2021/09/10 - Life - ROOPHLOCH - Howdy

Elegy

I’m mourning many days later for a fly I killed. I meant to shoo him hence. I meant that, but I was angry at their kind for having pestered me to sip the thin sheen of salty water my skin let’s drip to waste on warm days. My hand, this hand, holds the power of human empire, and I was careless with my heart’s passions.

Look at your own thumb, and know: it was that little thumb which made us masters of this world. It certainly was neither virtue nor special intelligence. Ask the cetaceans about that, when our computer slaves finally understand their manifestly complex languages, for they are still beyond us.

You may say, “it’s only a fly”. I may say, “humans are only ants on a marble” in reply. Of my religious pursuits, the reasons I’m now “off grid” for good, I can but daresay here: I’m sorry, lil fly. Let it be an odd epitaph to float scrawled amongst the detritus of the internet.

Silicon

I write these letters on a well-loved tablet. They glow orange on black, in neat monospace. Courier, I think, as good as my app’s latest (nerfed) version will let me use. I yet maintain some technofetishistic enthusiasms. I grit my teeth at this Apple toy, and dream of RasPads. Santa may send me one, if I’m a good girl, I hope. I’m an old hermit lady who cheerfully “believes in Santa”.

My tablet is being charged by 200 watts of solar power on the roof of my DIY off road camper. It is a camper, not a “tiny home”. Tiny homes are for erstwhile middle class people. It helps the newly déclassé to believe they aren’t just living in a trailer. It’s a crutch of dignity, so I try not to poopoo it. I do try. I’m happier with my highly lightweight camper anyway. Thanks to the Flexiride axle I put on hims, and the stainless steel replacing all the aluminium pop rivets, he can go where a wooden tiny home would shiver to bits. He likes his solar panels especially, and likes to charge luxurious little gizmos.

I keep the tablet plugged in when not hiking about, as the battery drains ever faster lately. It’s not a very old iPad, really, How is it that at this late date in the Atlantean decay of technophallic “civilization”, that infotech devices have ever worse battery life, and that such batteries grow harder to replace?

Batteries are a logistical worry. I have deep cycle marine batteries, only a year old. They float at about 13v, and at night drift from 12.7 down to 12.2 volts if I leave a bright light on or listen to radio or write and read on tablet. A tiny cheapo voltmeter and ammeter set in the junction box serves also as a nightlight. Lovely red is the best colour for LED. Old fashioned LED’s, cherry red and Smurf blue. Have you seen the old Smurf film? When the Smurfs were a darker, purplish blue and magical chimes rang when they talked and smurfed about? That colour. LEDs should stay such gentle colours. They are happier thus, I fancy, than in bright dot matrix screens.

I’m proud of my junction box. The box itself is ABS, drilled and cut by hand until the shavings polluted my lungs and poked my bare feet. Two 12 volt rails of 8 gauge run out the bottom: one to the solar controller supplied power and one to the batteries direct, insulated by ferrite for more radio quiet. Yes, honking 8 gauge copper wires. Mama don’t want any heat loss, thanks. Aside from the voltmeter the box is studded with 12v access terminals of every conceivable type: cigarette lighter size ports, banana plugs, wall-light mounted bare wire clamps… All of which were scrounged from a small town general store bargain bin when their Radio Shack nook closed down years back.

I enjoy this monstrosity in that flavour of delight which anyone may feel in their newfound amateur craft. It is a feeling which admits that most others might find the finished art piece obtuse or awkward. Like a grandmother with her kitschy quilt that won’t win at the county fair, yet she doesn’t really care. She’s right to feel a delight in such awkward children. Intimacy is a sturdy virtue which delights in the quixotic as much as the familiar. It is good for us to be intimate with our technologies, to see them less as “tools” than as helpful children. And certainly thus with more care than the empire would have us regard all “things” as disposable.

Carbon

The empire. Summer is finally waning, I hope. It has been hot here in the back of beyond. I shall dub this patch of North Americay as Fremontia. Fremontia is lovely scrub forest. Fremontia is burning, has spent months blanketed in a thick Hadean haze.

I listen to NOAA weather radio in Fremontia. One of the benefices of the American empire is the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. They are one of those branches of government it is hard to not adore. Like forest rangers giving nature talks and brown national park wooden signage. Or NASA (even forgiving when they were criminally foolish). Or NIST. Some bureaucracies are just plain cuddly. Would that they were all so.

NOAA radio is an underutilized friend to the traveller and retreatant. Each hour their amiable robot will report the local weather conditions and forecast. He is a jolly chap, patient and tirelessly eager to inform. This even when he helpfully reports on record breaking high temperatures and just how grotesquely we have deviated from the preindustrial climate norms. Mr. NOAA Roboto’s chipper General American accent invokes more optimistic times of this empire. Think JFK in 1962, establishing the Peace Corps, but in the Midwestern lilt of Charles Gurralt. NOAA says another record high was broken today. NOAA says the record low was in 1886. NOAA warns that the haze may be dangerous to humans, so please stay indoors. NOAA wonders if we notice a pattern here.

Thank you, Mr. NOAA, but I cannot stay inside! Summer is usually too hot to stay indoors in Fremontia. And I’ve not yet built a swamp cooler, nor could budget the water for it if I did.

So I take to more open shade on the lee of the mountain. The land below is good and hardy land. Green stolid pines and brush bear the heat with me. But the land is smothered to choking by a dismal grey soup.

This miasma reminds me so very much of Beijing, many years back. An uncle’s apartment tower, dark and silent from a rolling blackout, the smog so thick one could not see the roof. The Sun’s angry red of judgment. There, rows of ginkgoes were planted along roadsides in a desperate hope they might forgive humanity, sponge up our choking fumes from the Earth’s lungs. The ginkgoes were spindly and wretched as they despaired to breathe. They say Beijing’s sky was often blue in the 70’s, a cheer to mock Mao’s follies. It was true; I’ve seen pictures.

These pines in Fremontia do better than ginkgoes, and yet they must breathe the corpse ash of their cousins burning on distant mountains. The jewels of America, cultivated in hope for a dozen decades after the ravages of the Gilded Age, cremating in a few short years. And these years, how odd their tenor: humans shrug, having forgotten how to live without empire, even as we die from empire.

Hopey Changey

All this is bleaker than I meant, and certainly more than I feel.

Oh, I’m angry and sad enough to have learnt of Tahoe’s recent burning. Any of us who have toiled in “green collar” work know how desperately people strove over 2 decades toward fuels reductions thereabouts. And to its credit, the USA has done more than most in such conservation work. Certainly better than Canada, who have left the Rockies a patchwork forest matchbox waiting to poof and blanket Calgary in apocalyptic ash. (Calgaryans will probably shrug and laugh, then slug back a tar sands beer cocktail, I dunno.) BC has barely begun to burn, really. Tahoe too, I suspect. Perhaps posterity will take a clue and finally make it a national park rather than a tacky resort. All indeed dispiriting.

But one of the compensations of being truly off grid, of having bid a farewell to many of the follies of empire, can be a dawning equanimity before the death of things like planets and empires. This dawn is indeed slow in its advance, and quiet. But perhaps much of the angst and fear which fuels regimes of empires must needs be inculcated up close. In one’s face, as it were, the interpellating blare of empire is harder to elide. People begin to believe its bullshit about being universal, catholic, and hegemonic, even when in opposition to it. Futility and fatalism are the real spiritual cash of totalitarian regimes. And far more than any compulsions of the body, any monopolies on violence, the defeat is most tragic when we believe these lies. Empire’s worry is that we won’t find the contemplative space to grow resolve.

Resolve. Resolve to just… not be a part of it. The cleanness of “no”. And even better, the joy of saying, “why don’t we now do something right?”

The ideology of self sufficiency has its own pitfalls, natch. The mainstream likes to imagine “off grid” to mean a rejection in the vein of outlandish individualism. And indeed too often it can be so.

But silly tales of zombie apocalypses function to obscure what is at risk for empire in these countercultures. What if “off grid” or “solarpunk” is not at pith a rejection of empire, not a mimesis, but a reconnexion apart from the synthetic anomies instantiated by imperial hegemonies? Hegemonies feel humiliated most not by a mimetic antagonist, but by those who are indifferent. They fear less the *deconstructor* than those who *create* apart from. And if this “apart” is in service to imperatives of a more healthful commonweal… who knows what good and hidden trees are even now growing in the shaded demimondes?

I shall confess to a suspicion of movements, of tendencies, of politicking proselytism. But eventually, to survive, some emergent commonwealth must creep out from the “abandoned places of empire”. I suspect it will be a big tent. It will have to be to get anywhere. Humans are very good at denying their species survival interest, but it is a powerful motivator. And if we don’t want to support a better world, maybe our robot slaves will.

In such considerations, the virtue of “off grid” can be a contemplative reserve which lends needful resolve to new possibilities. It’s one thing to have a speculative futurism. It’s another thing to *live* a futurism through one’s personal craft: the craft of one’s life. One life becomes a mote of levity, nigh which other lives find a gentle hand out of empire’s own gravity well.

Suddenly things which were invisible under empire’s glare become visible. And craft is definitely one such. Craft is degraded under empire because it resists quantum value. It harbours subalterns about the dignity of one’s work. It speaks against the vampiric and vapid in industrial disposability culture. And suddenly in that more muted contemplative space, forbidden questions are asked. Questions like, “why not”?

Or “why can’t we have our cake and eat it too”? Indeed, why not? I say, we should have pharmaceuticals without Big Pharma. Why not? What if information prosthetics lasted for 30 years and were more field serviceable? What if devices were not made by near slave labour but crafted slowly to custom order? What if infotech is inherently poisonous to human psychology save in very specific conditions? What if those conditions varied from person to person, and could be discovered and rendered in education? What if we acted on that knowledge, to create local norms and spaces which served a more multivalent human ecology? Why not just conservation areas, but also permacultural areas? What if small towns became microarcologies dependent on surrounding CCA’s? Why not try?

Trying things gets a bit easier off grid, I find. And even better, little tryings become immediate. It becomes easier to say to one’s indolent self, “let’s try it today”. Ironically, one also can become more caring to that indolent self, saying, “ok, let’s try it tomorrow”. That is, experimental parameters become more lucid as their dependencies and externalities become clearer. And when it comes to crafting the personal of life, the immediacy and intimacy of an off grid situation helps elucidate an experimental ethos. That is, choices are simplified as sourcing is simplified in questions like, “how much protein should I eat?” Or “where should I forage for this added protein?” Or “what is the local impact of my foraging catchment area?” The grid, which is the empire, obscures the real import of such questions by coercive regimes of false ecology.

The healthy estate of the human often begins with rediscovering “Man is the measure”, as EM Forster prophetically enjoined in The Machine Stops. But even more wondrous is the leap from the human as measure to the pithy world. What if we scrap our economy and reconstitute for ecological systemic health? Why not? To be “off grid” means that at least in some small way *you can do that right now* and not just dream about it. Want to eat that native seed and plant the other three next to it? Do it. Off grid requires taking responsibility for action apart from the comforting lies of empire, to varying degrees.

And those varying degrees are alright, I think. I hope. They must be. We must avoid hairshirt self indulgent masochism. The touchstone for this is trauma mitigation. As a species, we plum can’t afford traumatic catharsis anymore. We’ve bit off too much power as a species to play that game anymore without systemic collapse. If you need cans of food or medical pills or that extry solar panel, and can get it, then use it with gratitude. Training wheels are good things.

If *we wanted*, we could make empire forge training wheels toward commonwealth. The liars will lie and brutes will swing their truncheon. But it really is still up to us right here and now.

Smolnet, smolgrid

Until a smolnet pal forwarded me the info on ROOPHLOCH, I hadn’t really thought of myself as “off grid”. That might seem odd given the foregoing post. But I built my solarpunk palace on wheels less in spirit of adventure than as a life raft. As well, I’ve pondered punting the internet entirely. It has been perverted into the monster we feared it might become. I now have zero interest in social media as such, certainly. But perhaps there is yet enough of the wilderness in the internet to create better, if smolnet and such nooks yet can bear up as a constructive demimonde. I’m certainly grateful to many of the hearts I’ve met by this medium. I’d not want to elide that, no matter our habits of often tenuous identity.

Maybe that’s the crux of the infotech problematic: all of this digital stuff has to eventually render meaning, critical meaning for real persons, or it is illegitimate and usually harmful. Internet certainly does affect us intimately, though we have pretended otherwise as society for dangerously too long.

In Smolnet I feel us groping towards some kind of productive restraint, engaging the issues of what UI subtly does to the human on an ontological ground. Many of us *feel better* in simple text rather than the orgies of sensorial stimulation on the web. I challenge this feeling goes deeper than the usual worries of UX ergonomics. Rather, I’m invoking something of a situationist question: what are the potential implications of entire demimondes emerging around a sort of “plain living” response to contemporary media? I won’t try to omnibus internet sociology; others have done that far better. But there is one hermit out here at the very far end of the internet pipe wondering, why not do it better, why not?

I reckon to post a bit on that for the duration of ROOPHLOCH in the perhaps idle hope that those closer to such decisions find value thereby.

Might Smolnet be an analogy for the problems and potentials of “off grid” lifeways? What if instead of positing a hairshirt “off grid”, we proposed a “smolgrid”? How might slow, intimate, productive networks of maximally resilient character be enhanced amongst us who have more or less left the mainstreams of human empire? They certainly exist. Though when we ensconce off grid lifeways as individualism, smolgrids may be limited from good growth. It’s one thing I am hopeful for in the Solarpunk counterculture, a centring of questions of economy and ecology on interdependent terms.

That’s not to say there is no virtue in the person, alone, pursuing independent sufficiency. Apart and together, in context. I’d like to learn how those poles might stitch together in our work “off grid”.

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