A Fistful of Dynamitismal URLs
Dear Delilah,
On this summery eve, to sate your Inbox’s inborn sieve for more e-mail, an e-mail on a few…
URLs.
Yummily, we begin with a Ran Prieur quote. Ran‘s begun a three month tour across the United States — without a car or expectation of reliable lodging, transport, or comfort. This is no conventional road trip. (Rather than carry a car with him, he’s leveraging a mish-mash of Greyhound, Amtrak, and Craigslist‘s RideShare program. Rather than pay for housing, he’s living on the dingy couches of http://ranprieur.com readers who have invited him to do so.)
He recently posted this.
December 4. I rarely get negative emails, but the ones I get are revealing:
“How nice it must be to not have a real job at your age and just sit around all day and live off others. You’re obviously an intelligent fellow (smart enough to let others do the work and you reap the rewards) but be honest, do you ever feel guilty, do you feel good about living on someone’s else couch in a house that they have to slave to pay rent for while you play on the internet all day?”
It occurs to me, nobody ever asks this kind of question to Stephen
King or J.K. Rowling, even though they also sit around writing all day instead of having “real” jobs, and they consume a lot more resources and more of the labor of others than I do. Of course, the difference is that they operate in the money economy, while I operate in the gift economy. They treat their writing as a zero-sum commodity, and charge money for it, while I treat my writing as a sharable commons, which I can “give away” free without ever losing it. Likewise, when I stay with people, their housing is a sharable commons which they can give without losing anything — and they feel like they’re gaining something, or they wouldn’t invite me back.But from the perspective of Dominator or Prisoner consciousness, any activity seems respectable if money changes hands, even if it’s exploitative, and any activity where money doesn’t change hands seems like stealing, even if everyone benefits. People often say that money is “neutral”, but I disagree. No tool has ever been neutral, and money is a dead thing that takes the place of love: If you love doing something, you will do it without being paid money, and if you are paid money, you will do something without loving it.
Now, I don’t think that anyone should feel guilty for participating in the money economy. We should feel grief! I collect and spend several thousand dollars a year myself, because the money economy rules the present age and there is not much room to get outside it. But almost any step we take outside it will help. If I ever own a house, I’ll let friends and family stay free, because one of the best ways out of our “slave to pay” trap is for us to move in together and collectively pay less for housing. Then the owning classes will have less power over us, we will consume fewer resources because there will be fewer houses to heat, and with fewer of us going to jobs, we won’t need as many cars. And we will have a lot more free time to find productive activities that we enjoy, and to build them into a better society that will grow through the cracks.
We follow up with a response to that Ran Prieur post by another American blogger, Casemeau, of a blog named “Living in a Van Down by the River.” (As you’d expect, Casemeau wrote the blog while… living in a van down by the river. He lives in Colorado — and though that blog’s since been taken down, Casemeau still lives in that van, downriver. Imagine what his winters must be like!)
This is what he wrote.
I think posts like today are perhaps the most helpful posts for your readers. The main barriers to getting outside the norms are not tangible (like, “where will I get food if I quit my job?”) but are intangible. I’ve been living in a van down by the river for years now, and I quickly forget how hard it was to unlearn and overcome the negativity — like that in the e-mail — which was coming from within myself. Those are the most difficult obstacles to freedom. Finding food is a breeze.
These are a few links I scrambled across, today, in my Alberta Tar Sands investigation.
Have a coffee-filled, fullbright, and brightly montanic morning.
Love,
Sess
Brian Curry. From his blog, Mysidian Dreams.