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| <article> | |||
| <h1>Être libres à l’époque du numérique</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/tre-libres-lpoque-du-numrique/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p><img src="https://mpng.pngfly.com/20190123/bst/kisspng-linux-libre-free-software-foundation-latin-america-download-freedo-svg-clipart-1-432-free-freedo-p-5c49402ceb6da7.6071370315483044289643.jpg"/> | |||
| <p>Nous parlons de plus en plus de « numérique » en substantivant un adjectif qui – initialement – comporte une signification technique précise et qui devient désormais davantage un phénomène culturel qu’une notion liée à des outils technologiques particuliers. Cette universalisation du numérique nous permet de comprendre des changements qui affectent l’ensemble de notre société et notre façon de penser, comme l’a bien expliqué notamment Milad Doueihi par son concept de <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055247">« culture numérique »</a>.</p> | |||
| <p>Mais il y demeure un problème majeur au sein de cet usage : nous avons de plus en plus tendance à penser « le numérique » comme un phénomène uniforme et homogène (sur ce sujet, il est intéressant de lire le débat entre <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://newrepublic.com/article/112336/future-perfects-steven-johnson-evgeny-morozov-debate-social-media">Morozov et Johnson</a>) alors que, en toute évidence, il ne l’est pas. « Le » numérique n’existe pas en tant que tel. Il y existe de nombreuses pratiques, usages, outils et environnements différents, chacun fondé sur des principes particuliers, chacun promouvant des valeurs spécifiques et entraînant des conséquences caractéristiques.</p> | |||
| <p>Le fait de penser « le numérique » comme un tout nous amène souvent à exprimer des jugements de valeur qui font abstraction des caractéristiques propres à des outils ou pratiques distincts : inévitablement donc, le jugement se radicalise, s’uniformise, se généralise en perdant tout son sens et sa cohérence vis-à-vis du particulier. « Le numérique » devient ainsi tantôt synonyme d’émancipation et de liberté, tantôt synonyme de contrôle et d’assujettissement : en somme, le numérique est bien ou le numérique est mal. D’un côté les technoptimistes, de l’autre les technophobes.</p> | |||
| <p>Et comme cela est naturel, les modes changent : nous passons d’un technoptimisme généralisé à une technophobie universelle. Dans les années 1990, le discours des optimistes semblait prévaloir : de la <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence">déclaration de l’indépendance du cyberespace</a> de John Perry Barlow aux discours d’émancipation posthumanistes, en passant pas les merveilles de la virtualisation. Depuis quelques années, il semblerait que la mode ait changé : il faut être critique vis-à-vis du numérique. Les grands gourous du numérique sont les premiers à en devenir les critiques : de Bill Gates à Tim Berners-Lee, en passant par Jimmy Wales&mldr; Le discours critique se retrouve dans la bouche des intellectuels – <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler">Morozov</a> est devenu le porte-drapeau de ce mouvement, avec des arguments que je partage dans l’ensemble – ou des universitaires. Des critiques philosophiques approfondies ont été développées consacrées à des phénomènes particuliers – je pense en premier lieu à la fine analyse que <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/http://ateliers.sens-public.org/facebook/index.html">Gérard Wormser</a> propose de Facebook.</p> | |||
| <p>Il me semble cependant nécessaire de différencier – et ainsi d’identifier – les aspects du « fait numérique » qui peuvent et doivent nous faire peur. Bien que j’ai toujours rejeté cette opposition entre optimistes et technophobes, je conserve néanmoins une préférence pour les optimistes – encore aujourd’hui alors que cette posture est passée de mode. J’ai tendance à être en accord avec <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/http://sens-public.org/article1369.html">les analyses de Pierre Lévy</a> qui soulignent le fait toujours d’actualié que plusieurs idéaux utopistes, qui portaient le développement informatique dans les années 1990, sont encore présents et en vigueur. Cependant, dans les dernières années – probablement aussi du fait que je suis devenu le père de deux enfants –, je suis de plus en plus angoissé, non pas par « le numérique » en général, mais par la place dans nos vies à laquelle accède – notamment via certaines technologies numériques – un nombre très restreint de sociétés privées : celles qu’on a commencé à appeler les <em>GAFAM</em> pour se référer à Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et Microfoft, sachant que cet acronyme est devenu une métonymie pour inclure également les nouveaux acteurs comme Netflix, AirBnB, Uber etc.</p> | |||
| <p>Cette influence ne dépend pas « du numérique », mais de certains usages spécifiques : plus précisément des usages de logiciels et de matériels propriétaires. Et, plus important, ces usages ne sont pas inévitables, mais on fait, hélas, trop peu – ou presque rien – pour les contrer, alors qu’il serait facile de mettre en place des mécanismes et dispositifs de protection de l’espace public.</p> | |||
| <p>Concrètement, le fléau dont nous sommes victimes est représenté par le fait que dans tous les domaines, de la vie privée à la vie publique en passant par l’activité professionnelle, nous sommes encouragés à utiliser des solutions propriétaires : MacOs, iOS, Windows, Word, Adobe, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, Gmail, Outlook&mldr; Ce problème n’émane pas, à mon sens, des entreprises – dont l’objectif principal est, évidemment, de vendre leurs produits –, mais du manque quasi total de sensibilité des institutions publiques et privées et de l’absence de littéracie numérique pour les usagers.</p> | |||
| <p>Quelques exemples :</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des systèmes d’exploitation propriétaires – MacOS et Windows – alors que nous pourrions utiliser des systèmes d’exploitation libres ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des dispositifs portables propriétaires sans nous soucier des conséquences ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des applications mobiles alors que nous pourrions utiliser des services web ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des logiciels propriétaires alors que nous pourrions utiliser des solutions libres ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous ne nous posons pas de questions sur les pilotes qui font fonctionner les dispositifs de nos ordinateurs alors que nous pourrions choisir les dispositifs en fonction de la transparence de leur conception.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>Ce sont fondamentalement les revendications de la <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.fsf.org/"><em>Free Software Foundation</em></a> qui n’ont malheureusement que trop peu d’impact sur les pratiques. Or deux considérations :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>ces pratiques sont très dangereuses ;</li> | |||
| <li>il serait très facile de les changer.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>Il me semble, en d’autres termes, que, le fait de penser « le numérique » comme quelque chose d’uniforme nous empêche de cerner le véritable problème et de chercher des solutions. Être génériquement technophobes est une posture qui n’amène à rien : cela revient à un nostalgique « <em>o tempora o mores</em> » qui plonge dans une inactivité abrupte. Des positions du type : « le numérique doit/ne doit pas être utilisé par les enfants » me semblent juste stupides. Elles réunissent des réalités hétérogènes qui n’ont aucun rapport entre elles : « le numérique » ? Quels outils ? Quelles plateformes ? Quels environnements ? Quels dispositifs ? Identifier des problèmes spécifiques est sans doute plus complexes : cela demande une étude et une compréhension du fait numérique dans sa diversité, une analyse des enjeux liés à un logiciel, à un format, à un protocole qui demandent du temps et de l’expertise. Mais cela permet de trouver des alternatives et de solutions concrètes.</p> | |||
| <p>Venons-en donc aux problèmes concrets pour ensuite proposer des pistes de solutions.</p> | |||
| <p>Le code est loi, <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html">disait Lessig</a> il y a quelques années. <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/books/review/Siegel-t.html">Morozov</a> explique bien à quel point les services proposés par les multinationales du numérique portent des valeurs précises qui ne sont jamais neutres. <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/20140407-geneva-tedx-talk-free-software-free-society/">Richard Stallmann</a> – fondateur du projet GNU et président de la <em>Free Software Foundation</em> – va plus loin : un ordinateur, dit-il, est une machine universelle qui calcule tous ce qu’on lui demande ; la question est de savoir qui demande à la machine d’effectuer les calculs ; on est là devant deux possibilités :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>l’usager est le maître du code et il est donc le maître de la machine ;</li> | |||
| <li>l’usager n’est pas le maître du code et il est donc à la merci de la machine – ou plus précisément de celui qui est maître de son code et donc typiquement une entreprise privée.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>Les téléphones portables, les tablettes et toutes leurs applications fonctionnent sur des logiciels dont le code appartient à des entreprises privées. Nous ne savons pas exactement ce que fait ce code, nous n’utilisons donc pas ces appareils, mais nous sommes plutôt utilisés par eux.</p> | |||
| <p>Concrètement :</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>notre vie est influencée et structurée par ces outils sans que nous puissions précisément en comprendre les principes. Les affordances des plateformes nous poussent à certaines pratiques, les notifications scandent nos rythmes de vie, les formats des données et des documents structurent l’organisation de notre pensée ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous ne savons pas ce qui est fait de nos données et qui y peut accèder.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>La même chose peut être dite – avec quelques nuances – des ordinateurs portables propriétaires. Apple, notamment, met en place des politiques qui restreignent de plus en plus de pouvoir à l’usager. Le fonctionnement de la machine devient complètement opaque souvent en protestant la nécessité de rendre les choses « simples » ou d’augmenter la sécurité. L’argument qui est devenu très vendeur est de ne pas donner à l’usager la main sur ses appareils pour éviter qu’il fasse des dégâts involontaires. Tout fonctionne indépendamment de l’usager, tout se configure de façon autonome, nous ne devons rien comprendre. Le prix à payer est que nous ne savons plus ce que nous faisons. Oui, nous ne faisons pas d’efforts pour comprendre la machine, mais en revanche nous sommes entre ses mains.</p> | |||
| <p>L’injonction à l’usage de logiciel et matériel propriétaire gagne en force et pouvoir – et cela n’est pas de la faute des entreprises privées, mais des usagers et, surtout, des institutions.</p> | |||
| <p>Or, s’il est normal que la littéracie numérique ne soit pas très développée chez des utilisateurs que personne n’a formés à ce propos, il me semble cependant aberrant que les institutions publiques – et les acteurs privés – n’entreprennent rien pour contrer ce phénomène et qu’ils soient au contraire à l’origine de cette multiplication de l’occupation de notre espace de vie par les privés.</p> | |||
| <p>Je vais donner quelques exemples concrets issus de sphères différentes de notre vie quotidienne :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>L’usage d’applications propriétaires dans les échanges privés. Je pense en particulier à Whatsapp, Messanger/Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter. Petite anecdote : je n’ai pas de Smartphone (pour les raisons que je viens de détailler). Depuis quelques années, je n’ai presque plus de contacts quotidiens avec mes parents (pourtant italiens !). Ils avaient l’habitude de communiquer avec moi par mail, mais depuis l’adoption de Whatsapp, ils considèrent que je ne suis pas joignable – je suis pourtant devant mon ordinateur connecté à longueur de journée. Ils préfèrent envoyer des messages sur Whatsapp à ma conjointe en lui demandant de me les relayer. Le contact familial est pris en otage par une compagnie privée. Au lieu que de devenir plus simple – avant il n’y avait pas ces possibilités de connexion, il fallait passer par une cabine téléphonique et un appel international&mldr; etc. –, le contact devient plus difficile, presque impossible, à moins d’adopter une application. Vous me direz : mais même l’appel téléphonique passait par une société. Oui, bien sûr, mais le monde n’était pas investi par une compagnie unique. Et de plus, ces compagnies était contrôlées par les États&mldr; Le téléphone était perçu comme relevant de l’utilité publique. Or la philosophie de la privatisation de l’espace public voudrait que j’achète un téléphone avec un des <strong>deux</strong> systèmes d’exploitation possibles (iOS ou Android de Google) et que j’installe <strong>une</strong> application qui appartient à Facebook. Si je n’accepte pas ces conditions, je suis exclu de la communication avec mes parents – pour la petite histoire, j’essaie de les obliger à m’écrire des courriels ou à m’appeler sur mon fixe.</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage obligatoire de logiciels propriétaires dans le cadre des institutions publiques. Docx, PDF, Internet Explorer (oui, encore lui) sont bien souvent des canaux obligés lorsque nous avons affaire aux institutions publiques ! Autre anecdote : je suis en train de demander la citoyenneté canadienne. Le seul moyen pour compléter cette demande est de remplir un formulaire PDF en utilisant Acrobat Reader. Impossible de le faire en utilisant un autre logiciel. Je suis donc obligé d’installer un logiciel propriétaire si je veux bénéficier des mes droits. Un formulaire HTML aurait été accessible par tous – en utilisant un standard ouvert. Formulons-le ainsi pour que la dimension d’aberration soit plus évidente : la seule manière pour devenir citoyen canadien est de passer par la société Adobe. Encore une fois, bien sûr, dans une société industrialisée et capitaliste, nous sommes depuis toujours confrontés à ce type de problèmes : pour remplir un formulaire papier, je suis obligé d’acheter du papier à une société privée, un stylo qui lui-aussi est produit par une société privée&mldr; mais, dans ce cas, il y a plusieurs sociétés entre lesquelles je peux choisir et, surtout aucune de ces sociétés ne détient le brevet du papier ou du stylo (sauf les BICs, mais il existe d’autres types de stylos !). Dans le cas d’Adobe, le format du formulaire, son accessibilité, la structure de ses données sont établis par Adobe et par lui seul.</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage obligatoire d’applications et de software propriétaires dans le cadre d’institutions privées d’utilité publique. Un exemple : les banques. Il s’agit évidemment de sociétés privées, mais qui ont des responsabilités à l’égard de l’ensemble des citoyens. Or, il est désormais quasiment impossible d’être client d’une banque sans avoir recours à des logiciels ou du matériel propriétaire. Pour accéder à son compte, il faut un Smartphone – propriétaire – sur lequel faire tourner des applications – -propriétaires – sous le contrôle, au choix, de Google ou d’Apple. Encore une fois, en tant qu’usagers, nous sommes obligés d’être clients de ces deux entreprises si nous voulons avoir une vie normale dans notre société. Pourquoi donc ?</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage généralisé du format docx comme format texte. Le format docx est désastreux pour une <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://eriac.hypotheses.org/80">série de raisons</a>. Mais ce n’est pas là la question. Le problème est que son usage est banalisé par les maisons d’édition, les institutions publiques et privées. Au lieu que de produire du texte, nous sommes obligés de produire du docx. Le format, évidemment, n’est pas neutre : il propose une conception particulière du texte et du document. L’accessibilité, en outre, dépend seulement du bon vouloir de Microsoft. Comment est-il possible que nous soyons pris dans la dynamique de transformation de l’écriture en une propriété d’une boîte américaine ?</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage de logiciel propriétaire par l’université et par l’éducation. À l’université, on présuppose que les membres de la communauté – étudiants, chercheurs, administrateurs – utilisent MacOs ou Windows. L’ensemble des services est pensé exclusivement pour ces deux plateformes. Aucune assistance n’est garantie pour les système libres. Souvent, il est impossible d’effectuer les tâches quotidiennes si on n’a pas un Mac ou un PC Windows. Les logiciels proposés sont toujours propriétaires – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Endnote&mldr; Dans le domaine de l’éducation primaire – ce qui est encore plus grave –, on associe le passage au numérique avec l’adoption généralisée des iPads. Or, il me semble absolument délirant de confier l’éducation publique à une entreprise privée. Mais, concrètement, c’est exactement ce qui arrive : les livres de texte deviennent des applications iPad, gérées et maintenues par Apple. C’est Apple qui décide de leurs vies, de leurs licences de distribution, de leurs accessibilités, de la date de leurs sorties, de leurs ergonomies. Nous voyons de grandes institutions se réjouir de leur progrès, car elles ont adopté ces technologies.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>De cette manière, nous sommes progressivement en train d’abandonner la chose publique – ainsi que nos vies privées – entre les mains d’une poignée d’entreprises. Je le répète : la responsabilité ne revient pas à ces entreprises, mais à nous-mêmes et à nos institutions qui – par commodité ? par facilité ? à cause des pressions commerciales ? à cause de notre ignorance ? – ne faisons rien pour défendre l’usage d’alternatives libres.</p> | |||
| <p>Il y en aurait pléthore, pourtant, d’alternatives ! Il suffit de prendre un moment pour regarder – par exemple sur le <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page">répertoire de la FSF</a> – pour constater que, pour tous les besoins que je viens de mentionner, il y a des solutions de type libre. Libres dans le sens que leur code est ouvert – et que donc il est possible de savoir ce qu’il opère –, qu’il peut être modifié et adapté à des besoins spécifiques – qui seront donc définis par les usagers et les communautés au lieu d’être fixés par une entreprise particulière – outre qu’être aussi gratuits, ce qui n’est pas la chose la plus importante, mais qui peut également servir d’argument.</p> | |||
| <p>Des exemples :</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>des systèmes d’exploitation GNU-Linux qui permettent de faire tourner nos machines en évitant qu’elles fassent ce qu’elles veulent ;</li> | |||
| <li>des logiciels libres pour remplacer les logiciels propriétaires ;</li> | |||
| <li>du matériel qui respecte la liberté des usagers en rendant publiques ses spécifications techniques.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>L’objection qu’on entend souvent est que ces alternatives « ne fonctionnent pas ». Concrètement cela signifie que souvent ces logiciels demandent une prise en main plus complexe. Bien sûr : dès qu’il s’agit de choisir, il est nécessaire d’avoir une compréhension de base qui demande une étude. Mais cette étude est la condition de la liberté. Si nous voulons être maîtres de nos machines, il faut que nous soyons capables de leur demander ce que nous voulons.</p> | |||
| <p>Cela demande des efforts, certes ; mais ces efforts sont au fondement de la possibilité de liberté. Au nom de la simplicité et des interfaces <em>user friendly</em>, nous renonçons peu à peu à être maîtres de notre vie. Dans une situation orwellienne, nous sommes prêts à déléguer notre vie à des entreprises pour éviter l’effort de nous demander ce que nous voulons faire.</p> | |||
| <p>Or, évidemment, il n’est pas possible de demander ces efforts juste aux utilisateurs. Il est indispensable que les usagers soient accompagnés, sensibilisés et aidés par les instances institutionnelles et publiques. Si l’on pense aux enfants, la question devient encore plus claire : leur éducation sera entre les mains d’Apple et Google si nous ne prenons pas la peine de prôner des alternatives à leurs monopoles.</p> | |||
| <p>Il est nécessaire et urgent d’agir pour faire changer cette situation :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>En premier lieu, ce sont les institutions qui doivent s’engager dans cette démarche. Il est nécessaire que toutes les activités institutionnelles puissent être réalisées avec du logiciel et du matériel non propriétaires et que les solutions libres soient les solutions recommandées. Il doit évidemment rester possible d’accomplir ces tâches avec du logiciel propriétaire, cela doit rester une option pour garantir la liberté des usagers : si vous voulez utiliser un Mac, un PC Windows, soyez les bienvenus, mais nous privilégions les solutions libres – et nous offrons support pour ces solutions. Les institutions devraient aussi contribuer au développement du logiciel libre en investissant dans ce domaine pour leurs infrastructures numériques – au lieu que continuer à déléguer les GAFAM.</li> | |||
| <li>Ensuite, il est nécessaire d’obliger les acteurs privés d’utilité publique à faire la même chose. Et d’exhorter aussi l’ensemble des acteurs privés.</li> | |||
| <li>Le changement d’usages et la diffusion de pratiques libres sera un pivot pour déterminer les producteurs de matériel à s’aligner à la philosophie du libre. Les producteurs de matériel qui fonctionne exclusivement avec du logiciel propriétaires doivent être pénalisés.</li> | |||
| <li>Ces actions publiques doivent être accompagnées par une véritable démarche de sensibilisation à ces enjeux et un investissant important en formation. L’éducation doit être au fondement pour rendre libres les utilisateurs de demain.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>« Le numérique » n’existe pas comme phénomène uniforme. Il y a dans les pratiques et les technologies des univers différents et parfois même opposés. Nous devons en être conscients et agir de conséquence. Il faut lutter pour que le monde ne se réduise pas à la propriété d’une poignée d’entreprises.</p></p> | |||
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| title: Être libres à l’époque du numérique | |||
| url: http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/tre-libres-lpoque-du-numrique/ | |||
| hash_url: 02b1967f7086ab2d3eb84d2ce8129e95 | |||
| <img src="https://mpng.pngfly.com/20190123/bst/kisspng-linux-libre-free-software-foundation-latin-america-download-freedo-svg-clipart-1-432-free-freedo-p-5c49402ceb6da7.6071370315483044289643.jpg"/> | |||
| <p>Nous parlons de plus en plus de « numérique » en substantivant un adjectif qui – initialement – comporte une signification technique précise et qui devient désormais davantage un phénomène culturel qu’une notion liée à des outils technologiques particuliers. Cette universalisation du numérique nous permet de comprendre des changements qui affectent l’ensemble de notre société et notre façon de penser, comme l’a bien expliqué notamment Milad Doueihi par son concept de <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055247">« culture numérique »</a>.</p> | |||
| <p>Mais il y demeure un problème majeur au sein de cet usage : nous avons de plus en plus tendance à penser « le numérique » comme un phénomène uniforme et homogène (sur ce sujet, il est intéressant de lire le débat entre <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://newrepublic.com/article/112336/future-perfects-steven-johnson-evgeny-morozov-debate-social-media">Morozov et Johnson</a>) alors que, en toute évidence, il ne l’est pas. « Le » numérique n’existe pas en tant que tel. Il y existe de nombreuses pratiques, usages, outils et environnements différents, chacun fondé sur des principes particuliers, chacun promouvant des valeurs spécifiques et entraînant des conséquences caractéristiques.</p> | |||
| <p>Le fait de penser « le numérique » comme un tout nous amène souvent à exprimer des jugements de valeur qui font abstraction des caractéristiques propres à des outils ou pratiques distincts : inévitablement donc, le jugement se radicalise, s’uniformise, se généralise en perdant tout son sens et sa cohérence vis-à-vis du particulier. « Le numérique » devient ainsi tantôt synonyme d’émancipation et de liberté, tantôt synonyme de contrôle et d’assujettissement : en somme, le numérique est bien ou le numérique est mal. D’un côté les technoptimistes, de l’autre les technophobes.</p> | |||
| <p>Et comme cela est naturel, les modes changent : nous passons d’un technoptimisme généralisé à une technophobie universelle. Dans les années 1990, le discours des optimistes semblait prévaloir : de la <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence">déclaration de l’indépendance du cyberespace</a> de John Perry Barlow aux discours d’émancipation posthumanistes, en passant pas les merveilles de la virtualisation. Depuis quelques années, il semblerait que la mode ait changé : il faut être critique vis-à-vis du numérique. Les grands gourous du numérique sont les premiers à en devenir les critiques : de Bill Gates à Tim Berners-Lee, en passant par Jimmy Wales&mldr; Le discours critique se retrouve dans la bouche des intellectuels – <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler">Morozov</a> est devenu le porte-drapeau de ce mouvement, avec des arguments que je partage dans l’ensemble – ou des universitaires. Des critiques philosophiques approfondies ont été développées consacrées à des phénomènes particuliers – je pense en premier lieu à la fine analyse que <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/http://ateliers.sens-public.org/facebook/index.html">Gérard Wormser</a> propose de Facebook.</p> | |||
| <p>Il me semble cependant nécessaire de différencier – et ainsi d’identifier – les aspects du « fait numérique » qui peuvent et doivent nous faire peur. Bien que j’ai toujours rejeté cette opposition entre optimistes et technophobes, je conserve néanmoins une préférence pour les optimistes – encore aujourd’hui alors que cette posture est passée de mode. J’ai tendance à être en accord avec <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/http://sens-public.org/article1369.html">les analyses de Pierre Lévy</a> qui soulignent le fait toujours d’actualié que plusieurs idéaux utopistes, qui portaient le développement informatique dans les années 1990, sont encore présents et en vigueur. Cependant, dans les dernières années – probablement aussi du fait que je suis devenu le père de deux enfants –, je suis de plus en plus angoissé, non pas par « le numérique » en général, mais par la place dans nos vies à laquelle accède – notamment via certaines technologies numériques – un nombre très restreint de sociétés privées : celles qu’on a commencé à appeler les <em>GAFAM</em> pour se référer à Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et Microfoft, sachant que cet acronyme est devenu une métonymie pour inclure également les nouveaux acteurs comme Netflix, AirBnB, Uber etc.</p> | |||
| <p>Cette influence ne dépend pas « du numérique », mais de certains usages spécifiques : plus précisément des usages de logiciels et de matériels propriétaires. Et, plus important, ces usages ne sont pas inévitables, mais on fait, hélas, trop peu – ou presque rien – pour les contrer, alors qu’il serait facile de mettre en place des mécanismes et dispositifs de protection de l’espace public.</p> | |||
| <p>Concrètement, le fléau dont nous sommes victimes est représenté par le fait que dans tous les domaines, de la vie privée à la vie publique en passant par l’activité professionnelle, nous sommes encouragés à utiliser des solutions propriétaires : MacOs, iOS, Windows, Word, Adobe, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, Gmail, Outlook&mldr; Ce problème n’émane pas, à mon sens, des entreprises – dont l’objectif principal est, évidemment, de vendre leurs produits –, mais du manque quasi total de sensibilité des institutions publiques et privées et de l’absence de littéracie numérique pour les usagers.</p> | |||
| <p>Quelques exemples :</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des systèmes d’exploitation propriétaires – MacOS et Windows – alors que nous pourrions utiliser des systèmes d’exploitation libres ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des dispositifs portables propriétaires sans nous soucier des conséquences ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des applications mobiles alors que nous pourrions utiliser des services web ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous utilisons des logiciels propriétaires alors que nous pourrions utiliser des solutions libres ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous ne nous posons pas de questions sur les pilotes qui font fonctionner les dispositifs de nos ordinateurs alors que nous pourrions choisir les dispositifs en fonction de la transparence de leur conception.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>Ce sont fondamentalement les revendications de la <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.fsf.org/"><em>Free Software Foundation</em></a> qui n’ont malheureusement que trop peu d’impact sur les pratiques. Or deux considérations :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>ces pratiques sont très dangereuses ;</li> | |||
| <li>il serait très facile de les changer.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>Il me semble, en d’autres termes, que, le fait de penser « le numérique » comme quelque chose d’uniforme nous empêche de cerner le véritable problème et de chercher des solutions. Être génériquement technophobes est une posture qui n’amène à rien : cela revient à un nostalgique « <em>o tempora o mores</em> » qui plonge dans une inactivité abrupte. Des positions du type : « le numérique doit/ne doit pas être utilisé par les enfants » me semblent juste stupides. Elles réunissent des réalités hétérogènes qui n’ont aucun rapport entre elles : « le numérique » ? Quels outils ? Quelles plateformes ? Quels environnements ? Quels dispositifs ? Identifier des problèmes spécifiques est sans doute plus complexes : cela demande une étude et une compréhension du fait numérique dans sa diversité, une analyse des enjeux liés à un logiciel, à un format, à un protocole qui demandent du temps et de l’expertise. Mais cela permet de trouver des alternatives et de solutions concrètes.</p> | |||
| <p>Venons-en donc aux problèmes concrets pour ensuite proposer des pistes de solutions.</p> | |||
| <p>Le code est loi, <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html">disait Lessig</a> il y a quelques années. <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/books/review/Siegel-t.html">Morozov</a> explique bien à quel point les services proposés par les multinationales du numérique portent des valeurs précises qui ne sont jamais neutres. <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/20140407-geneva-tedx-talk-free-software-free-society/">Richard Stallmann</a> – fondateur du projet GNU et président de la <em>Free Software Foundation</em> – va plus loin : un ordinateur, dit-il, est une machine universelle qui calcule tous ce qu’on lui demande ; la question est de savoir qui demande à la machine d’effectuer les calculs ; on est là devant deux possibilités :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>l’usager est le maître du code et il est donc le maître de la machine ;</li> | |||
| <li>l’usager n’est pas le maître du code et il est donc à la merci de la machine – ou plus précisément de celui qui est maître de son code et donc typiquement une entreprise privée.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>Les téléphones portables, les tablettes et toutes leurs applications fonctionnent sur des logiciels dont le code appartient à des entreprises privées. Nous ne savons pas exactement ce que fait ce code, nous n’utilisons donc pas ces appareils, mais nous sommes plutôt utilisés par eux.</p> | |||
| <p>Concrètement :</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>notre vie est influencée et structurée par ces outils sans que nous puissions précisément en comprendre les principes. Les affordances des plateformes nous poussent à certaines pratiques, les notifications scandent nos rythmes de vie, les formats des données et des documents structurent l’organisation de notre pensée ;</li> | |||
| <li>nous ne savons pas ce qui est fait de nos données et qui y peut accèder.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>La même chose peut être dite – avec quelques nuances – des ordinateurs portables propriétaires. Apple, notamment, met en place des politiques qui restreignent de plus en plus de pouvoir à l’usager. Le fonctionnement de la machine devient complètement opaque souvent en protestant la nécessité de rendre les choses « simples » ou d’augmenter la sécurité. L’argument qui est devenu très vendeur est de ne pas donner à l’usager la main sur ses appareils pour éviter qu’il fasse des dégâts involontaires. Tout fonctionne indépendamment de l’usager, tout se configure de façon autonome, nous ne devons rien comprendre. Le prix à payer est que nous ne savons plus ce que nous faisons. Oui, nous ne faisons pas d’efforts pour comprendre la machine, mais en revanche nous sommes entre ses mains.</p> | |||
| <p>L’injonction à l’usage de logiciel et matériel propriétaire gagne en force et pouvoir – et cela n’est pas de la faute des entreprises privées, mais des usagers et, surtout, des institutions.</p> | |||
| <p>Or, s’il est normal que la littéracie numérique ne soit pas très développée chez des utilisateurs que personne n’a formés à ce propos, il me semble cependant aberrant que les institutions publiques – et les acteurs privés – n’entreprennent rien pour contrer ce phénomène et qu’ils soient au contraire à l’origine de cette multiplication de l’occupation de notre espace de vie par les privés.</p> | |||
| <p>Je vais donner quelques exemples concrets issus de sphères différentes de notre vie quotidienne :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>L’usage d’applications propriétaires dans les échanges privés. Je pense en particulier à Whatsapp, Messanger/Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter. Petite anecdote : je n’ai pas de Smartphone (pour les raisons que je viens de détailler). Depuis quelques années, je n’ai presque plus de contacts quotidiens avec mes parents (pourtant italiens !). Ils avaient l’habitude de communiquer avec moi par mail, mais depuis l’adoption de Whatsapp, ils considèrent que je ne suis pas joignable – je suis pourtant devant mon ordinateur connecté à longueur de journée. Ils préfèrent envoyer des messages sur Whatsapp à ma conjointe en lui demandant de me les relayer. Le contact familial est pris en otage par une compagnie privée. Au lieu que de devenir plus simple – avant il n’y avait pas ces possibilités de connexion, il fallait passer par une cabine téléphonique et un appel international&mldr; etc. –, le contact devient plus difficile, presque impossible, à moins d’adopter une application. Vous me direz : mais même l’appel téléphonique passait par une société. Oui, bien sûr, mais le monde n’était pas investi par une compagnie unique. Et de plus, ces compagnies était contrôlées par les États&mldr; Le téléphone était perçu comme relevant de l’utilité publique. Or la philosophie de la privatisation de l’espace public voudrait que j’achète un téléphone avec un des <strong>deux</strong> systèmes d’exploitation possibles (iOS ou Android de Google) et que j’installe <strong>une</strong> application qui appartient à Facebook. Si je n’accepte pas ces conditions, je suis exclu de la communication avec mes parents – pour la petite histoire, j’essaie de les obliger à m’écrire des courriels ou à m’appeler sur mon fixe.</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage obligatoire de logiciels propriétaires dans le cadre des institutions publiques. Docx, PDF, Internet Explorer (oui, encore lui) sont bien souvent des canaux obligés lorsque nous avons affaire aux institutions publiques ! Autre anecdote : je suis en train de demander la citoyenneté canadienne. Le seul moyen pour compléter cette demande est de remplir un formulaire PDF en utilisant Acrobat Reader. Impossible de le faire en utilisant un autre logiciel. Je suis donc obligé d’installer un logiciel propriétaire si je veux bénéficier des mes droits. Un formulaire HTML aurait été accessible par tous – en utilisant un standard ouvert. Formulons-le ainsi pour que la dimension d’aberration soit plus évidente : la seule manière pour devenir citoyen canadien est de passer par la société Adobe. Encore une fois, bien sûr, dans une société industrialisée et capitaliste, nous sommes depuis toujours confrontés à ce type de problèmes : pour remplir un formulaire papier, je suis obligé d’acheter du papier à une société privée, un stylo qui lui-aussi est produit par une société privée&mldr; mais, dans ce cas, il y a plusieurs sociétés entre lesquelles je peux choisir et, surtout aucune de ces sociétés ne détient le brevet du papier ou du stylo (sauf les BICs, mais il existe d’autres types de stylos !). Dans le cas d’Adobe, le format du formulaire, son accessibilité, la structure de ses données sont établis par Adobe et par lui seul.</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage obligatoire d’applications et de software propriétaires dans le cadre d’institutions privées d’utilité publique. Un exemple : les banques. Il s’agit évidemment de sociétés privées, mais qui ont des responsabilités à l’égard de l’ensemble des citoyens. Or, il est désormais quasiment impossible d’être client d’une banque sans avoir recours à des logiciels ou du matériel propriétaire. Pour accéder à son compte, il faut un Smartphone – propriétaire – sur lequel faire tourner des applications – -propriétaires – sous le contrôle, au choix, de Google ou d’Apple. Encore une fois, en tant qu’usagers, nous sommes obligés d’être clients de ces deux entreprises si nous voulons avoir une vie normale dans notre société. Pourquoi donc ?</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage généralisé du format docx comme format texte. Le format docx est désastreux pour une <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://eriac.hypotheses.org/80">série de raisons</a>. Mais ce n’est pas là la question. Le problème est que son usage est banalisé par les maisons d’édition, les institutions publiques et privées. Au lieu que de produire du texte, nous sommes obligés de produire du docx. Le format, évidemment, n’est pas neutre : il propose une conception particulière du texte et du document. L’accessibilité, en outre, dépend seulement du bon vouloir de Microsoft. Comment est-il possible que nous soyons pris dans la dynamique de transformation de l’écriture en une propriété d’une boîte américaine ?</li> | |||
| <li>L’usage de logiciel propriétaire par l’université et par l’éducation. À l’université, on présuppose que les membres de la communauté – étudiants, chercheurs, administrateurs – utilisent MacOs ou Windows. L’ensemble des services est pensé exclusivement pour ces deux plateformes. Aucune assistance n’est garantie pour les système libres. Souvent, il est impossible d’effectuer les tâches quotidiennes si on n’a pas un Mac ou un PC Windows. Les logiciels proposés sont toujours propriétaires – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Endnote&mldr; Dans le domaine de l’éducation primaire – ce qui est encore plus grave –, on associe le passage au numérique avec l’adoption généralisée des iPads. Or, il me semble absolument délirant de confier l’éducation publique à une entreprise privée. Mais, concrètement, c’est exactement ce qui arrive : les livres de texte deviennent des applications iPad, gérées et maintenues par Apple. C’est Apple qui décide de leurs vies, de leurs licences de distribution, de leurs accessibilités, de la date de leurs sorties, de leurs ergonomies. Nous voyons de grandes institutions se réjouir de leur progrès, car elles ont adopté ces technologies.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>De cette manière, nous sommes progressivement en train d’abandonner la chose publique – ainsi que nos vies privées – entre les mains d’une poignée d’entreprises. Je le répète : la responsabilité ne revient pas à ces entreprises, mais à nous-mêmes et à nos institutions qui – par commodité ? par facilité ? à cause des pressions commerciales ? à cause de notre ignorance ? – ne faisons rien pour défendre l’usage d’alternatives libres.</p> | |||
| <p>Il y en aurait pléthore, pourtant, d’alternatives ! Il suffit de prendre un moment pour regarder – par exemple sur le <a href="https://via.hypothes.is/https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page">répertoire de la FSF</a> – pour constater que, pour tous les besoins que je viens de mentionner, il y a des solutions de type libre. Libres dans le sens que leur code est ouvert – et que donc il est possible de savoir ce qu’il opère –, qu’il peut être modifié et adapté à des besoins spécifiques – qui seront donc définis par les usagers et les communautés au lieu d’être fixés par une entreprise particulière – outre qu’être aussi gratuits, ce qui n’est pas la chose la plus importante, mais qui peut également servir d’argument.</p> | |||
| <p>Des exemples :</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>des systèmes d’exploitation GNU-Linux qui permettent de faire tourner nos machines en évitant qu’elles fassent ce qu’elles veulent ;</li> | |||
| <li>des logiciels libres pour remplacer les logiciels propriétaires ;</li> | |||
| <li>du matériel qui respecte la liberté des usagers en rendant publiques ses spécifications techniques.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>L’objection qu’on entend souvent est que ces alternatives « ne fonctionnent pas ». Concrètement cela signifie que souvent ces logiciels demandent une prise en main plus complexe. Bien sûr : dès qu’il s’agit de choisir, il est nécessaire d’avoir une compréhension de base qui demande une étude. Mais cette étude est la condition de la liberté. Si nous voulons être maîtres de nos machines, il faut que nous soyons capables de leur demander ce que nous voulons.</p> | |||
| <p>Cela demande des efforts, certes ; mais ces efforts sont au fondement de la possibilité de liberté. Au nom de la simplicité et des interfaces <em>user friendly</em>, nous renonçons peu à peu à être maîtres de notre vie. Dans une situation orwellienne, nous sommes prêts à déléguer notre vie à des entreprises pour éviter l’effort de nous demander ce que nous voulons faire.</p> | |||
| <p>Or, évidemment, il n’est pas possible de demander ces efforts juste aux utilisateurs. Il est indispensable que les usagers soient accompagnés, sensibilisés et aidés par les instances institutionnelles et publiques. Si l’on pense aux enfants, la question devient encore plus claire : leur éducation sera entre les mains d’Apple et Google si nous ne prenons pas la peine de prôner des alternatives à leurs monopoles.</p> | |||
| <p>Il est nécessaire et urgent d’agir pour faire changer cette situation :</p> | |||
| <ol type="1"> | |||
| <li>En premier lieu, ce sont les institutions qui doivent s’engager dans cette démarche. Il est nécessaire que toutes les activités institutionnelles puissent être réalisées avec du logiciel et du matériel non propriétaires et que les solutions libres soient les solutions recommandées. Il doit évidemment rester possible d’accomplir ces tâches avec du logiciel propriétaire, cela doit rester une option pour garantir la liberté des usagers : si vous voulez utiliser un Mac, un PC Windows, soyez les bienvenus, mais nous privilégions les solutions libres – et nous offrons support pour ces solutions. Les institutions devraient aussi contribuer au développement du logiciel libre en investissant dans ce domaine pour leurs infrastructures numériques – au lieu que continuer à déléguer les GAFAM.</li> | |||
| <li>Ensuite, il est nécessaire d’obliger les acteurs privés d’utilité publique à faire la même chose. Et d’exhorter aussi l’ensemble des acteurs privés.</li> | |||
| <li>Le changement d’usages et la diffusion de pratiques libres sera un pivot pour déterminer les producteurs de matériel à s’aligner à la philosophie du libre. Les producteurs de matériel qui fonctionne exclusivement avec du logiciel propriétaires doivent être pénalisés.</li> | |||
| <li>Ces actions publiques doivent être accompagnées par une véritable démarche de sensibilisation à ces enjeux et un investissant important en formation. L’éducation doit être au fondement pour rendre libres les utilisateurs de demain.</li> | |||
| </ol> | |||
| <p>« Le numérique » n’existe pas comme phénomène uniforme. Il y a dans les pratiques et les technologies des univers différents et parfois même opposés. Nous devons en être conscients et agir de conséquence. Il faut lutter pour que le monde ne se réduise pas à la propriété d’une poignée d’entreprises.</p> | |||
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| <article> | |||
| <h1>Computers as I used to love them</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>I’ve been struggling with file sync solutions <a href="https://tonsky.livejournal.com/323469.html">for years</a>. In the beginning, Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up. I moved to iCloud, but it was even worse. Finally, a few days ago, after iCloud <a href="https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1269741673715810304">cryptically broke again</a>, I decided it’s time to try something different.</p> | |||
| <p>I tried <a href="https://syncthing.net/">Syncthing</a>, a free and open-source alternative. And you know what? It’s been liberating. The sanity, the simplicity, the reliability, the features. It brings the joy of use and makes you believe <a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/">the collapse of civilization</a> can be slowed down a bit.</p> | |||
| <p><em>Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers.</em></p> | |||
| <p>It’s amazing how great computer products can be when they don’t need to deal with corporate bullshit, don’t have to promote a brand or to sell its users. Frankly, I almost ceased to believe it’s still possible. But it is.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="installation">Installation</h1> | |||
| <p>You download a single binary executable. You run it. There’s no step three.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/cli.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>No, seriously. It’s so simple I thought I missed something. But no. After you run that binary, you have a fully operational node of Syncthing. It’s ready to sync with any other Syncthing node, no other setup necessary. There’s no installers, no package management (but there are packages if you want to), no registration, no email, no logins, no password creation, no 2FA, no consents, no user agreements. Just download and run. Heck, setting up autostart on Linux server was more complex than just running the app itself!</p> | |||
| <p>Homebrew makes it even simpler:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/homebrew.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Just to give you the perspective, these are all the steps that Dropbox puts you through when you install it on a new computer:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_1.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_2.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_3.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_4.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_5.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_6.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_7.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_8.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_9.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_10.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_11.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Aaaaand… that’s not all! You also get this annoying notificaiton to deal with:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_12.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Only at this point can you start using Dropbox. Luckily, I already had an account, otherwise, it would be 5 more steps. Ridiculous!</p> | |||
| <p>(It goes without saying, that all of these are different windows. It does not happen in a single predictable area, mind you. You have to chase every one of them. And the “Set Up Dropbox” window is always-on-top, so it hides other required steps, which also adds to the fun.)</p> | |||
| <h1 id="no-artificial-limits">No artificial limits</h1> | |||
| <p>Because Synthing is free and doesn’t depend on server-side storage, they don’t need to put weird or unnatural restrictions on you. You can use as much space as you have on disk. You can sync as many folders as you want. You can sync any folder, no matter where it’s located. You can sync with anyone in the world. In fact, you can sync any folder with any number of people. At no point have you to wonder “but will it work with my plan”? If your hardware allows it, it will work. As simple as that.</p> | |||
| <p>Folders are the most vivid example of how other cloud storages constantly fuck up the simplest things. Syncthing can sync any folder on your drive, located anywhere. You can sync existing folders. You can sync multiple different folders. <em>Folders are just folders</em>, nothing special about them. Here I’m syncing “system” folders: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Desktop</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Library/Fonts</code>, and three custom ones. No sweat:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/folders.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>This simplicity lets you use it as a tool you can apply, sometimes creatively, to your task, not as a service you have to put up with. For example, by syncing <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Library/Fonts</code>, if I install a font on one machine, it automatically installs everywhere.</p> | |||
| <p>Contrast this with Dropbox, which requires you to put everything inside <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Dropbox</code> folder. If you keep your projects under <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/work</code> and want to sync it, well, tough luck. You can’t sync multiple folders either. Well, technically Dropbox can sync anything, of course. Files are files. But branding dictates there MUST be a Dropbox folder somewhere, even if it’s inconvenient for the user.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_folder.png" /> | |||
| Sweet, sweet branding... | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>But the worst offender is the iCloud. Same as Dropbox, it also requires you to put all your stuff into a folder. But that folder is called <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs</code>!!!</p> | |||
| <p>If you are a programmer, it’s unusable. First, you can’t in your right mind type THAT every time you need to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">cd</code>. Second, it contains spaces! Which breaks all sorts of things, believe me or not, even in 2020. I can’t keep Fira Code in iCloud because of python scripts, I can’t keep Jekyll blog like this one there because of Ruby, I can’t run bazel, etc. Useless.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/jekyll.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>And if you think symlinking it to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/icloud</code> helps, believe me, it does not.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/absolute_path.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <h1 id="no-registration">No registration</h1> | |||
| <p>How do you connect two devices, if there’s no registration, accounts, email, etc? Simple! Each device has a unique id, generated automatically when you first run the program. Share this id with another device, let them share their, and you are good to go.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/id.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Best news? Those ids are not even secret. They are more like public keys, so you can exchange them freely. But the scheme only works if both devices know ids of each other.</p> | |||
| <p>What I like about this scheme is how beautifully simple and down-to-absolute-essentials it is. This is pure mathematics. But it’s also very convenient to use. There’re no emails, no forms, no unresponsive web pages, no invites, no expiring tokens, no failing/outdated/overloaded APIs, no password management, nothing to hold onto or “manage”.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="power-mode">Power mode</h1> | |||
| <p>There’s power user mode! If you don’t care, there’s always a UI, and most of the things you can configure there. But if you’re a programmer and need more, you can:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>Install Synthing on a headless Linux server,</li> | |||
| <li>Control it by editing XML config,</li> | |||
| <li>Control it via REST API,</li> | |||
| <li>Configure folder ignores via regular expressions.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>All APIs and configs are well-documented:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/api.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>For example, this is my <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">.stignore</code> for workspace folder:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/stignore.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Configure it once and forget about generated classes, vendored dependencies and other caches syncing unnecessary forever.</p> | |||
| <p>In contrast, iCloud has a feature to exclude <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">*.nosync</code> files from syncing, but you know what? I usually don’t have files called <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">*.nosync</code>, that’s the problem:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/icloud_exclude.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>And Dropbox? Well… I still have nightmares about this Dropbox UI:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_folders.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>It’s kind of funny, how commercial apps have feature bloat but don’t have power mode. You can do more different things, but can’t configure them to your liking.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="no-upsell">No upsell</h1> | |||
| <p>Commercial solutions are interested in keeping users locked in and constantly upselling more features to them. As a result of that, you get notifications, features, popups. For example, on this screenshot, after I <em>just</em> installed Dropbox on a fresh machine:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_12.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Top to bottom:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>I already have an annoying red dot in the menubar,</li> | |||
| <li>Link to another product (Paper), even though it has nothing to do with file synchronization,</li> | |||
| <li>A firm suggestion I should enable notifications,</li> | |||
| <li>A notification that says my Desktop app is ready for use?! I mean, I’m looking at it from the desktop app!</li> | |||
| <li>Dropbox advertising some sort of trial,</li> | |||
| <li>Dropbox selling me more space (even though it was 2 years ago and I have >50% free),</li> | |||
| <li>Large “Upgrade” button,</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>In the mystic “For you” tab:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_for_you.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>we see:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>Starred items? What is it, a high-school notepad? If I really wanted, I could tag files in the OS, but thank you.</li> | |||
| <li>Calendar sync? Why on Earth would FILE SYNCHRONIZATION application wants to access my calendar?</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>Wait, there’s more:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_settings.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>More “features”:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>Desktop sync,</li> | |||
| <li>Photos sync,</li> | |||
| <li>Screenshots sync.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>These are at least file-like? I don’t understand why they have to be “special features”, though, if you already have an app whose primary task is to sync files. It already does that. Why are some files more special than others?</p> | |||
| <p>The answer is simple: the only way Dropbox can survive is by building and selling more features. You’ll never have peace of mind with them.</p> | |||
| <p>iCloud is much younger and doesn’t have feature bloat yet, but they are still interested in selling more Macs and iPhones. So they will always try to isolate you from the rest of the world. Expect weird restrictions and great inconveniences, like iCloud folder location or moving Desktop folder when you enable/disable sync for it.</p> | |||
| <p>Syncthing survival, on the other hand, does not depend on making more features. They do one thing, but they do it well. Look, their menu<a id="f1" href="#fn1" class="footnote">1</a> looks exactly how Dropbox used to look when it still was good in 2012:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/menubar.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <h1 id="no-lock-in">No lock-in</h1> | |||
| <p>Another ugly thing both iCloud and Dropbox routinely do is trying to scare you from walking away. Those appear every time you move more than one file outside of iCloud folder:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/icloud_scare_1.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/icloud_scare_2.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>And those are Dropbox versions:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_scare_1.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_scare_2.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>It might seem like they try to explain something, but they do not. They are scared you might be leaving and try to scare you back. The tactic is simple: question your every action, even trivial operations like moving or deleting files, display huge warning signs even for safe operations, long puzzling wording (“<a href="https://grumpy.website/post/0Ts_fkPQb">documents stored in iCloud will be removed from Mac</a>”) so that you never sure what will happen. That’s some shady shit.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/scared.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Syncthing, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care. They don’t get any money from you, so they are not interested in creating a need or constantly reminding about themselves. If you are looking for peace of mind, you can’t have it with commercial offerings.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1> | |||
| <p>Syncthing has reminded me how great computers can be if they are not made by corporations. It’s simple, predictable, sane, acts no-nonsense. You can configure it however you like and it always keeps you in control. It’s a pure function and it’s good at that. It’s free and open-source, but I’m much more happy to donate them €10/month than e.g. Dropbox. I would be a much happier person if at least half of the programs on my Mac/iPhone were like that.</p> | |||
| </article> | |||
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| title: Computers as I used to love them | |||
| url: https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/ | |||
| hash_url: 154a7a62b2eb5b0fbe17673fd7cbcf42 | |||
| <p>I’ve been struggling with file sync solutions <a href="https://tonsky.livejournal.com/323469.html">for years</a>. In the beginning, Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up. I moved to iCloud, but it was even worse. Finally, a few days ago, after iCloud <a href="https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1269741673715810304">cryptically broke again</a>, I decided it’s time to try something different.</p> | |||
| <p>I tried <a href="https://syncthing.net/">Syncthing</a>, a free and open-source alternative. And you know what? It’s been liberating. The sanity, the simplicity, the reliability, the features. It brings the joy of use and makes you believe <a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/">the collapse of civilization</a> can be slowed down a bit.</p> | |||
| <p><em>Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers.</em></p> | |||
| <p>It’s amazing how great computer products can be when they don’t need to deal with corporate bullshit, don’t have to promote a brand or to sell its users. Frankly, I almost ceased to believe it’s still possible. But it is.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="installation">Installation</h1> | |||
| <p>You download a single binary executable. You run it. There’s no step three.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/cli.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>No, seriously. It’s so simple I thought I missed something. But no. After you run that binary, you have a fully operational node of Syncthing. It’s ready to sync with any other Syncthing node, no other setup necessary. There’s no installers, no package management (but there are packages if you want to), no registration, no email, no logins, no password creation, no 2FA, no consents, no user agreements. Just download and run. Heck, setting up autostart on Linux server was more complex than just running the app itself!</p> | |||
| <p>Homebrew makes it even simpler:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/homebrew.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Just to give you the perspective, these are all the steps that Dropbox puts you through when you install it on a new computer:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_1.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_2.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_3.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_4.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_5.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_6.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_7.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_8.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_9.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_10.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_11.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Aaaaand… that’s not all! You also get this annoying notificaiton to deal with:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_12.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Only at this point can you start using Dropbox. Luckily, I already had an account, otherwise, it would be 5 more steps. Ridiculous!</p> | |||
| <p>(It goes without saying, that all of these are different windows. It does not happen in a single predictable area, mind you. You have to chase every one of them. And the “Set Up Dropbox” window is always-on-top, so it hides other required steps, which also adds to the fun.)</p> | |||
| <h1 id="no-artificial-limits">No artificial limits</h1> | |||
| <p>Because Synthing is free and doesn’t depend on server-side storage, they don’t need to put weird or unnatural restrictions on you. You can use as much space as you have on disk. You can sync as many folders as you want. You can sync any folder, no matter where it’s located. You can sync with anyone in the world. In fact, you can sync any folder with any number of people. At no point have you to wonder “but will it work with my plan”? If your hardware allows it, it will work. As simple as that.</p> | |||
| <p>Folders are the most vivid example of how other cloud storages constantly fuck up the simplest things. Syncthing can sync any folder on your drive, located anywhere. You can sync existing folders. You can sync multiple different folders. <em>Folders are just folders</em>, nothing special about them. Here I’m syncing “system” folders: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Desktop</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Library/Fonts</code>, and three custom ones. No sweat:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/folders.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>This simplicity lets you use it as a tool you can apply, sometimes creatively, to your task, not as a service you have to put up with. For example, by syncing <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Library/Fonts</code>, if I install a font on one machine, it automatically installs everywhere.</p> | |||
| <p>Contrast this with Dropbox, which requires you to put everything inside <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Dropbox</code> folder. If you keep your projects under <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/work</code> and want to sync it, well, tough luck. You can’t sync multiple folders either. Well, technically Dropbox can sync anything, of course. Files are files. But branding dictates there MUST be a Dropbox folder somewhere, even if it’s inconvenient for the user.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_folder.png" /> | |||
| Sweet, sweet branding... | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>But the worst offender is the iCloud. Same as Dropbox, it also requires you to put all your stuff into a folder. But that folder is called <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs</code>!!!</p> | |||
| <p>If you are a programmer, it’s unusable. First, you can’t in your right mind type THAT every time you need to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">cd</code>. Second, it contains spaces! Which breaks all sorts of things, believe me or not, even in 2020. I can’t keep Fira Code in iCloud because of python scripts, I can’t keep Jekyll blog like this one there because of Ruby, I can’t run bazel, etc. Useless.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/jekyll.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>And if you think symlinking it to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/icloud</code> helps, believe me, it does not.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/absolute_path.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <h1 id="no-registration">No registration</h1> | |||
| <p>How do you connect two devices, if there’s no registration, accounts, email, etc? Simple! Each device has a unique id, generated automatically when you first run the program. Share this id with another device, let them share their, and you are good to go.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/id.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Best news? Those ids are not even secret. They are more like public keys, so you can exchange them freely. But the scheme only works if both devices know ids of each other.</p> | |||
| <p>What I like about this scheme is how beautifully simple and down-to-absolute-essentials it is. This is pure mathematics. But it’s also very convenient to use. There’re no emails, no forms, no unresponsive web pages, no invites, no expiring tokens, no failing/outdated/overloaded APIs, no password management, nothing to hold onto or “manage”.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="power-mode">Power mode</h1> | |||
| <p>There’s power user mode! If you don’t care, there’s always a UI, and most of the things you can configure there. But if you’re a programmer and need more, you can:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>Install Synthing on a headless Linux server,</li> | |||
| <li>Control it by editing XML config,</li> | |||
| <li>Control it via REST API,</li> | |||
| <li>Configure folder ignores via regular expressions.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>All APIs and configs are well-documented:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/api.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>For example, this is my <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">.stignore</code> for workspace folder:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/stignore.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Configure it once and forget about generated classes, vendored dependencies and other caches syncing unnecessary forever.</p> | |||
| <p>In contrast, iCloud has a feature to exclude <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">*.nosync</code> files from syncing, but you know what? I usually don’t have files called <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">*.nosync</code>, that’s the problem:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/icloud_exclude.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>And Dropbox? Well… I still have nightmares about this Dropbox UI:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_folders.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>It’s kind of funny, how commercial apps have feature bloat but don’t have power mode. You can do more different things, but can’t configure them to your liking.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="no-upsell">No upsell</h1> | |||
| <p>Commercial solutions are interested in keeping users locked in and constantly upselling more features to them. As a result of that, you get notifications, features, popups. For example, on this screenshot, after I <em>just</em> installed Dropbox on a fresh machine:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_12.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Top to bottom:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>I already have an annoying red dot in the menubar,</li> | |||
| <li>Link to another product (Paper), even though it has nothing to do with file synchronization,</li> | |||
| <li>A firm suggestion I should enable notifications,</li> | |||
| <li>A notification that says my Desktop app is ready for use?! I mean, I’m looking at it from the desktop app!</li> | |||
| <li>Dropbox advertising some sort of trial,</li> | |||
| <li>Dropbox selling me more space (even though it was 2 years ago and I have >50% free),</li> | |||
| <li>Large “Upgrade” button,</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>In the mystic “For you” tab:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_for_you.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>we see:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>Starred items? What is it, a high-school notepad? If I really wanted, I could tag files in the OS, but thank you.</li> | |||
| <li>Calendar sync? Why on Earth would FILE SYNCHRONIZATION application wants to access my calendar?</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>Wait, there’s more:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_settings.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>More “features”:</p> | |||
| <ul> | |||
| <li>Desktop sync,</li> | |||
| <li>Photos sync,</li> | |||
| <li>Screenshots sync.</li> | |||
| </ul> | |||
| <p>These are at least file-like? I don’t understand why they have to be “special features”, though, if you already have an app whose primary task is to sync files. It already does that. Why are some files more special than others?</p> | |||
| <p>The answer is simple: the only way Dropbox can survive is by building and selling more features. You’ll never have peace of mind with them.</p> | |||
| <p>iCloud is much younger and doesn’t have feature bloat yet, but they are still interested in selling more Macs and iPhones. So they will always try to isolate you from the rest of the world. Expect weird restrictions and great inconveniences, like iCloud folder location or moving Desktop folder when you enable/disable sync for it.</p> | |||
| <p>Syncthing survival, on the other hand, does not depend on making more features. They do one thing, but they do it well. Look, their menu<a id="f1" href="#fn1" class="footnote">1</a> looks exactly how Dropbox used to look when it still was good in 2012:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/menubar.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <h1 id="no-lock-in">No lock-in</h1> | |||
| <p>Another ugly thing both iCloud and Dropbox routinely do is trying to scare you from walking away. Those appear every time you move more than one file outside of iCloud folder:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/icloud_scare_1.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/icloud_scare_2.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>And those are Dropbox versions:</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_scare_1.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/dropbox_scare_2.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>It might seem like they try to explain something, but they do not. They are scared you might be leaving and try to scare you back. The tactic is simple: question your every action, even trivial operations like moving or deleting files, display huge warning signs even for safe operations, long puzzling wording (“<a href="https://grumpy.website/post/0Ts_fkPQb">documents stored in iCloud will be removed from Mac</a>”) so that you never sure what will happen. That’s some shady shit.</p> | |||
| <figure> | |||
| <img src="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/scared.png" /> | |||
| </figure> | |||
| <p>Syncthing, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care. They don’t get any money from you, so they are not interested in creating a need or constantly reminding about themselves. If you are looking for peace of mind, you can’t have it with commercial offerings.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1> | |||
| <p>Syncthing has reminded me how great computers can be if they are not made by corporations. It’s simple, predictable, sane, acts no-nonsense. You can configure it however you like and it always keeps you in control. It’s a pure function and it’s good at that. It’s free and open-source, but I’m much more happy to donate them €10/month than e.g. Dropbox. I would be a much happier person if at least half of the programs on my Mac/iPhone were like that.</p> | |||
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| <h1>Unreal Engine 5 is meant to ridicule web developers</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridicule-web-developers/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>Our sources report that the underlying reason behind the impressive tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 by Epic Games is to ridicule web developers. </p> | |||
| <p>According to the Washington Post, the tech demo includes a new dynamic lighting system and a rendering approach with a much higher geometric detail for both shapes and textures. For example, a single statue in the demo can be rendered with 33 million triangles, giving it a truly unprecedented level of detail and visual density.</p> | |||
| <p>Turns out that the level of computational optimization and sheer power of this incredible technology is meant to make fun of web developers, who struggle to maintain 15fps while scrolling a single-page application on a $2000 MacBook Pro, while enjoying 800ms delays typing the corresponding code into their Electron-based text editors.</p> | |||
| <figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card kg-card-hascaption"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qC5KtatMcUw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="">VIDEO</iframe><figcaption>Each of hundreds of millions of triangles that compose this magnificent image is a direct evaluation of the skills of all web developers worldwide.</figcaption></figure> | |||
| <p>"We are disappointed with our colleagues," says the head of Web Developers Union Peter Eanline. "Both 3D game- and web-development have fundamental problems to overcome. Sure, they work hard computing millions of states in real-time by applying linear algebra and physics while maintaining up to 60fps of 4k video output. But at the same time we expect them to acknowledge equally challenging tasks like highlighting dozens of lines of code with 16 <em>different</em> colors, or remembering the scroll position after user closes an absolutely-positioned div, or deciding whether to inject CSS via JS or scale up the static assets cluster with Kubernetes."</p> | |||
| <p>The Web Developers Union members created an online petition to bring this potentially hostile decision of Epic Games to public light. The petition website is scheduled to go live in July 2020 (in approx. 43 days), as soon as the Node packages updating process is expected to finish.</p> | |||
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| title: Unreal Engine 5 is meant to ridicule web developers | |||
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| hash_url: 23b142e6e8edf164de61e003291e4619 | |||
| <p>Our sources report that the underlying reason behind the impressive tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 by Epic Games is to ridicule web developers. </p><p>According to the Washington Post, the tech demo includes a new dynamic lighting system and a rendering approach with a much higher geometric detail for both shapes and textures. For example, a single statue in the demo can be rendered with 33 million triangles, giving it a truly unprecedented level of detail and visual density.</p><p>Turns out that the level of computational optimization and sheer power of this incredible technology is meant to make fun of web developers, who struggle to maintain 15fps while scrolling a single-page application on a $2000 MacBook Pro, while enjoying 800ms delays typing the corresponding code into their Electron-based text editors.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card kg-card-hascaption"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qC5KtatMcUw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="">VIDEO</iframe><figcaption>Each of hundreds of millions of triangles that compose this magnificent image is a direct evaluation of the skills of all web developers worldwide.</figcaption></figure><p>"We are disappointed with our colleagues," says the head of Web Developers Union Peter Eanline. "Both 3D game- and web-development have fundamental problems to overcome. Sure, they work hard computing millions of states in real-time by applying linear algebra and physics while maintaining up to 60fps of 4k video output. But at the same time we expect them to acknowledge equally challenging tasks like highlighting dozens of lines of code with 16 <em>different</em> colors, or remembering the scroll position after user closes an absolutely-positioned div, or deciding whether to inject CSS via JS or scale up the static assets cluster with Kubernetes."</p><p>The Web Developers Union members created an online petition to bring this potentially hostile decision of Epic Games to public light. The petition website is scheduled to go live in July 2020 (in approx. 43 days), as soon as the Node packages updating process is expected to finish.</p> | |||
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| <h1>What’s up with me?</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://helloanselm.com/writings/whats-up-with-me">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>I’ve turned pretty silent over the past months here and on Twitter. And there’s a bunch of reasons for it that I now want to share.</p> | |||
| <h3>Digital Exhaustion</h3> | |||
| <p>It started a while ago that I lost my sould for web development, for working in the whole area. At the time I was Engineering Manager for a small team at <a href="https://laterpay.net/">Laterpay</a>. It was a great job, I had nice team mates but I realized that sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t something that’s going to work for about 30 more years for me. And when you realize this, it’s getting harder to do the work. I have backpain issues since over a decade, a good portion of it due to being in front of a device, steady and still standing or sitting, all day.</p> | |||
| <p>Last year I started the plan to grow more food in a new garden, to be more outside, less in front of a screen. My backpain issues and the lack of motivation, the feeling of being burnt-out from work empowered me to follow this sooner than later, so I quit my job beginning of March and focuses solely on being not in front of my usual devices all day. My days turned from at least 10hrs a day screen time towards less than 3hrs on average now.</p> | |||
| <h3>Nature and Outside Work</h3> | |||
| <p><a href="https://schaufelundgabel.de/en">Schaufel & Gabel</a> is my latest project, my biggest so far in my entire life. My biggest because it’s a huge challenge to grow food entirely outdoors, without much support from others except my brother who’s my business partner here. My biggest because I never had to make such a big financial investment into starting a project so far. With digital tools it’s easy: Buy a computer, a screen, a desk, an office chair and pay a little bit for hosting and Internet.</p> | |||
| <p>With growing vegetables, this is an entirely different level. You need a lot of equipment for growing plants, you need professional seed starting soil, you need to heat the small self-built sowing greenhouse which costs a lot during cold times of the year, you need to buy a lot of stuff to make the soil better (okay, you don’t need to but I want), you need more tools, more utilities and you need to ask and pay your local farmer colleagues to help you out with the big machinery for initial digging and grubbing the soil to prepare the beds.</p> | |||
| <p>So yes, this changed my life quite a bit and my daily work with it. I had a 100 square meter garden so far, now I have to care about over 1200 square meters. I can now produce vegetables for more than 10 people already, and most likely this number goes up by next year when we’re more efficient. This feels great, it feels great to be outside all day, to feel the soil in my hands, to grow my own food and share it with others. Knowing that they don’t need to buy it from the supermarket where it comes from all over the world. Now they get it from their neighbourhood.</p> | |||
| <h3>Covid-19 and the Internet</h3> | |||
| <p>When the Covid-19 lockdown started in Germany, I was already registered as a farmer which belongs to our system-relevant jobs. Of course, because we’re producing food for others. But what it means for me is that I’m able to go to work every day, to a place of calmness, full of nature because it is all nature. And to go there, I can go by bike and do my 7km commute and calm my mind during these ~15 minutes of cycling.</p> | |||
| <blockquote> | |||
| <p>Being outside during this mentally difficult times is one of the biggest reliefs and helpful advice I can give.</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>One thing I realized with the whole really mentally exhausting situation of a social lockdown is that the Internet isn’t really helpful. When I stopped reading newspapers and any other news, including Twitter and other social media, this helped me stay sane. It’s not that you don’t know about the latest news, the latest regulations. I always was up to date with that at latest by the next day. But I stopped dragging myself into more and more depressing news, more fear of a virus that is indeed a big issue for our society. On the other hand, anxiety and fear are fuel for viruses to spread, and it’s the worst for our immune system. </p> | |||
| <p>Blocking news away from me, not using the Internet much these days helped me a lot when feeling not well in the current lockdown situation. Going outside helped. Hearing about so many conspiracy theories these days makes me confident: SOcial Media isn’t helpful in such situations, it fuels anxiety, it fuels these theories and it doesn’t help making us happy. We should be happy in order to fight a virus, we should be connfident and strong so it doesn’t get a chance. Fair criticism is fine, conspiracy theories that are blindly follow opinions of single persons out there are not. Reflect, research your own, build your own opinion. But please don’t drag others blindly into wild theories, let them build their own opinion. Help them achieve it.</p> | |||
| <h3>A child was born…</h3> | |||
| <p>But yeah, I said I had multiple reasons that my life changed and the virus section already got longer than I intended it to be. Anyway, here’s the probably biggest news in my life: <strong>I became a father in early April.</strong> We’re now a family of three and it changed a lot: The days seem very short these days, everything takes a bit longer and “time is running short”. The nights are different, it’s now a couple of sleeping blocks with short breaks instead of 6–7hrs straight. But overall it’s warming my heart to have a small baby in our family. I learn a lot, for myself, about babies, about my mind, about how a family life is different to a no-child life. For me, I can’t complain and while son is crying multiple times a day and sometimes I can’t calm him down easily, it’s a huge enrichment to my life. He helps me stay sane during weird times, he helps me stay on track being a farmer for idealistic reasons—you don’t become farmer because of the money, I chose it because it’s mentally rewarding, manual work and a great chance to help stopping climate change and do things differently.</p> | |||
| <p>That’s it for this time, it’s the reason why the <a href="https://wdrl.info/">WDRL</a> is currently on hold for the first time ever but I’m very sure it’ll come back soon again with a new writing. It’s the reason why it took me a week to see this nice <a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/1255053482178097153">Twitter notification</a> and <a href="https://helloanselm.com/writings/open-source-can-be-a-career-path">video by Max Stoiber</a>.</p> | |||
| <p>Stay sane, stay healthy, reflect your thoughts and stay positive. Hear you soon!</p> | |||
| </article> | |||
| <hr> | |||
| <footer> | |||
| <p> | |||
| <a href="/david/" title="Aller à l’accueil">🏠</a> • | |||
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| title: What’s up with me? | |||
| url: https://helloanselm.com/writings/whats-up-with-me | |||
| hash_url: 25289703cb4dd3023c087715cddf6d55 | |||
| <p>I’ve turned pretty silent over the past months here and on Twitter. And there’s a bunch of reasons for it that I now want to share.</p> | |||
| <h3>Digital Exhaustion</h3> | |||
| <p>It started a while ago that I lost my sould for web development, for working in the whole area. At the time I was Engineering Manager for a small team at <a href="https://laterpay.net/">Laterpay</a>. It was a great job, I had nice team mates but I realized that sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t something that’s going to work for about 30 more years for me. And when you realize this, it’s getting harder to do the work. I have backpain issues since over a decade, a good portion of it due to being in front of a device, steady and still standing or sitting, all day.</p> | |||
| <p>Last year I started the plan to grow more food in a new garden, to be more outside, less in front of a screen. My backpain issues and the lack of motivation, the feeling of being burnt-out from work empowered me to follow this sooner than later, so I quit my job beginning of March and focuses solely on being not in front of my usual devices all day. My days turned from at least 10hrs a day screen time towards less than 3hrs on average now.</p> | |||
| <h3>Nature and Outside Work</h3> | |||
| <p><a href="https://schaufelundgabel.de/en">Schaufel & Gabel</a> is my latest project, my biggest so far in my entire life. My biggest because it’s a huge challenge to grow food entirely outdoors, without much support from others except my brother who’s my business partner here. My biggest because I never had to make such a big financial investment into starting a project so far. With digital tools it’s easy: Buy a computer, a screen, a desk, an office chair and pay a little bit for hosting and Internet.</p> | |||
| <p>With growing vegetables, this is an entirely different level. You need a lot of equipment for growing plants, you need professional seed starting soil, you need to heat the small self-built sowing greenhouse which costs a lot during cold times of the year, you need to buy a lot of stuff to make the soil better (okay, you don’t need to but I want), you need more tools, more utilities and you need to ask and pay your local farmer colleagues to help you out with the big machinery for initial digging and grubbing the soil to prepare the beds.</p> | |||
| <p>So yes, this changed my life quite a bit and my daily work with it. I had a 100 square meter garden so far, now I have to care about over 1200 square meters. I can now produce vegetables for more than 10 people already, and most likely this number goes up by next year when we’re more efficient. This feels great, it feels great to be outside all day, to feel the soil in my hands, to grow my own food and share it with others. Knowing that they don’t need to buy it from the supermarket where it comes from all over the world. Now they get it from their neighbourhood.</p> | |||
| <h3>Covid-19 and the Internet</h3> | |||
| <p>When the Covid-19 lockdown started in Germany, I was already registered as a farmer which belongs to our system-relevant jobs. Of course, because we’re producing food for others. But what it means for me is that I’m able to go to work every day, to a place of calmness, full of nature because it is all nature. And to go there, I can go by bike and do my 7km commute and calm my mind during these ~15 minutes of cycling.</p> | |||
| <blockquote> | |||
| <p>Being outside during this mentally difficult times is one of the biggest reliefs and helpful advice I can give.</p> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>One thing I realized with the whole really mentally exhausting situation of a social lockdown is that the Internet isn’t really helpful. When I stopped reading newspapers and any other news, including Twitter and other social media, this helped me stay sane. It’s not that you don’t know about the latest news, the latest regulations. I always was up to date with that at latest by the next day. But I stopped dragging myself into more and more depressing news, more fear of a virus that is indeed a big issue for our society. On the other hand, anxiety and fear are fuel for viruses to spread, and it’s the worst for our immune system. </p> | |||
| <p>Blocking news away from me, not using the Internet much these days helped me a lot when feeling not well in the current lockdown situation. Going outside helped. Hearing about so many conspiracy theories these days makes me confident: SOcial Media isn’t helpful in such situations, it fuels anxiety, it fuels these theories and it doesn’t help making us happy. We should be happy in order to fight a virus, we should be connfident and strong so it doesn’t get a chance. Fair criticism is fine, conspiracy theories that are blindly follow opinions of single persons out there are not. Reflect, research your own, build your own opinion. But please don’t drag others blindly into wild theories, let them build their own opinion. Help them achieve it.</p> | |||
| <h3>A child was born…</h3> | |||
| <p>But yeah, I said I had multiple reasons that my life changed and the virus section already got longer than I intended it to be. Anyway, here’s the probably biggest news in my life: <strong>I became a father in early April.</strong> We’re now a family of three and it changed a lot: The days seem very short these days, everything takes a bit longer and “time is running short”. The nights are different, it’s now a couple of sleeping blocks with short breaks instead of 6–7hrs straight. But overall it’s warming my heart to have a small baby in our family. I learn a lot, for myself, about babies, about my mind, about how a family life is different to a no-child life. For me, I can’t complain and while son is crying multiple times a day and sometimes I can’t calm him down easily, it’s a huge enrichment to my life. He helps me stay sane during weird times, he helps me stay on track being a farmer for idealistic reasons—you don’t become farmer because of the money, I chose it because it’s mentally rewarding, manual work and a great chance to help stopping climate change and do things differently.</p> | |||
| <p>That’s it for this time, it’s the reason why the <a href="https://wdrl.info/">WDRL</a> is currently on hold for the first time ever but I’m very sure it’ll come back soon again with a new writing. It’s the reason why it took me a week to see this nice <a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/1255053482178097153">Twitter notification</a> and <a href="https://helloanselm.com/writings/open-source-can-be-a-career-path">video by Max Stoiber</a>.</p> | |||
| <p>Stay sane, stay healthy, reflect your thoughts and stay positive. Hear you soon!</p> | |||
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| <article> | |||
| <h1>Setting Up Git Identities</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>Working on many projects across multiple identities can be difficult to manage. This is a procedure for leveraging git aliases to set an identity at the project level for any project with support for GPG-based commit signing.</p> | |||
| <h3 id="first-remove-any-existing-global-identity">First, remove any existing global identity</h3> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global --unset user.name | |||
| git config --global --unset user.email | |||
| git config --global --unset user.signingkey | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <h3 id="require-config-to-exist-in-order-to-make-commits">Require config to exist in order to make commits</h3> | |||
| <p>Without the global user name and user email, git would use the system’s hostname and username to make commits. Tell git to throw an error instead, requiring you to specify an identity for every new project.</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global user.useConfigOnly true | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <h3 id="for-each-identity-generate-gpg-keys">For each identity, generate GPG keys</h3> | |||
| <p><img src="https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/keygen.png" alt="GPG key generation output"/></p> | |||
| <p>Generate a GPG public/private key pair:</p> | |||
| <p>Choose (1) RSA and RSA (default) key type. Choose key size of 4096 bits. Set the key to not expire (0) unless you want to repeat this step periodically. Finally, set your name and email address. Comment can be left blank.</p> | |||
| <p>Once the key pair is generated we need to export the public key.</p> | |||
| <h3 id="export-the-public-keys">Export the public keys</h3> | |||
| <p><img src="https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/key-export.png" alt="GPG key export"/></p> | |||
| <p><em>For each identity</em>, export the public key:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format LONG user@example.com | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>where <code>user@example.com</code> is the email address of the identity you just created.</p> | |||
| <p>This will output a <code>sec</code> ID in the format of <code>rsa4096/[serial]</code>. Copy the serial number, then run this command to output the public key:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">gpg --armor --export <span>[</span>serial<span>]</span> | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>Copy the public key block and add it to your Github or Gitlab settings. With the public key, Github and Gitlab can cryptographically verify your commits, placing a “Verified” label next to each.</p> | |||
| <h3 id="set-global-git-config-identities">Set global git config identities</h3> | |||
| <p>Now we need to create the identities in git’s global config. For example:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global user.gitlab.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.gitlab.email <span>"gitlab@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.gitlab.signingkey 543166183AE7043A | |||
| git config --global user.github.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.github.email <span>"github@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.github.signingkey BCF8B7A8C138D16B | |||
| git config --global user.identity3.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity3.email <span>"identity3@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity3.signingkey 4F3FFC37B1A027BD | |||
| git config --global user.identity4.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity4.email <span>"identity4@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity4.signingkey D921F8BA473CF1FC | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <h3 id="create-git-alias">Create git alias</h3> | |||
| <p>Setting a git alias will give us a new git command to use to set the identity at a project level. This really is just a script that sets a particular global identity to the local config.</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global alias.identity <span>'! git config user.name "$(git config user.$1.name)"; git config user.email "$(git config user.$1.email)"; git config user.signingkey "$(git config user.$1.signingkey)"; :'</span> | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <h3 id="specify-git-identity">Specify git identity</h3> | |||
| <p>For each project, specify the git identity to use:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">$ cd /path/to/git/repo | |||
| $ git config user.email <span># should be no response</span> | |||
| $ git config user.github.email | |||
| github@example.com | |||
| $ git identity github | |||
| $ git config user.email | |||
| github@example.com | |||
| </code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>That’s it! Now whenever you start a new project or work on an existing project, you can be confident that the correct name, email address, and GPG signing key are being used.</p> | |||
| </article> | |||
| <hr> | |||
| <footer> | |||
| <p> | |||
| <a href="/david/" title="Aller à l’accueil">🏠</a> • | |||
| <a href="/david/log/" title="Accès au flux RSS">🤖</a> • | |||
| <a href="http://larlet.com" title="Go to my English profile" data-instant>🇨🇦</a> • | |||
| <a href="mailto:david%40larlet.fr" title="Envoyer un courriel">📮</a> • | |||
| <abbr title="Hébergeur : Alwaysdata, 62 rue Tiquetonne 75002 Paris, +33184162340">🧚</abbr> | |||
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| title: Setting Up Git Identities | |||
| url: https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/ | |||
| hash_url: 4218c8b3332d61d6702bb2bd73ea9944 | |||
| <p>Working on many projects across multiple identities can be difficult to manage. This is a procedure for leveraging git aliases to set an identity at the project level for any project with support for GPG-based commit signing.</p> | |||
| <h3 id="first-remove-any-existing-global-identity">First, remove any existing global identity</h3> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global --unset user.name | |||
| git config --global --unset user.email | |||
| git config --global --unset user.signingkey | |||
| </code></pre></div><h3 id="require-config-to-exist-in-order-to-make-commits">Require config to exist in order to make commits</h3> | |||
| <p>Without the global user name and user email, git would use the system’s hostname and username to make commits. Tell git to throw an error instead, requiring you to specify an identity for every new project.</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global user.useConfigOnly true | |||
| </code></pre></div><h3 id="for-each-identity-generate-gpg-keys">For each identity, generate GPG keys</h3> | |||
| <p><img src="https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/keygen.png" alt="GPG key generation output"/></p> | |||
| <p>Generate a GPG public/private key pair:</p> | |||
| <p>Choose (1) RSA and RSA (default) key type. Choose key size of 4096 bits. Set the key to not expire (0) unless you want to repeat this step periodically. Finally, set your name and email address. Comment can be left blank.</p> | |||
| <p>Once the key pair is generated we need to export the public key.</p> | |||
| <h3 id="export-the-public-keys">Export the public keys</h3> | |||
| <p><img src="https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/key-export.png" alt="GPG key export"/></p> | |||
| <p><em>For each identity</em>, export the public key:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format LONG user@example.com | |||
| </code></pre></div><p>where <code>user@example.com</code> is the email address of the identity you just created.</p> | |||
| <p>This will output a <code>sec</code> ID in the format of <code>rsa4096/[serial]</code>. Copy the serial number, then run this command to output the public key:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">gpg --armor --export <span>[</span>serial<span>]</span> | |||
| </code></pre></div><p>Copy the public key block and add it to your Github or Gitlab settings. With the public key, Github and Gitlab can cryptographically verify your commits, placing a “Verified” label next to each.</p> | |||
| <h3 id="set-global-git-config-identities">Set global git config identities</h3> | |||
| <p>Now we need to create the identities in git’s global config. For example:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global user.gitlab.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.gitlab.email <span>"gitlab@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.gitlab.signingkey 543166183AE7043A | |||
| git config --global user.github.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.github.email <span>"github@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.github.signingkey BCF8B7A8C138D16B | |||
| git config --global user.identity3.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity3.email <span>"identity3@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity3.signingkey 4F3FFC37B1A027BD | |||
| git config --global user.identity4.name <span>"Your Name"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity4.email <span>"identity4@example.com"</span> | |||
| git config --global user.identity4.signingkey D921F8BA473CF1FC | |||
| </code></pre></div><h3 id="create-git-alias">Create git alias</h3> | |||
| <p>Setting a git alias will give us a new git command to use to set the identity at a project level. This really is just a script that sets a particular global identity to the local config.</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">git config --global alias.identity <span>'! git config user.name "$(git config user.$1.name)"; git config user.email "$(git config user.$1.email)"; git config user.signingkey "$(git config user.$1.signingkey)"; :'</span> | |||
| </code></pre></div><h3 id="specify-git-identity">Specify git identity</h3> | |||
| <p>For each project, specify the git identity to use:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre><code class="language-shell" data-lang="shell">$ cd /path/to/git/repo | |||
| $ git config user.email <span># should be no response</span> | |||
| $ git config user.github.email | |||
| github@example.com | |||
| $ git identity github | |||
| $ git config user.email | |||
| github@example.com | |||
| </code></pre></div><p>That’s it! Now whenever you start a new project or work on an existing project, you can be confident that the correct name, email address, and GPG signing key are being used.</p> | |||
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| <article> | |||
| <h1>Home .git</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://martinovic.blog/post/home_git/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>Git is an incredibly useful tool for a programmer, you use it to version the work you do and distribute it easily on other computers. | |||
| But over the years, I’ve found that a lot of my workflow depends on various configurations and helper scripts I have in my path. | |||
| So why not version those as well, it does allow you to get started in seconds in a very familiar environment on every new computer or even a server if you spend a lot of your time in SSH sessions. | |||
| Bonus points for making it a public repository so others can take a look at your stuff and possibly get inspiration for improvements in their workflow, just make sure you don’t commit any private keys.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="the-setup">The setup</h1> | |||
| <p>Feel free to check out my home repository over <a href="https://github.com/tophatcroat/home">here</a>. As you can see, it contains my <code>.zshrc</code>, <code>.vimrc</code> a <code>bin</code> directory with various scripts, dotfiles and some other stuff I’ve curated while doing what I do best, fidgeting around a computer.</p> | |||
| <p>You can start your own version by simply initializing a Git repository in your home directory.</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span style="color:#111">cd</span> ~ <span style="color:#f92672">&&</span> git init</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>Now your directory will be full of stuff you probably don’t want to commit, like your downloads, pictures, private keys, shell history or what have you. | |||
| So it’s important to set up the <code>~/.gitignore</code> file immediately to stop you from accidentally committing stuff you didn’t want to.</p> | |||
| <p>Most importantly, you should ignore everything by default in your <code>~/.gitignore</code>:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span style="color:#75715e"># Blacklist all in this folder</span> | |||
| /* | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Except for these</span> | |||
| !.gitignore | |||
| !.gitconfig | |||
| !.notes/ | |||
| !bin/ | |||
| !Development/Sh</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>This will instruct Git to keep its hands off all files except for the <code>.gitignore</code>, <code>.gitconfig</code> and the files in the <code>.notes</code>, <code>bin</code> and <code>Development/Sh</code> directories. | |||
| So now, when you want to add any other file or directory you will require a force flag like so</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh">git add -f path_to_file</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>And that’s basically all you need to do to set this up, it’s now up to you to add and commit all you want and push it to the Git hosting service of your choice.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="the-cloning">The cloning</h1> | |||
| <p>So now it’s time to clone this into your new home directory, but if you try cloning it using <code>git clone</code> command it will complain that it can’t do that in an non empty directory. | |||
| To get around this, you need to initialize it first then manually add the remote and finally force a checkout like so:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span style="color:#111">cd</span> ~ | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Create an empty git repository in your home folder</span> | |||
| git init | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Add the remote</span> | |||
| git remote add origin https://github.com/TopHatCroat/home | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Get the stuff from up there</span> | |||
| git fetch | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Be careful! This will overwrite any local files existing on remote!</span> | |||
| git reset --hard origin/master</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>Running the last command will basically checkout all the files from the origin master branch and overwrite any files with the same path, so be careful if you already did some setup on the new machine.</p> | |||
| <p>And that’s it, you’ve saved yourself the bother of copying over the config files. | |||
| The only thing that remains is to install the tools that use the configs you’ve just brought over. | |||
| If you are feeling adventurous you could make a script that will do that for you like I did in <a href="https://github.com/TopHatCroat/home/blob/master/Development/Sh/setup.sh">here</a>, but that is up to you.</p> | |||
| <p><em>EDIT:</em> As a response to this blog post others have pointed out <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles">another viable solution</a>, or by using <a href="https://protesilaos.com/codelog/gnu-stow-dotfiles/">GNU stow</a>, or <a href="https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick">homesick</a> or <a href="https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm">rcm</a>. | |||
| Still, the solution presented here is the simplest to setup and understand and it does not depend on any other tool besides Git. | |||
| All in all, there are a bunch of ways to do this and a lot more resources are available <a href="https://dotfiles.github.io/">here</a>.</p> | |||
| </article> | |||
| <hr> | |||
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| title: Home .git | |||
| url: https://martinovic.blog/post/home_git/ | |||
| hash_url: 4be675592f4f6dcf636812263e9e1233 | |||
| <p>Git is an incredibly useful tool for a programmer, you use it to version the work you do and distribute it easily on other computers. | |||
| But over the years, I’ve found that a lot of my workflow depends on various configurations and helper scripts I have in my path. | |||
| So why not version those as well, it does allow you to get started in seconds in a very familiar environment on every new computer or even a server if you spend a lot of your time in SSH sessions. | |||
| Bonus points for making it a public repository so others can take a look at your stuff and possibly get inspiration for improvements in their workflow, just make sure you don’t commit any private keys.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="the-setup">The setup</h1> | |||
| <p>Feel free to check out my home repository over <a href="https://github.com/tophatcroat/home">here</a>. As you can see, it contains my <code>.zshrc</code>, <code>.vimrc</code> a <code>bin</code> directory with various scripts, dotfiles and some other stuff I’ve curated while doing what I do best, fidgeting around a computer.</p> | |||
| <p>You can start your own version by simply initializing a Git repository in your home directory.</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span style="color:#111">cd</span> ~ <span style="color:#f92672">&&</span> git init</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>Now your directory will be full of stuff you probably don’t want to commit, like your downloads, pictures, private keys, shell history or what have you. | |||
| So it’s important to set up the <code>~/.gitignore</code> file immediately to stop you from accidentally committing stuff you didn’t want to.</p> | |||
| <p>Most importantly, you should ignore everything by default in your <code>~/.gitignore</code>:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span style="color:#75715e"># Blacklist all in this folder</span> | |||
| /* | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Except for these</span> | |||
| !.gitignore | |||
| !.gitconfig | |||
| !.notes/ | |||
| !bin/ | |||
| !Development/Sh</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>This will instruct Git to keep its hands off all files except for the <code>.gitignore</code>, <code>.gitconfig</code> and the files in the <code>.notes</code>, <code>bin</code> and <code>Development/Sh</code> directories. | |||
| So now, when you want to add any other file or directory you will require a force flag like so</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh">git add -f path_to_file</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>And that’s basically all you need to do to set this up, it’s now up to you to add and commit all you want and push it to the Git hosting service of your choice.</p> | |||
| <h1 id="the-cloning">The cloning</h1> | |||
| <p>So now it’s time to clone this into your new home directory, but if you try cloning it using <code>git clone</code> command it will complain that it can’t do that in an non empty directory. | |||
| To get around this, you need to initialize it first then manually add the remote and finally force a checkout like so:</p> | |||
| <div class="highlight"><pre style="color:#272822;background-color:#fafafa;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4"><code class="language-sh" data-lang="sh"><span style="color:#111">cd</span> ~ | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Create an empty git repository in your home folder</span> | |||
| git init | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Add the remote</span> | |||
| git remote add origin https://github.com/TopHatCroat/home | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Get the stuff from up there</span> | |||
| git fetch | |||
| <span style="color:#75715e"># Be careful! This will overwrite any local files existing on remote!</span> | |||
| git reset --hard origin/master</code></pre></div> | |||
| <p>Running the last command will basically checkout all the files from the origin master branch and overwrite any files with the same path, so be careful if you already did some setup on the new machine.</p> | |||
| <p>And that’s it, you’ve saved yourself the bother of copying over the config files. | |||
| The only thing that remains is to install the tools that use the configs you’ve just brought over. | |||
| If you are feeling adventurous you could make a script that will do that for you like I did in <a href="https://github.com/TopHatCroat/home/blob/master/Development/Sh/setup.sh">here</a>, but that is up to you.</p> | |||
| <p><em>EDIT:</em> As a response to this blog post others have pointed out <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles">another viable solution</a>, or by using <a href="https://protesilaos.com/codelog/gnu-stow-dotfiles/">GNU stow</a>, or <a href="https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick">homesick</a> or <a href="https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm">rcm</a>. | |||
| Still, the solution presented here is the simplest to setup and understand and it does not depend on any other tool besides Git. | |||
| All in all, there are a bunch of ways to do this and a lot more resources are available <a href="https://dotfiles.github.io/">here</a>.</p> | |||
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| <article> | |||
| <h1>Digital Gardens</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://sentiers.media/dispatch-08-digital-gardens/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <div class="wp-block-columns alignwide"> | |||
| <div class="wp-block-column"> | |||
| <p>If you deal with a lot of knowledge “stuff,” articles, books, feeds, and need (or really like) to be able to not only find things again but also collect them somehow and ideally built from there to advance your thinking, make sense, and understand, most people would agree you need some kind of system, some set of practices. The oft cited idea of “information overload” is actually, a lot of the time, some form of filter failure. There is a lot of information out there but by focusing on stronger signals in the noise, keeping track of things, and having some structure in how you work, you can parse quite a bit of information without sliding into overload.</p> | |||
| </div> | |||
| <div class="wp-block-column"> | |||
| <p class="has-background has-normal-font-size has-light-background-background-color">This <em>Dispatch</em> is made possible by members of <em>Sentiers </em>and currently unlocked and free to read for everyone. If you are new here, you can subscribe to the free weekly below or <a href="https://sentiers.media/membership/">become a member</a> to also get the extra dispatches.</p> | |||
| </div> | |||
| </div> | |||
| <p>I’ve already covered some of that thinking in the second Dispatch, <a href="https://sentiers.media/dispatch-02-ideas-tools-from-my-process/">Ideas & tools from my process</a>. Here I’d like to look at a type of tool I’m not using yet, although there is some overlap with things I use. It’s the idea of the Digital Garden. I originally happened on it through Tom Critchlow’s piece <a href="https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/">Building a digital garden</a> which you should read but for now let pull this bit out:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>It’s a less-performative version of blogging – more of a captain’s log than a broadcast blog. The distinction will come down to how you blog – some people blog in much the same way. For me however blogging is mostly <i>performative thinking</i> and less captain’s log. <span class="highlight">So I am looking for a space to nurture, edit in real time and evolve my thinking.</span></p></blockquote> | |||
| <h3>Metaphors</h3> | |||
| <p>When talking about having a system for Personal Knowledge Management I usually use two metaphors. It’s easier to “find a needle in a smaller haystack,” which reflects my experience that when you think you’ll “just find it again on Google” it’s often not the case because “that guy who wrote that thing around that time talking about metamodernism” will give you nothing. However, simply searching for the word “metamodernism” through the full text of what you’ve bookmarked on <a href="https://pinboard.in/">Pinboard</a> usually does give results pretty quickly. The second metaphor is “composting” (fermenting is more exact but whatever), the idea that things you read and hear pile up in your brain, simmer, ferment, and might turn into something else. For that to work though, you need to randomly “bump into” those articles, quotes, notes, thoughts and have a practice of reviewing, revisiting, and ideally writing about the links you are making. That’s where the garden comes in.</p> | |||
| <p>Tom talks about streams (Twitter), campfires (his blog), and garden which was the missing part he started working on. Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about <a href="https://www.mentalnodes.com/a-gardening-guide-for-your-mind">seeds, trees, and fruits</a> (further down I’ll be linking to a couple of her posts but you should browse her site, loads of stuff on this and other adjacent practices). Let me add to these metaphors, just in case this one makes things click for you.</p> | |||
| <ul class="miscellany"><li><b>Stream and market</b>. Twitter, RSS, and I’d even add reading newsletters. Some of them are essay length and need some slow reading but many contain a lot of links with few thoughts and, paragraph to paragraph, email to email, are “stream like.” I’m adding market as a slower input of books and longer reads. | |||
| </li><li><b>Garden</b>. The way I save quotes and notes is close(ish) to this but is not a proper Digital Garden. This is where you take things you want to remember and expand (grow) upon. The things you “cultivate in season” are the current top of mind topics. | |||
| </li><li><b>Pantry</b>. Longer term storage. Bookmarking, marginalia in books, anything you file somewhere virtual or physical, keep for later, but aren’t necessarily thinking about more deeply in the “current season.” | |||
| </li><li><b>Kitchen</b>. I know, I’m pushing it now but where you actually take the time to actively assemble ideas and insights into something actually useful. When you turn the things you’ve collected and the hunches you quickly noted into some new knowledge. Here you’re blogging, newslettering, sending a longer text to a bunch of coworkers or friends, etc. | |||
| </li><li><b>Market stall.</b> Last one, sorry for the stretched metaphor. If you are writing with a professional purpose, things usually get more polished and require more time. I’m splitting this from kitchen mostly to draw your attention to the fact that a lot of people seem to think that blog posts or newsletters need to be at a certain level of finish… and never end up taking the time to write because of that. The basic idea is to cook for yourself in the kitchen, no need to get pro unless you want to! | |||
| </li></ul> | |||
| <p class="has-text-align-center">—</p> | |||
| <p>In short: inputs; a place to save things for later; a place to start making sense and drawing links; a time to write and share for fun (this is almost not optional, it’s such a useful way of thinking); and, if you want to, a time to write and share more seriously.</p> | |||
| <h3>What is it, really?</h3> | |||
| <p>Getting back to the digital garden itself, what is it? Everyone’s definition is a bit different and it’s still an emerging practice—even though it’s built on similar older ideas—but I’d say most share a few of the following characteristics:</p> | |||
| <ul class="miscellany"><li><b>Thoughtful notes</b>. Not just copying things over as you read a book. Some call them evergreen notes, some call them seeds. They are basically your thoughts on something you’ve read. | |||
| </li><li><b>Compact</b>. We’re not talking about pages of text but rather nuggets that are meant to be reassembled. | |||
| </li><li><b>Heavy linking</b>. The notes are kept short because there are multiple links back and forth between each, to connect concepts and ideas. | |||
| </li><li><b>Backlinks</b> (bi-directional). This is the more recent development in what people are using for digital gardens. In the most interesting systems, you’ll have a section to the side or at the bottom with “Links to this note,” listing all the other notes linking to it. For example here <a href="https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z2ZAGQBHuJ2u9WrtAQHAEHcCZTtqpsGkAsrD1">Most people take only transient notes</a>. | |||
| </li><li><b>Transclusions</b>. Hovering the cursor over a link pops up a modal window displaying the targeted page/note. Since the garden is made up of lots of small notes, it’s useful to be able to glance at the target page instead of clicking back and forth all the time (see backlinks above for an example). | |||
| </li><li><b>Editable</b>. Kept in a format and a “place” where you can and it’s accepted (so usually not a blog) that you can edit multiple times, re-organize, and add to individual notes and the whole. | |||
| </li></ul> | |||
| <p class="has-text-align-center">—</p> | |||
| <p>In short: brief notes from your own thinking, heavily linked back and forth, continually added to and edited.</p> | |||
| <p>The goal is to have a library of notes of your own thinking so you can build upon what you read and write, creating your own ideas, advancing your knowledge.</p> | |||
| <p>Lets stop here with the explaining and link to some thinking and examples. Hit reply for all comments and questions of course!</p> | |||
| <h2>Explore</h2> | |||
| <ul class="miscellany"><li>Already linked above, Tom Critchlow’s <a href="https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/">Building a digital garden</a> is an excellent explanation of the concept. | |||
| </li><li><a href="https://nesslabs.com/mind-garden">You and your mind garden</a> by Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a great read and, as mentioned above, click around, she’s done a lot more writing on the topic. | |||
| </li><li>Joel Hooks has a useful and different perspective with <a href="https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden">My blog is a digital garden, not a blog</a> . | |||
| </li><li>Amy Hoy’s <a href="https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/">How the Blog Broke the Web</a> is often mentioned, where she argues that the format and reverse chronology broke the more random and adhoc nature of the pre-blog web. Gardens might be a return to that. | |||
| </li><li>Maggie Appleton’s <a href="https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880">Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems</a> resulted in the rabbit hole thread you need with many many great examples. She also wrote <a href="https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals">A Short History of Bi-Directional Links</a>. | |||
| </li><li>Robin Sloan’s <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890">Stock and flow</a> from 2010 is a must read in this context. | |||
| </li><li>Lots of people are using <a href="https://roamresearch.com">Roam</a> for note-taking and its native backlinks make it a popular choice for garden-like writing. Anne-Laure researched <a href="https://nesslabs.com/roam-research-alternatives">free, open source, and self-hosted alternatives</a> to it and later settled on a wiki and kindly wrote <a href="https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-tiddlywiki">How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki</a>. | |||
| </li><li>⭐️ Andy Matuschak’s <a href="https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes">custom built notes platform</a> is extraordinary in it’s simple look, how it works, and there are literally hours and hours of reading in there with lots of very smart thinking. It might be the canonical example of a well tended digital garden. | |||
| </li><li>Azlen Elza made his own <a href="https://notes.azlen.me/g3tibyfv/">very similar version</a> which also makes for great reading. | |||
| </li><li>The <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/">Zettelkasten Method</a> is often mentioned in discussions around this kind of topic, I encourage you to have a look. <i>“Using a Zettelkasten is about optimizing a workflow of learning and producing knowledge. The products are texts, mostly.”</i> | |||
| </li></ul> | |||
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| title: Digital Gardens | |||
| url: https://sentiers.media/dispatch-08-digital-gardens/ | |||
| hash_url: 5a82172cc73bfc2050a2590b4d81e82d | |||
| <div class="wp-block-columns alignwide"> | |||
| <div class="wp-block-column"> | |||
| <p>If you deal with a lot of knowledge “stuff,” articles, books, feeds, and need (or really like) to be able to not only find things again but also collect them somehow and ideally built from there to advance your thinking, make sense, and understand, most people would agree you need some kind of system, some set of practices. The oft cited idea of “information overload” is actually, a lot of the time, some form of filter failure. There is a lot of information out there but by focusing on stronger signals in the noise, keeping track of things, and having some structure in how you work, you can parse quite a bit of information without sliding into overload.</p> | |||
| </div> | |||
| <div class="wp-block-column"> | |||
| <p class="has-background has-normal-font-size has-light-background-background-color">This <em>Dispatch</em> is made possible by members of <em>Sentiers </em>and currently unlocked and free to read for everyone. If you are new here, you can subscribe to the free weekly below or <a href="https://sentiers.media/membership/">become a member</a> to also get the extra dispatches.</p> | |||
| </div> | |||
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| <p>I’ve already covered some of that thinking in the second Dispatch, <a href="https://sentiers.media/dispatch-02-ideas-tools-from-my-process/">Ideas & tools from my process</a>. Here I’d like to look at a type of tool I’m not using yet, although there is some overlap with things I use. It’s the idea of the Digital Garden. I originally happened on it through Tom Critchlow’s piece <a href="https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/">Building a digital garden</a> which you should read but for now let pull this bit out:</p> | |||
| <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>It’s a less-performative version of blogging – more of a captain’s log than a broadcast blog. The distinction will come down to how you blog – some people blog in much the same way. For me however blogging is mostly <i>performative thinking</i> and less captain’s log. <span class="highlight">So I am looking for a space to nurture, edit in real time and evolve my thinking.</span></p></blockquote> | |||
| <h3>Metaphors</h3> | |||
| <p>When talking about having a system for Personal Knowledge Management I usually use two metaphors. It’s easier to “find a needle in a smaller haystack,” which reflects my experience that when you think you’ll “just find it again on Google” it’s often not the case because “that guy who wrote that thing around that time talking about metamodernism” will give you nothing. However, simply searching for the word “metamodernism” through the full text of what you’ve bookmarked on <a href="https://pinboard.in/">Pinboard</a> usually does give results pretty quickly. The second metaphor is “composting” (fermenting is more exact but whatever), the idea that things you read and hear pile up in your brain, simmer, ferment, and might turn into something else. For that to work though, you need to randomly “bump into” those articles, quotes, notes, thoughts and have a practice of reviewing, revisiting, and ideally writing about the links you are making. That’s where the garden comes in.</p> | |||
| <p>Tom talks about streams (Twitter), campfires (his blog), and garden which was the missing part he started working on. Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about <a href="https://www.mentalnodes.com/a-gardening-guide-for-your-mind">seeds, trees, and fruits</a> (further down I’ll be linking to a couple of her posts but you should browse her site, loads of stuff on this and other adjacent practices). Let me add to these metaphors, just in case this one makes things click for you.</p> | |||
| <ul class="miscellany"><li><b>Stream and market</b>. Twitter, RSS, and I’d even add reading newsletters. Some of them are essay length and need some slow reading but many contain a lot of links with few thoughts and, paragraph to paragraph, email to email, are “stream like.” I’m adding market as a slower input of books and longer reads. | |||
| </li><li><b>Garden</b>. The way I save quotes and notes is close(ish) to this but is not a proper Digital Garden. This is where you take things you want to remember and expand (grow) upon. The things you “cultivate in season” are the current top of mind topics. | |||
| </li><li><b>Pantry</b>. Longer term storage. Bookmarking, marginalia in books, anything you file somewhere virtual or physical, keep for later, but aren’t necessarily thinking about more deeply in the “current season.” | |||
| </li><li><b>Kitchen</b>. I know, I’m pushing it now but where you actually take the time to actively assemble ideas and insights into something actually useful. When you turn the things you’ve collected and the hunches you quickly noted into some new knowledge. Here you’re blogging, newslettering, sending a longer text to a bunch of coworkers or friends, etc. | |||
| </li><li><b>Market stall.</b> Last one, sorry for the stretched metaphor. If you are writing with a professional purpose, things usually get more polished and require more time. I’m splitting this from kitchen mostly to draw your attention to the fact that a lot of people seem to think that blog posts or newsletters need to be at a certain level of finish… and never end up taking the time to write because of that. The basic idea is to cook for yourself in the kitchen, no need to get pro unless you want to! | |||
| </li></ul> | |||
| <p class="has-text-align-center">—</p> | |||
| <p>In short: inputs; a place to save things for later; a place to start making sense and drawing links; a time to write and share for fun (this is almost not optional, it’s such a useful way of thinking); and, if you want to, a time to write and share more seriously.</p> | |||
| <h3>What is it, really?</h3> | |||
| <p>Getting back to the digital garden itself, what is it? Everyone’s definition is a bit different and it’s still an emerging practice—even though it’s built on similar older ideas—but I’d say most share a few of the following characteristics:</p> | |||
| <ul class="miscellany"><li><b>Thoughtful notes</b>. Not just copying things over as you read a book. Some call them evergreen notes, some call them seeds. They are basically your thoughts on something you’ve read. | |||
| </li><li><b>Compact</b>. We’re not talking about pages of text but rather nuggets that are meant to be reassembled. | |||
| </li><li><b>Heavy linking</b>. The notes are kept short because there are multiple links back and forth between each, to connect concepts and ideas. | |||
| </li><li><b>Backlinks</b> (bi-directional). This is the more recent development in what people are using for digital gardens. In the most interesting systems, you’ll have a section to the side or at the bottom with “Links to this note,” listing all the other notes linking to it. For example here <a href="https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z2ZAGQBHuJ2u9WrtAQHAEHcCZTtqpsGkAsrD1">Most people take only transient notes</a>. | |||
| </li><li><b>Transclusions</b>. Hovering the cursor over a link pops up a modal window displaying the targeted page/note. Since the garden is made up of lots of small notes, it’s useful to be able to glance at the target page instead of clicking back and forth all the time (see backlinks above for an example). | |||
| </li><li><b>Editable</b>. Kept in a format and a “place” where you can and it’s accepted (so usually not a blog) that you can edit multiple times, re-organize, and add to individual notes and the whole. | |||
| </li></ul> | |||
| <p class="has-text-align-center">—</p> | |||
| <p>In short: brief notes from your own thinking, heavily linked back and forth, continually added to and edited.</p> | |||
| <p>The goal is to have a library of notes of your own thinking so you can build upon what you read and write, creating your own ideas, advancing your knowledge.</p> | |||
| <p>Lets stop here with the explaining and link to some thinking and examples. Hit reply for all comments and questions of course!</p> | |||
| <h2>Explore</h2> | |||
| <ul class="miscellany"><li>Already linked above, Tom Critchlow’s <a href="https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/">Building a digital garden</a> is an excellent explanation of the concept. | |||
| </li><li><a href="https://nesslabs.com/mind-garden">You and your mind garden</a> by Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a great read and, as mentioned above, click around, she’s done a lot more writing on the topic. | |||
| </li><li>Joel Hooks has a useful and different perspective with <a href="https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden">My blog is a digital garden, not a blog</a> . | |||
| </li><li>Amy Hoy’s <a href="https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/">How the Blog Broke the Web</a> is often mentioned, where she argues that the format and reverse chronology broke the more random and adhoc nature of the pre-blog web. Gardens might be a return to that. | |||
| </li><li>Maggie Appleton’s <a href="https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880">Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems</a> resulted in the rabbit hole thread you need with many many great examples. She also wrote <a href="https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals">A Short History of Bi-Directional Links</a>. | |||
| </li><li>Robin Sloan’s <a href="http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890">Stock and flow</a> from 2010 is a must read in this context. | |||
| </li><li>Lots of people are using <a href="https://roamresearch.com">Roam</a> for note-taking and its native backlinks make it a popular choice for garden-like writing. Anne-Laure researched <a href="https://nesslabs.com/roam-research-alternatives">free, open source, and self-hosted alternatives</a> to it and later settled on a wiki and kindly wrote <a href="https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-tiddlywiki">How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki</a>. | |||
| </li><li>⭐️ Andy Matuschak’s <a href="https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes">custom built notes platform</a> is extraordinary in it’s simple look, how it works, and there are literally hours and hours of reading in there with lots of very smart thinking. It might be the canonical example of a well tended digital garden. | |||
| </li><li>Azlen Elza made his own <a href="https://notes.azlen.me/g3tibyfv/">very similar version</a> which also makes for great reading. | |||
| </li><li>The <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/">Zettelkasten Method</a> is often mentioned in discussions around this kind of topic, I encourage you to have a look. <i>“Using a Zettelkasten is about optimizing a workflow of learning and producing knowledge. The products are texts, mostly.”</i> | |||
| </li></ul> | |||
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| <h1>Plus rien à craindre</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://nrkn.fr/blog/2020/06/13/plus-rien-a-craindre/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>Pour le week-end de la Pentecôte, j’étais retourné là-bas pour honorer un engagement. J’avais dit à ma chère complice que je comptais prendre quelques jours pour avancer — enfin — dans le tri de mes papiers et de mes quelques affaires qui hantent encore ses lieux. Au moins élaguer, à défaut d’en finir une bonne fois pour toutes. J’ai donc retrouvé ce vieux bureau, à l’arrière de la maison, au-delà de la petite cour intérieure. Le petit destructeur de documents sous un bras, quelques sacs-poubelles dans la main restée libre. À peine installé, je me mettais en quête d’un cendrier également. Vieille habitude du lieu, nous y fumions à l’intérieur à l’époque.</p> | |||
| <p>Elle est venue me rejoindre, me donner un coup de main. Pour être avec moi avant tout, m’a-t-elle glissé. Et nous nous sommes alors affairés à ce grand déblayage qui paraît ne pas vouloir en finir. L’organisation s’est imposée d’elle-même, pour laisser le temps au destructeur de refroidir régulièrement. Sélection d’une boîte d’archives ou d’une pile de dossiers, parcours rapide des documents contenus. Ça se garde ? Oui/Non. Ça peut partir en l’état dans un sac ? Oui/Non. Ça passe forcément au destructeur ? Oui/Non. Au fil du tri, des redécouvertes heureuses et amusantes. D’autres moins.</p> | |||
| <p>Des révélateurs de souvenirs pas si profondément enfouis finalement. Des sujets à anecdotes, à discussions, à échanges de regards lourds de silence en tendant quelques papiers, entre chaque respiration de ce petit destructeur quasi indestructible. Et puis cet instant de pause improvisée où elle m’a regardé, le regard un peu triste, un peu hagard, de me voir broyer tout cela avec autant de ferveur. « J’ai l’impression que nous détruisons toutes tes traces, de t’effacer ». Quel effet a bien pu lui faire mon sourire, réjoui mais retenu autant que possible ? D’autant que j’ai pensé tout haut « c’est bien le but et j’y prends du plaisir ».</p> | |||
| <p>Je n’aurais su dire autre chose. Ç’aurait été mentir. C’était encore bien en dessous de la jubilation que j’éprouvais à assassiner cet autre que je méprise toujours autant, bien que je ne le haïsse plus depuis quelque temps. Mettre à mort ce non-être empêtré dans sa vie à découvert, parsemée de projets inachevés, de rêves tièdes et étouffés, de convictions sans engagement ni combat, de paroles en sourdine. Je remarquais pour l’occasion que ce que je tenais pour de la procrastination n’était rien de plus qu’un rejet de la bureaucratie, un déni de cette société qui me harassait déjà. Je culpabilisais alors. Je conteste désormais. Pas assez souvent encore. Pas assez fort, non plus. Mais je suis en bonne voie.</p> | |||
| <p>Dans ma nouvelle vie solitaire, je n’ai cure de ces traces, de ces preuves du temps d’avant. Mon monde d’après a commencé bien avant ce petit virus et le confinement qui s’est ensuivi. Dès que j’ai eu le courage de tout mettre en œuvre pour m’installer ici. Quoi qu’il en coûte. Solitaire, oui, mais jamais seul. J’ai tellement de voix dans ma tête. Régulièrement trop nombreuses pour que je puisse en isoler une dominante. Ce n’est pas un aveu de démence. Ce n’est pas quelque chose qui m’effraie, juste une source d’épuisement. Ces voix ne me sont pas inconnues. Elles sont miennes. Elles sont mes pensées qui parlent et qui débattent.</p> | |||
| <p>Lorsque j’essaie de les suivre toutes, ou le plus grand nombre possible, je sais que je peux perdre un instant les pédales, démarrer de ce monde pour partir un temps à la dérive. J’ai appris à le faire en confiance : il n’y a eu aucun naufrage jusque-là. Je termine systématiquement par retrouver le port à chaque fois. Déboussolé mais enrichi par ce voyage improvisé, même en eaux troubles et sombres. Le retour sur terre me donne matière à réfléchir. À décortiquer. Qui je suis. Qui sont mes semblables. Qui sont mes congénères. Que nous sommes peu de chose au milieu d’un grand tout qui ne nous appartient pas et que nous devrions entretenir et non exploiter avec cette avidité sans bornes.</p> | |||
| <p>Puis, lorsque je ne réfléchis plus, il arrive que des larmes d’espoir me coulent le long des doigts, s’invitent dans la plume et imbibent alors le papier. Je les vois prendre forme de mots que je ne soupçonnais pas sous mes yeux qui, eux, demeurent trop souvent secs de ne plus savoir pleurer. Lentement, je lis les phrases qui sont apparues malgré moi. Souvent à haute voix. De temps en temps, ma gorge finit par se nouer. Je suffoque. Perds pied. Me redresse sur ma chaise en vue de retrouver consistance. Bouche la plume et m’enfuis sur le balcon. Fumer.</p> | |||
| <p>J’ai maltraité l’enfant que j’étais. En ne le soutenant pas, en le trahissant parfois. Maintenant qu’il a grandi, que j’ai vieilli, il revient me demander des comptes. Je ne suis pas parvenu à le chasser, ni à l’esquiver. L’ai-je seulement souhaité ? Mais quelle n’a pas été ma surprise de constater qu’il n’avait aucune amertume, aucune cruauté, dans ses desseins. Il est revenu faire ce que je n’avais pas su : m’épauler. Il m’arrive même de me demander s’il n’a pas l’intention, folle, de me sauver.</p> | |||
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| <h1>Indefinite leave to remain</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://colly.com/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p class="as-subtitle">After almost six years of marriage, three expensive and stressful visas, and much quiet worry, we finally have confirmation that Geri can stay as long as she wants.</p> | |||
| <figure><span class="imageset"><img alt="A letter from the Home Office approving indefinite leave to remain" loading="lazy" src="https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail.jpg" srcset="https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail-600x.jpg 600w, https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail-900x.jpg 900w, https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail-1500x.jpg 1500w"/></span><figcaption>A letter from the Home Office approving Geri’s indefinite leave to remain.</figcaption></figure> | |||
| <p>Early this year, we prepared the usual pile of financial evidence and supporting material, and <a href="https://colly.com/stream/another-visa-application">submitted our application</a> for indefinite leave to remain in late March as required. Almost immediately, immigration services were suspended, a three-month interruption in response to Covid-19. Geri was finally allowed to complete the biometrics requirement <a href="https://colly.com/stream/nothing-to-do-in-sheffield">last week in Sheffield</a>, and with everything finally finished, we prepared to wait up to six months for a decision.</p> | |||
| <p>And then, early this morning, Geri woke me with “You’re not gonna believe this...”</p> | |||
| <p>And I didn’t.</p> | |||
| <p>“Your application for indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom has been approved.”</p> | |||
| <p>I’m a born worrier, and I deeply mistrust the authorities. The media’s calculated stirring of anti-immigrant sentiment and the government’s disgusting ‘hostile environment’ roadmap eats me up. Without certainty, the weight of concern is always present; not a constant worry, but the thought of rejection is quietly terrifying. So much anxiety, and yet Geri is white and a native English speaker, so of course, we have a significant advantage. In March, <a href="https://colly.com/stream/another-visa-application">I wrote</a>:</p> | |||
| <p>“I could list so many aspects of [the application process] that feel ‘hostile’ in some way. It’s awful for English speakers like us; I dread to think how someone with poor English manages to get through this.”</p> | |||
| <p>Anyway, we can breathe, and shed happy tears. Geri is the best thing that will ever happen to me, and we’re so happy together. At last, I can relax, safe in the knowledge that they can’t take that happiness away from us.</p> | |||
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| title: Indefinite leave to remain | |||
| url: https://colly.com/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain | |||
| hash_url: 73dc1ad4719144f3768002aa5cef60ef | |||
| <p class="as-subtitle">After almost six years of marriage, three expensive and stressful visas, and much quiet worry, we finally have confirmation that Geri can stay as long as she wants.</p> | |||
| <figure><span class="imageset"><img alt="A letter from the Home Office approving indefinite leave to remain" loading="lazy" src="https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail.jpg" srcset="https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail-600x.jpg 600w, https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail-900x.jpg 900w, https://colly.com/media/pages/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain/2548741874-1592227162/visa-letter-detail-1500x.jpg 1500w"/></span><figcaption>A letter from the Home Office approving Geri’s indefinite leave to remain.</figcaption></figure> | |||
| <p>Early this year, we prepared the usual pile of financial evidence and supporting material, and <a href="https://colly.com/stream/another-visa-application">submitted our application</a> for indefinite leave to remain in late March as required. Almost immediately, immigration services were suspended, a three-month interruption in response to Covid-19. Geri was finally allowed to complete the biometrics requirement <a href="https://colly.com/stream/nothing-to-do-in-sheffield">last week in Sheffield</a>, and with everything finally finished, we prepared to wait up to six months for a decision.</p> | |||
| <p>And then, early this morning, Geri woke me with “You’re not gonna believe this...”</p> | |||
| <p>And I didn’t.</p> | |||
| <p>“Your application for indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom has been approved.”</p> | |||
| <p>I’m a born worrier, and I deeply mistrust the authorities. The media’s calculated stirring of anti-immigrant sentiment and the government’s disgusting ‘hostile environment’ roadmap eats me up. Without certainty, the weight of concern is always present; not a constant worry, but the thought of rejection is quietly terrifying. So much anxiety, and yet Geri is white and a native English speaker, so of course, we have a significant advantage. In March, <a href="https://colly.com/stream/another-visa-application">I wrote</a>:</p> | |||
| <p>“I could list so many aspects of [the application process] that feel ‘hostile’ in some way. It’s awful for English speakers like us; I dread to think how someone with poor English manages to get through this.”</p> | |||
| <p>Anyway, we can breathe, and shed happy tears. Geri is the best thing that will ever happen to me, and we’re so happy together. At last, I can relax, safe in the knowledge that they can’t take that happiness away from us.</p> | |||
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| <h1>Dark Ecology</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>Take the only tree that’s left,<br/> | |||
| Stuff it up the hole in your culture.</i></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>—Leonard Cohen</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p><i>Retreat to the desert, and fight.</i></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>—D. H. Lawrence</p></blockquote> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>THE HANDLE, which varies in length according to the height of its user, and in some cases is made by that user to his or her specifications, is like most of the other parts of the tool in that it has a name and thus a character of its own. I call it the snath, as do most of us in the UK, though variations include the snathe, the snaithe, the snead, and the sned. Onto the snath are attached two hand grips, adjusted for the height of the user. On the bottom of the snath is a small hole, a rubberized protector, and a metal D-ring with two hex sockets. Into this little assemblage slides the tang of the blade.</p> | |||
| <p>This thin crescent of steel is the fulcrum of the whole tool. From the genus <i>blade</i> fans out a number of ever-evolving species, each seeking out and colonizing new niches. My collection includes a number of grass blades of varying styles—a Luxor, a Profisense, an Austrian, and a new, elegant Concari Felice blade that I’ve not even tried yet—whose lengths vary between sixty and eighty-five centimeters. I also have a couple of ditch blades (which, despite the name, are not used for mowing ditches in particular, but are all-purpose cutting tools that can manage anything from fine grass to tousled brambles) and a bush blade, which is as thick as a billhook and can take down small trees. These are the big mammals you can see and hear. Beneath and around them scuttle any number of harder-to-spot competitors for the summer grass, all finding their place in the ecosystem of the tool.</p> | |||
| <p>None of them, of course, is any use at all unless it is kept sharp, really sharp: sharp enough that if you were to lightly run your finger along the edge, you would lose blood. You need to take a couple of stones out into the field with you and use them regularly—every five minutes or so—to keep the edge honed. And you need to know how to use your peening anvil, and when. <i>Peen</i> is a word of Scandinavian origin, originally meaning “to beat iron thin with a hammer,” which is still its meaning, though the iron has now been replaced by steel. When the edge of your blade thickens with overuse and oversharpening, you need to draw the edge out by peening it—cold-forging the blade with hammer and small anvil. It’s a tricky job. I’ve been doing it for years, but I’ve still not mastered it. Probably you never master it, just as you never really master anything. That lack of mastery, and the promise of one day reaching it, is part of the complex beauty of the tool.</p> | |||
| <p>Etymology can be interesting. <i>Scythe</i>, originally rendered <i>sithe</i>, is an Old English word, indicating that the tool has been in use in these islands for at least a thousand years. But archaeology pushes that date much further out; Roman scythes have been found with blades nearly two meters long. Basic, curved cutting tools for use on grass date back at least ten thousand years, to the dawn of agriculture and thus to the dawn of civilizations. Like the tool, the word, too, has older origins. The Proto-Indo-European root of <i>scythe</i> is the word <i>sek</i>, meaning to cut, or to divide. <i>Sek</i> is also the root word of <i>sickle, saw, schism, sex</i>, and <i>science</i>. </p> | |||
| <p>I’VE RECENTLY BEEN reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life. Some books do that, from time to time, and this is beginning to shape up as one of them. </p> | |||
| <p>It’s not that Kaczynski, who is a fierce, uncompromising critic of the techno-industrial system, is saying anything I haven’t heard before. I’ve heard it all before, many times. By his own admission, his arguments are not new. But the clarity with which he makes them, and his refusal to obfuscate, are refreshing. I seem to be at a point in my life where I am open to hearing this again. I don’t know quite why. </p> | |||
| <p>Here are the four premises with which he begins the book:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>1. Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster.<br/> | |||
| 2. Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.<br/> | |||
| 3. The political left is technological society’s first line of defense against revolution.<br/> | |||
| 4. What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society. </p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>Kaczynski’s prose is sparse, and his arguments logical and unsentimental, as you might expect from a former mathematics professor with a degree from Harvard. I have a tendency toward sentimentality around these issues, so I appreciate his discipline. I’m about a third of the way through the book at the moment, and the way that the four arguments are being filled out is worryingly convincing. Maybe it’s what scientists call “confirmation bias,” but I’m finding it hard to muster good counterarguments to any of them, even the last. I say “worryingly” because I do not want to end up agreeing with Kaczynski. There are two reasons for this. </p> | |||
| <p>Firstly, if I do end up agreeing with him—and with other such critics I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D. H. Lawrence and C. S. Lewis and Ivan Illich—I am going to have to change my life in quite profound ways. Not just in the ways I’ve already changed it (getting rid of my telly, not owning a credit card, avoiding smartphones and e-readers and sat-navs, growing at least some of my own food, learning practical skills, fleeing the city, etc.), but properly, deeply. I am still embedded, at least partly because I can’t work out where to jump, or what to land on, or whether you can ever get away by jumping, or simply because I’m frightened to close my eyes and walk over the edge. </p> | |||
| <p>I’m writing this on a laptop computer, by the way. It has a broadband connection and all sorts of fancy capabilities I have never tried or wanted to use. I mainly use it for typing. You might think this makes me a hypocrite, and you might be right, but there is a more interesting observation you could make. This, says Kaczynski, is where we all find ourselves, until and unless we choose to break out. In his own case, he explains, he had to go through a personal psychological collapse as a young man before he could escape what he saw as his chains. He explained this in a letter in 2003:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>I knew what I wanted: To go and live in some wild place. But I didn’t know how to do so. . . . I did not know even one person who would have understood why I wanted to do such a thing. So, deep in my heart, I felt convinced that I would never be able to escape from civilization. Because I found modern life absolutely unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point a sudden change took place: I realized that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore I could do anything I wanted. I was free!</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>At the beginning of the 1970s, Kaczynski moved to a small cabin in the woods of Montana where he worked to live a self-sufficient life, without electricity, hunting and fishing and growing his own food. He lived that way for twenty-five years, trying, initially at least, to escape from civilization. But it didn’t take him long to learn that such an escape, if it were ever possible, is not possible now. More cabins were built in his woods, roads were enlarged, loggers buzzed through his forests. More planes passed overhead every year. One day, in August 1983, Kaczynski set out hiking toward his favorite wild place:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the Tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. . . . That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it. . . . You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>I can identify with pretty much every word of this, including, sometimes, the last one. This is the other reason that I do not want to end up being convinced by Kaczynski’s position. Ted Kaczynski was known to the FBI as the Unabomber during the seventeen years in which he sent parcel bombs from his shack to those he deemed responsible for the promotion of the technological society he despises. In those two decades he killed three people and injured twenty-four others. His targets lost eyes and fingers and sometimes their lives. He nearly brought down an airplane. Unlike many other critics of the technosphere, who are busy churning out books and doing the lecture circuit and updating their anarcho-primitivist websites, Kaczynski wasn’t just theorizing about being a revolutionary. He meant it.</p> | |||
| <p>BACK TO THE SCYTHE. It’s an ancient piece of technology; tried and tested, improved and honed, literally and metaphorically, over centuries. It’s what the green thinkers of the 1970s used to call an “appropriate technology”—a phrase that I would love to see resurrected—and what the unjustly neglected philosopher Ivan Illich called a “tool for conviviality.” Illich’s critique of technology, like Kaczynski’s, was really a critique of power. Advanced technologies, he explained, created dependency; they took tools and processes out of the hands of individuals and put them into the metaphorical hands of organizations. The result was often “modernized poverty,” in which human individuals became the equivalent of parts in a machine rather than the owners and users of a tool. In exchange for flashing lights and throbbing engines, they lost the things that should be most valuable to a human individual: Autonomy. Freedom. Control.</p> | |||
| <p>Illich’s critique did not, of course, just apply to technology. It applied more widely to social and economic life. A few years back I wrote a book called <i>Real England</i>, which was also about conviviality, as it turned out. In particular, it was about how human-scale, vernacular ways of life in my home country were disappearing, victims of the march of the machine. Small shops were crushed by supermarkets, family farms pushed out of business by the global agricultural market, ancient orchards rooted up for housing developments, pubs shut down by developers and state interference. What the book turned out to be about, again, was autonomy and control: about the need for people to be in control of their tools and places rather than to remain cogs in the machine. </p> | |||
| <p>Critics of that book called it nostalgic and conservative, as they do with all books like it. They confused a desire for human-scale autonomy, and for the independent character, quirkiness, mess, and creativity that usually results from it, with a desire to retreat to some imagined “golden age.” It’s a familiar criticism, and a lazy and boring one. Nowadays, when I’m faced with digs like this, I like to quote E. F. Schumacher, who replied to the accusation that he was a “crank” by saying, “A crank is a very elegant device. It’s small, it’s strong, it’s lightweight, energy efficient, and it makes revolutions.” </p> | |||
| <p>Still, if I’m honest, I’ll have to concede that the critics may have been onto something in one sense. If you want human-scale living, you doubtless do need to look backward. If there was an age of human autonomy, it seems to me that it probably is behind us. It is certainly not ahead of us, or not for a very long time; not unless we change course, which we show no sign of wanting to do. </p> | |||
| <p>Schumacher’s riposte reminds us that Ivan Illich was far from being the only thinker to advance a critique of the dehumanizing impacts of megatechnologies on both the human soul and the human body. E. F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith—there’s a long roll call of names, thinkers and doers all, promoters of appropriate energy and convivial tools, interrogators of the paradigm. For a while, in the ’60s and ’70s, they were riding high. Then they were buried, by Thatcher and Reagan, by three decades of cheap oil and shopping. Lauded as visionaries at first, at least by some, they became mocked as throwbacks by those who remembered them. Kaczynski’s pipe bombs, plugged with whittled wood, wired up to batteries and hidden inside books, were a futile attempt to spark a revolution from the ashes of their thinking. He will spend the rest of his life in Colorado’s Florence Federal Administrative Maximum Penitentiary as a result—surely one of the least human-scale and convivial places on earth.</p> | |||
| <p>But things change. Today, as three decades of cheap fuel, free money, and economic enclosure come to a shuddering, collapsing halt, suddenly it’s Thatcher and Reagan and the shrieking, depleting faithful in the Friedmanite think tanks who are starting to look like the throwbacks. Another orthodoxy is in its death throes. What happens next is what interests me, and worries me too.</p> | |||
| <p>EVERY SUMMER I run scything courses in the north of England and in Scotland. I teach the skills I’ve picked up using this tool over the past five or six years to people who have never used one before. It’s probably the most fulfilling thing I do, in the all-around sense, apart from being a father to my children (and scything is easier than fathering). Writing is fulfilling too, intellectually and sometimes emotionally, but physically it is draining and boring: hours in front of computers or scribbling notes in books, or reading and thinking or attempting to think. </p> | |||
| <p>Mowing with a scythe shuts down the jabbering brain for a little while, or at least the rational part of it, leaving only the primitive part, the intuitive reptile consciousness, working fully. Using a scythe properly is a meditation: your body in tune with the tool, your tool in tune with the land. You concentrate without thinking, you follow the lay of the ground with the face of your blade, you are aware of the keenness of its edge, you can hear the birds, see things moving through the grass ahead of you. Everything is connected to everything else, and if it isn’t, it doesn’t work. Your blade tip jams into the ground, you blunt the edge on a molehill you didn’t notice, you pull a muscle in your back, you slice your finger as you’re honing. Focus—relaxed focus—is the key to mowing well. Tolstoy, who obviously wrote from experience, explained it in <i>Anna Karenina:</i></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished itself of its own accord. These were blessed moments.</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>People come to my courses for all kinds of reasons, but most want to learn to use the tool for a practical purpose. Sometimes they are managing wildlife reserves or golf courses. Some of them want to control sedge grass or nettles or brambles in their fields or gardens, or destroy couch grass on their allotments. Some of them want to trim lawns or verges. This year I’m also doing some courses for people with mental health problems, using tools to help them root themselves in practical, calming work.</p> | |||
| <p>Still, the reaction of most people when I tell them I’m a scythe teacher is the same: incredulity or amusement, or polite interest, usually overlaid onto a sense that this is something quaint and rather silly that doesn’t have much place in the modern world. After all, we have weed whackers and lawnmowers now, and they are noisier than scythes and have buttons and use electricity or petrol and therefore they must perform better, right?</p> | |||
| <p>Now, I <i>would</i> say this of course, but no, it is not right. Certainly if you have a five-acre meadow and you want to cut the grass for hay or silage, you are going to get it done a lot quicker (though not necessarily more efficiently) with a tractor and cutter bar than you would with a scythe team, which is the way it was done before the 1950s. Down at the human scale, though, the scythe still reigns supreme.</p> | |||
| <p>A growing number of people I teach, for example, are looking for an alternative to a brushcutter. A brushcutter is essentially a mechanical scythe. It is a great heavy piece of machinery that needs to be operated with both hands and requires its user to dress up like Darth Vader in order to swing it through the grass. It roars like a motorbike, belches out fumes, and requires a regular diet of fossil fuels. It hacks through the grass instead of slicing it cleanly like a scythe blade. It is more cumbersome, more dangerous, no faster, and far less pleasant to use than the tool it replaced. And yet you see it used everywhere: on motorway verges, in parks, even, for heaven’s sake, in nature reserves. It’s a horrible, clumsy, ugly, noisy, inefficient thing. So why do people use it, and why do they still laugh at the scythe?</p> | |||
| <p>To ask that question in those terms is to misunderstand what is going on. Brushcutters are not used instead of scythes because they are better; they are used because their use is conditioned by our attitudes toward technology. Performance is not really the point, and neither is efficiency. Religion is the point: the religion of complexity. The myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up.</p> | |||
| <p>THE HOMELY, pipe-smoking, cob-and-straw visions of Illich and Schumacher take us back to what we would like to think was a kinder time: a time when no one was mailing out bombs in pursuit of a gentler world. This was the birth of what would become known as the “green” movement. I sometimes like to say that the movement was born in the same year I was—1972, the year in which the fabled <i>Limits to Growth</i> report was commissioned by the Club of Rome—and this is near enough to the truth to be a jumping-off point for a narrative. </p> | |||
| <p>If the green movement was born in the early 1970s, then the 1980s, when there were whales to be saved and rainforests to be campaigned for, were its adolescence. Its coming-of-age party was in 1992, in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. The 1992 Earth Summit was a jamboree of promises and commitments: to tackle climate change, to protect forests, to protect biodiversity, and to promote something called “sustainable development,” a new concept that would become, over the next two decades, the most fashionable in global politics and business. The future looked bright for the greens back then. It often does when you’re twenty. </p> | |||
| <p>Two decades on, things look rather different. In 2012, the bureaucrats, the activists, and the ministers gathered again in Rio for a stock-taking exercise called Rio+20. It was accompanied by the usual shrill demands for optimism and hope, but there was no disguising the hollowness of the exercise. Every environmental problem identified at the original Earth Summit has gotten worse in the intervening twenty years, often very much worse, and there is no sign of this changing.</p> | |||
| <p>The green movement, which seemed to be carrying all before it in the early 1990s, has plunged into a full-on midlife crisis. Unable to significantly change either the system or the behavior of the public, assailed by a rising movement of “skeptics” and by public boredom with being hectored about carbon and consumption, colonized by a new breed of corporate spivs for whom “sustainability” is just another opportunity for selling things, the greens are seeing a nasty realization dawn: despite all their work, their passion, their commitment and the fact that most of what they have been saying has been broadly right—they are losing. There is no likelihood of the world going their way. In most green circles now, sooner or later, the conversation comes round to the same question: what the hell do we do next?</p> | |||
| <p>There are plenty of people who think they know the answer to that question. One of them is Peter Kareiva, who would like to think that he and his kind represent the future of environmentalism, and who may turn out to be right. Kareiva is chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, which is among the world’s largest environmental organizations. He is a scientist, a revisionist, and one among a growing number of former greens who might best be called “neo-environmentalists.” </p> | |||
| <p>The resemblance between this coalescing group and the Friedmanite “neoliberals” of the early 1970s is intriguing. Like the neoliberals, the neo-environmentalists are attempting to break through the lines of an old orthodoxy that is visibly exhausted and confused. Like the neoliberals, they are mostly American and mostly male, and they emphasize scientific measurement and economic analysis over other ways of seeing and measuring. Like the neoliberals, they cluster around a few key think tanks: then, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Cato Institute, and the Adam Smith Institute; now, the Breakthrough Institute, the Long Now Foundation, and the Copenhagen Consensus. Like the neoliberals, they are beginning to grow in numbers at a time of global collapse and uncertainty. And like the neoliberals, they think they have radical solutions. </p> | |||
| <p>Kareiva’s ideas are a good place to start in understanding the neo-environmentalists. He is an outspoken former conservationist who now believes that most of what the greens think they know is wrong. Nature, he says, is more resilient than fragile; science proves it. “Humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environment,” he says, “and 80 percent of the time it recovers pretty well.” Wilderness does not exist; all of it has been influenced by humans at some time. Trying to protect large functioning ecosystems from human development is mostly futile; humans like development, and you can’t stop them from having it. Nature is tough and will adapt to this: “Today, coyotes roam downtown Chicago, and peregrine falcons astonish San Franciscans as they sweep down skyscraper canyons. . . . As we destroy habitats, we create new ones.” Now that “science” has shown us that nothing is “pristine” and nature “adapts,” there’s no reason to worry about many traditional green goals such as, for example, protecting rainforest habitats. “Is halting deforestation in the Amazon . . . feasible?” he asks. “Is it even necessary?” Somehow, you know what the answer is going to be before he gives it to you. </p> | |||
| <p>If this sounds like the kind of thing that a right-wing politican might come out with, that’s because it is. But Kareiva is not alone. Variations on this line have recently been pushed by the American thinker Stewart Brand, the British writer Mark Lynas, the Danish anti-green poster boy Bjørn Lomborg, and the American writers Emma Marris, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Schellenberger. They in turn are building on work done in the past by other self-declared green “heretics” like Richard D. North, Brian Clegg, and Wilfred Beckerman. </p> | |||
| <p>Beyond the field of conservation, the neo-environmentalists are distinguished by their attitude toward new technologies, which they almost uniformly see as positive. Civilization, nature, and people can only be “saved” by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering, and anything else with the prefix “new” that annoys Greenpeace. The traditional green focus on “limits” is dismissed as naïve. We are now, in Brand’s words, “as gods,” and we have to step up and accept our responsibility to manage the planet rationally through the use of new technology guided by enlightened science. </p> | |||
| <p>Neo-environmentalists also tend to exhibit an excitable enthusiasm for markets. They like to put a price on things like trees, lakes, mist, crocodiles, rainforests, and watersheds, all of which can deliver “ecosystem services,” which can be bought and sold, measured and totted up. Tied in with this is an almost religious attitude toward the scientific method. Everything that matters can be measured by science and priced by markets, and any claims without numbers attached can be easily dismissed. This is presented as “pragmatism” but is actually something rather different: an attempt to exclude from the green debate any interventions based on morality, emotion, intuition, spiritual connection, or simple human feeling.</p> | |||
| <p>Some of this might be shocking to some old-guard greens—which is the point—but it is hardly a new message. In fact, it is a very old one; it is simply a variant on the old Wellsian techno-optimism that has been promising us cornucopia for over a century. It’s an old-fashioned Big Science, Big Tech, and Big Money narrative filtered through the lens of the internet and garlanded with holier-than-thou talk about saving the poor and feeding the world. </p> | |||
| <p>But though they burn with the shouty fervor of the born-again, the neo-environmentalists are not exactly wrong. In fact, they are at least half right. They are right to say that the human-scale, convivial approaches of those 1970s thinkers are never going to work if the world continues to formulate itself according to the demands of late capitalist industrialism. They are right to say that a world of 9 billion people all seeking the status of middle-class consumers cannot be sustained by vernacular approaches. They are right to say that the human impact on the planet is enormous and irreversible. They are right to say that traditional conservation efforts sometimes idealized a preindustrial nature. They are right to say that the campaigns of green NGOs often exaggerate and dissemble. And they are right to say that the greens have hit a wall, and that continuing to ram their heads against it is not going to knock it down.</p> | |||
| <p>What’s interesting, though, is what they go on to build on this foundation. The first sign that this is not, as declared, a simple “ecopragmatism” but something rather different comes when you read paragraphs like this: </p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>This is the PR blurb for Emma Marris’s book <i>Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World</i>, though it could just as easily be from anywhere else in the neo-environmentalist canon. But who are the “many people” who have “unquestioningly accepted” this line? I’ve met a lot of conservationists and environmentalists in my time, and I don’t think I’ve ever met one who believed there was any such thing as “pristine, pre-human” nature. What they did believe was that there were still large-scale, functioning ecosystems that were worth getting out of bed to protect from destruction.</p> | |||
| <p>To understand why, consider the case of the Amazon. What do we value about the Amazon forest? Do people seek to protect it because they believe it is “pristine” and “pre-human”? Clearly not, since it’s inhabited and harvested by large numbers of tribal people, some of whom have been there for millennia. The Amazon is not important because it is “untouched”; it’s important because it is wild, in the sense that it is self-willed. It is lived in and off of by humans, but it is not created or controlled by them. It teems with a great, shifting, complex diversity of both human and nonhuman life, and no species dominates the mix. It is a complex, working ecosystem that is also a human-culture-system, because in any kind of worthwhile world, the two are linked. </p> | |||
| <p>This is what intelligent green thinking has always called for: human and nonhuman nature working in some degree of harmony, in a modern world of compromise and change in which some principles, nevertheless, are worth cleaving to. “Nature” is a resource for people, and always has been; we all have to eat, make shelter, hunt, live from its bounty like any other creature. But that doesn’t preclude us understanding that it has a practical, cultural, emotional, and even spiritual value beyond that too, which is equally necessary for our well-being.</p> | |||
| <p>The neo-environmentalists, needless to say, have no time for this kind of fluff. They have a great big straw man to build up and knock down, and once they’ve got that out of the way, they can move on to the really important part of their message. Here’s Kareiva, giving us the money shot in <i>Breakthrough Journal</i> with fellow authors Michelle Marvier and Robert Lalasz: </p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people. . . . Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>There it is, in black and white: the wild is dead, and what remains of nature is for people. We can effectively do what we like, and we should. Science says so! A full circle has been drawn, the greens have been buried by their own children, and under the soil with them has gone their naïve, romantic, and antiscientific belief that nonhuman life has any value beyond what we very modern humans can make use of.</p> | |||
| <p>“Wilderness can be saved permanently,” claims Ted Kaczynski, “only by eliminating the technoindustrial system.” I am beginning to think that the neo-environmentalists may leave a deliciously ironic legacy: proving the Unabomber right. </p> | |||
| <p>IN HIS BOOK <i>A Short History of Progress</i>, Ronald Wright coins the term “progress trap.” A progress trap, says Wright, is a short-term social or technological improvement that turns out in the longer term to be a backward step. By the time this is realized—if it ever is—it is too late to change course. </p> | |||
| <p>The earliest example he gives is the improvement in hunting techniques in the Upper Paleolithic era, around fifteen thousand years ago. Wright tracks the disappearance of wildlife on a vast scale whenever prehistoric humans arrived on a new continent. As Wright explains: “Some of their slaughter sites were almost industrial in size: 1,000 mammoths at one; more than 100,000 horses at another.” But there was a catch:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>This is the progress trap. Each improvement in our knowledge or in our technology will create new problems, which require new improvements. Each of these improvements tends to make society bigger, more complex, less human-scale, more destructive of nonhuman life, and more likely to collapse under its own weight. </p> | |||
| <p>Spencer Wells takes up the story in his book <i>Pandora’s Seed</i>, a revisionist history of the development of agriculture. The story we were all taught at school—or I was, anyway—is that humans “developed” or “invented” agriculture, because they were clever enough to see that it would form the basis of a better way of living than hunting and gathering. This is the same attitude that makes us assume that a brushcutter is a better way of mowing grass than a scythe, and it seems to be equally erroneous. As Wells demonstrates, analysis of the skeletal remains of people living before and after the transition to agriculture during the Paleolithic demonstrate something remarkable: an all-around collapse in quality of life when farming was adopted.</p> | |||
| <p>Hunter-gatherers living during the Paleolithic period, between 30,000 and 9,000 BCE, were on average taller—and thus, by implication, healthier—than any people since, including people living in late twentieth-century America. Their median life span was higher than at any period for the next six thousand years, and their health, as estimated by measuring the pelvic inlet depth of their skeletons, appears to have been better, again, than at any period since—including the present day. This collapse in individual well-being was likely due to the fact that settled agricultural life is physically harder and more disease-ridden than the life of a shifting hunter-gatherer community.</p> | |||
| <p>So much for progress. But why in this case, Wells asks, would any community move from hunting and gathering to agriculture? The answer seems to be: not because they wanted to, but because they had to. They had spelled the end of their hunting and gathering lifestyle by getting too good at it. They had killed off most of their prey and expanded their numbers beyond the point at which they could all survive. They had fallen into a progress trap. </p> | |||
| <p>We have been falling into them ever since. Look at the proposals of the neo-environmentalists in this light and you can see them as a series of attempts to dig us out of the progress traps that their predecessors knocked us into. Genetically modified crops, for example, are regularly sold to us as a means of “feeding the world.” But why is the world hungry? At least in part because of the previous wave of agricultural improvements—the so-called Green Revolution, which between the 1940s and 1970s promoted a new form of agriculture that depended upon high levels of pesticides and herbicides, new agricultural technologies, and high-yielding strains of crops. The Green Revolution is trumpeted by progressives as having supposedly “fed a billion people” who would otherwise have starved. And maybe it did; but then we had to keep feeding them—or should I say us?—and our children. In the meantime it had been discovered that the pesticides and herbicides were killing off vast swaths of wildlife, and the high-yield monoculture crops were wrecking both the health of the soil and the crop diversity, which in previous centuries had helped prevent the spread of disease and reduced the likelihood of crop failure.</p> | |||
| <p>It is in this context that we now have to listen to lectures from the neo-environmentalists and others insisting that GM crops are a moral obligation if we want to feed the world and save the planet: precisely the arguments that were made last time around. GM crops are an attempt to solve the problems caused by the last progress trap; they are also the next one. I would be willing to bet a lot of money that in forty years’ time, the successors of the neo-environmentalists will be making precisely the same arguments about the necessity of adopting the next wave of technologies needed to dig us out of the trap that GM crops have dropped us neatly into. Perhaps it will be vat-grown meat, or synthetic wheat, or some nano-bio-gubbins as yet unthought of. Either way, it will be vital for growth and progress, and a moral necessity. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said: “so it goes.”</p> | |||
| <p>“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future. But it’s not necessary to convince yourself that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived in paradise in order to observe that progress is a ratchet, every turn forcing us more tightly into the gears of a machine we were forced to create to solve the problems created by progress. It is far too late to think about dismantling this machine in a rational manner—and in any case who wants to? We can’t deny that it brings benefits to us, even as it chokes us and our world by degrees. Those benefits are what keep us largely quiet and uncomplaining as the machine rolls on, in the words of the poet R. S. Thomas, “over the creeds and masterpieces”:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>The machine appeared<br/> | |||
| In the distance, singing to itself<br/> | |||
| Of money. Its song was the web<br/> | |||
| They were caught in, men and women<br/> | |||
| Together. The villages were as flies<br/> | |||
| To be sucked empty.<br/> | |||
| God secreted<br/> | |||
| A tear. Enough, enough,<br/> | |||
| He commanded, but the machine<br/> | |||
| Looked at him and went on singing.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>OVER THE NEXT few years, the old green movement that I grew up with is likely to fall to pieces. Many of those pieces will be picked up and hoarded by the growing ranks of the neo-environmentalists. The mainstream of the green movement has laid itself open to their advances in recent years with its obsessive focus on carbon and energy technologies and its refusal to speak up for a subjective, vernacular, nontechnical engagement with nature. The neo-environmentalists have a great advantage over the old greens, with their threatening talk about limits to growth, behavior change, and other such against-the-grain stuff: they are telling this civilization what it wants to hear. What it wants to hear is that the progress trap in which our civilization is caught can be escaped from by inflating a green tech bubble on which we can sail merrily into the future, happy as gods and equally in control. </p> | |||
| <p>In the short term, the future belongs to the neo-environmentalists, and it is going to be painful to watch. In the long term, though, I’d guess they will fail, for two reasons. Firstly, that bubbles always burst. Our civilization is beginning to break down. We are at the start of an unfolding economic and social collapse, which may take decades or longer to play out—and which is playing out against the background of a planetary ecocide that nobody seems able to prevent. We are not gods, and our machines will not get us off this hook, however clever they are and however much we would like to believe it.</p> | |||
| <p>But there is another reason that the new breed are unlikely to be able to build the world they want to see: we are not—even they are not—primarily rational, logical, or “scientific” beings. Our human relationship to the rest of nature is not akin to the analysis of bacteria in a petri dish; it is more like the complex, love-hate relationship we might have with lovers or parents or siblings. It is who we are, unspoken and felt and frustrating and inspiring and vital and impossible to peer-review. You can reach part of it with the analytical mind, but the rest will remain buried in the ancient woodland floor of human evolution and in the depths of our old ape brains, which see in pictures and think in stories. Civilization has always been a project of control, but you can’t win a war against the wild within yourself.</p> | |||
| <p>Is it possible to read the words of someone like Theodore Kaczynski and be convinced by the case he makes, even as you reject what he did with the knowledge? Is it possible to look at human cultural evolution as a series of progress traps, the latest of which you are caught in like a fly on a sundew, with no means of escape? Is it possible to observe the unfolding human attack on nature with horror, be determined to do whatever you can to stop it, and at the same time know that much of it cannot be stopped, whatever you do? Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?</p> | |||
| <p>It’s going to have to be, because it’s where I am right now. But where do I go next? What do I do? Between Kaczynski and Kareiva, what can I find to alight on that will still hold my weight? </p> | |||
| <p>I’m not sure I know the answer. But I know there is no going back to anything. And I know that we are not headed, now, toward convivial tools. We are not headed toward human-scale development. This culture is about superstores, not little shops; synthetic biology, not intentional community; brushcutters, not scythes. This is a culture that develops new life forms first and asks questions later; a species that is in the process of, in the words of the poet Robinson Jeffers, “break[ing] its legs on its own cleverness.” </p> | |||
| <p>What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around us. </p> | |||
| <p>If you don’t like any of this, but you know you can’t stop it, where does it leave you? The answer is that it leaves you with an obligation to be honest about where you are in history’s great cycle, and what you have the power to do and what you don’t. If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time. </p> | |||
| <p>And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers:</p> | |||
| <p><i>One:</i> Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.</p> | |||
| <p><i>Two:</i> Preserving nonhuman life. The revisionists will continue to tell us that wildness is dead, nature is for people, and Progress is God, and they will continue to be wrong. There is still much remaining of the earth’s wild diversity, but it may not remain for much longer. The human empire is the greatest threat to what remains of life on earth, and you are part of it. What can you do—really do, at a practical level—about this? Maybe you can buy up some land and rewild it; maybe you can let your garden run free; maybe you can work for a conservation group or set one up yourself; maybe you can put your body in the way of a bulldozer; maybe you can use your skills to prevent the destruction of yet another wild place. How can you create or protect a space for nonhuman nature to breathe easier; how can you give something that isn’t <i>us</i> a chance to survive our appetites? </p> | |||
| <p><i>Three:</i> Getting your hands dirty. Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing. Pick up your scythe or your equivalent and get out there and do physical work in clean air surrounded by things you cannot control. Get away from your laptop and throw away your smartphone, if you have one. Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practice human-scale convivial skills. Only by doing that, rather than just talking about it, do you learn what is real and what’s not, and what makes sense and what is so much hot air.</p> | |||
| <p><i>Four:</i> Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility. And telling everyone. Remember that you are one life-form among many and understand that everything has intrinsic value. If you want to call this “ecocentrism” or “deep ecology,” do it. If you want to call it something else, do that. If you want to look to tribal societies for your inspiration, do it. If that seems too gooey, just look up into the sky. Sit on the grass, touch a tree trunk, walk into the hills, dig in the garden, look at what you find in the soil, marvel at what the hell this thing called <i>life</i> could possibly be. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it. </p> | |||
| <p><i>Five:</i> Building refuges. The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Advanced technologies will challenge our sense of what it means to be human at the same time as the tide of extinction rolls on. The ongoing collapse of social and economic infrastructures, and of the web of life itself, will kill off much of what we value. In this context, ask yourself: what power do you have to preserve what is of value—creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm? Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?</p> | |||
| <p>It will be apparent by now that in these last five paragraphs I have been talking to myself. These are the things that make sense to me right now when I think about what is coming and what I can do, still, with some joy and determination. If you don’t feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road. This is my approach, right now. It is, I suppose, the development of a personal philosophy for a dark time: a dark ecology. None of it is going to save the world—but then there is no saving the world, and the ones who say there is are the ones you need to save it from.</p> | |||
| <p>FOR NOW, I’ve had enough of writing. My head is buzzing with it. I am going to pick up my new scythe, lovingly made for me from sugar maple, a beautiful object in itself, which I can just look at for hours. I am going to pick it up and go out and find some grass to mow.</p> | |||
| <p>I am going to cut great swaths of it, my blade gliding through the vegetation, leaving it in elegant curving windrows behind me. I am going to walk ahead, following the ground, emptying my head, managing the land, not like a god but like a tenant. I am going to breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that knowledge is not the same as wisdom. </p> | |||
| <p>A scythe is an old tool, but it has changed through its millennia of existence, changed and adapted as surely as have the humans who wield it and the grasses it is designed to mow. Like a microchip or a combustion engine, it is a technology that has allowed us to manipulate and control our environment, and to accelerate the rate of that manipulation and control. A scythe, too, is a progress trap. But it is limited enough in its speed and application to allow that control to be exercised in a way that is understandable by, and accountable to, individual human beings. It is a compromise we can control, as much as we can ever control anything; a stage on the journey we can still understand. </p> | |||
| <p>There is always change, as a neo-environmentalist would happily tell you; but there are different qualities of change. There is human-scale change, and there is industrial-scale change; there is change led by the needs of complex systems, and change led by the needs of individual humans. There is a manageable rate of evolution, and there is a chaotic, excitable rush toward shiny things perched on the edge of a great ravine, flashing and scrolling like sirens in the gathering dusk.</p> | |||
| <p>When you have mown a hayfield, you should turn and look back on your work admiringly. If you have got it right, you should see a field lined with long, curving windrows of cut grass, with clean, mown strips between them. It’s a beautiful sight, which would have been familiar to every medieval citizen of this old, old continent. If you were up at dawn, mowing in the dew—the best time, and the traditional one to cut for hay—you should leave the windrows to dry in the sun, then go down the rows with a pitchfork later in the day and turn them over. Leave the other side of the rows to dry until the sun has done its work, then come back and “ted” the grass—spread it out evenly across the field. Dry it for a few hours or a few days, depending on the weather, then come back and turn it over again. Give it as much time as it needs to dry in the sun. </p> | |||
| <p>After that, if the rain has held off, you’re ready to take in the hay. </p> | |||
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| title: Dark Ecology | |||
| url: https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/ | |||
| hash_url: ef0bea4e3633945e71c7bda351661797 | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>Take the only tree that’s left,<br/> | |||
| Stuff it up the hole in your culture.</i></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>—Leonard Cohen</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p><i>Retreat to the desert, and fight.</i></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>—D. H. Lawrence</p></blockquote> | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| <p>THE HANDLE, which varies in length according to the height of its user, and in some cases is made by that user to his or her specifications, is like most of the other parts of the tool in that it has a name and thus a character of its own. I call it the snath, as do most of us in the UK, though variations include the snathe, the snaithe, the snead, and the sned. Onto the snath are attached two hand grips, adjusted for the height of the user. On the bottom of the snath is a small hole, a rubberized protector, and a metal D-ring with two hex sockets. Into this little assemblage slides the tang of the blade.</p> | |||
| <p>This thin crescent of steel is the fulcrum of the whole tool. From the genus <i>blade</i> fans out a number of ever-evolving species, each seeking out and colonizing new niches. My collection includes a number of grass blades of varying styles—a Luxor, a Profisense, an Austrian, and a new, elegant Concari Felice blade that I’ve not even tried yet—whose lengths vary between sixty and eighty-five centimeters. I also have a couple of ditch blades (which, despite the name, are not used for mowing ditches in particular, but are all-purpose cutting tools that can manage anything from fine grass to tousled brambles) and a bush blade, which is as thick as a billhook and can take down small trees. These are the big mammals you can see and hear. Beneath and around them scuttle any number of harder-to-spot competitors for the summer grass, all finding their place in the ecosystem of the tool.</p> | |||
| <p>None of them, of course, is any use at all unless it is kept sharp, really sharp: sharp enough that if you were to lightly run your finger along the edge, you would lose blood. You need to take a couple of stones out into the field with you and use them regularly—every five minutes or so—to keep the edge honed. And you need to know how to use your peening anvil, and when. <i>Peen</i> is a word of Scandinavian origin, originally meaning “to beat iron thin with a hammer,” which is still its meaning, though the iron has now been replaced by steel. When the edge of your blade thickens with overuse and oversharpening, you need to draw the edge out by peening it—cold-forging the blade with hammer and small anvil. It’s a tricky job. I’ve been doing it for years, but I’ve still not mastered it. Probably you never master it, just as you never really master anything. That lack of mastery, and the promise of one day reaching it, is part of the complex beauty of the tool.</p> | |||
| <p>Etymology can be interesting. <i>Scythe</i>, originally rendered <i>sithe</i>, is an Old English word, indicating that the tool has been in use in these islands for at least a thousand years. But archaeology pushes that date much further out; Roman scythes have been found with blades nearly two meters long. Basic, curved cutting tools for use on grass date back at least ten thousand years, to the dawn of agriculture and thus to the dawn of civilizations. Like the tool, the word, too, has older origins. The Proto-Indo-European root of <i>scythe</i> is the word <i>sek</i>, meaning to cut, or to divide. <i>Sek</i> is also the root word of <i>sickle, saw, schism, sex</i>, and <i>science</i>. </p> | |||
| <p>I’VE RECENTLY BEEN reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life. Some books do that, from time to time, and this is beginning to shape up as one of them. </p> | |||
| <p>It’s not that Kaczynski, who is a fierce, uncompromising critic of the techno-industrial system, is saying anything I haven’t heard before. I’ve heard it all before, many times. By his own admission, his arguments are not new. But the clarity with which he makes them, and his refusal to obfuscate, are refreshing. I seem to be at a point in my life where I am open to hearing this again. I don’t know quite why. </p> | |||
| <p>Here are the four premises with which he begins the book:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>1. Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster.<br/> | |||
| 2. Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.<br/> | |||
| 3. The political left is technological society’s first line of defense against revolution.<br/> | |||
| 4. What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society. </p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>Kaczynski’s prose is sparse, and his arguments logical and unsentimental, as you might expect from a former mathematics professor with a degree from Harvard. I have a tendency toward sentimentality around these issues, so I appreciate his discipline. I’m about a third of the way through the book at the moment, and the way that the four arguments are being filled out is worryingly convincing. Maybe it’s what scientists call “confirmation bias,” but I’m finding it hard to muster good counterarguments to any of them, even the last. I say “worryingly” because I do not want to end up agreeing with Kaczynski. There are two reasons for this. </p> | |||
| <p>Firstly, if I do end up agreeing with him—and with other such critics I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D. H. Lawrence and C. S. Lewis and Ivan Illich—I am going to have to change my life in quite profound ways. Not just in the ways I’ve already changed it (getting rid of my telly, not owning a credit card, avoiding smartphones and e-readers and sat-navs, growing at least some of my own food, learning practical skills, fleeing the city, etc.), but properly, deeply. I am still embedded, at least partly because I can’t work out where to jump, or what to land on, or whether you can ever get away by jumping, or simply because I’m frightened to close my eyes and walk over the edge. </p> | |||
| <p>I’m writing this on a laptop computer, by the way. It has a broadband connection and all sorts of fancy capabilities I have never tried or wanted to use. I mainly use it for typing. You might think this makes me a hypocrite, and you might be right, but there is a more interesting observation you could make. This, says Kaczynski, is where we all find ourselves, until and unless we choose to break out. In his own case, he explains, he had to go through a personal psychological collapse as a young man before he could escape what he saw as his chains. He explained this in a letter in 2003:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>I knew what I wanted: To go and live in some wild place. But I didn’t know how to do so. . . . I did not know even one person who would have understood why I wanted to do such a thing. So, deep in my heart, I felt convinced that I would never be able to escape from civilization. Because I found modern life absolutely unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point a sudden change took place: I realized that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore I could do anything I wanted. I was free!</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>At the beginning of the 1970s, Kaczynski moved to a small cabin in the woods of Montana where he worked to live a self-sufficient life, without electricity, hunting and fishing and growing his own food. He lived that way for twenty-five years, trying, initially at least, to escape from civilization. But it didn’t take him long to learn that such an escape, if it were ever possible, is not possible now. More cabins were built in his woods, roads were enlarged, loggers buzzed through his forests. More planes passed overhead every year. One day, in August 1983, Kaczynski set out hiking toward his favorite wild place:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the Tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. . . . That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it. . . . You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>I can identify with pretty much every word of this, including, sometimes, the last one. This is the other reason that I do not want to end up being convinced by Kaczynski’s position. Ted Kaczynski was known to the FBI as the Unabomber during the seventeen years in which he sent parcel bombs from his shack to those he deemed responsible for the promotion of the technological society he despises. In those two decades he killed three people and injured twenty-four others. His targets lost eyes and fingers and sometimes their lives. He nearly brought down an airplane. Unlike many other critics of the technosphere, who are busy churning out books and doing the lecture circuit and updating their anarcho-primitivist websites, Kaczynski wasn’t just theorizing about being a revolutionary. He meant it.</p> | |||
| <p>BACK TO THE SCYTHE. It’s an ancient piece of technology; tried and tested, improved and honed, literally and metaphorically, over centuries. It’s what the green thinkers of the 1970s used to call an “appropriate technology”—a phrase that I would love to see resurrected—and what the unjustly neglected philosopher Ivan Illich called a “tool for conviviality.” Illich’s critique of technology, like Kaczynski’s, was really a critique of power. Advanced technologies, he explained, created dependency; they took tools and processes out of the hands of individuals and put them into the metaphorical hands of organizations. The result was often “modernized poverty,” in which human individuals became the equivalent of parts in a machine rather than the owners and users of a tool. In exchange for flashing lights and throbbing engines, they lost the things that should be most valuable to a human individual: Autonomy. Freedom. Control.</p> | |||
| <p>Illich’s critique did not, of course, just apply to technology. It applied more widely to social and economic life. A few years back I wrote a book called <i>Real England</i>, which was also about conviviality, as it turned out. In particular, it was about how human-scale, vernacular ways of life in my home country were disappearing, victims of the march of the machine. Small shops were crushed by supermarkets, family farms pushed out of business by the global agricultural market, ancient orchards rooted up for housing developments, pubs shut down by developers and state interference. What the book turned out to be about, again, was autonomy and control: about the need for people to be in control of their tools and places rather than to remain cogs in the machine. </p> | |||
| <p>Critics of that book called it nostalgic and conservative, as they do with all books like it. They confused a desire for human-scale autonomy, and for the independent character, quirkiness, mess, and creativity that usually results from it, with a desire to retreat to some imagined “golden age.” It’s a familiar criticism, and a lazy and boring one. Nowadays, when I’m faced with digs like this, I like to quote E. F. Schumacher, who replied to the accusation that he was a “crank” by saying, “A crank is a very elegant device. It’s small, it’s strong, it’s lightweight, energy efficient, and it makes revolutions.” </p> | |||
| <p>Still, if I’m honest, I’ll have to concede that the critics may have been onto something in one sense. If you want human-scale living, you doubtless do need to look backward. If there was an age of human autonomy, it seems to me that it probably is behind us. It is certainly not ahead of us, or not for a very long time; not unless we change course, which we show no sign of wanting to do. </p> | |||
| <p>Schumacher’s riposte reminds us that Ivan Illich was far from being the only thinker to advance a critique of the dehumanizing impacts of megatechnologies on both the human soul and the human body. E. F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith—there’s a long roll call of names, thinkers and doers all, promoters of appropriate energy and convivial tools, interrogators of the paradigm. For a while, in the ’60s and ’70s, they were riding high. Then they were buried, by Thatcher and Reagan, by three decades of cheap oil and shopping. Lauded as visionaries at first, at least by some, they became mocked as throwbacks by those who remembered them. Kaczynski’s pipe bombs, plugged with whittled wood, wired up to batteries and hidden inside books, were a futile attempt to spark a revolution from the ashes of their thinking. He will spend the rest of his life in Colorado’s Florence Federal Administrative Maximum Penitentiary as a result—surely one of the least human-scale and convivial places on earth.</p> | |||
| <p>But things change. Today, as three decades of cheap fuel, free money, and economic enclosure come to a shuddering, collapsing halt, suddenly it’s Thatcher and Reagan and the shrieking, depleting faithful in the Friedmanite think tanks who are starting to look like the throwbacks. Another orthodoxy is in its death throes. What happens next is what interests me, and worries me too.</p> | |||
| <p>EVERY SUMMER I run scything courses in the north of England and in Scotland. I teach the skills I’ve picked up using this tool over the past five or six years to people who have never used one before. It’s probably the most fulfilling thing I do, in the all-around sense, apart from being a father to my children (and scything is easier than fathering). Writing is fulfilling too, intellectually and sometimes emotionally, but physically it is draining and boring: hours in front of computers or scribbling notes in books, or reading and thinking or attempting to think. </p> | |||
| <p>Mowing with a scythe shuts down the jabbering brain for a little while, or at least the rational part of it, leaving only the primitive part, the intuitive reptile consciousness, working fully. Using a scythe properly is a meditation: your body in tune with the tool, your tool in tune with the land. You concentrate without thinking, you follow the lay of the ground with the face of your blade, you are aware of the keenness of its edge, you can hear the birds, see things moving through the grass ahead of you. Everything is connected to everything else, and if it isn’t, it doesn’t work. Your blade tip jams into the ground, you blunt the edge on a molehill you didn’t notice, you pull a muscle in your back, you slice your finger as you’re honing. Focus—relaxed focus—is the key to mowing well. Tolstoy, who obviously wrote from experience, explained it in <i>Anna Karenina:</i></p> | |||
| <blockquote><p>The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished itself of its own accord. These were blessed moments.</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>People come to my courses for all kinds of reasons, but most want to learn to use the tool for a practical purpose. Sometimes they are managing wildlife reserves or golf courses. Some of them want to control sedge grass or nettles or brambles in their fields or gardens, or destroy couch grass on their allotments. Some of them want to trim lawns or verges. This year I’m also doing some courses for people with mental health problems, using tools to help them root themselves in practical, calming work.</p> | |||
| <p>Still, the reaction of most people when I tell them I’m a scythe teacher is the same: incredulity or amusement, or polite interest, usually overlaid onto a sense that this is something quaint and rather silly that doesn’t have much place in the modern world. After all, we have weed whackers and lawnmowers now, and they are noisier than scythes and have buttons and use electricity or petrol and therefore they must perform better, right?</p> | |||
| <p>Now, I <i>would</i> say this of course, but no, it is not right. Certainly if you have a five-acre meadow and you want to cut the grass for hay or silage, you are going to get it done a lot quicker (though not necessarily more efficiently) with a tractor and cutter bar than you would with a scythe team, which is the way it was done before the 1950s. Down at the human scale, though, the scythe still reigns supreme.</p> | |||
| <p>A growing number of people I teach, for example, are looking for an alternative to a brushcutter. A brushcutter is essentially a mechanical scythe. It is a great heavy piece of machinery that needs to be operated with both hands and requires its user to dress up like Darth Vader in order to swing it through the grass. It roars like a motorbike, belches out fumes, and requires a regular diet of fossil fuels. It hacks through the grass instead of slicing it cleanly like a scythe blade. It is more cumbersome, more dangerous, no faster, and far less pleasant to use than the tool it replaced. And yet you see it used everywhere: on motorway verges, in parks, even, for heaven’s sake, in nature reserves. It’s a horrible, clumsy, ugly, noisy, inefficient thing. So why do people use it, and why do they still laugh at the scythe?</p> | |||
| <p>To ask that question in those terms is to misunderstand what is going on. Brushcutters are not used instead of scythes because they are better; they are used because their use is conditioned by our attitudes toward technology. Performance is not really the point, and neither is efficiency. Religion is the point: the religion of complexity. The myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up.</p> | |||
| <p>THE HOMELY, pipe-smoking, cob-and-straw visions of Illich and Schumacher take us back to what we would like to think was a kinder time: a time when no one was mailing out bombs in pursuit of a gentler world. This was the birth of what would become known as the “green” movement. I sometimes like to say that the movement was born in the same year I was—1972, the year in which the fabled <i>Limits to Growth</i> report was commissioned by the Club of Rome—and this is near enough to the truth to be a jumping-off point for a narrative. </p> | |||
| <p>If the green movement was born in the early 1970s, then the 1980s, when there were whales to be saved and rainforests to be campaigned for, were its adolescence. Its coming-of-age party was in 1992, in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. The 1992 Earth Summit was a jamboree of promises and commitments: to tackle climate change, to protect forests, to protect biodiversity, and to promote something called “sustainable development,” a new concept that would become, over the next two decades, the most fashionable in global politics and business. The future looked bright for the greens back then. It often does when you’re twenty. </p> | |||
| <p>Two decades on, things look rather different. In 2012, the bureaucrats, the activists, and the ministers gathered again in Rio for a stock-taking exercise called Rio+20. It was accompanied by the usual shrill demands for optimism and hope, but there was no disguising the hollowness of the exercise. Every environmental problem identified at the original Earth Summit has gotten worse in the intervening twenty years, often very much worse, and there is no sign of this changing.</p> | |||
| <p>The green movement, which seemed to be carrying all before it in the early 1990s, has plunged into a full-on midlife crisis. Unable to significantly change either the system or the behavior of the public, assailed by a rising movement of “skeptics” and by public boredom with being hectored about carbon and consumption, colonized by a new breed of corporate spivs for whom “sustainability” is just another opportunity for selling things, the greens are seeing a nasty realization dawn: despite all their work, their passion, their commitment and the fact that most of what they have been saying has been broadly right—they are losing. There is no likelihood of the world going their way. In most green circles now, sooner or later, the conversation comes round to the same question: what the hell do we do next?</p> | |||
| <p>There are plenty of people who think they know the answer to that question. One of them is Peter Kareiva, who would like to think that he and his kind represent the future of environmentalism, and who may turn out to be right. Kareiva is chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, which is among the world’s largest environmental organizations. He is a scientist, a revisionist, and one among a growing number of former greens who might best be called “neo-environmentalists.” </p> | |||
| <p>The resemblance between this coalescing group and the Friedmanite “neoliberals” of the early 1970s is intriguing. Like the neoliberals, the neo-environmentalists are attempting to break through the lines of an old orthodoxy that is visibly exhausted and confused. Like the neoliberals, they are mostly American and mostly male, and they emphasize scientific measurement and economic analysis over other ways of seeing and measuring. Like the neoliberals, they cluster around a few key think tanks: then, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Cato Institute, and the Adam Smith Institute; now, the Breakthrough Institute, the Long Now Foundation, and the Copenhagen Consensus. Like the neoliberals, they are beginning to grow in numbers at a time of global collapse and uncertainty. And like the neoliberals, they think they have radical solutions. </p> | |||
| <p>Kareiva’s ideas are a good place to start in understanding the neo-environmentalists. He is an outspoken former conservationist who now believes that most of what the greens think they know is wrong. Nature, he says, is more resilient than fragile; science proves it. “Humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environment,” he says, “and 80 percent of the time it recovers pretty well.” Wilderness does not exist; all of it has been influenced by humans at some time. Trying to protect large functioning ecosystems from human development is mostly futile; humans like development, and you can’t stop them from having it. Nature is tough and will adapt to this: “Today, coyotes roam downtown Chicago, and peregrine falcons astonish San Franciscans as they sweep down skyscraper canyons. . . . As we destroy habitats, we create new ones.” Now that “science” has shown us that nothing is “pristine” and nature “adapts,” there’s no reason to worry about many traditional green goals such as, for example, protecting rainforest habitats. “Is halting deforestation in the Amazon . . . feasible?” he asks. “Is it even necessary?” Somehow, you know what the answer is going to be before he gives it to you. </p> | |||
| <p>If this sounds like the kind of thing that a right-wing politican might come out with, that’s because it is. But Kareiva is not alone. Variations on this line have recently been pushed by the American thinker Stewart Brand, the British writer Mark Lynas, the Danish anti-green poster boy Bjørn Lomborg, and the American writers Emma Marris, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Schellenberger. They in turn are building on work done in the past by other self-declared green “heretics” like Richard D. North, Brian Clegg, and Wilfred Beckerman. </p> | |||
| <p>Beyond the field of conservation, the neo-environmentalists are distinguished by their attitude toward new technologies, which they almost uniformly see as positive. Civilization, nature, and people can only be “saved” by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering, and anything else with the prefix “new” that annoys Greenpeace. The traditional green focus on “limits” is dismissed as naïve. We are now, in Brand’s words, “as gods,” and we have to step up and accept our responsibility to manage the planet rationally through the use of new technology guided by enlightened science. </p> | |||
| <p>Neo-environmentalists also tend to exhibit an excitable enthusiasm for markets. They like to put a price on things like trees, lakes, mist, crocodiles, rainforests, and watersheds, all of which can deliver “ecosystem services,” which can be bought and sold, measured and totted up. Tied in with this is an almost religious attitude toward the scientific method. Everything that matters can be measured by science and priced by markets, and any claims without numbers attached can be easily dismissed. This is presented as “pragmatism” but is actually something rather different: an attempt to exclude from the green debate any interventions based on morality, emotion, intuition, spiritual connection, or simple human feeling.</p> | |||
| <p>Some of this might be shocking to some old-guard greens—which is the point—but it is hardly a new message. In fact, it is a very old one; it is simply a variant on the old Wellsian techno-optimism that has been promising us cornucopia for over a century. It’s an old-fashioned Big Science, Big Tech, and Big Money narrative filtered through the lens of the internet and garlanded with holier-than-thou talk about saving the poor and feeding the world. </p> | |||
| <p>But though they burn with the shouty fervor of the born-again, the neo-environmentalists are not exactly wrong. In fact, they are at least half right. They are right to say that the human-scale, convivial approaches of those 1970s thinkers are never going to work if the world continues to formulate itself according to the demands of late capitalist industrialism. They are right to say that a world of 9 billion people all seeking the status of middle-class consumers cannot be sustained by vernacular approaches. They are right to say that the human impact on the planet is enormous and irreversible. They are right to say that traditional conservation efforts sometimes idealized a preindustrial nature. They are right to say that the campaigns of green NGOs often exaggerate and dissemble. And they are right to say that the greens have hit a wall, and that continuing to ram their heads against it is not going to knock it down.</p> | |||
| <p>What’s interesting, though, is what they go on to build on this foundation. The first sign that this is not, as declared, a simple “ecopragmatism” but something rather different comes when you read paragraphs like this: </p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>This is the PR blurb for Emma Marris’s book <i>Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World</i>, though it could just as easily be from anywhere else in the neo-environmentalist canon. But who are the “many people” who have “unquestioningly accepted” this line? I’ve met a lot of conservationists and environmentalists in my time, and I don’t think I’ve ever met one who believed there was any such thing as “pristine, pre-human” nature. What they did believe was that there were still large-scale, functioning ecosystems that were worth getting out of bed to protect from destruction.</p> | |||
| <p>To understand why, consider the case of the Amazon. What do we value about the Amazon forest? Do people seek to protect it because they believe it is “pristine” and “pre-human”? Clearly not, since it’s inhabited and harvested by large numbers of tribal people, some of whom have been there for millennia. The Amazon is not important because it is “untouched”; it’s important because it is wild, in the sense that it is self-willed. It is lived in and off of by humans, but it is not created or controlled by them. It teems with a great, shifting, complex diversity of both human and nonhuman life, and no species dominates the mix. It is a complex, working ecosystem that is also a human-culture-system, because in any kind of worthwhile world, the two are linked. </p> | |||
| <p>This is what intelligent green thinking has always called for: human and nonhuman nature working in some degree of harmony, in a modern world of compromise and change in which some principles, nevertheless, are worth cleaving to. “Nature” is a resource for people, and always has been; we all have to eat, make shelter, hunt, live from its bounty like any other creature. But that doesn’t preclude us understanding that it has a practical, cultural, emotional, and even spiritual value beyond that too, which is equally necessary for our well-being.</p> | |||
| <p>The neo-environmentalists, needless to say, have no time for this kind of fluff. They have a great big straw man to build up and knock down, and once they’ve got that out of the way, they can move on to the really important part of their message. Here’s Kareiva, giving us the money shot in <i>Breakthrough Journal</i> with fellow authors Michelle Marvier and Robert Lalasz: </p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people. . . . Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>There it is, in black and white: the wild is dead, and what remains of nature is for people. We can effectively do what we like, and we should. Science says so! A full circle has been drawn, the greens have been buried by their own children, and under the soil with them has gone their naïve, romantic, and antiscientific belief that nonhuman life has any value beyond what we very modern humans can make use of.</p> | |||
| <p>“Wilderness can be saved permanently,” claims Ted Kaczynski, “only by eliminating the technoindustrial system.” I am beginning to think that the neo-environmentalists may leave a deliciously ironic legacy: proving the Unabomber right. </p> | |||
| <p>IN HIS BOOK <i>A Short History of Progress</i>, Ronald Wright coins the term “progress trap.” A progress trap, says Wright, is a short-term social or technological improvement that turns out in the longer term to be a backward step. By the time this is realized—if it ever is—it is too late to change course. </p> | |||
| <p>The earliest example he gives is the improvement in hunting techniques in the Upper Paleolithic era, around fifteen thousand years ago. Wright tracks the disappearance of wildlife on a vast scale whenever prehistoric humans arrived on a new continent. As Wright explains: “Some of their slaughter sites were almost industrial in size: 1,000 mammoths at one; more than 100,000 horses at another.” But there was a catch:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>This is the progress trap. Each improvement in our knowledge or in our technology will create new problems, which require new improvements. Each of these improvements tends to make society bigger, more complex, less human-scale, more destructive of nonhuman life, and more likely to collapse under its own weight. </p> | |||
| <p>Spencer Wells takes up the story in his book <i>Pandora’s Seed</i>, a revisionist history of the development of agriculture. The story we were all taught at school—or I was, anyway—is that humans “developed” or “invented” agriculture, because they were clever enough to see that it would form the basis of a better way of living than hunting and gathering. This is the same attitude that makes us assume that a brushcutter is a better way of mowing grass than a scythe, and it seems to be equally erroneous. As Wells demonstrates, analysis of the skeletal remains of people living before and after the transition to agriculture during the Paleolithic demonstrate something remarkable: an all-around collapse in quality of life when farming was adopted.</p> | |||
| <p>Hunter-gatherers living during the Paleolithic period, between 30,000 and 9,000 BCE, were on average taller—and thus, by implication, healthier—than any people since, including people living in late twentieth-century America. Their median life span was higher than at any period for the next six thousand years, and their health, as estimated by measuring the pelvic inlet depth of their skeletons, appears to have been better, again, than at any period since—including the present day. This collapse in individual well-being was likely due to the fact that settled agricultural life is physically harder and more disease-ridden than the life of a shifting hunter-gatherer community.</p> | |||
| <p>So much for progress. But why in this case, Wells asks, would any community move from hunting and gathering to agriculture? The answer seems to be: not because they wanted to, but because they had to. They had spelled the end of their hunting and gathering lifestyle by getting too good at it. They had killed off most of their prey and expanded their numbers beyond the point at which they could all survive. They had fallen into a progress trap. </p> | |||
| <p>We have been falling into them ever since. Look at the proposals of the neo-environmentalists in this light and you can see them as a series of attempts to dig us out of the progress traps that their predecessors knocked us into. Genetically modified crops, for example, are regularly sold to us as a means of “feeding the world.” But why is the world hungry? At least in part because of the previous wave of agricultural improvements—the so-called Green Revolution, which between the 1940s and 1970s promoted a new form of agriculture that depended upon high levels of pesticides and herbicides, new agricultural technologies, and high-yielding strains of crops. The Green Revolution is trumpeted by progressives as having supposedly “fed a billion people” who would otherwise have starved. And maybe it did; but then we had to keep feeding them—or should I say us?—and our children. In the meantime it had been discovered that the pesticides and herbicides were killing off vast swaths of wildlife, and the high-yield monoculture crops were wrecking both the health of the soil and the crop diversity, which in previous centuries had helped prevent the spread of disease and reduced the likelihood of crop failure.</p> | |||
| <p>It is in this context that we now have to listen to lectures from the neo-environmentalists and others insisting that GM crops are a moral obligation if we want to feed the world and save the planet: precisely the arguments that were made last time around. GM crops are an attempt to solve the problems caused by the last progress trap; they are also the next one. I would be willing to bet a lot of money that in forty years’ time, the successors of the neo-environmentalists will be making precisely the same arguments about the necessity of adopting the next wave of technologies needed to dig us out of the trap that GM crops have dropped us neatly into. Perhaps it will be vat-grown meat, or synthetic wheat, or some nano-bio-gubbins as yet unthought of. Either way, it will be vital for growth and progress, and a moral necessity. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said: “so it goes.”</p> | |||
| <p>“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future. But it’s not necessary to convince yourself that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived in paradise in order to observe that progress is a ratchet, every turn forcing us more tightly into the gears of a machine we were forced to create to solve the problems created by progress. It is far too late to think about dismantling this machine in a rational manner—and in any case who wants to? We can’t deny that it brings benefits to us, even as it chokes us and our world by degrees. Those benefits are what keep us largely quiet and uncomplaining as the machine rolls on, in the words of the poet R. S. Thomas, “over the creeds and masterpieces”:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p><i>The machine appeared<br/> | |||
| In the distance, singing to itself<br/> | |||
| Of money. Its song was the web<br/> | |||
| They were caught in, men and women<br/> | |||
| Together. The villages were as flies<br/> | |||
| To be sucked empty.<br/> | |||
| God secreted<br/> | |||
| A tear. Enough, enough,<br/> | |||
| He commanded, but the machine<br/> | |||
| Looked at him and went on singing.</i></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p>OVER THE NEXT few years, the old green movement that I grew up with is likely to fall to pieces. Many of those pieces will be picked up and hoarded by the growing ranks of the neo-environmentalists. The mainstream of the green movement has laid itself open to their advances in recent years with its obsessive focus on carbon and energy technologies and its refusal to speak up for a subjective, vernacular, nontechnical engagement with nature. The neo-environmentalists have a great advantage over the old greens, with their threatening talk about limits to growth, behavior change, and other such against-the-grain stuff: they are telling this civilization what it wants to hear. What it wants to hear is that the progress trap in which our civilization is caught can be escaped from by inflating a green tech bubble on which we can sail merrily into the future, happy as gods and equally in control. </p> | |||
| <p>In the short term, the future belongs to the neo-environmentalists, and it is going to be painful to watch. In the long term, though, I’d guess they will fail, for two reasons. Firstly, that bubbles always burst. Our civilization is beginning to break down. We are at the start of an unfolding economic and social collapse, which may take decades or longer to play out—and which is playing out against the background of a planetary ecocide that nobody seems able to prevent. We are not gods, and our machines will not get us off this hook, however clever they are and however much we would like to believe it.</p> | |||
| <p>But there is another reason that the new breed are unlikely to be able to build the world they want to see: we are not—even they are not—primarily rational, logical, or “scientific” beings. Our human relationship to the rest of nature is not akin to the analysis of bacteria in a petri dish; it is more like the complex, love-hate relationship we might have with lovers or parents or siblings. It is who we are, unspoken and felt and frustrating and inspiring and vital and impossible to peer-review. You can reach part of it with the analytical mind, but the rest will remain buried in the ancient woodland floor of human evolution and in the depths of our old ape brains, which see in pictures and think in stories. Civilization has always been a project of control, but you can’t win a war against the wild within yourself.</p> | |||
| <p>Is it possible to read the words of someone like Theodore Kaczynski and be convinced by the case he makes, even as you reject what he did with the knowledge? Is it possible to look at human cultural evolution as a series of progress traps, the latest of which you are caught in like a fly on a sundew, with no means of escape? Is it possible to observe the unfolding human attack on nature with horror, be determined to do whatever you can to stop it, and at the same time know that much of it cannot be stopped, whatever you do? Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?</p> | |||
| <p>It’s going to have to be, because it’s where I am right now. But where do I go next? What do I do? Between Kaczynski and Kareiva, what can I find to alight on that will still hold my weight? </p> | |||
| <p>I’m not sure I know the answer. But I know there is no going back to anything. And I know that we are not headed, now, toward convivial tools. We are not headed toward human-scale development. This culture is about superstores, not little shops; synthetic biology, not intentional community; brushcutters, not scythes. This is a culture that develops new life forms first and asks questions later; a species that is in the process of, in the words of the poet Robinson Jeffers, “break[ing] its legs on its own cleverness.” </p> | |||
| <p>What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around us. </p> | |||
| <p>If you don’t like any of this, but you know you can’t stop it, where does it leave you? The answer is that it leaves you with an obligation to be honest about where you are in history’s great cycle, and what you have the power to do and what you don’t. If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time. </p> | |||
| <p>And so I ask myself: what, at this moment in history, would not be a waste of my time? And I arrive at five tentative answers:</p> | |||
| <p><i>One:</i> Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a “defeatist” or a “doomer,” or claim you are “burnt out.” They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that “fighting” is always better than “quitting.” Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel, intuit, work out what is right for you and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance—refusing to tighten the ratchet further—is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.</p> | |||
| <p><i>Two:</i> Preserving nonhuman life. The revisionists will continue to tell us that wildness is dead, nature is for people, and Progress is God, and they will continue to be wrong. There is still much remaining of the earth’s wild diversity, but it may not remain for much longer. The human empire is the greatest threat to what remains of life on earth, and you are part of it. What can you do—really do, at a practical level—about this? Maybe you can buy up some land and rewild it; maybe you can let your garden run free; maybe you can work for a conservation group or set one up yourself; maybe you can put your body in the way of a bulldozer; maybe you can use your skills to prevent the destruction of yet another wild place. How can you create or protect a space for nonhuman nature to breathe easier; how can you give something that isn’t <i>us</i> a chance to survive our appetites? </p> | |||
| <p><i>Three:</i> Getting your hands dirty. Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing. Pick up your scythe or your equivalent and get out there and do physical work in clean air surrounded by things you cannot control. Get away from your laptop and throw away your smartphone, if you have one. Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practice human-scale convivial skills. Only by doing that, rather than just talking about it, do you learn what is real and what’s not, and what makes sense and what is so much hot air.</p> | |||
| <p><i>Four:</i> Insisting that nature has a value beyond utility. And telling everyone. Remember that you are one life-form among many and understand that everything has intrinsic value. If you want to call this “ecocentrism” or “deep ecology,” do it. If you want to call it something else, do that. If you want to look to tribal societies for your inspiration, do it. If that seems too gooey, just look up into the sky. Sit on the grass, touch a tree trunk, walk into the hills, dig in the garden, look at what you find in the soil, marvel at what the hell this thing called <i>life</i> could possibly be. Value it for what it is, try to understand what it is, and have nothing but pity or contempt for people who tell you that its only value is in what they can extract from it. </p> | |||
| <p><i>Five:</i> Building refuges. The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Advanced technologies will challenge our sense of what it means to be human at the same time as the tide of extinction rolls on. The ongoing collapse of social and economic infrastructures, and of the web of life itself, will kill off much of what we value. In this context, ask yourself: what power do you have to preserve what is of value—creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm? Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?</p> | |||
| <p>It will be apparent by now that in these last five paragraphs I have been talking to myself. These are the things that make sense to me right now when I think about what is coming and what I can do, still, with some joy and determination. If you don’t feel despair, in times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road. This is my approach, right now. It is, I suppose, the development of a personal philosophy for a dark time: a dark ecology. None of it is going to save the world—but then there is no saving the world, and the ones who say there is are the ones you need to save it from.</p> | |||
| <p>FOR NOW, I’ve had enough of writing. My head is buzzing with it. I am going to pick up my new scythe, lovingly made for me from sugar maple, a beautiful object in itself, which I can just look at for hours. I am going to pick it up and go out and find some grass to mow.</p> | |||
| <p>I am going to cut great swaths of it, my blade gliding through the vegetation, leaving it in elegant curving windrows behind me. I am going to walk ahead, following the ground, emptying my head, managing the land, not like a god but like a tenant. I am going to breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that knowledge is not the same as wisdom. </p> | |||
| <p>A scythe is an old tool, but it has changed through its millennia of existence, changed and adapted as surely as have the humans who wield it and the grasses it is designed to mow. Like a microchip or a combustion engine, it is a technology that has allowed us to manipulate and control our environment, and to accelerate the rate of that manipulation and control. A scythe, too, is a progress trap. But it is limited enough in its speed and application to allow that control to be exercised in a way that is understandable by, and accountable to, individual human beings. It is a compromise we can control, as much as we can ever control anything; a stage on the journey we can still understand. </p> | |||
| <p>There is always change, as a neo-environmentalist would happily tell you; but there are different qualities of change. There is human-scale change, and there is industrial-scale change; there is change led by the needs of complex systems, and change led by the needs of individual humans. There is a manageable rate of evolution, and there is a chaotic, excitable rush toward shiny things perched on the edge of a great ravine, flashing and scrolling like sirens in the gathering dusk.</p> | |||
| <p>When you have mown a hayfield, you should turn and look back on your work admiringly. If you have got it right, you should see a field lined with long, curving windrows of cut grass, with clean, mown strips between them. It’s a beautiful sight, which would have been familiar to every medieval citizen of this old, old continent. If you were up at dawn, mowing in the dew—the best time, and the traditional one to cut for hay—you should leave the windrows to dry in the sun, then go down the rows with a pitchfork later in the day and turn them over. Leave the other side of the rows to dry until the sun has done its work, then come back and “ted” the grass—spread it out evenly across the field. Dry it for a few hours or a few days, depending on the weather, then come back and turn it over again. Give it as much time as it needs to dry in the sun. </p> | |||
| <p>After that, if the rain has held off, you’re ready to take in the hay. </p> | |||
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| <h1>Why I Stopped Protesting and Started a Garden</h1> | |||
| <h2><a href="https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2019/12/5/why-i-quit-350org">Source originale du contenu</a></h2> | |||
| <p>I quit protesting and started a garden. It sounds absurd at first, I know. But bear with me.</p> | |||
| <p>I first woke up to the threat of climate change in 2014 (I was a late bloomer), when 350.org was organizing the first People’s Climate March in New York City. Around that time, I started writing about environmental issues and then joining—and later organizing—protests. </p> | |||
| <p>It was exhilarating. It felt empowering. I experienced for the first time in my life the potential of masses of people organized for a common cause. Harvard political scientist, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world" target="_blank">Erica Chenoweth</a>, has concluded that as little as 3.5% of a population participating in nonviolent protest can effect political change. I was excited to be a part of that transformative minority. </p> | |||
| <p>Mind you, I never expected protesting, by itself, to change the world. Rather, I saw mass events as opportunities to raise energy and build solidarity, especially among those who participated, but also among those who witnessed from afar. When people would ask me if I thought events like the People’s Climate March “accomplished anything”, I would respond that what those events do is to help people realize that they are not alone, that together they have power when they act collectively, and (this is critical) to motivate them to organize when they go back home.</p> | |||
| <p>And so I joined the ranks. Raising my voice. Raising awareness. Raising hell.</p> | |||
| <p>Five years later, I was done.</p> | |||
| <p>Done marching. Done mobilizing. Done.</p> | |||
| <h2>It Was Fun While It Lasted</h2> | |||
| <p class="">When I first got active, there was no chapter of 350.org in the whole state of Indiana, where I live. In May 2016, 350.org organized the Break Free campaign, which consisted of twenty coordinated actions all around the world, all targeting the fossil fuel industry. One of those actions took place at the BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, near where I live. The BP refinery is the largest tar sands refinery in the U.S. There was a rally and march, attended by about 1,000 people. Forty-one people participated in non-violent civil disobedience on the BP property and were arrested. I was one of them.</p> | |||
| <p>After the Break Free action, I and a few others who participated in Break Free organized <a href="https://350incalumet.org/" target="_blank">the first chapter of 350.org in Indiana</a>. Though we all got deferred prosecutions, the judge in the case unnecessarily ordered all the arrestees to personally appear in court. This gave us an opportunity for our first action. We rallied around the state courthouse, and after the hearing, we marched to the nearby federal courthouse, put on an amazing street theater production, and delivered our demand to our Democratic senator, that he reject Donald Trump’s climate change-denying cabinet nominees. </p> | |||
| <p>Over the following years, we organized <a href="https://350incalumet.org/what-weve-done/" target="_blank">a variety of events</a>. We chartered a bus to the 2017 People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., and we raised money to subsidize tickets for residents of a housing complex who had been forced from their homes due to industrial lead contamination. We organized two pipeline walks, one in the fall and one in the spring, designed to bring attention to the existence of pipelines carrying tar sands oil through our neighborhoods, under playgrounds, and by schools. We raised money for and brought bottled water to the residents of East Chicago who had been most affected by the lead crisis. We organized a film screening of <em>The Reluctant Radical</em>, about Ken Ward, one of the “valve turners” who was arrested and prosecuted in 2016 for shutting the valves on pipelines bringing tar sands oil into the U.S. After the film, we had a virtual Q&A with Ken himself and the filmmaker.<em> </em>We tabled at the Northwest Indiana Earth Day Celebration and shared information with people about the tar sands pipelines and the fossil fuel industry in the region. And we hosted a 4-week non-violent direct action class. </p> | |||
| <p>Our last event was on Earth Day 2019. We organized an interfaith event called “Prayer for the Planet”, with representatives of Buddhist, Christian, Humanist, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Pagan, and Sikh religious communities, who shared in word, song, and prayer their unique understanding of the sacred calling to protect our planet.</p> | |||
| <p>It was good work. It was fun. I don’t regret any of it.</p> | |||
| <p>But at the end of three years, we had very little to show for our work. We were still just a handful of people with very few resources. We probably helped “raise awareness” in some people. But we had not accomplished any tangible goals. And we were all feeling burnt out.</p> | |||
| <p>Over the years, I kept thinking that what we really needed to do was go spend some time together outdoors, in the nearby national park or some other semi-wild place. We never did. I really wish we had.</p> | |||
| <h2>Go Big Green, or Go Home</h2> | |||
| <p class="">In July 2019, our chapter of 350 officially went on hiatus. Two other 350 groups had been organized elsewhere in Indiana in the meantime. But they too had gone inactive.</p> | |||
| <p>For a little while after our local 350 chapter disbanded, I considered starting a local chapter of Extinction Rebellion (also called “XR”)—which seemed like a hipper version of 350. But it didn’t take me long to see that I was going to have the same problems with XR that I had with 350. There were a lot of reasons why I decided to be done with 350, XR, and all the rest … but one reason predominated.</p> | |||
| <p>I could write about <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Greta-Thunberg-Cory-Morningstar/dp/3749464758" target="_blank">how 350.org and other Big Green groups have been co-opted by capitalists</a>. I could talk about how class and racial privilege are manifest in both the demographics and <a href="https://praywithyourfeet.org/2018/08/24/an-open-letter-to-my-activist-friends/" target="_blank">the tactics* of 350.org</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@baesharamdrag/what-are-you-doing-to-dismantle-your-middle-class-white-privilege-when-participating-in-xr-2bfcfc1d66a9" target="_blank">as well as XR</a>. I could write about how effective forms of <a href="https://praywithyourfeet.org/2018/07/17/civil-disobedience-vs-direct-action/" target="_blank">direct action</a> had been replaced with what Sophia Burns calls <a href="https://godsandradicals.org/2017/11/22/dont-protest/" target="_blank">“expressive protests”</a>, which are little more than theatrical productions followed by no real organizing, and which tend <a href="https://godsandradicals.org/2017/08/09/catharsis-is-counter-revolutionary/" target="_blank">act as a safety valve</a> for whatever revolutionary energy might be raised. I could write about the flaw in trying to effect political change by convincing people that climate change is real using facts and figures. I could write about <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-02/kingsnorth-why-sustainability-is-bad-for-the-environment/4290720?pfmredir=sm" target="_blank">the mirage that is environmental “sustainability”</a> and the futility of pursuing a transition to renewable energy without a reduction in consumption (on a scale which would collapse the global economic system).** </p> | |||
| <p>Any one of those things would have been enough of a reason to quit 350. But the biggest problem I had with 350, was … well, it was too big.</p> | |||
| <p>Climate change is a big problem. Maybe the biggest problem we’ve ever faced. Such a big problem would seem to demand big solutions, and big movements to bring about those solutions. But those big solutions have a way of causing their own problems. And those big movements have a way of distancing us from the very thing we are trying to save. </p> | |||
| <h2>The Co-Optation of Environmentalism</h2> | |||
| <p class="">Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of <a href="http://paulkingsnorth.net/books/confessions/" target="_blank"><em>Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist</em></a>, asks “What if the problem is bigness itself?” He explains that he became an environmentalist because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places: “Throughout my life I have had experiences on mountains and in forests that have offered up some unworded but real connection to something way beyond myself. …</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“Sometimes I ask myself why I give a shit about any of this. Why do I feel that the forests matter? The becks, the orang-utans, the hornbills, the giant anteaters, the speckled wood butterflies? I always come back to the same answer: … these things stir feelings in me that point towards a greatness that cannot be found within the human world alone. And I know that the possibility of these things disappearing for ever from the world brings about in me a passion, an anger, a fear and a frustration that is primal, atavistic and probably as old as the caves. Because I am an animal and this is my world; my birthright. It is my place.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="http://paulkingsnorth.net/2014/04/04/in-the-black-chamber/" target="_blank">“The Black Chamber”</a></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p class="">Looking back on the British road protests of the 1990s, Kingsnorth recalls it as the last time that the environmental movement was truly ecocentric. “They didn’t see ‘the environment’ as something ‘out there’; separate from people, to be utilised or destroyed or protected according to human whim. They saw themselves as part of it, within it, of it.” Environmentalism at its rawest, he writes, is simply people being in a place, knowing it, loving it, and standing up for it.</p> | |||
| <p>But so much of environmentalism today seems to have little to no attachment to any actual environment. It isn’t about the sacredness of the more-than-human world; it’s about ensuring that the machine of progress can keep moving “forward” so we can consuming at the levels we have become accustomed to. Kingsnorth writes that mainstream environmentalists have bought into the language and the ideological assumptions of industrial capitalism, so that they now “find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy.” </p> | |||
| <p>The language of climate activists today is of parts-per-million of carbon, peer-reviewed scientific papers, and technological fixes. But something is lost in all this abstraction. What is lost is our experience of connection to the earth. And I suspect that this is intentional. It’s easier to turn a forest or a mountain into a commodity when we don’t really feel anything for it. This is how we get sacrilegious environmental policies like carbon offsetting.</p> | |||
| <p>Amongst all the campaigns to “save the Earth” today, Kingsnorth sees “no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.” It’s no wonder we are feeling burnt out. We have lost the connection to the earth—not the planet Earth with a capital “E”, but the earth beneath our feet, the place where we are. “The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature,” writes Kingsnorth, “is the slow, messy business of <a href="https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2020/1/10/building-a-relationship-with-nature">getting to know a landscape</a>.”</p> | |||
| <p>Ecotheologian Thomas Berry once wrote, “We will not save what we do not love. And we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.” Climate activism is focused on the global, the general. And yet, love is always specific. Most of us cannot love “the whales”, any more than we can love a stranger, because we don’t interact with them regularly. But we can love the beings—human and other—with whom we are in direct relation. We cannot love “the Earth”, because we cannot have a relationship with the planet, any more than we can have a relationship with “humankind"—it’s too big. But we can love the place where we are and the people who live there.</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“If you treat this not as a ‘global issue', which requires some kind of mass political response, but instead as a personal experience you have to live through, things start to look rather different. I usually find that the small picture is the most important one. You can think about ‘global issues' until your head hurts and you want to die of despair: it is another form of abstraction. We live by the small things: the things we can control or experience personally.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/the-barcode-moment-part-3/" target="_blank">The Barcode Moment</a></p></blockquote> | |||
| <h2>Withdraw, and then …</h2> | |||
| <p class="">And so, after years of environmental activism, Kingsnorth decided to withdraw.</p> | |||
| <p>To a lot of people, withdrawing sounds like giving up. For those still operating within the paradigm of mainstream environmentalism, there are only two options,<a href="https://anotherendoftheworld.org/2020/01/23/not-extinction-rebellion-but-extinction-reconciliation/" target="_blank"> “fighting” and “giving up”</a>. But that’s a false dichotomy. Withdrawing doesn’t mean giving up, and it doesn’t mean doing nothing. Withdrawing is about pulling back to a space where you can breathe, a space to experience the world around you again, to remember what it is you are trying to save, to realize what you do and do not have the power to do, and to hear the call of the world to whatever it is that you are being called you to at this time and place. </p> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel–intuit–work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. .... Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/" target="_blank">“Dark Ecology”</a></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p class="">What then? What comes after withdrawing? Well, you have to work that out for yourself. But Kingsnorth does give some suggestions:</p> | |||
| <h3>1. Preserve non-human life.</h3> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“Maybe you can buy up some land and re-wild it; maybe you can let your garden run free; maybe you can work for a conservation group or set one up yourself; maybe you can put your body in the way of a bulldozer; maybe you can use your skills to prevent the destruction of yet another wild place.”</p></blockquote> | |||
| <h3>2. Get your hands dirty.</h3> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing. Pick up your scythe or your equivalent and get out there and do physical work in clean air surrounded by things you cannot control. Get away from your laptop and throw away your smartphone, if you have one. Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practise human-scale convivial skills.”</p> | |||
| <p>“I’ve thought for years that the best way to put a spanner in the consumer dystopia that is unfolding is to ground yourself in a place and to learn to do things with your hands–actually learn to do them, not just write about learning to do them. Grow your own carrots, learn to use an axe and a scythe, know where the sun falls and what the trees do and what is growing in the laneways.”</p></blockquote> | |||
| <h3>3. Insist that nature has a value beyond utility … and tell everyone.</h3> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“Environmentalists … have persuaded themselves that, in order to be taken seriously by those with the power to save or destroy, they must speak this language [the language of utility] too. But this has been a Faustian bargain. Argue that a forest should be protected because of its economic value as a ‘carbon sink’, and you have nothing to say when gold or oil of much greater value are discovered beneath it. Speaking the language of the dominant culture, the culture of human empire that measures everything it sees and demands a return, is not a clever trick but a clever trap. Omit that sense of the sacred in nature—play it down, diminish it, laugh nervously when it is mentioned—and you are lost, and so is the world that moved you to save it for reasons you are never quite able to explain.”</p></blockquote> | |||
| <h3>4. Build refuges.</h3> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“The ongoing collapse of social and economic infrastructures, and of the web of life itself, will kill off much of what we value. In this context, ask yourself: what power do you have to preserve what is of value–creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm?”</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p class="">Kingsnorth admits that none of this is going to save the world. But then maybe the reason why we’re in this predicament is the hubris of believing we could ever have saved the world in the first place. As Kingsnorth writes, “Sometimes I think that ‘saving the world’ is just another way of controlling it.”</p> | |||
| <h2>Post-Activism?</h2> | |||
| <p class="">This kind of thinking is what Bayo Akomolofe calls <a href="http://bayoakomolafe.net/sacred-activisms/" target="_blank">“post-activism”</a>. I’m sure that, to many people, it will seem an irresponsible (not to mention privileged) stance, given the state of the world. But more and more people have been arriving at a similar place in the last few years.</p> | |||
| <p>Jonathan Franzen, author of the controversial <em>New Yorker </em>article, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending?fbclid=IwAR0JP82wKMYemsFmZnjW15JNwo2en15SkOplF5Hs0q36wp-NEAjCYiUeKCU" target="_blank">“What If We Stopped Pretending?”</a>, argues that, while it remains important to try to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, </p> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.”</p></blockquote> | |||
| <p class="">Eric Demore, author of <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/the-palliative-environmentalist-8a3a3fe77a72" target="_blank">“A Palliative Approach to the End of the World”</a>, who writes that the Earth resembles a patient with an untreatable cancer. That cancer is industrial capitalism. But rather that trying to treat the patient with “disfiguring aggression”, Demore recommends a palliative approach. This means focusing on the short-term, the local, the concrete; it means “comforting my immediate world, my school, my street, the ravine behind my house.”</p> | |||
| <p>Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil, are co-authors of a series of articles at Truthout called, <a href="https://truthout.org/series/how-then-shall-we-live/" target="_blank">“How Then Shall We Live?”</a>, in which they wrestle with how to live in the face of climate catastrophe. <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/climate-crisis-forces-us-to-ask-to-what-do-we-devote-ourselves/" target="_blank">Jamail writes</a> that the root of the climate crisis is that we have become disconnected from the earth. The first step, then, before we attempt any solutions, is to reconnect. “For we cannot begin to walk until our feet are on the ground.” <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/what-would-it-mean-to-deeply-accept-that-were-in-planetary-crisis/" target="_blank">Cecil then explains</a> why growing vegetables is one way they have chosen to reconnect, as it provides not only food, but helps foster a relationship with the earth and with their human community.</p> | |||
| <h2>My “Bit of Earth”</h2> | |||
| <p class="">So I am taking Kingsnorth advice. I’m turning my attention from the planet to the place where I live, from humanity to the beings—both human and other—who I share this place with. I am turning from my hopes and fears about the future to the needs of the present. I’m turning from all the big picture stuff to the small scale, from the global to the local, to what I can see and touch and feel. </p> | |||
| <p>And I’m starting with the place where I live, the little plot of land where my house sits, with my yard and my garden. I’m starting the work (or, in some ways, the un-work) of rewilding my yard. Planting for pollinators will be next. I actually already had a garden, but now I’m looking for better ways to grow and preserve the food from the garden, as well as ways that I can use this food to connect with my local community. Recently I was inspired by <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/ct-ptb-davich-urban-gardening-farming-gary-st-0424-story.html" target="_blank">a woman living in nearby Gary, Indiana</a>, Aja Yasir, who has been fighting a legal battle with municipal authorities for practicing regenerative agriculture and growing a community food garden in the front yard of her urban home. There’s <a href="https://medium.com/@georgekao/why-growing-food-is-the-single-most-impactful-thing-you-can-do-in-a-rigged-political-system-40edea136064" target="_blank">something revolutionary about growing your own food</a>—especially doing it in a community. </p> | |||
| <p>When the Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay, was accused of retreating from reality into his garden, he responded, “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.” Kingsnorth speculates that what Finlay meant was …</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“that the beauty and meaning he was constructing around him was an attack on the kind of world that thinks it is meaningless to do something so small, so local, so specific. To tend a garden, to learn to be humble, to use your skills locally rather than globally: none of this will ‘save the world’, none of it is easy to rally large groups of people behind, none of it makes a good slogan. And yet, it has an impact.”</p> | |||
| <p>Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/learning-what-to-make-of-it/" target="_blank">“Learning What to Make of It”</a></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p class="">And when I know more what I’m doing, then I’m going to try my hand at <a href="http://www.guerrillagardening.org/" target="_blank">guerrilla gardening</a>. Maybe instead of protesting on the lawn of my state representative, I’ll secretly plant some vegetables in his yard.</p> | |||
| <p>At the same time, I’m going to really try to listen to the place where I live, to find out what it needs and wants, instead of automatically trying to impose my ideas on it. I’m taking the time from activism to go on that walk in the woods that we never did. I need to remind myself of the love I have for this place, especially the few wild parts of it that remain, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitats_of_the_Indiana_Dunes" target="_blank">wonderfully diverse Michigan lakeshore</a> with its dunes, forest, and wetlands, sandwiched though it is between a coal-fired power plant on one side and a noxious steel mill on the other. <a href="https://globalecoguy.org/learning-the-lessons-of-the-planet-54fa11d5abc9" target="_blank">There are, after all, important lessons to learn from (and to be reminded by) wild nature</a> … lessons about interconnectedness, about resilience, and above all, about limits.</p> | |||
| <h2>Getting Real</h2> | |||
| <p class="">And I also want to connect with my human community more intimately. So I’m starting a climate grief group. And I’m keeping it small—no more than five people and a moderator, so we can have a real conversation. </p> | |||
| <p>It is one of the ironies of climate activism that, in fighting for a more sustainable way of life, we often pursue our activism in an unsustainable way. In her essay, <a href="https://www.hollytruhlar.com/environmental-movement-failed/" target="_blank">“The Environmental Movement Has Failed”</a>, grief therapist Holly Truhlar writes that the environmental movement has failed to offer spaces where we can talk about our grief and other emotions, and until we do we are never going to be in right relationship with nature, with ourselves, or with each other. </p> | |||
| <p>So I’m starting this group (actually two of them) with the goal of creating a space where we can talk about feeling tired or afraid or overwhelmed or paralyzed or uncertain, where we can talk about these feelings without judgment and without a rush to answers or action. I believe that talking about our feelings honestly will lead to more appropriate and effective action when it is called for. As Dahr Jamail has written:</p> | |||
| <blockquote><p class="">“I’ve learned that I need to work on my own grief because it’s the only way I can access the depths within myself that are requisite of these times. Only then am I able to be clear about what is most important, and what my next right step should be. Only after fully taking in the gravity of our crisis and the impending collapse of civilization are my eyes cleared of any delusion, or any fantasy of hope.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Dahr Jamail, <a href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-15/uncertain-future-forum-dahr-jamail-essay/" target="_blank">“Dancing with Grief”</a></p></blockquote> | |||
| <p class="">I think this is what Bayo Akomolafe means when he says, <a href="http://bayoakomolafe.net/project/the-times-are-urgent-lets-slow-down/" target="_blank">“The times are urgent—we must slow down.”</a> It’s counterintuitive, but I’m finding the wisdom in it now.</p> | |||
| <p>Yes, I’m still probably going to call my state congressional representative when a bill is proposed that would make it impossible for a nearby coal-fired power plant to shut down. I’m still probably going to support the local youth who organize a protest at the mall on Black Friday. And I’m still probably going to march with friends and family at climate marches in the streets of Chicago—if for no other reason than they’re a lot of fun! But this isn’t going to be the focus of my attention for the foreseeable future.</p> | |||
| <p>I’m not saying that starting a garden or a grief group is going to save the planet, or humanity, or civilization. It won’t. </p> | |||
| <p>And I’m not saying this is the answer for everyone. It’s not. </p> | |||
| <p>It’s not even the answer for me. It’s more of a beginning of an answer. Or maybe the place from which I hope the answer will eventually emerge. For now, this is where I am choosing to stand. On this little bit of earth which I love, with these people who I love. And while I wait for the answers to come, at least we’ll have something fresh to eat from my garden.</p> | |||
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| title: Why I Stopped Protesting and Started a Garden | |||
| url: https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2019/12/5/why-i-quit-350org | |||
| hash_url: f84169abe9067aa3fde8e3f3fc200517 | |||
| <p>I quit protesting and started a garden. It sounds absurd at first, I know. But bear with me.</p> | |||
| <p>I first woke up to the threat of climate change in 2014 (I was a late bloomer), when 350.org was organizing the first People’s Climate March in New York City. Around that time, I started writing about environmental issues and then joining—and later organizing—protests. </p> | |||
| <p>It was exhilarating. It felt empowering. I experienced for the first time in my life the potential of masses of people organized for a common cause. Harvard political scientist, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world" target="_blank">Erica Chenoweth</a>, has concluded that as little as 3.5% of a population participating in nonviolent protest can effect political change. I was excited to be a part of that transformative minority. </p> | |||
| <p>Mind you, I never expected protesting, by itself, to change the world. Rather, I saw mass events as opportunities to raise energy and build solidarity, especially among those who participated, but also among those who witnessed from afar. When people would ask me if I thought events like the People’s Climate March “accomplished anything”, I would respond that what those events do is to help people realize that they are not alone, that together they have power when they act collectively, and (this is critical) to motivate them to organize when they go back home.</p> | |||
| <p>And so I joined the ranks. Raising my voice. Raising awareness. Raising hell.</p> | |||
| <p>Five years later, I was done.</p> | |||
| <p>Done marching. Done mobilizing. Done.</p><h2>It Was Fun While It Lasted</h2><p class="">When I first got active, there was no chapter of 350.org in the whole state of Indiana, where I live. In May 2016, 350.org organized the Break Free campaign, which consisted of twenty coordinated actions all around the world, all targeting the fossil fuel industry. One of those actions took place at the BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, near where I live. The BP refinery is the largest tar sands refinery in the U.S. There was a rally and march, attended by about 1,000 people. Forty-one people participated in non-violent civil disobedience on the BP property and were arrested. I was one of them.</p> | |||
| <p>After the Break Free action, I and a few others who participated in Break Free organized <a href="https://350incalumet.org/" target="_blank">the first chapter of 350.org in Indiana</a>. Though we all got deferred prosecutions, the judge in the case unnecessarily ordered all the arrestees to personally appear in court. This gave us an opportunity for our first action. We rallied around the state courthouse, and after the hearing, we marched to the nearby federal courthouse, put on an amazing street theater production, and delivered our demand to our Democratic senator, that he reject Donald Trump’s climate change-denying cabinet nominees. </p> | |||
| <p>Over the following years, we organized <a href="https://350incalumet.org/what-weve-done/" target="_blank">a variety of events</a>. We chartered a bus to the 2017 People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., and we raised money to subsidize tickets for residents of a housing complex who had been forced from their homes due to industrial lead contamination. We organized two pipeline walks, one in the fall and one in the spring, designed to bring attention to the existence of pipelines carrying tar sands oil through our neighborhoods, under playgrounds, and by schools. We raised money for and brought bottled water to the residents of East Chicago who had been most affected by the lead crisis. We organized a film screening of <em>The Reluctant Radical</em>, about Ken Ward, one of the “valve turners” who was arrested and prosecuted in 2016 for shutting the valves on pipelines bringing tar sands oil into the U.S. After the film, we had a virtual Q&A with Ken himself and the filmmaker.<em> </em>We tabled at the Northwest Indiana Earth Day Celebration and shared information with people about the tar sands pipelines and the fossil fuel industry in the region. And we hosted a 4-week non-violent direct action class. </p> | |||
| <p>Our last event was on Earth Day 2019. We organized an interfaith event called “Prayer for the Planet”, with representatives of Buddhist, Christian, Humanist, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Pagan, and Sikh religious communities, who shared in word, song, and prayer their unique understanding of the sacred calling to protect our planet.</p> | |||
| <p>It was good work. It was fun. I don’t regret any of it.</p> | |||
| <p>But at the end of three years, we had very little to show for our work. We were still just a handful of people with very few resources. We probably helped “raise awareness” in some people. But we had not accomplished any tangible goals. And we were all feeling burnt out.</p> | |||
| <p>Over the years, I kept thinking that what we really needed to do was go spend some time together outdoors, in the nearby national park or some other semi-wild place. We never did. I really wish we had.</p><h2>Go Big Green, or Go Home</h2><p class="">In July 2019, our chapter of 350 officially went on hiatus. Two other 350 groups had been organized elsewhere in Indiana in the meantime. But they too had gone inactive.</p> | |||
| <p>For a little while after our local 350 chapter disbanded, I considered starting a local chapter of Extinction Rebellion (also called “XR”)—which seemed like a hipper version of 350. But it didn’t take me long to see that I was going to have the same problems with XR that I had with 350. There were a lot of reasons why I decided to be done with 350, XR, and all the rest … but one reason predominated.</p> | |||
| <p>I could write about <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Greta-Thunberg-Cory-Morningstar/dp/3749464758" target="_blank">how 350.org and other Big Green groups have been co-opted by capitalists</a>. I could talk about how class and racial privilege are manifest in both the demographics and <a href="https://praywithyourfeet.org/2018/08/24/an-open-letter-to-my-activist-friends/" target="_blank">the tactics* of 350.org</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@baesharamdrag/what-are-you-doing-to-dismantle-your-middle-class-white-privilege-when-participating-in-xr-2bfcfc1d66a9" target="_blank">as well as XR</a>. I could write about how effective forms of <a href="https://praywithyourfeet.org/2018/07/17/civil-disobedience-vs-direct-action/" target="_blank">direct action</a> had been replaced with what Sophia Burns calls <a href="https://godsandradicals.org/2017/11/22/dont-protest/" target="_blank">“expressive protests”</a>, which are little more than theatrical productions followed by no real organizing, and which tend <a href="https://godsandradicals.org/2017/08/09/catharsis-is-counter-revolutionary/" target="_blank">act as a safety valve</a> for whatever revolutionary energy might be raised. I could write about the flaw in trying to effect political change by convincing people that climate change is real using facts and figures. I could write about <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-02/kingsnorth-why-sustainability-is-bad-for-the-environment/4290720?pfmredir=sm" target="_blank">the mirage that is environmental “sustainability”</a> and the futility of pursuing a transition to renewable energy without a reduction in consumption (on a scale which would collapse the global economic system).** </p> | |||
| <p>Any one of those things would have been enough of a reason to quit 350. But the biggest problem I had with 350, was … well, it was too big.</p> | |||
| <p>Climate change is a big problem. Maybe the biggest problem we’ve ever faced. Such a big problem would seem to demand big solutions, and big movements to bring about those solutions. But those big solutions have a way of causing their own problems. And those big movements have a way of distancing us from the very thing we are trying to save. </p><h2>The Co-Optation of Environmentalism</h2><p class="">Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and author of <a href="http://paulkingsnorth.net/books/confessions/" target="_blank"><em>Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist</em></a>, asks “What if the problem is bigness itself?” He explains that he became an environmentalist because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places: “Throughout my life I have had experiences on mountains and in forests that have offered up some unworded but real connection to something way beyond myself. …</p><blockquote><p class="">“Sometimes I ask myself why I give a shit about any of this. Why do I feel that the forests matter? The becks, the orang-utans, the hornbills, the giant anteaters, the speckled wood butterflies? I always come back to the same answer: … these things stir feelings in me that point towards a greatness that cannot be found within the human world alone. And I know that the possibility of these things disappearing for ever from the world brings about in me a passion, an anger, a fear and a frustration that is primal, atavistic and probably as old as the caves. Because I am an animal and this is my world; my birthright. It is my place.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="http://paulkingsnorth.net/2014/04/04/in-the-black-chamber/" target="_blank">“The Black Chamber”</a></p></blockquote><p class="">Looking back on the British road protests of the 1990s, Kingsnorth recalls it as the last time that the environmental movement was truly ecocentric. “They didn’t see ‘the environment’ as something ‘out there’; separate from people, to be utilised or destroyed or protected according to human whim. They saw themselves as part of it, within it, of it.” Environmentalism at its rawest, he writes, is simply people being in a place, knowing it, loving it, and standing up for it.</p> | |||
| <p>But so much of environmentalism today seems to have little to no attachment to any actual environment. It isn’t about the sacredness of the more-than-human world; it’s about ensuring that the machine of progress can keep moving “forward” so we can consuming at the levels we have become accustomed to. Kingsnorth writes that mainstream environmentalists have bought into the language and the ideological assumptions of industrial capitalism, so that they now “find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy.” </p> | |||
| <p>The language of climate activists today is of parts-per-million of carbon, peer-reviewed scientific papers, and technological fixes. But something is lost in all this abstraction. What is lost is our experience of connection to the earth. And I suspect that this is intentional. It’s easier to turn a forest or a mountain into a commodity when we don’t really feel anything for it. This is how we get sacrilegious environmental policies like carbon offsetting.</p> | |||
| <p>Amongst all the campaigns to “save the Earth” today, Kingsnorth sees “no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.” It’s no wonder we are feeling burnt out. We have lost the connection to the earth—not the planet Earth with a capital “E”, but the earth beneath our feet, the place where we are. “The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature,” writes Kingsnorth, “is the slow, messy business of <a href="https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2020/1/10/building-a-relationship-with-nature">getting to know a landscape</a>.”</p> | |||
| <p>Ecotheologian Thomas Berry once wrote, “We will not save what we do not love. And we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.” Climate activism is focused on the global, the general. And yet, love is always specific. Most of us cannot love “the whales”, any more than we can love a stranger, because we don’t interact with them regularly. But we can love the beings—human and other—with whom we are in direct relation. We cannot love “the Earth”, because we cannot have a relationship with the planet, any more than we can have a relationship with “humankind"—it’s too big. But we can love the place where we are and the people who live there.</p><blockquote><p class="">“If you treat this not as a ‘global issue', which requires some kind of mass political response, but instead as a personal experience you have to live through, things start to look rather different. I usually find that the small picture is the most important one. You can think about ‘global issues' until your head hurts and you want to die of despair: it is another form of abstraction. We live by the small things: the things we can control or experience personally.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/the-barcode-moment-part-3/" target="_blank">The Barcode Moment</a></p></blockquote><h2>Withdraw, and then …</h2><p class="">And so, after years of environmental activism, Kingsnorth decided to withdraw.</p> | |||
| <p>To a lot of people, withdrawing sounds like giving up. For those still operating within the paradigm of mainstream environmentalism, there are only two options,<a href="https://anotherendoftheworld.org/2020/01/23/not-extinction-rebellion-but-extinction-reconciliation/" target="_blank"> “fighting” and “giving up”</a>. But that’s a false dichotomy. Withdrawing doesn’t mean giving up, and it doesn’t mean doing nothing. Withdrawing is about pulling back to a space where you can breathe, a space to experience the world around you again, to remember what it is you are trying to save, to realize what you do and do not have the power to do, and to hear the call of the world to whatever it is that you are being called you to at this time and place. </p><blockquote><p class="">“Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel–intuit–work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. .... Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/" target="_blank">“Dark Ecology”</a></p></blockquote><p class="">What then? What comes after withdrawing? Well, you have to work that out for yourself. But Kingsnorth does give some suggestions:</p><h3>1. Preserve non-human life.</h3><blockquote><p class="">“Maybe you can buy up some land and re-wild it; maybe you can let your garden run free; maybe you can work for a conservation group or set one up yourself; maybe you can put your body in the way of a bulldozer; maybe you can use your skills to prevent the destruction of yet another wild place.”</p></blockquote><h3>2. Get your hands dirty.</h3><blockquote><p class="">“Root yourself in something: some practical work, some place, some way of doing. Pick up your scythe or your equivalent and get out there and do physical work in clean air surrounded by things you cannot control. Get away from your laptop and throw away your smartphone, if you have one. Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practise human-scale convivial skills.”</p> | |||
| <p>“I’ve thought for years that the best way to put a spanner in the consumer dystopia that is unfolding is to ground yourself in a place and to learn to do things with your hands–actually learn to do them, not just write about learning to do them. Grow your own carrots, learn to use an axe and a scythe, know where the sun falls and what the trees do and what is growing in the laneways.”</p></blockquote><h3>3. Insist that nature has a value beyond utility … and tell everyone.</h3><blockquote><p class="">“Environmentalists … have persuaded themselves that, in order to be taken seriously by those with the power to save or destroy, they must speak this language [the language of utility] too. But this has been a Faustian bargain. Argue that a forest should be protected because of its economic value as a ‘carbon sink’, and you have nothing to say when gold or oil of much greater value are discovered beneath it. Speaking the language of the dominant culture, the culture of human empire that measures everything it sees and demands a return, is not a clever trick but a clever trap. Omit that sense of the sacred in nature—play it down, diminish it, laugh nervously when it is mentioned—and you are lost, and so is the world that moved you to save it for reasons you are never quite able to explain.”</p></blockquote><h3>4. Build refuges.</h3><blockquote><p class="">“The ongoing collapse of social and economic infrastructures, and of the web of life itself, will kill off much of what we value. In this context, ask yourself: what power do you have to preserve what is of value–creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm?”</p></blockquote><p class="">Kingsnorth admits that none of this is going to save the world. But then maybe the reason why we’re in this predicament is the hubris of believing we could ever have saved the world in the first place. As Kingsnorth writes, “Sometimes I think that ‘saving the world’ is just another way of controlling it.”</p><h2>Post-Activism?</h2><p class="">This kind of thinking is what Bayo Akomolofe calls <a href="http://bayoakomolafe.net/sacred-activisms/" target="_blank">“post-activism”</a>. I’m sure that, to many people, it will seem an irresponsible (not to mention privileged) stance, given the state of the world. But more and more people have been arriving at a similar place in the last few years.</p> | |||
| <p>Jonathan Franzen, author of the controversial <em>New Yorker </em>article, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending?fbclid=IwAR0JP82wKMYemsFmZnjW15JNwo2en15SkOplF5Hs0q36wp-NEAjCYiUeKCU" target="_blank">“What If We Stopped Pretending?”</a>, argues that, while it remains important to try to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, </p><blockquote><p class="">“it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.”</p></blockquote><p class="">Eric Demore, author of <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/the-palliative-environmentalist-8a3a3fe77a72" target="_blank">“A Palliative Approach to the End of the World”</a>, who writes that the Earth resembles a patient with an untreatable cancer. That cancer is industrial capitalism. But rather that trying to treat the patient with “disfiguring aggression”, Demore recommends a palliative approach. This means focusing on the short-term, the local, the concrete; it means “comforting my immediate world, my school, my street, the ravine behind my house.”</p> | |||
| <p>Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil, are co-authors of a series of articles at Truthout called, <a href="https://truthout.org/series/how-then-shall-we-live/" target="_blank">“How Then Shall We Live?”</a>, in which they wrestle with how to live in the face of climate catastrophe. <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/climate-crisis-forces-us-to-ask-to-what-do-we-devote-ourselves/" target="_blank">Jamail writes</a> that the root of the climate crisis is that we have become disconnected from the earth. The first step, then, before we attempt any solutions, is to reconnect. “For we cannot begin to walk until our feet are on the ground.” <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/what-would-it-mean-to-deeply-accept-that-were-in-planetary-crisis/" target="_blank">Cecil then explains</a> why growing vegetables is one way they have chosen to reconnect, as it provides not only food, but helps foster a relationship with the earth and with their human community.</p><h2>My “Bit of Earth”</h2><p class="">So I am taking Kingsnorth advice. I’m turning my attention from the planet to the place where I live, from humanity to the beings—both human and other—who I share this place with. I am turning from my hopes and fears about the future to the needs of the present. I’m turning from all the big picture stuff to the small scale, from the global to the local, to what I can see and touch and feel. </p> | |||
| <p>And I’m starting with the place where I live, the little plot of land where my house sits, with my yard and my garden. I’m starting the work (or, in some ways, the un-work) of rewilding my yard. Planting for pollinators will be next. I actually already had a garden, but now I’m looking for better ways to grow and preserve the food from the garden, as well as ways that I can use this food to connect with my local community. Recently I was inspired by <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/ct-ptb-davich-urban-gardening-farming-gary-st-0424-story.html" target="_blank">a woman living in nearby Gary, Indiana</a>, Aja Yasir, who has been fighting a legal battle with municipal authorities for practicing regenerative agriculture and growing a community food garden in the front yard of her urban home. There’s <a href="https://medium.com/@georgekao/why-growing-food-is-the-single-most-impactful-thing-you-can-do-in-a-rigged-political-system-40edea136064" target="_blank">something revolutionary about growing your own food</a>—especially doing it in a community. </p> | |||
| <p>When the Scottish artist, Ian Hamilton Finlay, was accused of retreating from reality into his garden, he responded, “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.” Kingsnorth speculates that what Finlay meant was …</p><blockquote><p class="">“that the beauty and meaning he was constructing around him was an attack on the kind of world that thinks it is meaningless to do something so small, so local, so specific. To tend a garden, to learn to be humble, to use your skills locally rather than globally: none of this will ‘save the world’, none of it is easy to rally large groups of people behind, none of it makes a good slogan. And yet, it has an impact.”</p> | |||
| <p>Paul Kingsnorth, <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/learning-what-to-make-of-it/" target="_blank">“Learning What to Make of It”</a></p></blockquote><p class="">And when I know more what I’m doing, then I’m going to try my hand at <a href="http://www.guerrillagardening.org/" target="_blank">guerrilla gardening</a>. Maybe instead of protesting on the lawn of my state representative, I’ll secretly plant some vegetables in his yard.</p> | |||
| <p>At the same time, I’m going to really try to listen to the place where I live, to find out what it needs and wants, instead of automatically trying to impose my ideas on it. I’m taking the time from activism to go on that walk in the woods that we never did. I need to remind myself of the love I have for this place, especially the few wild parts of it that remain, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitats_of_the_Indiana_Dunes" target="_blank">wonderfully diverse Michigan lakeshore</a> with its dunes, forest, and wetlands, sandwiched though it is between a coal-fired power plant on one side and a noxious steel mill on the other. <a href="https://globalecoguy.org/learning-the-lessons-of-the-planet-54fa11d5abc9" target="_blank">There are, after all, important lessons to learn from (and to be reminded by) wild nature</a> … lessons about interconnectedness, about resilience, and above all, about limits.</p><h2>Getting Real</h2><p class="">And I also want to connect with my human community more intimately. So I’m starting a climate grief group. And I’m keeping it small—no more than five people and a moderator, so we can have a real conversation. </p> | |||
| <p>It is one of the ironies of climate activism that, in fighting for a more sustainable way of life, we often pursue our activism in an unsustainable way. In her essay, <a href="https://www.hollytruhlar.com/environmental-movement-failed/" target="_blank">“The Environmental Movement Has Failed”</a>, grief therapist Holly Truhlar writes that the environmental movement has failed to offer spaces where we can talk about our grief and other emotions, and until we do we are never going to be in right relationship with nature, with ourselves, or with each other. </p> | |||
| <p>So I’m starting this group (actually two of them) with the goal of creating a space where we can talk about feeling tired or afraid or overwhelmed or paralyzed or uncertain, where we can talk about these feelings without judgment and without a rush to answers or action. I believe that talking about our feelings honestly will lead to more appropriate and effective action when it is called for. As Dahr Jamail has written:</p><blockquote><p class="">“I’ve learned that I need to work on my own grief because it’s the only way I can access the depths within myself that are requisite of these times. Only then am I able to be clear about what is most important, and what my next right step should be. Only after fully taking in the gravity of our crisis and the impending collapse of civilization are my eyes cleared of any delusion, or any fantasy of hope.”</p> | |||
| <p>— Dahr Jamail, <a href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-15/uncertain-future-forum-dahr-jamail-essay/" target="_blank">“Dancing with Grief”</a></p></blockquote><p class="">I think this is what Bayo Akomolafe means when he says, <a href="http://bayoakomolafe.net/project/the-times-are-urgent-lets-slow-down/" target="_blank">“The times are urgent—we must slow down.”</a> It’s counterintuitive, but I’m finding the wisdom in it now.</p> | |||
| <p>Yes, I’m still probably going to call my state congressional representative when a bill is proposed that would make it impossible for a nearby coal-fired power plant to shut down. I’m still probably going to support the local youth who organize a protest at the mall on Black Friday. And I’m still probably going to march with friends and family at climate marches in the streets of Chicago—if for no other reason than they’re a lot of fun! But this isn’t going to be the focus of my attention for the foreseeable future.</p> | |||
| <p>I’m not saying that starting a garden or a grief group is going to save the planet, or humanity, or civilization. It won’t. </p> | |||
| <p>And I’m not saying this is the answer for everyone. It’s not. </p> | |||
| <p>It’s not even the answer for me. It’s more of a beginning of an answer. Or maybe the place from which I hope the answer will eventually emerge. For now, this is where I am choosing to stand. On this little bit of earth which I love, with these people who I love. And while I wait for the answers to come, at least we’ll have something fresh to eat from my garden.</p> | |||
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| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/d991865574f0f29b42f75b29e768354b/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Québec solidaire propose un Plan d’indépendance alimentaire pour subvenir aux besoins du Québec</a> (<a href="https://quebecsolidaire.net/nouvelle/quebec-solidaire-propose-un-plan-dindependance-alimentaire-pour-subvenir-aux-besoins-du-quebec" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/ef0bea4e3633945e71c7bda351661797/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Dark Ecology</a> (<a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/911b72ae5d6e140268adf8591aae7df3/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Journal-Hydration</a> (<a href="https://adactio.com/journal/16404" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/ad8fd9818243ad950a794021d3dc794c/" title="Accès à l'article caché">De l’alternumérisme : d’autres numériques sont-ils possibles ?</a> (<a href="http://www.internetactu.net/2020/02/13/de-lalternumerisme-dautres-numeriques-sont-ils-possibles/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
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| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/2857bcda24e61cd80229ec230ee3d2b1/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Réforme des retraites : comment sont traités les milliers d'amendements déposés ?</a> (<a href="https://www.rtl.fr/actu/politique/reforme-des-retraites-comment-sont-traites-les-milliers-d-amendements-deposes-7800107173" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/02b1967f7086ab2d3eb84d2ce8129e95/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Être libres à l’époque du numérique</a> (<a href="http://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/tre-libres-lpoque-du-numrique/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/91a099e7f48f8733274f7b27cb68b772/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Exercice pour préparer l’après crise sanitaire pour être sûr que tout ne reprenne pas comme avant</a> (<a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/fr/node/851.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/384b330b3de6f4f2bac8c81f0f04c404/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Atlanta Asks Google Whether It Targeted Black Homeless People</a> (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/technology/google-facial-recognition-atlanta-homeless.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -78,6 +82,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/7f74e315811927454830814bcb659896/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Minimum</a> (<a href="https://journal.loupbrun.ca/n/021/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/4218c8b3332d61d6702bb2bd73ea9944/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Setting Up Git Identities</a> (<a href="https://www.micah.soy/posts/setting-up-git-identities/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/9a3fecdca72af16f1403b9e77b6e8e04/" title="Accès à l'article caché">“Hey Google, stop tracking me”</a> (<a href="https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/hey-google/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/50cdcad7054aa6777687db43157b9f0f/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Intent</a> (<a href="https://adactio.com/journal/16986" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -96,10 +102,14 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/a015cd984c70f739bf51aa6b2a80d141/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing</a> (<a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/30/science.abb6936" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/23b142e6e8edf164de61e003291e4619/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Unreal Engine 5 is meant to ridicule web developers</a> (<a href="https://www.theolognion.com/unreal-engine-5-is-meant-to-ridicule-web-developers/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/63396398249526e12072e828b8641030/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Coronavirus : les premiers désaccordés.</a> (<a href="https://www.affordance.info/mon_weblog/2020/03/coronavirus-premier-cordee.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/67c8c54b07137bcfc0069fccd8261b53/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3</a> (<a href="https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/13/mercurial%27s-journey-to-and-reflections-on-python-3/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/f84169abe9067aa3fde8e3f3fc200517/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Why I Stopped Protesting and Started a Garden</a> (<a href="https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2019/12/5/why-i-quit-350org" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/6723325d9229f986f6b77cc5ff6d3ef2/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Choose Boring Technology</a> (<a href="https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/73f93e0e8e7810a36d88555c2cbfa573/" title="Accès à l'article caché">as days pass by</a> (<a href="https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2020/05/06/hammer-and-nails/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -122,6 +132,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/10a0e890ada0487e0adf4548960f056f/" title="Accès à l'article caché">How To Keep Believing in the Internet</a> (<a href="https://jenmyers.net/daily/how-to-keep-believing-in-the-internet.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/5db0711c2794aed3bf1433b48084064c/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Plus rien à craindre</a> (<a href="https://nrkn.fr/blog/2020/06/13/plus-rien-a-craindre/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/24f52bba99b1423102f93cf86b948c5b/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Journal-Lightweight</a> (<a href="https://adactio.com/journal/16797" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/a72c83494fc6636cde5b73bd2b064958/" title="Accès à l'article caché">La nature est un champ de bataille</a> (<a href="https://www.editions-zones.fr/lyber?la-nature-est-un-champ-de-bataille" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -130,6 +142,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/b4edfe74a826089b329de71ea9c9b8c1/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Mark Alizart : « Le climato-scepticisme doit se comprendre comme un fait politique, non comme une opinion » (Coup d’état climatique)</a> (<a href="https://diacritik.com/2020/04/01/mark-alizart-le-climato-scepticisme-doit-se-comprendre-comme-un-fait-politique-non-comme-une-opinion-coup-detat-climatique/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/25289703cb4dd3023c087715cddf6d55/" title="Accès à l'article caché">What’s up with me?</a> (<a href="https://helloanselm.com/writings/whats-up-with-me" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/c1c53ee2ef8544ad798629bf8a3b7249/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Thinking about Climate on a Dark, Dismal Morning</a> (<a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/thinking-about-climate-on-a-dark-dismal-morning/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/5abb317f078fc9f585712bfa3f772504/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained - sources</a> (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -140,6 +154,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/542585b2d85213911f91b498a643e010/" title="Accès à l'article caché">The Tyranny of Stuctureless</a> (<a href="https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/5a82172cc73bfc2050a2590b4d81e82d/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Digital Gardens</a> (<a href="https://sentiers.media/dispatch-08-digital-gardens/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/47f2c0c2984a00e8a6041232f4e87e1f/" title="Accès à l'article caché">L’humain du futur</a> (<a href="https://www.hypothermia.fr/2020/01/lhumain-du-futur/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/b33f1c0179a41a26c9c75499fdc970d8/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Garder une trace de ses lectures</a> (<a href="https://bribesdereel.net/traces-de-lectures" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -168,6 +184,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/fd776407232cd6fd7627bac7dba39755/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Épuiser la pratique</a> (<a href="https://www.quaternum.net/2020/02/29/epuiser-la-pratique/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/73dc1ad4719144f3768002aa5cef60ef/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Indefinite leave to remain</a> (<a href="https://colly.com/articles/indefinite-leave-to-remain" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/ebaa216561b046ae17b29b399305b294/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Second-guessing the modern web</a> (<a href="https://macwright.org/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/4c5cc5e59531ef04e068c883a1a0e166/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Running a Paid Membership Program</a> (<a href="https://craigmod.com/essays/membership_programs/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -226,6 +244,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/e3d7b7a2b567315813058779ff45b77d/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Il n’y a pas de solution, il n’y a que nous</a> (<a href="https://framablog.org/2020/04/08/il-ny-a-pas-de-solution-il-ny-a-que-nous/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/154a7a62b2eb5b0fbe17673fd7cbcf42/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Computers as I used to love them</a> (<a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/de93ff8ea46e134a57ecd2671897abee/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Bientôt dans presque tous les commissariats, un logiciel pour fouiller dans vos portables</a> (<a href="https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1579520319-police-gendarmerie-un-logiciel-pour-fouiller-portables" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/ff864f1890f6eb967b3f9645554708e0/" title="Accès à l'article caché">About static site generators</a> (<a href="https://fvsch.com/static-site-generators/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| @@ -246,6 +266,8 @@ | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/77db8cc6de2906f31a4d37d91a47a3aa/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Currying in CSS?</a> (<a href="https://www.trysmudford.com/blog/currying-in-css/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/4be675592f4f6dcf636812263e9e1233/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Home .git</a> (<a href="https://martinovic.blog/post/home_git/" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/ceecad22409cbd161b85bf5f18b09413/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Estimating NetNewsWire for iOS Demand</a> (<a href="https://inessential.com/2020/01/03/estimating_netnewswire_for_ios_demand" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
| <li><a href="/david/cache/2020/a9155966aed8a47ec727d156bf8b5458/" title="Accès à l'article caché">Transmission de COVID-19 par aérosol, les implications pour la santé publique</a> (<a href="https://www.lejournaldumedecin.com/actualite/transmission-de-covid-19-par-aerosol-les-implications-pour-la-sante-publique/article-opinion-47087.html" title="Accès à l'article original">original</a>)</li> | |||
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