Evolving Strategy Lifeboat Labs
Author: Douglass Carmichael Issue: 2024-03-20
Evolving Strategy: Lifeboat Labs
by Douglass Carmichael
You must watch and cogitate about the NVIDIA keynote.
This is clever and fun, even shocking for scale, but my sense is that it is boring and strips our movements in the world of proximity to real people. I want the hint of real people in my interactions. AI removes that, giving us fake proxies. The proxies with NVIDIA extend to the whole world.
I am trying to develop the next level strategy ahead of and after initiating Gardenworlds.
A few years ago, I proposed the idea of Gardenworld and its politics [1] as a way into a viable approach to the climate-induced collapse that we were likely to experience. But then, as the reality of collapse became clear, I added the idea of lifeboats, and that successful lifeboats would become garden worlds and Gardenworlds could become centers of arts and conversation and hence elements of nascent civilizations, with access to the deep past of humanity which would be preserved in many places and forms and hence allowing rapid production at higher levels in arts, governance, and science.
I now want to call the Lifeboats lifeboat labs as places for, amongst life-sustaining necessities, places to experiment with new forms of human society, leaving behind war, capitalism, and much of the rest.
The strategy of first Lifeboats has a major advantage over Gardenworld because it is about preparation without dismantling current life patterns, and hopefully more attractive. The switch from current agriculture, often industrial, to Gardenworld, is too threatening and still considered unnecessary by most people. We need a stepping stone in between doing nothing and deep action.
You know how it goes, n people and n chairs and music. When the music stops the gods remove one chair and the n people struggle to fill the n minus 1 chairs. A moment of rushed chaos and then quiet as the chairs are filled and it is clear who lost out, and the music starts again. (I remember this from grade school in NYC.)
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
This is an apt metaphor. See, for example, this morning’s NYT article on palm oil affecting jobs in Malaysia. The idea is that European restrictions on palm oil imports cut jobs in Malaysia. Indeed, that is happening. The crunch, like musical chairs, will cost jobs and lives as we move toward the great simplification.
Might it not be better for the crunch to be managed within Malaysia than forced from the outside? The resulting action would be much better nuanced to local conditions. But it will be hard for local officials to be agents rather than victims along with their populations. The need to create lifeboats for each community will help clarify the logic.
1. The book Gardenworld Politics is available at Amazon.
Related:
- Douglass Carmichael (author)
- 2024 (year)
- Topics: