2025-10-25                             dispatches from helix
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   I finished "Tools for Conviviality". I should probably pick
   up "Small is Beautiful" next. My gut reaction was to
   disagree with a lot of it -- because it requires rethinking
   like ... the world.

   (Some of my summarization of the book, below, is probably
   wrong! It wasn't a close academic reading, I was just
   curious about the book that inspired Community Memory among
   other things)

   Without stoking the thoughts that lead to depression it's
   hard not to think that we've just built things wrong,
   especially if you follow Illich's line of thinking.

   He was against rapid transport (the train, the airplane, the
   individual automobile) -- arguing that while global
   productivity was improved by these things and individual
   people can point to things that they like about them (which
   is why they were adopted, after all) they have increased
   alienation and forced people to be more mobile (because they
   _can_ therefore they _should_ and eventually therefore they
   _have to_).

   This got me thinking about how many small towns are hollowed
   out -- you can easily travel to a bigger city for work,
   eventually leading to people moving away and taking their
   spending money with them -- eventually meaning more and more
   people need to move to cities. But cities are expensive and
   now you have many more people competing for the same
   resources.

   In the late 20th and early 21st century this effect happens
   on the scale of whole countries. Canada and Ireland (two
   countries I have experience with) experienced massive drain
   in the late 20th century -- which slowed due to a
   combination of those source countries eventually becoming
   more pleasant to live in _but also_ the major destination
   countries (the USA and UK respectively) becoming less
   hospitable to immigrants and their own native-born people
   alike.

   I'm a life-long fan of the European Union and what it starts
   for. I still am, I think, but I've begun to question if the
   free flow of money, services, goods and people has actually
   been a good thing. Are Irish people better off as 1/27th of
   the EU? We have access to a larger market to sell to and to
   purchase from.

   We can live and work abroad (I moved to the UK when I was 19
   and I just ... showed up and filled in a form for an
   National Insurance number and that was -- I lived and worked
   there for 13 years). I've personally benefitted. But is it
   good? When Ireland was more isolated it had more local
   industry.

   When the generations before me were building the Republic,
   electrifying and bringing telephones and TV to the whole
   country, they created local expertise. The Irish Electricity
   Supply Board consulted (and consults) for other nations
   building their grids, including other formerly colonized
   countries.

   Now, I don't want to make it sound like the ESB was
   recreating everything from first principles with a lathe and
   some coils of wire -- the ESB's generation facilities have
   long been dependant on German engineering companies like
   Siemens, and our telephone systems were Ericsson and Alcatel
   (but manufactured in Ireland!).

   I'm not saying none of this would exist if we had free trade
   from the start. But I'm not _not_ saying that. In the 50's
   and 60's, Ireland was worried about becoming dependant on
   foreign sources of fuel, so they built power generation
   fueled by peat; one of our few natural resources. (This is
   bad, of course, as stripping Ireland's bogs to burn the peat
   is hardly sustainable.)

   (I went and looked it up -- about 50% of Ireland's
   electricity is from natural gas, and about 50% of that gas
   was from a local gas-field -- but that's now depleted and
   it's expected 90% of natural gas will be imported by 2030)

   Where was I? Idk, man.

   I've taken approximately 50 flights in my life, including a
   few over the Atlantic; most importantly when I emigrated to
   Canada. But do I think that easy access to cheap flights has
   been good (for the climate, for improving average levels of
   happiness, for the development of individual countries, for
   the economic outlook of declining rural places and
   less-developed countries)? Probably not.

   Global commerce would be worse and more expensive and slower
   if we were stuck in the age of sea-shipping, but I think the
   important things that can't be made locally would still get
   imported and perhaps the less important things that are easy
   now but were hard back them would still be made locally.

   (And like: do I want to work in a factory? No. But also I
   don't want to work in a Tim's drive-thru or in a Best Buy or
   a call-center -- the entry level jobs that have replaced
   factory work)

   Okay I should stop typing. Bye.