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Gemscrawler adiabatic has suggested that the endpoint of the Smol Earth philosophy is more or less the way the Amish live and, hey, we already *have* the Amish, if you think they're so great, why don't you cut to the chase and go join them? On the basis of previous friendly interactions with adiabatic I am taking this as well-meaning and good-natured teasing to express a philosophical disagreement over which we might seriously and sincerely engage, so I'm writing a response. I'm not upset by the comparison, even though I don't think it holds. I'm supremely aware that I've done a pretty lousy job of trying to explain just exactly what Smol Earth is and is not about, so I can't be upset about misunderstandings of mischaracterisations. It seems a useful exercise to try to carefully and explicitly differentiate myself from the Amish. If I can't, well, heck, why *don't* I try joining them?
Two caveats up front. One, I don't know that much about the Amish. This post is based on skimming the following three Wikipedia articles:
I strongly suspect the people who wrote and edited those articles are not themselves Amish and that the vast majority of Amish people have not read them. Not that this means they are full of falsehood, but I'm sure there is probably some misrepresentation. Then again, maybe this doesn't matter, I strongly suspect adiabatic is no more of an expert than I am and is using some vague outsider's notion of what the Amish are like, which probably accords pretty closely with these articles.
Two, this is actually more a differentiation of my own personal philosophy from the Amish philosophy, not a differentiation of the Smol Earth philosophy from it. One of those things is a superset of the other. I sure hope they are consistent! But the Smol Earth philosophy is not super dogmatic or all encompassing. I fully expect there will be people who will disagree with me on all sorts of things but with whom I share enough common ground on Smol Earth specific issues that we can fruitfully be part of the same community. I don't want to presume to speak on the part of everybody interested in the project or put people off if they actually skew more Amish than me in some ways, or whatever. I will try to be careful about distinguishing these two things, but might not do a perfect job at it.
Anyway, onward. This is relatively casual and off-the-cuff, I'm just gonna quote chunks from the above articles and outline where I agree and disagree:
"Amish do not view technology as evil". 100% the same for Smol Earth and for me.
"Restrictions are not meant to impose suffering". 100% the same for Smol Earth and for me.
"Amish communities are known for travelling by horse and buggy because they feel horse-drawn vehicles promote a slow pace of life. But most Amish communities do also allow riding in motor vehicles, such as buses and cars. In recent years many Amish people have taken to using electric bicycles because they are faster than either walking or harnessing up a horse and buggy". Man, what's the objection (if indeed there is one) to *non*-electric bicycles? Those are still faster than walking or horse and buggy. I don't feel like they promote a fast paced life. Bikes are friggin' great technology. Quoting St Sheldon again, "I have always loved riding bicycles, especially for the feeling of freedom and self-sufficiency that they give". Technology which scores very high on inducing feelings of freedom and self-sufficiency and simultaneously scores very low on consuming resources, producing waste and wrecking the biosphere will be the last technology up against the wall in any revolution I'm part of. All else being equal in these regards, I quite like the idea of favouring the solutions which also promote the slowest pace of life.
"The Amish are known for their plain attire" (there's a lot more following this, read the original if you want). The fast/disposable fashion industry is an environmental blight and also has an appalling worker's rights record and I think it's important to boycott it as much as your circumstances allow. Beyond that, I don't really care about this. If you want to express yourself by wearing colourful clothing, go for it, just don't make clothing more wasteful and less durable and less practical than it otherwise could be for the sake of making it more colourful or whatever, and don't whimsically change your mind or allow yourself to be told every six months what looks good. Unplain attire can be entirely philosophically unobjectionable to me. I don't think buttons are "too flashy"; I like buttons, they're easier to repair than zippers. If you want to wear a dress which is shorter (or longer!) than calf-length, I will not be offended. Smol Earth is entirely unconcerned with fashion.
"Amish meat consumption is similar to the American average though they tend to eat more preserved meat". Boooo. Eating a lot of meat is horrendously inefficient in terms of litres of water and square kilometres of land consumed and kilograms of carbon dioxide produced per calorie or per gram of protein consumed. Like, really so much worse than eating plants. The American average is way too high. There's also the whole animal suffering angle (check out Sunset's recent post!), but I like to lean on this other one, because even people who believe that non-human animals are unfeeling automata (and I freely admit that I believed this for most of my life, and even now, honestly, I don't think it's indefensible), even people who believe we have God-given dominion over the animals, they can't argue with it. It's not philosophy, it's not ethics, it's friggin' engineering, it's input vs outputs, it's objective and empirical. Heavy meat consumption does not, cannot scale to ten billion people. Smol Earth is also more or less unconcerned with this, though. I think it's natural that our readers and authors will have more vegetarians and vegans amongst them than an equally sized random sample of, say, Hacker News readers and authors, but that's not really what it's about.
"Working hard is considered godly, and some technological advancements have been considered undesirable because they reduce the need for hard work. Machines such as automatic floor cleaners in barns have historically been rejected as this provides young farmhands with too much free time". I don't think that difficult manual labour is in and of itself virtuous or good for the soul or anything. If you can use technology to reduce the hard work involved in some essential task without wrecking the biosphere (or putting us on a path which will wreck the biosphere any time before the death of the sun or whatever does it for us) and without consuming finite resources so fast that we'll exhaust them before the death of sun or whatever, go for it. I think most high-tech modern technology fails those tests. I have no beef with free time at all. In some sense Smol Earth is actually specifically about changing how we spend free time (some early, soul-crushingly long versions of the "About us" document were explicit on this point). I don't think we can degrow food production or healthcare or other life-or-death stuff very quickly at all, because there are too many people and the biosphere is too wrecked for really sustainable non-industrial approaches to those things to work. But recreation and leisure and art and culture, we can degrow and de-industrialise that stuff as hard and fast as we want, and I want to work toward that because it feels hypocritical not to if I'm only accepting industrial food and medicine with my nose pinched as a temporary stopgap until we've shrunk our population enough and healed the planet enough that we can replace it with organic agriculture conducted with artisanal hand tools or whatever. Leisure and recreation today is almost synonymous with digital electronics, people think that life without them would involve sitting and staring at the wall and twiddling your thumbs, that it'd be excruciatingly dull, and I feel the need to push back against that falsehood. But an instantaneous cold turkey abandonment of consumer electronics is plainly not necessary on ecological grounds, extremely difficult to do (at least in part because modern digital electronics and online services are literally engineered to be addictive), will have an extremely high "relapse" rate, and also can't effectively be a basis for any kind of cultural movement, because once you're onboard you are unable to communicate with any people you wanna convert who aren't within shouting range of you. Maybe a good one sentence summary of most of the Smol Earth philosophy is "using computers and networks to effect a shift in recreation, leisure, entertainment and art in the nearish future which spreads the knowledge and perspectives and attitudes necessary to make people support a bigger and slower shift in all other aspects of life in the less-nearish future". The Amish grow up in a world absent of most of modern technology. It's the default baseline for their children. I grew up expecting a future of space colonies and Dyson spheres and nanoassemblers, the youth of today are growing up with YouTube and Insta and Alexa and Okay Google and ChatGPT there from day one. Imagining a future without that stuff as being tolerable, even pleasant, is going to be extremely hard for them. We can't just all collectively jump to it easy peasy, we'll have to really work at it, together, slowly.
The Amish are apparently not actually opposed to electricity itself, only specifically "electricity from public power lines". This is part of a principle of "separation from the world". I am pretty sure this refers mostly to sociocultural separation from non-Amish. It's weird, to me, to consider connecting to a power grid to violate this, but whatever. If this principle meant "not giving a shit about the natural world beyond your village horizon", that would be directly contrary to Smol Earth philosophy, but I don't think it means that. Anyway, because of this prohibition on public power lines, "the electricity needed to run a modern dairy must be produced, typically using diesel/gasoline generators or solar power". Similarly, "Bottled gas may be used to heat water, fuel ranges, and run refrigerators. Gas-pressured or kerosene lanterns provide lighting. Batteries power the red lights on buggies. Gasoline generators may provide energy for washing machines, water pumps, and agricultural equipment". Apparently this is all fine because there's no physical tether to the outside world. Again, weird to me. What I and likely many Smol Earthers have against public power grids is that they are primarily built out of copper, which is finite, and you have to dig it up from wherever random forces of nature happened to deposit it and refine it out of whatever form random forces of nature left it in, and random forces of nature didn't care about whether or not those processes were super energy intensive or destructive of habitats or productive of nasty waste. Same for diesel and gasoline and kerosene plus they also roast the planet and damage people's lungs. Same for the chemistry in the batteries with finite charge cycles that usually accompany solar panels.
"The Old Order Amish tend to restrict telephone use, as it...interferes with social community by eliminating face-to-face communication". I and probably a great many of my readers grew up hearing older and less computery people continually insist that email and chatrooms and things like that were "impersonal" and the relationships we had online weren't as meaningful as the ones we had face to face, that our internet friends weren't "real friends", and so on, and so forth. You probably feel like I do that that was and is nonsense and that computers and networks can indeed provide a viable substrate for genuine social community. Heck, the aim of Smol Earth would be pretty obviously futile if we didn't believe it was. So I obviously don't fully endorse this sentiment. That said, I think that the hard opposite stance, that there is nothing at all unique and important about face-to-face communication and we are fine without any of it is probably also nonsense, so I have some sympathy with this bit of Amish perspective. I think the ecological problems with computers and networks are bigger problems than the psychosocial ones, bigger and probably less avoidable or reformable. They are mine and Smol Earth's main motivation for reducing them. If psychosocial benefits result as a side-effect, that's a nice bonus.
"Amish typically believe that large families are a blessing from God". I believe humanity ought to be very conscious about population growth because all else being equal the rate of consumption of finite resources and the rate of production of persistent hazardous waste increases in proportion to population. For a given "quality of life" or "standard or living" provided by a given type/level of technology, half the population will last twice as long before running into problems. That's maybe an oversimplification in some ways and some cases, but it's a good first order approximation to the truth, and a much better approximation that "lol, Malthusians can't science". Unbounded population growth is undeniably unsustainable. If anybody quips "oh, so you're not Amish, you're an ecofascist instead" in response to this, I will CRUSH you, you disingenuous twit. I'm so tired of this pathetic and dreary false equivalence. I explicitly and powerfully disavow genocide, forced sterilisation, government-enforced N child policies, and Great Replacement conspiracy theories, always have, always will, I just think it's absurd to preach that unbounded population growth cannot possibly ever have negative consequences. This is of course just my personal stance, Smol Earth does not take a stance on population issues, just like it doesn't take stances on fashion or diet.
"The Amish do not usually educate their children past the eighth grade, believing that the basic knowledge offered up to that point is sufficient to prepare one for the Amish lifestyle. Almost no Amish go to high school and college." Huge discordance here not just with my personal philosophy, but with Smol Earth's. Smol Earth is unashamedly and unabashedly pro-education, especially on ecology and Earth sciences and maybe demography? Maybe under the Smol Earth philosophy the "highest" use of industrialised science and technology while it's still being kept around, beyond making sure there's enough food and clean water and medicine for everybody, which is *why* it ought to be kept around for the time being, is to enable better understand and monitoring of the full and lasting impact of our way(s) of life on the rest of the planet so that we can strive to ever reduce it. To a Smol Earther, science and technology are not magical never ending sources of tools to let us expand infinitely throughout the universe, consume ever more energy and resources, grow ever larger in number, live in ever higher grades of luxury, fulfil our destiny and live up to our potential. That's science in the service of the ideology of the cancer cell. But we don't embrace ignorance as an antidote. Instead we see science as a means by which to better perceive the planetary limits and holistic systems within which we have to be content to live. Science in the service of balance and stewardship and that kind of thing, not expansion and dominion. Maybe we think Earth observation satellites are the coolest high tech things which don't directly keep people alive.
I think that will do. Honestly, Smol Earth does not feel particularly Amish to me. Now, one might say all of the differences above are missing the forest for the trees. If you zoom out enough to miss these pesky details, you might say that "Amishness" is a successful cultural toolkit for reliably transmitting across multiple generations a package of beliefs and values and skills which together facilitate a group of people not only living a life which doesn't rely too heavily on modern technology but also being (as far as I'm aware) pretty content and happy about living that way, even though they are surrounded by a world pushing something more". From *this* perspective, sure, Smol Earth is actually totes Amish, we aspire to collective create and publish and distribute exactly that kind of cultural toolkit. Which modern technologies we give thumbs up or thumbs down to and what we use those technologies for and what we don't and why we've made those decisions and the colour and length of our dresses are all substantially different, and we rely more on scientific consensus than scriptural authority as our guide, but if you ignore all that...
A lot of people on Team Space Cancer will perceive this as waste of our species' intellectual potential, as condemning us to a pathetic and boring and frustratingly Earthbound life, not to mention the sheer embarrassment of going extinct like mono-planetary chumps when an asteroid wipes us out, thereby cementing our status as losers in the Contest of Existing. They might assume that anybody who doesn't share this take must actually be pretty stupid and perhaps should have paid more attention in physics class. Part of the goal of Smol Earth is to push back against the idea that a low-tech outdoor lifestyle is necessarily intellectually stultifying or anti-scientific or lacking in a spirit of grand adventure and exploration. We'll create a safe space for hardcore STEMmy-techy folk to talk about things like "hubris" and "humility" without feeling or being treated like class traitors.
Finally, I'm kind of glad adiabatic gave their post a title mentioning my "endpoint", because this is something very important that I probably haven't written enough about yet. My endpoint is not, in fact, the Amish, or Renaissance Italy, it's more like stone age hunting and gathering. And I say that without worrying about it seeming crazy and extremist because I am actually not about the endpoint, not at all. Instead I am all about the infinite asymptotic approach to it. Here are my axioms:
1. As a matter of empirical fact, stone age hunting and gathering sustained humanity for hundreds of thousands of years and probably could have continued to do so for hundreds of thousands more, perhaps even millions of years.
2. It's not empirical fact but I believe it is self-evident that Earthbound industrial growth societies based on destructive and energy-intensive extraction and transformation of finite resources cannot possibly hope to sustain humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. Our first attempt has barely lasted a few hundred years!
3. Humanity has now grown so large and degraded the planet to such an extent that we are absolutely dependent upon modern industrial technology to keep us alive, so we cannot react to point 2. above by just abandoning all industrial technology tomorrow. There's just not enough left to hunt or gather, even if we *did* remember how to be good at that, which we don't.
4. I have come to find Humanity the Glorious Immortal Space Cancer a deeply unsatisfying and kind of repugnant view of what our species should be, so I personally also cannot react to point 2. above by scribbling out the "Earthbound" part and hoping we continue to find new habitable planets faster than we denude 'em, forever (I also think it's a lot harder and less probable than many advocates think).
5. I don't think humanity is an evil blight which ought to be snuffed out ASAP. I would like us to be around for as long as we can manage, while being entirely at peace with point 4. implying our inevitable extinction one day. I'm not actively pleased about inevitable extinction, I don't wanna suggest it's karmic justice for Anthropocene extinctions or anything like that, I just can't see it as a cosmic tragedy.
6. I can of course see that there are a great many ways in which life with some modern industrial technology is rather more pleasant than life with none and I don't begrudge anybody wanting to enjoy that for as long as they can.
Is there a single, coherent, genuinely long term story I can weave about the future of humanity which acknowledges and respects every single one of these points and doesn't rely on magical thinking or divine intervention? Yes, I think there is, and its basis is the fact that the integral of A*exp(-bt) with respect to t from 0 to infinity is a finite quantity (assuming A is finite and b is > 0). Sorry for the not very accessible expression, but this is the core of my personal eco-philosophy made as clear and compact as I possibly can. No matter how little of a finite resource is left, no matter how quickly you are currently consuming it, no matter how long you would like it to last, there absolutely verifiably exists a solution to that problem. You just have to slow down fast enough and never stop using less. Same goes for not producing more of a persistent hazardous waste product than the biosphere can safely absorb, you just have to never stop producing less. Zeno sustainability. So, when we can't live without a high-tech solution to some problem, throw progress at it to make it more energy efficient and less wasteful, by all means, but when we *can* live without a high-tech solution, throw at least as much energy into weaning ourselves off of it as we do into greening it up, because the Jevons paradox is real and because every physical process has a theoretical maximum efficiency which we cannot improve upon, so the only way to never stop shrinking our impact is to never stop using less and less and less of even the most clean and efficient tech. Simultaneously, keep the population shrinking and work hard to restore the biosphere, because these two steps will slowly shift more and more problems out of the first category (can't live without high-tech) into the second category (can).
Smol Earth takes it as a given that individually owned computers used in our free time and networks between them are things we can happily live without, they are already in that second category, so the prescription is not just greening but also at least as much weaning. There's already a blossoming Permacomputing movement which seems to me mostly focussed on the greening, because of course it's fun to hack with a solutionist mindset. Smol Earth wants to specifically address the weaning side, which I perceive to be neglected. Because personal computers and networks can influence human offline behaviour too, we shouldn't waste the opportunity to use their greener incarnations before the end of the weaning period to also promote rapid and concerted green-n-wean transitions in as many other aspects of life as possible. Hence, the idea of a kind of low-impact electronic cultural movement (dare I say, blech, lifestyle movement? Blech!!!) which doesn't unnecessarily demonise solar panels and windfarms and electric cars but rejects them as any kind of long term solution and keeps one eye squarely on a future of contended low-tech exuberance in rejuvenated nature. We need to commit ourselves firmly to an Infinite March back to the stone age, not because we want to actually get there, we don't (well, I don't, feel free to run ahead if you want), but because it is the only safe direction for a long term journey. Cold, uncaring, inescapable reality is providing the sticks to encourage us on this journey (extreme weather, rising sea levels, food and water shortages, mass extinctions, collapsing fish stocks, bla, bla, bla). It's up to us to provide some carrots too, by collectively rediscovering how to be content without flashing screens and thinking sand.
I'm not asking you, personally, to become a caveman, I'm not even condemning your great-great-great-grandchildren to be cavemen. As long as we start the Infinite March off at a fast enough sprint, then every kilometre can take longer than the previous one. We'll never actually end up as cavemen. We might not even get close to cavemen for ten thousand years. We will certainly not pass through points where we are perfectly reenacting life in actual historical periods, like the Renaissance or the Middle Ages or whatever, because the march will progress at different speeds in different spheres of life, and we'll also presumably retain some modern scientific understanding and societal value systems. There's IMHO no "awkwardness of being only halfway in the modern world" whatsoever. I've believed *that* since at least 2017 when I wrote about "hybrid timelines":
Very happy with the six point formulation above and the paragraphs that follow it! Thanks, adiabatic, for provoking it. Most of it is strictly Solderpunk Orthodoxy, btw, not core Smol Earth philosophy. Smol Earth is something *I* can do to cling to my lifelong identity as a computer person a little longer while still believing all of the above and feeling like I'm being true to it (it is absolutely not the only thing I am doing to be true to it, it would be woefully inadequate in isolation). Smol Earthers certainly need not believe every line of the above. If you are a computer person who is not on Team Space Cancer or on Team Industrial Growth Forever and you're feeling kind of conflicted about continuing to enthusiastically compute because of it, I think that alone ought to be more than sufficient for you to get something of value from some of what Smol Earth publishes or for you to have thoughts and feelings worth being published by Smol Earth.
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