Material world
In an unprecedented effort, sixteen of the world's foremost photographers traveled to thirty nations around the globe to live for a week with families that were statistically average for that nation. At the end of each visit, photographer and family collaborated on a remarkable portrait of the family members outside their home, surrounded by all of their possessions--a few jars and jugs for some, an explosion of electronic gadgetry for others. Vividly portraying the look and feel of the human condition everywhere on Earth, this internationally acclaimed bestseller puts a human face on the issues of population, environment, social justice, and consumption as it illuminates the crucial question facing our species today: Can all six billion of us have all the things we want?
Stats for nerds
2recommend
7mentions
6people
2012–2024years
29% recommend57% neutral14% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
I guessed about four but i was completely blown away by some of the details. Absolutely fascinating.
- Highly recommend this if you've not heard of it yet, goes into detail about lithium and some other vital raw materials :
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Material-World-Substantial-Story-Fu...
"Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. They built our world, and they will transform our future."
- It's a story I cite fairly often.
A few others which examine this sort of thing are:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)
- https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (originally published as: https://qntm.org/lena )
and I can never miss a chance to recommend "Raindrop" from Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_)
At some point in the future one hopes that a technology will be developed which allows doing more than just pillaging the earth's resources for some additional comfort/convenience/energy, agriculture and improvements on it would be that, except that by making Malthus wrong, they've just increased the number of people for whom problems need to be resolved --- computing had the potential to do this, but the discussion about taxing CPUs to fund a universal basic income or even job re-training for displaced workers never got out the gate --- solar may be the first such, but it really needs more adoption, and an implementation which doesn't depend on batteries which added a fifth item to the resources humans plunder:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world
(the newcomer is lithium, the others were sand, salt, copper, and oil)
We keep crossing tipping points which no one talks about much:
and folks have been writing science fiction stories on this sort of thing since _Make Room, Make Room!_ (and the public is moderately familiar with the movie version _Soylent Green_)
What technologies or social changes offer an escape hatch?
- cold fusion?
- making limestone out of CO2 in warm moist air (needs abundant energy and either an affordable/available reagent or a new process)
- switching folks from eating beef to something else?
- desalination (needs abundant energy, and a compleatness which will prevent issues such as: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S106422931502009X )
- An interesting fictional examination of this sort of thing is Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":
https://marshallbrain.com/manna
and it all makes me wonder what homesteading in the 21st century could be like, and what the resource limits are --- Isaac Asimov once posited that if one converted the entirety of the earth's crust into biomass the limiting element is phosphorous --- what is the limiting material for our modern lifestyle?
There's at least one recent book which looks at this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125937631-material-world
Who is going to determine how resources are divided/allocated? Using what mechanism?
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed (and multiple species were made extinct before that decision was arrived at) --- will my children live in a time when commercial fishing is halted?
The homestead act in the U.S. had families setting up farms on 160 acres or so --- how do modern technologies affect the minimum acreage which a family would need for self-sufficiency to any measurable degree?
What sort of industrial base is needed for technologies such as bottled hydrogen being made by solar power? How long do the bottles and the bottling/capture system last? How long does a geothermal system last and what sort of on-going maintenance is needed and how does replacing it get budgeted for?
Modern industrial farming practices are burning/using as many as 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for 1 calorie of food energy --- what happens to food prices when we get past peak oil? Solar is supposed to work as a replacement --- when the cost of a barrel of oil is ~$400 last I checked --- what does food cost at that price point?
- Reminds me of the book Material World by Peter Menzel
- I appreciate the aesthetic of minimalism, and if it's pragmatic for a particular person, more power to them.
There is, however, an underlying (but not specifically articulated) article of faith in the Silicon Valley / news.yc / startup / digital nomad culture that a minimalist life is somehow more moral or sophisticated or something.
This meme goes at least as far 2400 years ago when Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel.
Much of this pride in minimalism is coupled w a only thinly veiled disgust with how "bloated" and "gross" other people are. I've seen blog posts, coffee table books, etc. that intentionally juxtapose pictures of a virtuous, thin, happy minimalist with a unhappy, overweight person and their tons of possessions.
e.g. the front cover of this
https://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Global-Family-Portrait...
seems almost designed to make us recoil from the "wasteful" American family.
The problem I have with this stance is two-fold:
(1) there is no inherent reason why it's wasteful or gross to own a lot of things. Sure, some people purchase junk too fill a void inside them. But other people drink to excess, sleep around, or travel to the ends of the earth for the same reason. Just because some people in category X are motivated this way doesn't mean that everyone in category X is.
(2) much of the self-congratulation on minimalism is really just disguised self-congratulation for being upper-middle class and having the "right" preferences. A lot of people would tell you that there is no reason that rock-and-roll is inherently better than Indian pop music or African whatever - it's just different cultures with different norms. And yet many of these same people would tell you that their upper-middle-class Silicon Valley lifestyle _IS_ better than, say, that of some family living in the suburbs of Texas. The fact that the minimalist Silicon Valley is both enabled by and required by very high incomes is ignored. (What I mean by this: living in SF / Silicon Valley means that you CAN'T have a huge kitchen or garage full of stuff, and it also means that you have the means to substitute other people's capital and labor for your own.)
The family living in suburbs in Oklahoma might have a two car garage, but they might also have two rolling tool chests in those garages, so that they can do all the auto maintenance that they need. The minimalist living in SF instead might take Ubers.
How is the "gross" profusion of junk in the former case less virtuous than the minimalism of second case?
This leads me to my third point: there is no possibility of true minimalism: there is only the ability to outsource the ownership of things to someone else. The SF loft minimalist who only owns two plates and two forks actually owns a fractional share in dozens of industrial kitchens and hundreds of food delivery trucks; they're just kept "off the books". Out of sight, out of mind.
A lot of people like to own things, for their own reasons. Some good, some bad.
Be aware that when you read "ooh, minimalism good!" articles, you're reading self-flattery. And that's fine - people are allowed to be fans of their own economic class and lifestyle aesthetic.
...but such propaganda should not be consumed uncritically, or without awareness of who and what is implicitly being denegrated by it.
