C-Realm Podcast

Justin Ritchie and Seth Moser-Katz, the co-hosts of the Extraenvironmentalist Podcast were in NYC to document reRoute: Building Power for a New Economy, a conference put on by the New Economic Institute. After a Mexican dinner they sat down to record the conversation that is the centerpiece of this week's C-Realm Podcast episode. Seth and Justin talk about the experience they have gained in creating their podcast, how they make use of the complimentary skill sets, and relay some of the themes from the conference with special emphasis on student debt and formerly good advice that now leads to bad outcomes. Artificial intelligence scholar, Larry Yeager, has signed on to be the third trialouger for the Los Gatos, California stop on the 2013 C-Realm couch-surfing tour. You can hear recordings of Tom Barbalet in conversation with Larry here and here. Music by The Sometime Boys.

KMO welcomes knowledge management expert and 3 Quarks Daily contributor, Misha Lepetic, to the C-Realm to talk about how technology is disrupting the business of journalism, hollowing out the middle class and fostering increased inequality. They review the literature of dissent to the general atmosphere of techno-triumphalism in places like San Francisco and draw from the work of George Packer, Evegeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, Albert Hirschman, and Robert Neuwirth.  The conversation turns to the growth of the informal economy and how services like AirBnB, which purport to serve the “sharing economy,” may actually be creating an electronic paper trail to make activity in the informal economy visible enough to be effectively regulated and taxed. Misha uses the example of the Boston bombing to consider the consequences of social media-enabled vigilantism. Music by Shanimal. Folks interested in attending the "Consciousness in the Cloud" trialogue in Los Gatos, CA on August 19th can sign up via the MeetUp listing for the event.    

KMO welcomes author and podcaster Douglas Lain back to the C-Realm on the eve of the publication of his novel Billy Moon. The conversation starts off with some light banter about tv shows before moving into the events of May of 1968 in France. In the novel, Doug has placed Christopher Robin Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame in Paris for the 1968 uprising. Topics covered include the invention of "childhood" once industrialism had reduced the need for child labor, Occupy Wall Street and it's seeming failure to force concessions from the oligarchic class, and the dream of bringing imagination into the world of work. Like KMO, Doug is planning a couch surfing tour which he hopes to fund with a Kickstarter Campaign. Music by the Cadillac Moon Ensemble.

KMO welcomes Noble Ape creator Tom Barbalet back to the C-Realm to discuss the counterproductive habits of academic philosophers of mind that prompted Tom to start the Noble Ape project 17 years ago. Tom offers the steam trains of Cuba as an example of why he does not worry about peak oil. In fact, Tom says that there's not an apocalyptic scenario on offer that doesn't leave him feeling hopeful. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the level of consideration we should extend to simulated beings, particularly ones that humans interact with and have become emotionally invested in. In his closing remarks, KMO explains why he has deactivated his Facebook account. Music by Tom Barbalet.

KMO welcomes Jay Smith back to the C-Realm to discuss his impressions of the 2013 Age of Limits conference. Many repeat C-Realm Podcast guests were in attendance at the conference, and while they all have reputations as being "doomers" of one stripe or another, none are paint quite as grim a picture of the near-term future as Guy McPherson who is predicting the extinction of the human species before the end of the 21st Century. KMO and Jay talk about the allure of doomsday forecasting. Later, KMO reads and responds to a short essay by a C-Realm listener and talks about his upcoming couch-surfing tour.   Music by the Formidable Vegetable Sound System.

KMO welcomes Bruce Damer, the host of Dr. Bruce's Levity Zone, back to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about technology, the destruction that industrial civilization visits on the natural world and the possibility that the planetary plant body accepts that damage as the price of partnering with the monkey brain to venture beyond the planetary cradle. Bruce talks up the benefits of voluntarily reducing the birth rate and agrees with Evgeny Morozov about the downside of the mindset he call "technological solutionism." Finally KMO talks about an upcoming Couch Surfing Tour to the west coast.   Music by Mornin', Old Sport.

KMO welcomes techno-optimist Eric Boyd back to the C-Realm to talk about the barrage of feel-good propaganda about energy independence for Saudi America from unconventional sources of hydrocarbon energy. KMO and Eric agree that sources of energy abound, and that in the long run, exotic energy sources like seafloor methane clathrates and  synthetic fuels made by using nanotechnology to extract carbon from the atmosphere hold great promise but that these visions are unhelpful distractions from the needs of the present historical moment. They both agree that carbon trading is a farce and that geoengineering is all but inevitable.   Music by Mamie Minch.

KMO welcomes Dmitry Orlov back to the C-Realm Podcast to  to discuss his new book, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit. Dmitry developed the 5-staged model of collapse several years ago, and this conversation is a follow-up to C-Realm Podcast episode 96: Kollapsnik and the Ripping Yarn. In the book, Dmitry presents case studies of people who responded adaptively to collapses of various sorts, and the conversation focuses on organized crime syndicates in post-Soviet Russia as well as the Roma (Gypsies) who have mastered the art of hiding in plain site, staying flexible, and maintaining a clear boundary between themselves and the larger societies in which they operate. Music by Mornin', Old Sport. Related C-Realm blog post: Descent into Anarchy?

KMO welcomes author and publisher Chip Walter back to the C-Realm to discuss recent findings in paleoanthropology. Chip has a new book out. It's called Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and and Why We Survived, and in it, Chip describes the evolutionary process called neotony. It's what makes adult humans look like baby apes, and it not only gave us a new phase of life, i.e. childhood, but it allow us to survive while so many fellow species of humans with whom we used to share this planet have gone extinct. We've certainly had some close shaves, and we're certainly not out of danger in the present.   Music by Shanimal.

Erik Davis joins KMO in the C-Realm for a face to face conversation about the psycho-spiritual differences between the East and West coasts of the United States. Later, they examine the pressure on humans living in an techno-industrial civilization to adapt themselves from biological time (kairos) to the digital time (chronos) of the clock and of information technology. Erik explains how both techno-utopian and Luddite belief systems rest upon problematic notions of human nature. Sometimes technology elicits a yuck response from us, but just as that visceral reaction can steer us wrong, we discount it at our peril. Music by Shanimal.

KMO welcomes Ben McLeish to the program to discuss the overlapping concerns of the C-Realm project and the Zeitgeist Movement. Ben discusses the differences between "market efficiency" and actual efficiency and invokes the historical example of Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, to illustrate what happens to visionaries in a capitalist milieu who try to put actual efficiency before the maximization of profit. Later, Ben uses the example of John Snow and cholera outbreaks 19th Century England to illustrate the tensions between the societal priority of meeting basic human needs and the priority of facilitating economic transactions even when doing so will cause avoidable human death and suffering.   Music by Andrew Woods.

KMO welcomes Ashton Applewhite to the C-Realm to examine cultural attitudes about aging and the elderly. Cultural stereotypes about the elderly abound, and some of the most pernicious  claims Applewhite, are that they are greedy and leech resources from the young, that they are a burden on the healthcare system, that they are sexless, that they have lost their cognitive faculties and that they are uniformly conservative in their social orientation and in their politics. Ashton thinks that the life extension movement and its advocates, people like Aubrey de Gray and Ray Kurzweil are pushing a deluded and elitist agenda that would divert resources from more deserving uses.   Music by Southside.

KMO welcomes SF author, futurist, and contrarian, David Brin to the C-Realm to talk about the themes of his new novel, Existence. Those themes include some long-running areas of interest for C-Realm listeners including the need to balance a sober view of the challenges human civilization faces as we transition from smart animals into beings that must learn to weild the god-like powers in real time with no do-overs. This is a particularly challenging proposition given our tendency toward self-deception, factionalism, and righteous indignation. David champions recipricol accountability, the American genius for compromise, and the idea of becoming good ancestors. Music by Southside.

KMO welcomes Mark Robinowitz of OilEmpire.us back to the C-Realm to unpack a recent Rolling Stone article in which Bill McKibben declares that the energy industry has proven proponents of peak oil wrong. The conversation covers not only the interplay between peak oil and climate change but also the social, political, and economic dynamics that pit climate change activists against people working to raise awareness of the limits to growth. In response to Mark's claim that most people don't even know what petroleum is, much less the essential role that it plays in modern agriculture and industrial civilization, KMO wonders whether there is anything to be gained by trying to introduce a population accustomed to sound bite policy analysis to the spectrum of concerns covered in the C-Realm Podcast.   Music by Shanimal.

KMO welcomes Carolyn Baker back to the C-Realm to discuss the topics she plans to address at the upcoming Age of Limits gathering. The conversation begins with the simultaneous need for mental healthcare in a time when fewer and fewer people have access to any sort of healthcare. Carolyn talks about staying sane in an age of madness and the danger of having a mental health professional reduce large scale social phenomena of a society in the process of catastrophic transition down to individual mental pathology and affixing that label to you. Later the topic turns to Occupy Wall Street and the subject matter of David Graeber's new book, The Democracy Project: a History, a Crisis, a Movement. (A portion of the book appeared as A Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming Collapse in The Baffler.) Why protest to demand that a collapsing political system reform itself when you can simply demonstrate a different way of meeting human needs through direct democracy and mutual aid? Music by Mamie Minch.