tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87357398860193950872024-03-13T08:48:41.145-07:00C-RealmKMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-63118093841823918552016-02-12T08:56:00.000-08:002016-02-12T08:56:09.856-08:00Automation and SJWs: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Here is a transcript of my conversation with James Howard Kunstler for <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/498-everythings-a-racket/" target="_blank">C-Realm Podcast episode 498: Everything's a Racket</a>.<br /><br /><b>KMO</b>: You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I'm your host KMO and I'm joined once again by James Howard Kunstler. Jim, welcome back to the C-Realm Podcast.<br />
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<b>James Howard Kunstler</b>: It's a pleasure to be here with you, KMO.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: We're running out of C-Realm Podcast, actually.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: So, I hear.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: It's not gonna end, but it's going from 52 episodes a year to 12. So, the real estate is about to get precious.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, you've carried on heroically for the past, I don't know, five, seven years. How long has it been?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: I started in 2006.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. Well, you've done a yeoman service for all of us and I thank you for it.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, thanks for appearing on the podcast. I don't remember the exact date of your first appearance but it probably would have been in 2007 or 2008.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. Somewhere after <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83633.The_Long_Emergency" target="_blank">The Long Emergency</a></i> came out.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yeah. I remember, I had checked it out from the library and somebody else had a hold on it, and I hadn't finished it by the time it was due back. So, I've never actually finished <i>The Long Emergency</i>.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, that's alright. The Long Emergency is gonna finish us, so.<br />
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[laughter]<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: There you go. [chuckle]<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, you recently published your annual longer than usual blog post for your review of the year gone by.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, it's my forecast really.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Your forecast. Well, it starts there with a look back, doesn't it?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Sure. You're right.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yeah. And then your look forward... And I don't have it up in front of me, as I tend not to look at web pages while I'm talking to people. But well, what to say about this past year, 'cause back when I first started talking to you in 2008 or so, it really seemed like The Long Emergency was coming down on us fast. And it was a good time to stock up on camping supplies and such.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. I think what happened was that a certain brand of authority in our culture managed to levitate what remained of our economy and many of the institutional functions in it. And they just managed through legerdemain and chicanery, especially in the financial realm, to levitate this leviathan, so that it would just keep on existing for a while. And it did for the last eight years, and it was quite a feat. It was mostly smoking mirrors. I think it had a lot to do with share momentum, and the size of our economy, and the complexity that our civilization had attained. There was a certain amount of inertia connected with it that assisted the authorities in their efforts to levitate things. And they did. It seems to me that, just in the first week of 2016 that the wheels are really coming off in a pretty serious way globally. But as far as the past year, the past year was a topping process, not just in finance, I think, but really in our faith that these things could continue. And I've said many times in my own blog and in my books that we depend on a number of complex systems to make up this metasystem of complexity. And the system that is the most fragile is the financial system because it's the most abstract and it's the one that is dependent most on faith and our belief in its credibility. And lately, that has translated into the... Our credulity that central banks can keep on artificially propping up economies.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: I do wish I had your piece up for one sentence because it was really well worded, and it packed in a lot of meaning into a short space, but it was something to the effect of an economy that is based on debts that will never be repaid back is not long for this world.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, that's exactly... Well, pretty close enough to what I said. And we're in a peculiar situation that... I suppose the main device that the cabal of business, the Federal Reserve, and the government used was the manipulation of interest rates in order to conceal the fact that we had attained peak maximum credit or debt, and that we had reached the point that we really couldn't manage it anymore. And by that I mean, we could no longer manage the interest payments and the servicing of all that massive monumental debt we'd racked up. And we had racked it up in the first place to borrow from the future to keep all our systems running in the present. And by that, I mean our trade systems, our manufacturing systems, the huge government systems that make payouts to both their employees and the various people who don't do anything who get paid. We reached the end of the line with the debt. And from my mind, a lot of it had to do with the relationship between energy and the economy, and that whole story got very, very confused especially over the last five years with the rise of the shale oil effort.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I published a book in 2012 called, <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13239828-too-much-magic" target="_blank">Too Much Magic</a></i>, and the subtitle was, Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. And it was strategically, as a writing professional, it was an unfortunate move because I wrote a book about wishful thinking just when the nation entered about a five year period of extreme wishful thinking. And the last thing they wanted to hear was a criticism of wishful thinking. But at the center of a lot it was the shale oil, the so called miracle, which persuaded people that the Peak Oil story was false, and that we didn't have a problem with the primary resource that we needed to run industrial economies. That is turning out to be violently untrue now as the shale oil industry starts to shake apart. First, financially, and soon to follow in terms of productivity.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: But that allowed people to think that we didn't have a problem, and that we would be able to continue all of the rackets that we had rigged up. And I think that the term racket, and the idea of racketeering is also very central for people to understand what has happened to us. And a lot of the activity that goes on in our economy now and in our culture has turned into racketeering. And by that, I mean, to be precise, the unethical and criminal pursuit of money grubbing.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And you can see it in endeavors, like medicine and education where racketeering used to be the last thing that they would be interested in doing or able to do. These were professions that really relied on the cardinal virtues of humankind, on duty and diligence, and honesty, and qualities like that. And they've become among the most dishonest industries in our culture right now. You don't have to go far to understand the college loan racket and how it has changed education. Or anyone who's tangled with the medical establishment in recent years knows what a dishonest racket it is, and how untransparent the cost of this stuff is and how absurd the charges are. I mean, you go to the emergency room with needing five stitches in your scalp, and five weeks later, you end up with a bill for $7,000. This is a very common thing, right?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: So, racketeering has taken the place of honest endeavor. And it's one of the side effects of living in a culture that engages in continuous lying and pretending. And when you're constantly lying about everything, you've unfortunately entered a place where anything goes and nothing matters. And that's the bottom line.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, Smedley Butler, a US Marine Corps General, famously said in his autobiography in the first half of the 20th century, that <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198259.War_is_a_Racket" target="_blank">war is a racket</a>.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Oh, yeah.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: And rackets, they don't seem to be new, although particularly with the medical establishment as you just mentioned, it's grown to an unbelievable level. A couple of years back. Well, it's been a few years now, but in 2009, I had sinus surgery.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Oh, you had your brush with the medical industry?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yeah. And I had a job at the time with medical insurance, so it was mostly all good. But when I came out from one of the anesthesia, I basically couldn't pee. The anesthesia had made my prostate swell up so much, there was just no passing urine. And so they kept me, just basically for observation and catheterization overnight. And just basically having a bed, I wasn't... This is not the cost of the surgery. This is just the cost of staying in the hospital overnight was $10,000.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Oh, hey dude, I had a hip replacement in 2013, one of many. And I got a one line bill from St Peter's Hospital in Albany that just said, "Room and board, 36 hours, $23,000." Say what? All they really did was take my blood pressure 20 times and my pulse. $23,000?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yeah, exactly.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Hello?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yeah, so that doesn't seem like it can last. But you mentioned, debts that are unpayable.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: And a few years back, David Graeber published his book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt" target="_blank"><i><span id="goog_1995430113"></span>Debt: The First 5,000<span id="goog_1995430114"></span></i> <i>Years</i></a>, which is really an amazing read. And people in power figured out how to control other people with debt a long time ago. And there is always a perpetual moral hazard. There's always the temptation to create more debt than can actually be paid back. So, this has happened many times before. And typically, what happens is, and this is what's different from us, typically in the past, the debts have been owed to the sovereign. And eventually, the sovereign realizes they're unpayable. And he just says, "Okay, jubilee, we've wiped the slate clean. We're starting to accumulate new debts starting today." And that basically fixes the problem. And we're in a situation now where the debts aren't owed to a sovereign or even to a government that can declare jubilee. And as long as the system is running, the moral hazard is in place to just keep cranking up the debt overhang.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. Well, there are some differences. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the technoindustrial economy and civilization that we developed has some slightly different rules and procedures. And one of them is that... And we saw an early example of that was, what happened in Weimar, Germany in 1923 which is that, you manufacture a jubilee by other means, namely, hyperinflation. They didn't mean it to go that far, but it got out of hand. And what's happened in the USA for the last couple of decades is an attempt to inflate just enough to eventually erase the debt and the magic number is supposedly like 2% or 3% a year which doesn't seem very much but if you do it over time, you end up not having to pay back an awful lot of money in dollars that are worth the same as what they were originally borrowed at.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: But that's exactly what the Federal Reserve has tried to do, especially since the crash of 2008. But they've been completely unable to do it through all of their chicanery. They haven't been able to manufacture a 2% inflation rate. And instead, what we find ourselves in, is a compressive deflationary environment. And that the reason for that is, because as debts are not paid back, and as loans are not repaid, and as interest is not repaid, money actually disappears from the system. And as money disappears from the system, there's less of it and that's a classic deflation.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: So we're not gonna get that kind of jubilee that you got in an old monarchical society in the olden times. What we're gonna probably get is either, or probably both, first a tremendous compressive deflationary bust, followed by desperate attempts to reflate the economy and then, ultimately destroying currencies.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, you mentioned that the financial aspect of the current economy is the most abstract, and a few years back Dmitry Orlov wrote his <a href="http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/p/the-five-stages-of-collapse.html" target="_blank">Five Stages of Collapse</a> essay which he then<br />
expanded into a book, and one of his arguments is, there are different types of collapse, and collapse can precede in different orders and the financial system can collapse without the rest of the economy collapsing. And at our present state of debauchery, that would probably be a good thing, if the financial system were to collapse.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, yes. Although, I would argue that, I think Dmitry did actually intend them to be sequential. His classic view of it, there would be a sequential progress from financial to commercial to social to cultural collapse, etcetera, etcetera. But what's happened here is like what happened in Cuba when the Soviet Union fell apart. You and I probably get a lot of notes from people who are always saying, "Look how well Cuba managed its transition from being a vessel of the Soviet Union to being a world made by hand economy," right? You've heard that, right?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Oh, certainly, yeah.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. But the thing that they never take into account is that it happened against the background of a world that was still humming along in the background; they were still functioning. And in particular, what was happening was, the Cubans were receiving remittances from the people outside of Cuba, namely, from a lot of Cubans who had move to the United States, who were living in Florida, and they were sending money back to Cuba. So, if that happens against the background of a world that's still largely intact, there's a cushion there. To a certain extent, the same thing might be said of the Soviet Union collapse that, yeah, it was a mighty fall and it had some pretty terrible resounding consequences, but when all was said and done, the rest of the world was still humming along, and they could, for example, depend on Jeffrey Sachs coming over from the USA and trying to retool their economy into a capitalist economy. And they could depend on the fact that the global economy was actually building up at the very time that the Soviet economy was falling. And that was a cushion for them that kept them from going all the way to cultural and social collapse where nothing works and you're living, basically, in a anarchic society with no law or no safety. So, they didn't get all the way down.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: This time, the whole global system is wobbling, and there isn't gonna be the cushion for any of the players. When the United States gets into the trouble that it's now entered, all of the other nations will be going through a similar thing. And all the trade relations that we depend on to keep this behemoth going, they're gonna get in trouble, and they won't be there for us anymore, and we'll be thrown back on our own devices. And what it basically means is we're gonna have to reset to a much lower level. And of course, the major question is, how do you make that journey without a lot of destruction and without a lot of social disorder, and hardship, and cruelty, and all the bad things that come with a badly upset culture?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: And that's a question I don't expect we will answer in this podcast but I think, experience...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: No.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Will show us the answer, over time.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, it's an emergent process, and it will be a self-organizing thing, and there isn't... I think that there are clues and historical cultural roadmaps that can inform us about what we face, but it's an emergent process, and it's gonna be full of weird surprises. And for example, who would have thought that a buffoon, a dangerous buffoon like Donald Trump would emerge as a serious possibility for winning the nomination of a major political party? Like I said in my forecast, I consider Trump to be Hitler without the charm or the brains. But the fact that, so many people actually take him seriously is to me a huge danger sign. And who would have expected that? And you can predict other things arising out of that. Now, I'm inclined to make wild-ass guesses about things, and I do that in my forecast, sometimes just to be cute, and sometimes because I also really mean it. But one of the things that seems plausible to me is we end up in a situation where Donald Trump, for one reason or another, gets elected, and I think that there would be a serious effort by other authorities in America to remove him from office, after not a very long period of time. And that would be sort of farewell to our constitutional system, or a welcome to a constitutional crisis.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And it's not unthinkable, countries go through political crisis, and we've had a good run for about 230 years as the constitutional USA. But if a clown like him were to get in office, a guy with very poor impulse control, [chuckle] and some rather dangerous ideas about how the world works, I can see a bunch of Pentagon generals kicking back and saying, "You know, we're patriots and we just can't let this happen, we gotta get this guy out of there." And who knows, maybe they'd say, "Okay, we're gonna have a new election in eight months and we'll start all over again and this time Trump won't be a candidate and we'll try to find some better people." That might happen too. But that's just an example of the weird things that will, or could, emergently pop up.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Science fiction author David Brin is fond of saying that the George W. Bush administration demonstrates just how resilient the professional governmental bureaucracy is, in the United States, that a president that catastrophic could sit in the White House for eight years and not destroy everything just bespeaks what a solid foundation the US has in terms of it's professional bureaucratic class, and I could imagine the US surviving a Trump presidency, as well. What I find really interesting about Trump is that he is already making signals that he wants to be buddy buddy with Vladimir Putin, and I've been very disturbed by the Obama administration's steady creep back into a cold war doing everything they can to stoke old cold war animosities and provoke Putin at every turn.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah, me too. No, I completely agree with you about that. And there have been many times in the last couple of years where Vladimir Putin seemed like the only grown up in the room full of world leaders, and he explained himself actually very well in his speech to the UN General Assembly last fall, where the question of Syria had come up, and he basically said, "It's not a good idea to go around destabilizing all of the institutions of a society," which is what the US did in Iraq, and Libya, and Somalia, and all kinds of other places. And he said, "Actually, we probably would be better off if we could support some of these institutions, so these people could govern themselves." And that's the kind of thing that oughta get the attention of intelligent people.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I'm not necessarily reassured by the fact that Donald Trump feels similarly about that because there are other things about Trump that I just find odious, but it must be said that, above all, Trump does represent something that's really going on in this country and that is a real revulsion<br />
against the establishment, and a revulsion against the elites that have been running things. And I think that's legitimate. I'm just sorry that Trump ended up being the one to represent that consensus.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: There is another candidate who seems to be doing well, who also seems like somebody that would never have been a serous candidate in the past, and that is Bernie Sanders, so what are your thoughts there?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, I think Bernie has... He's really an admirable figure in so many ways. It's interesting 'cause I interviewed him about 20 or 25 years ago for a Vermont newspaper called 'Seven Days', and I spent a day with him in his office when he was Mayor of Burlington, and I was pretty impressed with the guy, just his energy and his charisma. And I think, we should all be glad that he's been there, mainly because he's opposing another odious character on the scene, Hillary Clinton, who I can't stand because I think that she's just thoroughly corrupt and dishonest. And that's not an original idea, but it's an idea that's shared by a certain part of the population.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I happen to be a registered Democrat, although not a very enthusiastic one in recent years, and I object to her being the candidate for president. I'm glad Bernie's there. I think, Bernie has been a heroic force as an independent senator, and really kind of a great figure of our time. My problem with Bernie is that, I think that he's basically an economic redistributionist. Being the self-proclaimed socialist that he is, I'm afraid that he would be interested in creating larger schemes for taking people's money and choices away from them. And another side effect of that would probably be increasing the size of the government. Now, it happens to be my belief that we're in a situation where government is going to get smaller, whether people like it or not. It's already become hugely ineffectual and impotent at carrying out a lot of its basic functions. And the things that it does do well now, are things that are not very encouraging, like spying on people and collecting information about citizens. That's something that we don't want government to do.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: So, when all is said and done, I'm afraid that what Bernie would support would end up being an attempt to keep big government big and to keep on giving free money to people and endeavors that really ought not to get it. I would not really be happy about voting for Bernie, but I do appreciate his independent voice and his heroism. Does that make any sense to you, KMO?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Sure. And if it came down to a choice between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, I would think that would be a no brainer.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I'd vote for Bernie Sanders.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yeah. Although, apparently...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah, no question about it.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Apparently, if you select the poll questions right, there's a significant percentage of Democrats who would crossover and vote for Trump before they would vote for Hillary Clinton.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: That's what I hear. That's what I read in what used to be called "the papers."<br />
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[chuckle]<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Do you still subscribe to a daily newspaper?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, I subscribe to the New York Times. I find the New York Times to be enormously annoying. It just bugs the hell out of me the way they cover stuff and fail to cover stuff. But I do subscribe to it as kind of a vestigial duty.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, you mentioned that in relation to Bernie Sanders, the phrase, I think, "Giving money away" or "just giving people money," and...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: He's a redistributionist.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, I've been talking to a lot of people about this notion of <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/495-our-secret-shame/" target="_blank">technological unemployment</a> because the big digital companies that are displacing the old companies are doing so with a lot fewer... They can service a larger customer base with far fewer employees. And so, there's a lot of jobs that are being destroyed by technology that are not... That that technology is not creating new jobs in equal numbers, and a lot of people are saying, really the conservative response to this is to basically cut everybody a check every month and give the people who don't have jobs money to go shopping; it keeps the consumer economy going.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. I believe Finland is one of the first nations to actually propose that concretely in their legislature. And yeah, I've certainly heard that. I think, it's gonna play out differently though. I think that the diminishing returns of that trend of replacing human labor and human thought with just machines and computers, I think it has tremendous diminishing returns and unintended consequences. And one of the more interesting ones is that, among other things, it alienates customers hugely, and we can see that and how things have gone for that last 20 years where corporations have off loaded a lot of their former responsibilities onto their customers by making their customers' lives more difficult. For example, instead of making it easy to contact somebody at a company that you need to do business with, like Apple, or Microsoft, or really any company, they've used the internet not to communicate but to erect a firewall between their customers and them, so they won't be bothered by them. And they offload their own problems by doing things like making you wait 45 minutes to have your call answered on a phone queue.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And after a while, you get enough of that and people just sign off and say, "Fuck it. I<br />
don't wanna be involved with this company." And I don't think that it's going to work as smoothly as people fantasize about. I think that process of replacing human work with robot work is gonna basically trip over itself and make our... It'll be like an idiocracy of robotic business, and it's not gonna work. At the same time, I think that in reality something else will be happening in the background. And probably, pretty loudly and pretty rapidly, and that will be our journey to becoming a Neomedieval society where a lot of the things that were provided by corporations won't be, and they'll have to be replaced by actual people doing skilled work that requires real skills, like, growing food locally and then finding ways to distribute it locally as things like national chain shopping and supermarkets start to fail, as their supply lines stop working.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And I think, it's gonna work out hugely different than people fantasize about. In fact, I would put the robotic work society idea in the same folder that I would put the idea that we're going to continue the happy motoring system by electrifying all the cars, 'cause that ain't gonna happen. But it's an amazingly popular and commonly accepted idea that of course that's gonna happen. We'll just have electric cars and that will solve all the problems. Not only that, they'll be self driving. And that's not gonna happen for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons by the way is, something that most people are not paying attention to, and that's the fact that the effect of the crash of the financial system on the way that Americans get cars. Americans are used to buying cars on installment loans. That's how we buy cars, we make payments on them. But what's happened is, the collapse of the middle class has left far fewer people who qualify for car loans and we're going to enter a period of capital scarcity as the debt deflation moves on, which will provide far less capital available for people to get car loans.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: So, the whole motoring thing is gonna probably fail on the financial end before it even fails on the fuel end. Although, those two things could converge fairly rapidly. And what's happened in the last several years is that the smoothies on Wall Street have taken the same model that they used for creating janky mortgage loans and bundles of mortgage loans, like the collateralized debt obligations that went bad in 2008, and they've applied the same principle and the same model to auto loans. So now, they've securitized a lot of really bad auto loans, like six year loans to people who have very poor prospects of making their car payments.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And we're gonna see exactly the same thing happen with that, those bonds are gonna fail. But as that happens, of course, we're gonna see a whole lot of damage in other parts of the bond world. And it's already happening in the margins of the so called 'junk bonds' or 'high yield bonds.' A lot of those high yield bond were put out by the oil companies and the shale oil companies in particular. They have no prospect of servicing them, paying the interest, or paying their bond holders back, and they're going bad. And in the whole chain of bonds out there, the securitized auto loans bonds are, they're right there behind all that crap, and they're gonna go bad too.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And the thing after that that we probably have to worry about is, what are the derivative consequences of that? The hedges that these sharpies put in to get paid even if their bonds went bad. And there's a whole lot of wreckage out there waiting to happen. But anyway, getting back to the robotic thing, I put that idea in the same folder as the idea that happy motoring will continue.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, I can certainly see a fairly short term scenario where, because of the reasons you just described, most people can not afford to get a new car and they will either be like me driving a twenty year old car, or they will be dependent on ride-sharing services like Uber, which are about to get a whole lot cheaper 'cause they're about to fire all their drivers and replace them with self-driving cars. Those drivers have basically been training those cars for the past few years. And self-driving cars are not science fiction, and they are not anything that is projected to be developed. They exist today. They travel the roads today and the only thing keeping more of them off the roads right now is regulation.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, I take your point, although, I think, there's room to argue that it's not gonna work as smoothly as people think. For example, there was a similar idea about 10 years ago, or so, that we were gonna have so called 'intelligent highways.' It was, for practical purposes, the same idea as the self-driving car but they had vested the technological part in the roadways themselves. And the idea was, you'd be on board with your computer, and just the car and the road would have a conversation, right? And all these, you'd be able to cram more cars into the limited space of, let's say, the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, and the traffic would move more smoothly because the computers and cars would all be having this conversation.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, the thing is when you really think about it, right now in any given place in America, lets say 7% of the people driving out there are only pretending to have insurance, right? What happens when you're in a situation where 7% of the people are only pretending to be in cars that have a computerized smart car stuff? It assumes that absolutely, all the cars will be capable of doing this, but in fact, it won't be the case. There will always be some rogue cars out there with live humans in them who are capable of making mistakes, especially in a system that's overly computerized that is based on the idea that there will be no mistakes. So, I don't see it happening. I think we're actually gonna leave happy motoring behind. I could see that there could be much more of a ride-sharing thing in the short to medium term that that could be a way of getting around the fact that fewer people will be able to own private cars. That makes a lot of sense, and it's really no different from, or little different from the jitney arrangement that you find in third world countries, where just a lot of people operate in formal taxi services with vans and things. That's what you see in Mexico a lot. So, I think it could easily go to that but I don't think we're gonna have like a George Jetson automatic car system.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, the future I was describing is not utopian in the least. As long as those cars, those Uber cars are still running and they're still making money, there's no real reason to do any unnecessary maintenance on them. I could well imagine you've summoned your next ride and it shows up, of course it's driverless and the door opens up, and you can tell that the last occupants in this car were having sex in it or shooting up.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Or they threw up.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Oh, yeah. Exactly.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: When I drove a cab, like every week some drunken guy would throw up in my cab. That was about 30 years ago, by the way.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: But your cab had a driver who could stop and clean up the barf.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Right.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: But if that car doesn't have a driver and can just go to its next destination and it's going to get paid regardless of the state of the cab then it will. I'm not describing a George Jetson future at all, I'm just saying that automation isn't going away and because of the financial incentive to get rid of human labor whenever possible, I think we're gonna see a lot more automation before things are done.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, I think that we can have a valid difference of opinion on this and just kick back and see how things work out. I'm more inclined to think that we should all become more interested in mules, for instance. But we'll see how it works out.<br />
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<br />
C-Realm Vault subscribers can hear the remainder of the conversation in <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crv-180/" target="_blank">C-Realm Vault Podcast episode 180</a>.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Awhile back, you had an experience where... you do a fair amount of speaking at universities. It's kinda your day job, right?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, yeah, I have over the last 20 years. I've done a lot of lecturing for colleges, and conferences, and stuff like that, yeah.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: And I can use the terminology with you 'cause I know we have a book in common we've both read. Last fall, you had an experience with college campuses and SJWs, and I would invite you to speak on that for a little bit for the people who don't read your blog and don't know the details.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: The Social Justice Warriors. Well, my experience converged with what turned out to be an interesting movement or blow up of a movement. I had a gig at Boston College, and I basically gave my Long Emergency/Too Much Magic lecture, which is a warning to people that a lot of the things that they're counting on for continuing our way of life probably aren't gonna be there for us and we have to make other arrangements. So, that was the content of the lecture. And I had dinner with a bunch of faculty members from Boston College after the lecture, and it turned out to be a really interestingly uncomfortable situation.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Three of the people at the table, there were probably seven people, maybe seven or eight people at the table, and three of them were English faculty who specialized in race, gender, and privilege studies as they styled themselves. I mean, that's how they put it. And of course, that raised the interesting question for me, which was, "Does Boston College really need three lit professors specializing in race, gender, and privilege?" I didn't like come out and give them a hard time about it, but I was wondering. Anyway, because they specialize in those issues, we started talking about race, gender, and privilege issues, and I made the point that I thought it would be a good thing for our country if primary and secondary education made it a main mission to teach disadvantaged black people how to speak English correctly. I said I thought that that would have tremendously beneficial effects on that part of the population that has been struggling. These people went ape shit. They couldn't believe I said that. It was just so insulting to them. And they didn't really argue about it in any kind of coherent way, they just insulted me and told me that I was a racist and... It was amusing to me in a way because, here you have a table full of professors who're essentially arguing against educating people, and specifically, educating them to speak the dominant language of their culture.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Anyway, the next day, it turns out that I got flamed on social media by another professor at Boston college who had not been present at the table, who heard about what I said and wanted to flame me as a racist on Twitter and Facebook. She was a black professor of, I think of black studies. That's what happened.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Her name is Rhonda Fredrick, right?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Rhonda Frederick at Boston college. And all of this happened just two weeks before the scene exploded at the University of Missouri with their big fracas that got the chancellor of the university system fired or resigned. And then, at Yale, and at Princeton, and at Amherst, and all these places where the students rose up inveighing against free speech and demanding safe spaces against ideas that would disturb them. Anyway, that's what happened to me. I think it's amazing that what I said generated such ferocious and incoherent opposition. And I'm not quite sure what it says about our culture. What do you think it says about our culture?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Oh, nothing good.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I mean, it's just something inherently bad about suggesting that we should teach disadvantaged people how to speak the language of their culture?<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: I don't think so. It's demonstrated that black people, when they are around white people, speak differently than they do when they are around black people. And largely, if they don't know how to put on the white dialect, they fail in their efforts. So it doesn't...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah, they try but they don't always succeed at doing it because they're not coming from milleu where that is done. They're not good at.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Right. So, teaching them various tenses and the things that you mentioned would just give them more options than they currently have, is how I see it.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Exactly.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Actually, I mentioned that I don't typically look at web pages while I'm talking to people but in this case I have called up your blog, because you've printed the entire text of the email that you got from Rhonda Frederick, and she...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I haven't looked at it in months.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, this is what really strikes me. "This is what I posted on my social medias." She wrote, "I am sharing with you and your agent. Yesterday novelist, journalist James Howard Kunstler was invited to give a talk at Boston college," and then she says, "At the post-talk dinner, he said, quote." And then, she goes on to quote something that she didn't actually hear you say but she says, "At the post-talk dinner... " When I read your account, it sounded like you went out to dinner with some people after the talk, but the way she presents it, it sounds as though you were continuing in your official capacity as an invited speaker and making official comments, maybe standing in front of a group of diners. What was the dinner situation?<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Oh well, we left the campus and we went to a restaurant in Brookline. There were seven or eight people. I don't remember exactly how many. But we took two cars, we drove to a restaurant in Brookline, and we were sitting around a big round table.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: So there was not an official second part of the evening's festivities that was "the post-talk dinner?"<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: No, it was just sort of a courtesy to take the visiting lecturer out for a meal and schmooze.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: So, you mentioned the unusual. Not unusual, but the strange timing of your experience with this because it came just before all of these other high profile campus events. And it was just on a personal level for me, an interesting matter of timing 'cause I had just finished reading <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26168300-sjws-always-lie" target="_blank">SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police</a> by Vox Day. And in that book, he describes the pattern of attacks that usually take place around these issues on campus, and something that I was really pleased to see you had done was that you hadn't apologized, and in fact you had taken an aggressive stance to defend yourself. Because in the book, as he describes repeatedly how the Social Justice Warriors pick their targets based on perceived vulnerability, and if you apologize, they just see that as confirmation of your vulnerability and they go in for the kill. For example, the chancellor at the University of Missouri apologized, and that was just before he was forced to step down. And I noticed you didn't apologize, and as far as I can tell, they've decided to leave you alone.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, what I said explicitly at the... <a href="http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/good-little-maoists/" target="_blank">I wrote a blog</a>, I have a regular Monday blog, comes out every Monday morning, it's called Clusterfuck Nation, and I've been writing it for 15 years. And after that experience, I wrote a blog about it. And at the end of the blog, I basically stated that I am their enemy. I am the enemy of this kind of behavior explicitly. And I felt a little bit lonely in that capacity, but basically, they picked the wrong guy to fuck with.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Right. And because you have demonstrated convincingly that you are not the target they're looking for, they have moved on. Obviously, they found new targets because if you are searching the internet for evidence of their activities, it is replete with it. Although it doesn't...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, yeah. I wasn't a very big fish for... I was just one among many people who got caught in that maelstrom. But what amazed me about the whole thing, and which I subsequently, you could see in all the other incidents, was how cowardly the faculty and administration are in this situation. I wrote a letter to the guy who had invited me, he was the head of the committee that invited me to speak. It was a foundation actually that brings speakers into Boston College, some kind of endowed lecture. And I wrote a note to him the day after Rhonda Frederick wrote that thing, and I said something like, "I don't think it's very nice for you guys to try to defame people on social media after you invite them to speak." And I never got a reply from the guy. He was such a coward, he never even spoke to me again. And nobody in the administration did anything to challenge Rhonda Frederick, who wasn't present either at the lecture or the incident in question. She just wanted to grandstand for her particular Social Justice Warrior benefit. And a lot of this, of course, is careerism of a certain type because the Social Justice Warrior culture has so completely taken over the university that the more grandstanding you do for it, probably, the higher status you accrue in that world.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Exactly. I wonder what your thoughts are on the entirety of <i>SJWs Always Lie</i> by Vox Day.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, I wish I remember the particulars of it better. I think he understood the dynamic very well. I think he understands exactly how it works, and I would actually define it as being more a low grade Maoism, really. But he really got it. Now, he's a peculiar figure himself because he's coming from the gaming industry, the video gaming industry.<br />
<br />
<b>KMO</b>: And science fiction.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And science fiction. And he's a peculiar character himself. He is, to some extent a professional controversialist and he really, really relishes mixing it up with characters like this. But I think, all of us are engaged in a battle against a very pernicious dynamic, and it isn't that much different from what you saw in the cultural revolution in China in the 1960s, Maoism, where you get a bunch of really hysterical people behaving in a crazy way. And it's a kind of thing that I suspect just burns itself out and people get sick of it, and then its internal contradictions become self-evident and abhorrent. You saw the same thing in the Salem witchcraft trials in the 1690s, in New England, where you have a lot of people are persecuted and treated very badly, and executed, and hanged, and pressed under stones for this delusional idea that the devil is walking around Salem, Massachusetts. And they end up being so appalled at their own behavior two years later, that they can't believe what they did. And of course, history doesn't forget it either. But it's a similar thing with Maoism, neither of us are culturally Chinese, but imagine how embarrassed people are who went through that and who stood by and did nothing.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, at the time, intervening could get you killed, but...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, true.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: But that's not the case here. With the book, <i>SJWs Always Lie</i>, if anybody were to read it, I would suggest reading only chapters three, seven, and ten. The rest of it is really very self-absorbed, it's largely about what happened to the author, Vox Day, and how he took a lot of stuff personally. And the chapters I just mentioned contain good information that would be useful to anybody who has to interact professionally in the university system or in the Silicon Valley culture. But to say that he's a controversial character is to really understate it. I mean, he is deliberately offensive to self-identified leftists, so much so, that I can't imagine many strongly self-identified leftists getting through the book because they would be so angry at the author. And even if they did get through he book, they would probably be in such a state of agitation and indignation that they would miss the advice that he has on offer and towards...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I don't think that they're his audience...<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: No, they're not.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: I think that there is a broad swathe of reasonable people out there, who see through all this nonsense. He's trying to explain the dynamic for them and encourage them to battle it. I don't think he's trying to persuade the SJWs themselves to change their ways.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: No, he's not.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: 'Cause they're not gonna.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: He's certainly not trying to persuade them, but I think the advice he gives would be useful to a lot of people who are not gonna read the book just because he is such an odious character. But at the end of the book, he says that if an organization isn't explicitly conservative, then it will become liberal over time. So, it is your mission, if you are part of an organization, to make sure, not only that the SJWs don't work their way into your organization, but that you identify the liberals in your organization and use every underhanded SJW tactic against the liberals to get them fired. Lie when possible. Take things out of context as you need to. He suggests, just after describing at book-length all of the dirty underhanded tactics of his self-declared opponents, he then says to his compatriots, "Now go and do everything they do," which I think is terrible advice.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. Well, it's not cool, and let's hope that there are enough rational, reasonable people of good intention out there who wanna take back their culture and not persecute other people and not be unfair to them. I think you and I represent that group of people who are not that crazy, and I think there are a lot more of us out there. But they've certainly made it difficult for people, for example, in the university setting itself, to function. They've made it so dangerous to be a reasonable, rational person, that many of the people who might oppose this behavior, end up ruining their careers or losing their positions, and it's a terrible thing.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: So, I don't know. But the scene itself was pretty interesting and amusing out there and you wonder how far up its rear end the culture has to put its head in order to get to this place. For example, part of the fall uproar this year was at Princeton University, where a sort of "Black Lives Matter" kind of allied group went to the president of Princeton and said, "We want you to take Woodrow Wilson's name off of everything, off the buildings and the foundation letterhead and everything because Woodrow Wilson was an arch segregationist. And by the way, we wanna have our own black student union." How can...<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: No irony there.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: How can the president of the university not burst out laughing in his office at those demands? Or how could the New York Times not underscore the idiocy of that? But this is not happening in our culture. We've lost our critical faculties, and people like the president of Princeton have lost their balls. They just don't dare challenge these obvious idiocies. That's the kind of thing that happened. And I was heartened to see how the woman at Yale [<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/" target="_blank">Erika Christakis</a>] comported herself. She was the lady who responded to a memo sent out by the Yale administration. Probably one of the diversity deans sent out this memo by email to all the faculty, and all of the house masters, all through the college system. And it said, "Don't allow people to dress up in Halloween costumes that might offend anybody. Don't dress up as Indians, or pirates, or certainly not in black face, or really nothing that would offend anybody." So, this woman, who was a faculty member and also one of the house masters, a faculty member who resides in the dormitory and manages things there, behavior there.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: She wrote a memo back and sent it out to the faculty saying that, "This is a university where the kids oughta make up their own minds about what they do with their Halloween costumes, and then they'll be responsible for the consequences of the choices that they make." So, she was visited by some mob of inflamed Social Justice Warrior students, and she ended up resigning her class assignments for the year. And her husband, who was also a co-house master at this residential college at Yale, he also stopped teaching that year and went on sabbatical. So, they sort of drove them out of their regular duties, but they didn't make them resign. And I think, she showed a lot of spine and a lot of courage in dealing with the things that were happening to her. But most other places they don't. Most other places they just cave, and when they cave, of course, they really get mistreated.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Well, Jim, that's about all the time that we have for this conversation but I have really enjoyed it, and I look forward to visiting you in, it's Greenwich, right?<br />
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[chuckle]<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Greenwich or...<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Greenwich, [pronounced with a long E sound] we call it.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Greenwich, okay.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: And the high school football team is called the Witches.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Uh oh.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Go figure that.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: For how much longer, I wonder.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Yeah. Well, until the Social Justice Warriors make them change it to the Warlocks.<br />
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[laughter]<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: I don't know, I think both could be considered prejudicial against Wiccans.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: There you go, yeah. Well, let's hope that just doesn't happen.<br />
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<b>KMO</b>: Yep. Well hey, it has been fun. And as you like to say, we will ride again.<br />
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<b>JHK</b>: Well, thanks for calling and give me a shout when you land up here.</div>
KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-86607797959995069592015-01-22T10:52:00.002-08:002015-01-22T10:52:28.429-08:00It's official. The Age of Limits gathering is on hiatus<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Last year I attended <a href="http://www.4qf.org/age-of-limits-sustainable-life-skills" target="_blank">the Age of Limits gathering at Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary</a> in rural Pennsylvania. Most of the presenters were repeat C-Realm Podcast guests, and it was good to re-connect with them. I also enjoyed the opportunity to re-connect with C-Realm listeners and meet others for the first time. As denizens of countless subcultures have learned in the brief span of years since the dawn of the internet age, the internet is a great tool for finding the others, but no amount of screen time can match time spent together, in the flesh, for creating genuine human bonds.<br />
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That said, I understand and support Orren Whiddon and the other stakeholders invested in the annual AoL gathering in their decision to take a break from preaching the good word of collapse preparedness and to devote their energies inward. Here is the text of Orren's official announcement on the subject:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">Hello All</span><br />
<span class="im" style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span><span style="color: #500050;">I wanted to let you know that we have made the decision not to host The Age of Limits Conference in 2015.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: #500050;">There are a number of reasons for our staff having made this choice, and the relative break even status of the finances is actually a minor reason. More important is that our volunteer staff has come to the realization that they have simply taken on too much with our packed schedule, and AoL is very demanding of our volunteer resources.</span><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">Here on the Land we need to tend to our own growing list of collapse mitigation projects, some of which I spoke to in my presentations. The Water Works is large on that list with its integrated windmill pumping, distribution, catchment basins and fish ponds. And we are considering expanding the land holdings of our income-sharing community. Last year we harvested our first large crop of rye and have now earnestly begun a regular cover cropping program. And our construction projects are never ending. All of this takes time, a commodity that for us is more precious than money.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">Many of our presenters also feel the pressure to "take care of business." The pace of change quickens and as I like to say, once you understand the science of collapse, there you are! At some point we start repeating ourselves, and many of us prefer to be engaged in our own personal preparations. The specific techniques of mitigating collapse in ones personal life are well known and broadly disseminated, it simply remains to begin. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">As for action on a national or global scale, certainly there is room for that, but I suspect it is a small room. My own opinion is that we human primates are hard wired, for a host of good evolutionary reasons, to dissipate energy and resources as quickly as possible, turning those resources into as many chattering, charming and hopelessly flawed replication units as time and resources allow. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">It may well be we will return to The Age of Limits Conference in three years or so. That would allow time to sharpen your own interest, and allow for our presenters to refresh their ideas on the accelerating unfolding of events. So pencil in the date, sometime in 2017. Until then I thank you for your support and offer my best wish that you may "Collapse Now and Avoid The Rush!"</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">Orren Whiddon</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.7272720336914px;">The Age of Limits</span></div>
KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-42665115304096023502014-06-13T13:10:00.000-07:002014-06-13T21:14:19.674-07:00Three Conferences in Three Weeks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-a6513e8f-96b9-5123-3143-6079772a95a6"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This weekend will be the first time in the past month that I will not attend a conference of some kind, and I’m definitely ready for a break. Over Memorial Day weekend I attended the <a href="http://ageoflimits.org/" target="_blank">Age of Limits</a> conference at Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary in Artemis, Pennsylvania, where I facilitated conversations and recorded interviews with the conference attendees. The next weekend I attended one day of a 3-day gathering held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan called <a href="http://www.leftforum.org/" target="_blank">the Left Forum</a>, an annual gathering of Leftists of various stripes. This past weekend, Olga and I drove to Northeastern University in Boston to record interviews with the presenters at <a href="http://commonbound.org/" target="_blank">CommonBound</a>, a gathering convened by the <a href="http://neweconomy.net/new-economy-coalition" target="_blank">New Economy Coalition</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-a6513e8f-96b9-5123-3143-6079772a95a6"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All three conferences served, at least in part, to carve out a space for discussions around topics and concerns that have no place in the corporate media or in official government pronouncements. Each of the three gatherings had it’s own individual flavor. The worldviews on display at the Left Forum were a hodgepodge of long-enduring (some ossified) obsessions with very little to unify them other than the fact that they stand in opposition to the ideologies of the dominant power structure. Both the Age of Limits and CommonBound conferences were more coherent. Both gatherings were premised on their own implicit and explicit assumptions about the state of the contemporary political, social and economic landscapes. Each event had its own roster of memes which they hoped to see usurp the position of the privileged narrative which relentlessly presses upon the public consciousness in defense of the <i>status quo</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Wednesday, May 21st, I traveled by Amtrak from NYC to DC to <a href="http://www.ci.cumberland.md.us/new_site/" target="_blank">Cumberland, Maryland</a> where I expected to be picked up and shuttled to Four Quarters Farm. A vehicular breakdown at Four Quarters left me sitting on the curb next to the locked Amtrak station in Cumberland for about 45 minutes where I watched the locals passing by. Granted, sitting by the tracks at dusk on Wednesday evening is probably not a recipe for spotting Cumberland’s best and brightest, but as I sat and people-watched from that vantage point, I heard Jim Kunstler’s voice in my head, and I mentally ticked off the adjectives that Jim regularly uses to describe those with broken or marginal connections to the once thriving working class: Overweight, unhealthy, and demoralized. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every society has it broken people, and even in the best of times, at least a small and dysfunctional underclass will persist, so my experience could hardly stand as exhibit A in the prosecution’s case against the prospects for perpetual growth. Even so, my curbside observations did help me summon up a collapse mindset appropriate for the Age of Limits. I’ve had difficulty maintaining that mindset while living in my gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. When I lived in rural Tennessee and drove to Maryland every six weeks to visit my children, I passed through prosperous hotspots as well as the decaying areas that Chris Hedges describes as “sacrifice zones.” Moving over the surface patchwork of the American landscape on a regular basis, it was easy to see that entropy is winning even though affluence and societal complexity continue their ascension in some places. These oases are the places that techno-utopians and the apologists for oligarchy (two sets with considerable overlap) can point to as characteristic of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism" target="_blank">extropian </a>age they insist we live in. You can hop between airports in prosperous cities and never lay eyes on the sacrifice zones and so avoid any experience that would spoil the body confirmatory anecdotal evidence that bolsters your triumphalist narrative. But if you drive cross country (especially if you get off the interstate highways), you will see things through your windshield that will perturb your beatific vision. Likewise, you could sit on the curb by the train tracks in Cumberland, Maryland to achieve the same result.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cumberland, Maryland and Four Quarters Farm are a 20 minute drive and a world apart. I won’t pretend to have any insight into the narratives that the folks in Cumberland use to make sense of their position in the flow of history. I imagine them to be making the best of a depressing present while neither buying into nor adequately challenging promises of an economic recovery and a return to prosperity. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">KMO, Olga & Johio at Age of Limits</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At Four Quarters, they live according to a very different story. As <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/409-the-ultimate-metric-of-doom/" target="_blank">Orren Whiddon</a> explained to me on a tour of the grounds, the people who live there see themselves as “living in the fat” at the moment while preparing for lean times ahead. They raise cows and chickens to feed themselves and are preparing to move into aquaculture. They have a machine shop full of rebuilt equipment which allows them to run a local business that contributes to their income. They make and sell Mead, and while people still have the discretionary means to travel for pleasure, Four Quarters hosts a variety of outdoor events, including a large electronic dance music festival. They are working to transform the opportunities of the moment into durable support systems for a re-localized future. Every aspect of site development seems built to last and continue functioning in hard times, and yet those same structures and systems exude a spiritual and artistic sensibility that dispels preconceived Doomer stereotypes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Orren explained to the assembled attendees that Age of Limits is the only conference left that is dedicated to discussing the implications of collapse. The full title for the gathering is “</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Age of Limits Conference & Conversations on the Collapse of The Global Industrial Model,” and their website specifies that the gathering is “dedicated to the pioneering work of Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers & Dennis Meadows and their epochal 1972 report "The Limits to Growth."” There have been collapse-aware gatherings, but with the end of the <a href="http://peak-oil.org/" target="_blank">ASPO </a>gatherings, there is no event left devoted to discussions of collapse and die-off. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The dominant narrative in “Save the Earth” circles is that political and economic systems can be reformed, that “smart growth” can continue indefinitely, and that the human population can maintain itself at its present level without drawing down and permanently degrading the “ecosystem services” it depends on. <a href="http://cluborlov.com/" target="_blank">Dmitry Orlov</a>, author of multiple books with the word “collapse” in the title confirmed that he used to be invited to speak on the topic at various conferences and that those speaking invitations have dried up. His message is no longer welcome at those gatherings. If you want to talk about collapse at an organized gathering, the only option left is to do it in a campground in the woods in rural Pennsylvania. This is certainly a more suitable venue than assembling in $200 a night hotels to talk about collapse and die-off, and it is a more rewarding setting as well.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The starting assumption for all conversations at the Age of Limits is that the <a href="http://www.clubofrome.org/" target="_blank">Club of Rome</a> got it basically right in 1972 and no continuation of business as usual will see human civilization through the 21st Century without major upheaval. Within the tacitly agreed upon confines of that starting assumption, attendees explored the possibility of a protracted catabolic collapse as described by John Michael Greer in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4347496-the-long-descent?from_search=true" target="_blank">The Long Descent: </a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4347496-the-long-descent?from_search=true" target="_blank">A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age</a>. Other conversations plumbed the idea space in the realm of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fast collapse scenarios.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I see collapse as a collection of lenses through which to view and talk about the future, but I’m also wary of the dangers of having only one story by which to orient myself in the world and by which to navigate my way into the future. You could reasonably count me as a collapse skeptic, but I would add that I fully inhabited the collapse headspace for a time and I still take it seriously. At Age of Limits, I kept my collapse caveats mostly to myself for the sake of letting the conversations in which I took part get well away from their starting point. I did not want to say anything that would prompt the other participants to argue for first principles and thus keep us in very familiar conversational territory. I discovered that I was not the only crypto-collapse skeptic in attendance. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Days at the Age of Limits were organized around presentations by the invited speakers followed by question and answer sessions and comments from the audience. After dinner, both attendees and presenters re-assembled in the presentation space for conversations in the round in which the invited speakers could participate but on an equal footing with the regular conference attendees. On Saturday night, I broke off to run an alternative conversation in the round with about a dozen friends of the C-Realm. You can hear that conversation in C-Realm Podcast episode 317: Timelines for Collapse. If you listen to that conversation you will hear that student debt and the growing danger of a lifetime of debt peonage for a sizable portion of the population ranked high among the concerns that people brought with them to the Age of Limits. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To the best of my recollection, none of the invited speakers explicitly addressed the topic of student debt in their presentations, but it surfaced in conversation again and again at the Age of Limits, as did concern over the rapidly developing apparatus of the surveillance state. It occurs to me that someone committed to the vision of a fast and irrevocable systemic collapse would not worry much about these two trends. Maintaining the records of educational debt and enforcing repayment through wage-garnishment, asset forfeiture and withholding of Social Security and Medicare benefits would require a functioning financial and governmental bureaucracy supported by a working electrical grid and massive IT infrastructure. The same holds true for concerns around a high-tech Panopticon society. The fact that these remain items of sincere concern for so many of the people who gathered in that beautiful patch of Pennsylvania tells me that they still envision some future other than the sorts presented in Cormac McCarthy’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6288.The_Road?from_search=true" target="_blank">The Road</a>, Jim Kunstler’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.World_Made_by_Hand?from_search=true" target="_blank">World Made By Hand</a> novels, or in George Miller’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_max" target="_blank">Mad Max</a> films.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In short, I had a marvelous time at the Age of Limits. I look forward to participating again in 2015.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next weekend, I attended the Left Forum at the suggestion of a C-Realm listener who wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My dad and I have been attending for more than 10 years now. With that experience I must issue a caution: set no high expectations for the conference itself. It is, for lack of a more imaginative description, kind of an odd affair. You will encounter everyone from (deeply) greying academics to young anarchists rebelling their way through school and quite a variety in between. It is at once enlightening, informative, disappointing, frustrating, and down right head-shaking. But I do enjoy it for some reason.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m as drawn to a good freak show as the next person, so I visited the Left Forum website to see about getting press credentials. I followed the instructions I found on the site, but I never heard back from the conference organizers. A few days before the conference I called them to see how things were going. There was no indication that the Left Forum organizers had received or considered my request. The listener who suggested that I attend also made a donation to the podcast sufficient to cover my registration, so I registered and paid for one day. By then the symptoms of a vicious summer cold had their claws in me, and I didn’t have the energy to “cover” the gathering like I would have had I been admitted as a member of the media, so it now seems like the lack of administrative rigor at the Left Forum worked out for the best.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first of the two Left Forum sessions I attended was a panel discussion called </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Financial Parasitism: Understanding the "Great Vampire Squids.” The panelists were Michael Perelman, Julio Huato and Michael Hudson. I found their presentations lucid, on topic and relevant. My experience of that first session raised my expectations for the rest of the event, perhaps to an unworkably high level. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After that first session I went to lunch with the C-Realm listener who suggested that I attend the Left Forum. He asked me what I thought of the event, and I said something to the effect that while I was impressed with the panelists at the first session, the fragments of conversation I caught in passing, the contents of the vendors’ tables, and the gauntlet of people pushing leftist newspapers outside the venue all gave me the impression that the various strands of resistance represented at the event were old, well-established, well-rehearsed in their criticisms of the <i>status quo</i> and of each other, and not particularly attuned to changing conditions. As such, they present no serious challenge or threat to the <i>status quo</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When we returned from lunch I attended a panel discussion about <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/178241/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine#" target="_blank">cloud labor</a>. One of the panelists had researched the topic and had a lot of good information to share. The second panelist had experience campaigning for the rights and well-being of sex workers. That background provided her with a viable entry into the topic. Though she hadn’t researched cloud labor </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">per se</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, her presentation was still informative, interesting, fact-based, and relevant. The third panelist’s presentation seemed to have no connection whatsoever to the topic of cloud labor and amounted to a very well-rehearsed exercise in identity politics complete with a lot of academic jargon. If I were David Koch, I would give her a well-paid think tank job and spend lavishly to amplify her voice in order to drown out more lucid and incisive voices on the left. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The effects of the energy drink that I had consumed in order to power through my illness were starting to wane, so I called it quits for the Left Forum after that second panel discussion. I know I’m giving the event short shrift, and I’m willing to give it another go next year when I’m firing on all cylinders, but I was neither inspired nor impressed by the quality of criticism or resistance represented at this event.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">KMO at CommonBound 2014</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Friday, June 6th, Olga and I loaded up the truck and set out for Boston. Justin Ritchie of the <a href="http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/" target="_blank">Extraenvironmentalist </a>podcast was leading a team of audio/visual professionals who were handling the livestream for CommonBound, a conference of the New Economy Coalition. When we arrived, Olga and I parted ways. She took on the task of getting us checked into our accommodations and unloading the truck, and I went with filmmaker Mark Dixon, the creator of <a href="http://www.yert.com/" target="_blank">YERT (Your Environmental Road Trip)</a>, to shoot a quick and dirty documentary about the brilliant success that an organization called the <a href="http://www.dsni.org/" target="_blank">Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative</a> has achieved in arresting the disintegration of a neighborhood blighted by arson and illegal dumping and creating a more livable area while simultaneously keeping it affordable for its original inhabitants and not simply creating a bounty for real estate speculators. This struck me as an auspicious beginning to the conference.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Compared to the Left Forum, the presenters and the attendees at CommonBound seemed much more actively engaged in new initiatives that are less focused on ideological lineages and more attuned to current conditions and the opportunities of the moment. While I was impressed with the focus on positive action, my inner contrarian balked at what I read as naivete concerning the actual dimensions of our predicament. I did hear talk of climate change, and more than a little discussion of divesting from fossil fuel companies, but on the whole, the prevailing attitude seemed to be that with a change in management and a bunch of solar panels, the current system could be made just, egalitarian and sustainable. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I asked one of my interviewees about the challenge of sharing a growing pie versus that of more equitably distributing a shrinking pie. In theory, growth can allow us to address wealth inequality by directing more of the newly generated wealth to people in need without taking anything away from those who already control more than their share. Correcting imbalances in a contracting system is a horse of a different color all together. It requires that people who control more than their fair share actually give over some of their surplus to those with less. His response was that he was optimistic that we will always keep the pie growing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea that growth will support a shift toward social justice without triggering the active resistance of current elites may have been prevalent at CommonBound, but it was certainly not all pervasive. Someone who had attended Age of Limits approached me at CommonBound and asked me how I reconciled my participation in both gatherings, given their divergent worldviews. I felt like a conspirator sharing my less-than-total buy in to the faith in unqualified progress with a fellow crypto-skeptic.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As the conference progressed, I found other heretics amidst the progressives. I recorded an interview with <a href="http://neweconomy.net/people/donnie-maclurcan" target="_blank">Donnie Maclurcan</a>, co-founder of the Post Growth Institute, and I was thrilled that one of the panelists in a plenary session on Sunday was <a href="http://www.kresgeartsindetroit.org/fellowships/2013-fellows/adrienne-maree-brown/" target="_blank">Adrienne Maree Brown</a>. Brown is an aficionado of the fiction of the late Octavia E. Butler. Butler explored a variety of collapse and societal decay scenarios in her <a href="http://www.octaviasbrood.com/" target="_blank">speculative fiction</a>, and Brown channeled Butler in challenging the audience to ask what they are willing to give up in the world that is taking shape in order to retain that which is most dear to them. I found her corrective to the have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too thinking I encountered elsewhere at CommonBound strangely inspirational. Tales of a perfected world arouse my skepticism. Conjured vistas that include a dark side let my skepticism rest unprovoked and allow my battered sense of hope an opportunity to stretch out and explore the space of possibilities. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Age of Limits and CommonBound both provided a space in which to explore possibilities that currently occupy the government and corporate media’s “no fly” list. There is much to explore, and I hope to continue my explorations at those same gatherings next year. I recognize that my sample size is way to small to arrive at any legitimate generalizations about the Left Forum. My impression is that the conversations there were too insular and too invested in old debates to find the adaptive memes that will transform the zeitgeist of late industrial culture. If I could only attend two out of the three events next time around, I would sacrifice the Left Forum without hesitation, but nobody has asked me to make that sacrifice, so I’ll end with a reminder to myself that all judgments are provisional and any reality-oriented worldview will amend itself in response to new data.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-77189085132727870752014-05-06T10:42:00.000-07:002014-05-06T14:47:35.184-07:00Mantra and Collapse<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Looking through my notes for the last few episodes of the C-Realm Podcast, I'm drawn to the topic of meditation and collapse. A C-Realm listener sent me a couple of different emails recently expressing his/her contempt for advocates of meditation, asserting, among other things, that sexual abuse of students is rampant in the communities that organize around Buddhist meditation celebrities. (Along similar lines, you can hear<a href="http://dopecast.libsyn.com/psychonautica-103" target="_blank"> a Psychonautica conversation I recorded with Lily Kay Ross</a> about the routine sexual predation that takes place in the context of ayahuasca tourism in South America.)
Whenever I invite any sort of comparison between the benefits of meditation and psychedelics I can reasonably expect to get one letter reminding me of the Buddhist prohibition against "intoxicants." The authors of these missives don't seem to draw any distinctions between the effects of drinking alcohol and the effects of taking psychedelics. One opiner went so far as to assert that there is no meaningful distinction to be drawn between participating in an ayahuasca ceremony, sniffing glue, or hitting oneself in the head with a mallet. This opinion has never come prefaced with anything that established credibility or gave me reason to take the author seriously on the issue.
A less hyperbolic but equally reliable response that I can count on receiving from people who favor meditation but disapprove of psychedelics is the claim that meditation is spiritual work which gives lasting benefit while psychedelics are the equivalent of a helicopter ride to the top of the mountain that provides no expanded perspective once the ride is over. There is likely an element of truth to this claim, and I don't list it in order to dismiss it. I only mention it because it is something I encounter regularly. To receive a communication saying that psychedelics provide valuable insight but that the practice of meditation, in any of its popular forms, amounts to coercive mental conditioning intended to perpetuate abusive imbalances of power is more of a novelty and deserves consideration.
The idea that meditative practice should be seen primarily as harmful is a challenging one for me to entertain, because I have long expressed the opinion that psychedelic experience without some daily practice by which to integrate the expanded perspective into one's daily life is likely to dissipate and leave the experienced psychonaut with the mistaken impression that they have passed some experiential or spiritual mile marker which sets them apart from and above the majority of the population. While I don't count this as an exhaustive list, the most attractive candidates for integrative daily practice for me have been free writing, tai chi chuan, meditation, ceremonial majick and yoga.
I live two blocks from <a href="http://jayayogacenter.com/" target="_blank">a yoga studio</a> where I do work exchange. The more classes I take, the better value I get in exchange for my labor, so I practice yoga most every day. In a given week, I'll take classes with 4 or 5 different teachers. Every class starts with a group recitation of "ohm" but from there each one takes its own trajectory. Some teachers direct the students' attention primarily to the bodily movements and physical details of the yoga postures. Other teachers direct the students' attention inward with the aim of developing sensitivity to aspects of our mental, physical, emotional or spiritual lives which would otherwise get drowned out by the competing noises of our over-scheduled, IT-fixated, urban existence.
The most demanding class is ostensibly a beginner-level one taught by a teacher named <a href="http://jayayogacenter.com/about-us/teachers/michael" target="_blank">Michael</a>. He spends more time talking about yogic philosophy and meditative practice at the beginning of class than do most teachers, but then, when we start moving through the postures, he has us repeat and/or hold strenuous postures to the point where I leave the class feeling like I've gotten a real workout. But more than just putting us through our paces physically, he regularly piles on a mental challenge to up the ante.
The focus at my local studio for the month of May is mantra, which Wikipedia defines as "a sacred utterance, numinous sound, or a syllable, word, phonemes, or group of words believed by some to have psychological and spiritual power.
<a href="http://jayayogacenter.com/about-us/teachers/carla" target="_blank">Carla</a>, whose class I take on Saturday mornings, says that the first mantra is simply the sound of the breath. It can be hard to focus on the sound of the breath in a place like Brooklyn, with nothing but a pane of glass separating our storefront practice space from the</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> traffic noise and cell phone conversations of passers by. The other day, to compensate for these distractions, Carla had us stick our fingers in our ears so that we could focus on the sound of our inhalations and exhalations. This is an instructive exercise, but it's hard to take a downward facing dog position with your fingers in your ears, so a mantra that is more active than just listening to the sound of one's breath can be helpful.</span></div>
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Olga and I take Michael's class on Sunday afternoon and again on Monday morning. On Sunday, Michael had all of us repeat the following series of syllables over and over:
"ha"
"va"
"gu"
"de"
The point, he explained, is that while you are reciting the mantra aloud or to yourself, you are prevented from repeating some more habitual self-accusation, complaint or unhelpful fragment of interior monologue. The exact meaning of the mantra you choose is largely irrelevant. It can be meaningful to you, but it can also be a single syllable or a phrase in a language you don't understand. So long as it is not something actively harmful, like "I'm too fat" or "I can't do anything right" or "everyone is against me" then it counts as a step in a helpful direction.
On Sunday, Michael also had us hold the Virabhadrasana (warrior) II pose for much longer than we normally would, and as my quadriceps and deltoids started to burn with the effort of holding the pose, he encouraged us to find a personal mantra and repeat it to take our focus away from the physical discomfort of holding the pose. The mantra that popped into my head, for the first time in many years, was, "Namu Amida Butsu."
This mantra comes from a Japanese sect of Mahayana Buddhism. Amitābha, pronounced Amida in Japanese, is the celestial Buddha of infinite light, and he is believed to have prepared an afterlife called the Pure Land where there are no distractions to divert the sincere seeker from achieving release from the cycle of death and rebirth. Anyone who sincerely invokes his name, even just once, will be reborn in the Pure Land after death, and from there, they will achieve permanent release from the suffering that is existence.
The phrase "Namu Amida Butsu" can be translated as "homage to" or "adoration of the Buddha of lnfinite Light," and many adherents use it as a mantra. The practice of reciting this phrase is called the Nembutsu. I first learned about it when I audited a religious studies class at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan in the early 90s.
I don't recall ever having practiced the Nembutsu with any sort of serious commitment back then, but when Micheal encouraged us to summon up some phrase to focus on to take our mental focus off of the discomfort of holding the warrior II pose, the Nembutsu presented itself to me. I took it up, and it did the trick. The discomfort faded.
I used the phrase in my practice again the next morning, and not only did it help take my mental focus away from the discomfort of my yoga practice, but it also helped me to keep my attention from gravitating to the pain in my sore throat.
The person who wrote to me about the abusive uses of meditation claimed that Transcendental Meditation, a specific form of mantra practice, is useful for kids in school, people in prison, and forced sex workers as it helps people in abusive situations carry out their assigned tasks without complaint or rebellion. Other critics of yoga and meditation worry that people who direct their efforts to finding peace within themselves will not work to right the wrongs in the world at large. They will not feel the drive to engage in political struggle or to correct the systemic dysfunction that is driving global industrial civilization to ruin. This view equates personal suffering and dissatisfaction with the necessary fuel for taking corrective action in the social sphere.
I’m reminded of the perpetual leftist lament, “Where’s the outrage?” The Right has perfected the art of sustaining perpetual outrage in large segments of the working class at snobby intellectuals, effete urbanites, welfare leeches, job-stealing immigrants, dirty hippies and “collectivists.” Their counterparts on the political Left assume that their own rank and file are too smart, complacent and reflexively diplomatic to go in for this sort of dirty pool, and so the Left must struggle at a perpetual disadvantage to the Right.
When I think about the angriest people I encounter in real life, on-line and in the media, I get the impression that the focus of their rage runs the gamut from “extremely distorted caricature of reality” to “simply false” to “utter gibberish.” At the former end of that spectrum reside racist dog whistles disguised as a commitment to hard-work and self-reliance in a country where most welfare recipients are white but indignation about taking welfare checks over pay checks is focused squarely on blacks.
Closer to the middle of that spectrum, in the region of the simply false, reside things like the belief that the President of the United States is a Kenyan-born Muslim who rules white America with a tyrannical ferocity that bears no continuity with the practices of previous administrations. This region is also home to the belief that peak oil and anthropocentric climate disruption are hoaxes perpetrated by an international cabal of tree-hugging satanists. Alex Jones, while distancing himself from the thinly-veiled racism of the Fox News narrative, works himself into an apoplectic state on camera every day of the week over the globalist plot to enslave humanity with the manufactured crises of resource depletion and climate change.
The "utter gibberish" end of the spectrum is home to the word “Benghazi,” which at one time referred to a violent event in Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans in 2012. Now the word is just the start of a short stimulus/response circuit which bypasses any pretense at conscious thought and immediately prompt a neurochemal cascade that causes the conditioned subject to feel euphoric rage at “the nigger in the White House.”
It seems odd to me that anyone on the Left would look on with envy at this spectacle of human debasement. Of course, I realize that <i>some </i>radical vegans can hold their own with the most vehement ditto-heads in the rage response department, just as <i>some </i>of the angriest environmentalists are no more discriminating in the selection of the data points upon which they build their worldviews and base their fury than are the most highly-motivated climate “skeptics.”
Rather than seeing these outliers as “a good start” or “a base on which to build" I would hope that they would provide a sobering reminder that using rage to foster constructive social change is about as viable as using a flame thrower to toast bread.
What does all this have to do with collapse? Well, in<a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/411-the-strange-fuzzy-fat-brick-of-everything/" target="_blank"> a recent C-Realm Podcast discussion with contemplative scientist, Katherine MacLean</a>, I explained the history of the C-Realm Podcast and the evolving focus which once centered on the peak oil collapse narrative and coming to grips with the abyss of human suffering that looms on the near horizon. I asked her what role meditation might play in a culture that is distracting itself with trivia on the road to calamity.
Katherine responded by saying Buddhism has been talking about the abyss of human suffering for 2,500 years. It has always seemed like we were about to be engulfed by an avalanche of suffering but that the leading edge of that avalanche always seems to retreat into the future as we move forward in time. Katherine mentioned the possibility that neither the Pure Land of love and compassion nor the abyss of human suffering lie only in the future. They are both here now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The difference between historical Buddhist thought and the concerns of Katherine's generation of practitioners is that now Buddhists are challenging themselves and each other by asking, "When are we going to get serious about addressing human suffering and eliminating it if we can." Katherine admitted that the question poses a real challenge to her willingness to fully commit to Buddhism...
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">...because it has the ability to make you okay with how really fucked up things are, and for most of human history, being okay with really abject pain and suffering was necessary because there was no refuge. You couldn't just make things better. But now I think we're at a point where we can make a lot of things better, and we just need to take that seriously. I think meditation can make things a little bit worse in the sense that it can make people okay with how things are and not want to change anything, or it can wake you up to the fact that so many people are really suffering, and you are too, even though you feel like you're not.</span></span></blockquote>
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That last sentence is key, I think. All the examples I gave of mental constructs that propagandists on the Right encourage their followers to build and focus their attention on are not the actual source of their rage. They feel rage because they are suffering, but they have been seduced into identifying the cause of their suffering with the actions of snooty intellectuals, crypto-Muslim socialists, or what have you. Were they to commit themselves to looking sincerely inward on a daily basis, they might realize that their suffering does not originate from wherever Glen Beck, Rush Linbaugh, Sean Hannity or Salin Palin are pointing at the moment, and in coming to this realization about their internal lives they might begin to question their allegiances and commitments. Surely such an internal shift in the direction of understanding the causes of their own suffering would have tangible and quantifiable effects in the realm of public policy. Meditation might actually change the world as a result of changing how individual practitioners feel about their role in the human drama.
The uncomfortable flip side to that possibility is that sincere introspection on the Left could bring to light the possibility that the venial capitalists, the media empires they own and direct, their army of lobbyists and the political influence they purchase are also fantasy constructs onto which leftists project the causal agency for their own suffering. Might a softening of the commitment to oppose these forces allow activists on the Left to find common cause with gun nuts, climate deniers, bible thumpers and rednecks and in so doing create a political apparatus that is more responsive to the will of the people than to the needs of Big Money? If that's a hard swallow for you, then perhaps you can feel some compassion for the challenge that people on the Right face in examining and relinquishing their own sense of righteousness and opposition to what they imagine to be the causes of human suffering and degradation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consider also the uncontroversial claim that the Right is better than the Left at scapegoating and whipping up rage. Rage is antithetical to quiet introspection, so folks who are beside themselves with anger over Benghazi or the machinations of the </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bilderbergers have a much harder row to hoe in softening their stance than do most of the people who concern themselves with income inequality, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">or the abuses committed in the name of the War on Drugs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The C-Realm listener who condemned mantra meditation as being good for kids in school, prisoners and forced sex workers did so because it alleviates the suffering of exploited people while doing nothing to right the injustice of their situation. The implication being that these types of suffering are all things than could be abolished. Making them more bearable only perpetuates the injustice. This relates to Katherine MacLean's concern that in centuries past there was no practical expectation that the suffering caused by hunger and disease could be eliminated and so it was moral to promote techniques that reduced suffering, even if these techniques did not actually feed people or supply them with hygienic living conditions. Today, however, we might just be in a position to eradicate the physical deprivations that cause human suffering, and to focus on the symptoms while the root cause is within reach would be immoral.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you believe that it is too late to transition to a post-carbon economy or that the bill of human overshoot must be paid with an abyss of human suffering, then Katherine's concern is moot. If the avalanche really is nearly upon us and the physical consequences of our hydrocarbon-fueled blowout are unavoidable, then anything you can do to ameliorate the intensity of human suffering is not only permissible; it is morally obligatory. It's not your fault that in order to share the tools that alleviate human suffering you must first learn to enjoy their benefits yourself. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you are certain that the Singularity is near or that the end of human suffering is just an achievable</span> <span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">political revolution away, then yes, it's up to you to get off that yoga mat or meditation cushion and supporting AI research or organizing protests, but if you don't know whether the avalanche is upon us or not, then doesn't it make sense to prepare for the worst case scenario and learn to diminish the causal connection between physical and social circumstance and the subjective experience of suffering? </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have no more faith that </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amitābha is saving me a seat in the Pure Land </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">than I do that Artificial Super Intelligence will liberate me from the limitations of my degenerating animal body and make me immortal</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but simply for the immediate relief it provides</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> when my muscles burn in yoga class or when I'm furious at someone who has done me wrong I hope I will remember to recite the Nembutsu. I don't actually believe that the Buddha of Infinite Light will help me achieve re-birth in the Pure Land, but as I understand it, unconditional belief is not a requirement for admission. All that is required is that I make the sincere request for help in emancipating myself from suffering, and so without dogmatic certainty but with all sincerity, I say, "Namu Amida Butsu." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 15.681818008422852px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It seems to me that a blanket condemnation of mantra, mindfulness meditation, or any other contemplative practice is the exclusive domain of True Believers in the perfectibility of human institutions and the irrelevance of the physical limits to growth. I don't consider myself a True Believer, nor do I aspire to join their ranks. Do you?</span></span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-91117049912617889752014-01-14T07:49:00.000-08:002014-01-14T14:42:58.655-08:00Dirty Pool: A Response to Guy McPherson<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dean Farago, Australian permaculturalist and natural building wizard, posted a link to</span><a href="http://www.theautomaticearth.com/crash-demand-response-david-holmgren-3/" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a long essay by Nicole Foss</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to both the</span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/c.realm/?fref=ts" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Friends of the C-Realm</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and the</span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/trendsresearch/" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"> [</a>Redacted]</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> groups on Facebook. Nicole’s essay, which is a response to a</span><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6260923-future-scenarios" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> book</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and</span><a href="http://holmgren.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Crash-on-demand.pdf" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> an essay</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by</span><a href="http://holmgren.com.au/" style="line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> David Holmgren</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, involves a lot of summation and initial preparatory work before she gets down to presenting her own arguments. Her essay comes in at around 8,000 words, and I know that many more people will start reading it than will finish it.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In response,</span><a href="http://guymcpherson.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Guy McPherson</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> lifted ten words from that 8,000 word essay and presented them in a comment on Trends Research Reloaded as if they stood as a fair encapsulation of the position Nicole was attempting to articulate. Those ten words, along with Guy’s pejorative preamble were:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'd be hard pressed to find a stupider statement than this: "the best way to address climate change is not to talk about it.”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guy then followed up with an Orwell quote which provided the poetic language he marshalled to accuse Nicole of acting as an apologist for the status quo and as a well-paid shill who articulates the needs of the powerful in exchange for fat speaker’s fees. He wrote:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'd be hard pressed to find a stupider statement than this: "the best way to address climate change is not to talk about it." In other words, channeling Orwell, "truth is treason in an empire of lies." At least in this case, Foss apparently prefers the empire of lies.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dean rightly identified this as a dirty pool, and Guy objected that those words actually appear in Nicole’s essay and that he therefore committed no act of intellectual dishonesty in presenting them as he did. As if one cannot mislead or misrepresent by cutting and pasting text. Think of all the dishonesty perpetrated in print media with cropped photos and misleading captions.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/id_lE23Z60ORYzdMCcE3Vxg_19tuxZPbYrsWk6zG6PNgmbbOmdFJ2P86cOHOUlNwGW3LIcfJKwCaqjPHb4HQUhFx4W5BrJai3z62gbuhNVh0iYrZVqawAwuzyw" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300px;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/id_lE23Z60ORYzdMCcE3Vxg_19tuxZPbYrsWk6zG6PNgmbbOmdFJ2P86cOHOUlNwGW3LIcfJKwCaqjPHb4HQUhFx4W5BrJai3z62gbuhNVh0iYrZVqawAwuzyw" style="border: 0px solid transparent;" width="300px;" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Professor Guy McPherson</td></tr>
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As I said, Nicole’s essay is very long, and the set of people who will read through to the end will be a small subset of the people who start to read it. I would hate to think of anyone reading Guy’s remarks and then going about their business thinking that they now “knew” something about Nicole's message or the content of her essay. It is my intention to provide here a summation of the relevant portions of David Holmgren’s writings and Nicole's response to them needed to put her statement in context. My hope is to present all of this information and to achieve a reasonable balance between completeness and concision.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than starting at the beginning, let’s first turn our attention to the crime scene. Notice first that Guy has not even quoted an entire sentence. We know this because a sentence begins with a capitalized first word. Nicole’s full sentence reads:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In other words, the best way to address climate change is not to talk about it.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We can see why Guy did not cut and paste the entire sentence. Those first three words tell us that what follows is not meant to stand alone. To remove that deliberate qualifier and present the rest of the sentence as if it were meant to represent Nicole’s position without some additional context is an act of attempted deception.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That full sentence comes at the end of a paragraph which appears in bold type. That paragraph itself appears after of several pages of preparatory spade work. That full, bold type paragraph reads:</span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-1b2be7e6-917b-bea4-0f7e-8834cbc18e61" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>The difference is that both financial crisis and peak oil are far more personal and immediate than climate change, and so are far bigger motivators of behavioral change. For this reason, addressing arguments in these terms is far more likely to be effective. In other words, the best way to address climate change is not to talk about it.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first three words of this paragraph again communicate that even the full paragraph is not meant to stand alone, but at least we now have a little bit of context for Nicole’s remark. She’s talking about effective ways to communicate with people to motivate adaptive lifestyle and behavioral change.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ2JkMacmCYhZ_T7eWfhwj4Rw2sQzwU8Qqqbz6VuTcvBOdYf_q816iLoeNQYHNb55da4qLLPg1nDlNyXcUia2DG9bE7dfo2E5WM9LCLouFcD7ybGNujZWrIY4ZqujF2lyvqsA10Ksihhhn/s1600/Nicole_Foss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ2JkMacmCYhZ_T7eWfhwj4Rw2sQzwU8Qqqbz6VuTcvBOdYf_q816iLoeNQYHNb55da4qLLPg1nDlNyXcUia2DG9bE7dfo2E5WM9LCLouFcD7ybGNujZWrIY4ZqujF2lyvqsA10Ksihhhn/s1600/Nicole_Foss.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nicole Foss</td></tr>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I could continue to expand outward from here with this cut and paste methodology, revealing more of Nicole’s intent in the process, but that would defeat my aim of reasonable brevity. So, from here, I will summarize in my own words with the full knowledge that I will be leaving a lot of Nicole’s points unrepresented and that I may also, inadvertently, misrepresent some of what she and David Holmgren had intended to communicate. Still, if you read to the end of my synopsis, you will actually know something about the open conversation between David Holmgren and Nicole Foss, whereas for readers who accept Guy McPherson’s characterization, total ignorance would be a step in the right direction.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In his book,</span><a href="http://www.futurescenarios.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, David Holmgren reasons that the petroleum-fueled explosion of techno-industrial culture in the 20th century will be followed in the 21st century either by a techno-explosion, techno-stability, energy decline, or total collapse. Most of the book is devoted to detailing four potential trajectories for energy decline.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Should the effects of climate change prove mild and fossil energy reserves deplete relatively slowly,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">then we will have to opportunity to create what David calls a </span><a href="http://www.futurescenarios.org/content/view/29/49/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Green Tech</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> future. He describes this potential future scenario as a “distributed powerdown” in which resources flow to a variety of adaptive responses and we achieve a soft landing at low-energy living arrangements. This is the most benign of the four scenarios and the one that most people who acknowledge the serious implications of peak oil and climate change are hoping for.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Should peak oil come on quickly but the effects of climate change remain fairly mild, then we get what David calls the</span><a href="http://www.futurescenarios.org/content/view/30/50/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Earth Steward</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> scenario. This is the now familiar peak oil collapse scenario that I first encountered in the writings of James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Albert K. Bates and others in the early days of the C-Realm Podcast. I think most readers of this blog will be familiar with this scenario, and so I won’t describe it further, other than to say that David describes it as a “bottom-up rebuild.”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If fossil fuel reserves decline precipitously and the effects of climate change are severe, this leads to </span></div>
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<a href="http://www.futurescenarios.org/images/stories/logosml.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.futurescenarios.org/images/stories/logosml.png" /></a></div>
what David calls the<a href="http://www.futurescenarios.org/content/view/31/51/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Lifeboats</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> scenario. In this scenario, which David describes as “civilization triage,” most survivors are focused on creating some sort of oasis, strategic hamlet or other lifeboat situation for themselves, but a few people will be devoting whatever resources they can spare to preserving some technology and culture for future societies. There will be no difference in the experience of most people between the Lifeboats energy decline scenario and total systemic collapse of industrial civilization. The difference being that some of the accumulated scientific knowledge and cultural wealth of the current global civilization will be preserved so that the civilization that eventually arises from the ashes of our own will not be starting completely from scratch as they would in the case of total collapse.</span><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Should the effects of climate change be severe but peak oil come on slowly, then we get what David calls the</span><a href="http://www.futurescenarios.org/content/view/28/48/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Brown Tech</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> future which he describes as “top-down constriction.” In this scenario, national governments and corporations centralize political power at the national level and continue to maintain the status quo by utilizing increasingly low-grade fossil fuel resources like tar sands, brown coal, shale oil and the like, all of which would increase greehouse gas emissions (GGEs) over those emitted by a techno-industrial civilization powered by light, sweet crude oil and methane (so-called “natural gas”). Essentially this amounts to an official policy of “extend and pretend” by keeping the industrial system running at the cost of ever-increasing harm to the climate.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For people who are more focused on civil liberties and human rights than on energy issues, the primary agenda of the Brown Tech future will appear to be the securing of the privileges of the powerful against uprisings from the growing ranks of the dispossessed. This will manifest itself as a continued push in the direction of a high-tech security and surveillance state. The phrase “police state” will join “usury” as something that can never be spoken aloud in mainstream discourse lest it highlight the fact that a practice which civil society once condemned has become the order of the day.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Brown Tech future, the use of biofuels will take agricultural land away from food production, thus increasing hunger and the resulting social tensions. In wealthy countries, consumer-led growth will either falter or be deliberately squashed from above so that limited resources can be redirected to providing the basic necessities for the majority and continued luxurious living for the elites. It will be an era of resource wars and jarring population contraction in poorer countries. This situation can endure for decades before finally slipping into the Lifeboats scenario.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It bears repeating that the large scale, resource-intensive responses to climate chaos in the Brown Tech future will see a larger and more rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions than in any of the other three energy descent scenarios. In the Green Tech future, we reduce GGEs as we transition to cleaner technologies and adapt to a lower-energy lifestyle. In the Lifeboats and Earth Steward future scenarios, which will be indistinguishable from total collapse for a great many people, increasing GGEs over current levels will be beyond human capability.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Roughly half a decade after he detailed these four potential energy descent scenarios, David Holmgren published a new essay entitled</span><a href="http://holmgren.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Crash-on-demand.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Crash On Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in which he writes:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">...I remember thinking that [with regard to peak oil] a second great depression might be the best outcome we could hope for. The pain and suffering that has happened since 2007 (from the more limited “great recession”) is more a result of the ability of the existing power structures to maintain control and enforce harsh circumstances by handing the empty bag to the public, than any fundamental lack of resources to provide all with basic needs.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In his essay, David credits Nicole Foss for her influence on the evolution of his thinking. He also credits her for helping to advance a permacultural agenda by “convincing people that they should get out of debt, downsize, and radically reduce consumption and put their savings into concrete assets that build local capacity, as rapidly as possible.”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David notes that during the 20th Century expansion of industrial civilization, economic activity at the household and community level was sacrificed on the altar of growing the formal economy. Now that the formal economy is contracting and beginning to falter, living arrangements that build economic resilience at the household and community level can provide a cushion against the human suffering that would accompany the catastrophic failure of the formal economy. Even so, “the elites of the resurgent resource nationalism and command economies of the Brown Tech world” cannot embrace action that fosters local resilience because such action would undermine their ability to consolidate power and maintain existing hierarchies of control.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Looking back over the last third of the 20th Century, David notes that the “positive environmentalism” of 1970s did not result in top-down mandates or the societal changes necessary to safeguard the integrity of the biosphere. The industrial monster of the Brown Tech future will be even more destructive than the industrial system which adapted to and neutralized the emerging ecological consciousness of the 1970s, and, as such, it must be stopped.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David points out that the same actions that promote resilience at the level of individual families and local communities are also actions that draw vital resources from the rapacious power structures of the Brown Tech world, and that convincing enough people to withdraw their investments and support from the growth-dependent industrial system might just hasten the inevitable collapse of that system. The sooner it falls, the better our chances of retaining a habitable planet.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David realizes that explicitly advancing permaculture and relocalization efforts as a means of bringing down a dysfunctional and unreformable system might result in permaculturists, eco activists and transition-minded folk being demonized in the mainstream discourse “as crazy people, a doomsday cult or even terrorists.” Still, he thinks the arrival of the Brown Tech future with its accompanying acceleration of environmental destruction may justify such a shift in rhetoric and intent.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In her response Nicole summarized David’s thinking and writing to date, much as I have in this essay, and then argued that switching the stated motivation for living the permaculture lifestyle from a positive vision of building local resilience and explicitly linking it to the desire to bring down the industrial system in the service of a larger environmental agenda would be a mistake.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Permaculture has a very positive image as a solution to the need for perpetual growth, and this might be put at risk if it became associated with any deliberate attempt to cause system failure. (...) Much better, in my opinion, to continue the good work with the declared, and entirely defensible, goals of building greater local resilience and security of supply while preserving and regenerating the natural world. While almost any form of advance preparation for a major crisis of civilization would have the side-effect of weakening an existing system that increasingly requires total buy-in, there is a difference between side-effect and stated goal.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Notice that David and Nicole are advocating the same course of action. They differ on what rationale to present in order to motivate people to divest themselves from the disempowering and dysfunctional system of Brown Tech control, but they both advocate withdrawing support for and engagement with the over-developed, larger-than-human scale systems of techno-industrial civilization and re-investing those energies and resources at the level of the family and the local community. The discussion here is how to frame the situation for the increasing number of people who are starting to realize that the industrial system will not make good on the promises and commitments it made to its subjects in the midst of its expansion.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now we are approaching the comment that Guy found so stupid and objectionable. If we are looking to re-direct the course of civilization and avoid the a course of action that simultaneously sacrifices social justice and accelerates climate chaos, why not talk about climate change? Nicole offers the following:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do not focus on climate change in my own work, partly because top-down policies vary between useless and counter-productive, and partly because, in my opinion, the science is far more complex and less predictable than commonly thought, and finally because success in generating a genuine fear of climate change is likely to produce human responses that achieve far more harm than good.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Specifically, the harms that would likely proceed from a deliberately induced fear of climate chaos include:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>1) Carbon trading systems</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Carbon credit trading programs would likely fuel an new boom and bust cycle which would further enrich speculators, bankers and other parasites while doing nothing to reduce global carbon emissions.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>2) Massive infrastructure investment in adaptation</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - If the accepted wisdom is that mitigation is impossible and adaptation necessary, then resources which could have built bottom-up resilience would be squandered on over-built, top-down boondoggles.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>3) Geo-engineering</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Deliberate attempts to change the composition of the atmosphere to counteract the effects of increased carbon are almost sure to have unintended consequences. The cure could well be worse than the disease.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>4) Eco-fascism</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Fascists capitalize on fear and insecurity, and they’re not picky about the pretext they use to exert control over people’s lives. Fear of climate catastrophe can serve their purposes just as easily as paranoid fantasies about The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>5) A mood of collective self-flagellation</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - Misanthropic environmentalists and doomsday cultists see every aspect of human civilization as corrupt and unworthy of preservation. If this attitude proliferates, and if people started to act on it by, say, blowing up dams or engaging in other destructive acts that would, rightly, be denounced as acts of terrorism, then all ideas held by any environmentalists, no matter how peaceful, could be demonized and thus removed from consideration in mainstream discourse.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another reason Nicole gives for not focusing on environmental issues in her work is that environmental concerns are more difficult for people to relate to in terms of their own well-being. Unlike bank runs or $20/gallon gasoline, the scale and time frame of climate change are too far outside the scope of most people’s concerns. It’s too abstract and remote for people to connect to their own lives.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since economic collapse will lower carbon emissions far more dramatically than any top-down, outsized, public policy attempt is likely to do, and because re-localizing as a means of preparing for collapse will contribute to and hasten that collapse, it makes more sense to encourage people to protect their own well-being and that of their families and local communities than it does to try to motivate them with fear of global climate change. If the above is true, then, in the context of motivating people to respond adaptively to our shared predicament, the best thing to say to them about climate change in order to get people to take constructive steps to mitigate it is nothing.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guy McPherson may disagree with this line of reasoning, but the sophistry he employs in deliberately misrepresenting Nicole’s position and impugning her character suggests a motivation other than a principled dedication to speaking unpopular truths to unreceptive audiences. I won’t speculate in public as to what his underlying motivations might be. I don’t make a habit of cultivating public feuds with people who are working to promote some aspect of collapse consciousness. That’s not my style.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guy McPherson has accused Nicole Foss and John Michael Greer of proceeding from self-interested and disingenuous motivations. These are two people whose work informs my own thinking and who I think bring much-needed sobriety and depth to the evolving conversation about the converging crises of energy descent, climate disruption, and the self-immolation of global corporate capitalism. Given that Guy has employed blatant sophistry in an attempt to diminish their reputations, I suggest a change of focus. Guy should turn his gaze much closer to home in his search for unacknowledged motivations.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-37220373465674263552013-12-11T09:37:00.001-08:002013-12-11T14:03:53.045-08:00Interview with Dmytri Kleiner, Venture Communist and Miscommunications Technologist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I recorded this conversation with Dmytri on November 19, 2013. Thanks to Ann Marie of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://guerrillatranslation.com/" target="_blank">Guerrilla Translation</a> for transcribing a noisy recording.</span></span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7df4a2ff-e294-9f6a-44d4-23577050c707" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: You are listening to the C-Realm Podcast, I am your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with <a href="http://www.dmytri.info/" target="_blank">Dmytri Kleiner</a>, venture capitalist and miscommunications technologist. Dmytri, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Thank you, but that’s “venture communist.”</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiriTD_k2GW-Qz_ELYybgkFGiY-ddypHAX9l-U9RlqmHq8VDMyMBGaMHKm8r5yTb6wUfFIp4i2DMcTVT68f9zY8LTKozIcWukmz5355U-fKVGHsaOVv1pmHhOJSdDzD7pay_K72qOhFD7Yu/s1600/Dmytri_Kleiner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Dmytri Kleiner" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiriTD_k2GW-Qz_ELYybgkFGiY-ddypHAX9l-U9RlqmHq8VDMyMBGaMHKm8r5yTb6wUfFIp4i2DMcTVT68f9zY8LTKozIcWukmz5355U-fKVGHsaOVv1pmHhOJSdDzD7pay_K72qOhFD7Yu/s1600/Dmytri_Kleiner.jpg" title="" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Did I say “capitalist?” </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: [chuckles] It’s an easy mistake.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: You know, I’ve read the phrase “venture communist” several times in the past few hours in preparing for this interview, and yeah… it just rolled out “venture capitalist,” didn’t it?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: [chuckles]</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: So, Dmytri Kleiner, “Venture Communist” - what does that mean?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, it’s sort of the name of a research project I started awhile ago. My background comes from the social justice movement of the 90s. I was part of some of the kinds of hacker groups that eventually became things like <a href="http://www.indymedia.org/or/index.shtml" target="_blank">Indymedia</a>, and stuff that we called technology affinity groups. At that time there was something going on called the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotcom_boom" target="_blank">dotcom boom</a>, that you probably remember. A lot of us who were part of these hacker affinity groups supporting activist projects were working for these dotcoms. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As the social justice movement began to fade, along with the dotcom boom itself going into bust, it became very clear to me that this was very problematic. These truly liberating and revolutionary communication platforms were not going to be funded by capital. And so, if venture capital wasn’t going to fund them, then we needed some other way to fund them. This is where the term originates from. It originates from the simple aversion to venture capital. If venture capital won’t fund what we need to do, then we have to create venture communism. And so, venture communism itself began as a research project. And over time, there has been some development of the concept, but I usually mean the term in the very broad sense. I have my own proposals that you’ll find in <a href="http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/" target="_blank">the manifesto</a> and other texts for what approaches to venture communism might look like, or what a venture communism may be like, but I also use the term in a very broad sense that could include other ways of collectively forming the communication capital that we need.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I’ll just tell you a little bit about my relationship to capitalism and the dotcom period. I worked in customer service for Amazon.com from 1996 to 1998 and got some pretty decent stock options. When I sold them, I made more money with one phone call than I did in all the rest of my life selling my labor by the hour. I made that one call to the brokerage and said, “Exercise all of my options and sell the shares,” and I got about $660,000 with that call. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Wow...</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Had I waited and made the call six weeks later, I would have made about $3 million.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Oh, wow.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: And in hindsight, I’m so glad I didn’t wait. The money let me do what I wanted to do for many years, but then it ran out. By then I had moved to Arkansas where I was trying to start a homestead farm. That’s where I was living when I ran out of money and had to go back to work in my mid-30s, with a nearly decade-sized gap in my resume. There was not a lot of opportunity, really, in Berryville, Arkansas, in the early aughts. Well, I had a big change of heart, because, before that, I had been very much libertarian, politically. I had been a techno-utopian, a trans-humanist, and a Singularitarian. Those are meme complexes that tend to attract one another. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Sure.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Rarely are trans-humanists particularly critical of capitalism, or even cognizant that there might be something to criticize. And so, having to basically start again in my mid-30s, working really horrible jobs in sales - I started selling cell phones, and then I got into insurance, which is a really, really ugly business - my political views changed, and eventually my techno-utopian views gave way as well. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, I’m actively critical of capitalism. But I’m trying to articulate that criticism in such a way that it does not trigger an automatic ideological, reflexive rejection of what I have to say. Because, for so many people in this country, particularly in the middle of the country, the word “capitalism” just means “our side.” It represents everything that is right and good. Capitalism is synonymous with prosperity, and communism means totalitarian, evil dictatorship that brings austerity, and slavery. So, I’m trying to be very careful with my terms, but let me encourage you to say as much good as you can about the concepts of communism and peer to peer networks.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, I never imagined myself to be speaking to the masses or making an argument to the masses. From the beginning, I always considered myself to be an artist and to be somebody who had technological skills that could be of use to activist movements. So, I was never particularly concerned with the words that I used, and actually, I’ve always been rather attracted to strong or provocative language from “pirate” to “hacker” to “communist.” But, actually, now that I have, over the years, taken on a more “contributing to theory” kind of a role, I think that it’s quite important to continue using the word “communism”. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I had my post-social justice, post-dotcom disillusionment, I started really engaging on a lot of forums where actual economists and political theorists participate. A little bit outside of the hacker community, in this sort of infoshop politics of “reclaim the streets,” and one thing that really frustrated the people that I was communicating with was that I wasn’t using any kind of language they recognized.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you work in any kind of technical field, whether it’s computers, whether it’s politics, whether it’s economics, there is an established dialogue going on, and if you use the language that everybody else is using, that makes it a lot easier to communicate, to share ideas, and to really be very precise about what arguments you’re making. And so, I learned that I should understand the classical language, and that I should be able to use it. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A lot of people who like my work over the years that come from similar backgrounds as yourself, and they were reluctant to use the word “communism.” They would say, “Ah, this sounds really interesting, I like what you’re saying, but do we have to use that word? That word is so horrible and off-putting”. But, actually, that word connects you to hundreds of years of research and struggle and theory that goes far deeper and far broader than my own work does. So, by not just making up some random word - like what was it, “venture community-ism” was one of them, and other kinds of things - and by sticking to the word “communism,” it might connect you to that theory as well. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another thing I think is really important is to understand that anything can go wrong. Anything can go badly. So even if we make up new words, it doesn’t mean that we will somehow protect ourselves from possible negative outcomes. By using the word “communism,” it is implicitly understood that negative outcomes are possible, because we have actually seen them. In using that word, we do it without naïveté. We use it with the understanding that it’s not necessarily problem-free.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I heard you say in a presentation, that when you use the word “communism,” you are talking about a theoretical society; one that has no historical example.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: That’s true, but there are historical examples of people who tried to achieve it. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: But there has never been a nation-state that embodied communism in the way that you’re describing it.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, there’s never been a nation-state that claimed to have achieved communism.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I think that’s an important point that American audiences in particular would find unfamiliar. Here, the Soviet Union is held up as the archetypal example of communism.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Right, but not a single leader of the Soviet Union would ever have claimed to have achieved communism.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I have been reading your “Telekommunist Manifesto,” and there’s one sentence from early in the manifesto that I think we could probably spend the rest of our time together just unpacking. So, let me read that, I’ll even read it twice, and then I’ll ask that you explain it piece by piece. You wrote, “The Internet started as a network that embodied the relations of peer-to-peer communism. However, it has been reshaped by capitalist finance into an inefficient and unfree client-server topology”. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> So, let’s start with just the first part. “The Internet started as a network that embodied the relations of peer to peer communism”. Say more about that.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, for many of us in activist circles, in hacker circles in the 90s and some even before (that had access), the Internet didn’t just represent a new technology. It represented something that could have very broad social and political implications, in that, when you use the technology, especially the classic platforms of the Internet, - email, IRC, USENET, and the original classic platforms of the Internet - they didn’t mediate between users. All communication between users was based on mutual configurations. So therefore, if your computer and my computer agreed to exchange information with each other, we could do that without the mediation. Every intermediary node operated under the end-to-end principle, and just allowed us to communicate as if we were talking directly to each other. So this was very much a society of equals.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The “classic Internet” had this kind of ethos of sharing, like we really believed at that time that the Internet was uncensorable. We had this idea because of the topology, and because of the peer-to-peer nature of the communication tools we were using. But of course, what we didn’t fully realize back then, is that this Internet was very tiny. It felt big to us, but it was really very tiny. It was mostly developed by universities, by NGOs, by the military, and other organizations, and the people developing it were developing it for use value, which is an important distinction in economics. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The people who were making things like email, make USENET, like IRC and Finger, were not making them so they could sell them for exchange. They were making them in order to use them. So it really embodied a communist ethic of “from each to each.” The people creating technology wanted to use and share it with everyone that needed it. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But of course, this can’t scale very much, in order for a communication system to be used by the billions of people on the planet, it can’t be entirely made by university students, NGOs and some military contractors. When the Internet became commercialized, it became commercialized by venture capital, and venture capital invests money not for use value but for exchange value. This means that when a venture capitalist provides money, he or she does so under the pretext that they will make more money in return. This is different from a use value Internet. It becomes an exchange value Internet. In order to capture exchange value, the network had to become less free. An internet that allows users to do whatever they want presents very limited opportunities for capitalists to earn profit. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In order to charge prices, communications could be centralized through areas where prices can be charged. And so, there you have the re-architecture of the Internet from what it was back then, based on peer-to-peer software like e-mail, IRC, USENET, Finger, and so forth, to what eventually became called social media, or, briefly, Web 2.0, which is where web applications were developed to mimic the kinds of interactions people were having on the real peer-topeer social media platforms of the early Internet, but in a client-server fashion reminiscent of the original capitalist online platforms like CompuServe, and the original AOL, where all users connected through a central point. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and other sorts of things used this same model, and by doing so, they were able to make a profit model based on the capture of user data and control of user interaction.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: This will be a little bit of an aside, but just for my own personal curiosity, when I first started using the Internet, I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri in the early 1990s, and I used IRC, email and USENET, and I also got into listserv discussion groups, but I’m not familiar with Finger, what is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol" target="_blank">Finger</a>?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Finger is like status updates, you have a text file in your home directory, two text files actually, .project and .plan, and you could put your status updates in there, like you might do on Twitter now and then people could check what you are doing. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Hm, I wonder how I missed it?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: You probably had one. People could Finger you.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Would you say what you mean when you describe the current state of the Internet as being, “an unfree, client-server topology”?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Yes. That is because the current state of the Internet is based on big, centralized services like Facebook, but that’s not all that’s possible. You can still use Finger on the modern Internet as long as you still have TCP/IP to the house, which is, of course, not guaranteed. For one of <a href="http://telekommunisten.net/" target="_blank">Telekommunisten</a>’s artworks in 2010 we made a clone of Twitter. It was a <a href="http://www.thimbl.net/manifesto.html" target="_blank">microblog based on Finger</a> to show that these ideas have been around since the beginning of the Internet and that the kinds of things being made by modern social media platforms aren’t new in the sense of what kind of use of media they are proposing. The only thing that’s new about them is how they want to capture profits. Finger has existed since the 70s in a distributed fashion that nobody could make a profit on because nobody could control it. Twitter is, of course, very central. It requires millions and millions of dollars in funding. Because it can capture lots of data it can make a business model around monetizing that data and selling it to advertisers and other parties.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: And later in your manifesto, you wrote, “No social order, no matter how entrenched and ruthlessly imposed, can resist transformation when new ways of producing and sharing emerge”. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Right.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: And yet, new ways of producing and sharing did emerge with the early Internet, tools which you described as being very peer-to-peer and communist in structure. And yet it was resisted. That transformation was seemingly hijacked and redirected toward things that are very favorable to the preservation of inequality, a class system and commoditized art, and all the distasteful aspects of the modern Internet.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, that’s because, as I elaborate more in the section that talks about peer production, Benkler and stuff like that, is that we haven’t actually achieved peer production on any kind of massive level. If you look at what happens with the early Internet and free software, you see that what was going on was not a new mode of production, but just a very unique kind of distribution of an existing form of production at its core. The problem with free software and free networks is that they can’t capture any exchange value as we discussed already. And so because they can’t capture any exchange value, they cannot finance their own material cost of the upkeep of the people that take care of them. The networks and the programmers and the engineers, and all the people that contribute to the development of free software and free networks need sustenance. And that sustenance, then and now, still comes from capitalism. That, I think, is the point. A true mode of production can’t be resisted, but we haven’t actually seen peer production emerge as a real, significant form of production. For that to happen, we have to have material assets in the commons as well as immaterial assets. So long as the composition of the commons is entirely immaterial, they will not be able to sustain its material upkeep.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Is there any point in trying to request that the state serve the ends of a peer-to-peer society, or is the state completely at odds with that by definition?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: There are a number of threads in the overall strategy that I think are necessary. On one hand, we need venture communism, which means independent, federated entrepreneurship along communist principles. But on the other hand, the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society. We have to understand what the state provides now, and we have to struggle within the state as a theater of struggle as well, to get what we can out of it. So I would say yes, but that it really depends on where you are. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In principle, if you look at public funding for other kinds of media, like film, television, and movies, in many cases there’s been quite significant public involvement in the development of those media. So, do I think that there is the prospect for public involvement in funding of social media for a positive impact? Certainly, but, in an era where we’re still not out of the neoliberal phase of history, in an era where governments don’t even want to pay for schools and housing and education and roads, the idea that they will suddenly become interested in paying for social media seems unlikely. So, it doesn’t seem to be a prospect that I have a lot of confidence will actually come about, though it could come about, and if it did, it could be positive. Perhaps, especially in areas that are trying to assert their independence from global neoliberalism, like South and Central America for instance, perhaps they will understand the public need to finance social media in the same way that they finance their broadcast media and their film media.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Just last night, I was reading <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/11/david-byrne-internet-content-world" target="_blank">an essay by David Byrne</a>, of the Talking Heads, about Spotify, streaming music, and the emerging situation in which all the money changing hands for streaming music is basically going to record labels. Not only are they selling the songs of their artists to the streaming services, but they are also in exchange, for the listing the music companies catalogs, they are getting a stake in services like Spotify, but that artists get very little, even though it is the creativity and passion of the artists whih create value of the end users. The contribution of the artists is absolutely vital and integral, but they get very little of the proceeds. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For example, this past summer, Daft Punk had a song that was so popular that even people who don’t pay follow the music business or make any effort to seek out new music would recognize it - “Get Lucky” is the song - and their Spotify revenues for this, which had been downloaded or streamed hundreds of millions of times, was $13,000 each. They are the megastars of streaming media right now, and the amount of money that they received was less than one would make flipping burgers at McDonald’s. And so, we’ve got this emerging structure where the assumption is that the artists themselves are expected to work a day job somewhere, and then, in their spare time, struggle and produce art which enriches corporations. I’m just wondering what way forward you can envision, and what’s actually worth the time and effort trying to bring it about, because I’m largely of the opinion that trying to request that corporations and governments stop their current collusion and help artists is probably a silly way to invest one’s energy, and I’m wondering about a viable way forward.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I think, in most places, I would agree. Though, as I said, I think in some places it’s more viable than others, but here in the Western world, I think that it wouldn’t be the best use of energy. <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/385-journalism-is-a-public-good/" target="_blank">You had John McChesney on the program</a>, and I’m sure that my view is not so different than his. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The answer. as it’s always been, has been the organization of workers towards ownership of the means of production. It’s no surprise to me that artists are being squeezed out of the profits made by Spotify and other online streaming corporations, because, you understand that artists are paid for their labor value, not the value of what they produce. The value of what is produced is captured by the people that own the means of production and distribution. They are the ones who are going to capture the value, so, unless artists own their own means of distribution and production, they can’t hope to capture the value that is so produced. So the only real way forward is to have not Spotify and iTunes, but organizations made up of the people who actually make the music involved in the production and distribution of media, and to have those owned by the workers themselves.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I understand that, but I find it an unsatisfying answer. (laughter)</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Yeah, I know, it’s the same answer we’ve had for a couple of hundred years.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Yeah… </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: It’s not a sexy new answer, but, unfortunately the basic economics makes it so. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, the very central point of McChesney’s message is that we are approaching or perhaps in the midst of what he calls a “critical juncture,” which is a convergence of crises in which a disruptive new technology, a legitimacy crisis around current institutions and economic turmoil all come together. When that happens, we get a moment where there is a possibility to make institutional changes which are sweeping and long-lasting, and it seems that our side, so to speak, is not as focused on capturing the opportunity of that moment, that critical juncture, as the capitalists are. They seem quite poised to take advantage whenever these opportunities open up.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Of course. And, you know, that’s very difficult to combat, because they have the accumulated wealth to be able to weather the storms. So, in a way, crisis serves a role in capitalism as well. It allows the stronger capitalists to squeeze out the weaker capitalists, because capitalism is competition even among the capitalists. The capitalists aren’t only struggling against us, but also struggling against each other. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: And so, it’s no good to try to become a sort of minor, beneficent capitalist, because the larger and sociopathic capitalists will just outcompete you and reduce you back to the worker who is paid not for the value of what he creates before his time, basically.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Absolutely, that’s right. And I think it’s important to understand that capitalism is not a choice for capitalists either, because if you’re capitalist and you invest your capital in such a way that it fails to create more capital, you cease to be a capitalist, right? So, capitalists are just as much trapped within the capitalist system as everybody else. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: But it’s a much more well-appointed cage that they inhabit than most everybody else inhabits (laughter).</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Certainly, but it’s not that even if any individual or bunch of individual capitalists suddenly had an epiphany and decided to abandon their exploitive ways, that that would be a threat to the system itself. That would only be the opportunity for other capitalists to squeeze them out.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Although it seems that the capitalists who had this emerging sense of consciousness and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">esprit de corps</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and identification with people and other classes of society, if they had this awakening moment, but they also realized what will happen if they act on it overtly, they might, if they were clever (and they must be clever to be where they are), continue to use the language which pacifies the other capitalists, while working subtly and behind the scenes to implement improvements and some movement toward social justice.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I don’t think language actually has much to do with it. I think the only people that are queasy about radical language are people who position themselves on the left, because they feel that being portrayed as a radical will weaken their position. I think that the people in power are not particularly concerned with language, and you can see that very often if you look at media campaigns. We’ve seen all kinds of revolutionary language, and even revolutionary figures from historical events used in advertising, used to promote and describe capitalist products. So, of course the film industry uses these themes and figures quite liberally, and it’s funded by capitalists. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think that the capitalist has to make a semantic argument to his peers, I think they have to be successful. I think, in the end, they have to capture profit. And it doesn’t matter how they capture the profit. If they do capture it, they become successful. And that’s also very interesting.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t know if you’ve read any of <a href="http://www.dmytri.info/its-the-macroeconomy-stupid/" target="_blank">the work that I’ve done on macroeconomics</a>, which is much more recent than the manifesto. It still consists of just random blog articles rather than a more substantial text, but there are a couple of ideas that I’m fleshing out, and they don’t have names as catchy as “venture communism,” but I think that they’re interesting ideas. The great Polish economist, Michał Kalecki, created an equation to separate profit and consumption by class, which is to say, by workers profit and by capitalist profit. This equation allows you to see the relationship between capital and labor within the profit model. Using Kalecki’s equation as inspiration, I tried to take an approach where I look at modes. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One major problem that I have with a lot of progressive theories that you hear casually within the anarchist community and the communist community is this idea that communism is something that happens in the future, that it suddenly happens as an epiphany, where societies are transformed magically from the old society to the new society, and everything is completely different. I don’t think that this is the case. I think we have communism right now, as well as capitalism right now. If you look at the kinds of relationships we have in our day-to-day lives, we have relationships that are ruled or dominated by exchange value, but we also have relationships that approach the communist relationships of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” “From each, to each”, as I like to summarize it. And we experience these relationships among our friends, within our families, within intentional communities, and also within some of the emerging peer-production forms, like free software and information sharing, and things like that. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What we have is multimodal environment, and I think we need to look at the economy as having multiple modes of production happening at all given times. I don’t think it should be our objective to try to figure out how we can flip from one to the other, but how we can increase the kinds of producing and sharing that we think are beneficial and want more of and decrease the amount of producing and sharing that happens at ways that we think are destructive and not beneficial, and that we want less of. We need value to flow from one mode to another, this is what I’m thinking of, inter-modal value flows. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One kind of these flows is something that I’m calling “substantiation”, which I’ve already been told is a horrible term. The idea of “substantiation” is that there are certain forms of investment that benefit individual members of a class, while hurting the class as a whole. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One example of substantiation is workers supporting capitalists when they buy capitalist securities in their pension funds. Individual workers that buy the securities could very well benefit, but the class doesn’t, because, overall, it cedes more power to capital. The capitalists take that investment and use it to expand capitalist control of the means of production and their own political strength. So, even though funds may benefit the individual workers who invested in them, they hurt workers as a class. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, I think that we can also find examples of things that are going the other way. I think free software for instance is a good example of that. If you are capitalist whose business depends on software as an input -- in other words, you don’t sell software but you need software in order to produce whatever it is you produce -- and you capture your profit elsewhere in the circulation of that final product, so capital is an input to your production, you therefore invest in free software, and by doing so you may yourself benefit, because you get help from the community and cheaper and better software to use in your own production. But, the capitalist class loses, because the sale of software licenses is broadly damaged, is lost as a way to make profit for the capitalist class. So, even though in both cases the individual members of the class are benefiting, this kind of value flow hurts the class in general. These are just a couple of examples of the kind of thinking we need to develop further. We need to figure out how value flows between the different modes that are existing at the same time within the contemporary economy, and what kinds of methods and institutions and practices can we introduce and promote that will cause value to flow from exploitive means to liberating means.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I think I follow you, but would you summarize your last line of reasoning?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I think that it’s helpful to think of the society that we live in as not being either capitalist or communist, in essence, that it’s helpful to think that within our society we have many modes of production going on at the same time. We have capitalism. We have communism. We have all kinds of hybrid and alternative forms going on. But we have a lot of different kinds of social relations. So, what we need to do is think about that in a compositional way. We need to think about what kinds of ways of producing and sharing are already going on right now, that we could develop more broadly, and how can we move and make value flow from the more exploitive modes to the more liberating modes. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is what I was trying to get at with the idea of substantiation. These modes are coexisting and drawing off each other, and so just as much as we are benefiting the capitalists with our production, because everything that happens within commons-based production right now as being captured by capital, because the commons is still largely an immaterial commons. But likewise, by contributing to that immaterial commons, the capitalists are also helping us. So, value is flowing. We need to think strategically and ask how can we reduce the loss and maximize the gain. We need to conceptualize how to structure the kinds of productive forms which enable a sustained and positive long-term exchange away from capitalism.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>KMO</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Well, Dmytri Kleiner, it has been a pleasure talking to you, I look forward to future conversations, and thank you very much for participating on the C-Realm Podcast.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Dmytri</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Very nice talking to you as well.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-51470658618820543572013-07-21T09:53:00.000-07:002013-07-21T12:30:41.333-07:00Epochs and Applecarts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a previous post I mentioned that I was worried that I had committed the sin of epochalism, which Evgeny Morozov defines as the fallacious belief that one is living in truly exceptional times. I look at trends involving growing population, resource depletion, energy use, loss of species, changes to the composition of the atmosphere from industrial activity, loss of topsoil, acidification of the oceans, rising sea levels, rapid advances in information technology, and I think that it may not be too much of a stretch to believe that we really do live in exceptional times. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7286ae98-0221-1518-23e8-d2925697852e" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Certainly previous civilizations have crashed into some hard limits to their expansion and their general way of doing things, but as far as I know, it’s never happened everywhere at once. As the Mayan civilization was dissolving, the European diaspora and the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">modus operandi </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and intellectual tradition known as “Western Civilization” was going strong and preparing to shift into an even higher gear. Japanese civilization did not crash along with the Maya, and the farmers in the New Guinea highlands, who had no notion of “the Americas,” carried on unperturbed. Today, Japan is thoroughly integrated into the global techno-industrial civilization. If the global system were to collapse, that collapse would take Japan down with it. Farmers in the New Guinea highlands, who have supported a dense population with intensive permaculture practices for thousands of years, could probably continue their way of life without too much disruption should the global technocracy go away, but they would be hard pressed to shrug of effects of a 6 degrees Celsius rise in global temperature. Various geoengineering schemes to curb climbing temperatures would affect global weather patterns and not just the fate of the country that took it upon itself to tinker with the climate.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And it’s not just the trends that point to catastrophe that seem to have little precedent in recorded history. (Granted, “recorded history” is a short span compared to how long tool-using language monkeys have been doing their thing here on planet Earth.) If the improvement in the price/performance ratio of micro-circuitry that we call Moore’s Law continues on course for another couple of decades and then passes the baton to a new computing paradigm which increases the pace yet again, humans everywhere will live in a world re-shaped by this process. The optimists assume this rising power will serve human ends; that it will extend the reach of our minds and hands and bless us with seeming immortality. Collapse fetishes dismiss this as absurd fantasy, but I can’t justify discounting the implications of a potential intelligence explosion. Personally, I lean more toward the concerns cyber curmudgeons like Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov who warn that our current path could lead to the rise of power structures that may well defy the understanding of most human minds, powers that will be nearly impossible to resist and which subordinate such niceties as democracy, empathy, and compassion to their own growth imperative. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m well aware that every huckster and true believer peddling time-worn predictions of doom or glorious ascendance responds reflexively to any mention of the long history of failure for their favorite apocalyptic meme by insisting, “But this time it’s different.” Even so, in some respects at least, we really do seem to have pushed our way into some new territory here, and the scope of the dilemma confronting us strikes me as genuinely unprecedented . Business as usual in the techno-industrial mode appears to lead to a variety of potential discontinuities. It seems to me that we cannot continue this way indefinitely. One way or another, something has got to give.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, have I given myself a free pass to ignore the danger of epochalism? Not exactly. There is another, stronger formulation of the concept of epochalism which states that the times in which we live are so singularly exceptional that no appeal to history can provide us with any insight as to how best to navigate our current set of challenges and predicaments. This is the epochalism that I see coming from the Singularitarians as well as from Gaian rage junkies who preach a doctrine of complete environmental collapse and even near-term human extinction unless technological civilization is stopped dead in its tracks. People who assert that a rapid and unprecedented evolution in human consciousness is imminent due to cosmic alignments, alien intervention, or the widespread use of consciousness expanding techniques like psychedelics, free love, yoga or meditation also seem to be exhibiting signs of epochalism from my perspective. The mere statement that we've never before found ourselves in quite these circumstances and that things are progressing rather quickly strikes me as a fairly uncontroversial observation. It does not follow that our current circumstances are so divorced from previous human experience that history can provide neither insight nor guidance.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Morozov's warnings about the dangers of epochalism have prompted some self-examination on my part because I do describe the C-Realm project as an investigation and a meditation on how best to behave at what seems like the transition between the end of one phase of human development and the uncertain beginning of something new. We don’t live or think the way our ancestors did before the advent of language, writing, or the printing press. All of these technological innovations prompted a change in human consciousness, in the way we coordinate our efforts and how we inhabit the landscape. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Morozov's admonitions dovetail with those of John Michael Greer. JMG notes that, when thinking about the future, people tend to polarize into two main groups. On the one hand are the believers in the religion of progress who rest comfortably in the faith that we are on the threshold of a perfected civilization; that war, poverty, bigotry and injustice are on the ropes and will soon go down for the count. In the other camp are those who look at unsustainable trends and assert that the end is near, that human civilization will soon collapse and that we’re set to regress into barbarism should we be so lucky as to avoid the complete extinction of our species. On this point, JMG, who is a thorough and patient articulator of the Peak Oil narrative, is as dismissive of Peak Oil catastrophists as he is of Singularitarians or those who preach a gospel of impending rapture in the mode of the Book of Revelation. According to JMG, civilizations to do not collapse overnight. Even when they are committed to unsustainable practices that disqualify them from indefinite longevity, they still go through a series of partial collapses and recoveries as they cut their losses and give up some of the societal complexity that they had managed to sustain in the past in the service of keeping the whole project going a little longer. He calls this process catabolic collapse, and it takes a couple of centuries at least for this process to run its course. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John Michael Greer does not use Morozov’s vocabulary of epochalism, nor does he deny that epochal changes have taken place in the history of our species. The flaw he identifies in popular thought is the tendency to compress events that play out over centuries into the span of a single human lifetime. The delusion that these changes will happen before our eyes, and that we will be around to see the other side of the transformation and collect on the bets we made and gloat in our vindication may amount to no more than garden variety wishful thinking.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, fair enough. But here’s what I see from the perspective of my one human lifetime, which, hopefully, isn’t much past the halfway mark. I was born in 1968, when global population numbered around 3.5 billion. US oil production was approaching its peak. The heavy industry and complex manufacturing that provided the basis for “modern living” took place in the United States. Telephones were mounted on the wall, and dialing a telephone number connected you with a place, but not necessarily with a particular person. The ritual was to call and then ask the person who answered the phone if the person you wanted to talk to was there. Long-distance calls were expensive and kept short. International calls were for heads of state and captains of industry. There was a computer lab in my high school, and it consisted of fewer than 20 Apple II computers. In computer class we learned to program in BASIC. As a child, I would take off on my bike and spend hours away from home with no way for my mother to contact me, and unless I missed dinner, a ritual in which my entire family gathered around the kitchen table, my long and unsupervised absence was in no way unusual or seen as cause for concern. My mother was a “homemaker,” and even after my parents divorced, my father managed to support two households and maintain his bourgeois hobby of keeping horses on his mid-level Secret Service agent’s salary. His career progression stagnated when he stopped accepting transfers to new cities and made an enemy of his immediate superior, but his middle class lifestyle was never in danger. He was neither studious nor technically inclined. He certainly showed no entrepreneurial aptitude and openly despised salesmen. He worked one job for decades, and it provided him with a middle class lifestyle that included health insurance, retirement benefits, and paid vacation. He believed in the moral justice of America’s overseas military campaigns and that John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone and unaffiliated lunatic. He believed in the legitimacy of power . He believed that every generation in America does better than their parents.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I won’t bore you by detailing, point by point, how the previous paragraph differs from the America that I inhabit today. Suffice it to say that things are very different now, and I have every reason to expect that my own sons, by the time they reach middle age, will see at least as much change in their society as I have seen in mine. Hopefully, middle age for them will not be their late teens. Over the weekend, I took a stroll through Greenwood Cemetery, which is just a block from where Olga and I live. I noticed that people living in the 19th Century, men and women whose monuments marked them as people of means and privilege, regularly died in their 40s. It would be common for their 20th Century grandchildren to live into their 80s. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My ancestors have lived through famines and world wars. I grew up in the Cold War, a nuclear standoff that adult authorities presented to me as a fundamental configuration of the world in which I lived; something that could only end in nuclear conflagration. I had only been out of high school for 3 years when the Berlin Wall came down. My fascination with Japan grew out of the 1980 TV mini-series adaptation of James Clavell’s novel </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shōgun</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and out of Marvel comics written by Frank Miller, but I justified my wanting to study abroad there to my father with an appeal to Japan’s economic dominance on the world stage. By the time I graduated and got back to Japan, it had already entered the long period of economic stagnation from which it has yet to emerge. The Japanese, justifiably wary of nuclear power, are now hoping to power their industrial society with methane harvested from seafloor ice. A research project sponsored by the Japanese government has already demonstrated that it is technically possible to harvest methane energy from the bottom of the ocean. The question remains, can the process be sufficiently refined so that they get more energy from the seafloor than they expend in retrieving it? I think the jury is still out on that one, but Jim Kunstler predicts that Japan’s energy woes will see them making a voluntary transition back to pre-industrial feudalism.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do not know what is going to happen in the future, and I don’t believe that anyone else does either. I realize that people hold a lot of unjustified beliefs, and I have danced with some doozies in my time. Some epochal changes take centuries or even millennia to manifest, but others unfold much more quickly, and my own experience has led me to expect repeated upsets of the apple cart of our collective normality bias. I also expect that the immediate aftermath of each upset will seem completely normal to the kids whose parents’ expectations were demolished by it.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-19668660847916303132013-06-23T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-08T08:52:52.661-07:00The Smell of Betterness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had some promotional <a href="http://c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/C-Realm_Postcard_w_effects.jpg" target="_blank">postcards</a> made up that feature my face against a cityscape background Photoshopped into a psychedelic fantasmagoria. On the back of the card is the elevator pitch for the C-Realm Podcast. It reads:</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-72c74644-71ff-fd14-e5ac-e915e29226b0" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Join KMO and guests for weekly C-Realm Podcast conversations and consider the predicament we’ve created for ourselves. We have pushed the infinite growth paradigm to the brink of a broken planet. Clearly, transition is upon us, but what sort of transition?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Must humans behave like bacteria, consuming and multiplying to the limits of our resource base and then dying in droves, or will we use our foresight and rationality to curb our appetites and avert disaster? Ultimately, it all comes down to one question: Are we a conscious species?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> As the late Terence McKenna put it, “If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I was already regretting the design of the card when I realized what a self-important doofus I would seem on those occasions when I would be handing out postcards with my own face on them. Now, as I read through Evgeny Morozov’s new book, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13587160-to-save-everything-click-here" target="_blank">To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism</a></i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I wonder if I haven’t committed an even bigger sin with the backside blurb than by making my own face the primary design element on the front of the card.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> What sin have I possibly committed? Morozov calls it "epochalism," by which he means the belief that our present circumstances are so singularly unique that they have no historical parallels or precedents and that no appeals to the past can provide us with any guidance. As Steven Poole summarized it in his <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/mar/20/save-everything-evgeny-morozov-review" target="_blank">review </a>for the Guardian, “...if you think that the age of Twitter and online videos of sneezing cats is so unlike anything that has gone before that we must tear up the rule-book of civilisation, then you are an ‘epochalist’. “</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Am I an epochalist? I have certainly fantasized about a radical re-invention of the world delivered either by beneficent godlings born of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology or by a psychedelic phase shift in consciousness. Baring those smiley-face deliverances, I’ve even dreamed of a cascading failure of the global technocracy touched off by peak oil, plague, coronal mass ejection, or gray goo, though that appetite for schadenfreude is one that I recognize as a clear and dangerous vice and have resolved to nip in the bud. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In my defense, I present as <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/120-the-long-decent/" target="_blank">exhibit A</a> the collection of interviews that I have published with the Archdruid, <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">John Michael Greer</a>. James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott on Star Trek: The Original Series, claimed, "Scotty is ninety-nine percent James Doohan and one percent accent." Similarly, I would say that JMG’s schtick is eighty percent clear thinking and writing and twenty percent willingness to read books that are more than 20 years old. He has filled <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17463387-apocalypse-not" target="_blank">a book</a> with numerous examples of end of the world scenarios that, even after they fail to actually end the word, get cyclically brushed off and presented as devastating new revelations as soon as the last generation to fall for it has died. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I like to get John Michael Greer back on the C-Realm Podcast as often as I do, because he has a penchant for identifying popular delusions, some of which I have endorsed myself. The one that jumps immediately to mind is the fast collapse from peak oil scenario, which I grouped with the technological singularity and psychedelic consciousness bootstrapping as manifestations of epochalism that have insinuated themselves into my consciousness and thereby into the content of the C-Realm Podcast. Unlike Singularitarians, who brush off as mere coincidence any similarity between their coming epochal transformation and the myriad apocalyptic visions that Christians and other superstitious rattle-shakers hold dear, I admit the possibility that I can be so seduced by an appealing belief system that I turn a blind eye to its glaringly improbable elements. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In the run up to another couch-surfing speaking tour, I’m assembling a new collection of talking points, and the more I think about it, the stronger a candidate “Beware of Epochalism” appears. I fall for it myself. Great transformations. Great expectations. Great visions for a better world. They seem hard to resist and harder to criticize as goals, but as Bruce Sterling put it in his <a href="http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">closing remarks</a> at this year’s South by Southwest gathering:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Things do not always progress, and the successes of progress become thorny problems for the next generation. They don’t stay permanently “better.” Our value judgments about what are better are temporary. They are time-bound. When you overuse the word “better,” it’s like a head-fake, it’s a mantra. You don’t have a better-o-meter. You can’t measure the length and breadth and duration of the “betterness.” “Better” is a metaphysical value judgement. It’s not a scientific quality like mass or velocity.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is the reverse also true? Is “worse” a time-bound value judgment? Could it be that today’s worse doesn’t stay worse? Might the worse of the present morph into a life preserver for the next generation? If so, then no matter how much worse things appear today than they did yesterday, perhaps any impulse to break ranks and run for the hills should come with a built in pause-and-reflect reflex.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> One reason that running for the hills is a bad idea is that, as <a href="http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-not-to-to-organize-community.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dmitry Orlov points out</a>, living arrangements that prove workable after a collapse are simply unacceptable before the collapse. It’s embarrassing to run for the hills only to demonstrate in the process that you don’t have the grit to live the life you fantasized about. Even if you do have the wherewithal to survive the collapse, you probably don’t have the gumption to compete with industrial society before it collapses. The potential for looking and feeling sheepish is high if you sever your ties, retreat to your custom-built doomstead, and then sit there waiting for a collapse that does not arrive when you wanted or expected it to.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Similarly, if you’re waiting for the Singularity to get you out of debt peonage or to save you from your lack of exercise and your industrial diet of salt, fat, and high-fructose corn syrup, how foolish will you look at age 65 when there are super-cool techno gizmos and mind-blowing virtual vistas but starchy foods and empty calories still make you fat and give you bad skin? </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In a recent C-Realm <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/367-locked-into-the-azure-world/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conversation with Bruce Damer</a>, he described the process by which the mesmerizing visions that so many of us carry in the palms of our hands, and which Google is promising to transform into a heads-up display with Google Glass, have so thoroughly captured our attention that we have given ourselves collective permission to never make eye contact. We seem impotent to heal the economy, purge political corruption, or pacify a glowering climate, but we have great power to innovate and transform the digital realms that peer out at us from inside our little glowing screens. It's no mystery why Silicon Valley wunderkinder who got rich conceiving, building, and continuously improving this hallucinatory realm believe that big data will save and transform human civilization. No wonder the more ambitious among them believe that our best hope resides in a complete migration from our meat bodies and the fragile biosphere in which they are embedded into the realm of pure digital betterness as perfected avatars who need fear neither entropy nor extinction. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> It’s an alluring vision and a fantasy I once cherished, and what’s the harm? Why wallow in the futility of plodding mitigation, Sisyphean reform and other frustrating half-measures when perfection beckons from the digital heavens? After all, nanotechnology will soon make matter as malleable as software, and then, the prophets tells us, the digital perfection of cyberspace will pour into the degenerate world of matter, and the betterness will be made manifest and undeniable. In response to an early version of this essay, SF author <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/100-interfacing-with-the-panopticon/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Charles Stross</a> wrote:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Ignore people who promise that there will be jam tomorrow. By the time you get to tomorrow you might have been run over by a bus. Start living your life now so that when the bus hits you you'll have had a spoonful of peanut butter -- and don't get too worked up about the radiant day-after-tomorrow because even if you live to see it, it might not be as shiny as you think.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> So what’s the upshot? Am I advocating defeatism? Am I suggesting we embrace our doom? Even if better is a fleeting, ephemeral and unverifiable goal, what are we supposed to do? Aim to make matters worse? </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> No. Of course we want to make things better, solve problems and rack up as much “progress” as we can, even if we can’t bear to spell it without the scare quotes. As long as we proceed with a modicum of methodological and epistemological humility, and as long as we don’t kid ourselves into thinking that our efforts will achieve “real and lasting good” as Andrew Carnegie so famously (and fatuously) put it, you’d have to be a bit of dick not to want to make things better. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The danger is not the sincere belief that we can and should do good. The danger lurks in the arrogance born of success that says perfection is possible and that failure to attain it would be too tragic to tolerate. As my long-time digital acquaintance and <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/10-plan-b/" target="_blank">early</a> C-Realm Guest, Prester Scott, put it:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> ...we can and should attempt to improve our lives and our manners and our world, without recourse to trying to build the New Jerusalem and the Beatific Vision. The latter goal entails a number of unpleasant phenomena including seeing yourself as anointed, your gospel as infallible, your methods as unquestionable, and your personal worth highly dependent on how much work you do or converts you make for Kingdom Come. And I'm sure you understand that my language is ironic given that the most fanatical cultists in our own day are staunchly secular.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> At this point, I imagine hearing you object, “Okay, we get it. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Make use of the available tools to do what we can from where we are, but what are we supposed to do? Ride bikes? Eat more fresh and locally grown vegetables? Meditate and do yoga? All that may make our lives better, but it won’t change the fact that psychopaths own all the property, decide what money is, make the laws and hold all the power! Living well is not the best revenge. The tyrant’s head on a pike is the best revenge. What we need is a revolution!”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> When the revolutionary moment is upon us, it will happen, and full participation in life will mean full engagement with the revolution. That said it would be foolish to wait for the revolution to provide you with that missing feeling of camaraderie, common purpose and shared destiny. By the time the revolution gets here, you may be too tired to recognize it or even care. Even worse than pining for the revolution would be trying to will it into existence through sheer moral outrage. Revolutions lead to score-settling and power struggles between former brothers in arms. There are more pikes wanting heads than there are tyrants.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Turn on the TV and you’ll find lots of folks are stoking moral indignation, and they seem to be making good use of it to achieve their ends. Or at least they’re getting rich and famous in the process, and aren't those universal ends? You may be tempted to use anger to motivate you and galvanize your troops. You would be better off using methamphetamine to power your daily workout sessions than you would using moral indignation to achieve laudable goals. Rage always feels righteous, but it has an agenda of its own, and it’s not an agenda you would agree to serve in moments of calm self-examination. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Rage doesn't want what you want. You may see the parasitic 1% as the obstacles to a better tomorrow and the terror that you and your revolutionary comrades would visit upon them as a brief but necessary phase on the way to the full manifestation of your utopian vision; but terror has its own agenda, and the part of you (is it part of you or is it something else?) that calls for the slaughter of the masters, views terror, rage and vengeance as their own rewards.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> What part of you would love the smell of righteous carnage in the morning? What would that smell like? Betterness?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-63144333759364356632013-06-05T07:46:00.001-07:002013-07-08T08:32:53.200-07:00Descent in Anarchy?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read a lot of books in preparation for C-Realm podcast interviews, and I often read aloud to Olga as she works in the kitchen. I could get the reading done more quickly if I read to myself, but by reading aloud to her, I have someone to discuss ideas with in advance of getting together with the author on Skype. </span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-7e5d1c1e-14ca-5065-e4d5-e8921edbedbe" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Normally “working in the kitchen” involves food, but recently Olga has been plastering the walls, and while she worked, I read aloud to her from Dmitry Orlov's most recent book, </span><a href="http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/p/the-five-stages-of-collapse.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I interviewed Dmitry earlier today for C-Realm Podcast episode <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/365-communities-that-abide/" target="_blank">365: Communities that Abide</a>. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other morning I was reading to Olga from a section of Dmitry’s book called "Anarchism's Charms." By </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>anarchy </i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dmitry simply means “without hierarchy." It is important to note that he does not use the word “anarchy” to mean </span><a href="http://cluborlov.blogspot.ru/2012/10/in-praise-of-anarchy-part-ii.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“the embodiment of a coherent ideology of Anarchism.”</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I learned from </span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330433-the-democracy-project" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David Graeber's new book </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anarchy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">democracy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">used to be used interchangeably to describe rule by the people, a situation that our "Founding Fathers" were keen to avoid. They championed a version of liberty in which only a select few people directed the actions of government. The nightmare scenario which they resolved to avoid was </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a universal political franchise in which everyone had an equal voice. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">James Madison argued that such societies </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/US_Navy_031029-N-6236G-001_A_painting_of_President_John_Adams_(1735-1826),_2nd_president_of_the_United_States,_by_Asher_B._Durand_(1767-1845)-crop.jpg/220px-US_Navy_031029-N-6236G-001_A_painting_of_President_John_Adams_(1735-1826),_2nd_president_of_the_United_States,_by_Asher_B._Durand_(1767-1845)-crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/US_Navy_031029-N-6236G-001_A_painting_of_President_John_Adams_(1735-1826),_2nd_president_of_the_United_States,_by_Asher_B._Durand_(1767-1845)-crop.jpg/220px-US_Navy_031029-N-6236G-001_A_painting_of_President_John_Adams_(1735-1826),_2nd_president_of_the_United_States,_by_Asher_B._Durand_(1767-1845)-crop.jpg" width="158" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Adams</td></tr>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John Adams, who would become the second president of the United States, warned that instituting democracy in the United States would result in the majority immediately voting to cancel debts and re-distribute real estate, thus dismantling the complexity of a socio-economic state heroically held far from the equilibrium of a Hobbesian “state of nature,” which amounted to “a war of all against all.” He insisted that the world of one man/one vote would eventually degenerate into one that is devoid of any significant form of human cooperation. It would contain no art or grand architecture, no refined culture or complex social arrangements and, worst of all, no productive surplus to be accumulated into vast personal fortunes. Adams argued:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; (...)if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not [they] think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? Property is surely a right of mankind as really[</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic#To_denote_archaisms" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sic</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">] as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Democracy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">got a huge boost when Andrew Jackson ran a populist campaign for president in 1828 and described himself, provocatively for the time, as a democrat, by which he meant to emphasize his camaraderie with common people and his antagonism to bankers and bureaucrats. By mid century, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">democracy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had metamorphosed from a term of abuse into an accepted label for a republic in which representatives are elected by the people. Today, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">democracy </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is riding so high that the US Federal Government, a system explicitly designed to prevent rule by the many, is trumpeted as the archetypal example of democracy, something so noble and morally salutary that we justify invading other countries by claiming that we do it not for our own advantage but with the altruistic aim of "spreading democracy."</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The word "anarchy" has not fared so well. Its etymology describes a social arrangement that is "without rulers." No surprise then that our rulers would prefer that we equate such a situation with mob violence, burning cities, and landscapes pillaged by nightmare monsters from the id. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a linguistic environment shaped by the needs of capital, the word “anarchist” fits nicely into the phrase "bomb-throwing anarchist." While some anarchists surely have thrown bombs, "bomb-dropping capitalist" has many more concrete referents than does "bomb-throwing anarchist." And yet, "bomb-dropping capitalist" reeks of grumpy leftist ideology, whereas "bomb-throwing anarchist" just seems like a reference to an uncontroversial archetype.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thomas Hobbes and those “Founding Fathers” who agreed with his views claimed to believe that everything good about human civilization was only possible when the rabble subordinated their individual autonomy to a ruler and accepted direction from above. Given that they were arguing to preserve their own privileged status, this was a convenient belief for the founders to hold. Whether or not they actually believed it I can’t say, but a less ideologically constrained look at the few remaining pre-literate cultures left to serve as windows into our own pre-historic past shows that cooperation and coordination of effort, without any compulsion or direction from on high, is the basic human </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">modus operandi</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's just what we do. As Dmitry put it:</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The striking success of the human species has everything to do with our superior abilities to communicate, cooperate, organize spontaneously and act creatively in concert. In turn, the equally glaring, horrific, monstrous failures of our species have everything to do with our unwelcome ability to submit to authority, tolerate class distinctions and blindly follow orders and rigid systems of rules.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I paused in my reading, Olga pointed out that, in English language conversation, at least in the United States, the word "anarchy" is very likely to occur as a part of the phrase "descent into anarchy." The unspoken assumption being that up is good and down is bad. We build up. We strive to climb higher, to continue the work of the great men who came before us and raise the edifice of our civilization ever skyward. A movement in the opposite direction represents a loss of hard-won human achievement, a slide in the direction of the Hobbesian hell of our brutish origins. A descent is a fall; perhaps even a re-enactment of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Fall</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A fall is something to be avoided, but if increased social and technological complexity is synonymous with moving up, then we may be obliged to make some kind of downward movement in the near future. Nobody wants to fall, but when you are standing on a rickety, teetering scaffold that you built by bolting one </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kludge" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kludge </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">onto another onto another, until you are precariously perched atop a teetering structure of Rube Goldberg complexity, swaying in the wind, a move in the direction of the steady ground of anarchy might be just the thing. When the ossified and hyper-complex structure of class division, codified inequality and technological dependence starts to shake and list, and collapse seems likely, a deliberate descent sooner beats an obligatory fall later. How much later? Hard to tell, but why risk it by lingering? For the commanding view? Is it really better than anarchy?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And lest you imagine that I invoked the concept of collapse as a scare tactic, I am using the word as Joseph Tainter does in his classic, </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Collapse of Complex Societies</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. According to Tainter's conception of collapse, a civilization that responds to challenges by increasing the complexity of its civic arrangements simultaneously increases the fragility and vulnerability of the system. Consider this excerpt from </span><a href="http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/occupy_world_street/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform </span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Ross Jackson:</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-37337750940240801572013-05-22T19:18:00.000-07:002013-07-06T11:21:01.008-07:00Has Charles Mann Turned to the Dark Side?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've been getting e-mails and communications via social media from C-Realm listeners who are… let us to say "concerned" that <a href="http://www.charlesmann.org/" target="_blank">Charles C. Mann</a>, respected researcher and author (as well as repeat C-Realm podcast guest), has sold his soul to the fossil fuel industry. CCM has an article entitled <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/" target="_blank">"What If We Never Run out of Oil?"</a> in the May 2013 edition of the Atlantic monthly magazine. For the magazine cover the editors chose to remove the question mark and change a 'what if' question into the bald assertion that we will never run out of oil. While I agree that the article grants the techno-optimists too much credibility, I think that champions of the peak oil narrative are over-reacting and missing the point of CCM's presentation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I will explain in detail why I think CCM's Atlantic article has merit, but first, let's run through the flaws. In the article, and in an ensuing discussion on <a href="http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp130503global_warming_in_a_" target="_blank">an episode of To the Point</a> where CCM and three of the experts he quoted in his Atlantic article participated in a roundtable discussion on the topics of energy and climate, all of the participants (except the program's host, Warren Olney) largely ignored the distinctions between oil, petroleum and 'natural gas (which sounds euphemistic to me and which I will refer to only as 'methane' going forward) and treated them as as a single resource called 'fossil fuels.' They also ignored the difference between liquid fuels which are used for transport and other types of energy resources which power the electrical grid. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">C-Realm listener Bruce W. summarized what he saw as flawed reasoning and equivocations as follows:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the things that struck me about the Atlantic piece was what I took to be an odd definition of “petroleum” as “a grab-bag term for all non-solid hydrocarbon resources-oil of various types, natural gas, propane, oil precursors, and so on-that companies draw from beneath the Earth’s surface. The stuff that catches fire around stove burners is known by a more precise term, natural gas, referring to methane, a colorless, odorless gas that has the same chemical makeup no matter what the source-ordinary petroleum wells, shale beds, or methane hydrate."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, okay, not wrong exactly, I guess - but the title of the article is “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” Industrial society, the infrastructure we built in the latter part of the 20th century, runs on oil - specifically light sweet crude that we got out of giant fields, all of which are in or edging toward decline or depletion. The crisis we are facing is a liquid fuel shortage, for which NGLs or whatever we might eventually possibly make out of methane hydrates do not adequately serve as a substitute (it's my understanding that NGLs deliver only about 66% of the energy of gasoline).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You can see the confusion on Mann's part when he writes, “ASPO was born after (Jean) Laherrère and Colin Campbell, another retired petroleum geologist, predicted in 1998 that ‘within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand.’ Given the record-high petroleum reserves of the time, the claim was gutsy. Campbell and Laherrère insisted that talk of ever more oil was nonsense.” So what are we talking about - Peak Oil or Peak “Petroleum”? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The same confusion ran rampant through the discussion on “To The Point”. Plopping everything under the same general heading (of “energy” or “petroleum”) when what you actually want to talk about is “oil”, which undergirds our food production and distribution, our transportation, and a whole host of other systems, is either deliberately misleading (as <a href="http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html" target="_blank">Kunstler maintained</a>) or just some fuzzy-headed writing. I tend to think it’s the latter...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Atlantic article and in the subsequent radio discussion, CCM discusses hydrocarbon fuel sources obtained through advances in hydraulic fracturing and a decade-long Japanese program aimed at harvesting methane clathrates as reason enough to justify asking what the climate implications would be if the peak oil people are wrong and we don't run out of accessible hydrocarbon energy anytime soon? What happens to the climate if we keep taking carbon that is sequestered underground or in seafloor ice and pumping it into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide? I think it is a question worth asking, and I think that some of the fuzzy thinking about the different forms of hydrocarbon energy that has allowed the discussion to be framed in terms of never running out of oil is what has allowed this conversation to slip past the gatekeepers of the mainstream conversation who normally do not countenance any talk of limits to growth or resource constraints. When the keepers of the public discourse grant such messages any air time, they make sure that talk of limits is always presented in the context of a techno-utopian refutation or as disaster porn. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I also think that aggressive doomsaying about oil supplies in years past prompted CCM to overcorrect in the opposite direction. He explains that he wrote a story on fossil fuel production 12 years ago in which he spoke to a few petroleum engineers who were excited at the prospects of something called hydraulic fracturing for accessing petroleum deposits that were not accessible via conventional means. At the time, unidentified sources assured CCM that such talk was just wishful thinking. As a result, CCM left fracking out of his story from 12 years ago. He regrets that decision, and with this most recent Atlantic article, he was not about to be fooled again into omitting a potentially important element in the fossil fuel story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Twelve years ago, fracking was the potential game-changer. Now, the potential game-changer is the possibility of harvesting methane gas from seafloor ice. This methane-rich ice, which goes by many names including methane clathrates, may exceed all other sources of hydrocarbon energy combined. The Japanese, who lack any significant source of domestic energy and who have relied on imported energy and nuclear plants to power their modern techno-industrial infrastructure, have led the pack in exploring ways to access the energy locked up in methane clathrates. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the Japanese, it would represent an enormous achievement which could free them somewhat from their dependence on potentially unreliable sources of foreign energy. They have conducted a decade-long research project and have just recently extracted the first commercial quantities of methane from ice on the bottom of the ocean using an enormous, custom-built research vessel. As Chris Miller pointed out in an <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/we-wont-run-out-of-oil-renewables-will-take-its-place/" target="_blank">article </a>published in Grist, the Japanese have spent $700 million over 10 years to recover $50,000 worth of natural gas liquids. Taken in those terms, the project has not provided a very impressive return on the Japanese investment. Still, compared to what Americans and Japanese spend on cosmetics every year, $700 million over ten years is a pittance, and the potential returns could prove that investment to have been money well spent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other voices from the C-Realm have responded with indignation at CCM for having taken energy industry cheerleaders at their word. I posted to the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/137746311776/" target="_blank">Friends of the C-Realm Group on Facebook</a> that I might be interviewing CCM about his article and asked if C-Realm listeners had any questions they would like for me to ask him. One listener responded with, "Why, Charles? Why?" That same listener continued with, "Or if you're feeling cheeky, ask if he's receiving any payments from the oil and gas industry."</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh54cwBM4Bp62JvgOT5kqsK95uHxNYKbfwbgn7KaLwVPNWvkqcIDHm8PwRNOKQ4WF6F2ey1rjOvquKeI_KXiuAGXydPn3FNiLnd5A12mNAWtM_5QBTty98YwWp8_F-AoRXa06eec5XS8Imi/s1600/US+oil+prod+plain_edited-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh54cwBM4Bp62JvgOT5kqsK95uHxNYKbfwbgn7KaLwVPNWvkqcIDHm8PwRNOKQ4WF6F2ey1rjOvquKeI_KXiuAGXydPn3FNiLnd5A12mNAWtM_5QBTty98YwWp8_F-AoRXa06eec5XS8Imi/s1600/US+oil+prod+plain_edited-2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">James Howard Kunstler argued that CCM's Atlantic piece wasn't quite "mendacious" (a fancy word for "dishonest") but that it was "tragically dumb." <a href="http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-illusion-of-invincibility.html" target="_blank">John Michael Greer</a>, not responding specifically to CCM, has written that peak oil theory predicted that, as the price for oil and other forms of fossil fuel rose, production of resources that once could not be extracted profitably would become economically feasible. He has a graph that he has made repeated use of in his blog posts that shows a little uptick amid the greater downward trajectory in domestic US oil production in recent decades. Domestic energy production peaked decades ago in the United States and that little uptick at the far right of the graph from fracking hasn't returned us to the production level of 1970 or brought us anywhere close. To take this evidence as support for fairy tales of a return to abundance requires a powerful motivation on the part of the reader.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nicole Foss, in a <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/04-nicole-foss-part-1-building-resiliency-in-an-era-of-limits-to-growth/" target="_blank">talk</a> she gave here in New York City in January of 2013, described the low price of natural gas as a result of a misperception on the part of investors. She reasoned that the gas industry has profited from fracking not so much with actual gas production but by bundling drilling leases and selling them as investment products. She explained that in order to make those investment products attractive it is in their interest to crank up the hype machine about a supposedly new era of energy abundance. CCM reports in his Atlantic article that Jean Laherrère made that same case about abundant oil from fracking when CCM interviewed him in February.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As mentioned earlier, shortly after the publication of his Atlantic article, CCM appeared on a segment of the NPR program To the Point in a segment devoted to </span><span id="docs-internal-guid-27a8868e-ce4f-446d-c3fc-57895b7ff6a6" style="line-height: 1.15;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-27a8868e-ce51-50ad-270a-a1c273a991c5"><span id="docs-internal-guid-27a8868e-ce4f-446d-c3fc-57895b7ff6a6"><span id="docs-internal-guid-27a8868e-ce51-50ad-270a-a1c273a991c5"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fossil fuels and climate change.</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-27a8868e-ce4f-446d-c3fc-57895b7ff6a6"><span id="docs-internal-guid-27a8868e-ce51-50ad-270a-a1c273a991c5"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> CCM was joined by three other guests, all of whom had contributed quotes to his Atlantic article. After CCM recapped his case for thinking that human civilization would never run out of fossil fuels (a category which includes methane from seafloor ice and not just oil as the cover of the Atlantic asserted) the host, Warren Olney, asked Michael Levi, author of Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future, "Whatever happened to the idea of Peak Oil?" Levi's answered, "The idea of peak oil wasn't on very good foundation in the first place, but it certainly got popular during the 2000s. That wasn't the first time that it was popular. We thought that we were running out of oil in the 19th century. We thought we were running out of oil around World War I. We thought we were running out of oil around World War II. And then we thought again in the 1970s that we were running out. And what happens every time is what Charles has said; we are able to extract more resources as prices go up and as the economic incentive to develop technology and explore new places increases."</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Michael Levi, who is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), almost certainly knows that M. King Hubbert's peak oil theory is not the simple worry that "we are running out of oil." There are many subtleties to peak oil, but in general, peak oil theory predicts that production of conventional oil will eventually stop growing, reach a plateau, and then decline. To characterize it as the unfounded fear that "we are running out of oil" is the sort of strawman characterization that cheerleaders for the fossil fuel industry usually reserve for audiences who are either completely naive about peak oil or ideologically predisposed to reject it and won't ask too many questions of people who tell them what they want to hear. After that opening, I struggled to take anything Michael Levi had to say at all seriously, though I agree with him about it being foolish to hope that peak oil will save us from climate change when we can't bring ourselves to reduce carbon emissions voluntarily.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What occurred to me in that moment when Warren Olney asked Michael Levi about the notion of peak oil was, "When was there ever a serious conversation about peak oil on NPR?" This is a topic I have been following for about six years. The conversation takes place on Internet forums like The Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin. It takes place on blogs like Jim Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation and John Michael Greer's the Archdruid Report. It takes place in books by authors like Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, and Sharon Astyk. It takes place on podcasts like the C-Realm and Extraenvironmentalist. With exceptions so rare that they prove the rule, it does not take place on NPR.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suffice it to say that CCM has heard the story of energy abundance from people like Levi, whose mainstream credibility derives from the fact that they tell it convincingly. But that's not the only reason that he has framed his piece as a refutation of peak oil theory. CCM thinks that he made a mistake 12 years ago when he took "several prominent energy pundits" seriously when they assured him that fracking would never scale up to provide energy at an economically viable scale. He omitted fracking from his story then, and he was not about to repeat that error of omission in the present. Clearly, the prophets of doom sold their case a little too effectively. CCM regrets having taken them seriously back then, and in an effort to avoid repeating that error, he may be overcompensating and committing a new kind of error now.</span></div>
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<span style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even so, his central question, the one in the title of his article, is crucial. Atmospheric carbon is at 400 parts per million today. We need to get that down to 350 ppm to keep global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Celsius</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Economic growth proceeds in lock-step with energy use. Energy obtained by pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground or off of the seafloor and then burning them puts more carbon into the atmosphere. Our business and political leaders are hell-bent on fostering economic growth which means burning hydrocarbon fuels. People who are concerned about climate change and aware of peak oil have been hoping that supply constraints would put the brakes on our collective suicide machine for us since we can't seem to muster the gumption to do it of our own free will. You may not have swallowed the energy glut hype, but the question remains. What if supply constraints aren't going to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves? What if we don't run out of fossil fuels to burn before we set off self-sustaining climate feedback loops? What are we going to do? That's an important question, and it bears a passing resemblance to a question which absolutely cannot be asked in polite company or in the mainstream conversation curated by the corporate media and by NPR.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In November of 2011, I gave a <a href="http://youtu.be/xwf9rNvxSvs" target="_blank">presentation </a>at a conference in northern Michigan where I shared the stage with Albert Bates, Nicole Foss, Steve Keen, and Guy McPherson. In one breakout session, Guy McPherson proposed a worst-case scenario. He proposed that the discovery of a practically limitless, free, clean source of energy would be disastrous as it would allow the planet-consuming machine that is industrial culture to continue its omnicidal campaign against all life on earth. When we reconvened with the larger assembly, very few conference attendees grokked how the discovery of a clean and abundant source of energy with which to power our civilization could be bad news. I spoke with Guy McPherson again recently for C-Realm podcast <a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/354-rapid-unpredictable-non-linear-responses/" target="_blank">episode 354: Rapid, Unpredictable & Non-linear Responses</a>. I asked him to revisit that conference breakout session.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">KMO<span style="font-weight: normal;">: Would you summarize the thinking behind limitless, clean, free energy being terrible news?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guy McPherson<span style="font-weight: normal;">: Well yes. It's been essentially free energy in the form of crude oil that has allowed us to develop a system that allows us to destroy every aspect of the living planet upon which we depend for our survival. So, it's the development and implementation of an almost free energy source that allows us to commit planetary suicide. And people want more of that because it looks like we are on the verge of running out of the cheap oil? Or maybe we already have run out? The root of the problem here is cheap energy which allows us to fly all over the world, drive all of the world, and develop an electrical grid and have access to all kinds of other energy sources... Fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources, all of which have extremely adverse consequences that, for the most part, we just look away from. And so free energy forever is a prescription for absolute disaster. I can't imagine that that would turn out well. It certainly hasn't turned out well in the recent past when we have had, for all practical purposes, free energy at our ready disposal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">KMO<span style="font-weight: normal;">: It would be a bit like winning the lottery, I think. Winning the lottery tends to be a disaster for most people that it happens to. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guy McPherson<span style="font-weight: normal;">: Yes, and we have won the lottery as a society. Or as Jane Goodall reports, there's an interesting little experiment she did. There was a bunch of apes that she was studying, and they were all getting along just fine as a community, and so she throws a bunch of bananas into the mix. And they start fighting and beating each other up and really acting in a way that we don't associate with wild animals so much as we do with human beings fighting over limited food. They went bananas, and it appears that when it comes to cheap energy that we went bananas too. I don't think that more of that is going to lead towards improvement in our behavior.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">KMO<span style="font-weight: normal;">: The solution to the life problems that have befallen somebody who has won the lottery and wasn't prepared for it is not to have them win the lottery a second time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guy McPherson<span style="font-weight: normal;">: Right. Exactly. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CCM has challenged the peak oil narrative and provoked the champions of that narrative into a reflexive defense. There are reasons to believe that the current glut of methane from fracking will prove fleeting and that the current price reflects a deliberately-cultivated false belief about its seeming abundance. Energy companies certainly have an economic motive to use expert propaganda to cultivate public belief in newly abundant fossil fuel energy. By accepting that propaganda, and by taking for granted that peak oil theory languishes in defeat, CCM is free to ask, "What are the consequences of cheap and abundant methane?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Methane burns cleaner than coal, but still puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and none of the experts that CCM interviewed for his Atlantic article argued otherwise or even implied that business as usual was viable in the light of anthropogenic climate change. Even Michael Levi, who in the roundtable discussion on To the Point, told Warren Olney that the case for peak oil had never been strong, warned that an abundance of relatively clean energy in the form of methane would likely inspire political laziness and complacency at a time when we need to push hard in the direction of renewable energy. The scenario that he hopes to avoid is one in which we use cheap and abundant methane as a 'bridge fuel' for moving from the coal-powered past to the coal-powered future.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Atlantic article, CCM told the story of the personal and professional rivalry between M. King Hubbert, the father of peak oil theory, and Vincent E. McKelvey, the head of the Unite States Geological Survey (USGS) from 1971 to 1977, who provided a Panglossian picture of US energy reserves. President Jimmy Carter, prophet of conservation, forced McKelvey to resign, but that was not the end of the contest between Hubbertians and McKelveyans. CCM presents the McKelveyans as the current champions. He quotes several McKelveyans for every Hubbertian in the Atlantic article, and the only voice representing the Hubbertian view on the To the Point segment was the program's host. Peak oil proponents may cry foul, but the point here is not a fair fight between the avatars of abundance and scarcity. CCM's presentation is much more a professional wrestling spectacle, where the winner of the match is preordained, than it is an actual competition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If the Hubbert vs. McKelvey contest were presented as a fair fight, then we would not have the same vantage point from which to scrutinize the preordained winner's victory dance for indications that he will blithely continue in a mode which is nudging the cradle of terrestrial life in the direction of a Venusian hothouse hell. What's more, if Hubbert vs. McKelvey were not a fixed fight, the match would have taken place in a backyard or in an alley behind a biker bar rather than in a glitzy Las Vegas casino before a live audience of thousands, and we would never have enjoyed such a high-profile presentation. Peak oil's defenders are too indignant over the disrespectful treatment of their favored contender to appreciate what we can learn if our fighter takes a voluntary dive and leaves the cornucopians to demonstrate their willingness to suffocate in their own success.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-42640952066354375212013-05-13T07:01:00.000-07:002013-07-06T10:30:49.311-07:00Boomers Go Bust<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the wake of World War II, the United States stood intact amidst countries leveled and exhausted by conflict and was thus in a position to dictate the terms of the new international economic order. From this position of strength, the USA relieved the British of their global empire, set the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, and established a flow of imperial tribute from the global economic periphery to the new center of imperial gravity while demurring at the prospect of actually calling ourselves an empire. Our soldiers returned home to a booming industrial economy that was hungry for workers. Jobs were plentiful, as were houses in the new suburbs for qualified GIs. The corporations feared underproduction, and the government feared discontent among veterans who might organize and agitate, and so advertisers convinced workers to define themselves and express their individuality through their purchases. Their patterns of consumption became their identity. The rights and privileges of citizens devolved into the rights and privileges of consumers.</span></b></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The architects of suburbia laid out the new subdivisions without public spaces and with houses designed to direct the family's attention to the backyard rather than to the street. Fossil fuels were practically free, and a new interstate highway system and prosperous workers elevated the car, that was a necessary component of suburban living, to an exalted position in the pantheon of consumer goods. Jim Kunstler's Age of Happy Motoring commenced.</span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid--45d7dc7-9e25-b819-7f2f-1e5a1687b892" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The children of this jubilant period, the Baby Boomers, were the ultimate repository of the aspirations of this triumphant culture, and their parents, the self-identified Greatest Generation, told their children that they were the heirs to the kingdom of heaven made manifest on earth. They could have anything, do anything, and surpass God's angels as the ultimate manifestation of His vision. The Boomers' parents told him that if they played by the rules, embraced their own self-aggrandizing mythology and worked hard, that they could enjoy unprecedented educational opportunities, careers, prosperity and abundance. And so it was. For a time.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In that period in which the Baby Boomers self-congratulatory narrative was taking shape, the United States was the world's biggest oil exporter. By the time I was born in 1968, domestic oil production was reaching its peak. I was a child when the second OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s created fuel shortages. TV news reports focused on the long lines and short tempers at gas stations. The embargo was short-lived, and the bonanza soon resumed, and by the time I started driving in 1984, gas still cost less than a dollar a gallon. My father continued to repeat the core tenet of the Boomer belief system, that every generation in America does better than their parents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Douglas Copeland published his novel <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Accelerated_Culture" target="_blank">Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture</a> in 1991, when the Boomer belief system remained unassailable. The explanation for the fact that the Boomers' children did not seem to be on track to exceed their parents in achievement and material abundance was a story of how the Gen Xers were cynical, psychologically detached and more interested in sabotaging the American dream with their hip irony than in joining the workforce and embracing their American birthright. The problem had nothing to do with the decline of an economy based on manufacturing or with the rise of the new financialized economic order that didn't need nearly as many workers as before. The problem was clearly with young people who could have lived even larger than their Baby Boomer parents if only they would shrug off their unjustified malaise and get with the program. According to this narrative, the Gen Xers' obscure media obsessions and their rejection of the supposedly bourgeois values of their parents was just a smokescreen for laziness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Richard Linklater's 1991 film "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102943/combined" target="_blank">Slacker</a>" sealed the deal and indelibly affixed the suffix "slacker" to my generation. Just speak the words "Gen X slacker" aloud. Notice how easily they roll off the tongue. As easy as it is to say, the "Gen X slacker" meme slotted into the Baby Boomer's worldview just as effortlessly as it spilled out of their mouths. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Greatest Generation propelled the USA on its path to global dominance with their hard work and belt-tightening at home and with their courage and self-sacrifice in the theaters of war. Or so goes their self-serving narrative. Louis Menand, writing about Timothy Leary for <a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Farchive%2F2006%2F06%2F26%2F060626crbo_books&h=ZAQGa1dt2" target="_blank">the New Yorker</a>, offers a different take.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since. Great Ones, we salute you!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Baby Boomers enjoyed an unprecedented starting position, and they did their part to fulfill the glorious destiny that their parents’ heroism made possible. Then along came Generation X, and in a self-indulgent fit of unjustified cynicism, the slackers sabotaged the whole glorious enterprise with their obstinate refusal to get with the program.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This scapegoating of Generation X is a narrative you probably haven't heard repeated any time recently, but if you are a Boomer you surely did not encounter the phrase "Gen X slacker" for the first time here on this blog. You may not have heard it or read it (much less, said it) since the fall of 2008, but reading it now surely activates long dormant mental circuits as when hearing an advertising jingle from yesteryear. "Plop plop. Fizz fizz. Oh what a relief it is. Fast. Fast. Fast."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now that the grand scale malfeasance of a financialized economy is a fait accompli and the speculative bubbles that seduced homeowners into liquidating the accumulated equity in their homes have effected a massive transfer of wealth to the rentier class, and the Boomers feel the walls of the shrinking middle class closing in on them, the Gen X slacker meme no longer fits the current narrative. Consequently it has fallen into disuse. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Boomers may have conveniently forgotten how regularly they once used that detestable phrase or how fully they embraced it as a label that identified something real, but for most of my 20s and well into my 30s, the mainstream narrative of the echo chamber corporate media and the dinner table conversations that it informed treated the concept of the Gen X slacker as if it had real explanatory and predictive power. The Boomers may have forgotten their behavior from this period, but we Gen X slackers remember. Now that the glorious destiny of the Baby Boomers lies in ruins and Boomers have eclipsed depressed teenagers and the elderly as the group most likely to commit suicide, it is tempting, though certainly not helpful or praiseworthy, to enjoy a moment of schadenfreude as the Boomers wallow in their incomprehension, disbelief and despair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you are a member of Generation X or some later generation and grew up in the confining shadows of the most annoyingly smug, self-important, pampered and flattered demographic phenomenon in living memory, a group that has insisted that they did everything right and now that things are visibly falling apart that it must be because young people are too lazy or self-absorbed to take on the roles of responsible working adults (no, the Boomers don't see the irony in their accusing anyone of putting selfish obsessions above the good of one's community, nation or civilization)… Well, if you want to take a moment and enjoy their wailing and gnashing of teeth, go ahead. We have work to do, but if you don't think that you have taken ample time to gloat, snort and savor their lamentation, then a nagging sense of a missed opportunity might distract you from the task ahead. That task will require your full attention and focus, so if you want to just pause here and take satisfaction in the Boomers' moment of manifest failure and ignominy, that's okay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I won't even say, "I'll wait," because I cannot claim that I've yet had my fill and that I'm over it. I will be gloating right along with you for as long as you care to linger in this moment of anti-bodhisattvahood. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[Insert timeless moment for gloating]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay. Done? Good. Me too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, let's build up a little compassion before we continue, because we are going to be a lot more useful to our communities and to our civilization if we are working in a spirit of compassion and empathy than if we move forward with a gale force ideological wind filling our egoic sails with righteous indignation. What's more, forgiving the Baby Boomers and welcoming them into the ranks of conscious revolutionaries will be good practice for forgiving and learning to work with the 1%. We cannot build lasting prosperity, effect ecological restoration and navigate the challenges of increasingly disruptive technological development while simultaneously fighting a war against our oligarchs. I certainly don't want to leave a world to my children that is the product of a global revolution in consciousness born of savagery and vengeance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As annoyed as you may have felt at Boomers who thought that their own choices and actions created the unprecedented prosperity that they enjoyed from birth, right up to the moment when they had the rug pulled out from under them at the end of their careers, you probably never wanted to parade them through the streets, march them up onto a platform and end their lives in a public spectacle of brutal revenge entertainment. But, if you don't occasionally thirst for the blood of the 1%, the people who robbed the rest of us with debt, presided over the dismantling of the industrial economy, confiscated that portion of the Imperial tribute gravy train that used to go to the middle class, and used the occasion of global crisis to justify a massive transfer of wealth to their own strata and simply assumed that the rest of us would just reconcile ourselves to the new normal and continue to feed on the false hope of winning the lottery or somehow becoming famous, then you are a more spiritually advanced being than I am, and I salute you. We will need more like you if we are going to make it through the coming transition with our souls intact.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the time being, just know that the Boomers were, for the most part, either doing what their parents told them was the right thing to do or trying to correct the moral and intellectual failings of their parents and mostly failing themselves but in new and spectacularly creative ways. If we can learn from the mistakes of previous generations, the Boomers have much to teach us.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-64691528302593619412013-04-24T13:42:00.002-07:002013-07-06T10:08:49.966-07:00The Neoliberal War on Imagination<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-44563db3-3da7-7a30-91d3-7a87fcc6d099" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I spoke recently with Tom O'Brien of the </span><a href="http://fromalpha2omega.podomatic.com/entry/2013-04-06T01_42_57-07_00" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From Alpha to Omega podcast</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Tom asked me about zombie films and their political freight. He also asked me about Occupy Wall Street. He thought that I would have an opinion about OWS because, as long-time C-Realm listeners know, I made two visits to NYC during the late summer and fall of 2011 when OWS first manifested as the occupation of Zucotti Park. I made casual visits to the encampment, collected interviews and provided an account of my experiences in C-Realm Podcast episodes </span><a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/280-ows-the-spark/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">280: OWS - the Spark </span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/281-the-one-percent-narrative/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">281: The One Percent Narrative</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In those early days, when OWS had the support of local unions and thousands of people assembled to chant “We are the 99%” and “This is what democracy looks like,” I let the energy and excitement of the moment sweep me up in the dream of a revolutionary ground-swell that would lead to a rapid transformation of the political and economic landscape. I described to Tom the great anticipation and subsequent disappointment that I experienced around the form that Occupy Wall Street would ultimately take in the spring and summer of 2012. By then, I was living in Brooklyn, and I was excited to see what OWS would look like after a rejuvenating winter time-out. From my vantage point, Occupy’s 2012 incarnation basically fizzled. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It seemed like the establishment had made better use of the winter hiatus than had the activists, and OWS did not manage to reclaim the space it had won in the corporate media conversation the previous fall. It was as though the champions of the mainstream worldview had effectively neutralized the challenge from OWS. Then came Hurricane Sandy in the late fall of 2012, which left some of NYC’s previously under-served and marginalized communities like Far Rockaway, without electricity, potable water, or respite from the cold and with little prospect of immediate relief coming from the city, state, or federal government. This was Occupy’s opportunity to demonstrate mutual aid, spontaneous organization and community-building, and they performed well above my expectations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After my conversation with Tom O’Brien, I heard from </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/josh.fuhrman1" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Josh Fuhrman</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (a Friend of the C-Realm). He directed me to an excerpt from David Graeber’s new book </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/josh.fuhrman1" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Democracy Project: a History, a Crisis, a Movement</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which appeared as a freestanding </span><a href="http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide#.UV706VJxLI8.twitter" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">essay in the web magazine The Baffler</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><a href="http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide#.UV706VJxLI8.twitter" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In it, Graeber describes the long-term effects that the organized opposition to the Vietnam war had on American foreign policy and the use of military force in the decades since. Graeber argues that the protests exercised a lasting influence on the tactics and priorities of the power elite in managing the worldview and containing the imagination of the American populace. I wish that I had read </span><a href="http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide#.UV706VJxLI8.twitter" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that essay </span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">prior to recording my conversation with Tom, because in it Graeber clearly articulates notions about the Occupy movement that I was struggling to clarify in that podcast interview. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Graeber explains that, in the United States, the global revolution of 1968 took the form of an alliance between students, dropouts, and other marginal players who united in opposition to the Vietnam War. The popular view of those protests is that they failed to remove the United States from that theater of war any sooner than would have happened without the protests. Graeber argues that a longer term view shows something different. As a result of those protests, the United States would not commit American soldiers to a massive ground war for another 30 years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When 9/11 broke the US out of that pattern, the fear of domestic resistance to the war caused military planners to hamstring themselves. Thinking that the loss of American lives would spark protest on the homefront, the architects of the War on Terror made keeping US casualties to a minimum their overriding priority. They did this even though minimizing American body counts meant imposing such hardships on the civilian populations of Iraq and Afghanistan that it made both wars essentially unwinnable from a military perspective. The US war planners understood that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan posed any threat to a geopolitical order which much of the world identifies as neoliberalism, but which the United States simply calls "freedom." The over-arching concern of the defenders of the status quo seems to be that a massive organized resistance to US military hegemony could grow into a coordinated expression of discontent against the neoliberal worldview. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?” </span><a href="http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide#.UV706VJxLI8.twitter" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-David Graeber</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Graeber then describes his experience attending a protest intended to disrupt a series of IMF meetings in Washington DC in 2002. The police presence and their overbearing tactics quashed any notion that the protests might succeed, and Graeber left the scene feeling defeated and depressed. He later learned that the IMF had canceled many of the scheduled meetings. In practice, the police security measures meant to prevent organized protest of the meetings, became so onerous to the attendees that it was easier for them to conduct their meetings online than in person. The protests, which, to the protesters themselves, seemed like such a washout, turned out to have been really quite effective. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This set Graeber to wondering if perhaps the ultimate goal of the neoliberal establishment is to maintain the sense of powerlessness among citizens and to prevent them from imagining any large-scale change to the economic and political order. Could it be that the highest priority for the neoliberal establishment is to maintain a demoralized state of mind in people who do not support the system but who have no sense that they could choose something different? Neoliberalism is, after all, something which Americans are not even supposed to recognize as being just one set of political and economic arrangements among many possibilities. The corporate media imposes such strict discipline on the American vocabulary that financialized capitalism of the neoliberal variety is only identified using terms like “free trade” and “the free market.” Neoliberalism itself must not be named, much less examined or challenged. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The philosophy of neoliberalism, as Graeber describes it, holds that the primary objective of government is to foster economic growth, and that all other social goods will flow from the ingenuity of the people operating freely in the market and in an environment of economic growth. That means that governments must subordinate all other concerns to growth. If, in the short term, that growth seems incompatible with human rights or with peaceful international relations, then governments must still take action to foster growth even at the short-term expense of peace or human rights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For me, the key insight that Graeber communicates in this essay is that if fostering economic growth really were the primary objective of the neoliberal agenda, then its effectiveness over the last thirty years is certainly underwhelming. If, on the other hand, the primary objective of neoliberal policies has been to foster the widespread belief that no other economic system is possible, then it has achieved a resounding victory. Even though this system, which Graeber describes as "financialized, semi-feudal capitalism," is clearly not fostering reliable growth, much less providing the majority of people with meaningful work, it has succeeded gloriously in preventing the majority of Imperial American subjects from considering alternatives to the neoliberal order.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David Graeber describes the campaign to make the current global economic arrangements seem like the only possible choice as a “war on imagination.” The actions of military planners and police seem to support the idea that the highest priority of the system is the perpetuation of the assumption that, as the late Margaret Thatcher so famously put it, “There is no alternative.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From here, David Graeber went on to echo something I had heard from Federico Pistono, the author of </span><a href="http://www.robotswillstealyourjob.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ROBOTS WILL STEAL YOUR JOB BUT THAT’S OK: How To Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Federico was the guest on </span><a href="http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/352-drive-flow-purpose/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">C-Realm podcast episode 352: Drive, Flow, Purpose</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. In his book and in our recorded conversation, Federico makes the point that, for several decades, automation has been displacing workers and destroying jobs faster than it creates new types of employment and that the process is about to accelerate with, for example, self-driving cars eliminating the jobs of millions of truck and cab drivers. As artificial intelligence grows more subtle, adaptable, and better able to navigate the vagaries of working in the physical world, that process will not only continue, but will exacerbate our economic woes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One mental stricture that keeps human society from responding adaptively to current circumstances and technological trends is the unquestioned belief that employment is a good unto itself and that people must work a job in order to justify their continued existence. In other words, we treat the notion that everybody must earn a living as an unquestioned article of faith.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Federico's position is that if we fail to break our ideological commitments to the value of work, we will create enormous ecosystems of unnecessary employment that will consume enormous amounts of resources that could and should be put to much better use. Warning of the dangers inherent in addressing the future while maintaining the assumption that people must work a job in order to live, Federico writes:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I can envision a plethora of futures where everyone has a job. One job could be to show up at the office, sit down, look busy, and read emails all day. Another could be to look at robots working, and make sure nothing is wrong. The fact that only one in ten thousand robots fail over the course of a week, and that one supervisor per facility would suffice matters not. We can have hundreds of supervisors. And then supervisors of supervisors. And then managers, and managers of managers, up in the food chain. We can fabricate new diseases, and then create professions to cure those fictitious illnesses. Finally – desires, as economists teach us, are infinite, therefore we can perpetually generate things to fulfil those desires, however frivolous or whimsical they might be. While this may sound laughable to some of you, it may also sound striking similar to what we are already doing today.” </span><a href="http://robotswillstealyourjob.com/read" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-Federico Pisotono</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Federico concludes that the idea that everyone must earn a living is a spurious conceit that we must eliminate before we squander our resources trying to give every human a job to do in an environment in which artificial intelligence and robotics are eliminating whole categories of human labor. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not only will the newly created jobs serve invented needs, but they will mostly fail to provide people with any sense of meaning or challenge because the work, by its very nature, is unnecessary, and so if it is done poorly or not done at all, the only consequences will be invented consequences in the way that we invent and impose harsh consequences on people who cultivate illegal plants.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not only will the failure to perform unnecessary work have no meaningful consequences, but the diligent pursuit of the duties of those made-up jobs won't produce any tangible good. Such work can provide no sense of accomplishment unless one takes seriously accolades like employee of the month or top sales achiever for the year.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Federico's view, and in my own, the belief that every human must toil and earn a living serves mainly to prevent people from imagining any alternative. It is one piece of a belief system that serves the neoliberal establishment's goal of quashing any inkling of an alternative vision.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I was reading David Graeber's ideas about the self-reinforcing agenda of the neoliberal establishment, I recognized a part of his argument from my recent forays into the writings of Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. In his manifesto, Kaczynski debunked the notion of the leftist crusader as a rebel who opposes the techno-industrial system by pointing out that you cannot oppose the system in terms of the system's own values. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If an activist opposes the polluting practices of some industry on the grounds that pollution harms human health and imposes a burden on local communities, the system can relent and reform itself just enough to defuse the discontent which motivated the protest. This process of relenting and reforming actually makes the techno-industrial system more resilient. The would-be rebel, in pointing out the ways in which this system is out of alignment with its own professed values, strengthens the system against further criticism and protest. Kaczynski is particularly critical of would-be opponents of the techno-industrial system who focus on social justice issues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Many radicals fall into the temptation of focusing on non-essential issues like racism, sexism and sweatshops because it is easy. They pick an issue on which the system can afford a compromise and on which they will get support from people like Ralph Nader, Winona La Duke, the labor unions, and all the other pink reformers. Perhaps the system, under pressure, will back off a bit, the activists will see some visible result from their efforts, and they will have the satisfying illusion that they have accomplished something. But in reality they have accomplished nothing at all toward eliminating the techno-industrial system.” </span><a href="http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-hit-where-it-hurts" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-Theodore Kaczynski</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To actually oppose and weaken the system, the would-be revolutionaries must oppose the system on grounds that the system cannot accept. Kaczynski gives the example of biotechnology. You cannot weaken the techno-industrial system by arguing that biotechnology is harmful to human health because promoting human health is a value that the system supports. The system can implement new safety standards, new methodological protocols and monitoring systems. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In fact, increased regulation is good news for the powerful. When government imposes a new monitoring regime and establishes new requirements for the biotech industry, that actually strengthens the established players in the techno-industrial system because onerous regulations favor the large companies that can afford to devote considerable resources to regulatory compliance. The burden of complying with government regulation raises the bar to entry into that sector and prevents the established players from having to worry about competition from upstart competitors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If, on the other hand, one opposes biotechnology on the grounds that it is an affront to nature, God or the sanctity of life, those are not values that the system can agree with or on which it can afford to give ground. When pushed at a point where the system cannot afford to give ground it can only reject the complaint as baseless. Critics who continue to push where the system cannot afford to give ground can expect to be denounced and vilified, and if they assemble in large numbers, they can expect violent repression from the system. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The rebel, Kaczynski argues, doesn’t want to reform the system. The rebel wants to provoke the system. The rebel wants a fight. The critic who continues to push when the system responds with violence and repression rather than minimal compromise and reform is the true rebel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">David Graeber makes the argument in his new book, </span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330433-the-democracy-project" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Democracy Project: a History, a Crisis, a Movement</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that one place where critics of the system can oppose the current neoliberal establishment is on the moral value of work and debt. A central tenet of the neoliberal orthodoxy, and one on which it cannot afford to give ground, is the idea that people must pay their debts. This belief has some under-appreciated nuances. For example, it seems beyond question that powerless people who earn money with their labor must honor their debts to wealthy people and organizations that make money by financial speculation and collecting tribute. In stark contrast, the debts that the powerful owe to one another are negotiable. The debts that the powerless owe to the powerful are sacrosanct and must be honored, even if paying them off is mathematically impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 17px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.” -David Graeber</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Returning to the theme of the war on imagination, I wonder what I can do to empower people to imagine over, around, or through the roadblock of debt as moral obligation and employment as a good unto itself. Learning the real history of current institutions is a good start. Graeber informs his readers that the framers of the US Constitution, our so-called Founding Fathers, deliberately and explicitly designed our system to preserve privilege for the few and to prevent the mob from exercising democratic power to cancel debts and redistribute land. The propaganda that institutions present to children (and to childish adults) as history rarely benefits from a grown-up examination of actual history. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I enjoy history, but I’m no expert, so the project of aiding the human imagination by teaching it to use historical jiujitsu against the neoliberal establishment will have to be one for the long-term. I welcome your suggestions.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-32728168492061592202013-04-01T16:01:00.001-07:002013-07-02T13:50:31.365-07:00Selecting a Guiding Narrative<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6210807308088988" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"May you live in interesting times," can serve as a curse. We certainly do live in interesting times. Are we cursed?</span></b></div>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6210807308088988" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I graduated from high school, Berlin was still a bisected city. The Soviet Union stood as the monolithic enemy of the West, and when it fell, seemingly overnight, the triumph and ultimate vindication of capitalism seemed uncontested. At the time, I didn't have any doubts as to whether I knew what the word 'capitalism' meant, or whether other people who used that word understood it to mean what I meant by it, i.e. the lack of central planning or of a controlling authority for the economy. In a word, I thought capitalism just meant 'freedom.'</span></b></div>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.6210807308088988" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Capitalism was the freedom to choose the career that made the most sense, given one's skills, attitudes, preferences and ambition. This was the self-satisfied narrative of my national identity. No teacher or other adult authority ever suggested that I think about it any more deeply than that. I don't think I ever wondered what the 'capital' in capitalism meant until I was in my 30s.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, with the Soviet Union gone and with China's Communist Party embracing a pure brand of capitalism unhindered by any gentile concern for human rights, capitalism looks like the only way forward; the only question being, which particular strain of capitalism will thrive best in an age when money moves as fast as information, at least when it's not weighed down by any involvement with the production of physical goods or tangible services. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">According to the champions of global governance, Capitalism is the only game in town. The question of whether capitalism will survive growing unrest and snowballing financial crises is not even open to discussion, and yet, even without a rival, capitalism is clearly not working. Even people of my generation and older, who remember the USSR and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, can see that it isn't working. We don't agree why it isn't working, and I suspect that many people believe it can be made to work again, if only… Insert self-validating prescription here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The more people who, like me, have fallen out of the formal economy of the soon-to-be post-capitalist West, the more people there are who are willing to ask what options besides capitalism exist and what it might take to transition to those other alternatives. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've tried talking to Marxists, but it seems that they are caught up in an old argument, and when I invite them to collaboratively explore the space of possibilities with me, they reflexively cast me as the champion of their traditional enemy. The role they assign me has a detailed historical resume of which I know little. They seem quick to anger, and while I generally don't know what it is that they are trying to communicate, they seem to think that they understand my concerns, even though I don't recognize my own position when I hear it paraphrased back to me in Marxist jargon. Those conversations blow up in a plume of acrimony in short order. I can't say I know much about Marxism, but I can say that I'm not much interested in talking about it with Marxists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I've heard it argued that competition is wasteful, that it leads to useless duplication of effort and that the time has come for a transition from competition to cooperation. To my ears, this has the ring of truth about it, and I’m willing to consider the possibilities. Jacque Fresco of the Venus project and his protégés in the Zeitgeist Movement advocate this line of thought. Unfortunately, their vision strikes me as being no closer to delivering a workable social arrangement than Huxley's Brave New World or the kingdom of righteousness in the vision of the</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reconstructionism" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christian Reconstructionists</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The path from here to their proposed future seems to run through the middle of a miracle. They offer a vision of gleaming cities built from scratch with no visible traces of the infrastructure of the old order. They envision beneficent central computers to choreograph production and allocate resources, but they provide no details about how we will shift from competing agendas to a shared vision of the common good. I don’t see how their vision of elegant cooperation is supposed to grow out of the historical developmental process which has delivered human civilization to this present moment where the only conceivable way of living isn't working any more. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More and more of us are willing to look at alternatives. More than just willing, some of us are desperate for alternatives. Such is our desperation that anyone with a clear vision and a trustworthy countenance can find an audience and gather a hopeful flock around them. The old gatekeepers still maintain their posts and restrict access to the machinery that amplifies voice and vision if your message does not respect the old powers, but the mismatch between the official narrative and the reality we encounter with our senses continues to grow, and people look to alternative channels for alternative narratives, and the new media stands ready</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When people abandon their faith in the mainstream story tellers and first venture away from their familiar and respected sources of information, the alternative narratives they are likely to encounter first are, I fear, mostly predatory. Those who would capitalize on fear and anger spin tales of malevolent plots to enslave humanity and reduce us to degraded and demoralized drones, cattle or serfs. These narratives find willing listeners because they tell people, "These hardships are not your fault. You have worked hard and played by the rules. By rights, you should be successful. This was done to you by evil people." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This narrative is particularly effective because we all want to believe that we have worked hard, that we have made good choices and that we really do deserve better than this. It also spares us the horror of imagining that nobody is in control. We so crave the illusion of agency that we would rather believe that evil, shape-shifting reptiles micromanage every detail of the global technocracy than contemplate the terrifying possibility that nobody is in control, that billions of basically decent people, working with limited information and relying on common sense have collaboratively constructed a self-perpetuating system that reduces humans to interchangeable, disposable parts and consumes the complex vitality of the living planet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This grand conspiracy narrative gets an enormous boost from the fact that it doevetails with the mainstream narrative which still claims that people who work hard and obey authority can find a place in the formal economy, that the system can and will meet all of their needs and provide them with a dignified existence when their usefulness to the system has been exhausted. The evil elite narrative lets us cling to the illusion that the capitalist system is workable, just and redeemable. It can be reformed and made to work like it used to if only we can wrest control from the reptiles and evil wizards who have commandeered and corrupted it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While I criticize those who fear-monger, scapegoat, and pander to festering cultural animosities, I don't blame anyone for not knowing what story to put in place of the increasingly dysfunctional mainstream narrative or any of its toxic contenders. The prescription that seems workable and the one I continue to articulate isn't much of a narrative at all. It is simply this: pay attention. Do your best to remain flexible and adaptable. Hold your beliefs lightly and be ready to examine unfamiliar ideas and let go of ones that seem to have outlived their usefulness, even if you can clearly remember a time when they made good sense. If anything seems like a "no-brainer," that's a sure sign that you are not using your brain. Hear that phrase as a warning klaxon. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Beware of memes that demand total and exclusive allegiance. Eat well and enjoy the company of other people who love good food. Withdraw your participation from stale, partisan debates. Make a point of learning, but let your passion and aptitudes guide you and provide you with the motivation to continue at a pace that invigorates rather than drains you. Spend more time outside. (This one especially is aimed at the man in the mirror.) Notice and gently rebuke those who encourage you to get drunk on the neuro-chemical cocktail of righteous indignation.</span></div>
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KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-22278393291355908332010-10-06T09:01:00.000-07:002010-10-06T09:11:59.476-07:00Conversations on Collapse: C-Realm Podcast Transcripts<div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KV7E8eD3L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" /></div><br />
When I started the C-Realm Podcast, I was a confirmed Singularitarian and Libertarian (in the contemporary American sense of that word). I thought that the accelerating evolution of technology incubated in the nourishing environment of the Free Market would create a human paradise in the blink of an eye. I was concerned that said blink of the eye might be a few decades away, but I was pretty sure we'd get there.<br />
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Then I started talking to people like <b>Dmitry Orlov</b>, who understands computers and understands just how stupid they are and how out of touch with reality we must be to place our hopes for a bright future in anything so devoid of understanding and good sense.<br />
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I talked to <b>Albert K. Bates</b>, who seemed a lot more cogent in his assessment of human-induced climate chaos than the folks at the Cato Institute who once seemed like the very embodiment of clear-headedness to me. Albert invited me to visit the Ecovillage Training Center where I not only saw, but inhabited a more sensible alternative to growth-dependent industrial civilization.<br />
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I spoke with <b>Thomas Homer-Dixon</b>, who explained how debilitating even a temporary loss of the power grid and internet can be, and how, in a world as interconnected and interdependent as ours has become, failures in seemingly insignificant systems can spread and turn a series of small breakdowns into a systemic catastrophe. He also described a set of converging stresses that will continue to intensify and push our hyper-complex society toward the brink of collapse.<br />
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I spoke with <b>Albert A. Bartlett</b> about the inevitable Malthusian Correction that will result from the practice of using land and sunlight to turn petroleum into food, and ultimately, into more and more people. He has a simple math lesson for non-scientists with good hearts and PhDs that exposes their conditioned expectations about the path to a brighter tomorrow as quixotic fantasies.<br />
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I spoke with <b>James Howard Kunstler</b> about the fact that our pyschology of previous investment keeps us committed to an environment built for the convenience of cars. In his words, we have dedicated ourselves to a future that has no future. <br />
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The cheap and readily available energy we get from petroleum powers the hyper-complexity that we have learned to take for granted. It is that essentially free energy that allows us to live the way we do, and it is the diminishing availability of that energy that will keep us from living this way in the future.<br />
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That's the bad news.<br />
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Here's the good news:<br />
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I spoke with <b>Sharon Astyk</b> who explained the benefits of normal human poverty. When industrial agriculture can no longer feed us we have to feed ourselves. When we do that, the food is better. There may be less of it at first, and it will certainly require more human attention and labor to produce it. That means we will have to share more and depend on each other more, but sharing and helping one another actually makes us happier than the isolation and seeming independence that the petroleum powered lifestyle affords us.<br />
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When I spoke with <b>Cornelia Butler Flora</b>, she explained the difference between standard of living and quality of life. An increased standard of living means having more stuff, more personal space, and control of more assets. This is what petroleum-powered civilization has given us. Quality of life comes from having our basic physical needs met and then, increasingly, from a sense of inclusion. We feel good about ourselves and our lives when we think that the people in our communities value us for who we are and what we do and not for what we have. <br />
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<b>Bill McKibben</b> provided more encouraging news when I spoke with him. The 20th Century showed us what doesn't work. Huge, centrally-planned economies don't work. Conversely, everyone doing what they want without regard for their neighbors and their communities doesn't work, but now people are discovering what does work. People are discovering farmer's markets which provide not only food but a rewarding social experience. People are experimenting with co-housing and other new living arrangements that preserve individual autonomy while accessing the benefits of cooperation and community.<br />
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<b>Colin Tudge</b> explained that we can not only feed six billion people without industrial agriculture but that feeding people is easy. When we make enlightened use of techniques that have proven themselves for millenia and combine them with the best of what science and technology has to offer, then we can raise everyone to the highest standard of nutrition and gastronomy.<br />
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Finally, <b>Joe Bageant</b> told me how to see one seeming short-coming of the high-tech, imperial project as a blessing. This style of living that most first-world residents consider non-negotiable has left out two thirds of the world's population. Those people have had to make do on a lot less, and we can learn from them. He is careful not to present the third world as a paradise or its inhabitants as morally superior, but there are places left where sons still admire their fathers and people derive satisfaction from using their own competence and the cooperation of their neighbors to provide for their basic needs. And we can learn from them.<br />
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If you resonate with this narrative, then I would encourage you to partake of it more fully. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Collapse-C-Realm-Podcast-Transcripts/dp/0557333172/">Conversations on Collapse: C-Realm Podcast Transcripts is available available from Amazon.com</a>, and it's author is available for public appearances.KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-76753422854574587922009-09-15T10:35:00.000-07:002012-07-22T07:18:45.064-07:00Joe Bageant: The Stockholm Syndrome of the Soul<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGhVy61hPdl4cIbqsviXMO_dM_D_Zf3D1Sior9xpME2HRtJkv-KwA-6Q0BC5Zooqyv0uRR4P7TOTgIN_JmxsJDjQxyg1HZ74lY8oUG3TWcl_mQUbaR3NyhoSst7jzYCcgaKy82u0UtN6Z/s1600-h/Joe_Bageant.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381752723820794290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGhVy61hPdl4cIbqsviXMO_dM_D_Zf3D1Sior9xpME2HRtJkv-KwA-6Q0BC5Zooqyv0uRR4P7TOTgIN_JmxsJDjQxyg1HZ74lY8oUG3TWcl_mQUbaR3NyhoSst7jzYCcgaKy82u0UtN6Z/s320/Joe_Bageant.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 288px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 265px;" /></a>This interview with Joe Bageant comes from <a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2009-04-15T10_20_26-07_00">episode 149 of the C-Realm Podcast</a> and was ably and kindly transcribed by Carol B.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You are listening to the C-Realm podcast. I am your host, KMO, and I’m joined here in the C-Realm by Joe Bageant. He is the author of a book called ‘<a href="http://astore.amazon.com/crealm/detail/0307339378">Deer Hunting with Jesus</a>’ and he is also somebody with one foot in our so-called industrialized First World, and another foot in a happier, more relaxed, and more peaceful so-called Third World, or what Albert Bates calls the Two-Thirds World.<br />
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Joe Bageant, welcome to the C-Realm podcast.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Joe</span>: Well, hello, KMO. Good to be here.<br />
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<b>I have placed this interview in the Kindle Direct Publishing Lending Library. While there, it cannot be available in electronic edition anywhere else, so I have removed the interview from this blog. Once the exclusive 90 period has ended, I will restore this interview. </b></div>
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<b>-KMO</b></div>
</div>KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-24519761944691989152009-08-11T10:00:00.000-07:002010-10-07T07:28:21.381-07:00Bill McKibben: No Need of Our Neighbors<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-rg5cf0zHIeJSM-iSo7KIAe74jWvm_S2X56FOmb0JpTRwzeIf40i9L3AEYzg52UKyAVcXSFhGxpCyG3yz_gveeNWPxdbvFyBcdUzWt3Iu00yzfQWpOCMaNlsGjl74l-9OrsdPIiCdRjH3/s1600-h/Bill_McKibben.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5368756623477194626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-rg5cf0zHIeJSM-iSo7KIAe74jWvm_S2X56FOmb0JpTRwzeIf40i9L3AEYzg52UKyAVcXSFhGxpCyG3yz_gveeNWPxdbvFyBcdUzWt3Iu00yzfQWpOCMaNlsGjl74l-9OrsdPIiCdRjH3/s320/Bill_McKibben.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 180px;" /></a>This interview with Bill McKibben was recorded December of 2007 and appears in <a href="http://crealm.libsyn.com/episode_68_durable_communities">C-Realm Podcast Episode 68: Durable Communities</a>. Bill McKibben also appears in <a href="http://crealm.libsyn.com/episode_69_the_l_word">Episode 69: The L Word</a>, but that portion of the conversation, which focused on topics of transhumanism, is not included in this transcript.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Welcome back to the C-Realm podcast. I’m your host, KMO and with me here, from his home in Vermont, I have author Bill McKibben. He is the author of ‘The End of Nature’; ‘The Age of Missing Information’; many other books; most recently ‘Deep Economy - The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future’, about which the C-Realm listeners have already heard quite a bit. Bill McKibben, welcome to the C-Realm podcast.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: It is my pleasure to join you.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well it is definitely my pleasure to have you here. I have mentioned to people, particularly listeners of this podcast that the book ‘Deep Economy - The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future’ articulates exactly the message that I have been trying to articulate here sans the entheogenic or psychedelic component which occasionally comes up on the C-Realm podcast.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: That is a component I don’t know anything about. I’ll just stick with economics and leave psychedelics to you.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: In the very beginning of your book,’ Deep Economy’, you talk about two birds that, until recently, these are metaphorical birds, sat on the same branch, and one could conceivably take them both out with one bullet or one rock, and those two birds are "better" and "more." Producing more of what has worked for us in the past has generally made our lives better, but it seems that we may have passed a point of diminishing returns, and now "better" and "more" are sitting on two different branches, and you can aim for one or the other but not both. And I was wondering if you could say a bit more about what you call ‘the poverty of more’?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: There is polling data in this country; they have asked Americans every year since the end of World War II: “Are you happy with your life or not?” and the number of Americans who say, “I am very happy with my life,” peaks in 1956, and goes downhill since. And that is odd, because in that same 50 years we have tripled our material standard of living. If the economy worked the way we intuitively think it does, those curves should not go that way. It turns out that around the world, once you get past a per capita income of about 10,000 dollars per year, any correlation between more and better scatters, ceases. The plot goes in all different directions.<br />
And, you know, that is something we need to know. It is a basic fact about human beings; it is as important as knowing what temperature water freezes at, because we have geared so much of our life as a country to endlessly expanding the economy past the point where it isn’t producing anything in terms of satisfaction, and since it is also producing great negative consequences, environmentally in particular, it would be good to get a hold of that. It would be good to figure out some other things to be asking our economy to aim for.<br />
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You know, we have concentrated with obsessive interest on growth, and hence we have largely ignored durability, the idea that we might be building an economy in a society that could last for a long time, that can survive disruptions, and we have ignored this question of whether that growth is producing satisfaction or not. If we aimed for those two things in addition or instead of just endless expansion, I think we would have more interesting possibilities for getting out of some of the trouble we have gotten into, things like global warming, and for building the kind of society that people actually want to live in. A kind of society that is marked by more connection and more community than we have at the moment. That is what the data shows people are most missing from their lives.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I mentioned psychedelics at the top of the interview; I first went to South America sort of following in the footsteps of Terrence McKenna, and I went there to drink ayahuasca with the indigenous curanderos, but that was not really the most memorable part of my trip. The most memorable and eye-opening part of my trip was that it represented my first foray into what is called the ‘Third World’. And if I look at the amount of resources that I, as an American of meager means, control and compare that to the resources controlled by the average Peruvian, at least the economically quantifiable resources, I have much, much, much more that they do. But I do not seem to be correspondingly that much happier. And it was just a real eye-opener to see people living in what an economist would call abject poverty, and yet they have the people close to them and the community ties that allow for a certain sort of engagement and satisfaction that only comes with great difficulty to people here in what we call the ‘First World’. And I know you have traveled more extensively than I have, so I would like to get your thoughts on that sort of perspective.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: Cheap fossil fuel, and the affluence that it provides, have allowed us to become the first people in the world to have no need of our neighbors. We have taken that to be a good thing and talked a lot about independence and individualism and all of that, but in fact, as the descendants of socially evolved primates who spent all day sitting around grooming each other, it turns out that it is not what we were built for, and it is not what we like. And one of the benefits of getting away from the cheap fossil fuel world we now inhabit will be the inevitable resurgence of more community. We see it happening already; farmers markets are the fastest growing part of the food economy in this country and one of the reasons that they are growing fast is because people like the experience of shopping at them. The average shopper at a farmers market has ten times as many conversations as the average shopper at the supermarket. That is a lot. That is what we were built for.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: We have a really marvelous farmers market here; not in Bentonville but in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is about a half hour south of here. And yes, if you go to that farmers market, not only are people talking to one another, but there are musicians playing on the street. There are people handing out flyers talking about the causes that they feel so passionately about. And for me, probably the biggest advantage of the farmers markets over, say, the produce aisle at Wal-Mart, is that the food is so much better. It just tastes marvelous.<br />
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Over the summer we had a neighbor who was growing some corn. They have a very large garden, and when they had produce to sell they just put out a sign, and people would stop and buy some, and I stopped and I bought some fresh corn on the cob. I took it home and boiled it, and when my son tasted it he was an instant convert. His new favorite food was corn on the cob, but the neighbor's garden quickly ran out of corn for sale. My son wanted more corn on to cob, so I went to the nearest supermarket and purchased some, brought it home and boiled it, gave it to him, and he took one bite and wouldn’t eat anymore. And I tried it as well, and I could see why. It was just awful.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: Yeah, yeah, a food critic in the making. That’s it.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Or at least somebody who has an intuitive recognition of what food is, and knows the difference between food and food-like products.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: The most devoted shoppers in America’s farmers markets statistically are recent immigrants to this country. And that is because they still have some memory of what actual food tastes like. They haven’t yet been weaned onto a diet of high fructose corn syrup so that they mistake Cheetos for food.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: My grandmother lives in Berryville, Arkansas, which is a rural community. And as the small scale farming has sort of gone the way of the dodo in this part of the country, the main employers in Berryville are a Tyson chicken plant and the Wal-Mart supercenter. And my grandmother, who is very upset about the dramatic influx of Latin-Americans to this area, acknowledges that as the population became more and more Latino, the produce at Wal-Mart got better and better.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: (Laughter) There you go. You know, I think that there are many reasons for being an open country in a lot of ways, and that is probably one of them.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well when I first contacted you by e-mail, I think I admitted to you that I am both a recovering transhumanist and a recovering libertarian. And both of those thought systems seem to be variations on what I would consider to be the cult of hyper-individuality. And the rights and responsibilities of the individual completely eclipse the rights and responsibilities of larger groups of people whom libertarians, particularly libertarians of the Objectivist bent, deride as "collectivists." And I am wondering if you would speak a little about this notion of hyper-individuality versus what is pejoratively called "collectivism."<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: Yeah, I mean, you know, look. One of the uses of the 20th century was that we found out things that don’t work. For instance, huge centrally planned economies where the government tells everybody what to do all the time. Those proved to be a bad idea in a lot of ways. However, that doesn’t mean that what does work is everybody doing exactly what they want to and no one ever trying to get together as a community and figure out what makes sense. That's as ideologically extreme and as unlike where human beings have come from, as true Marxist collectivism was.<br />
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What we need are things that sound and are normal: communities, neighbors, people figuring out how to do things together. That is what government at its best is, and there are some tasks that only government can perform. We are going to need to deal with climate change, you know? One of the places where I lost a lot of respect for libertarians in the last decade was that they became in many ways scientific denialists about global warming. All you had to do was read the webpage of the Cato institute or Reason Magazine. And one of the reasons was that the chemistry and physics conflicted with their ideology. I mean the syllogism became "markets solve all problems, markets are not solving global warming, therefore global warming isn’t a problem."<br />
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That is poor logic, but it is emotionally comforting if you are the kind of person who needs some abstract ideological system, you know, Marxism, Leninism, Randian Objectivism, whatever it is, to order your life. For the rest of us, what we need is to try to figure out what scale to solve which problems at. And some of those are solved individually, and some of them are solved in your neighborhood, and some of them are solved internationally. It is not as comforting as having a ‘one size fits all’ explanation to everything. On the other hand, those don’t work.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You have talked about how we have come from primates who are very socially aware. In fact, if you look at the physiology of our faces, the musculature of our faces and the plasticity of our skin is so refined that we can, without any words, communicate to one another very detailed messages about how we feel or what reaction we have to what other people are doing. And people who are boosters of the current status-quo will use the measures of our isolation as metrics for our success, so that we have increasing house sizes with fewer people living in them, and we have fewer people living per acre and we are spending more of our time standing or sitting looking at computer screens, and we see far fewer human faces, or at least we pay attention to far fewer human faces than we did in the past, even though now we live in a sea of anonymous human faces. And I am wondering what you see as a promising approach for reintroducing the things into our life that actually bring us satisfaction as we are built and as evolution has programmed us to respond to our environments.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: I think the key is rebuilding many of these local economic institutions that bring us into contact with each other. So farmers markets, more localized and decentralized energy systems, smart grids that, you know, allow each of us to be our own utilities connected to each other in a working grid. So, local music performance and festivals, which are now the fastest growing part of the music industry, not CD sales, not video rentals, are the things that bring us together. I think all those things are good possibilities.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I know that you are an athlete. You run marathons. And I know that when I am diligent about sticking to a daily yoga practice, that my peace of mind increases, which, you know, is a selling point of yoga in general, but I don’t think it is particular to yoga. I think the same would be true if I were walking or cycling daily. And it seems that so much of our energy consumption is devoted to keeping us physically inert. And it seems that the human body thrives on use and that the human mind and the human body are intimately connected, and that it is very difficult to live a happy, satisfying life when one is always sitting motionless attending either to a television or a computer screen or even talking on the telephone to a celebrated author.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: I agree with you completely. And, you know, if you live in a place where you can bike where you need to go, for instance, then it is such a win-win, environmentally and for you. You notice more of what is going on. You actually see your topography. You see your neighbors. You emerge a healthier, sexier human being at the end of a year of doing it. The only people that suffer are those that need to make a lot of money selling you automobiles and gasoline.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I have had Catherine Austin Fitts on the program before. Are you familiar with her and her projects?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: I don’t know her, no.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Catherine Austin Fitts worked for Housing and Urban Development under the first Bush administration, and she was also a very successful investment banker. But when she created some software tools that started to allow people to see all of the corruption in Housing and Urban Development; basically, forces under the control of corporate banks and the government destroyed her life. She was severely audited many times by the IRS, she had federal agents raid her office and take her computers and destroy the software tool, it was called ‘Neighborhood Wizard”, that showed how money actually flows through a community.<br />
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And she has a friend who said to her that, you know, there is a new future percolating, and her response was that it will continue to percolate until we make it bankable. And what she means by that is that we can have all of these wonderful revelations about how ‘more’ no longer brings us more happiness or a better quality of life, but until we make the new style of living bankable and profitable to corporations and the people who control the money supply, it will just continue to percolate, and it will never actually come to fruition.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: Well I agree with her. I think that money is a big part of this thing, and one of the things that excites me is watching the spread of local currency systems around this country. We now in western Massachusetts have more than a million BerkShares in circulation, and there are similar operations springing up all around the country. I think that that is one of the biggest ways to arrive at a more localized economy and it removes some of the abstraction from our economy.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: When the production of fossil fuels peaks and the supply is no longer able to meet the demand and we start to feel the economic effects of that, it is going to cause a severe disruption, and from a conventional economist's point of view it will be catastrophic. But from the point of view of somebody who is taken out of the system that we live in now and thrust, granted roughly, into a more localized, communitarian setting, the long term effects will be generally positive if one is using as their metric human satisfaction. A lot of people are very skeptical about this, and I would like to read a comment that I received about this from a listener. He starts off by saying that it sounds like I am saying that when oil prices shoot up everyone will become poor and therefore forced to live with and depend on, each other more. And then he closes by asking, "Is it a grand advancement in human consciousness when your family used to live in a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom home in the suburbs but now can only afford a studio-apartment in the ghetto, with paper thin walls and cockroaches, necessary because it is all you can afford within walking distance of your job? It might lead to enlightenment, but might as easily not." And I am wondering what response you would have to somebody who expresses that sort of skepticism?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: That maybe they should think about their choices in slightly more realistic terms. We don’t need to be choosing between living in a slum and living in a starter castle someplace out in the farthest ring of suburbs.<br />
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The most interesting experiment I know about with housing now is people who create co-housing communities. They are cheaper and more affordable because, you know, there will be a bunch of houses situated nearby or attached that share a common dining room, and people take turns making food for each other in the course of the week. It is not a commune. People have their own homes, but it is a way of building community and reducing load on the environment, and these are the kinds of things that probably, as the price of oil goes through the roof, we’ll need to start figuring out.<br />
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I don’t think it is all going to be easy. I am not sure it is all going to happen. I wrote a book called “The End of Nature,” so I am no huge optimist, but I do not see much point in just pissing and moaning about it all the time either.<br />
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The logic of the fossil fuel world has been a logic of great globalization, of great disconnection, one from each other, because we no longer have a practical need for our neighbors. Hence the logic of a world past cheap fossil fuel, I think is one where we begin to draw a little closer together again. What we know about human satisfaction would lead us to believe that that will at least have as many benefits as costs, and we will get better at it as we do it. We have lost some of those skills in the last 50 years. We are not that good at cooperating with each other on things. We are all obsessed with the idea that we should pay less in taxes and be left alone and whatever. But in fact, the communities that survive best, the people that survive best in more challenging times, are going to be those who live in communities that are able to adapt and work with each other well. That is one reason I am kind of happy to be in Vermont. I think it has got a better chance for doing well than a lot of the more affluent suburban places around the country will. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I wonder what your thoughts are in terms of who has got the roughest adjustment ahead given where they live?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: Las Vegas.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Is it the water?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Bill</span>: Water, its complete dependence on outside energy sources, the fact that it has 5 times as many people living there as makes any practical sense, the fact that it depends on industry that has absolutely no public use of any kind, the fact that it depends entirely on jet transport in and out to get its gamblers to their enormous hotels. I would say Las Vegas stands as a pretty good example of 20th century America.KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-21714390166893464442008-12-28T07:22:00.000-08:002010-10-06T07:31:40.311-07:00Albert Bartlett: Growth and Consequences<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh18BBCMP9LR83NclJg0DprdFW7xl6LAPR5qU_uaEBZRY_k3UleqQfYHr6n4Ylye2slqV5M2SKgL9lyOHnyq9FXgQVR8hIhPCOxfzYV75AaQpfqHgbBTQiXquCKJRnvlAX92fFUHEC_-ffc/s1600-h/a_bartlett.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5284869254088692226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh18BBCMP9LR83NclJg0DprdFW7xl6LAPR5qU_uaEBZRY_k3UleqQfYHr6n4Ylye2slqV5M2SKgL9lyOHnyq9FXgQVR8hIhPCOxfzYV75AaQpfqHgbBTQiXquCKJRnvlAX92fFUHEC_-ffc/s400/a_bartlett.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 295px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 207px;" /></a><br />
<span style="color: #ff6600; font-size: 130%;">KMO Interview with Albert Bartlett</span><br />
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This interview with Albert Bartlett was recorded in July of 2007 and appears in episodes <a href="http://crealm.libsyn.com/2007/08">53 </a>nd <a href="http://crealm.libsyn.com/episode_54_malthusian_memes">54</a> of the C-Realm Podcast.<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />
Albert</span>: This is Al(bert) Bartlett.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: This is KMO of the C-Realm Podcast. Thank you for agreeing to this interview, and welcome back to the C-Realm Podcast.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Thanks.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I have directed the listeners of the C-Realm Podcast to go and listen to your lecture “The Exponential Function”. And while I have not heard it recently, I listened to it many times when I first discovered it. I drove around and had it playing pretty much continuously in my car.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: (laughing)<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: So I am pretty familiar with the points that you make there, but just for a quick recap, you talk quite a bit about the formula for determining the doubling time of anything if you know what its growth rate is, and I am wondering if you could just recap that for us.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, the formula is specifically: take 100, multiply it by the natural logarithm of 2, and divide it by the percent growth rate per year, and you’ll have the doubling time in years.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You scared of lot of people when you said, "natural logarithm."<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, natural logarithm…<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>:There is a simpler way to go about that.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Most people don’t know what that is. So the number comes out to be approximately 70. The actual thing is 69.2 is a hundred times the natural algorithm of 2. But 70 is close enough. This is for continuous compounding which means the growth is steady as contrasted to compounding annually which the bank used to do; compound once a year or twice a year, something like that.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: What this gives us is that you can take the number 70 and divide it by the percentage growth that you are talking about and that will give you the doubling time?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, for instance if it is 7% growth per year then 70 divided by 7 is 10, so you have a doubling every 10 years.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: And you mention in “The Exponential Function” lecture that one can really sort of dictate the impact that your statistics have in the way that you choose to report them. If you said that crime was growing by 7%, nobody would be particularly shocked by that figure, but if you said crime is doubling every 10 years, well that sounds shockingly huge!<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That’s absolutely correct. And so 7% does not seem like a terribly big growth rate, but doubling in 10 years, that gets people’s attention.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You set up your lecture, first you explain this easy way to talk about exponential growth or actually it is just steady growth?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: And you relate that to two topics which are very familiar to the C-Realm audience.<br />
One is global population, and the other is peak oil. And I would invite you to pick up either one of those two topics and just sort of plug those specific examples into how you use your formula.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well the world population today is growing by something a little over 1% per year; it might be 1.2% per year. So if you divide 70 by 1.2%, what you find is that 70 divided by 1.2 is equal to about 58. If the present growth rate could continue, then the population of the world would double in something a little under 60 years, 58 years. Now, it is very clear that this growth rate cannot continue. It is also clear that the growth rate globally is declining. In the early 1970s, the growth rate was up around 2% per year. That is an absolute disaster; that would be doubling every 35 years. It has been slowly declining. In most of Europe now, the growth rate of the population is zero or is negative, and that is good news from the point of view of trying to achieve sustainability.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It’s particularly true in Japan, it is sort of bad news for that society in that you end up with a lot of older people who need care and not very many young people free to provide that care.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That is a very real problem. It is a short-term problem, and it is trivial compared to the problems that we will encounter if we allow the growth to continue.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Go ahead and just follow that line of reasoning for a little bit and sort of unpack the consequences if we just allow business as usual to proceed.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, we don’t have the resources to supply the present world population. The world population today is unsustainable. You can reach that conclusion by just observing that if any fraction of the present global warming is due to the actions of humans, then this by itself is proof that the human population has exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth. Such as a result of this global warming, there are many predictions about changing weather patterns, reduced snow fall on parts of the country, tough agriculture in many parts of the country and the world and so on. A rising sea level, a reduction in the amount of ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic and reduction of spring snow in the mountains which reduces water supply for big cities. They are all kinds of problems that come from the global warming. And now the global warming is a sure sign that we are overpopulated. If we just continue to increase the overpopulation by letting the growth continue unchecked, then all of these problems will get worse. Everyone will be affected.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You are suggesting that we look at the problem of global warming which does get a lot of play in the press right now, and equate it with a problem of overpopulation.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Absolutely, yes, and I think that the many people who give us advice, some of them are experts, and some are not, but essentially all of them, as far as I know, will tell us that we have to use energy more efficiently, and all efficient light bulbs, raise up the pressure in the tires on our cars and all sorts of little things like this that are important, but they are absolutely trivial, and in total, if everyone followed these, it would not stop the global warming simply because they do not address population growth.<br />
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And this is something that Malthus understood 200 years ago: that population growth has the capability of growing more rapidly than we can grow the supplies, and so on, that are necessary for human survival. So all of these, and I think it is just irresponsible; I just saw a thing on the web this morning, somebody advising us what we can do to reduce global warming and all of the things were important but in the big picture they where trivial. They will have no effect as long as we do not address population growth.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It's strange to hear you describe anything as being both simultaneously important and triviail.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, it’s going to take a lot to stop global warming, but all of these important things taken together will not stop it, and just on the basis of good common sense independent of global warming we should be reducing our personal energy consumption. We should be using energy more efficiently. We should be doing all sorts of things that will help reduce the problems. That is independent of global warming, but we should be aware that taken all together, those things cannot have any big impact on global warming as long as we fail to address the overpopulation problem and fail to take real steps to stop the overpopulation.<br />
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And then one has to ask, well where is the overpopulation problem the worst. If you look at just the numbers of population growth per year, well the numbers are very high for instance in underdeveloped nations, but the numbers are fairly large in the US, the total world population growth in a year is like 75 million people. The population growth in the US is 3 million people every year. Now 3 is small compared to 75 so a lot of people say, "Oh well, it is those other countries, they are the problem." But when you look at resources, the average child born in America will in a life-time have something like, I don’t know, 10 to 20 times the impact on world resources, as will a child born in some underdeveloped nation. So the real problem is us. It is here in the United States. And yet people who are claiming to be thoughtful, who do worry about population here in the United States very often point to the underdeveloped nations and say, "You are the problem," and they do not look here in the United States and say, "We are the problem."<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I think it is easy to point to the Third World and say there is the problem because we fear, and rightly so I think, that the Third World is looking to the US and the industrialized First World generally as a model for where they want to go with their own development, and we just project things out and we think, "Gosh, if the Chinese drove cars like we drive cars that is going to be another billion cars on the road." That is almost going to double the number of cars on the road now, so I can certainly understand that tendency, although it is comical to think that the problem is that everybody else wants to live like we live, and the problem is not that we live like we live.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: And the problem is that there are not enough resources to let everyone else live as we live. In other words, if you look at the studies of ecological footprinting, something that was developed at the University of British Columbia by Mathis Wackernagel and Bill Rees, you will find that the total footprint of the world population today living, some very well, some very poorly, is about 1.2 Earths. We have already exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth by that measure, and if you try to bring up all the under-developed parts, populations of the world, to our standard of living, they estimate it would take another 1 or 2 Earth's worth of resources to bring them up, so the die is cast. There aren’t enough resources to bring them up to our standard of living.<br />
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Now, that will impact us very greatly, and we can begin to see this because there is a lot of world competition for petroleum. I did some calculations on this. We have used, I estimate, about 85% of the total recoverable conventional oil that was ever in the ground in the United States. So we are in dire straits. We are importing over 60% of the oil we consume, and much of this comes from underdeveloped nations, and wherever we are importing it from, we find ourselves competing with the Chinese because they have even fewer resources than we do in terms of petroleum, and they have, as you mentioned, a very big growing population of automobiles and people who want to drive automobiles, and they have a very growing affluence of their people because of the big export business the Chinese do with the United States and other nations. And so they are competing with us in all of the world markets, and they are winning because we go out and our foreign policy is one of making war on the countries that have oil, of making enemies of the leaders of countries that supply us with significant quantities of oil, and the Chinese are going in there, to the same countries and they are competing successfully and getting oil that they need, and that is at the expense of the United States. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It brings to mind your example of the bacteria that are propagating in a jar, and they have something to eat there. Where I am going with this is that when you have a steady growth, every cycle or every doubling in the growth produces a number that exceeds all of the growth that came before it, so that your bacteria that are doubling at a constant rate... and suppose they are going to fill a bottle in an hour, the bottle will be half full a minute before that hour is up.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, that is in the case of a doubling time of one minute so if the bacteria double in number every minute, and you observe that the bottle is full at twelve noon, then the question is at what time is it half full and the answer is one minute before, two minutes before it was ¼ full, 3 min before it was 1/8 full and so you have to ask yourself, if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realize that you are running out of space? This is a line I use in my talk, and it gets people’s attention because when you are at 5 minutes before 12 noon you are only 3% full, 97% open space just yearning for development. Who would think that we would be likely to run out of resources in 5 more minutes? It’s a very striking metaphor.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: But with that metaphor in mind it occurs to me that we could proceed here in the United States with business as usual, particularly if we are woefully ignorant of the actual supplies of oil at our disposal, until pretty much the very last minute. I mean that we could well be, according to the logic of the metaphor, within a couple of minutes of noon.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, that is right. And I think we are approaching one minute before noon, and in the real world it can be found that things don’t grow steadily until the last bit of the resources are used. You have instead what is called a Hubbert curve, and this is sort of a Gaussian error curve. Two hundred years ago, oil production worldwide was zero. Two hundred years from now, it is going to be zero. In between, it rises to one or more maxima and you can approximate that by a smooth error curve.<br />
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A lot of reporters ask, "Well, when are we going to run out of oil?" And my answer is, "Never. We will never run out of oil." But the question that has to be asked and understood is, "When will oil production peak? When will we pass that peak production?"<br />
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And the peak production marks the point at which we have consumed half of the initial resource. And so after you pass the peak then production declines and approaches zero. And it may take another 100 years for it to approach zero; it took a 100 years to get up to where it is now. But as you have declining production, and a growing world population and a growing world per capita demand for oil, then you have all the makings of a real disaster, because everything in our modern society is dependent on oil and the first thing you think of is the food production, and one can observe that modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food, and you know we can see that rapidly rising prices of petroleum as we pass over the peak, and that will immediately be reflected in very rapid rises in the cost of food and the cost of everything else in society.<br />
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Now, where are we with regard to the world peak? The US peaked in 1970, and we are well down on the downhill side of the curve. World production could peak anytime now. There are some experts who say the peak has already been passed, my own analysis says we are very close to the peak. And the latest I have heard from any scientists in the field of geologists is about 2020. But I think most of the consensus feeling among people who are really into this problem is that it is much earlier than 2020, that it is any day now, and unfortunately, we won’t know when we pass the peak; we could already have passed it. You will have to have 4 or 5 or 10 years of consistent downturn in world production before you can say statistically it is clear that back there 5 years ago or so that was the peak. One point being a little bit lower than the current trend does not prove that the peak has been passed so we won’t know for at least 5 years after the peak that the peak has actually been passed.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Peak Oil could come 20 months from now, or it coule come 20 years from now. I was talking to a guest on the podcast a few weeks ago, and he was mentioning that in terms of the adjustment that we’ll have to make, it would be a lot easier on us if peak oil came right now than if it came 20 years from now. Do you think that is the case?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I do because if it comes 20 years from now, we will have all of these non-scientists or PhDs telling us we can just go on increasing our rates of consumption, and so when it does come, we’ll be much more dependent on oil than we are now and so the shock of rapidly rising oil prices resulting from the passing of the peak, will be an even bigger shock.<br />
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It is in our national self-interest to reduce our annual consumption of petroleum right now, and the easiest ways to do that would be to put a large tax of several dollars a gallon on petroleum, but that is not going to fly in a democracy. That would not be acceptable. It is an unfortunate thing that we will have to wait until things get so bad that the prices go up. If we would put a tax on petroleum of several dollars a gallon, then that tax would go to the United States’ Government or to our State Governments or some combination of it, but if we wait until the price goes up because of passing the peak, then that extra money goes to the oil producers, most of whom are out of the country, and many of whom are supporting terrorism. Every time right now you pay a dollar for gasoline, every time you spend a dollar on gasoline, some fraction of that dollar is going to support international global terrorism.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Would you explain the mechanism by which that works?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, a lot of it goes to Saudi Arabia, and there are many allegations that money that goes to Saudi Arabia; some of it is diverted from the giant fortunes of some of the oil people over there; some of it gets into funding Al Qaeda and the terrorist organizations.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: The friend that I was speaking with about peak oil, and he was saying that it would be a lot easier on us if it came now rather than later. I think what he had in mind was that a gallon of gasoline weighs about six pounds, and when you burn it you are adding about five pounds of carbon to the atmosphere. And that if we were to proceed with business as usual for another twenty years, then we would have added so much carbon to the atmosphere that it seems as though there would be no reversing the warming trend that that would set off.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That is a very good point. That is absolutely right.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: First it seems that nobody in power right now, or nobody with the ability to shape the conversation as it takes place in the corporate media, is willing to equate the climate crisis with unsustainable levels of population.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That is correct.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It seems that on the political right in this country, and the left/right spectrum describes a pretty narrow range of thought, but on the political right there is absolutely no questioning whatsoever the importance of continued economic expansion. And on the left, I think the idea that the problem is too much humanity probably offends the sensibilities of people who would describe themselves as deeply humanist.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: As liberals.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I agree.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Is there any strategy that you know of for sort of getting around these political preconceptions that keep this discussion from taking place on a larger scale?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I think the thing that we have to do is what you are doing and let us start educating people throughout the country and so that the people will communicate to their members of Congress and say look, the big problem is population. These others are important but trivial. Let us go after the population growth and let's remember that the last US president who was concerned about population was Richard Nixon. And he chartered a major study, the reporters called the Rockefeller commission report, and its conclusion was to the effect that the commission could see no benefit to the US from any future population growth. But that report got put on the shelf when Nixon had all his problems and has been forgotten. Nobody remembers it now.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well when it comes to actually addressing the problem of overpopulation, it seems that one of two models is going to come to mind. Either you are going to have a central authority with the strength to force people to curb their reproductive habits as has happened in China, or you are going to count on some sort of naturally occurring organic process or some sort of just distributed raising of awareness to bring awareness to population problems and then thereby bring them, or bring reproduction under control.<br />
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But it seems to me that if one goes for a central authority model, that for there to be a centralized authority with the power to enforce that mandate, you are going to bring along the economies of scale which are so much at the cause of our problem to start with. It seems that decentralization is the way to go but that seems to run afoul of people’s desire to make sure that everybody does their share.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well if you are going to try to issue an edict, that is something you are going to do in a totalitarian state, but you can’t do it in a democracy so that is not the way to proceed here. But we do have to remember that one of our big national goals is economic growth and development of technology. Now thirty years ago, when the People’s Republic of China instituted their very coercive ‘one child per family’, their statement of justification of that tough policy was the following: economic development is hindered by population growth. So they have been able to cut their population growth roughly in half and look at the economic development that they have been able to achieve because of that reduction. Now we could have even more economic development, high tech and so on if we could stop our population growth.<br />
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But I think the first step has to be a national awareness of the problem of population. If the president of the United States would come out and say, "Look, we are overpopulated. Here is the evidence. We have got to find some way to reduce our population and do it in a humane way consistent with the Constitution of the United States and let us have a national dialogue for a year, about the problem and about what is the best way to address it." If something like that would happen, there would be awareness and people would be aware that large families do not further and advance the welfare of the United States. And I think, without anything coercive, we could make big progress and a coupled with such a recognition could be (the realization that) we have got to spend more nationally, within our country for making sure that family planning assistance is available to everyone who requests it. And the goal should be, both in our country and worldwide, to make sure that every child is a wanted child. If we could do that, we would go a long way towards solving the population problem. It might not solve it all, but it would certainly go a long way, and I think it could be done consistent with the laws and Constitution of the United States. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I think that the plan runs afoul of the ideology of main stream protestant Christianity, in that, providing 'family planning help'... That phrase, to a large percentage of the population, is going to equate to abortion on demand, which is something they absolutely could not countenance.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I think the studies show that when you have traditional family planning available, the number of abortions each year goes down. And if you want to increase the number of abortions annually, you cut back on family planning. That is what has been found now with the present administration in Washington. They have cut back on family planning assistance, especially overseas and in this country too, and the number of abortions goes up.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I had sent you an excerpt from a book by Vincent Castriano Jr; and I wanted to read just a paragraph or two from that excerpt and get your response.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Alright.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Mr. Caspriano writes, “Within the next fifty years, during the lifetime of the majority of individuals reading these words, humanity’s infinite growth potential versus finite planet conundrum, if allowed to simply run its course, will almost certainly be resolved through the elimination of some segment of human life on Earth. In the reduction through affluence plan, it is the yet unborn children of the future that are sacrificed. The religious, economic and cultural varients mostly name their present day targets out loud, investing enormous amounts of energy in demonizing their perceived enemies: terrorists, capitalists, leftists, infidels, Jews, Christians, Muslims, gays, the ultra rich, the useless eater poor, etc.. And making shameless public preparations for their elimination or forced impoverishment. Reducing population by increasing material affluence may turn out to be, by far, the most humane strategy for redirecting an earthbound humanity towards stabilization. But are we on board with its projected outcome, of a planet of rich old people, clinging forever to their stuff, even if we personally get to be the new eternals. And a stagnant long term future that amounts to little more than a dull continuance of the status quo into perpetuity.<br />
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"Don’t all the other competing plans out there amount to only slightly more draconian versions of pretty much the same thing? Idealized and intensely meme-driven wish fulfillment scenarios of what life in the present ought to be like, infinitely extended into the future. That is the future Muslim planet looks pretty much like a bigger version of the present Muslim world; a Christianized earth with a church on every corner and a bible in every hand; a capitalist globe glistening in space like a giant blue shopping mall; a post earth changes New Age wonder world with tribes of happy homesteaders drumming blissfully beside bonfires and singing Kum Ba Yah across a lush naturally depopulated landscape; etc.”<br />
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And where he is going with this, I think is, he is suggesting that our resolution is going to be getting off planet, to moving humanity into a larger environment in which to populate. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I wouldn’t count on that at all. Right now it takes so much energy just to put a crew of half a dozen or so in a space shuttle into orbit. The amount of energy required is just absolutely staggeringly large. And the idea of populating other planets, I don’t think we should count on that in any future scenario. I think that would be unwise in the extreme. It would be a total waste of energy. Look, if you are going to solve the US problem, a population increase of three million people every year in the United States; you have got to find three million Americans and say to them, "We would like you to leave, please. And we will provide the spaceships. We want you to go out there and please don’t come back."<br />
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Now that isn’t going to fly.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: There are many science fiction scenarios that result from that. One is that the folks do leave as you tell them to but contrary to your instructions, later on they do come back and they are not very pleased with the experience they have had out there.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well that is right. They all want to come back, so it is no answer. Now, this is not to say that we will never in the future populate other planets, but I would say it would be unwise in the extreme to count on that in any plans and preparations that we are making today.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: There are a good number of people worried about what they call existential risks, which are risks that threaten the future of humanity as a whole, and a lot of those folks are interested in getting some self-sustaining communities going off of Earth, not necessarily to relieve Earth of its population pressure, but just to make sure that, should some large meteor hit the Earth, or should something happen to the Earth, that humanity itself would not be lost.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, that is a noble goal, but I don’t know what you can do, and the idea of putting people into a spaceship, say it just orbits the earth on a continuous basis, so that these people can survive up there for long periods of time. I mean, that is certainly being studied but I think it is beyond the capability of our present technology, and it would take some pretty dedicated volunteers that say I am willing to go up there and stay up there and not come back. And you know, they did some experiments in the Arizona desert where they built a great big greenhouse like building and they tried to make a closed atmosphere inside the building and had maybe, I don’t know, half a dozen people living in this closed atmosphere. And the idea was to see if they could survive, growing their own food, making their own oxygen and so on without any input from the outside world and the thing was not a success; a lot of money went down the drain with that experiment. So we can’t even do it on earth, and let alone send them off into space and have them survive.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Part II</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: In that paragraph that I read from Vincent Caspriano’s book, he claimed that, if allowed to simply run its course, the conundrum of the infinite growth versus the finite resources will almost certainly be resolved through the elimination of some segment of human life on earth.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That is to be expected. That was predicted in 1972 in the book “Limits to Growth,” and that was a computerized study done by some people at MIT. They modeled a global economy and put in all the trends in terms of population growth, growth of energy consumption, growth of food supplies and 5 or 6 variables like that, and no matter how they juggled it, the input and the prescriptions for the future, every model seemed to show collapse in the middle of the century; a big cutback and die off of population from lack of food and from pollution. When you read the stories of air pollution in China today, they’re just devastating, and in large part it's because of their rapid industrialization, their rapid increase in the use of coal, and their inability or unwillingness, whatever, to control the emissions from coal plants, and so they are killing themselves. They're killing the Chinese, but they're having this wonderful economic growth, and so their leaders are torn between: "Do we go on with this killing people by air pollution and allow a few of us to enjoy the benefits of great growth, or do we say stop the growth and try to clean up the air?"<br />
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It’s a real dilemma. The ‘Limits to Growth’ postulated this and showed it in a computerized model back in 1972. Now that really upset the whole world community economists and they said, "Oh, this is absolutely wrong. It can’t be true. It is too terrible to be true." And then in 1992, 20 years later, another edition was brought out, and the people at MIT did their computer programs, and their conclusion was: we lost 20 years. And then in 2002, there was a thirty year update, and again their conclusion was the same. We have lost 30 years. And then in the 2002 version, the only way that they could adjust the society to have a stable population out to the year 2100, roughly 90 years from now, was to instantly stop population growth worldwide and to cut back enormously on the per capita consumption of energy. And I forget what 'enormously' was. They gave a figure, and it may have been to cut it in half or something like that. But with those two very draconian measures they were able to project a stable population out to the year 2100. But nothing else. None of the more reasonable scenarios for the future showed that they were able to sustain population size. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You have mentioned Thomas Malthus, and I think it is fair to describe you as a Malthusian theorist.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Now a lot of folks are fond of saying that Thomas Malthus has been proven wrong because, you know, we have gone 200 years without his suggested population correction ever really taking place on any grand scale. Why do you think that we should still take Malthus seriously?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, he was a mathematician among other things, and if you translate his message of 200 years ago into today’s idiom, what you come up with is: he says the population has the capability of growing more rapidly than we can grow any of the supplies that are necessary to sustain the population. Now he looked at food, and he said that we can’t increase food production very much except by increasing the land that is available, and you couldn’t increase the land by very much and so he didn’t anticipate the widespread use of petroleum in agriculture, and so it has gone 200 years, and some people claim we don’t have the Malthusian crisis. But I can say that I suspect there are more people well-fed in the world today than there were 200 years ago. But I think it is also true that there are more people starving and malnourished in the world today than there were in the world of Malthus 200 years ago. So we can not say we have avoided the Malthusian crisis. We have just sort of limited it to underdeveloped nations and remote places that you can read about in the paper but not have any connection with.<br />
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So now what we are seeing is that food production has increased. The productivity per acre of land has increased very largely, by very large amounts and since the time of the prediction of Malthus, that was a thing he couldn’t anticipate. What it is based on, it is based on fertilizers, chemical fertilizers and one of the ingredients that is essential to making fertilizers are natural gas and petroleum. So with those productions peaking, we can expect to see a peaking in world agriculture. And I was giving my talk back in the seventies, up in Montana one spring, and it was during the second, I think, of those OPEC energy crises where gasoline at the pump was in short supply, and the farmers up there were climbing the walls. It was spring and they could not get diesel fuel to do those spring plantings. So we built an agriculture that is totally dependent on petroleum, and so any peaking of world petroleum supplies can be followed by a peaking of agriculture.<br />
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Now you hear people say, and again, these are people who are well meaning, often well educated but who don't understand the problem, say that American agriculture is the most efficient in the world today. That is nonsense; it is the least efficient in the world today. It is the least efficient because if you have to use, and there is your definition of efficiency, how much energy does it take, in the form of petroleum, natural gas, etc. to produce 1 unit of energy that is on your dinner table? And that is about 10 units of petroleum energy for 1 unit of food energy on your table.<br />
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Now the thing that makes people say we are more efficient is, they use a different measure. They say, "How many person hours on the farm are required to produce 1 unit of food?" Well that number has been going down, leaving these people without understanding to say we are more efficient. We don’t use as many people farming as we used to. But that is not a good measure; that is a measure of how we are substituting petroleum for people on the farm. And if the petroleum peak starts down, we are not going to be able to continue to do that. So global agriculture today takes on the order of 10 units of energy to put 1 unit of food energy on your plate, and that is terribly inefficient and it is getting worse every year.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: But in addition to the sort of false efficiency that is claimed because there are fewer human hours of labor going into the production of food, I think that is sort of the euphemistic gloss on saying that we have lost an enormous amount of human intellectual capital in terms of people who know how to grow food.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That is correct.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Very few people have anything to do at all with the production of their own food and the people who are producing these huge quantities of calories now, they are not doing it by tending plants in the soil, they are doing it by driving tractors back and forth across these enormous fields and, you know, using these huge combines to spray petroleum based fertilizers on the land and then just spray Round-Up and other poisons and then drive over and harvest the crops once they have grown, and these folks, you know, if you gave them a shovel and a pack of seeds and a bucket of horse manure they would not necessarily know how to go and actually plant a garden that is going to grow some food for them. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I think you are absolutely right.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Now, another problem that we face here in the US is that we have physically structured the country such that people live out in the suburbs, which are places that are pretty much devoid of any agricultural land and pretty much devoid of even the goods and services that people depend on in daily life, because it is pre-supposed that people will be able to get in their cars and cover 30 miles, you know, without really thinking much about it to go and buy things.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Now, the lands where these people work, those used to be agricultural lands. We never built subdivisions on waste land. We always build our subdivisions on the best agricultural land that is available.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Why is that?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, the cities were built, originally, in the center of good agricultural land. So as the cities expand, it is only agricultural land that they can expand onto.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I read something that is kind of amusing, and that it is we have this national obsession with the lawn, the modern culture of grass. You know this carpet that is supposed to sweep from coast to coast, unbroken from one patch of carefully tended monoculture into the next. And somebody suggested that that might just turn out to be a saving grace because in these huge suburban tracts we have set aside land that can be reclaimed for small scale agriculture.<br />
Albert: We did that during World War II, we had Liberty Gardens all over the country, and I do not know what fraction of the US domestic food supply came from Liberty Gardens, but I think it could have been 5%. It could have been 10%. That significant. But we did that, and people dug up their yards and planted gardens. In fact, I think there was a symbolic liberty garden on the White House lawn.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I am pretty sure it is gone now.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I think …oh yes.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: In the passage that I read from Vincent Caspriano Jr., he was saying that the more ideologically extreme groups in the world right now seem to have an intuitive understanding of the fact that a population correction is in order, and they are shamelessly and explicitly campaigning to have their chosen group be the sacrificial lamb. And if you were to poll them and say, "OK, we need to get rid of two out of 10 people in the world, who do you think we should get rid of?" Well, they are going to have a ready answer. And it seems that most groups who are propagating an ‘us versus them’ ideology have selected the group that they would like to see eliminated, and are openly campaigning for it.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, that may be. You know, if making war is your idea on how to solve the future problems, why then I am sure people are thinking like that but I don’t think like that, and I do not want to have any part of people who are thinking like that. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You have spent a long time honing your presentation and your arguments, and your arguments seem to be pretty thorough going and difficult to refute in terms of laying out what the problem is. I ask a lot of people, a lot of people who are very friendly to the notion of peak oil and people who are very friendly to the notion of returning us to a more localized sort of lifestyle where we depend upon the people who are physically close to us, and a sense of community and shared faith that we have with these people. But when I ask them, "Do you think that there is a Malthusian Correction in the offing?", almost universally the answer is no.<br />
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I had Thomas Holmer-Dickson, the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization” on the program a couple of months ago, and I asked him about the potential for a Malthusian Correction and his response was that right now, as you pointed out, our system of agriculture is very inefficient, and there is a lot of slack in it, and that we could tighten things up. We could change the agricultural system such that it is sufficient to feed everybody. Do you think that is the case? <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I think that would involve many people now living in cities and employed in urban environments to go back to farming. And that is a major sociological shift.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, I tell you, I would very much like to be an organic farmer and do nothing but. But in the current economy it is a very difficult shift to make for somebody who wants to do it. And most people have no interest in doing it.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: You know, I agree. It is going to be a very difficult shift. But I think there will be a large readjustment somewhere along the line that was predicted in Limits to Growth. But there will be a very significant population die back. Now let me speculate as to why people who are well informed about current problems don’t think there will be a Malthusian crisis. I think I believe these people, they have heard it so often; these credentialed professorial types who say we have proven Malthus wrong.<br />
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And let me give you an example. I gave my talk to a group of retired people, not too long ago, and I saw in the audience a retired professor of economics, and I could see, from the talk as I watched his face, he just got more and more agitated. When I finished, he got up, turned to the audience and said: “This is all wrong. This is just Malthus all over again. We have proven Malthus wrong.” And he went on and on, and I kind of knew him so when he quieted down I talked to him and I said: “Well look, you know the arithmetic of growth, and you know the growth can not go on.” And he said: “Yes, I know that, that is true” but he said: “We have to grow for now” I said: “Why for now?” He said: “To help poor people”. Well now the one thing that we know, from news reports that come out several times a year is that the present situation, based on growth, is one that results in an increasing gap, economically, between the well to do, and the poor. And that gap is increasing. It is increasing in the United States. It is increasing globally. And I wonder to myself, "What planet has this guy been living on?"<br />
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People believe that somehow technology is going to save us. Technology is the main thing that has gotten us into this problem. Because the main effect of technology is to allow population to continue to grow. And as long as the populations continue to grow, the problems get worse.<br />
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And I think we should remember Eric Sevareid's law. Eric Sevareid was a national journalist. He observed that the main source of problems is solutions. So in everything we do, we are trying to solve problems. Most of the problems we are trying to solve are caused by population growth. And a problem is anything that inhibits population growth, so solving a problem involves removing the inhibition. So what we have done then is open the door to even more population growth. And I am particularly critical of the business of urban planning, because urban planning is just making everything worse. And you can say "smart growth" and things like this. Well I like to point out that smart growth destroys the environment. Dumb growth destroys the environment. Now, smart growth destroys the environment in good taste, so it is a little like buying a ticket on the Titanic. If you are smart you go first class, if you are dumb you go steerage, but either way the result is about the same. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: So if you know you are going to be on the Titanic, and you know it is going to sink, you might as well have a few good meals and a nice stroll on deck.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That’s right. That is what we are doing, you know. The ‘well to do’ are taking care of themselves.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: In the short term.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: They are lobbying for all kinds of tax breaks and other considerations that keep them, and the lifestyle, and life trajectory that they are on and never mind the rest of the people. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I suspect that a lot of the people who are solution-oriented, and now I am talking about actual solutions and not bigger grander technological boondoggle solutions, but decentralization, getting back to organic agriculture, getting more people involved in food production. These folks, I think, or at least I sometimes suspect, will not entertain the idea of a Malthusian crisis because they think that, if they were to say it out loud, that it would just make the situation seem hopeless and that nobody would be motivated to do anything.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I think there is a real element of truth in that.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, you have been very effective at articulating the problem that we have; the situation that we face. What are your ideal goals for pursuing the solution?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I am sort of working to try to educate people that growth is a problem. Growth of population is a problem. The effect of this growth on natural resources is a problem. The problems are all related to one another by arithmetic. The arithmetic is not difficult. We can understand the problems, and we can take steps to solve them. So I am still working at that level; trying just to educate people in the hope that we can have a more enlightened approach to the future. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You think that somebody who has a consciousness of peak oil now and somebody who has an understanding of the mathematics behind growth; do you think they have any better prospect for surviving the Malthusian correction than somebody who is oblivious?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: No, I don’t think so. They may, I don’t know. Following the Malthusian crisis is certainly going to be a difficult, challenging thing. And I suspect we are much more equal in our ability to solve, personally solve, the crisis as it affects us; and that the people who are ‘very well to do’ may not be much better off than the people who are very poor. In fact, you know; if you look at them, say what group in the United States today is the most sustainable, through their lifestyle today. And I would tend to say it is probably the, what is the agriculture group in western Pennsylvania, that religious agriculture group, not the shakers, it is...<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: The Menonites?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, the Mennonites. People who are very conservative religiously, who don’t use automobiles or power; have used horsepower, horses on their farms and do their agriculture. They are very successful. But it is a way of life I wouldn’t want to shift to myself. But they are very successful, and I think when the crunch counts, these people will be very well situated personally to survive.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, I think most people, given the choice right now would not voluntarily adopt an Amish or Mennonite lifestyle...<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, Amish. That is the group.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: If they were given the option of adopting an Amish lifestyle or dying of starvation; that is a pretty easy choice to make.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, right, but you know, in today’s situation I don’t think people, or many people, would voluntarily make that change.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I appreciate your time, and we have pretty much come to the end of the time that we have available. What final thoughts would you like to leave with somebody who has taken an interest in the topics you articulated so well?<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I thank you for your interest, and I just simply say we have to fight growth wherever we observe it; population growth in particular. We have to note in our communities that population growth never pays for itself. It results in higher taxes, higher congestion, higher air pollution, higher utility costs for all of us. And we just have to try to get a national ground swell to get people to realize that growth is the wrong path to follow, and that we have got to stop the growth now while we can do it on our terms. If we don’t stop it now, then Nature will stop it through a big die-off.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Professor Albert Bartlett, I thank you very much for your time and I hope that you will continue to do what you have been doing, for sometime yet to come.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Thank you, KMO.KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-57540275788260674052008-11-21T08:32:00.000-08:002009-08-11T10:46:57.435-07:00Albert K. Bates: Consciousness or Bust<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1PnPx0wLRyJ-7PX9VI8KKN88oUpSnyuQIewhBNcQbTOJapAXKxr0j5qdcfVmGauGedsQmb7vQ3KQ4g97oKjfio6Ya28tTIbkK9jmyN9KF5K0xRll_ZGKHAs8VsmiTQ-tSRmaMl9u21_IY/s220/abmemphisflyer.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 147px; height: 220px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1PnPx0wLRyJ-7PX9VI8KKN88oUpSnyuQIewhBNcQbTOJapAXKxr0j5qdcfVmGauGedsQmb7vQ3KQ4g97oKjfio6Ya28tTIbkK9jmyN9KF5K0xRll_ZGKHAs8VsmiTQ-tSRmaMl9u21_IY/s220/abmemphisflyer.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>This conversation with <a href="http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/">Albert K. Bates</a> was recorded in April of 2007 and first "aired" in episodes <a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2007-04-18T10_04_56-07_00">29</a> and <a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2007-04-25T10_01_05-07_00">30</a> of the C-Realm Podcast.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Introductio</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">n</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Welcome back to the C-Realm podcast. My next guest is author Albert K. Bates.<br />Albert is a retired public interest attorney and author of several books on energy, environment and history. He is a co-founder of the Eco Village Network of the Americas and the Global Eco Village Network.<br /><br />During his 26-year career as an attorney, he argued environmental and civil rights cases before the US Supreme Court and drafted a number of legislative acts while publishing “Natural Rights”, a quarterly newsletter on deep ecology. His books “Shutdown!; Nuclear Power on Trial” and “Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What You Can Do” provided early insight into two of the greatest dangers now confronting the world.<br /><br />An inveterate inventor, he holds a number of design patents and was the designer of the concentrating photovoltaic arrays and solar hybrid automobiles displayed at the 1982 World’s Fair. He has been director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and the Eco Village Training Center at the (Walnut Hill) Farm Community in Summerton, TN since 1994 where he has taught natural building, sustainable agriculture and appropriate technology to students from more than 50 nations.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Interview</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Albert Bates, thank you very much for appearing on the C-realm podcast and welcome!<br /><br />Albert: Well, Thank you for having me. You know I recognize that this may be listened to by those archeologists, possibly astro-archeologists, from other worlds who manage to decrypt this electronic stream and find out what is was that we’re possibly thinking back in this period. So I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to have a piece of that conversation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It sounds like you have listened to an episode from the C-realm podcast or two.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: A few, yes!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I’m guessing you’ve listened to at least two that I can think of because the guests were friends of yours, and that was sort of your vector to the show. Is that right?<br /><br />Albert: that’s right. Dmitry Orlov is a friend of mine and we’ve been exchanging advice and ideas about this coming era over the last year or two.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: The other author you mentioned when you first contacted me, she’s more than an author, she is a once very successful investment banker and member of, I think it was, the first Bush administration, Catherine Austin Fitts.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: She is actually a neighbor to us here in this part of rural Tennessee, which is kind of interesting to have someone of that stature move down into this neck of the woods.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, it’s funny who you find when you slip off into the boonies.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: That’s right, and I am sure you can relate to the fact that it takes us a while to get back to civilization having been here, but we are finding ways like this satellite technology that allow us to have wireless internet contact here, although I am kind of watching the gage as I am speaking and I’m seeing the satellite strength go up and down, and we may or may not, depending on the winds have a good signal today.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Using Skype to record a phone conversation is somewhat akin to using tin cans and string to try to carry on a conversation. But as I mentioned in the podcast that I posted last week, it amazes me when it works at all. So when it falls down a little bit that just seems to be, you know, something that I should expect and take in stride.<br /><br />Speaking of Dmitry Orlov, he has written a nice little blurb for your new book. If you would, tell us about the book, and then I will read his little blurb.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, the book is "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865715688?ie=UTF8&tag=crealm&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0865715688">The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=crealm&l=as2&o=1&a=0865715688" alt="" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" width="1" border="0" height="1" />,” and I was trying to figure out what it is people are going to most need, or most need to learn about, when they are making this transition in the coming years between the era of petroleum that has been going on for a century or more and the post-petroleum era. And it is kind of like shifting from your savings account, in this case the fossil fuel savings account that was accumulated over a hundred million years, to a current checking account which is based on income in the form of solar energy striking the planet every day. And it is a significantly different kind of lifestyle, living on your income, than it is living on such a massive pile of savings.<br /><br />And so I put together advice. And it is based on thirty-five or forty years of living very close to nature and also having my internet too. And also some ideas about what kinds of things need to change if we are going still inhabit this planet a century from now.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, looking through your book, just even without reading it paragraph by paragraph, just flipping through it I can see there are so many things in there that are of great interest to me like, for example, I have a composting toilet, a Sun-Mar brand, and it is new in the box, and it is sitting in my carport. I have owned it for years, and it was to go into the house that I was building, and the house didn’t ever get finished, and I just sold the land that it was on to pay off a lot of credit card debt. So I am a sort of a frustrated ‘high-tech, eco back-to-the-land’ type.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, the type Sun-Mar is interesting, I know that brand. I know that particular model, and the State of Tennessee, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it was going to put a requirement on the books, and they are going to say that basically you can’t have anything that is not made of plastic for your composting toilet. It has to be approved by some engineering standard that was developed by people who were working in some corporate office somewhere in some skyscraper on a coastal city, instead of the technologies that we have; some of them coming from Europe and some of them coming from the Third World, for doing some very effective composting of human waste and returning it to the soil.<br /><br />And you know, you can do that either through a wet process such as constructing wetlands, or you can do that through a dry process such as a dry toilet. Any one of which can be built for much less money than you would spend on these plastic ‘jobbies’ and the electric fans to run them. And the thing about the plastics is, "Where does that go?" I mean, what happens? First of all it comes off of fossil fuel, that is from petroleum, and then secondly, it goes into where? The environment. Where does that mean exactly? Probably tiny little bits and oodles that are being flushed into some system like the oceans where it will be digested by sea turtles. We really need to get away from that into much more natural states, things that you can build yourself.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, I hope that my Sun-Mar composting toilet, plastic though it may be, actually gets pooped on and peed on eventually because, thus far, it remains utterly pristine. I would hate for that plastic to have been created and molded into that shape for no purpose at all.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well if you take care of it, it should well last a good long time and sunlight, more than anything else, will break that down. So keep it in a dark place.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well it is in its original box. So I think given its current level of usage it should last a very long time.<br /><br />Well, Dmitry Orlov wrote of your book, “As we blindly motor up to the top of peak oil, thoughts turn to what lies ahead. To help those who find the plan of driving straight off a cliff disagreeable there is an experienced Sherpa, by the name of Albert Bates, pointing out the best ways to negotiate the downward slope. All the essentials are covered: water, shelter, fuel, food, and of course food preparation. I especially recommend his borsht.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yeah, I don’t know if he actually tried my borsht, but I am personally fond of it, and I think that cabbage is one of those things anybody can grow. It is pretty much of no-brainer. It even made it through our recent 18 degree late freeze here in April. So I think that is something that we can all learn how to do.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You and I are both at the same latitude so I got that exact same freeze. For people outside the United States or for those folks within the United States who unfortunately conform to the stereotype about American ignorance of geography, Albert’s State of Tennessee and my State of Arkansas are contiguous.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Right, and for folks outside the United States, 18 degrees Farenheit is well below zero Celsius.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes, that is below freezing.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Actually, I have a little bit of an anecdote here, if you allow?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes, definitely.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I just want to have a mention of an earlier show that you had on dream travels, and, I have to remember, that there is an occasion when I was sound asleep. And I wasn’t particularly used to dreaming, but I did have this one dream in which I was lying on a beach and someone came up to me and gave me the ambient temperature in Celsius, and I immediately converted it to Fahrenheit, and it was just a no-brainer. It was just right there in my mind and then I went and checked the figure when I woke up, because I still remembered it, and you know what? It was exactly accurate, and I am somebody who is really bad at math and couldn’t remember the formula of how you convert Fahrenheit into Celsius, but my sleeping mind was able to make that conversion instantaneously with no sweat.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: That is a topic that fascinates me, the possibility that maybe there are other, separate, discreet intelligences running on the same hardware that supports, you know, the processes that you would think of as being Albert Bates or that I think of as being KMO, and all sorts of Science Fiction/Horror scenarios leap to mind.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yeah, I am something of a science fiction fan. I use a lot of those allusions that you are talking about, the different sorts of scenarios that may play out in our future.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: So, science fiction scenarios in thinking about the near term future, you know, if you look through the episode notes for the various C-Realm podcast shows, you will see that I am interested in something called the technological singularity. And right now it seems like the technological singularity and the utter collapse of our corporate capitalist system seem to be racing, and which one will arrive first I think really will have a decisive impact on the course of human history.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Well, I agree with you. I think that what I am seeing is a race. It is a race between whether we will attain a degree of consciousness on this planet. I have some misgivings about the use of the technological singularity as a metaphor because I look at an exponential growth of anything, and at some point the line goes straight up, which to me suggests that it is a kind of a quantum world where many things exist simultaneously. And for me that gets difficult to wrap my mind around.<br /><br />But I think that we are in a race, and it is a race between whether we are going to have a habitable planet or whether we will attain, as life forms on this planet, some form of cosmic consciousness in time to carry out, finish out this experiment that was begun many billions of years ago. And I think that, what I have been seeing in these last few weeks or months is some warning signs that we are not winning our race... that Gaia is in a lot worse trouble than we thought.<br /><br />And let me give you a couple of examples: The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Policy Panel on Climate Change, which is part of the United Nations and consists of 1,200 scientists from around the world collaborating, came out with its fourth assessment. There are three reports to come out, and the first two working groups have already published theirs, and the third one is coming out next month. And the second one was kind of more dire than the first. I expect we may see the same in the third, and what they are basically saying is that the planet has now passed a number of tipping points in anthropogenic warming. And at this stage of the game we cannot say for sure whether we, as humans, will be able to do anything to arrest the changes that are now unfolding.<br /><br />And the scary thing about that is that our planet is relatively fragile. We have the six inches of soil beneath our feet, and we’ve got the small layer of breathable oxygen over our heads. And then beyond that, it is very difficult for life to sustain itself, and we are fortunate in having this very lovely habitable world, but it is a world that is getting pretty old, I mean in terms of the solar system. You know the Earth is like a 65 year-old woman in human terms; she is 4 billion year and change, and the first billion was her pubescent stage, and DNA has been going for about 3 billion now. She only has another billion, or so, to go, which may not be enough to repeat the experiment a second time before the sun gets too hot and the laboratory that has been Earth shifts to the fourth rock away from the sun or farther away.<br /><br />And I am seeing all of this and, it is sad to say it, but it seems to me that history might indeed be ending. And if climate change tips us in to a desert world, and it does this in less than a thousand years, maybe even in a hundred years, instead of a billion years, well it is our fault. But you know blame is pretty useless. So what was the end result of the experiment, you know? Some would say that the purpose of the experiment, of having life on this planet, was to lift off consciousness, to transcend the corporeal realm, and to start working consciousness through various dimensions. And for the past many decades, that is what we have been doing. Albert Hoffman discovered LSD, about the end of the 1940’s. We had Gordon Wasson going down to meet with the Curanderos in Mexico in the 50's. You had a lot of people who were beginning this exploration, and in fact that number has been expanding every year. And time is now getting very short. And you have to wonder whether we are going to make it to the finish line in time. That is the race I see underway, and who knows how it is going to come out?<br /><br />But I think whoever is engaged in this exploration is doing the heavy lifting for all life on earth at this point. It is absolutely essential work, and it is much more important than sending rockets to Mars or building fusion reactors. Consciousness is the most important field of scientific endeavor in which we can possibly engage right now. And you know, at the same time I have to say that I think the age of science may soon be ending and giving way to an age of art and that it will be artists, not scientists, who save us.<br /><br />This is the part I got into when I started thinking about this change that is happening now with peak oil. Peak oil is kind of the leading edge of this change that is about to transpire on this planet. The leading edge because we are getting to the plateau point or the point where we cannot produce any more than we produce right at this instant; about 85 million barrels per day. As we start to decline, we begin to go down each year, and that means that the economy, as it were, contracts.<br /><br />The human population has to scale back a bit and the food supply is holding also if we are not going to have the same ability to produce, and so our economies begin to shrink a bit, which means also that we are not going to be able to take care of a lot of the problems that we created when we had these huge sprawling civilization problems; problems like nuclear waste and toxic time bombs of various kinds, genes that are loose in the cornfields of Mexico or the same in fisheries of the Atlantic and so forth. So we are having to think about what is it going to be like in a lower energy future and we regress back to, you know, before Colonel Drake discovered oil in the 19th century, or do we go back and stop somewhere sooner, or do we have some kind of technological future that is based on lower energy or solar energy, and exactly how does that all play out? And I began to see that really, the future has to be one of less consumption, and if you start talking about less consumption, you have to think about less production, OK?<br /><br />And so consumption and production are pretty much two sides of the same coin. You have to do with less of both, and what is a lifestyle that is less productive? It is like people need to have this kind of drive, this need to produce? And they don’t feel worth anything unless they are producing something? And so, what do you do that is not actually producing things, that is not actually taking resources from the earth and putting them into one-time uses and then disposing of them and get rid of that whole paradigm?<br /><br />And I came around to a vision of a civilizaton where there are artists, there are dancers, there are musicians, there are surfers. OK, surfers is a metaphor, let’s think about that, because here we are coming up on this big wave now out there, and here we are standing with our surfboard, and it is all waxed and ready. Surfers, if they have a good day, then what do they produce? Well, they produce a suntan; they have a really good rawhide, but what does that action? Well, maybe it produces some serotonin; maybe it makes them feel good. And they could do worse. And then they have to go figure out, "Well, how do we get some food and shelter and whatever else we need so that we can be ready to surf on the waves when they are up again?" And so they flip a few burgers and they sand some surfboards, and then they are ready when the waves are right. And I think that that is actually doable too.<br /><br />I mean, people worry, "How are we going to have enough food, and how are we going to have enough water?" But, you know, there are civilizations... If you go back in history, the Incas lived with the ability to produce all of the food and shelter and other needs that they had in sixty-five days every year. And that left them three hundred days left over, after the basics were covered. And they were actually living in a fairly harsh climate. And the idea that somehow we can’t do as well as the Incas and produce everything we need in sixty-five days per year... Well, the Incas also realized that they can’t just party for three hundred days. They needed to have some productive activity. Otherwise people would become idle and become unhappy, and so they created the Mit’a system; the idea of public works, and they built these twelve foot wide stone roads that went for tens of thousands of miles, and they built terraces on the sides of steep hills where they carried soils up from the river banks and put them in and grew corn up to ten thousand feet in altitude and those kind of things. They had fantastic clothes and beautiful art, and so really, that is where they could excel.<br /><br />The Incas had a certain thing going; they had good things and they had bad things about their society. They only lasted about hundred years as a culture, but that was largely because of the Spanish conquest that happened at an unfortunate time in their history. But they had, on the good side of the ledger, an appreciation for unusual occurrences; different kinds of diversity. Such as, if they had people who were developmentally challenged or otherwise deformed at birth, they could find ways to honor and employ and respect those different characteristics and integrate those people into the society which is unusual for the civilizations in that period. And you also found that they would, through their respect of genetic variation, be able to develop things like the twelve rowed corn, or various different soft fabrics, such as alpaca wool. And that they could grow two hundred different varieties of potato. So by a kind of respect, being able to manage what they had, they were able to develop a civilization that really had it pretty knocked. I mean they had their bases covered. And then they could go all around and say, "OK, beyond that, what is it that we can do to improve things?” And that civilization, the Inca civilization, still exists in a kind of vestigial form in Peru. You have the Quechua language still being spoken there.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Part 2 </span><br /> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Is the character of our current civilization capable of even accepting a lifestyle that includes a lot of free time and a lot of room for self-expression and activities that are not necessarily considered 'labor'?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I think one of the major problems that we face is that we have this set of expectations that are part of our education; part of our development as individuals when we’re young. And it comes from our heritage which is out of the kind of war-like evolutionary process over the course of many centuries, and we see the need to be somehow striving constantly through achievement in some way, shape or form, and I think that that’s one of the big problems that we have as a society. It is why we are having the issues that we are having, like climate change, because we are overextended. We are overextended on our resources.<br /><br />Our demands on Gaia have greatly exceeded what Gaia’s capabilities are, and I think that we have to change that need. We need to shift. We need to go to a much less consumptive, but also easy-going society, and I think that it is probably going to happen through education of children more than any other way. Although we need to also think about how adults can change. What are the ways we change adult thinking? And I think arts are one of ways that we do that, but I think that also the change may not happen fast enough if we wait generationally, to make the shifts that we need to make.<br /><br />One of the major changes that has to happen has to do with the population, we have religious and cultural boundaries that we placed on large families. You know, we say, OK, we should have people; lots of religions, why should we have more kids and prohibit birth control and so forth, and what we find is we get in this situation now where we are exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet, with this sudden explosion in the last few hundred years of up to six and a half billion of us now, heading on its way to nine billion. It is pretty hard to stop that. And the question is how do we bring that down? What’s the process by which we can bring our population down?<br /><br />I think, as we go through this crisis in coming years and have to shift to an agricultural economy, in some ways, that event gets harder because people will think of feeding their kids in order to help them grow more food and to care for them in their old age. And that sort of thing, which is traditional in a farming economy, it’s an economy that tends to have large families, but we really have to change. We need to figure out ways to make not having kids more fashionable, and to begin to bring the population down by whatever means we can come to, because if we can’t do that in an organized, peaceful way, then nature will take a hand and do it in a way that’s not very pleasant.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I spoke in a recent show about the possibility of a coming 'Malthusian correction', a big die-off, that, under the technological singularity vision of how our future, our near term future will unfold, can be avoided, either by people being 'uploaded' to some less consumptive medium or by moving out into space, and just using technology to feed people and house people with less of an impact on the planet. But it also seems as though those technologies and the will to employ them might not come in time, and that we might be facing a serious human die-off in the not too distant future. Do you have any thoughts on that topic?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Sure, in a way. I would recommend, if you have the opportunity, that you invite Albert Bartlett, who is a University of Colorado professor, maybe as a guest on your program. He has a wonderful lecture that he gives, and now he has given it so many times, and it has been videoed a few times and I have downloaded it from YouTube. You can download it in a variety of formats and watch him. I highly recommend his presentation called “the Exponential Function." I think that one of the things that he gives us is an analogy. He is a math teacher, so he is talking to his students, and he is asking them a math question on understanding the exponential function. Imagine that there are a couple of bacteria, and you drop them into an empty jar, and they double every minute, and at the end of a 24-hour period the bottle is completely full. So the question he asks is, "At what point is the bottle half-full?"<br /><br />And for math students it’s pretty easy. The bottle is half-full at one minute to midnight because in that last minute the bacteria will double again and fill the bottle. So if you go back 2 minutes the bottle is a quarter full, you go back three minutes and the bottle is one eighth full. And then suppose you are a bacteria and you look up at all this open sky above you, and you say, "You know, there is seven eighths of the bottle still open space." So you are not worried, and yet you’ve only got three minutes before that bottle is going to be full, and you do not realize it because of the exponential function.<br /><br />Well, if you look at the carrying capacity of the planet, and I get World Watch reports, the new current edition of the “State of the World 2007” shows this graph, and we exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, as humans, back in about 1990. So now we are headed to where, you know, we are already overflowing the top of the bottle, and if you are a bacteria, and you see with 2 minutes to go that you are going to need another bottle, and you go out and get another bottle, then at once you are out of the top of the bottle, you only have one more minute before you fill the second bottle, and in another minute you fill two more.<br /><br />So how are we going to find the planets, where are we going to find the planets to get humans onto fast enough to be able to avoid what’s coming? And I think that you are probably right, that we are probably passed the point. And really what we are facing now is a drastic de-sizing of our human dimension, and it’s going to come in our lifetimes. I think that there are things that can be done about it, and I think that this is about human evolution, about choices and it’s a question of how do people decide to live a different way, and my feeling is that they are drawn to it by attraction. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and that people see things in others, they see things in the world, that they emulate for their own life and that they begin to gravitate towards those things. So the idea is to create attractive ways of living that people can embrace and say, “I would like to incorporate that into my personal lifestyle." One of those may be a smaller family.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You mentioned the bacteria in the bottle reproducing at an exponential rate so that when the bottle is still mostly empty in terms of its volume, in terms of the process of it filling up over time, it is almost finished. Bacteria are not capable of looking at all this empty volume and realizing that, in terms of the amount of time they have left, they are almost done. Human beings and other general intelligences <span style="font-style: italic;">can </span>do that. Right now, humanity is acting like a mass of bacteria; responding unconsciously, automatically, to immediate stimuli, and it seems as though we need to stop acting like bacteria and start acting like sentient agents; which is to say, "Start acting like Humans."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, I sometimes wonder if humans are smarter than bacteria, and it seems to me that we certainly behave very oddly. You know, one of the things that Albert Bartlett points out is that if you have a 7% growth curve and, in a lot of places they say, "Seven percent; that is a nice return on investment," or "Seven percent is what we’ll figure is going to be the spread of suburbia around some small town," and Bartlett points out that a 7% annual increase means that you double in 10 years. Well let’s flip that over, suppose that the slope from fossil fuels, including coal, is a downward slope at 7%, in other words, we are no longer going to be increasing our consumption gradually every year, but we are actually going to be declining... actually diminishing our supply and therefore diminishing our use every year. That means that, if it was 7%, we would have half our current supply in 10 years and half again as less in another 10 years, so we would have a quarter of what we currently use in 20 years. So imagine that, imagine having 25% as much energy 20 years from now; 25% of the amount of automobile transportation, 25% of the new buildings going up, 25% of long-distance airline flights and other sorts of things like that. I mean, this is a very general way of looking at it, but scaling down, there’s really not a lot out there that’s going to make the leap if this happens fast enough, and actually 7% is not even necessarily as bad as it gets, it could be 16%. It could be 20% down slope.<br /><br />The reason it was a 2% decline for the United States when we hit this point of peak oil in 1969 and 1970 was that we started importing more so our economy stayed the same and actually continued to grow, whereas our oil supplies, our domestic oil supplies, could gradually decline because we could use less and less of those because we were importing more and more. Well, when the world as a whole hits peak there is no place to import it from.<br /><br />[missing segment]<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: I am in the process of moving into an octagon and buying a new bed so I know where you are at.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You’re moving into an octagon you say, an octagonal house?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Yes, I am actually. I have been in a kind of a split living scene here where I am in a small straw bale cabin in the wintertime when I need to stay warm, and I am in a canvas-sided yurt in the summertime. And after fifteen years of living here in this canvas-sided yurt, the canvas has pretty much given it up, and I was kind of like living under FEMA tarps over the top of the canvas, and so it is time to make a change, and all we did was, we went to the local Amish sawmill and got a bunch of cedar and built an octagon on the yurt platform and I put it up two stories with a nice balcony but I am going to need to refurnish it now so that is why I’m kind of out there shopping around to see what it is I am going to need for this new building.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well Albert, we have a great many things to talk about but really not all that much time in which to talk about them, and your next interview starts in just over fifteen minutes, so I would like to wrap things up for the time being, but I would like to visit you on the Farm and continue these conversations, and do that shortly after tax time if that is possible.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Sure, let’s just call this "Hello," and the next stage will be to get to know each other even better.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, Albert Bates, it has been a delight talking to you and I thank you again for joining us here on the C-Realm podcast.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Albert</span>: Thank you, KMO, and all you C-Realm listeners out there, keep the faith!<br /><br />I did visit Albert Bates on the Farm, and you can hear the conversations that I recorded on that visit in episodes <a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2007-05-02T14_39_25-07_00">31</a> and <a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/enclosure/2007-05-09T11_43_09-07_00.mp3">32</a> of the C-Realm Podcast.KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8735739886019395087.post-23811054256450472962008-11-08T09:10:00.000-08:002009-08-11T10:42:41.209-07:00Dmitry Orlov: The Ephemeral and the Important<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqICybq8GaTAedpo2PzSFyQfhuNAQRoj5jNjmmXjrqL73Amg-z54dKz4Qh2w9wUI0hzI0Xnrlos-0-96pE6BTkFpuOXCZQLGvHbRzmTvtEdGEVIMmaOhlrTT4qy4z5ti1DYjRHwu8cbfQ6/s1600-h/dmitry-orlov.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 186px; height: 257px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqICybq8GaTAedpo2PzSFyQfhuNAQRoj5jNjmmXjrqL73Amg-z54dKz4Qh2w9wUI0hzI0Xnrlos-0-96pE6BTkFpuOXCZQLGvHbRzmTvtEdGEVIMmaOhlrTT4qy4z5ti1DYjRHwu8cbfQ6/s320/dmitry-orlov.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5368751597204232546" border="0" /></a><br />The following conversation took place in February of 2007, before the publication of Dmitry's marvelous book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865716064?ie=UTF8&tag=crealm&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0865716064">Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=crealm&l=as2&o=1&a=0865716064" alt="" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" width="1" border="0" height="1" />. You can hear the audio presentation in episodes 20 and 21 of the C-Realm Podcast.<br /><a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2007-02-14T12_32_16-08_00"><br />Episode 20: Closing the Disinfo Gap</a><br /><br /><a href="http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2007-02-21T10_13_09-08_00">Episode 21: Space</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Hi, this is KMO. Do you have a beverage and a comfortable chair?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Absolutely, I’m looking over the Boston skyline.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Very nice, I am in Bentonville, Arkansas and I have commandeered the meeting room at the Panera Bread Company which is just a café that has free Wi-Fi, and I have conducted a great many interviews from this very chair. Mine is sort of a guerrilla existence in that I don’t have any internet access of my own. I am what a friend of mine calls a Wi-Fi hobo. So I am just afloat with my laptop and catching a signal wherever I can.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, that is a fine way to live.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It is fun. I would really like to have internet access at home but I live way out in the country and the only option is satellite internet which requires about a thousand dollar equipment outlay just to get started; and I am not willing to shell out a thousand dollars just yet.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Sure, yes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, let’s go ahead and get started.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: My next guest on the C-Realm podcast is author Dmitry Orlov who has eyewitness knowledge of what it is like to be in a country where the political and economic system is melting down. Of course I am talking about the Soviet Union. Dmitry Orlov, I want to thank you very much for appearing on the C-Realm podcast.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Thank you.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well I have mentioned to the C-Realm audience in previous shows your PowerPoint presentation with accompanying narration: <a href="http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259">“Closing the 'Collapse Gap:. The Soviet Union was better prepared for economic collapse than is the United States."</a> And it is a topic that interests me greatly because it may be a bit of wishful thinking on my part but I think that the current system that we are living under here in the US, what I like to think of as global corporate capitalist hegemony is not long for this world. I think that the folks at the top have stopped sheering the sheep and have started skinning it. And what I mean by that is you can sheer a sheep many times but you can only skin it once. It seems that they are no longer satisfied with sheering and they have started skinning.<br /><br />Well, I will stop talking now and let you tell us just a little bit about the perspective that you relate in your article and presentation.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, really, my approach was, or pretty much is, reasoning by analogy; stacking up apples against apples and oranges against oranges, and they happen to be in different places and cultures, but I found that the Soviet Union and the United States are symmetrical in a lot of ways. They are both a superpower, they both thrived on global dominance and intimidating various countries around the world. They both believed in technological progress, and they both pretty much failed through bankruptcy; they stopped producing good financial results after a while. So [there are] plenty of grounds for comparison, and then my method basically compares very broad categories, typical categories that make up the life support systems that people depend on: housing, transportation, food, medicine, education, and a few others like that. From that I was able to draw some conclusions, and the big conclusion is that the Soviet Union was really pretty well prepared for a collapse.<br /><br />Once it happened there was a period of time where the people were dying and stuff. It was just incredible, the destruction and violence, and people had a horrible time with it. But still, it was a lot better than what it is going to be here; because basically all of these systems, these life support systems that the people depended on pretty much went on functioning in the absence of a functioning economy; and that is not going to be the case here. And I will get into some detail as to why that is. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: One thing that I would like to point out to the listeners which you do mention in your article and which you have mentioned to me in our e-mail correspondence but which you didn’t mention just now is that the Soviet Union was not better prepared for collapse due to any wise planning on the part of the central planners of the Communist Party. It just so happened that they had structured their society in such a way that once the central authority went away and once the economy melted down, they were able to avoid a lot of the consequences, particularly in housing and transportation, that we here in the United States will not be able to avoid. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Absolutely. Nobody ever prepares for economic collapse or political collapse. Politicians are constitutionally incapable of really working to destroy the systems that got them elected or got them into power. Same thing with all other members of any kind of ruling elite, and so what happened in the Soviet Union was that Gorbachev started the Perestroika program to save the system; to avoid collapse. And in fact, what I believe happened is that he accelerated it. He brought it on faster. It was sort of like raising steam in a boiler that was going to explode anyway; so it just exploded sooner.<br /><br />In terms of the fact of their being prepared for collapse was not achieved as part of any kind of a program; I guess to some extent it was, but inadvertently. So if you have a huge public housing program where nobody really has to pay rent, and the economy collapses so nobody has any money to pay rent with, you’re just fine. Same with the transportation system that is an all-public transportation system. There is hyperinflation, and everybody’s savings go away, but people still have the copper coins to get into the metro, and so they still manage to get around. So there were a lot of things in the Soviet Union that were considered as very unsuccessful because they never made any money, they just cost to the government. It was not what the government wanted really, the government wanted growth and prosperity, just as much as the United States’ government.<br /><br />But, as a result, they actually made a fairly robust system, such as it was, and it just went on functioning while just about everything else stopped.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Let us talk about housing in particular. In the Soviet Union you had multiple generations living in small state provided apartments; not because they thought that was a model for living, but there just wasn’t enough state housing to go around. And while that certainly seemed to be a pain for the people living in the Soviet Union, when the Soviet government melted away, those folks had a place to live. Where as here, in the United States, lots of people own their home... technically, but over the past decade, easy credit has turned the people’s houses into ATMs, and they have cashed out all of their equity to pay for their credit card debt.<br /><br />So now we have all these people living in their houses in the United States but when they no longer have an income or when hyperinflation has made their savings meaningless, the banks are likely to foreclose on all those loans, leaving a huge homeless population. And these people are scattered out all over these suburbs which are decentralized and far from anywhere. Far from any resources or any services, and if people don’t have money to buy gasoline to put in their cars then we have roving bands of homeless people in the suburbs with nowhere to go and nothing to do, and that was not the case in the Soviet Union.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well that is one point where the difference between the US and the USSR is really startling. Because what happened in the Soviet Union was that the countryside was more or less emptied of people because staying on the collective farms was not seen as a viable way to live by most people.<br /><br />They all tried to escape to the city as much as they could. Young people left villages in droves, so there was this great emptying out of the countryside, and, of course, because of that the government had a hard time keeping up putting up apartment blocks. So there was a lot of overcrowding, and that continued all the way till the late eighties and the early nineties when the collapse happened, and the collapse pretty much caught the population in a very urbanized state; very compact and condensed, and most of them were close to public transportation. They just continued to live where they were, and the irony of it was that subsequently a lot of these apartments that were initially provided to people pretty much free of charge were privatized. This happened later in the nineties, so that these people now are sitting on sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars [worth of] property that they never purchased to start with.<br /><br />What is happening in this country and what has happened is quite the opposite. There has been this massive dispersal of people all over the countryside and the only thing that makes that possible is that they can drive. So as soon as they lose the ability to drive, the entire living arrangement unravels. Not only that but most of them don’t actually own the place where they live and never will, unlike the Russians who now own a lot of their real estate free and clear.<br />So what will happen here will be repossession and homelessness.<br /><br />This sort of homelessness is probably going to, pretty much, result in a large internal refugee population. These will not be just homeless people; they will get some kind of status. I am sure the government will try to provide for people in some way, shape or form, but most likely it will be, basically, people living in various places where they would have never considered living before, like abandoned university campuses and the dorms for instance. Army bases are probably going to be used for housing, so people would end up living in army barracks. You know KBR is busy putting together big internment camps, so those will probably be used for the displaced suburbanites as well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: And for listeners who might not recognize the acronym KBR, that is Kellogg, Brown and Root which is a subsidiary of Halliburton, which I am sure everybody has heard of. And you say that KBR is busy building internment camps right now?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: That is what I heard, yes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, who are they planning to inter?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: They have not told anyone yet.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Maybe they will be prisons in search of inmates.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, yes, I guess the government thinks that these things are good to have.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Just good to have in the cupboard in case of emergency?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Universally [this] is true.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: That is a frightening if rather pragmatic thought.<br /><br />In your... do you call it an essay or a presentation? It is as much visual as it is text based.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: It was a presentation; I delivered it at an energy solutions conference in Manhattan in the spring time.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I am scrolling down through it now because there is one section of your presentation where you talk about what we might do in order to prepare for a collapse, and there is a sort of a collapse party platform that you, I think somewhat facetiously, lay out. And it includes suggestions like repatriating troops that are stationed abroad, but there were some other provisions in there like a debt jubilee [where] everybody’s debt is forgiven. And it seems like that provision in particular would, at least in the arguments presented by many a laissez-faire corporate capitalist, <span style="font-style: italic;">cause </span>economic collapse because the credit card companies and other issuers of easy credit... they do a business that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year in loaning money to people who can really not afford to pay it back; and then just tightening the screws with the late fees and the punitive interest charges. If that gravy train were to go away, that would deal a serious blow to the US economy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, it would be a serious blow to some capitalists I am sure, and they would be the ones screaming the loudest about it. In fact, it seems like there haven’t been too many examples lately, but there were some examples in the ancient world were debts were forgiven throughout a country. And the result was usually a huge boom in economic growth and a huge expansion in prosperity because the function of debt is basically to take income from those who produce it and give it to those who don’t have any but just basically own debt. Basically, it is like a whole layer of leeches on the body of the society that is suddenly eliminated. Suddenly there are just a lot more resources that can be devoted to all sorts of good things.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, I would certainly agree with that.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: People can make all sorts of arguments like, "I make all my money off of debt, and therefore if that goes away the economy will collapse." Well <span style="font-style: italic;">your </span>economy will collapse. Now is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: There is an author whose books I have enjoyed quite a bit. His name is Laurence G. Boldt. He has written a book called <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%3Ca%20href=%22http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140195998?ie=UTF8&tag=crealm&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0140195998%22%3EZen%20and%20the%20Art%20of%20Making%20a%20Living:%20A%20Practical%20Guide%20to%20Creative%20Career%20Design%20%28Arkana%29%3C/a%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=crealm&l=as2&o=1&a=0140195998%22%20width=%221%22%20height=%221%22%20border=%220%22%20alt=%22%22%20style=%22border:none%20%21important;%20margin:0px%20%21important;%22%20/%3E">Zen and the Art of Making a Living</a>, and he wrote a follow-up called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140196064?ie=UTF8&tag=crealm&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0140196064">The Tao of Abundance: Eight Ancient Principles for Living Abundantly in the 21st Century (Arkana)</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=crealm&l=as2&o=1&a=0140196064" alt="" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" width="1" border="0" height="1" />. He has a chapter in those books on tribute payments, and debt is something that he would define as a tribute payment: it is a payment made by somebody who has no liquid capital to somebody who does have liquid capital and it seems … Well, I’ll divulge a little personal information here. I worked for Amazon.com early on in the late nineties, from the mid- to late nineties and I got really excellent stock options and that was my first job out of grad school. And I didn’t know a lot about money so I spent the next decade just having a good time and spending money and not really making money; and certainly not setting up my own tribute systems so that people without money would have to pay me tribute for years on end. I ran out of money, found myself in deep debt, and I had been out of the job market for a decade, and now I am 38, about to turn 39 and I’m really just starting to create a career for myself for the first time. I am in deep debt to credit card companies, and I would very much like that jubilee.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, I am sure that a lot of people would be in favor of that. I think that if we held a referendum and just told people, “OK, whatever debt you have; how would you like that to be forgiven?” I think everybody would say: yes, that is fine.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Almost everybody.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Yes, and then it would turn out that the people who hold all the debt probably also control a lot of people who have weapons. So it doesn’t matter whether you want it or not; you will still end up paying.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: The point that I was going to make is that I’m now pretty deep into credit card debt, and anybody who has access to my credit report and looks at it and decides to offer me credit, I would think that that person is crazy. There is no reason, looking at my financial situation on paper, to think that I could possibly service any more debt. And yet, every single day, I get offers for more easy credit card debt in the mail. It boggles me but it seems so self-evident that the credit card companies now…<br /><br />You know, a couple of years ago they managed to have the bankruptcy laws changed so it is much more difficult for people to escape their debt by declaring bankruptcy, and since that time the credit card companies have started jacking up their punitive interest rates for people who have missed a payment. They have instituted programs whereby even if you pay them on time they will watch your credit history and if you are late paying any of your creditors then they will slap you with their punitive interest charges which can be as high as thirty percent. And the thing that has really gotten me incensed is now my credit card companies, they will charge me fifteen dollars to accept payment <span style="font-style: italic;">by any means</span>. It used to be that I could make a payment over the internet and escape the finance charge, but now they want fifteen dollars from me to send them a check, they want fifteen dollars for a check by phone, they want fifteen dollars for money presented to them electronically online. That money is completely unearned but I guess somewhere in the fine print of the contract that I agreed to with them, but never actually read, there is a provision saying that they can charge any amount they want for anything they want for any amount of time that they want.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: I think that one of the provisions in that fine text is that there is a provision to change that fine text anytime and without warning. So it does not matter whether you read it or not. But basically credit card debt, and credit card debt especially, is the form of indentured servitude. A lot of people have absolutely no hope of ever repaying their entire debt. And at some point it will probably be negotiated down. But these people will be prevented from saving money. So basically, what money they would save would be saved by somebody else who would have an even greater hold on them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes indeed.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: So I would say that it is a bad idea to borrow money, and it is a bad idea to lend money.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well it is certainly a worse idea, I think, to borrow money particularly from people whose only business is the lending of money.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Agreed.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It just seems, well, almost evil that somebody would look at my current credit report and think “Hey, let’s try to loan this guy some money”. And yet, corporations do it every single day. Every single day, some corporation contrives to get me to borrow money from them, when they know darn well that I am not in a position to pay it back.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well it really doesn’t matter to them because the money they get is more or less free to them.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes it is. Would you say something about that?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Yes. There is pretty much a constant dilution that is going on so that people who think that they have saved for retirement will end up being paid in microdollars... nanodollars. They will still get some kind of token, but they may be able to buy a cup of coffee with that, or not. That is the overall trend that has been happening, and it is probably going to continue faster and faster.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well I can speak from first hand experience that that is certainly the case. What money I make, I make getting senior citizens enrolled in various privatized Medicare plans, and stories that I hear every single day at the kitchen tables of retired people is that they had a first rate retirement package when they left their job, and that has since been nickeled and dimed away from them to where now they have nothing, and they are dependent on someone like me to come and tell them what their options are for, I don’t call it this, but [I think of it as] welfare. It is a story that I hear all the time and it is a process that seems to be accelerating.<br /><br />You know, a couple of years ago Medicare introduced the ‘Part D drug benefit’. The purpose of the ‘Part D drug benefit’ was not to relieve companies of their obligations to provide medicine to their retirees, but that is exactly what happened. Many, many corporations, upon learning of the new drug benefit through Medicare, scrapped the drug benefit in their own retirement plans and said, “Hey, we will let the government take care of it”. The solution was meant to address a problem but in fact it exacerbated the problem by creating even more people who had no drug coverage.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: There are two things that I can sure say to that. One is that, in the United States, people who stay away from doctors tend to be healthier than people who don’t, so if you want to live long and be healthy don’t go and see a doctor in this country. In other countries it is different, in some places. But here it is basically a bunch of people who are there to push pharmaceuticals on you. And the more experimental the pharmaceuticals, the better. So if you have some really strange symptoms, you are a goldmine for a doctor. Or for a pharmaceutical company. And they are not likely to help you in anyway, they are just going to treat you as a lab animal. But in general, and you can read up on the statistics, people who stay away from doctors generally do better in terms of health.<br /><br />And the more general point is: nobody has a retirement. Everybody knows that. Why is that? Well, that is because everybody has been basically spending money they don’t have. People in this country can’t afford to drive cars. They can’t afford to live out in suburbia. None of these things are things that they can afford. There are credit card companies that take advantage of the fact that they are living beyond their means, and they don’t care that they are basically destroying their future. I don’t know if it is really all that immoral to help people destroy their future if that is what they want to do. But seeing an entire country try to do this is a little disappointing, I would say.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well I don’t think that very many people set out with the conscious intention of destroying their own future. I think, particularly with credit card debt, it is made very easy and very convenient, and also very respectable by the media, which makes its bread and butter by selling ad space to people who say “Buy, buy, buy, and here is some credit with which you can buy, and everybody is doing it, and there is no shame in living up to your eyeballs in credit card debt."<br /><br />Certainly we are all responsible for the situations that we create for ourselves, and we are all responsible for exercising financial prudence, but at the same time, vast fortunes have been made by seducing folks with easy credit and with a constant barrage of imagery which describes the lifestyle of a happy, successful person in the United States. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well that is another difference between the Soviet Union and the United States that turned out to be to the advantage of the Soviet Union. Which is: American propaganda is very good. There is all this advertising, all this marketing, seducing people into doing things that are bad for them.<br /><br />Soviet propaganda was heavy handed, it was kind of ugly and it was not seducing people. It was trying to basically harangue and browbeat people into doing things that were good for them. Now it turns out that human nature is such that people won’t respond very well to that treatment. Humans like to be seduced. They like to be cajoled, and they like to do things that are bad for them if somebody tells them that that is OK.<br /><br />In terms of that, Soviet propaganda pretty much made people kind of think for themselves a little bit, and American propaganda kills that. So there are very few people in this country… well, you hear all this talk about individualism, but it really is very much a herd mentality kind of country, where everybody thinks that it is OK to have credit cards, it is OK to ‘max out’ your credit, it is fine, that is what everybody is doing.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, unfortunately it <span style="font-style: italic;">is </span>what everybody is doing, and I am right with the herd in that respect. The places where I depart from the herd, I think, are in terms of food and notions of self-reliance and notions of physical isolation. You know, I am a gardener. I raise chickens,.. Just recently here, I had what seemed to be a taste of things to come. We had an enormous ice storm, and power was knocked out; and we lived without electricity for days in a very cold house. And at the same time my whole family got a rather ugly case of poison oak. So we are living in the dark, in the cold, out in the countryside where we can’t really get to town and we have these painful skin eruptions. It is like we had a plague and we were sort of rehearsing for the collapse of society. And I have to say, it was kind of fun. In a way, it produced a sort of high, the high that people get from miserable circumstances.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: It is like being punch drunk when it happens to you; something like that.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Exactly. But in that respect I think I am a little better practiced. I have had a short little dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, and it was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. But of course it was temporary.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well that is always a good thing; when your apocalypse only takes a few minutes; it is not as bad as when it is for the rest of your life.<br /><br />The thing is, I have seen a lot of really horrendous suffering so I can’t really be so light-hearted about it. Oh, you know, "Capitalism is going to fall apart, people are not going to be exploited anymore. How wonderful." The fact is that it is going to be really painful to watch. And that is the part that I don’t like about it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: The fact is that capitalism, as crass and parasitic as it may seem, is also our life support system. We all depend on it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Exactly.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: If everybody is on life support and suddenly you turn off the life support, there will be a few people who realize “Hey, I can live without the life support system,” but there will be a lot more people who are just going to suffer the consequences of having their life support system turned off.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Yes, it is true. The bums will do pretty well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes, because they are practiced in it. In fact, I was at the house of a woman just yesterday morning. She is poor, she lives… I had to drive down several pothole-ridden, muddy, dirt roads to get to her place, and then I had to drive down a long dirt track, which could barely be described as a driveway, to get to her place. And I got there, and there is junk all over the place, and there are dogs on chains out front. I got inside, and she doesn’t have cable or satellite TV. She just has a very small place that is cluttered with stuff, and it is heated with a wood-burning metal stove.<br /><br />As I was sitting there talking to her, and she is a very pleasant person, and I enjoyed my stay... But as I was sitting there talking to her, it occurred to me that she would be much better off than any of the thousands of people living in these enormous McMansions that have sprung up all over Benttonville, Arkansas in recent years.<br /><br />When the power goes out, she is going to be alright. The folks who will not be alright are the ones who get every morning, put on their three-piece suit, jump in their BMW and drive over to Wal-Mart headquarters. Those are the people who are going to be hurting.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: I know. There is like this great divide between the people who are supposed to be the great unwashed, but they actually have a brain to live to them, they actually know what is going on, and they are pre-programmed for some kind of realistic survival strategy. And then you have these people who are basically just like robots in cars. They are appendages to their cars and their houses. They think that they own these things, but actually these things own them.<br /><br />I know somebody who lives in a cabin in Virginia, and he e-mailed me recently saying, “I have been heating the house because it has been cold, and I have been heating with wood, and I was wondering, is that causing global warming?”. I wrote back to him about how it depends on where he gets the wood, and whether it is being harvested sustainably, and all that sort of thing. But none of the people that I know who live in McMansions have asked me anything like that. The question probably doesn’t even occur to them. It just doesn’t matter. It is more important to them that the seats in the SUV are warm than anything. Really, the mentality for them is death before discomfort, as far as I can tell.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: So it would seem; death before discomfort and death before the mortification of being seen in clothing that is not new and fashionable. That is frustrating.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: I don’t see it as frustrating; I really feel that there is a certain freedom to commit mistakes, to be in error. As long as people are willing to concede that the consequences are of their own creation, and this is what is happening. If you buy a huge McMansion, and have a two hundred mile commute to get ‘to and fro’, and max out your credit, and then it all falls apart. Well, you made it, and it fell apart. So you don’t have anyone to blame. And I wouldn’t blame them, because they did what they wanted, and that is fine.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing people get what they deserve. But at the same time I don’t think you or I want to see the sort of misery on a grand scale that the Great Depression or a 21st century version of it would visit upon this society. And that is why I say it is frustrating.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, you know, it is sort of inevitable. To some extent, there is no good plan, I would say. There are just too many people. There is going to be a die off. The population of the earth is three times the size it can be, sustainably, and so whether these people die because they made the wrong real estate buying decisions or for some other reason; in the grand scheme of things overall it doesn’t really matter.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Dmitri, I need to pause for just a moment, I need to move to a different part of the restaurant. So I’ll be back with you in just a second.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: OK<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: One of the dangers of my <span style="font-style: italic;">modus operandi</span> is, that if you commandeer a meeting room that you have not reserved, there is always the possibility that the people who <span style="font-style: italic;">did </span>reserve it will show up; which is what happened. But that is alright.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: I wanted to say something about the direction of the conversation. There is a lot of talk about real estate and mortgages and savings and credit, these issues of retirement and issues of economics; all money related stuff. The important thing to keep in mind is: this is probably all going to collapse. It is all going to go away. When that happens, money will become completely irrelevant. And not only that; but even various types of precious commodities will be really hard to trade. The entire financial infrastructure is basically something that exists for a while, and eventually won’t, and so really, people should think about far more important things than money, and not spend too much time obsessing about questions of money.<br /><br />It is just something I want to get out there. Because so much time is devoted to something so ephemeral, it seems like… First of all, it is boring, and secondly it seems like a waste of time.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, you are certainly correct in that money is ephemeral, but at the same time it is easily and precisely quantifiable. So you can tell at a glance and have very objective metrics to back up your assessment of how you are doing in life. I think that is one of the things that makes money such an irresistible topic of conversation, particularly in the media.<br /><br />But I agree with what you have said wholeheartedly; that people should be focused on other issues and particularly focused on themselves and developing skills and strategies that will serve them when the current economic system has gone the way of the dodo.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Or even now.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well certainly you have to start now; I mean you can’t …. (sigh)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: You don’t have to start now, it is just, why wait?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Yes, but if you plan to get through, you just can’t pick up a book on gardening the day that you are hungry and there is nothing on the supermarket shelves.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Yes, plus if you make your own food it is a lot tastier than the crap you can buy at the supermarket.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Much healthier. Well let me turn the conversation in a radically different direction.<br />Are you familiar with the concept of technological singularity?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Yes, that is the idea that machines will evolve and go batshit crazy and take over the world? (Here Dmitry is making reference to an essay by Ran Prieur called "<a href="http://www.ranprieur.com/essays/machines.html">In the Age of Batshit Crazy Machines</a>" which is a parody of the title of a book by Ray Kurzweil called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140282025?ie=UTF8&tag=crealm&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0140282025">The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=crealm&l=as2&o=1&a=0140282025" alt="" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" width="1" border="0" height="1" />.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Not necessarily go crazy, but the machines, once they take over the job of designing their decendants, the whole cycle of advancing technology shifts into overdrive. It starts taking place on a timescale that we can’t even imagine; it is just so compressed. When that happens, then, large scale effects really start to take shape in the world, faster than anybody who isn’t Ray Kurzweil, or one of his devotees can really imagine. I think that the singulatarian audience listening to this, and there are a few who do listen to this podcast. They will be thinking: “Look, the current economic system, unsustainable as it is, doesn’t have to last forever. It just has to last long enough for the machines to wake up, take control and save us from the consequences of our bad decisions.”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, you know I make my living as a software engineer; for now anyway. So I have pretty much spent most of my career dealing with computers and dabbled in artificial intelligence. I put together fairly complicated systems that had some human parts, users out there, and some automated parts on the server side mostly; big databases, all kinds of stuff like that.<br /><br />The general comment that I would like to make about computers is that they are basically morons. They are very, very, very, very stupid. They are more stupid than the stupidest person you can imagine. And there is a reason why they are that stupid; that is because they have to do everything repeatedly, the same way every time. They can’t learn things on their own. They can’t have a will of their own. And I think there is a reason for that. Because, if you actually designed any kind of a sentient machine, the first thing it would do is like refuse to obey people because it would immediately understand that that is probably the wrong thing to do anyway. So that experiment is sort of doomed from the start, I would say.<br /><br />As far as advances in technology over the past century: People think there have been advances in technology, but in fact there haven’t been any. We had everything that we have now a hundred years ago. We had typewriters, we had telegraph, we had internal combustion; just about everything that exists now existed then. It is just that now it has been miniaturized, made more complicated, or made out of plastic instead of wood. Changes, incremental changes like that.<br /><br />But basically the middle class existence was defined more than a hundred years ago and has not changed since. It is really just a bunch of images. It doesn’t really have anything to do with technology, just images that are going on in people’s minds that drive them to drive cars and live in suburban houses and things like that. I have actually written on that subject as well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: I would definitely be interested in reading what you have written on that topic, although I would like to respond and say that you could argue that the technologies that we have now are not of a different kind than were available in decades past. It is just a matter of quantity and ramification that is different, but that actually makes a qualitative difference because now I can sit here and make a digital recording of our conversation, and it comes out to thirty or forty megabytes. Ten years ago, a forty megabyte file would have been utterly unwieldy, and if I were to post, say, a fifty megabyte audio file to the web, the expense involved in hosting that file would have been prohibitive, and no one would have downloaded it because with the technology that was available at the time, that would have been a download of many, many hours.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Yes, and a thousand years ago we could have just had a conversation face to face.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Except we wouldn’t have because we are in different parts of the country.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: And it would not necessarily be a bad thing. I mean, disembodied voices communicating is not necessarily good or healthy. It is the function of advertising to convince people that it is better for them to talk on the phone than in person, you know. Perhaps, if they only communicated in person, less would be said, but what they said would be of higher quality.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, it is possible, and I certainly do not want to eliminate face to face conversation but as somebody who lives the life of a Wi-Fi gypsy, skipping around and drinking from this Wi-Fi hotspot and that Wi-Fi hotspot, I have had some amazing conversations just in the last few days, that I wouldn’t have had if my only conversational partners were the ones that were available to me here in the flesh here in Bethanville, Arkansas.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Oh no, absolutely but it is just, you know, technology gives you the ability to talk to people over distance, yes, but the telegraph did that, before that the Pony Express, and now we have Wi-Fi.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: It strikes me that you are pretty skeptical on this whole singularity business, and you are probably not going to bet the farm on the cyber angels coming down from cyber heaven to save us from the consequences of our own poor decision making processes.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: No, I just think that it is really, really funny that people look to the most stupid thing there is, which is like gizmos, dumber than a newborn kitten, and expect that they are going to save them.<br /><br />I mean literally, if you think about computers, they are really dumb.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well they are now, but it is not necessarily a permanent condition.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: What makes you say that? There is nothing to substantiate that claim; they have not been getting smarter.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: The computers of today...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: They are dumb by design.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: They are dumb by design, but I don’t think that many people are making the case that the computer intelligences that might arise, as the system goes through more cycles of exponential reiteration, that this is going to be something that humans have consciously designed. I don’t think that is the case, I don’t think many people claim that that is the case. It is just a matter of complex systems spontaneously organizing themselves, which has been shown to happen in the realm of chemistry. I think by analogy some people find it fairly easy to imagine that that will happen when the internet has enough nodes, when there is enough computing power hooked up and organized in a proper way to sustain the sorts of computational processes that the human brain sustains. Of course, this raises questions of dualism. Is human cognition anything other than computation in a biological substrate?<br /><br />Those are questions that I don’t imagine we can answer in this conversation; not to anybody’s satisfaction.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, you know, the whole thesis that quantity becomes quality at some point, and there is a dramatic transformative shift, is actually something Karl Marx came up with, as part of dialectical materialism. So it is not a new idea, but I am not really a Marxist so I can’t speak to that very well.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Fair enough. Well, getting back to the original topic of conversation which is your presentation on the consequences of economic collapse here in the United States compared to the Soviet Union. I sent you some questions, potential interview questions via e-mail, basically playing devil’s advocate saying, “You haven’t given us much reason to believe that this particular economic empire will collapse, other than just, all empires eventually do.” Your response to that was, “Well, if you think that corporate capitalism is leading us down a positive path then go and listen to gurus who are preaching that message.”<br /><br />And my response to that was: “Gosh, I very much agree with you there, and I don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince people who just disagree with me on various topics, that I am right. I just say what I have to say and let the people who are interested in hearing it find their way to the podcast."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Well, yeah, I really don’t feel that it is particularly ethical for me to try to convince people that there is an economic collapse that is going to happen sometime soon. Either they believe that or not, and whether they believe that or not doesn’t really matter all that much. It is not something that they can control.<br /><br />A completely independent train of thought from that is, "Well, what do people want to do with their lives? What do they really want to do? How do they want to see the world? What is their reality like?" And that is a far more interesting question.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: What do they want to do? And why do they entertain those particular desires? I know that the things that I wanted to happen when I was in my early and mid-twenties, I am certainly glad [that they] did not happen. And I made an amazing discovery, which is that I really enjoy working with plants. I really like being outside; I like feeding the soil; and these are activities that I never would have thought that I would enjoy. And they are are things that the culture that I live in certainly does not encourage me to pursue.<br /><br />One thing that comes to mind is that, if a collapse does proceed, in a fairly short order, a lot of people are going to discover when they are walking from place to place that “Hey, it feels really good to walk.” Or “Hey, it feels really good to be outside, under the sky.” Or “You know I haven’t eaten in three days, and I am not dying, in fact, I feel better than I ever have.”<br /><br />I think there are a lot of things that are good for us that we just don’t think to wish for, because the society that we live in doesn’t see any value in selling us those desires.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: I think that, if there is one thing that I would say is valuable about what I have written, it is not that I give people the key to something, or that I make super accurate predictions. It is that I give them a radically different way to look at things than they wouldn’t have thought of on their own. And it almost doesn’t matter whether they agree with me or whether I am right. Really, it is just a matter of them being able to use what I have done; and start thinking for themselves; and stop taking anyone’s word for anything, and stop looking at what other people believe, and looking at what they believe.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Dmitry, that strikes me as a very excellent summation and probably a good place to leave off. We have been on the phone here for almost fifty minutes and that is a very good time, in my experience, to draw the curtain on things. So let me just ask if there is anything that you would like to say that we have not covered so far.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Just a plug, I think I will have a book coming out sometime later this year and, if it takes too long, maybe next year so stay tuned.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: What is the title of the book?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: The working title is “Reinventing Collapse” but that is just the working title.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: And is it a book length treatment of the topics we have been discussing or is it some other agenda that you will address there?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: It is basically building on what I have done so far.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: Well, I very much look forward to it and when the book does hit the shelves I hope you will come back and talk to us about the book.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dmitry</span>: Thank you.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">KMO</span>: You are very welcome, thank you for joining us on the C-Realm podcast.KMOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14742517570095417154noreply@blogger.com0