thousands will die. (Sorry about that last part, but that's how it came to me in the dream.)

High Fructose Corn Syrup = Poison.

Obviously, a lot of people have scooped this before me, but I feel obligated to relay the signal. When Klint posted this story at Technoccult, they got an Instant Bullshit Response™ from an employee of Weber Shandwick, a nest of PR parasites in the NY metropolitan area. (You can give them a call at 212-445-8000.)

THE GIST: The Food and Drug Administration, one of the single most failed regulatory bodies in the history of US government, has known that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) contains mercury. So have the mega-corporations who synthesize and sell HFCS. This is nothing new: agribusiness has been poisoning your environment and your children for decades now.

Best summary link: The Green Fork.

Still, it's important to repeat the truth. Johnny B. over a Dysnomia has a great little post on the PR machine that's scrambling to spin this. So it's also important to spotlight this: after corporations poison you, they will spend millions of dollars to lie about it before they give up a single cent to pay for the damage they've done.



Consider this an open invite for Weber Shandwick employees to think about how meaningless your lives are. Oh, and your comments will be deleted and/or altered as I see fit.

SimVermont: Real Deal Open Source Gov

Note: this is inspired by a recent Brainsturbator article on Bucky Fuller's World Game.

Accurate simulation is a powerful tool. From airplane design to processor boards, humans use highly accurate simulations to make highly important decisions. State government should be no different, especially a state with a data-set as small as Vermont's.

A man named Alok Chaturvedi claims he's achieved a 1:1 world simulation, running two IBM super-computers at once. He also claims it's proprietary, and he runs a corporation called Simulex that farms out this prediction engine to corporate and military clients.

Regardless of how accurate his machine really is, we do know that it's a massive computation hog. His system, which he calls Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation, is run on a bridged connection between two University computers (taxpayer funded?) and obviously, more expensive than anything Vermont state government could afford. Meet the Orion Complex:



Fortunately, Vermont is a much smaller data set. The world has over six billion humans, but Vermont only has 600,000.

Data is only numbers -- simulation requires algorithms. Having a detailed snapshot of Vermont's wetlands is only a static image. In order to run a simulation off those numbers, we have to understand how they interact and why they change.

The hardest part is the most important: modeling ecosystems. Getting data will probably be a matter of civilian volunteers collecting it throughout the state. We will also be in the process of discovering how to model most of the ecosystem relationships for the first time.



Carbon Cycles

Population Ecology

Microclimate Design



Resources: Vermont State Gov's statistics collection, the Vermont Biodiversity Project, good old Wikipedia, and especially the Gund Institute's highly relevant Research Archive.

A Short History of Ending US Oil Dependence

"It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs"

--Barack Obama

Right on, eh? This sounds like exactly what we need -- a radical break from the previous administration. Except...well, history paints a much more disturbing picture. With no further commentary from me, here's a look back at our previous administrations:

"To keep our economy growing, we also need reliable supplies of affordable, environmentally responsible energy. Nearly four years ago, I submitted a comprehensive energy strategy that encourages conservation, alternative sources, a modernized electricity grid, and more production here at home, including safe, clean nuclear energy. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. And my budget provides strong funding for leading-edge technology -- from hydrogen-fueled cars, to clean coal, to renewable sources such as ethanol. Four years of debate is enough -- I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on foreign energy."

--George W. Bush

"Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977, never."

--Jimmy Carter

"We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil."

--Gerald Ford.

"Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving."

--Richard Nixon

Are You Pushing Hard Enough?

Do you think you deserve to relax? This kind of thinking, dear reader, is simply and fundamentally fucked. "Relaxation" is like Anarchy or Freedom -- either it's a constant fact of life, or it's a meaningless concept...monkey mouth noise. You should constantly be relaxed, centered, grounded, aware and at peace. That shouldn't be a reward, it should be a reality. If "Relaxation" means some sort of lazy, wallowing celebration of a mostly meaningless recent accomplishment, you're setting yourself up for failure by breaking the very patterns of behavior that made you successful to begin with.

Do you seriously take yourself seriously? As many marketers and magicians have observed: if you want to know what people think, pay no attention to what's coming out of their mouth. Instead, watch their behavior. What we say is just words -- what we do has a great deal more to "say" about how we percieve the world. It's often helpful to visualize personal heroes and dead ancestors sitting across the table from you, watching silently. Most of the people I've met who believe the government is watching them, oddly, are still very awkward on camera and have yet to start projecting or being entertaining.

Do you have a Mandala of Priorities? Playing with Mindmapping recently, it dawned on me that my interests should be organized in a spiral. For instance, although I find algae farming and Earth-built housesto be completely fascinating, I'm also living in an urban apartment, at least until summer 2009. So my focus should be on more immediate and relevant issues, like composting, setting up an indoor sprouting operation that's catproof this time, and setting up an equally secure indoor gardening box for multiple varieties of heirloom Kale, Tomatoes, Carrots, Arugula, Lettuce and Wheatgrass. Focus on research areas with immediate and obvious benefits.

Are you pushing hard enough? Great news -- this is not a philosophical or complicated question. There is a single, all-purpose Universal Answer and that answer is NO. You can always improve your operation. Let me know about any specific productivity blocks you're facing and I'll whip up answers in the form of future Pizza SEO posts. I do a lot of projects and I've been screwing up in spectacular new ways for over two decades now -- I'm here to help you help you.

Hope Tech 2009: World Design Manuals

Over on Autonomy Without Tears, Jon Storvick has begun digging into the reality-based planning of a huge urban regrowth project like what we've been discussing so far. (If you're just catching up, start with this roundup.) Jon is focusing on this right here:



What's the fastest way to reclaim that kind of dead soil? Is it possible to show up with soil, water tanks, plants and seedlings, and work outwards to start doing bioremediation, soil restoration and water purification? How much can be saved by recycling onsite materials? Can we rebuild this "bad" real estate into beautiful and abundant designed ecosystems for human habitation?

In questions of land rehabilitation, I find myself coming back to two amazing reference books: Edible Forest Gardens,by David Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, and Mycelium Running,by Paul Stamets.

The best kind of writing is repeatably useful. The philosophical headfucks, like Finite and Infinite Games,for instance, will unfold over the course of time and mean very different things to you at different points in your life. My favorite kind of useful writing, though, is a truly well-done reference book that stands as a Human Species Accomplishment. The kind of obsessive work that went into early editions of Encyclopedia Britannia or Webster's dictionary takes a lot out of you, and few authors have the patience or balls to build monuments right.

Edible Forest Gardens is the kind of book that I will pass on to my kids because it will still be useful for them. I cannot say the same for CSS Mastery,you know? David Jacke and Eric Toensmeier have built one of the coolest reference books I've ever found: a hands-on local ecosystem designer's manual.

WHAT IS AN EDIBLE FOREST GARDEN?

An edible forest garden is a perennial polyculture of multipurpose plants. Most plants regrow every year without replanting: perennials. Many species grow together: polyculture. Each plant contributes to the success of the whole by fulfilling many functions: multipurpose. In other words, a forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food productions.

I recognize the price is steep, and I'm working on a "public source" version of the same material, because most of the concepts are naturally circulating on Teh Internets. Jon also found a massive Torrent about appropriate technology: check that out here and let me know how it works. Getting #TECHXFER moving in 2009.

The best companion piece is Paul Stamet's manual. If you've never seen Stamets speaking at TED, please do so now. It's inspirational, educational, and the best introduction to the man's work. When I ordered Mycelium Running, I expected it to be a biographical account of his work and his visions -- what I got was a detailed, perfectly illustrated guide to hands-on projects in "mycoremediation," the art and science of healing soil with mushrooms.

Of course, there is plenty of biographical details and vision statements, and lots more, too. Like Edible Forest Gardens, Stamets has created a book that stands as a complex and consistently useful toolkit. After thirteen huge chapters covering over 100 projects, he concludes with a nearly 100 page field guide to useful medicinal, argicultural and food mushroom species. This is a goldmine and very much worth the higher cost.

ALSO ALSO: Check out this amazingly good documentary, Wildlife of Detroit, about the regrowth of an urban center into a post-consumer agriculture community:


Detroit Wildlife from florent tillon on Vimeo.

#whatworks -- Check out some brainfood from sociologist Charles Dobson: "Social Movements: A Summary of What Works"

Hope Tech 2009 or, Back to Memetics

Back to memetics, folks: I've moved the World Design Party thinking over to BRNSTRBTR, a Tumblr project. The World Design thinking is going to stay very much the same, though, only more grounded in hands-on demonstrations. Like this, for example...



Hope Tech 2009 is deliberately symmetrical and patterned to be a year-long campaign. Twelve characters in a 3x4 grid, a name that sounds imperative and fresh until September, and two of the powerful single-word memes in circulation today: hope and tech. Shamelessly cynical marketing thinking employed in an open-source campaign for the public good.

The logo is by Jacob North, and I'm encouraging Pizza SEO readers to grab this and run with it, should the spirit move you.

My goal is to spotlight and network people and groups who are actively improving the world with repeatable solutions. For clarification, getting a large grant from George Soros is definitely a solution, but not something people can template and repeat elsewhere. Backyard aquaculture is a repeatable solution, so is microloan investing, and the thermal mass architecture of Michael Reynolds. We're trying to keep up with #whatworks.

Urban Earthships

"Since the inception of the Greater World Community, Michael Reynolds has attempted to address some of these questions. In his newest book, Earthships volume III, Michael Reynolds introduces his idea of the Urban Earthship - City Application. While I have not fully investigated the concepts, he presents drawings and explanations for designing entire cities that don't need municipal water or power services. Perhaps it's a crazy concept, but we have done crazier things."

--source: Ann Scmidt



"A low-density compound of people living 15 miles outside of Taos, New Mexico is either going to result in a ton of driving, or else is going to be curbing its environmental footprint primarily through its residents never going anywhere or buying anything. This is fine, perhaps, when you're talking about people with total commitment to the cause, but it's not really pointing in the direction of a systemic solution. My understanding is that it's much better to encourage people to live in relatively small apartments where they can walk to the grocery store and take mass transit to work than it is to get everyone to stick solar panels on the roofs of big exurban houses."

--source: Matthew Yglesias

The rest of the comments on the Yglesias article were very educational -- great to see questions and conflicting ideas get played out. On that same note, check out the comments from John Robb's most recent Resilient Community article, Urban Farming Platforms -- again, the comments make the post 1000x better.



READING: In addition to the Earthships series, here's two accessable, illustrated and detailed books on the subject of earth building: Earth-Sheltered Housesand Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques.






Finally, check out the great Flash presentation from David Sheen about his Urban Earthpod design.

World Design Brainfood Overdose 2009

"Once the fragile legal frameworks that give the concept of "ownership" its current meaning break down, stockpiles of wealth or weaponry become an invitation to seizure by governments as well as less officially sanctioned thieves. Those whose value consists of things they can do and teach, on the other hand, give everyone a reason to leave them unharmed. This latter strategy, unrealistic as it looks from the modern world's viewpoint, has worked consistently in the past. The success and survival of Christian monks in Dark Age Europe is paralleled by that of Buddhist monks in the bitter wars of the Sengoku jidai period of medieval Japan, Taoist priests and hermits in the repeated disintegrations of imperial China, and many other people who have embraced strategies based on the value of knowledge in past ages of collapse. Even in the pirate havens of the 16th century Caribbean, among the most brutal and lawless societies in recorded history, physicians, shipwrights, and other skilled craftspeople led charmed lives, because everybody knew their own lives might depend on access to those skills at some point in the future."

SOURCE: Facing the De-Industrial Age, by John Michael Greer.



"Generally, we think of cars as things which are quickly replaced in our society, and buildings as things which rarely change. But that will not be the case over the next few decades. Because of population growth, the on-going development churn in cities (buildings remodeled or replaced, etc.), infrastructure projects and changing tastes, we'll be rebuilding half our built environment between now and 2030. Done right, that new construction could enable a complete overhaul of the American city.

This is especially true since we don't need to change every home to transform a neighborhood. Many inner-ring suburban neighborhoods, for instance, can become terrific places simply by allowing infill and converting strip-mall arterials to walkable mixed-use streets. This transition can happen in a few years."

SOURCE: My Other Car is a Bright Green City, by Alex Steffens.



"So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich."

SOURCE: How to Get Rich, by Jared Diamond, of all people. I know.



"...cities do seem in many ways to respond much better to globalization than nation-states do. When a city's population globalizes, when it becomes a global marketplace, if it can keep the local peace and order, it booms. London, Paris, New York, Toronto, they've never been more polyglot and multiethnic.

In my futurist book TOMORROW NOW I was speculating that there might be a post-national global new order arising in cities. Cities as laboratories of the post-Westphalian order.

However...okay, never mind the downside yet. Let's just predict that in 2009 we're gonna see a whole lot of contemporary urbanism going on. Digital cities. Cities There For You to Use. Software for cities. Googleable cities. Cities with green power campaigns. Location-aware cities. Urban co-ops. "Informal housing." "Architecture fiction." The ruins of the unsustainable as the new
frontier.

A President from Chicago who carried the ghettos and barrios by massive margins. Gotta mean something, I figure."

SOURCE: State of the World 2009, a spiral conversation with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky.

Open Question: What to do with dead cars?

What's the best use for a dead car?

We know that the tires can be used for Earthships, but what about the chassis? Can window glass shards be used for home-made PV? What's the most efficient way to bioremediate waste oil? What are the biggest safety hazards of working with car wrecks? How can we turn this junk into a resource?

#d09 World Design Xmas Eve

So I'm up at 5:23 am once again, looking out at pouring rain on a frozen Illinois landscape, and I'm thinking about Vermont. Also, Detroit...Mumbai, Lagos and Earth with 7 billion homo sapiens. It's World Design Wednesday, and Christmas Eve, too.

First of all, a big thank you to Miss MCM, global citizen and Earthship owner, for being the only one to actually call up some Detroit real estate agents and determine what in the hell is going on:

"Okay, I just spoke to a listing agent in Detroit of several forclosure properties. According to her, when you buy bank-owned properties, you do indeed get a clear title. She said some of the ridiculously low priced properties (500/month) that are showing up in MLS may actually be rentals, it's hard to tell on some of these sites. She was very nice; if anyone truly wants to buy some properties in Detroit I would be happy to pass on her contact info."

As the map demonstrates, Detroit has a huge surface area -- and 30% of it, "about 40 square miles," is just vacant land. 67,000 homes have been foreclosed on and 44,000 of those are empty.

According to the improbably named Doug Diggs, who works for Detroit as the Director of their Planning and Development Department, the average home demolition totals out at just over $10,000 in expenses. Clearly the cost and logistics of demolition is an obstacle to work on, but like the magick Christmas miracle that it is, the Detroit Project still lumbers on.

As Klintron pointed out at Technoccult, "there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel." No matter where you are, there's models for Doing It Right that you can study and learn from. His recommendations: The Free State projects in Wyoming and New Hampshire, the Ithaca Hours program, as well as CAMP and Bolozone in St. Louis.

Klintron also dropped this gem: "the problem with St. Louis or Detroit is the same. There's already highly organized paramilitary forces there: the police."

Detroit has proven to be a great study example on Food. A recent MSNBC story tried to evoke hope but wound up dropping one of the most concrete problems facing the Detroit Project:

"Focus:HOPE's food program serves 41,000 people a month; manager Frank Kubik estimates that's only half the number of Detroiters in need of the assistance."

So even if you moved to Detroit with 400 like-minded people, which is a high estimate of what's possible here, you'd be faced with the responsibility of providing food for 100 people with no land, no options, and too much fear and anger. If that sounds like a bad situation, let's take a step outwards:

"The average age of American farmers is over 55 and approaching 60. The proportion of principal farm operators younger than 35 has dropped from 15.9 percent in 1982 to 5.8 percent in 2002. Of all the dismal statistics I know, these are surely among the most frightening. Who will be growing our food twenty years from now?"

That's Richard Heinberg, and those would all appear to be USDA numbers, accurate enough as government propagandaccounting goes.

I also highly recommend the thinkage in the Christos Vasilikiotis essay "Can Organic Farming Feed the World?" and the most recent dispatch from Resilient Community author/genius John Robb about Urban Farming Platforms.

...and finally...

Jon Storvik from Autonomy Without Tears provided the best closing note I could imagine:

"I think one of the most popular critiques of this project (and the one that is most likely to hold it back) is that people are saying "why Detroit? Why can't we do this in our own areas?" Well, you can, if you can get enough people in your area to come along for the ride. The thing is, if this sort of idea is going to take hold and become an inspiration to communities across the country, someone needs to go ahead and do it somewhere. Detroit might as well be the starting point.

Land and housing is cheap. Detroit is already one of the most extreme examples of failed/feral cities in the country, if this kind of thing can be done there, it can be done anywhere. Why not drop a couple grand on a property or two and see what can be done? It's not even like you'd have to live there, we could set up eco-rental units, even provide housing for WWOOF workers who might want to come work on an experimental urban farm. Lots of room for ideas here, folks."

World Design Party: #d09 Detroit 2009

Thanks to Acrylicist, Technoccult masterbrainer Klinton, Jon Storvik, legendary creature of legend Xtal, and Chris Arkenberg for getting this started up.

The Basic Pitch: The City of Detroit has such an absurdly bad depression on home prices that you can currently buy an apartment building for less than $1000. To begin with, hop on Realtor.com and take a look around Detroit.

Rather than abandoning Detroit, should we be embracing this opportunity to start over? Is there a proven track record of using sustainable development and ecosystem design to raise property values? Are there factories that could be transformed into carbon sinks, community supported farms, bioremediation projects and public parks? Are there blocks that could benefit from permaculture installations?

Is there any precedent for building and maintaining Earthships in an urban environment? Would city permitting even allow for a sane use of blighted land, or is development for profit legally mandatory? Can we just demolish a home to avoid having to pass a housing inspection? Is it generally a bad idea to try and build in the Atrazine-saturated "Poison Belt"?

Are there existing models for doing this right? Yes. Thanks to Mathpunk for the tip about Braddock, Pennsylvania -- where their hands-on mayor John Fetterman is rebuilding a "collapsed" former steel town that lost 90% of it's population since 1940.



TOOLS

I've started a Google Maps project for the cheapest homes in Detroit to see where the clusters were. Check it out: Detroit 2009.


View Larger Map

Best Tool Ever = Open Questions. Where's the best place to build a homebase in the United States of America? The best balance of opportunity, risk, resources and constraints? This is obviously a very personal and subjective question -- but I think patterns will emerge. If not PDX, if not Detroit, if not Montana...

We all value personal freedom and quality company, we're all intro-extroverted autodidacts who never learn. I'm curious what the free mammals have to say on this.

Memetics: Open Questions

Dawkin's initial meme concept was a suggestion -- a metaphor. It was not a theory, or even a very clear hypothesis.

It's pretty clear to most observers that something like a meme is at work in the transmission of concepts and ideas and customs from human to human. This is why so many books have been written on the subject despite the lack of any workable theory -- the author can build a case off anecdotes about ideas spreading like wildfire, make general observations about the patterns, and then wrap it up with a grandiose conclusion. In the meantime, they haven't added much of anything to the discussion.

The best Malcolm Wells book was not written by Malcolm Wells -- it's called Made to Stick, and it's written by Dan and Chip Heath. Their book is a perfect deconstruction of why authors like Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are so popular, despite being factually wrong nearly all of the time. (If you'd like to learn more, just print out their first year of Fast Company columns, which is better than their books was.)

Far from philosophy and popular science, in the field of sales persuasion, the focus is on That Which Works. Men like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays weren't looking for the individual building blocks of idea viruses, they were looking for working techniques, the applied science of memetics.

I've really been digging the work of Edward Wilson and Wes Unruh for the past few months -- they collaborated on a dense but accessable book called The Art of Memetics. It's probably the most interesting non-fiction approach to Memetics I've found so far, and Wes is making the entire book available for free. I believe he's just past the halfway mark, so you can catch the first dozen or so chapters now.

In closing, here's my open questions:

1. What is the core component of memetic transmission? Is there one?

2. What is the smallest possible memetic unit? How short can the message be and still retain it's potency?

3. Are memes an emergent property of cultural systems? In other words, we assume memes are bottom-up, human ==> culture, but why assume that when there's just as much evidence that the opposite could be true?

4. To what extent is the meme associated with the host language? Are memes made of language, or does language exist to "carry" memes? Are English memes and Chinese memes functionally the same?

Vermontistan & Personal Autonomy Technology

Still expanding the operation on the Free Vermont project. I've been fleshing out an "About" page, using an FAQ format to get myself started.

Sidenote: I use this method A LOT to "frame" my writing jobs and articles. All essays are consecutive answers to a logical sequence of questions. If you write out the questions first, everything falls into place faster. Don't expect to just produce the blueprint when you first try this exercise: just brainstorms questions in no particular order. You can organize them later.

As you probably know, I use Blogger as a sketchpad for ideas. When I think I've got a decent project concept, I start a new page on Blogger. Boom. I think the free canvas that Google provides here is amazing. (I've prepared a guide to customizing Blogger at Audible Hype for those curious. For Wordpress users, Pizza SEO recently did an article on Wordpress Customization, too.)

Free Vermont is definitely still in sketch mode, overlapping with the 5GW Project at Skilluminati, as well as the research I'm still doing to expand and explain the last Brainsturbator post, "Saving the World Starts in Africa." I have not yet grokked in fullness, and there's still more learning to be done.

Here's what I do know: most of the research money, manpower, and promotional work is being wasted right now because of redundant work. Everyone wants to lead the parade, dominate the discussion, patent The Solution.

The concept of intellectual property has done more damage to the "Green" movement than the actual opposition. (Look at the cautionary case of William McDonough, who provides the memetic ecosystem with valuable fertilizer.)

If something works, it should be documented online and made available for other humans to try, anywhere. The only danger behind Open Information is lost profits -- the only danger from Trademark Greed is lost lives.

Proprietary language is an attempt to brand a topical discussion. We can talk about synchronicity, we can talk about positive thinking, but when we talk about the Law of Attraction© Joe Vitale and Oprah Winfrey get paid a little bit more. This is why Richard Bandler decided to build a franchise off the horseshit name "Neurolinguistic Programming" instead of just calling it hypnosis like Milton Erikson did. Pizza SEO© Business Note: Once he'd gotten a whole generation of suckers to buy into the "NLP" franchise, Bandler was smart enough to position himself into something even more elite...now he's doing Design Human Engineering.

...AND THE GOOD NEWS

Well, Meraki Solar Wireless Routers are on sale. They are sure as hell not cheap, with every system priced at over $1000. Going to wait on the first round of user reviews before I jump on that.

Also check out the work being done at Open Farm Tech -- some of the most valuable and dense open source material on "Community Resilience" I've found anywhere. Still lots of missing details, though...more of a framework than a finished manual.

World Design Wednesday Report

Here's what I've been up to for World Design Wednesday:

1. Free Vermont. I've been building a Twitter feed and a background blog to accompany this little communication platform. Although "Free Vermont" is rooted in the Vermont Secession movement, I'm not advocating secession at all. As my mom so perfectly puts it: "We lead. No need to secede." From banning slavery to women's rights, Vermont has always been ahead of the curve and the future will be no different. More on this next week...meanwhile, I'm developing content in the lab.

2. DIY Projects. I've already implemented the compost and vermiculture, and today I've been working on starting sprouts: alfalfa, barley and sunflowers. Studying up on hydroponics systems, because I really want to start getting Kale going in this apartment. I've interacted with a number of seekers in the past week who hadn't seen In The Wake, a solid and valuable collection of core life skills. I recommend starting with the chapter on water purification. I want to build an ecosystem around myself and work more closely with living technology.



3. Actual World Design. I've been thinking about building Earth simulators for the purpose of testing ideas out in virtual space. This not science fiction: there's actually a company that does this for corporations and the US military, called Simulex. I've been stashing a great deal of research and technical data about Alok Chaturvedi and his work at the Brainsturbator forum.

Rather than having this kind of tech in the hands of DARPA eggheads, I'd like to make it open source. Anyone should be able to use this system to test out ideas, and get detailed data they can keep, analyze and compare with others.

This project has turned my attention back to the work of Will Wright, the game design genius that long ago gave us SimEarth. I'm taking notes on Agent-Based Models, IBM's new Deep Green, the Teraflop SP supercomputers, and the very valuable realm of System Dynamics. I'm also thinking that I'll have to dig into the work of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita for better modeling algorithms.

I recognize that I'm in over my head, but that's also my favorite environment to be in. I think starting with a smaller-scale version -- like a Virtual Vermont, for instance, with a database of 600,000 agents -- would be a more manageable and realistic project to start with.



4. Solar Energy Innovation. Am I mis-reading reality, or has everything about solar power changed in 2008? It's gotten radically cheaper, more efficient, and on top of that, MIT's Professor Nocera is working on artificial photosynthesis to enable storage of solar energy as hydrogen gas. As if on cue, a Chinese team discovered a new catalyst to improve the process and reduce the costs: carbon nitride, which humans have been making since 1834.

The future looks good from here. The biggest problem we face is human ignorance -- we've got all the tools to build a better life on Earth right in front of us.

PIZZA SEO WARS 3: It Had To Happen

Loyal readers, please welcome The Third Pizza SEO, by Andrej Salner.

Andrej was hired by the Slovak Usurpers because of me. The irony, poetry and beauty of my pranks actually creating a job for someone...well, it's beyond words. It's also especially funny how Andrej has been adopting a number of my language patterns in his own writing. Andrej Salner is a smart guy who's been very helpful and polite, and I'm glad to see Pizza SEO finally heating up again.

This is turning into an excellent case study on Brand Subversion, as well as the obscure discipline of Latent Semantic Indexing. It's also an international exchange of knowledge. Andrej taught me about SEO research tools directly, and I'm teaching him English copywriting skills without really trying. (I'm not bragging, I'm giving Andrej a compliment...I'm not trying because I don't have to, he's smart enough to model my patterns on his own.)

Also worth checking out: they finally updated the still-born Squidoo page I mocked with The Pizza SEO Project. I'll clearly have to change that one around, since they've swiped my text for this gem:

Pizza SEO is a search engine optimization company based in Bratislava, Slovakia. We used a small company site to reclaim the name "Pizza SEO" from Justin Boland. We did this for a single reason, to protect the name of a hard working, small SEO company.

It goes on to mock me at great length, so definitely check it out. I haven't gotten broken down in such depth since I wrote that article about 9-11.

I thank Andrej for taking the time to do this - it makes the game much more entertaining. It's also quite interesting to see what kind of human being my recent data cloud makes me out to be. Immediate Lesson: talking about drug use on Twitter will probably get used against you. I probably shouldn't advocate the ritual use of LSD here, either...but I will.