Tag: Digital Revolution

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The Age of the Autodidact – Self Learner

You are replaceable if all you ever do is learn a single skill for a single application. Machines do this, AI does this. You must actually be educated to adapt to this new digital age. Education is the knowledge of principles and potential applications of them, in all facets of human experience…

In order to learn anything, the skill or concept must have a bucket to be placed in…a place in your mind, in your experience. You could read 100 books and take copious notes, but if you do not have buckets to place the ideas into, you won’t remember a thing. It is when we make connections in the ideas we read about, and find connections to things we have already experienced that we actually retain what we have learned.

Science: Organized Body of Knowledge Developed to Understand a Given Subject

There are many sciences, but unless we actually know what science means in its original context, we begin to view science as an esoteric set of skills and knowledge that has gate keepers in white coats, whom we believe without question, because they are the clerics of the new religion. We never blink an eye when tomorrow they pronounce new dogmas that completely contradict the dogmas they pronounced yesterday. It is of great importance that we understand science as a means to understanding, not the definitive end to understanding.

Here are some buckets to place all you learn into, these are ancient buckets, developed by the Greeks and given a rebirth in the middle ages:

The Trivium and Quadrivium can be broken down further into new arts. These additional arts emerged since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. None the less they are simply connections between the original arts or sub categories of them. For example, Arithmetic and Geometry are connected by Logic (Dialectic) and the mathematical sciences. Furthermore, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Geometry are necessary for Physics, which is the science of our shared experience in the natural world; this includes biology, chemistry, etc. Ethics (study of morality), and Metaphysics (study of being) are sciences heavily dependent on logic, grammar and rhetoric and inform our spirituality helping us know what is good. These are the arts that inform the science of the humanities. Finally music touches the soul with beauty as does the visual arts, which both can and do inform architecture, design and our experience in the natural world…thus they are understood through physics and experienced through creativity and spirituality. All is connected and none is mutually exclusive, therefore an educated person can never be specialized, unless this person be disintegrated…unbalanced…disconnected.

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We are Peasants…

Introduction

The yeomen of ancient times produced food on their own land, on a Lord’s land, traded labor or goods for food, or found themselves destitute simply begging and consuming what others produced. We are all farmers of content, or simply consumers of content, or both.

Digital Content Creation as Subsistence Farming

We, like these ancients, find ourselves in an analogous situation. We plant digital content, channel the waters of traffic to this content, the followers consume, and if they are grateful enough, they repay the growing tree with the compost of money. In this context, and if you ever grew anything, you know that compost, good compost, is GOLD.

I do not want to overstate the connection between digital subsistence and real subsistence. The two forms of sustaining ourselves are inseparable in my journey, which is the great marriage of digital farming and actually raising our own food. This has become my obsession to live a simple and sustainable life.

Sustainability

Sustainability has become a chronically under-appreciated concept in my life and “career.” As many who continue to experience job layoffs in the tech industry, egg shortages in the grocery stores, and the extraordinary instability in the economy, both globally and at home, we are faced with some choices to make.

  • Continue to go to work for an employer or start our own business
  • Continue to depend 100% on the grocery store or grow what we can and depend on community farmers

These choices are not comprehensive, as you will see in my future posts, because so many sacrifices and decisions make or break our journey to sustainability.

What Can We Do?

Ultimately, we are being called to produce fruit, whether that is actual, digital or both. The industrial age is gone, this new digital age does not have room for a career mentality as it is forcing us to engage with our own replace-ability. We are too expensive as senior employees to keep in the corporations, and only a small number are needed to guide and coach the much cheaper inexperienced hires…so what are the too expensive and too old to do?

Join The New Peasantry…the New Digital Revolution

Join my family and I, as we discover the answer to this. We are farming our homestead, forming our children for entrepreneurship rather than a career, through homeschooling, and developing products and services to help those who join us on this path. There will be struggles, successes, losses, and failures…but I am certain joy and peace will be at the end of this. Blessings to my digital and local community who join us…and to all who are undecided.