one word description of our era: Fatalist

from ruien.livejournal.com

we've survived contemporary, modern, and post modern. for years we've grasped at straws and wallowed in despair uncertain of where we are culturally and where else we could strike out at. It finally came to me this morning, the word we've needed for the past decade or so is "Fatalist".

What energies is not directed towards worrying about doom and gloom is put into perpetuating it. This is the colour of were we are at, the mass panic, if you will, of reaching the end of the Book of Destiny and finding empty pages that are still writing itself in. We count the blank pages ahead and panic. We stare at the thin crawling line of text as it tries to form words and panic. We scrawl our own versions of the future in the blank spaces and panic. We turn back a few chapters and thinking we can divine the future from the past, panic. Fatalist.


some two weeks ago, Wikipedia exploded.
A certain hysteria griped registered users and volunteers over "possible copyright violations" on several thousand articles... pertaining to biology stub articles divulging encyclopaedic information on individual species of animals. Seriously, people. Why for the love of god would the estate of some dead guy who wrote an encyclopaedic guide to something sue you for spreading that information and what sensible court would allow such a ridicule of human civilisation to exist?

There is a limited number of ways in which to deliver certain information in words, and a limited number of ways with which to string a sentence. I'm pretty sure, from memory of bibliography classes, that in a free community encyclopaedic setting such as wikipedia, "copyright infringement" of written information can easily be circumvent by simply stating the source of the information. One would be hard pressed to prove in a court of law that compiling a book about certain types of shellfish, for example, classifies the entries as original compositions and use of them to trample over the compiling author's "exclusive rights". Unless, of course, you made those creatures up.


Also noting the tone of new mass media imaginings in the last few years: end of the world. cheap slasher. toilet humour. end of the world. surviving the end of the world. anti-mortality. end of the world.


Was reading some article about earthships, that giant hippy concept about building homes out of mud and rubber tires. It seems sound. people have proven that it works. Take away the earth-hippy aspect and it is still a great, workable concept. For a hippy-based idea, the engineering behind it is surprisingly practical. (Except the part where building one would cost you roughly the same for mud and salvage what brand new materials would cost, that one still has me stumped. What, do you buy the damned tires new? >.> )

But the fatalist aspect is this: it's not bigger than it is, more popular than it is, not as important an advancement to the world a large as it is, not so much because it wouldn't work, but because people prefer to go "no, it wouldn't work for me.. oh i don't know, it just wouldn't. i know it" rather than read the manual. Because rather than put in a few billable hours for city officials and engineers to study the techniques and learn from the working examples, they prefer to freak out over perceived public safety threats. Rather than going down to the strange man's site to see what he's doing and why he thinks it would work and learn from it, we as a culture shy away and hide indoors and wait for the "inevitable explosion" and are disappointed when it does not happen.


Human civilisation was built on extelligence, the exchange of ideas and knowledge. By restricting that flow, by shying away from it voluntarily, by refusing to participate in that exchange, we are effectively undermining ourselves as a civilisation. Maybe we like it that way, I can't say for everyone, but it certainly would be a shame.



Also, the idea of a earthship community amuses me. It could open a whole new way of life, or back to an old one. Where a kid at age 10 starts building his own shed/clubhouse/treehouse with the help of his parents and neighbourhood kids, gaining experience and ideas so by the time he's 16, he's ready to start building his own home, which, due to the modular design, would form the core of his future habitat and be continuously added to as he grows older... think of the enormous social benefits, keeping your would-be trailer-trash kids out of the streets and teaching them a useful trade, practical sustainability, responsibility, recycling, value of hardwork etc heh.

 

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