Let’s face it, our lives are awash in crap: shitty TV, shoddy politics, decrepit physical spaces, throwaway popular culture, and a cratering economy. Navigating all of this detritus on a daily basis is both exhausting and bewildering. And paradoxically, as information (‘content’) proliferates on the internet and through other forms of digital media, the looser our grasp becomes on what is truly real. After the day’s Facebooking, Second Lifing, Tweeting, Grand Theft Autoing, and American Idoling are done, is there any energy left to really explore what it means to be a citizen, a partner, a parent, a person, a man? Does the sum of all this digital effluvia actually add value to our lives in the long run?

Amidst this proliferating atmosphere of disposable and disorienting culture, a few of us have decided to attempt something a little different. Our vision is to create a place that gathers quality creations from a core group of interacting contributors on a broad array of subjects that are decidedly non-trivial. By emphasizing true substance and real personalities, we hope to offer a stark alternative to the dominant media motifs of the day: throwaway content, empty celebrity, and hyper-insulated pseudo-communities. We want to birth a clearinghouse for ideas, images, and discussions that actually builds knowledge, character, and discernment. And of course, we’ll have a lot of fun along the way....

The name of this new website is Oysterwagon, a moniker that is explained in the full version of the pitch for contributions. We're hoping that many people will join in to contribute to the site, so if you would like me to send you the full version of the Oysterwagon kickoff pitch, send me an email a jeremy@postpeakliberal.com, and I can forward it to you. Basically, we want as many people to get involved, on any level, as we can. So hop on board the Wagon. (If you already have articles, pictures, stories, poems, or other material that you would like to contribute, send them along to theprojectdesk@gmail.com, and we'll give you immediate feedback)

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Okay, now on to other things. Periodically, when nothing really specific inspires an idea for a posting, I like to just do a kind of intellectual reset, a recapitulation of my understanding of the big picture. One of my biggest frustrations with liberal columnists and writers is that there is almost never a unifying theme or narrative that runs throughout their work. One day there's a column on unemployment, then the next something on indigenous rug makers in the Sudan. Then there will be a piece on gender inequities in the workplace, or something on green design. Now obviously, to be a liberal is by definition to be interested in a broad variety of subjects; to be open-minded. And clearly, you can't write about the same thing every day or week and still keep readers interested. But still, I think that liberals need to more explicitly weave a unifying narrative through their disparate pieces of work. Some kind of grand idea has to snake its way through more liberal thought. One thing that conservatives get right is the constant pounding away of the same theme, so that everyone is on the same page with unified talking points. Obviously, I think they go a little overboard, and generally their talking points are wrong. But liberals would be well-served by understanding the power of repetition and the galvanizing force of the Big Idea.

So with that in mind, let's do a Summer Reset of the big picture.

Looking around us, there are a lot of things to be worried about. Oil continues to spew into the Gulf, wrecking ecosystems and destroying generations of maritime culture. Our multi-front war in the Middle East will soon enter its second decade, with fairly little to show for it except bumper-crop profits for military contractors and ruined narco-terrorist states. The global economy is in rough shape, with low-wage powerhouses China and India replacing the decaying high-wage US and Europe as the prime movers. The national economy of the US is still mired in recession, with a higher 'natural rate' of unemployment settling in for a long visit, and car-centered suburbia collapsing as a viable way of life. Deadly toxins are parking themselves in at alarming levels all across our food chain, with unknown results for human health and reproduction. Bees are disappearing, whales are on their way to massive dieoffs, temperatures are surging to new highs all across the globe, American children are facing epidemic rates of diabetes and obesity, etc., etc., etc.

Thinking metaphorically, we're really looking at a set of Concentric Circles of Collapse, or Russian Nesting Dolls of Catastrophe. We've got an interlocked set of problems, with each smaller area of trouble embedded in a larger one. Our individual bodies are in tough shape (disease, obesity, mental illness), but that situation is set within the larger problems of high-stress work and over-indulgent consumer culture. Those problems are in turn embedded in a hyper-leveraged economic system that was built on suburban sprawl, deindustrialization, overreliance on service industry jobs, and unsustainable borrowing. Moving further out in our set of concentric circles, the whole consumer capitalism arrangement is massively unsustainable, drawing down natural capital and resources at an alarming rate, and ruining the planet in the process. And that is probably the largest level of catastrophe: the decline of virtually every natural system on earth. Accelerating extinction of species, global warming, the collapse of global fisheries, fresh water depletion, topsoil exhaustion, heavy metal saturation of living tissues across the food chain, etc. 

With such a bewildering array of crises, it is no wonder that neither liberals nor conservatives can craft any kind of coherent course of action. It is much easier to retreat into scapegoat narratives of moral and spiritual collapse, or to dream dreams of technocratic mastery and future perfection. Neither of these strategies can do much good, and as long as our mainstream thinkers are mired in these delusions, we'll lurch from trouble-spot to trouble-spot, and the general pattern of decline will continue. Jim Kunstler calls this the Long Emergency, a long stretch of general devolution and decentralization. I highly recommend Kunstler's website and his books. He is our greatest contemporary commentator.

In general, I am in full agreement with Kunstler. Peak Oil is kicking in for good, as the easy oil is gone. The Gulf disaster is the perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Surface deposits are gone (or in politically-volatile areas), so we're drilling a mile into the ocean and then two miles further down. This kind of drilling can never be made trouble-free and cheap, no matter how many 'fail-safes' we put in place. So we're in for a rough patch in the coming decades, as the suburban sprawlscape becomes prohibitively-expensive and ultimately gives way. The mortgage implosion, especially in states like Florida, California, and Arizona, is the leading edge of this devolutionary iceberg. 

Also, I am heartily in agreement with most hues of greenie-culture, which sees the key to our future as local economies, green products, cooperative businesses, renewable energy, and the like. We really do need a kind of moon-landing type of effort to create a green energy/green jobs America (It's just too bad that we're blowing all of our cash on a trillion-dollar-a-year military and other Rube Goldberg projects like the non-reforming health care reform that lumbered through Congress this year). I love farmers' markets and hybrid cars like any other NPR-lefty. 
 
But I diverge from most other commentators in that I think that none of our green dreams of sustainability will happen without a dismantling of the basic social form of modern culture and economy: One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling. This social form is the building block of consumer capitalism itself, and is thus the foundational source of almost all of the higher-level problems that we're facing. This social form literally creates and energizes dysfunctions all through our various economic and political systems. For example, the pressure for 'full employment,' for everyone to have a fulfilling and substantive job, over-monetizes all of our social functions, destroying older, non-market ways of providing goods and services. Another example is the American Dream itself: the desire for a mini-British manor for each nuclear family spawns the hyper-wasteful and spiritually stultifying suburban project. You would be hard-pressed to find a better way than suburbia to waste resources and spawn juvenile, copycat consumption. The One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form also puts incredible pressure on the educational system, as it must forever produce qualified and productive workers, even if the overall labor-to-production ratios are on a long-term trend towards de-skilled work and automation. Because we're locked into this one way of working and living, there is relentless pressure to increase everything, all the time: higher wages, economic growth, bigger financial returns, more products (regardless of need), increased turnover of trends. We don't know of any way to be except to grow, which is a bad recipe for a finite planet and finite life-spans.

I firmly believe that this social form has to be transcended before any of our society-wide projects can succeed. There are not going to be meaningful market-jobs for everyone in the near future, so individual identity will have to be hung on something other than career and achievement. Many are living this new reality right now, as unemployment and under-employment are carving out deeper, permanent trenches. 'Success' will have to be redefined to mean something other than how much money one makes. Similarly, the atomization and fragmentation of dwellings will have to end. The home-improvement porn of cathedral-ceiling sitting rooms that no one ever sits in will have to go. The Extreme Home Makeover ridiculousness, where teenagers get larger rooms than what 40% of families (extended) around the globe have for their whole house, will need to be tossed aside.

In short, we will have to live more collectively. The fetishism of house and product will need to end. Consumption, and thus production, will need to be drastically curtailed. Economic contraction will have to become the new ideal for our politicians and economists. In the current arrangement, the economy has to grow, because everything hangs off of maximizing consumption, to drive the need for full employment and servicing of the single-family dwelling. But if people start living more collectively, pulling services out of the money economy and back into the household economy, then the full-employment, economic growth imperative can be broken, and we can start tackling some of those wider, concentric circles of collapse.