Ok so this is the boring but necessary
chapter where I point out the self evident unpalatable but critically
important truth and outline some basic broad brush options.
Also bear in mind this writing is a
constructive attempt at a coping mechanism for me as a powerless
individual rather than a delusive ego based Kanye West type bipolar
episode.
I am in broad sociological strokes
refashioning the basic needs of a society as an exercise and because
societies celebration of itself, which will be the last element I
include, has been my lifes study.
Our species is self annihilating and
taking a majority of evolved lifeforms on the planet down with it.
Sorry the time for argument has passed.
The only luxuries that remain are the weakest form of non critical
denialism and an affront to the dignity of man quite frankly.
The time for useful idiots has past and
saying that we’ll exclude Humpty Trumpty and Pee Wee Goebbels
and the Blonde British windsock and put the rise of conservative
painfully self evident corporate facist vassels aside for
a moment.[So disappointed in you Australia]
So lets put a few unpalatable truths
front and centre because without that collectively we cannot untether
ourselves from the barrage of distractive blither that inflates the
post rational envelope the world is currently engaged in with media
pimping for short cash the saddest and most cynical global pantomime
ever produced.
The world as we know it is convulsing
and expiring.
American crops this year were delayed
via flooding then cut short by further climatic instability.
Australias food production is also down
this year.
The scientific consensus is that once
reliable rhythms of climate are becoming increasingly unstable.
Food production is becoming unstable
globally. Terms and concepts like 'Multiple breadbasket failure' are
being discussed seriously.
Nobody knows the pace of this change,
this increase in instability, but the consensus is it’s
accelerating.
And again I’m not interested in
argument. There are only two possibilities.
One is that our inertia as a
species leaves us reacting to a systematic collapse of global and
probably terminal proportions.
All hope is lost and morphine, magic
mushrooms and weapons grade Kush become our most sought after
commodities. Whatever adhesive traditionally binds nation states
devolves and our civilisation dissolves into a terminal puddle of
mayhem.
If we don't act before some social
tipping point is reached, wherein the future shortens to a week or
fortnight at a time then we will have given up all agency to think
beyond immediate survival and at that point with cohesion lost so is
any viable future.
The second possibility is we recognise
this impending radical change in our environment and do something
about it while we still have the structures of our critically ill and
expiring system in place in order to effect some deft triage.
This gives rise to a further set of
potential outcomes.
- It's too late but we try anyway and achieve a collective death with a comparative collective dignity achieving the equivalence of a decent party at the end of the universe before our demise.
- It's not too late and we salvage some collective political bedrock with which to fashion a workable sustainable social model.
I’ve looked at our predicament and
imagined a future in which smaller countries, Potentially nimble
political entities, more tugboat than oil tanker, might set an
example for others to find hope in an otherwise increasingly hopeless
situation and world. Bhutan, Iceland and New Zealand are countries
that have at least broached the possibility, that a 'wellbeing'
quotient for the population should surpass the GDP as a metric.
Because it certainly appears that there
are hugely disruptive times on the horizon and preemptive defensive
reconfiguration of every facet of society, the ability to adapt
swiftly and with collective vigor in the face of cascading
multifaceted challenges including food production and distribution,
climate based infrastructural disruptions, potential global refugee
migrations, in my mind inevitable large scale economic instability
with attendant mass mega-innue.
Further reading
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067
Onward....
“Imagination is an essential quality
of a flexible, adaptable mind.”
I'm using New Zealand as my test tube
for this thought experiment. We are small and adaptive and isolated
from the usual mass migration scenarios.
[although I see a lot of upper middle
class blue water catamarans with families attached heading
semi-permanently our way in
the not too distant future and more seriously some pacific intake
from drowning communities]
ONE
FOOD
We need to secure food production
independent of climatic vagaries.
The production and distribution of food
is any societies primary function.
Intensive indoor farming needs to
become the first priority of any society that wishes to future proof
itself. It is a field in it's infancy and has huge economic and
employment and commercially intellectual potential.
Further; NZ has two universities
ranked in the top 100 for agriculture and forestry in the QS World
University Rankings.
Lincoln specializes in improving New
Zealand's land-based knowledge, wealth and productivity, and
is ranked among the global top 50 for agriculture & forestry and
Massey is also a world renowned agricultural university. Agriculture
and innovation in agriculture has a strong foundation already
throughout many NZ educational institutions
The more we can grow food indoors and
at increasingly optimal productivity the more stable we will be in an
otherwise increasingly unstable world.
Not my area of expertise but to my mind
a fairly self evident market given the disruptive conditions at hand.
Commercial viability would seem to be straightforward. It would also
appear to be self evident that if we do not construct systems which
feed communities via close proximity then the idea of communities
themselves will perish.
Our current state of indoor
growlighting efficiency seems to be this mass produced programable
panel that covers a 5 ft squared growing area.
Cheaper perhaps to compile inhouse from
imported components.
Not my balliwick.
Some of the largest indoor growing
facilities are associated with the accelerating legal cannabis market
and serve as an example of how quickly growing infrastructure can be
constructed given the right incentives.
Obviously nothing beats cannabis as a
cash crop given cash being available however cash itself is less
important overall than the biological insurance indoor cropping could
lend any population prepared to invest in it and I bring this up too
just to point out that it's not like anyones being asked to reinvent
the wheel in terms of available applied technology.
Creating a meaningful new industry
would also dovetail into areas of a social 'wellbeing' quotient,
employment, empowerment on several scales.
TWO
HOUSING
At present average housing cost in NZ
has crossed the $700 000 rubicon.
Under the present status quo I can't
begin to fathom the mental capsule needed to presume 20 years of
stability required for a classic mortgage.
We [and the world] need a flexible,
scalable foundation of a building/habitat manufacturing base to
provide housing that reflects the robustness and energy efficiency
necessary to withstand climatic extremes and resource sharing as well
as surges in demand from our present population and influxes in our
population caused by inevitable global migration.
Not qualified at all in this regard but
in any society shelter is mandatory and primary and both shelter and
food being foundational I'm focusing on it on principle.
I'd presume a focus on cheap viable
building materials research. Rendering, compiling, building
techniques, an entire new approach to shelter in an adaptive state
would be the challenge given the status quo is presently
unsustainable and will only grow more so.
The Auckland Uni Architectural school
is a brains trust that could be brought to bear.
Also personally I'd guess that
financial services, which are a large part of real estates cost at
present in the near future will either die gibbering of old age or be
smothered in it's bed by it's children.
As you can tell this topic illustrates
why I shouldn't talk on matters I'm ignorant about but housing and
shelter is an important critical collective need that will need to be
addressed.
However again, the development of
alternative systems of housing and accommodation has within it a
progressive quality wherein the 'hope' at it's foundation lends
itself to a larger interwoven social/cultural dynamic that is
essentially inoculative to paralyzing despair in the face of radical
change.
THREE.
MAKERS-SPACES
As you can probably see I'm just
working, in primitive sociological terms through your primitive
hierarchy of needs for any functioning community/society/state
Food-tick
Shelter-tick
Society........
Maker Spaces.
Sometimes called FabLabs, TechShops or
Hackerspaces are communal spaces with shared tools and shared skills
where individuals and groups can improvisation-ally engineer
solutions, inexpensive adaptations, improvements, group and
individual projects, creating communities with mentors and teachers
and skill-sharers empowering various grades of raw curiousity and
providing opportunities for collective and individual problem solving
and education.
Driven by specific, usually project
driven educational factors, the ambition to compile a cheap and
powerful personal computer, a need to set up an indoor garden,
exploring 3D printing to obtain some open source do-dad or a reason
to get out of the house and just explore for it's own sake.
The differences between these community
based centers and other learning institutions such as Universities
and poly techs would be shorter, more informal and less certification
driven participation. Short cycle makes them more adaptive, more
informal makes them more elastic and less formal certification makes
them more about self actualisation than top down industry driven.
They also promote a robust,
improvisational, socially cohesive problem solving component into a
local culture.
They would have the potential of being
practical incubators in a period when innovation on a local scale
becomes increasingly relevant.
They would provide a social facility
that was constructive by definition.
They would be open to all and that
inclusiveness would be a social asset to combat a host of isolative
mentally unhealthy issues that are growing concerns.
Empowerment and self realisation being
key foundations of general wellbeing.
A network of these maker-spaces would
require planning and not inconsiderable investment in funds and
management however their efficiency in providing social stability,
potential innovation, community resilience and adhesion ideally might
have successes that alleviate stresses on other budgets contained
within, unemployment, health and Justice systems.
And also, as with all the above stated,
the inference is that investment in alternatives to our present
systems that are showing the beginnings of terminal failure are far
more achievable the earlier in the curve of increasing systematic
pressure they are made.
Because hiding in a well off hole in
the ground waiting for the new refeudalization is a foolish
alternative.
It's said that societies exist via the
cultivation of dependency and the monopolization of violence.
That's quite a terse description.I
think there's terse times ahead.
Present Govt's cannot simply ship
themselves off to holes in the ground via private metal eggs, all of
their eggs are in one basket and so it is up to us to egg them on and
suggest that they act like good eggs or as is traditional during
social revolutions, we'll probably kill them all and either eat them
or not.
When [or if] the state cannot provide
security, in food, in shelter, in peace, then communities reform
themselves based on quite unforgiving primitive models.
I see foundations being implemented now
to combat the most challenging fallout of inevitable systemic
disruption being the wisest investments to be made. By wealthy
individuals who enjoy loyal servants, from Govts who want to continue
being viable and to all of us others those who look with increasing
despair and powerlessness into the future and lack structure.
Even if it's just for the sake of
laughing at the gibbering hedge managers sentenced to each others
company an indefinite period finally emerging waving their guns from
some hole in Otago.
So we have bustling intensive farming
setups working with the maker space wing while the modulated prefab
structure industry tries to keep roofs over everything.
All under the auspices of a new civil
defense future proofing dept.
Suicidal youth and the generally
disaffected are offered invitations to save the world initially in
discussion forums, real time meetups and makerspaces.
Metrics, goals, achievable outcomes
defined and initiated.
Meanwhile, the only people left that
retain the ability to encompass the potential doom of our species and
still contemplate celebration need to be given shelter and support to
create outbursts of whimsy that defy despair.
Because all work and no play makes
humanity a dull boy.
Which brings me to act three, the
upcoming third installment in this little thought exercise that I'll
finish and post and then also additionally amalgamate into one long
read because the separations are simply ways of me providing myself
writing targets and conceptionally
it probably doesn't suit being broken up although to motivate myself
it had to be segmented or this waffle might never have come to pass.
Allow
me to introduce myself, technically I'm a clown.
I
inhabit the 'dark' real estate of clowns definition. I have
specialized for over 30 years as an international clown soloist in
making despair comic.
I did
quite well, I worked for myself around the world as well as being a
corporate mercenary clown in many countries for Coca Cola and Suntory
and Mitsubishi and Chrysler and many others, in technical clown terms
I am at a level where once invited, I passed a two day cirque du
soleil audition in New York. Finishing as the only clown in the final
eight selected out of an initial fifty eight prospects.
I've
also done a variety of big budget private parties. A host of
International Arts festivals and have networked extensively with
others in my field from a multitude of countries.
All
whilst being demonstratively unhappy.
I
returned to NZ from my base of ten years in Hawaii just over a year
ago weighing very little and without having eaten solids for 10
months due to cancer of the esophagus, I was not expected to live
more than a couple of months by the US medical advice I'd been given.
But
via the reduction of 2/3rds of my stomach and some of my esophagus
and thirty six lymph nodes in an eight and a half hour operation by
NZ health services followed by a year of self imposed solitude as I
fed myself via machine then without I am now a 55 year old able
bodied unemployed clown.
It's
hard to be a cynically unhappy clown when the rest of the world
shares that state as a growing hopeless baseline. Thanks for catching
up people!
I
have a small reputation for getting dark things done. One example is
I danced in China to a mixed audience of retired military and their
families, using context and non english comprehension to my advantage
to a song by Nine inch nails called 'closer' . I succeeded in getting
cheerful elderly Chinese to smile and clap along to a chorus of, 'I
want to fuck you like an animal-I want to feel you from the inside
out.'
It's
petty but I'm proud.
A
less petty but proud dark function of mine was for two years I was a
'death Sherpa' to a friend of mine who died of cancer. He was also
what could be called a dark clown and very successful. He was a
challenge both as a vocation and a friend but I could make him laugh.
I got the last chuckle from him 48 hours before he died.
I've
spent the last year having had my life unexpectedly saved, alone and
looking for ways to meaningfully reinsert myself back into the world.
I may
have gone mad, it wouldn't surprise me.
I
would like to leverage NZ and also my network of international
contacts with performers and festival managements to nurture a
studied whimsical response to our potential demise as a species.
It's
sufficiently dark enough to challenge and experience has taught me
that one of only things that makes tragedy palatable is comedy of a
sufficient quality.
So in
my third installment I'll be outlining how NZ can further position
itself as a defiant, quirky antithesis to general despair and
powerlessness by promoting whimsy not as a distraction but as an
inclusive reward for the multitude of sacrifices that will come with
adapting and accepting an uncertain future.
A
'Tearoom at the end of our species.' type deal.
