Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Tuesday, December 9, 2003Book Review
I recently had the opportunity to read a peculiar book which I've been trying to track down for some time. I had come to notice an interesting common feature among many of the recent so-called 'Diamond Age' science fiction novels. Many authors seem to be anticipating a very similar post-industrial future where the nations we know today have been obsolesced by numerous small communities bound by common aesthetic themes, cultures, lifestyles, and belief systems. In other words, it's as if groups of Star Trek fans, neo-pagans, medieval recreationists, hackers, homosexuals, goths, native American tribes, post-modern artists, environmentalists, hedonists, nihilists, and so on got together and formed little mini-states of their own centered on more-or-less self-sufficient communities expressing, through their architecture, their particular culture and interests. What would allow civilization to assume such a curious form? The nanotechnologies of the Diamond Age which, by virtue of their ability to provide near total self-sufficiency of the individual at no particular cost, eliminates economics as we know it and, subsequently, the systems of government and national boundaries which are based on it.
This notion stirred a memory of a book I had seen mentioned in Whole Earth Review many years ago. A book with the peculiar name Bolo'Bolo by an author known only as P.M. and whose illustrations features images of the world broken up into thousands of micro-states formed by collections of little self-sufficient communities dubbed 'bolos'. After some time I was finally able to find a source for the book and a web site dedicated to its ideas. After reading it, it seems to me that this may in fact be the origin of this idea so many science fiction authors are adopting.
Bolo'Bolo is, basically, about what life would be like if government and economics as we know them went obsolete. (note, that's 'went obsolete', not overthrown by revolution or destroyed by disaster) It's also a strong indictment of the collective system on which western industrial culture dominated civilization is based. Bolo'Bolo seems to collectivize a lot of the ideology of the post-industrialists of the 1960s and basically advocates the abandonment of economics and work as they exist today in favor of an easier but much more efficiently structured way of life which is centered on the 'bolo' a small community of about 500 individuals with common interests/culture who, more-or-less, provide for all their basic needs with a minimum of labor by virtue of careful use of technology and the simple close proximity of resources and facilities. Ideally, the bolo takes the form of a conjoined community structure akin to the famous Chinese Mansions of Yongdin Province. P.M. dubs these structures 'palaces' and they are meant to offer comfortable and casual shelter with as much efficiency of energy and material use as possible.
Now one might think this is merely another reinvention of the eco-village or commune as advocated by environmentalists. But Bolo'Bolo differs greatly from any environmental ideology in that is is not about sacrificing quality of life or standard of living in the name of some greater good. Nor is it about changing beliefs, culture, or lifestyles except where it pertains to the notions of economics and work. It's about organizing life for the maximum quality of life -the maximum freedom of personal time for the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment. P.M. notes that prior to the invention of civilization human beings only needed to work for about 20% of their waking time in order to meet their survival needs. Here we are in the 21st century, with all this supposed labor-saving technology at hand, working as much as 80% of our waking time to maintain our standard of living with vast portions of the population subjected to misery and poverty. Why? P.M. suggests it's simple inefficiency, the inefficiency of our exploitative time-devouring system of economics and industry, something P.M. has characterized as the Global Work Machine.
In many ways Bolo'Bolo seems to echo the sentiments of another book; How To Live Without A Salary by Charles Long. Contrary to the 'get rich quick' intimations of its title, this book is a guidebook to a frugal but casual way of life that minimizes the individual dependence on salary income and goes into very specific detail on the mechanisms by which the contemporary consumer culture steals away our time in exchange for often useless and redundant junk. It's an invaluable book for any disabled or retired person needing to make the most of a fixed income, professional artists, writers, or entrepreneurs meeding to cope with highly variable income, or just anyone who has finally woken up and realized their personal time is more valuable than junk.
Is the civilization described in Bolo'Bolo really possible? Technically, yes, but from a sociological standpoint it could be very difficult to transition to -a fact P.M. does seem to acknowledge. This is where P.M. and the science fiction writers seem to diverge. P.M. sees the post-industrial evolution as being driven by deliberate social change -a global awakening of the population to the way they've hood-winked themselves with the 'arbeit macht frei' delusion. This seems to harken back to post-industrial theory of the 60s, where it was assumed that the corporate industrial way of doing things was doomed to collapse by virtue of its inherent unstainability and anti-social nature. But this seems to ignore the power of human rationalization and the tendency to perpetuate even self-destructive pathological behavior, a problem P.M. does acknowledge but offers limited solution to.
The Diamond Age authors seem to see this evolution as driven primarily by technology, or more specifically by the ability of post-industrial technology -nanotechnology in particular- to decentralize production to the point where every individual ultimately has the ability to make all he might need by himself at virtually no cost. Economics and business exist on the premise of facilitating access to goods and services beyond the means of the lone individual. Government exists on the premise of providing goods, services, and facilities which economics doesn't support for lack of profit motive or the need to protect the society from economic exploitation. (though in practice they tend to fail miserably at the latter...) But what happens when, by virtue of some self-replicating semi-intelligent tool capable of making most anything and cheap enough for everyone to own, most everyone can provide for all their own needs? Thus the technology becomes the force obsolescing economics and government as we know it -making them incrementally irrelevant as people's needs and lives simply diverge away from them- and providing the situation favoring the evolution of a bolo-like society.
I tend to see a more likely scenario as a combination of these two views. A social movement isn't powerful enough alone for this evolution because logic is weak in the face of rationalization and self-delusion. At present the technology for self-sufficiency in a bolo-like arrangement exists but still demands a degree of compromise in personal convenience for the western middle-class individual that will forever be used as an excuse to deny feasibility -even if one could manage make the middle-class acknowledge their responsibility for the misery the support of their standard of living inflicts upon the rest of the world. On the other hand, technology is rarely employed to its maximum potential without the general social recognition of that potential. This is plainly demonstrated by such things as hybrid auto technology which has, in fact, been feasible, practical, and frequently demonstrated for most of the 20th century but is only just now coming into mainstream use in the 21st. Perhaps this is the reason for the almost magic-like capabilities attributed to emerging nanotechnology. Could it be that the intellectual insiders of this new technology are deliberately exaggerating its potential in the hopes of insuring such high social expectations that the technology can truly reach its maximum, if more modest, potential?
I foresee an invisible revolution. A gradual emergence and adoption of post-industrial technology driven by an emerging culture and network of enthusiasts and entrepreneurs exploiting, through greater flexibility and ingenuity, the inherent flaws in the system to their own benefit and in the process out-evolving the Global Work Machine like quick proto-mammals scurrying under the feet of a slowly starving dinosaur. Many of these people may be unabashed capitalists but their culture will be, as P.M. puts, 'substructive'. In the end, it's all Confederate money when the technology and its network of users achieves a level of ubiquity where the exchange of materials and information become more practical than money and -as in the case of the Open Source software world- reputation and innovation become the predominate currency.
Altogether, Bolo'Bolo is a compelling vision and quite relevant to all those with an interest in post-industrial theory and technology as well as those with interests in planned community or eco-community development. The english translation of Bolo'Bolo can be ordered in the US from Autonomedia. A web site for Bolo'Bolo can be found at www.bolo-bolo.org. The web site offers some more recent articles on this topic, describes work a prototype bolo community project, and notes a number of books by P.M. which are as yet unavailable in English. The book How To Live Without A Salary is available at Amazon.com and can be seen here.
