(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Climate Crisis -- What Are You Doing About Information Access? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-06 Climate chaos is here. So I’m posting a question or topic every week about something every one of us is likely to face, to see if we can work together on the nuts and bolts of figuring out ways to survive. Prior questions were: Do You Stay or Do You Go? What Is Your Timeline? What Skill Do You Need To Learn? How Will You Deal With Flooding? What About Potable Water? Got Energy? What Are Your Preparations For A Food Emergency? Do You Have Enough Nutrients? What Are Your Plans For Fire? What Will You Do About Medical Care? What Are Your Plans For Mental Health? Do You Have Community? This week’s question is What Are You Doing About Information Access? We need information As conditions get worse, we will need more information, and more unusual or unique information than we currently use. If you need to, can you fix your computer? your phone? your plumbing? a bad bleed? kill mold? make soap? cultivate wild yeast? or anything else that you don’t do now but may need to when conditions change? If not, you need a way to find out how to do these things. Where will you get that information? Climate chaos threatens digital information systems The cloud is made up of server farms in the real world. As physical entities, these server farms are vulnerable not only to political actions and online hacking, but also to power failures, floods, fires, hurricanes, drought, etc. Digital media require electricial energy for user access; if electricity is not available, the information stored on the media is also not available. And anything that physically interferes with or disrupts either the media playback mechanism (such as rust, mud, broken components, magnetic disruption, etc.) or the information storage system (such as the above listed threats to server farms) can destroy user access to information. Hardcopy information has vanished Newspapers and magazines die weekly. Libraries are notoriously underfunded, are increasingly collecting digital instead of hardcopy information formats, and are being attacked by extreme right wing groups who are forcing withdrawal of access to books. Independent bookstores are few in number due to Amazon, and the chain bookstores have fared no better. Older information systems have been forgotten and destroyed Human civilization is roughly 11,000 years old and, for most of that time, information was passed from person to person, and remembered and memorized in songs, rituals, religious practices, art, and lore. The destruction of indigenous cultures has destroyed massive amounts of human knowledge about how we live. Consumerism has homogenized cultures worldwide, leading to even more widespread loss of information. Destruction of community is ripping knowledge away from us every day. And we have outsourced our memories into devices so that, without them, our access to our own lives and knowledge is very limited. The Long Now Foundation I am not a member, nor am I vouching for them. But the Long Now Foundation has been thinking about this issue specifically for a few decades, they are in San Francisco (so I’ve been to their headquarters, The Interval, a few times), and Stewart Brand and Brian Eno are both deeply involved. So color me interested. The Long Now is very project-oriented. The Clock is a bit whimsical, but the Rosetta Project is seriously interesting and was deliberately constructed to be analog and not dependent on electricity for use at all. The Interval is where the Manual for Civilization is stored. It’s a library that specifically instructs the user in how to recreate civilization from scratch. It’s 3,500 books and the curation is done by the Long Now community. Browsing the titles is interesting. Also of interest is that the library is at Fort Mason, essentially at current sea level. (It’s our blindspots that’ll get us.) Specialization or generalization What can you, as an individual, do about information, then: do you generalize, or become specialized? Do you want a doctor with general knowledge or a specialist in dental surgery, or both? How can we make sure we have both, and can we afford and support both? How can we figure out what specializations we actually need? After all, the Golgafrinchians were done in by making the wrong choice on what was really needed. What are the most basic jobs needed to support a culture? I’d say providing food and water, medical care, education, methods to create and support community (art, politics, religion, etc.), and recycling/maintaining the ecosystem. What are you doing about your information access? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/6/2244048/-Climate-Crisis-What-Are-You-Doing-About-Information-Access?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/