It was probably a range of plants and fungi seeking interaction with a species that could care for them and bring them to new places. Maybe wheat and yeast ganged up to control the apes? However the first plant humans propagated were fig trees, and apparently the first plant we grew in a gardening context was the bottle gourd (pot to ferment stuff in!) Maybe we find out one day which of those fuckers are responsible for us having credit scores and 9-5 now!!

I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome

Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn’t such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.

Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as “green” isn’t going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can’t grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don’t produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.

A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as “stuff forgotten in a pot” - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.

Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.

Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.

Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn’t work in that case)!

Btw one of my crazier theories (although I’m not the only person considering it) is that it wasn’t us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.

Can’t be arsed to get bogged down by anarchist theory word salad or watch kung fu movies, but to ask “How do we feel about […]” in an anarchist community seems a little ironic to me. As an anarchist I don’t really want to have to care about how others think I should feel about something.

If anyone wants to give an ELI5 to an old and tired punk about who the situationists are or were I’m happy to listen, and I might even let you know how I feel about them …

I feel you. I’m older, and some years ago I decided to get off facebook. All the people I loosely connect with in my region are on there, events get announced there, my hobby groups are there. I felt very superior to all those who kept using fascist social media, and told myself I was better off without it. I also became very isolated from other humans and spent 24/7 with the same person and with my animals. It was great for a while, but ultimately I went back to using the blasted site. I believe it can be healthy to spend time away from the algorithm especially when one is a little too hooked, I don’t think it’s good to isolate from others forever and get too hung up over how and where most people like to interact.

I’d say I now use the site with more self awareness - when I realize that the algorithm is fucking with me I get off. I also make an effort of engaging with people I like in real life, through shared interests and activities. I still hate facebook with a passion and to not feel too bad about using it I post a lot of political stuff to try and radicalize my friends on there.

I’d say don’t suffer too much for your idea of social media purity. If it helps you connect with others, use it. If you feel you are too hooked, go touch grass.

I built a solar tracking system with light sensors for a solar cooker. It worked beautifully on a cloudless day but sometimes got confused when there were some clouds. Some weeks later I realized that my glorious invention was trying to find something we know the position of at any time during the day. Considering the time and money spent and how smart I had felt for building that monstrosity made me feel very dumb afterwards.

They always make my day when I find them. Where I live there’s a lot of abandoned land with good biodiversity (because nobody is around to fuck it up!) and you can hear their broken-fax-machine calls during mating time and then later in the year you might be lucky and find mum and chicks running along some path.

The comments of OP give off serious bot vibes

Yay foraging, thanks for creating the community!

world’s first

Good for them. Leaves the question where they put all the waste not produced in Finland.

Has anyone solved the problem of nuclear waste yet? As far as I know the waste I protested against as a young girl 30 years ago, which was going to be stored in some super safe former salt mine, is still standing around over ground in some storage facility in Germany, waiting for an accident to happen. The only thing we can afford at this point is degrowth.

I’m sick of any new or old ‘green’ tech being used as an excuse to keep ramping up our energy use. It’s all money making schemes to fill the pockets of investors, no matter if it’s EVs and stupid lithium mines or nuclear and its fucking waste. And of course the mines and the waste never end up in the backyards of those who peddle that shit.

Search for tech coops, quite a few seem to be popping up recently. I’m not directly in tech and still haven’t found who I’d really love to work for, so I can’t help much, but it’s a lovely question and I’m curious about other people’s answers!

Mumbo jumbo sounds very defensive to me. It’s strange how people get quite angry or at least really dismissive when you mention anything that is beyond the commonly accepted mainstream science - even when there’s no direct harm done to them by people talking about it. It’s also strange when you find out how many actual scientists are animists or carry some sort of spiritual belief.

When you get deeper into indigenous philosophies (branded since the times of enlightenment as superstitious mumbo jumbo) you often find belief systems that are incredibly pragmatic and would solve many of the social and environmental problems our rationalist thoughtscape has brought about, but our Western supremacist education makes it difficult for us to accept how much we could gain by opening up to it.

I became an animist after reading about the concept of Wendigo, and then applying the scientific method to indigenous belief systems by just acting as if they were true and finding out what happens in my life. For a brief period after the landscape and my ancestors were starting to speak to me I wasn’t sure whether I was descending into psychosis, but ultimately the results of listening to these voices and taking their guidance were more sound than continuing to follow the un-guidance of Western rationalist culture. At the same time I met quite a few people who were going through the same changes of mind. There seems to be an interesting process going on that brings more and more people back into a connection and relation with non-human life (animals, plants, rivers, mountains, ancestors …) and those who open up to it are usually those who I consider working for positive improvements (social justice, environmental issues), so I consider them my family.

The very first opening up, even before reading about Wendigo, was by me being a pet owner and having some experiences with my horse that showed a depth of soul I could not continue to dismiss - so maybe you want to ask your dog about what they think about the mumbo jumbo? ;-)

As an animist I recognize and respect the sacredness of all that is, as a former skeptic this notion would have made me deeply defensive a few years ago, and even now I still find myself resisting to anything I perceive as prescribed group practice. My own experience makes me wonder how others who haven’t reconnected to landscape yet would perceive such an idea.

What would count as a definition for you?

What is an address broker?

Cutting down the Amazon rain forest, mistreating your workers, mistreating animals, perpetrating genocide, driving a country into fascism, to just name a few. There’s probably more stuff I’d consider evil.

Here’s a rather specific example of greenwashing I had to do with, of the kind that’s a bit silly and very wide spread and almost impossible to avoid, but has a huge impact on where I live: I was doing a translation for a paper producing company. Their brochure was describing how they were caring for the forests that produce their paper and how they were championing the protection of the environment. They made it sound like they were planting and caring for some kind of fairy tale forest full of wildlife and biodiversity. The reality: all they ever plant is eucalyptus monoculture that by now covers half of the country and is one of the main causes of wildfires getting worse every summer.

Another example that I do not have personal experience with but that I imagine must be very difficult to navigate is being a programmer and working on some tiny snippet of code for something that has the power of causing unimaginable harm to society - like most of financial and stock market stuff, or election winning manipulating algorithms.

Water is a limited resource and even tech like desalination doesn’t solve anything if you have nowhere to put all the salt. As long as our tech includes BS like water-guzzling data centers to run AI for creating stupid fake cat videos there’s not much hope. We’re monkeys with technology and some species wiser than us should probably take our monkey toys away because all we use them for is causing more damage.

Technology =|= Civilization

Humans are nice to each other as long as they can afford it. Limit their access to clean water and food and they will turn into bloodthirsty monsters, like any animal will do.

The entire list of mental disorders is made up - people have just grouped certain symptoms together and gave them an invented name. This can be useful for categorizing and treating people, but ultimately your mind is your own and nobody can really say what’s going on inside. I have diagnosed myself and find categorizing myself as autistic useful - although I hate the idea that whatever goes on in my brain is considered a disorder, so I prefer the term neurodivergent. I’d use official diagnoses where they are useful for getting help and support, but always take them with a grain of salt. Psychiatry is not an exact science and both diagnosis and treatment are often not much more than trial and error.

Be especially careful when you are a person who has every reason to be angry about something in their life and someone tries to diagnose you with something like “Is-angry-for-no-good-reason” disorder, as it used to be the case of women suffering from ‘hysteria’ and abused teenagers getting diagnosed with personality disorders.