Speaking Truth to Power

We have examples that there is an endless set of ways to produce energy. Today was an unseasonably cold, physically discouraging day, in which a sequence of very common occurrences produced some very amazing results. Today the news, which are somewhat hard to avoid, emitted additional weirdness into the world with the announcement that an alleged  bogeyman and menace to our way of life had finally been killed after ten years of weirdness that may have no single point of focus.

Yet, despite the completion of a mission undertaken abstractly, a process that Camus so elegantly criticized, there is no real closure in the completion of the egoist, nationalist, everything-but-human-scaled undertaking. Just ask the families of those who died as a result of the man’s decisions. The physical product is that a sixty-year-old man was allegedly shot to death, and half the world considered this potential fiction to be a relief and a closure. Yet it added to our thinking, and produced amazing results. We shall express the results of this day’s physical events and feelings in the form of a question:

Why the hell are we not producing energy through conversation?

Consider the following, all of which are true within the same scope:

(a)    all conversation between humans, regardless of cognitive development, language and all other variables between speakers, is a circular activity, a loop.

(b)   all electrical circuits (circuit being essentially the same word as circle) are circular, constantly and simultaneously sending and receiving, much in the same physical way as conversation.

(c)    an eardrum is a vibrating membrane, a thing that produces vibration while serving as an amplifier and translator of other sources of vibration, such as the human chest cavity and vocal cords or the beating of an insect’s wings. Eardrums send to the brain just as they receive from the outside world, and as such hearing is perceived in a circular way.

(d)   a speaker is a vibrating membrane, a thing that produces vibration while serving as an amplifier and translator of electrical impulses, sending as vibration what it receives as electrical impulses.

(e)    electrical current can be generated through the motion of magnets around a pole, as in a car’s generator or any electrical motor. The motion can be delivered as electrical impulse through wires, like the ones hooked up between electrical amplifiers and speakers. Speakers, vibrating because of magnets attached to them, behave much like the human eardrum, which is a mirroring of the chest cavity and vocal cords.

With all this is mind, it stands to reason that sound like that produced through production of the human voice should be translatable between a vibrating membrane and an electrical generator through a simple wire that can communicate electrical impulses. This writer is not an electrical engineer or physicist, so the reader will forgive any steps that have been skipped here; in fact, the skipped steps are the challenge to be presented in this discussion. Therefore, if we can move electrical motors with our constant vocalizing, even if it takes the help of a tiny battery-powered translating amplifier, and we have the means to store power in batteries –even rechargeable ones –then it stands to reason that we should be able to produce as much electricity needed to do our stuff as the noise in the world can deliver.

Once we employ materials that can elegantly produce this power without too much waste, sound, and in particular speech (but why not also airports, train tracks and commuter highways?), would be a huge source for energy-producing vibration. We’ve taught a car to get power from its own brakes; why can’t the human voice have a part in producing power? Crowded bars could become as productive as coal-burning plants. All microphones employed in every application could be producing at least enough locally-stored power to essentially run all the machinery related to its use, if not concentrated with other devices to produce sources of power to be redistributed. Entire power grids could be localized –to a ridiculously local scale –around sources of sound. Loud places like malls and bars could support quieter places like dentists’ offices, bank branches and homes. Even the vibration produced by heavy objects driving over bridges could somehow be redirected to magnetic generators. Power companies could not only be exposed as being wasteful and inefficient, but rendered entirely unnecessary. We will leave the other implications up to the reader’s imagination.

The issue here is the use of energy sources that we already have, and our intention is to live in greater connection with all things, and to eliminate waste from our ecology. We should develop the maturity and habits of mind to make real cost-benefit analyses, such as the following. The human voice is produced by a living human. If we apply the rules of phenomenology to economics, then not even humans are off the hook from scrutiny about the means of their production. A living human takes water and food to produce. Water must be delivered through pipes (which take immense energy and material expense to produce and install) from sources that must be located, tapped and purified through immense expense of material and energy. Food is produced, prepared and delivered by equally immense means that the average person is just beginning to perceive, which have been explored admirably by Pollan (mentioned because he’s popular now) and his colleagues and predecessors.

So the human voice is expensive enough a thing. Human speech is already a thing with a big carbon footprint, and so forth. Not even the cynical Stalinists or other people with currently acceptable or unacceptable points of view have dared (in large numbers) to look this deep into efficiency, but we have to learn how to look this hard, if we’re going to make accurate analyses that can hope to produce elegant solutions. There are now seven billion very expensive human products walking the earth and consuming exponentially more resources and energy than we produce. With intentions based on living in connection with all things, why not take one of our necessary by-products and make something of it?

We encourage the reader to take this idea and make hay of it. Don’t patent it, or else you’re no reader of mine. Make some money off it, maybe, but not such that others can’t as well. The people who control energy production and provision serve power. But power is power, and not life, and one can only serve life or something else besides life. What do you serve? Power is most frightened for its survival when those who need power’s abilities lose that need. A sixty-year-old man was allegedly shot to death this week because of decisions he made as a result of dealing with his own environment’s economic and power pressures, and added to a circle of pain and killing that those of us still alive will have to deal with for the rest of our lives. Again we end up with a circle; this one produces only negative results. With that in mind we say to our audience: if you find something wrong with this discussion about making electricity through yacking (about politics, perhaps?), don’t dare take it as an excuse to leave. Rather take it as a reason why this discussion so badly needs your involvement and input.

The piezo effect, for one, and various perspectives on producing work in general, have already set up a mirror for this investigation. Go figure it out! Have fun!

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Tags: amplifier, anarchy, capitalism, circuit, communism, conversation, electricity, electronics, energy, existentialism, future, language, magnetic, Osama Bin Ladin, piezo, power, speaker, speaking, sustainable, work