The Real Zack Morris

Who Built the Pyramids

I spent the last two posts talking about what’s going to happen because of the 99% movement and how it will affect us.  We are already seeing people pulling their money out of banks and general strikes are just around the corner.  This won’t have as much of an impact as people think, because the banks no longer hold money, they hold debt.  So the next step will probably be people stopping their credit card payments, or forming some kind of debt union to dictate the terms of repayment.  The mainstream media thinks the protests will break up before this happens, because they won’t survive the weather.  But the reality is that the protestors ARE survivors.  They may go underground from time to time but they endure.  They are a million copies of Cody Lundin saying THIS IS WHAT WE DO, MAN.

So now that that’s settled, I want to daydream a bit about what’s driving us in the first place.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but life is exciting again.  I haven’t felt this inspired since the 90s.  And it’s doubly sweet because the Nothings (the 2000s) were so profoundly bad.  I’ll never go back, and my guess is, neither will you.  This song sums it up nicely for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjoA4nYBD5U

I spent the last decade doing work that sounded ok on the face of things but left me bereft of my spirit.  It’s like I was working towards the past.  I knew in my heart that my dreams were dying, and it made me sound like some kind of crackpot idealist.  But most everything I’ve ever said is either going to happen or is here now.  So I’m a daydreamer.  I take that as a compliment.

You want to know what I dream about?  Stuff like this:

I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of links like this that I have stumbled upon and sent around to friends over the years.

Lately I’ve been playing Rocksmith, and after two days I can already play some songs.  I barely knew what a bar chord was.  We are entering an era where we can learn new skills orders of magnitude faster than we used to.  Just watch, music in 2-3 years is going to be incredible, because a whole generation will be playing instruments that wouldn’t have otherwise.  I don’t know how I missed this coming.  I’m being surprised again - and it’s wonderful.

When we daydreamed in high school in the mid 90s, we were perhaps 10 to 20 years ahead of the curve.  We wondered what the Matrix was.  We talked about a post-fossil fuel world and curing cancer and AIDS.  We imagined a future of people interconnected wirelessly, long before the internet and cell phones were ubiquitous.

By 2000 we were perhaps 5 years ahead of things.  I remember wondering about what would come after Napster.  Now we have BitTorrent and Facebook and Twitter and ways of communicating and sharing that go far beyond what we imagined.  By 2005 we were less than 2 years ahead of things.  We didn’t really see things like the iPad coming, at least not as a successful, ubiquitous product that grandparents buy.  Today I often feel like I’m 2 weeks ahead of the curve at best.  Just talking about something seems to spark it into existence.  Half my searches result in me finding that something has already been invented.

That’s why I’ve begun to look further.  What is coming a decade from now?  Do I have time to invent it?  If not, who will?  And how will that change our lives?

I realized the other day, that’s what the future is.  It’s the manifestation of ideas.  On Star Trek, you tell the replicator to make something and it just does it.  Well, that’s just around the corner.  In 2020, instead of spending $30 on printer ink, we’ll spend $30 on a gallon of polymer for our makerbots to build us, I dunno, flower pots.  That’s just the way it will be.  Corporations that maintain the status quo, enforcing things like software patents and lawsuits against municipal wifi, just seem to get in the way of real progress.

Connected to this is ever-growing productivity, which is intimately tied to inflation and goes up about 3% per year, like compound interest.  We are getting ever better at doing more with less.  You get constantly better at your job, but the last time the middle class got a raise was probably 1999.  Look in any industry and you’ll see individual employees doing the work that would have taken 2.5 people 30 years ago, before computers and email and overnight global shipping.  The minimum wage today should be $16.50, and it actually is in most other developed countries (like Australia).  People who want to lower the minimum wage to create jobs evidently want to create the kind that people do in China.

I was watching “What a Way to Go” on either FSTV or LinkTV but they said that Americans have 70 energy slaves working for them in the form of fossil fuel.  Imagine how much of our prosperity (food/clothing/transportation/housing) comes so cheaply compared to the rest of the world.  We can go to the store and buy a loaf of bread for $2 that a person in Africa would have to work all day for, because they have no energy slaves.  That’s why in America, physical labor doesn’t pay much.  A semi truck doesn’t care if the driver pedals.

Another way of saying that is that we have a 70x multiplier on our labor.  It’s more profitable to make a sale than make a computer.  That’s why I believe so strongly in ideas like free food and public transportation.  Because it’s simply a waste of everyone’s time to work for a dollar here and there when machines already do the work.  We should be aiming higher as a culture.  I’m tired of rich men in suits going on talk shows and saying that we each need to pull our weight.  The truth of the matter is, they are at the top of the pyramid, so if they have a dozen employees, each with 70 energy slaves, it’s like they are enjoying the comforts that a thousand slaves provide.  They are living the lifestyle previously known only to lords and pharaohs.  Of course they want us to pull our weight.

I saw another show last night called “What the Ancients Knew” that showed the quarries where workers pulled the stone for the pyramids.  They did everything by hand with primitive tools.  It turns out that the stones get smaller towards the top of a pyramid.  They came in inconsistent sizes and were fit tightly into place by master stonemasons to form a perfectly straight, smooth surface.

That’s when I realized how the pyramids were built.

You want to know how?  Try to build one.  The secret to the pyramids is human ingenuity.  You give a few thousand workers bonuses and incentives for who moves the most stone, and they will very quickly discover the best way to do it.  We don’t know how they did it, because we’ve never built a pyramid by hand.

Today with our 70 energy slaves and hundreds of years of 3% productivity improvements and 300 million people, compared to ancient Egypt’s 5 million people, we could build a pyramid 4096 times bigger than they could.  The great pyramid was 480 feet tall, with a base of 756 feet and a volume of 91 million cubic feet.  Ours would be 7680 feet tall (1.5 miles!) with a 12,096 foot (2.5 mile) base and a volume of 375 billion cubic feet.

And we could probably build bigger than that.  TNT in machine-drilled holes cracks stone much more easily than swollen wood wedges in hand-drilled holes.  Train cars carrying a stone can be pushed by a single person, verses teams of dozens or hundreds of people rolling stones on wooden logs.  We would find ways to raise stones with little effort using solar or wind power.  We might even build our pyramid out of steel so it’s hollow inside.  Future generations would never be able to figure out how we built it without fusion and artificially intelligent robots to do the work for us.  They’ll have 700 or 7000 energy slaves, and virtual assistants orders of magnitude more productive than us.

So when I look around at the problems facing the world today, like hunger and low pay, I say “bah! fools!”  These are ancient problems.  Human ingenuity can overcome them trivially, but we don’t seem to try.  We do everything the hard way, by hand.  We think small.  Or more specifically, our leaders think small.

We’re told that this small way of thinking is the responsible way to be, but we know in our hearts that it ignores the bigger questions about meaning and human potential.  We’ll work, and we’ll do good work.  But our dreams will take us further.  They will provide us with bigger levers to multiply our efforts.  They will take us to the stars and deeper into our own minds, and sooner than we think.  I’m reminded of the Sublime song lyric: “hard work good, and hard work fine, but first take care of head.”

PEOPLE are the ones who built the pyramids.  People like you and me.  And they did it with far less than we have.  What would YOU like to do with your life, if it weren’t for the small-minded people, institutions and policies holding you back?  What kind of pyramid would you build besides the financial one propping up the overprivileged?  I think that’s where we can look to get beyond the barriers holding back the 99%.  Picture where we want to be.  Then work backwards.  Don’t listen to the ones who stand to benefit from your marginalization.  Use the resources at your disposal for something great.

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  1. zackarymorris posted this
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