Turn On Tune In Drop Out
Turn On Tune In Drop OutTheBottleneck is crushing the humanity out of humans world wide. BloodForOil? and the FeedbackEffect. And ThePentagonPredictsGlobalDieback?.
Humans never evolved to live in these gigantic cities anyway - only bees and ants are suited to such scales of organization. It was insect-like for we engineers to endlessly reimplement the systems that all the other bees are already buzzing over in the corporation next door. TheTechJobMarketIsAnIllusion?.
Therefore,
Sell your mortgaged house and extract its equity. Get yourself a mansion in a nice little town in the hills. Take a laptop and WDSL / a satellite dish for your connection to the world of words. Start up a teahouse or a B&B. Get in touch with nature and OpenSource and stop killing yourself for a living.
Choose your climate, though - hills can be windy and cold.
Yes. Research it carefully - you're going to have to make a life there. You're looking for a community of people you can relate to and trust. Some middle-American cow town ringed with rusted out cars and trailer parks isn't going to make you a happy camper. Visit as many IntentionalCommunity?s as you can before pulling up stakes. But then get!
TurnOnTuneInDropOut was coined in 1968 by then Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, famed for his experiments with and advocacy of LSD. So isn't advocating TurnOnTuneInDropOut in an engineering forum the height of irony?
What is advocated on this page has little of necessity to do with Timothy Leary or with LSD or other drugs. One can move to the countryside without getting stoned; one can just as easily get stoned without moving to the countryside.
Even without using Leary's phrase, a page advocating this kind of thing in a computer medium is the height of irony. Computers and the Internet depend on a developed-world global infrastructure that could not exist if everyone followed this advice. And I notice that back-to-nature enthusiasts somehow always manage to take e.g. a steel axe along with them. Irony, I say, irony.
Steely, more like it. But who says you have to be a bee to enjoy the honey? This page doesn't advocate giving up our sweet technology. It advocates getting some distance between you and the infernal sooty engines of self-destruction that are presently necessary to create our technology. Once we have enough brainpower living naturally, we'll start to find other ways to build infrastructure. DNA chips are already on the books. It's not much more of a stretch to think of genetically engineering wireless routing functions into common herbage, and strewing the Internet like some kind of latter day JohnnyAppleseed?. It just takes will and ingenuity - and we've got that. After the MilitaryMediaIndustrialComplex? dies its death, presuming we're still here, we're going to have to find another way. Let's start now.
Some folks think this is selfish. But it's a lot more selfish to lock your work away in some tiny compartment of a great feudal hierarchy. InformationWantsToBeFree, and so do you.
Information doesn't want to be free. You want it to be free.
Actually it wants you to be free.
How do you know that?
How do you know I know that?
I don't know you know that.
Then why did you ask me how I know it?
Sounds nice and all. How does one eat?
Very well. Most geeks with mortgages have them in big smoky cities with high and, in the current market, increasing property values. A lot of money is being driven out of paper and into bri7cks. But in little towns there are nice houses you can pick up for a fraction of your mortgage. And live happily on the rest.
This is not to say you don't make money by your skills. But you don't have to apply them for the benefit of someone else's copyright and someone else's pocketbook. Oh, if you still want a foot in that world, you can always do some part-time work with a consulting firm ... or start one of your own ...
Alternatively, emigrate. If you're European or American, you'd be amazed at the property prices in the nicest parts of Mexico or Australia. Of course, there are bureaucratic hassles in making the move, but with the power of your first world currency, the way can always be smoothed, especially if you make no local income.
Now you might say to yourself, "Yeah, Green Acres, nice fantasy, but I'm comfortable where I am doing what I'm doing with whom I'm doing it. This isn't so bad." And maybe you're right. Freedom isn't for everyone.
Who are you to define freedom for everyone? After all, bees are free. They like being bees. "Freedom isn't for everyone" is just patronization. Just because someone doesn't want your point of view, doesn't mean they don't want, or have, freedom.
Question is always FreedomFromWhat. Freedom from roads, advertising, debt, broadcast media, networking, manufactured food, crowds, lines, shopping carts, smog, bottled water, diamonds, gold, jetboats, cell phones, drinkers, rock 'n' roll, battery farming. Freedom from everything required to service millions of people jammed into just a few square miles of hive. Obviously, freedom from that isn't for everyone, or else there wouldn't be so many people living like that.
Little hick towns are far from Shangri La - they're generally closed-minded centers of ineloquence full of trapped and impoverished folk who dream of something better for their children. You want to be part of a community like that, you better get ready to lower your expectations.
Raise them instead. IntentionalCommunity?s are not hick towns. Now life in the beehive may be very comfortable if you have a nice cell and the queen bees value your brain. But there are places on earth where you can live very well, surround yourself with people who take care of one another, and make a beautiful and sustainable life. IntentionalCommunity?s are often very nice places indeed.
Some folks like cities. The internet is a poor substitute for personal interaction.
Personal interaction in IntentionalCommunity?s? There's lots of it! Try these for size:
How does one eat?
Very, very well out of one's own veggie garden/chicken-flock. Been doing it for the past six years, and have better computation & network facilities than I ever had in the corporate/city world. I'll never go back. The biggest trick is to get rid of all debt as fast as possible.
Some folks like cities. The internet is a poor substitute for personal interaction.
I've lived in towns and cities of varying sizes, and more people does not equal a guarantee for social interaction. Social activity is found wherever you look for it, and whether or not you feel you've found it is completely up to personal preference. --DanielSherman
Small towns generally foster more social interaction than do large cities. Whenever I've lived in urban areas, I've noticed that the only social interaction is a friendly-but-empty "Hi" when I pass my neighbors in the parking lot. "Don't smile" and "avoid eye contact" are the principal social rules in large cities. --KrisJohnson
DoWhatMakesYouHappy?. If TurnOnTuneInDropOut makes you happy, and you have the ability and wherewithall to do so, then do it. If something else makes you happy (and it's not overly destructive), do that instead.
Happiness is an illusion. People may be happy for a few moments when they acquire something they want. A car, an orgasm, that sort of thing. Then it goes away and is replaced by hope and fear. The HumanHive is a network of these cycles, each bee/person making objects of hope and fear for the others. Natural cycles are much slower and less tangible. Contentment and harmony are invisible signposts on the egress to the hive. If you need to do anything - as opposed to just wanting to do it - you're headed back in again.
TurnOnTuneInDropOut may make some folks happy. It might make others miserable. ToEachHisOwn?. Just because someone elects not to TurnOnTuneInDropOut doesn't make them a bee or a slave or any other such patronizing nonsense. (I, for one, am perfectly happy with my current life and lifestyle, and see no reason to do as the original poster suggests. Plus, my wife would likely kill me--she's a city girl at heart and considers PortlandOregon, where we live (Beaverton, actually) to be "the sticks". Some people just like big cities; and not because there is a Gap located at a convenient distance (assuming you take the SUV, of course). Lots of other amenities--cultural attractions of all sorts, fine cuisine (especially of the foreign variety), etc. that just isn't available in a small town or rural area. --ScottJohnson
Scott has exposed the fallacy behind Leary's 3 commandments. The social structures, institutions, organizations, etc. that we find ourselves in weren't imposed by any external force. They aren't "unnatural". People continually choose to TuneOutTurnOffDropIn? because they like to. They may bitch about the unexpected consequences and some minority would be happier living another way, but most humans seek the comforts of large scale social hierarchies. If the entire population of the earth turned on, tuned in and dropped out we'd just rebuild the same crap in less than a generation. -- EricHodges
Actually cities of BeeHive scale are a very new social development for humans. They weren't possible until the IndustrialRevolution just a few generations ago. And even then it took NikolaTesla's engineering skill to make them anything more than squalid pits of hand-to-mouth misery. We don't have enough experience of continuous civilization to say that what we do now is the only way.
The HumanHive is currently an artifact of scale. But nothing says all human societies will become hive-like once they achieve sufficient population density. It's our job as engineers to create technological possibilities for people. To eat your own DogFood on this, you better get some place beautiful and make it more beautiful. Happily there are plenty of beautiful places left to TurnOnTuneInDropOut outside the walled cities and interstate corridors.
But be careful--otherwise we'll all move there and soon your nice bucolic retreat will become yet another burb. Or as DonHenley? put it--"call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye".
Bingo. Of course, some folks (not necessarily the authors of the above) seem convinced, come hell or high water, that the HumanCondition? was imposed by an external force, and is therefore unnatural. (See GrandConspiracy). And that those of us who aren't clever enough to recognize this are by definition fools
To be a bee in a hive, a cog in a machine, an engineer in a cubicle, - is that really all you're capable of? No one here has suggested any GrandConspiracy that forces you to live the life you do. And this page isn't calling anyone a fool. It's simply saying there are very pleasant and productive ways to live outside of the HumanHive. That there is a way out, and a big beautiful world outside. That you can go live there when you get tired of doing what you're told. Doing what you're told isn't foolish. It's natural.
I'd much rather be programming in a cubicle than a farmer. I've worked on a farm (as have my parents, grandparents, etc.) and all of us have busted our humps to make sure we don't have to do that for a living. It can be fun on the weekends and a nice place to retire, but living on what you grow is boring and exhausting.
Certainly farming for a living is the pits, one of the most brutal ways to exist that you can choose. But farming for a living isn't what's being proposed on this page. Keep engineering for a living, or whatever else it is you like to do. Just get debt/attachment free and go some place where you're not packed in like sardines.
Without large scale social organization we all have to farm to survive. Moving your laptop to a rural community isn't dropping out, it's just relocating. You're still using power generated by large power companies consuming resources and funded by municipal bonds traded on bond markets. You have to buy the laptop from a manufacturer that employs busy bees and uses chips made in factories that pollute rivers. That satellite dish doesn't do anything without a satellite, the companies that made it, the rockets that lifted it, the companies that made the rockets (who also probably make ICBMs and other implements of war), etc. Or is this page merely advocating myopia?
You can enjoy all the products of the hive without living inside it. That's not myopia. It's perspective. And once outside you can look at what's possible rather than just what exists now. The fact is the oil is running out, the infrastructure is coming apart, and even the folk in power forsee the end of the way things are now. We've got to change the way we maintain our civilization away from all the pollution and dehumanization. Humans have made bigger jumps in the past. It just takes guts and brains and a tangible need. Grasp the nettle, tear yourself away from the big steel and glass teat, and become part of TheNextIndustrialRevolution?.
To be a bee in a hive, a cog in a machine, an engineer in a cubicle, - is that really all you're capable of?
I'm capable of whatever I set my mind and body to. However, I derive my satisfaction in life from activites outside of work; not from what I do in the office. I'm fortunate in that my job is enjoyable, pays well, and has reasonable hours--but it is certainly not the MeaningOfMyLife?.
Good for you! No one here has suggested any GrandConspiracy that forces you to live the life you do. And this page isn't telling you there's no way out. It's telling you there is a way out.
It's also telling me that if I choose not to exercise that way out, then I'm a "bee in a hive", etc. Buzz. In other words, it seems to be suggesting that there is something wrong with me should I choose not to TurnOnTuneInDropOut; and that moving to the hills with the laptop in tow is the only true way to find happiness; all else is inferior.
Yep. See TheBeehiveIsUnstoppable for reasons why. If puts you on the defensive, then by all means, make the money honey, eat your industrial pollen, go about your bzz bzz business. I'm very glad you do and can only invite you to stop.
Of course, you can feel free to move to the countryside if you want to, and congratulate yourself (publicly) on your newly-found independence. We won't complain a wit or utter a word in opposition. However, don't be terribly surprised if we "bees" find your hubris about being a self-appointed, modern-day HenryDavidThoreau to be both boorish and boring.
Thoreau? Those days are gone. No one is independent. The point here is simply that you don't have to put up with cities. You can find a nice spot and consult, invest, live intentionally - and let all the stress and debt out of your life. If you get off on stress and debt, well, good luck to you.
If that's how you enjoy life, then by all means; do so. Some of us enjoy our lives as is; including spending some portion of them in a cubicle. I doubt that I would be happier were I to TurnOnTuneInDropOut--ScottJohnson
People didn't start off in giant cities, but people didn't exactly start off with advanced technology or open social orders, and the two have developed somewhat hand in hand. However, there have been several radical approaches to urban planning in the last few centuries, and they've had notably different results. How many of the problems noted here are associated with living in cities, and how many are associated with living in broken cities?
The most important American philsopher of the past twenty-five years is a programmer, but he occupies an office at MIT rather than a cabin next to a pond in the woods. I'm speaking of RichardStallman. RichardStallman is spearheading a revolution as we speak.
It may be that my MIT reference is in error. RichardStallman has long since departed MIT; however I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that the FreeSoftwareFoundation still had offices on the MIT campus. Now, they seem to be located across the CharlesRiver? (in downtown Boston). At least according to the contact info on the FSF website (http://www.gnu.org)
MIT is a fine way to turn on and tune in! But they make you read TheWizardBook there. Which is like drugs...turning wide-eyed innocent freshmen into SmugLispWeenies. A seductive tome, it is...
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