December 6. Just spent a week in Mexico. I've heard some buzz about Americans moving there to flee hard times, and I wonder if they know something I don't, or if I know something they don't: the Mexican nation-state is collapsing, and it seems likely to get awfully hot.
We were staying in La Paz, a city of 200,000 in southern Baja California. If you want to roll the dice on global cooling, you could hardly find a better combination of warm temperatures, empty beaches, low prices, and nice people. If you're looking for a smaller town, check out Todos Santos on the other side of the peninsula, and for something more cosmopolitan, I'm told that Guadalajara has a large and thriving gringo expatriate community.
While I was down there I read David Holmgren's book Future Scenarios, and he makes a good point about one advantage Mexicans have over Americans: they're a lot more mentally adaptable. His example is that hardly anyone who owns a house in Mexico has insurance, because they're not afraid to lose everything and start over. Of course, that resiliency is something we can all work on. Just in a week, I met four different American couples who had sold most of their stuff and gone permanently on the road, or the waves. Most impressive were two women from Oregon, both over 60, who are living on a 35 foot sailboat.
Also, the Baja California climate gave me a better appreciation of permaculture. On my own land, the difference between good and bad management is not that great. Even if I do everything wrong, bushes and trees will eventually grow. But down there, the difference is orders of magnitude. They have warmth and sunlight all year, but because of bad soil and long dry spells, the main plants are cacti, and big patches of ground are lifeless. Just building topsoil and keeping it moist would make any plot of land incredibly productive. And yet, the normal practice is to rake up piles of brush and burn them. If they just made one big pile and threw some water on it, it would turn into great topsoil, which they could then use to grow more biomass, and get a topsoil-building feedback loop.
December 8. Destroyed US town a model of eco-living as it rebuilds. Greensburg Kansas was 95% destroyed by a tornado, and is rebuilding with rainwater harvesting, LED streetlights, and wind and geothermal energy. I know this is still industrial-green, but it's a big step in the right direction. Maybe in 20 years, some destroyed town will rebuild with rocket heating stoves and food forests.
December 11. Two nice pieces by a long-time reader, about Unschooling, and Unworking. This bit is especially relevant right now:
Back when my husband had health insurance, we were appalled at how much we were spending on this "benefit." We could never afford to go to the doctor because we couldn't afford the deductible and co-payments. After keeping track of expenses, we realized we were spending thousands of dollars a year on insurance. We quickly canceled it and then were able to go to the doctor when we needed to see one.
December 14. Just over the last few weeks, it seems like America has turned a corner... a vertical corner. Our daily actions are the same, but on the level of mind, or spirit, we've dropped off a cliff. You can see it on the left, where the attitude toward Obama has flipped from excitement to disgust. You can see it on the right, where only a few elderly people still look like they're making arguments, and everyone else looks like they're having a seizure. And you can see it in the conspiracy crowd, who are telling increasingly ridiculous stories that this is all part of a plan, because the alternative is too troubling.
It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin.
What would happen if you swapped out the bank executives, the generals, the billionaires? Nothing. It doesn't matter who you plug into the role of dog catcher -- the dog catcher still has to catch dogs, and every role in a domination system must channel domination. Ultimately there is no boss. At the top of the pyramid sits the logic of the pyramid itself. And that logic is basically a big fire that consumes everything and finally burns out.
It is said that the elite want a global government. They would also like to fart strawberries. If you think the elite get everything they want, stop pretending to oppose them and admit that you worship them as gods. Did the rulers of ancient Rome get a global government? The smart elites are already building their lifeboats, as you should be. Kunstler said it best: in a few years the government will be lucky if it can even answer the telephone.
It is said that climate change can enable a global government by uniting all of humanity against a common enemy. But climate change is not an enemy. If it were, right wingers would believe in it. An enemy is something that you get angry at and go violently destroy. Climate change calls for us to love strangers and animals and make sacrifices to help them. That's why our angry chimp tribe species cannot possibly stop it. Instead, we need to prepare to ride it out.
And then what? This will not be the final empire, because three of the things that empires feed on -- topsoil, forests, and human foolishness -- all regenerate, one of them very quickly. It is said that we are "evolving", and it's true that we have gained blue eyes and the ability to digest cow milk. But if we're evolving resistance to large repressive systems, not on the level of culture that blows away with the wind, but on a deeper level, then we're doing it so slowly that it's going to take us thousands of years to get anywhere.
A thousand years is not such a long time. Here's something to cheer you up, written about 2300 years ago in Ecclesiastes chapter 9:
7 Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.
8 Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.
9 Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun.
10 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
11 I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
12 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
December 18. The other day I posted a link about white skin being an adaptation to vitamin D deficiency in high-latitude grain eaters. Then Emily suggested something similar and mind-blowing: suppose malnutrition causes greed. It makes sense that malnutrition would make us greedy about food, and that greedy feeling could carry over to other things. I'm sure we can find exceptions, but there could still be a strong correlation, and as far as I know it's never been investigated. Also it's important to remember that neither wealth nor obesity necessarily means a person is getting the right nutrients. In a culture where unhealthful food is fashionable, rich people will be malnourished, and if the government subsidizes food with high calories and low nutrients, poor people will be both fat and malnourished.
December 20. Again with politics. The reason health care reform is impossible goes deeper than corporate control of the government, and deeper than capitalism. The underlying problem is that civilization has not learned how to shrink. It can get larger in a smooth steady motion, but it can only get smaller in ugly collapses. I don't know why. I like to think we will someday learn how to build large complex systems where all the numbers move gently up and down like waves -- although we might decide it's more fun to just keepy cycling through growth and collapse until we go extinct. (Or we could evolve out of our big brains that drive us to large complex systems, which is basically the same as extinction.)
Since American oil peaked in the early 1970's, continued real economic growth has been impossible, so we've been having fictional economic growth by increasing the amount of money flying around without increasing useful activity. Among the pillars of the fictional economy are the medical industry and the insurance industry. Collectively we can no longer afford to pay for them, but we also can't shrink them without economic collapse. You've probably seen this chart of worldwide life expectancy vs health care spending. The problem is, all that wasted money is holding up the economy. It's being paid to people whose jobs are parasitic, who could serve society just as well (or better) by sitting home and doing nothing. But we have no mechanism to pay them for sitting home and doing nothing! And if we pay them less than they're now getting, they'll have less to spend, and more unnecessary jobs will be lost, and so on.
I can imagine simple ways to fix this if I were the Magical Utopian Dictator, but that's now how it works. The Archdruid covered the same basic idea in his latest post, Weishaupt's Fallacy. Adam Weishaupt was the leader of the original Illuminati, who were basically a bunch of nice people who thought they could convert the existing power structure over to doing good. Of course the existing power structure crushed them, and they've been villified ever since. Greer thinks this was because they understimated the strength and intelligence of the ruling system, but I think it's because they failed to grasp its very nature.
Lefties do not understand that central control is fundamentally evil, and an evil system wants to do evil things: bomb foreign cities, build torture prisons, spy on citizens, and generally channel money/power from those who don't have it to those who do. Nature abhors a benevolent dictator. Right wingers do understand this, which is why they're always trying to undermine the government when they're not in power, and use it to do evil when they are in power -- and more important, it's why they always succeed.
Now, I think European socialism is the best large-scale centrally controlled system in history -- but it can't last. Inevitably it will become more and more repressive and unstable. As a long-term solution, the only way to build a good society is to start from the ground up, making every relationship one of equals, and every action completely voluntary. As I've said before, I think this is going to take us thousands of years, and it will require us to become aware of many kinds of domination more subtle and powerful than government.
December 21. New post from Anne, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and the End of Modernist Epistemology. Basically, thanks to the internet, authority has been eliminated as a basis for belief, and not just opinion beliefs but fact beliefs. Now you can go online and find an authority supporting any fact you want. The result is that our mental models are now determined by only two things: what we want to believe, and direct personal experience. Where I see this going is that global consciousness will continue to fragment into what Anne calls information tribes, and these tribes will go through a kind of natural selection: the ones that are the best at seeking out relevant personal experience and adapting to it, will thrive, and the ones that are the best at blocking personal experience that contradicts their beliefs, will suffer.
December 23-24. One of the most potentially valuable new technologies is something I learned about in Anna Wise's book The High Performance Mind. There are great subtle benefits to getting your mind in a meditative state, but it's extremely difficult -- you might practice for thousands of hours over many years before you get it right. Back in the 1970's, a scientist named Max Cade discovered how different human mental states correlate with different frequencies of brainwaves, and he invented a biofeedback device called the Mind Mirror. The idea is, it shows you the levels of the key frequencies in real time, so you can learn much more quickly to move between different mental states. More than 30 years later, the Mind Mirror still costs thousands of dollars, but I found this: the OpenEEG project, and here's a photo gallery of a homemade model. Adam comments:
I've done a bunch of research on the Mind Mirror and OpenEEG over the past several years, including interviewing one of the original MM engineers. I looked into building a cheap EEG system... however, it's on the edge of being commercially viable, and I came to the conclusion that if I waited a few years, the technology would catch up and let me focus on software instead of hardware.
Recently Emotiv dropped its prices a lot. $1250 gets you a developer headset and a software development kit that gives you raw access to EEG data. The protocols are closed, so you can't write open source software for it, and it doesn't use active electrodes, so you have to use saline dampened pads. But it has 16 channels, so it has a lot more detail.
There's also this one from Brainquiry. It uses active electrodes and has open protocols for accessing raw EEG data. To make a Mind Mirror, all you really need is the 2 channel model. I am thinking that in another year or so, I will either get the Brainquiry, or there will be another low-cost EEG. We should see inexpensive, multi-active-electrode, open EEG headsets in the next few years from other manufacturers.
The problem I had with OpenEEG is that it isn't wireless -- and I didn't want to hook my brain up to a hand-built system that is connected to 115V power.
December 26-28. Continuing on technologically enduced enlightenment, readers suggest shortcuts: The hemi-sync process claims to alter brainwaves by putting certain sounds through headphones. And a stroke leads a brain scientist to a new spirituality by disabling her left brain in just the right way, something that might be reproducible with surgery. And here's an article about the business of cognitive enhancement.
My position on this issue is best expressed by this Tom Waits quote about music:
If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays.
Suppose you're a rock climber and someone says, "Why go to all that trouble? Here's a ladder." Or: Why bother solving a crossword puzzle when you can just look up the answer? Why ride a bicycle across the continent when you can just get on a plane? Why learn to make something with your own hands when you can just buy one made by somebody else? It comes down to the meaning of life. If you're here to accomplish things, then you might as well just sit in a box pushing buttons. If you're here to explore and learn, then the long road might be more valuable than the short road. And if you're here to have a good time, then what are you doing on such an awful road that you're in a hurry to get to the end?
Another issue is how and when technologies make us weaker. One thing we can ask, when considering a tool, is whether it focuses our native strength, like a knife or a pencil or a biofeedback machine, or whether it does the work for us, like an engine or a calculator or a wire in your brain. Generally, machines that do physical work make us physically weaker, and machines that do mental work make us mentally weaker... so what's going to happen when machines do spiritual work?
A more profound question is: "Does the presence of this thing make me stronger in its absence?" That's what a good teacher does, and oddly, it's what a crutch does, unlike a metaphorical "crutch". If your leg is broken, a crutch lets you walk around and keep the rest of your body in shape until the leg heals. And if you're building a permaculture seed community to survive the collapse of industrial civilization, you can use a truck or a backhoe to strengthen your position for a world without engines. It might also happen that a technology makes individuals stronger in its absence, but makes the whole human species weaker in its absence, like vaccinations, which give each person immunity but prevent us from adapting to diseases on the level of genetics or culture.
What if a technology makes us stronger in its presence and weaker in its absence, and we go ahead and use it anyway? Then we are making a lifelong alliance with that technology, and that means both our individual lives and the life of the human species. In either context, if we ever break the alliance and give up or lose the technology, then we will have to pay back all the benefits. Our primitive ancestors made alliances with fire, stone tools, and clothing. Our more recent ancestors did it with metal tools, grain farming, machinery, electricity, the automobile, and most ominously, economic growth. In our own lifetime we've become dependent on computers -- although some uses of computers do make us stronger in their absence, like sharing information about biosand filters and rocket mass heaters.
I don't think our permanent alliances are limited to the ones we made tens of thousands of years ago. But it's going to be interesting to see which modern technologies can break free of their debts to the extractive economy.
December 29-30. On a tangent to yesterday's post, Jeff mentions philosopher Robert Nozick's "experience machine":
If you were given the opportunity to hook up to a machine that would be guaranteed to let you experience absolutely anything you could ask for, and that would be completely indistinguishable from the real experience, but you had to commit to it for life, would you do it? In other words, if the only difference between reality and the machine is the abstract notion that one is "authentic," does that authenticity have value on its own?
I can think of two answers. The first is: We already did it! Civilization, compared to the ways of other human cultures and other species, is an artificial world in which we are gods. And we're pretty much all stuck in it for life. A more challenging answer, to both the first answer and to the original question, is: Give me a non-circular definition of "authentic".
I've struggled with this question for years. But now I think I might have been wasting my time. From a 2001 interview between Derrick Jensen and Martín Prechtel, here's a great bit about how some languages don't have the verb to be:
In a culture with the verb to be, one is always concerned with identity. To determine who you are, you must also determine who you are not. In a culture based on belonging, however, you must bond with others. You are defined by where you stand and whom you stand with. The verb to be also reduces a language, taking away its adornment and beauty. But the language becomes more efficient. The verb to be is very efficient. It allows you to build things.
Suppose "real", like "to be", is nothing but an artifact of language. "Real" is a tool we use to favor or exclude certain experiences, ideas, or directions of inquiry. It has no non-circular definition, and no consistent meaning. We call things "authentic" and "inauthentic" for all kinds of reasons, and what we're saying is: You shall respect this or disrespect it; you shall take this path or avoid it; you shall integrate this into your mental models or ignore it. "Real" is a shortcut, making language more efficient at the expense of understanding. I don't know if there are any cultures without the concept, but I would very much like to live in one, because everyone in that culture would have to be more intellectually rigorous than anyone in this culture.January 3-4. Baker/thatcher brings back ancient grains that can be used for both baking and thatching. Anne comments:
Research into good thatching wheat varieties continued into the fifties and sixties. Of the last good developments, Maris Widgeon and Maris Hunter are still available commercially -- I bought a few grams of Maris Widgeon seed from Bountiful Gardens and replanted out to a fairly good-sized patch. KUSA seeds might also have something. The chokepoint for thatching isn't a good wheat varietal, its finding a reaper-binder that can harvest the field without crushing the stalks (ruining the waterproofing ability of the resulting roof).
January 4. Here's a remarkable reader project, the illuminated thread. Brett is between the second and third stages of a giant bike ride all over the country, on which he makes videos, records himself whistling in water towers, does parkour in ruins, and repeatedly gets in trouble with the authorities for photographing active and abandoned industrial sites. There are some nice thoughts in the Q and A section, and he needs to raise more money for stage three.
January 9. In Olympia I gave a talk and attended an Awakening the Dreamer symposium, and I kept noticing one issue: When affluent Americans ask "what can I do", they mean, "What can I do to save the whole world? What can I do to turn industrial capitalism around in its tracks, to halt species extinction and reverse arctic melting, to feed all the starving people without further increasing the population, to transform human consciousness and witness a global utopia in my lifetime?"
My answer is, you can't do shit. And I'm a woo-woo optimist. I think that beneath all events is an invisible Flow that is intelligent and loving. I think that any human system that goes out of balance with human nature, or with other life on Earth, is doomed to fail. I think that in all possible futures, dandelions will grow through ruined Wal-Mart parking lots. But within this optimism, I see room for epic catastrophes. And some catastrophes are now so far along that "what can I do to stop it" is the wrong question, and the right question is "what can I do to survive it, to help others survive it, to minimize suffering and prepare for recovery?"
Find a landbase and build the topsoil; plant fruit trees and vegetable gardens; learn to forage and hunt and repair stuff; learn uncommon useful skills; make local friends; work to make your city and region more sustainable and resilient; make friends in other regions in case you have to move; gradually shift more of your activities and dependencies out of the money economy; break your addictions; get healthy; spend your money on tools and skills and long-keeping food; meditate; exercise your intuition. This is not meant to be a complete list, but a list of examples of the kind of thing you should be doing. The title of my talk was "Weeds through Pavement", because when pavement turns to forest, the pavement does not turn green and put down roots -- plants crack the pavement and grow through it. So do that.
January 11. By popular demand, I'm going back to Avatar. First, we shouldn't be surprised that conservatives hate Avatar... unless we think about the meaning of "conservative". The movie supports the most traditional of traditional values: a tribal society living in balance with nature, and defending its culture through violence. So how can "conservatives" hate it? Because in practice, conservatism is an emotional state, and people in that state don't care what's traditional or radical for humans in general -- they only care what's traditional or radical for them personally. So you can make the most untested and wildly maladapted society in history, and after a couple generations, all the traditionalists will angrily defend it and attack the ways of the previous hundred thousand generations.
It also turns out that leftists hate Avatar, but only a particular breed of leftists, those with academic training in identity politics. Annalee Newitz wrote When will white people stop making movies like Avatar? And David Brooks, a centrist, calls Avatar the White Messiah fable. Their point is that this is one of many films that turns someone from our culture into the leader and "most awesome member" of an alien culture, and that it would be more politically correct to show the aliens saving themselves without our help.
That's a good point, but it's hard to count the number of points they're missing: A movie must take viewers on a journey, and the journey has to start from where we are. If the people from the alien culture were the protagonists, only a few dedicated liberals would go see it. How many of you have seen El Norte? And any Hollywood blockbuster must make its protagonist super-awesome. Nobody complained that Bruce Willis was more awesome than anyone else in Die Hard. Avatar opens the door to that complaint by putting its hero among another race, but you'd have to be blind to think that race is the heart of the movie.
Of course, Newitz and Brooks are blind. Newitz is a techie and Brooks is a huge supporter of "progress", so they can't stand the thought that Avatar has made a billion dollars with a message about ecology and the human race: that we are not the rulers of a pile of resources but the servants of a living planet, that an extractive economy is not just unsustainable but evil, that our place is among dangerous wild creatures and not our own sterile devices, that it was wrong for us to conquer the Indians, not because their skin was a different color, but because they lived better.
Did we conquer the Indians? When lefties say that Avatar purges white guilt, they are making several questionable assumptions: that we are white, that we feel guilty, and that white guilt is a good thing. This is an obsolete view of race. A more helpful view was pioneered in the zine and book Race Traitor: that "white" is a social class only loosely connected to pale skin, that thinking of ourselves as "white" makes us obedient to an unjust system, that the best thing "white" people can do is not to sit around feeling guilty for the crimes done in the name of whiteness, but to disown whiteness and take the other side. Every one of us has ancestors who lived more or less like the Na'vi, and who were violently conquered by disconnected, resource-extracting cultures. If we all stop identifying with those cultures, the whole game is over.
We did not conquer the Indians. The Babylonians, the Romans, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans conquered us... but not completely. The reason Avatar is so popular, and so important, is that it is helping us to remember who we are.
Of course, what to do with that awareness is a much harder question. No matter who we think we are, we are still dependent on the conquering system for our survival. We're not going to voluntarily kill ourselves, and I think it's silly to try to limit ourselves to technologies that existed 20,000 years ago. The important thing is that we make the shift from an extractive economy to a sustaining economy, and from the made world to the found world. And we might not be able to make that shift once and for all -- we might have to keep making it again and again.
January 13. I've just finished reading Gaiome, a book about ecological orbiting space colonies. The author, Kevin Scott Polk, is both a permaculturist and an astrophysicist. Here's the Gaiome introduction from his web site. In the first chapter he sets up and knocks down all the usual stories about going into space: to extend exponential growth, to escape the dying Earth, to bring back resources, and to shift our consciousness from biology into machines. His argument against the first is one I've never seen before: he does the math and shows that even if we could expand civilization at light speed out into the galaxy, even a very low rate of exponential growth would quickly overwhelm the geometric growth of our sphere of expansion.
He concludes that we first have to learn to live sustainably on Earth, which is relatively easy, before we learn the much more difficult skill of living sustainably in small constructed environments. Then he lays out his plan. First, a space tourism rocket with the same safety standards and flight frequency as a large airliner. Meanwhile, much more research into tiny cycling ecologies like Biosphere 2. Then, technologies for extracting materials from asteroids and turning those materials into gaiomes, and into bigger asteroid extractors and space fabricators, and so on. His eventual utopian vision is 700 trillion people living in 80 billion gaiomes all over the solar system, all of them self-sufficient but grouped into cultures and nations, and by then new technologies will make it easier to expand this model to other star systems.
In terms of current knowledge, Polk doesn't miss anything. He cites Richard Heinberg, Chellis Glendinning, Jared Diamond, and loads of hard science. But I'm thinking, how much have our scientific paradigms changed in the last 500 years? And why shouldn't they change just as much in the next 500? Maybe when our first space probe reaches Alpha Centauri, it will be picked up by someone who just walked there.
January 14. George Monbiot covers Avatar: The Holocaust We Will Not See:
...engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.
Then he goes through a great summary of the atrocities of the European invaders... and fails to answer the fascinating questions he raises: What if Avatar had followed history? And why didn't history happen like Avatar? To answer the first, I would love to see a movie where the Na'vi get crushed, Pandora is developed to near extinction, the resources are wasted on space suburbs, and as the whole system collapses, the avatar population finally learns to appreciate the ways of the Na'vi. That movie would have sold about 17 tickets.
To answer the second: no ecological society has ever won a violent war against an extractive society, because an extractive society is inherently more ruthless, and if there are resources to burn, more physically powerful. The Seminoles held out for decades in the swamps of Florida. Now Disney World is there. In a hundred years, squid and jellyfish will swim through its ruins. You cannot defeat the Empire with force -- you can only outlast it.
January 20-21. The big news in American politics is that the Republicans just won a senate race in liberal Massachusetts. Here's an article, Why Martha Lost, arguing that the Democrats have alienated voters by acting like they're entitled to votes, and by ceding populist anger to the right. Or consider this Naomi Klein essay on how corporate branding has taken over politics. The Democrats won the 2008 election by branding themselves as progressives, but it turns out the system is too ossified to make any progressive reforms. Meanwhile the Republicans have branded themselves as the party of anger, so now they are getting votes even from angry liberals.
January 25. Great Reddit comment: Brian Boyko on why Americans don't protest, because we understand that it just doesn't work. For example, a large majority of Americans are in debt -- this site estimates at least 80%. Imagine if half of those people took to the streets and shut down the whole country, demanding Jubilee, a total cancellation of debts. Would it work?
Of course not! Maybe the military would test new high-tech weapons on the crowds, or maybe the elite would take helicopters to their fortified compounds and let the country implode. But the last thing that would happen would be for congress to pass a law canceling all debts. And if they won't make that reform, they certainly won't make a reform less popular, harder to understand, and equally radical, like single-payer health care or a corporate death penalty.
But what will happen is that more and more people will be unable to feed the giant blocks of money, will be cut off from benefits distributed through the giant blocks of money, and will organize to take care of each other.
January 29. The Misanthrope's Guide to the End of the World. I'm guessing that he has never read Joseph Tainter, but has independently come up with the same idea. My condensation:
Garbage eschatology is based on the premise that our technological infrastructure has acquired too much complexity for us to fix. It will kill us not by turning sentient and wanting to kill us, but by stupidly collapsing on top of us, like a gigantic Windows Vista. My view is based on the idea that the entropy of a software system inevitably increases with time, past a point of no-return. Beyond that, we cannot stop it from collapsing under its own weight, and cannot marshal the resources to reverse the aging process either. The best we can do is hide and then emerge from the rubble...
Here's a general rule about technology: Any technology is resilient to the extent that we can decrease its complexity, or rebuild it after a catastrophic fall in complexity. Where we can do neither, that technology is doomed to keep increasing in complexity until it collapses, never to return. When you think about it that way, it's hard to imagine how we could still have the internet in 100 years, but it's certain that we'll still have metalworking and the wheel.