ice cream !!!

[near horse]

I don’t think the loss of various “skills” is anything new. Probably been going on since the earliest humans. When a newer, easier method becomes available, it is usually embraced and the previous technology/skill falls by the wayside.

I’m not sure how one can market their operation – even if it’s a sole proprietorship horselogging or organic farming without “selling” the way they operate or how they do stuff – perhaps even why they do it a certain way etc. Isn’t that still pitching? Perhaps our claims aren’t hollow like those of the big guys but we’re in the same game IMO.

[goodcompanion]

@near horse 29893 wrote:

I don’t think the loss of various “skills” is anything new. Probably been going on since the earliest humans. When a newer, easier method becomes available, it is usually embraced and the previous technology/skill falls by the wayside.

I’m not sure how one can market their operation – even if it’s a sole proprietorship horselogging or organic farming without “selling” the way they operate or how they do stuff – perhaps even why they do it a certain way etc. Isn’t that still pitching? Perhaps our claims aren’t hollow like those of the big guys but we’re in the same game IMO.

We’re in the same game because it is the only game in town. We all must do business in imperial coin.

To my mind the main value of a skill-embedded farming, logging, or craft operation is that it can function both in the realm of reciprocal, non-currency-based exchange, and, albeit in a more debilitated way, in the mainstream cash economy. (I do feel that when it comes to a “marketing” contest the larger players will always have a leg up on us) But the fact that we can exist and function in the cash economy allows us to preserve skills and show through our example one alternative way of providing ourselves with basic goods and services.

Yes of course loss of skills has been going on since time immemorial, but don’t you agree, Geoff, that the pace of this deskilling has picked up an incredible amount of momentum in the last 100, 50, 30 years? The quantity of basic physical and social functions that we humans can no longer carry out without the aid of vast corporations is totally staggering. In fact as I go through my day almost everything I interact with is provided by a large corporation or government entity, and even when I interact with people who live in my town, most of the time the communication passes through media provided by corporations. And a big shout-out to Dell, Fairpoint, Green Mountain Power, and Microsoft for helping me whine about it the internet, the irony is not lost on me.

The path of history is, it’s true, old methods being abandoned as newer and easier ones become available. But another theme of history is that consolidation invariably runs its course, crashes, and those who are left to pick up the pieces often must resort to older ways to cobble together a living amongst the wreckage as best they can.

[Carl Russell]

@near horse 29893 wrote:

I don’t think the loss of various “skills” is anything new. Probably been going on since the earliest humans. When a newer, easier method becomes available, it is usually embraced and the previous technology/skill falls by the wayside.

I’m not sure how one can market their operation – even if it’s a sole proprietorship horselogging or organic farming without “selling” the way they operate or how they do stuff – perhaps even why they do it a certain way etc. Isn’t that still pitching? Perhaps our claims aren’t hollow like those of the big guys but we’re in the same game IMO.

I’m not sure I was focusing as much on the loss of skills as much as I was focusing on the marketing to a culture with the intent to replace needed skills with an advertising agenda. Dependency = market share security. We have moved beyond a culture where everyone needs to be adept at the skills of earth-base livelihood, but advertising strategists have long been marketing to the sense of need that exists within a person who has specific marketable skills that have nothing to do with taking care of their own needs.

Marketing is all about the story…. especially at the small scale, but the difference is that I can deliver my story without using a bottle of white-out to pass over the holes. I can be honest about my story because I have a lot of control over the details. When companies begin doing business at a scale where they are so dependent on the components of their production that they HAVE to accept what is available, then they lose control of the details of the story. That is when the “story” becomes a marketing scheme, and buyer beware.

B&J took this to a new level by marketing the preposition that they would use our dollars to fund a business that was supposed to address inadequacies in the story. A lot of people bought into that. A lot of people saw the success in this marketing strategy and have tried to replicate it. As Michael points out they just picked the details they knew would have the greatest import and then let the rest slide.

It makes me think….. when I started using draft animals in 1986 for logging and farming it was because I firmly believe that to produce food in a truly sustainable system, we need to use live power. It has always been a huge deal for me that Organic food can be raised using petroleum based internal combustion.

Some could come visit our farm and see the generator, diesel truck, car, bulldozer, chainsaws, cell phones, and computers and take issue, and as Erik says the irony is not lost on my either, but the bulk of our needs are being met by a system using natural resources within our local ecosystem and my family is the largest consumer of this story anyway….. any others who line up to buy the surplus are there with their eyes wide open, and usually looking for us to help them move their own lives in this direction….

..Geoff mentioned succession, which in many ways describes sustainability .. moving by changing, toward a system that can sustain itself by changing toward success.

Carl

[BiancaAvila]

i don’t understand why most people are obsessed with ice cream 🙂
i know it’s sweet and stuff but i prefer warm stuff (this way you can eat it as fast ans as much as you want 😎 )

[Author]

Posts