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Howard:

After the earthquake and there were no services for a few days, a lot of things became visible. Like there are no railroad lines into where we live.

Bob Rossney:

Yeah, the earthquake was a real eye-opener. There's only about 5 days worth of food in the Bay Area.

Howard:

Which means that broken bridges mean it's hard to get food trucks in. Without trucks, food becomes a problem.

Bob Rossney:

Things could get extremely grim in a bad emergency.

Howard:

I've always wondered when a real blackout is going to hit Phoenix in July. I think tens of thousands of people could die.

Bob Rossney:

No kidding. Phoenix is a city that shouldn't even exist. Yet there it is.

Pogo:

That could actually do Phoenix some good... my state... long term - you can't support life there... well maybe life, but not civilization.

Guest 2369:

Isn't it better for use to inhabit land which is unusable for anything else, instead of colonizing areas which could instead be used to grow food etc.?

Bob Rossney:

That's a good point, 2369, were it not for Glen Canyon

Howard:

The problem with inhabiting Phoenix is that you gotta flood Glen Canyon and depend on electricity to keep you alive much of the year.

Guest 2369:

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with that area... just a generalization.

Howard:

When I grew up there, they always talked about the mystery of the Ho-Ho-Kam, these Indians who sent small crews there to work on irrigation. They disappeared. I believe they left because they concluded that the place is uninhabitable. The place is entirely dependent on air-conditioning, irrigation, and imported drinking water.

Bob Rossney:

Air conditioning! That's another technology for Technos... Air conditioning and television did in the front porch.

Howard:

Something I never thought about before is that people used to sit on their porches on hot nights, but now with air conditioning, that doesn't happen.

Bob Rossney:

And so now we hang out in the Palace to talk to our neighbors.

Howard:

In some ways, this is cooler than a porch. I mean, you know, cooler in the hipster jargon sense.

Howard:

Food. What else about it except we never think about supply lines?

Bob Rossney:

Well, there's the problem of centralized production.

Howard:

What's the problem?

Bob Rossney:

Agricultural knowledge has gotten so centralized that very few people have it. In the US, that is.

Howard:

Weird to think that people have forgotten how to grow stuff!

Bob Rossney:

Think about it! If you don't eat, you die... And yet you're totally dependent on strangers for your food. This seems significant to me.

Howard:

Technologies that free us from onerous labor also tie us to others. I grow a small portion of my food through the summer, for fun, but I'd hate to do it for a living.

Guest 2362:

Dependency is the nature of society.

Bob Rossney:

Actually, 2362, I think the trend is the other way now. Things like Community Supported Agriculture are steps away from agribusiness.

Howard:

I think we get both freedom and bondage. We're free from digging in the ground all day, dependent on the electrical utilities.

Bob Rossney:

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, Howard... it's just that what goes on in the world should not be shrouded in mystery.

Guest 2369:

Every study I have seen says that life as a gatherer/hunter was less labor intensive than our own...

Howard:

I think "Stoneage Economics" was the classic about how hunting-gathering was less work than commuting. You had real trouble if you had an abscessed tooth, though.

Bob Rossney:

Hey, without the sterile field I'd be dead now.

Guest 2362:

How big a trend away from interdependence, by whom?

Bob Rossney:

I was thinking of CSA, 2362. Are you familiar with it?

Howard:

CSA?

Bob Rossney:

Community Supported Agriculture.

Howard:

How does that work?

Bob Rossney:

My wife and I are subscribers to a farm in the Valley. We get a box of vegetables from them every week. They deliver to Berkeley.

Howard:

Ooh. I get it. Keep the small farms alive and have a direct connection to your food source. Are the prices comparable to the supermarket?

Bob Rossney:

We pay something like $15 a week for it. They're BETTER than the supermarket.

Howard:

What do you get for that?

Bob Rossney:

We get far more vegetables than we can eat in a week. What we don't get: a choice. This week it's kale and beets. Next week it's radishes and daikon. It's a terrific thing, I think.

Howard:

How does one find out about signing up for it?

Bob Rossney:

Full Belly Farm is at 510-528-8630. They deliver to various parts of the East Bay... And they know about other CSA projects, if you're outside their radius.

tt2:

There is a place here in WA state, near Seattle (Bothel).

Howard:

Sounds like a great topic for Technos. I wonder if there is a web page that can connect people with CSA in their area?

Bob Rossney:

If so, it's not run by Full Belly. There are other issues... There's Jefferson's idea of the yeoman farmer, which underlies a lot of American mythology.

Howard:

We can definitely continue the CSA conversation in Technos. Sounds like a great idea. Do you have any contact with the folks at the farm? Do they send out newsletters?

Bob Rossney:

They have something called Full Belly Beet.

Howard:

Some other "soft" side of technology, perhaps?

Bob Rossney:

I actually want to avoid disaster scenarios. There's too much of that kind of thinking. Disaster scenarios suck you into reductio ad absurdums.

Howard:

Disaster scenarios are fun, but the hard part is how daily life works. Sure, suggest a topic related to technology and critical thinking about it.

Bob Rossney:

"We must adopt this simple solution or we will ALL DIE!" Another topic that I have in mind: Demographics. I think that as a field demographics is understudied and underdiscussed. The ways market research and focus groups are shaping reality right now are profound.

Howard:

The web, of course, provides an enabling technology for demographic research on a large scale.

Spoon:

It's certainly not underutilized by ad sales.

Bob Rossney:

Right, spoon, but the IMPLICATIONS of that are understudied. Well, it's consensus reality that I mean. With the "consensus" monitored by focus group. Demographic research of a really narrow and skewed population sample.

Howard:

Focus groups must work. Which is scary. Do all 24 year old urban females think and feel the same way about everything? Or am I oversimplifying?

Bob Rossney:

Did you ever read Interface, by Stephen Bury? It's about a presidential candidate who's wired into a real-time focus group.

Howard:

Yeah! Instant polling, fed directly into a political candidate's brain! Like Clinton, only better!

Bob Rossney:

The focus group scenes in that were so goddamned hilarious!

Bob Rossney:

I think that the increasing boutiquization of commerce offers a lot of possibilities.

Howard:

If you combine handcraft with the worldwide market, you get something interesting. For example... There are crafts workers in South Africa who sell wire-sculpture toys in Ohio, via the Web.

Bob Rossney:

That's a weird sort of hyperspecialization, a market-share grab. But other kinds of boutique marketing make more sense. They offer opportunities for small producers to get into the market.

Howard:

The problem is what to DO about corporations.

Guest 2362:

Opportunity must turn a profit, No?

Howard:

amen

Howard:

I bought a whole buncha Odwalla yesterday.

Bob Rossney:

I think Odwalla's going to make it. I think the difference between Odwalla and Jack-in-the-Box is interesting.

Howard:

Justin "corporations are evil" is trading stock on a daily basis? How interesting.

Bob Rossney:

People don't hate Odwalla.

Howard:

E Coli. There's another food-technology subject. Can't have a rare burger any more.

Bob Rossney:

I think, deep down, everyone knows Jack is bad for them. Oh yeah, modern meat. Mad cow disease.

Howard:

It has to do with the way extremely large numbers of cattle are slaughtered. Meat factories are not too clean.

Bob Rossney:

I wish I could afford to only eat Niman-Schell beef. More boutiquization.

Howard:

The cleanliness of meat factories is a scale problem, a profit problem, and a political problem.

Bob Rossney:

Well, the political problem got solved once before.

Howard:

Upton Sinclair, you mean? What we need is a really great miniseries on e coli and meat production.

Bob Rossney:

I guess "Modern Meat" didn't have quite the same effect as "The Jungle" did. Yeah, a miniseries based on "Modern Meat" would be pretty great. Probably a conflict of interest for Orville Schell now, though.

Howard:

Schell sells meat and is now dean of UC school of journalism and lives in Bolinas!

Bob Rossney:

Plus he speaks fluent Chinese. Actually Schell was more concerned with antibiotics in feed and bovine growth hormone, if memory serves.

Howard:

In the age of deregulation, I wonder how many people don't connect centralized meat production and government agencies.

Howard:

Meat technology! There's a great new topic for Technos!

Spoon:

The fact is we don't know where anything comes from.

Bob Rossney:

True, Spoon. But another fact is that that information is not unavailable to us.

Howard:

Okay, we've moved from community supported agriculture to poisonous meat.

Bob Rossney:

Let's go back to corporations. Here's the thing about corporations: The corporation is an ARTIFACT. It is a THING that is made by HUMAN BEINGS.

Howard:

Say more about the artifact.

Bob Rossney:

The structure of corporations was INVENTED, not DISCOVERED. It can therefore be CHANGED.

Howard:

It was a charter granted by royalty in order to finance exploration. Like Columbus. I don't know. Some things that get invented are very hard to change. Like the money economy.

Bob Rossney:

There are *all kinds* of things that could be done to jigger with corporate law.

Howard:

Wouldn't the changes in corporate law have to be global?

Bob Rossney:

You have to change things like rules of fiduciary responsibility. Sure. CEOs often claim that they're constrained from doing the decent thing because it's fiscally irresponsible. The laws constrain them to be fiscally responsible but those laws can be changed.

Howard:

Changing corporations has a long and hairy history. Art Kleiner wrote a interesting book about it. "The Age of Heretics"

Bob Rossney:

Well, Art was talking about change from within, wasn't he? I'm talking about change from without. Legislative reform.

Howard:

Yes, he also noted that Saul Alinsky pioneered demonstrations at stockholders meetings as a way of confronting corporate policies.

Bob Rossney:

I mentioned this to one of Gerald Levin's coworkers at T-W and she just flipped out.

Howard:

And he noted that the most powerful people in the world are the people who decide where to invest grandma's pension funds.

Bob Rossney:

You follow the trail of capital back to the source, that's what you find.

Howard:

Working Assets is an example of an attempt to change the normal corporate profit structure.

Bob Rossney:

HUGE pools of money being managed by these little people.

Howard:

If the pension fund managers decide to invest in socially responsible businesses, there's a revolution right there. If they make money at it, then something really big happens. Wanna leap off on a tangent?

Bob Rossney:

Give us a tangent, Howard.

Howard:

Electric cars. I swear that I really met a guy who really has a battery that really works. Detroit wouldn't listen to him so he did the smart thing. Went to Tokyo. Now that Honda is interested, GM is interested

Bob Rossney:

Another thing I want to talk about - and this ties in to something Howard just said, uh, tangentially. I want to examine the way innovations diffuse in time and space. The story of the battery that Howard told is a great example. Why did that idea have to go to Japan before it could appear in America? How does that particular mechanism work? Another thing I'm interested in is cultural barriers to change. Someone on the WELL today was complaining about mass transit. She said: "Subways will only be useful when a mother can carry her baby and groceries onto them." Which is exactly how they're used in Asia and Europe. But there's something going on at ground-level that keeps us from doing it in the US. If we're getting near summing up, lemme pontificate about Technos for a sec. I think that one thing we're suffering from is too many answers and too few questions. Everybody has a goddamned opinion about how the world should be working. I think we need to suspend our tendency to judge and to reach conclusions. I think we need to continually ask ourselves, "What is going on here?" and that's what I'm trying to do in Technos. That thing in the Technos essay about cycles of observing, thinking, and writing? That's my mantra.

Howard:

That's the ticket! Join us in Technos at www.minds.com for the long form version of this discussion. Aloha!

Bob Rossney:

Thank you, Howard. This was a blast.

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