"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
2020...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) [Mission 1.3]
Today is March 3rd, 2020 and I have been dancing for five hours in this crazy red rock desert. The quarter moon works its way slowly across the sky, marking our ritual progress. Friends are here too, bodies pulsing rhythmically or beating the drums in frenzied time, their active tattoos weaving bright contrails of color in the darkness. Photos are taken, videos uploaded; evidence for the mission. We are gamers, and we play a long game.
Ten years ago I went into existential crisis, true hell-in-a-bucket mode. Thanks, Alchemy old friend. There I was, a successful technology executive with all the trappings and toys that came with that turn-of-the-century Silicon Valley lifestyle. I worked at one of the giant corps, cranking out shiny talismans of technolust full of OLED, LTE, GPS and other three, four and five letter incantations. It was the best. Until it wasn't. Until he showed me.
Alchemy showed up in my social stream one night, that glowing mask avatar leering from the screen. "How long before that new gadget you're working on ends up in a junk heap in Guiyu, obsolete except for the value of the raw materials inside?"
"Did you realize that it takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip -- a total 630 times the mass of the final product? Did you know the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight, and fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer? I would like you to consider the true impact of what you do, when you are 'changing the world' as you like to say."
And thus began my transformation.
When you start to pull on that thread -- measuring the true lifecycle impact of the things you own, the food you eat, the work that you do -- a lot of things come unraveled. We live in a complex world, and of course you can't just stop it all. We still need cities and corporations and financial systems and the Internet, and we need food systems that can feed our ravenous billions. But you can become mindful of the costs, and you can seek to improve the value of things. You can learn to grow, to code, to fab, to build communities, to keep bees. I pulled, and I struggled with the unraveling, and then I learned. I'll spare you the dark details, but it was a long road and bumpy.
So now I know things and share them. I learned python and mandarin and fabML. I learned to deploy lightweight sensor nets and visualize pollutants in my city. I learned to stage massively multiplayer augmented reality art games. And I learned to dance like a dervish in the desert, driving hard against the African polybeat, swept up in the quest to level up my life.
(photo credit Bert van Dijk)
Views: 40
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Comment by Wasserperson on March 18, 2010 at 7:31am
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A great turn from your current life, towards your envisioned one. And lots of poetry in the description! Thanks!
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