Differentiating myself (and Smol Earth) from the Amish
------------------------------------------------------

Gemscrawler adiabatic has suggested[1] that the endpoint of the
Smol Earth philosophy is more or less the way the Amish live and,
hey, we already *have* the Amish, if you think they're so great,
why don't you cut to the chase and go join them?  On the basis of
previous friendly interactions with adiabatic I am taking this as
well-meaning and good-natured teasing to express a philosophical
disagreement over which we might seriously and sincerely engage,
so I'm writing a response.  I'm not upset by the comparison, even
though I don't think it holds.  I'm supremely aware that I've done a
pretty lousy job of trying to explain just exactly what Smol Earth
is and is not about, so I can't be upset about misunderstandings
of mischaracterisations.  It seems a useful exercise to try to
carefully and explicitly differentiate myself from the Amish.
If I can't, well, heck, why *don't* I try joining them?

Two caveats up front.  One, I don't know that much about the Amish.
This post is based on skimming three Wikipedia articles[2, 3, 4].
I strongly suspect the people who wrote and edited those articles
are not themselves Amish and that the vast majority of Amish people
have not read them.  Not that this means they are full of falsehood,
but I'm sure there is probably some misrepresentation.	Then again,
maybe this doesn't matter, I strongly suspect adiabatic is no more
of an expert than I am and is using some vague outsider's notion
of what the Amish are like, which probably accords pretty closely
with these articles.

Two, this is actually more a differentiation of my own personal
philosophy from the Amish philosophy, not a differentiation of
the Smol Earth philosophy from it.  One of those things is a
superset of the other.	I sure hope they are consistent!  But the
Smol Earth philosophy is not super dogmatic or all encompassing.
I fully expect there will be people who will disagree with me on
all sorts of things but with whom I share enough common ground
on Smol Earth specific issues that we can fruitfully be part
of the same community.	I don't want to presume to speak on the
part of everybody interested in the project or put people off if
they actually skew more Amish than me in some ways, or whatever.
I will try to be careful about distinguishing these two things,
but might not do a perfect job at it.

Anyway, onward.  This is relatively casual and off-the-cuff, I'm
just gonna quote chunks from the above articles and outline where
I agree and disagree:

"Amish do not view technology as evil".  100% the same for Smol
Earth and for me.

"Restrictions are not meant to impose suffering".  100% the same
for Smol Earth and for me.

"Amish communities are known for travelling by horse and buggy
because they feel horse-drawn vehicles promote a slow pace of
life. But most Amish communities do also allow riding in motor
vehicles, such as buses and cars. In recent years many Amish people
have taken to using electric bicycles because they are faster than
either walking or harnessing up a horse and buggy".  Man, what's
the objection (if indeed there is one) to *non*-electric bicycles?
Those are still faster than walking or horse and buggy.  I don't
feel like they promote a fast paced life.  Bikes are friggin' great
technology.  Quoting St Sheldon again, "I have always loved riding
bicycles, especially for the feeling of freedom and self-sufficiency
that they give".  Technology which scores very high on inducing
feelings of freedom and self-sufficiency and simultaneously scores
very low on consuming resources, producing waste and wrecking the
biosphere will be the last technology up against the wall in any
revolution I'm part of.  All else being equal in these regards,
I quite like the idea of favouring the solutions which also promote
the slowest pace of life.

"The Amish are known for their plain attire" (there's a lot more
following this, read the original if you want).  The fast/disposable
fashion industry is an environmental blight and also has an appalling
worker's rights record and I think it's important to boycott it as
much as your circumstances allow.  Beyond that, I don't really care
about this.  If you want to express yourself by wearing colourful
clothing, go for it, just don't make clothing more wasteful and
less durable and less practical than it otherwise could be for the
sake of making it more colourful or whatever, and don't whimsically
change your mind or allow yourself to be told every six months
what looks good.  Unplain attire can be entirely philosophically
unobjectionable to me.	I don't think buttons are "too flashy"; I
like buttons, they're easier to repair than zippers.  If you want to
wear a dress which is shorter (or longer!) than calf-length, I will
not be offended.  Smol Earth is entirely unconcerned with fashion.

"Amish meat consumption is similar to the American average though
they tend to eat more preserved meat".	Boooo.	Eating a lot of meat
is horrendously inefficient in terms of litres of water and square
kilometres of land consumed and kilograms of carbon dioxide produced
per calorie or per gram of protein consumed.  Like, really so much
worse than eating plants.  The American average is way too high.
There's also the whole animal suffering angle (check out Sunset's
recent post[5]!), but I like to lean on this other one, because even
people who believe that non-human animals are unfeeling automata
(and I freely admit that I believed this for most of my life, and
even now, honestly, I don't think it's indefensible), even people
who believe we have God-given dominion over the animals, they can't
argue with it.	It's not philosophy, it's not ethics, it's friggin'
engineering, it's input vs outputs, it's objective and empirical.
Heavy meat consumption does not, cannot scale to ten billion people.
Smol Earth is also more or less unconcerned with this, though.
I think it's natural that our readers and authors will have more
vegetarians and vegans amongst them than an equally sized random
sample of, say, Hacker News readers and authors, but that's not
really what it's about.

"Working hard is considered godly, and some technological
advancements have been considered undesirable because they reduce
the need for hard work. Machines such as automatic floor cleaners
in barns have historically been rejected as this provides young
farmhands with too much free time".  I don't think that difficult
manual labour is in and of itself virtuous or good for the soul
or anything.  If you can use technology to reduce the hard work
involved in some essential task without wrecking the biosphere
(or putting us on a path which will wreck the biosphere any time
before the death of the sun or whatever does it for us) and without
consuming finite resources so fast that we'll exhaust them before the
death of sun or whatever, go for it.  I think most high-tech modern
technology fails those tests.  I have no beef with free time at all.
In some sense Smol Earth is actually specifically about changing how
we spend free time (some early, soul-crushingly long versions of the
"About us" document were explicit on this point).  I don't think
we can degrow food production or healthcare or other life-or-death
stuff very quickly at all, because there are too many people and
the biosphere is too wrecked for really sustainable non-industrial
approaches to those things to work.  But recreation and leisure and
art and culture, we can degrow and de-industrialise that stuff as
hard and fast as we want, and I want to work toward that because it
feels hypocritical not to if I'm only accepting industrial food and
medicine with my nose pinched as a temporary stopgap until we've
shrunk our population enough and healed the planet enough that we
can replace it with organic agriculture conducted with artisanal
hand tools or whatever.  Leisure and recreation today is almost
synonymous with digital electronics, people think that life without
them would involve sitting and staring at the wall and twiddling
your thumbs, that it'd be excruciatingly dull, and I feel the
need to push back against that falsehood.  But an instantaneous
cold turkey abandonment of consumer electronics is plainly not
necessary on ecological grounds, extremely difficult to do (at least
in part because modern digital electronics and online services are
literally engineered to be addictive), will have an extremely high
"relapse" rate, and also can't effectively be a basis for any kind
of cultural movement, because once you're onboard you are unable
to communicate with any people you wanna convert who aren't within
shouting range of you.	Maybe a good one sentence summary of most
of the Smol Earth philosophy is "using computers and networks to
effect a shift in recreation, leisure, entertainment and art in
the nearish future which spreads the knowledge and perspectives
and attitudes necessary to make people support a bigger and slower
shift in all other aspects of life in the less-nearish future".
The Amish grow up in a world absent of most of modern technology.
It's the default baseline for their children.  I grew up expecting
a future of space colonies and Dyson spheres and nanoassemblers,
the youth of today are growing up with YouTube and Insta and Alexa
and Okay Google and ChatGPT there from day one.  Imagining a future
without that stuff as being tolerable, even pleasant, is going to
be extremely hard for them.  We can't just all collectively jump
to it easy peasy, we'll have to really work at it, together, slowly.

The Amish are apparently not actually opposed to electricity
itself, only specifically "electricity from public power lines".
This is part of a principle of "separation from the world".  I am
pretty sure this refers mostly to sociocultural separation from
non-Amish.  It's weird, to me, to consider connecting to a power
grid to violate this, but whatever.  If this principle meant "not
giving a shit about the natural world beyond your village horizon",
that would be directly contrary to Smol Earth philosophy, but I don't
think it means that.  Anyway, because of this prohibition on public
power lines, "the electricity needed to run a modern dairy must be
produced, typically using diesel/gasoline generators or solar power".
Similarly, "Bottled gas may be used to heat water, fuel ranges,
and run refrigerators. Gas-pressured or kerosene lanterns provide
lighting. Batteries power the red lights on buggies. Gasoline
generators may provide energy for washing machines, water pumps,
and agricultural equipment".  Apparently this is all fine because
there's no physical tether to the outside world.  Again, weird to me.
What I and likely many Smol Earthers have against public power grids
is that they are primarily built out of copper, which is finite,
and you have to dig it up from wherever random forces of nature
happened to deposit it and refine it out of whatever form random
forces of nature left it in, and random forces of nature didn't care
about whether or not those processes were super energy intensive
or destructive of habitats or productive of nasty waste.  Same for
diesel and gasoline and kerosene plus they also roast the planet
and damage people's lungs.  Same for the chemistry in the batteries
with finite charge cycles that usually accompany solar panels.

"The Old Order Amish tend to restrict telephone use, as
it...interferes with social community by eliminating face-to-face
communication".  I and probably a great many of my readers grew
up hearing older and less computery people continually insist that
email and chatrooms and things like that were "impersonal" and the
relationships we had online weren't as meaningful as the ones we
had face to face, that our internet friends weren't "real friends",
and so on, and so forth.  You probably feel like I do that that was
and is nonsense and that computers and networks can indeed provide a
viable substrate for genuine social community.	Heck, the aim of Smol
Earth would be pretty obviously futile if we didn't believe it was.
So I obviously don't fully endorse this sentiment.  That said, I
think that the hard opposite stance, that there is nothing at all
unique and important about face-to-face communication and we are
fine without any of it is probably also nonsense, so I have some
sympathy with this bit of Amish perspective.  I think the ecological
problems with computers and networks are bigger problems than the
psychosocial ones, bigger and probably less avoidable or reformable.
They are mine and Smol Earth's main motivation for reducing them.
If psychosocial benefits result as a side-effect, that's a nice
bonus.

"Amish typically believe that large families are a blessing from
God".  I believe humanity ought to be very conscious about population
growth because all else being equal the rate of consumption of
finite resources and the rate of production of persistent hazardous
waste increases in proportion to population.  For a given "quality
of life" or "standard or living" provided by a given type/level
of technology, half the population will last twice as long before
running into problems.	That's maybe an oversimplification in some
ways and some cases, but it's a good first order approximation to the
truth, and a much better approximation that "lol, Malthusians can't
science".  Unbounded population growth is undeniably unsustainable.
If anybody quips "oh, so you're not Amish, you're an ecofascist
instead" in response to this, I will CRUSH you, you disingenuous
twit.  I'm so tired of this pathetic and dreary false equivalence.
I explicitly and powerfully disavow genocide, forced sterilisation,
government-enforced N child policies, and Great Replacement
conspiracy theories, always have, always will, I just think it's
absurd to preach that unbounded population growth cannot possibly
ever have negative consequences.  This is of course just my personal
stance, Smol Earth does not take a stance on population issues,
just like it doesn't take stances on fashion or diet.

"The Amish do not usually educate their children past the eighth
grade, believing that the basic knowledge offered up to that point
is sufficient to prepare one for the Amish lifestyle. Almost no
Amish go to high school and college."  Huge discordance here not
just with my personal philosophy, but with Smol Earth's.  Smol Earth
is unashamedly and unabashedly pro-education, especially on ecology
and Earth sciences and maybe demography?  Maybe under the Smol Earth
philosophy the "highest" use of industrialised science and technology
while it's still being kept around, beyond making sure there's enough
food and clean water and medicine for everybody, which is *why*
it ought to be kept around for the time being, is to enable better
understand and monitoring of the full and lasting impact of our
way(s) of life on the rest of the planet so that we can strive to
ever reduce it.  To a Smol Earther, science and technology are not
magical never ending sources of tools to let us expand infinitely
throughout the universe, consume ever more energy and resources,
grow ever larger in number, live in ever higher grades of luxury,
fulfil our destiny and live up to our potential.  That's science
in the service of the ideology of the cancer cell.  But we don't
embrace ignorance as an antidote.  Instead we see science as a means
by which to better perceive the planetary limits and holistic systems
within which we have to be content to live.  Science in the service
of balance and stewardship and that kind of thing, not expansion
and dominion.  Maybe we think Earth observation satellites are the
coolest high tech things which don't directly keep people alive.

I think that will do.  Honestly, Smol Earth does not feel
particularly Amish to me.  Now, one might say all of the differences
above are missing the forest for the trees.  If you zoom out
enough to miss these pesky details, you might say that "Amishness"
is a successful cultural toolkit for reliably transmitting across
multiple generations a package of beliefs and values and skills
which together facilitate a group of people not only living a life
which doesn't rely too heavily on modern technology but also being
(as far as I'm aware) pretty content and happy about living that way,
even though they are surrounded by a world pushing something more".
From *this* perspective, sure, Smol Earth is actually totes Amish,
we aspire to collective create and publish and distribute exactly
that kind of cultural toolkit.	Which modern technologies we give
thumbs up or thumbs down to and what we use those technologies
for and what we don't and why we've made those decisions and the
colour and length of our dresses are all substantially different,
and we rely more on scientific consensus than scriptural authority
as our guide, but if you ignore all that...

A lot of people on Team Space Cancer will perceive this as waste of
our species' intellectual potential, as condemning us to a pathetic
and boring and frustratingly Earthbound life, not to mention the
sheer embarrassment of going extinct like mono-planetary chumps
when an asteroid wipes us out, thereby cementing our status
as losers in the Contest of Existing.  They might assume that
anybody who doesn't share this take must actually be pretty stupid
and perhaps should have paid more attention in physics class.
Part of the goal of Smol Earth is to push back against the idea
that a low-tech outdoor lifestyle is necessarily intellectually
stultifying or anti-scientific or lacking in a spirit of grand
adventure and exploration.  We'll create a safe space for hardcore
STEMmy-techy folk to talk about things like "hubris" and "humility"
without feeling or being treated like class traitors.

Finally, I'm kind of glad adiabatic gave their post a title
mentioning my "endpoint", because this is something very important
that I probably haven't written enough about yet.  My endpoint is
not, in fact, the Amish, or Renaissance Italy, it's more like stone
age hunting and gathering.  And I say that without worrying about
it seeming crazy and extremist because I am actually not about
the endpoint, not at all.  Instead I am all about the infinite
asymptotic approach to it.  Here are my axioms:

1. As a matter of empirical fact, stone age hunting and gathering
   sustained humanity for hundreds of thousands of years and probably
   could have continued to do so for hundreds of thousands more,
   perhaps even millions of years.
2. It's not empirical fact but I believe it is self-evident that
   Earthbound industrial growth societies based on destructive and
   energy-intensive extraction and transformation of finite resources
   cannot possibly hope to sustain humanity for hundreds of thousands
   of years.  Our first attempt has barely lasted a few hundred years!
3. Humanity has now grown so large and degraded the planet
   to such an extent that we are absolutely dependent upon modern
   industrial technology to keep us alive, so we cannot react to point
   2. above by just abandoning all industrial technology tomorrow.
   There's just not enough left to hunt or gather, even if we *did*
   remember how to be good at that, which we don't.
4. I have come to find Humanity the Glorious Immortal Space Cancer
   a deeply unsatisfying and kind of repugnant view of what our species
   should be, so I personally also cannot react to point 2. above by
   scribbling out the "Earthbound" part and hoping we continue to find
   new habitable planets faster than we denude 'em, forever (I also
   think it's a lot harder and less probable than many advocates think).
5. I don't think humanity is an evil blight which ought to be
   snuffed out ASAP.  I would like us to be around for as long as we
   can manage, while being entirely at peace with point 4. implying
   our inevitable extinction one day.  I'm not actively pleased about
   inevitable extinction, I don't wanna suggest it's karmic justice
   for Anthropocene extinctions or anything like that, I just can't
   see it as a cosmic tragedy.
6. I can of course see that there are a great many ways in which
   life with some modern industrial technology is rather more pleasant
   than life with none and I don't begrudge anybody wanting to enjoy
   that for as long as they can.

Is there a single, coherent, genuinely long term story I can weave
about the future of humanity which acknowledges and respects every
single one of these points and doesn't rely on magical thinking or
divine intervention?  Yes, I think there is, and its basis is the
fact that the integral of A*exp(-bt) with respect to t from 0 to
infinity is a finite quantity (assuming A is finite and b is > 0).
Sorry for the not very accessible expression, but this is the core of
my personal eco-philosophy made as clear and compact as I possibly
can.  No matter how little of a finite resource is left, no matter
how quickly you are currently consuming it, no matter how long you
would like it to last, there absolutely verifiably exists a solution
to that problem.  You just have to slow down fast enough and never
stop using less.  Same goes for not producing more of a persistent
hazardous waste product than the biosphere can safely absorb, you
just have to never stop producing less.  Zeno sustainability.  So,
when we can't live without a high-tech solution to some problem,
throw progress at it to make it more energy efficient and less
wasteful, by all means, but when we *can* live without a high-tech
solution, throw at least as much energy into weaning ourselves off
of it as we do into greening it up, because the Jevons paradox is
real and because every physical process has a theoretical maximum
efficiency which we cannot improve upon, so the only way to never
stop shrinking our impact is to never stop using less and less and
less of even the most clean and efficient tech.  Simultaneously,
keep the population shrinking and work hard to restore the biosphere,
because these two steps will slowly shift more and more problems
out of the first category (can't live without high-tech) into the
second category (can).

Smol Earth takes it as a given that individually owned computers
used in our free time and networks between them are things we can
happily live without, they are already in that second category,
so the prescription is not just greening but also at least as much
weaning.  There's already a blossoming Permacomputing movement
which seems to me mostly focussed on the greening, because of
course it's fun to hack with a solutionist mindset.  Smol Earth
wants to specifically address the weaning side, which I perceive to
be neglected.  Because personal computers and networks can influence
human offline behaviour too, we shouldn't waste the opportunity to
use their greener incarnations before the end of the weaning period
to also promote rapid and concerted green-n-wean transitions in
as many other aspects of life as possible.  Hence, the idea of a
kind of low-impact electronic cultural movement (dare I say, blech,
lifestyle movement?  Blech!!!) which doesn't unnecessarily demonise
solar panels and windfarms and electric cars but rejects them as any
kind of long term solution and keeps one eye squarely on a future
of contended low-tech exuberance in rejuvenated nature.  We need to
commit ourselves firmly to an Infinite March back to the stone age,
not because we want to actually get there, we don't (well, I don't,
feel free to run ahead if you want), but because it is the only safe
direction for a long term journey.  Cold, uncaring, inescapable
reality is providing the sticks to encourage us on this journey
(extreme weather, rising sea levels, food and water shortages,
mass extinctions, collapsing fish stocks, bla, bla, bla).  It's up
to us to provide some carrots too, by collectively rediscovering
how to be content without flashing screens and thinking sand.

I'm not asking you, personally, to become a caveman, I'm not even
condemning your great-great-great-grandchildren to be cavemen.
As long as we start the Infinite March off at a fast enough sprint,
then every kilometre can take longer than the previous one.
We'll never actually end up as cavemen.  We might not even get
close to cavemen for ten thousand years.  We will certainly not
pass through points where we are perfectly reenacting life in
actual historical periods, like the Renaissance or the Middle Ages
or whatever, because the march will progress at different speeds
in different spheres of life, and we'll also presumably retain
some modern scientific understanding and societal value systems.
There's IMHO no "awkwardness of being only halfway in the modern
world" whatsoever.  I've believed *that* since at least 2017 when
I wrote about "hybrid timelines"[6].

Very happy with the six point formulation above and the paragraphs
that follow it!  Thanks, adiabatic, for provoking it.  Most of it is
strictly Solderpunk Orthodoxy, btw, not core Smol Earth philosophy.
Smol Earth is something *I* can do to cling to my lifelong identity
as a computer person a little longer while still believing all of
the above and feeling like I'm being true to it (it is absolutely
not the only thing I am doing to be true to it, it would be woefully
inadequate in isolation).  Smol Earthers certainly need not believe
every line of the above.  If you are a computer person who is not on
Team Space Cancer or on Team Industrial Growth Forever and you're
feeling kind of conflicted about continuing to enthusiastically
compute because of it, I think that alone ought to be more than
sufficient for you to get something of value from some of what
Smol Earth publishes or for you to have thoughts and feelings worth
being published by Smol Earth.

[1] gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/adiabatic/scrawlspace/2024/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_way_of_life
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnung
[5] gemini://arcanesciences.com/gemlog/24-04-09/
[6] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/asceticism-or-something-like-it.txt