March 4/9. The Archdruid writes about technology and the externalization of costs. Greer does a great job of explaining how technology, as it has developed over the last few thousand years, has given obvious benefits to its users and owners, while causing harm that is not obvious to its users and owners. An example would be a factory that makes a product cheaper by exploiting workers or dumping toxic waste. Capitalism rewards whoever does the best job of externalizing costs, which leads to increasing costs that are now poisoning whole systems like the economy and the biosphere, and leading to collapse.
So far, so good. But western intellectuals can't rest at pointing out what's actually happening; they have to turn it into some kind of universal logical statement. This is the same disagreement I have with Derrick Jensen: he observes the behavior of large complex society over its first few thousand years, uses that behavior to make a universal logical definition of "civilization", and projects that definition onto all possible large complex societies. To me that's like defining the human potential by watching a baby, and Greer does the same thing by defining "technological progress" so that it logically requires increasing externalization of costs. If you want to see Greer's argument as local not universal, you can go through his entire post saying "as we know it" after every instance of the word "technology" or "technological".
His conclusion: "a society that chose to stop progressing technologically could maintain itself indefinitely, so long as its technologies weren't dependent on nonrenewable resources or the like." My conclusion would be: "a society that made it a top priority to not externalize costs could keep improving technologically without destabilizing itself." Or, if we have a culture that is acutely aware of whole systems, then any new technology, in order to outcompete existing technologies, has to externalize fewer costs. You can already see the first glimmers of this in ecological food labeling.
So the externalization of costs is not a feature of technology, but a feature of human lack of awareness, which leads to one particular bad path in the vast landscape of toolmaking. We've been on this path at least since the invention of stone weapons that caused prehistoric extinctions, and I think we can get off the path without going all the way back there. Technological changes that benefit whole systems do not have to be reversals, but can lead us outside the tiny realm of stuff we have already tried.
Now, from the perspective of the doomer vs techno-utopian debate, it may seem that I'm making a stealth argument for unlimited fusion power or a Star Trek future. I'm against those things. My intention is to argue for the vastness of the Unknown Unknown. It's the same argument Terence McKenna made when he said, in the context of extraterrestrial life, that looking for radio transmissions from other planets is like looking for Italian food on other planets.
This argument has practical implications. If you think civilization as we know it is collapsing, and you also think that the range of human action is limited to stuff we've already tried, then you might expect to get a head start on the future by learning pre-industrial skills like blacksmithing or small-scale farming. If that's what you love to do, cool, you can probably carve out a niche. But if you think it's what you have to do, you're gambling your quality of life on the belief that your own imagination sets the limits of the collective response of billions of people to a historically unique crisis.