Lambdas and meathooks and crossbows, oh my!

[pozorvlak]

I have now returned from Edinburgh, where I was visiting a symposium to celebrate the 60th birthday of Gordon Plotkin (not his death, as totherme and I had somehow assumed: fortunately, we discovered our mistake before we tried to console anyone). It was a theoretical computer science conference, which isn't really my area, though there's some overlap: I think I knew five of the other attendees, including totherme. My motivations for attending were a) a chance to hang around and chat with totherme, b) a chance to meet some CS people, in case I decide to move in that direction when I finish my PhD, c) a chance to hear the extremely eminent Dana Scott speak. I mostly got at least something out of all the lectures (with the disturbing exception of Marcelo Fiore's lecture, which was pretty much pure category theory). However, if I have to see another model of the untyped lambda calculus in the next month I shall not be responsible for the consequences of my actions.

One of the things totherme and I discussed (as well as the monadicity of trees, database APIs, context logic and the like), was the idea of the Grim Meathook Future. Joshua Ellis's original post from which the name is taken is worth reading, and quite short: the relevant bit is

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

Or, as jwz put it:

Well, the "grim meathook future" is a very specific, peak-oil-and-fascism sort of doomed. "Doomed" covers all sorts of upsetting eventualities, like man-made black holes, killdozers, and our new robot overlords.

I don't pretend that my categories are the most concise possible.

Now, post-Katrina, the possibility of the GMF has been weighing on my mind rather: in fact, I become more and more convinced that this is what the future has in store for us.

Which leads me to my question: assuming for the sake of argument that the GMF is inevitable in some form, what should I be doing now to prepare for it? What skills can I gain that will enable me to survive (I've given up on prospering) in the post-oil, post-tech, post-sanity economy? I'm thinking things like first aid (to patch yourself up, and to make you too useful to be killed outright). Knowing how to tan leather or make bread or grow food or some other tangibly useful thing. And knowing how to do it all without electricity or anything made from petrochemicals.

So, I turn to you, my personal brains trust. What do you recommend? Assuming that we don't nuke ourselves to death, of course.

On a completely unrelated note, this is the best eBay item description ever. Thanks to Mat for the link.

Comments

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Update on Ye Olde Comment - that blog has moved, so here are the new links:
http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2006/06/04/are-you-worthless/
http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2006/08/21/worst-security-tool-ever/