Author Archives: oook

Infra

Funny how stuff comes up and then is echoed. At dinner tonight I was asked about how I happened to do dissertation research in Nova Scotia, and that led to the tale of how in the late 1960s I’d wanted to return to Sarawak to study the effects of infrastructure projects on communities and regions, but at that time there was no interest in and certainly no money to support such research. So here’s an interesting post from Doc Searls, Rethinking out loud about infrastructure:

I’m here to suggest that two overlapping subjects — infrastructure and internet — are not well understood, even though both are made by humans and can be studied within the human timescale. The term “infrastructure” has been in common use only since the 1970s. While widely used, there are relatively few books about the subject itself. I’d say, in fact, that is more a subject in many fields than a field in itself. And I think it needs to be. Same with the Internet. Look it up on Google and see how many different definitions you get. Yet nothing could be more infrastructural without being physical, which the Internet is not.

Doc links to Stephen Lewis on The Etymology of Infrastructure and the Infrastructure of the Internet which notes that

Infrastructure indeed entered the English language as a loan word from French in which it had been a railroad engineering term. A 1927 edition of the Oxford indeed mentioned the word in the context of “… the tunnels, bridges, culverts, and ‘infrastructure work’ of the French railroads.” After World War II, “infrastructure” reemerged as in-house jargon within NATO, this time referring to fixed installations necessary for the operations of armed forces and to capital investments considered necessary to secure the security of Europe.

My own use of the term had specifically to do with consequences of what the 1960s labelled as Development, essentially the first steps toward the social and economic transformations that were eventually labelled as Globalization. Much more to say about all of that…

18 months later

A seven mile walk is, well, easier if there’s an audio stream accompanying the relentless fall of the feet. I usually load up the MP3 player with something fairly current –recently acquired music or podcastery– but this morning I looked in the Archives and (thinking about recent bloggery) pulled out James Kunstler’s 14 July 2006 appearance on BazookaJoe’s Small World, mostly concerned with issues raised in Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century (2005). I recall listening to this when it first appeared, and thinking Kunstler a bit alarmist, but one time’s alarmism is another time’s prescience… For example:

[since the book’s publication in 2005] The one thing that really has yet to occur is that the bottom hasn’t fallen out of the American consumer economy, but I think that we’re very close to seeing that, and that the inertia of the last couple of decades has been tremendous and is sort of carrying things onward, you know, running on fumes. But I think we’re on the verge of seeing a great deal of trouble in the… among the homeowners who have bought houses in the last 5 years, using creative mortgages, and they’re going to get in trouble I think with their mortgage payments, and we’ll see a great deal of carnage out on the real estate scene, where a lot of American individual wealth is invested. You know, that’s going to be reflected in this consumer economy, which is 70% of our economy, so I don’t think we’re far from seeing trouble with that, and as that occurs, you know, the political trouble is going to ramp up… [41:30-42:28]

(The podcast is archived here and makes an interesting hour, whether one’s motivations are Schadenfreudian or social-historical)

Jim Kunstler

The question of Who Gets It Right is always vexing, and the search usually involves dabblings at the fringes of opinion, be it in realms of food, of music, of politics, of education or whatever. As a lifelong adventurer in interstices, such territory is pretty familiar to me. I’m probably a contrarian by preference, though I’m fairly closeted in terms of expressing my views to audiences who don’t already know (and, mostly, share…) my predilections.

One of the writers I seem to be in pretty close agreement with is Jim Kunstler, author of (among others) The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape and the recent novel World Made By Hand (which I haven’t read yet) and a lively blog. From the penultimate paragraph of today’s posting:

The only “change” that America really wants to hear about is evicting George Bush from the White House. They’re sick of him and all the disturbance he has caused in their financial affairs. But beyond that, the American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face — such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class’s private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future.

The whole posting (couched as a list “Does Mr. O know?” that’s heavy on the subject of the prospects of oil) is surely worth reading, and should be filed in the Look Again in 6 Months file. That one is beginning to bulge… and might well be turned into a blog of its own, which would deliver stuff for re-reading at a later date. Wonder if there’s any software out there to facilitate such a service?

Hot Stuff

Eddie Thomas & Carl Scott – Tomorrow (November 21, 1928)

There’s tons more via PegLegSam’s offerings on YouTube, which include a lot of Pete Seeger TV (with various guests).

And (while we’re at it, and because I invoked his name a couple of days ago) here’s Rev. Gary Davis, playing in his all-but-inimitable style:

…and that led me to Skip James:

and