Tuesday, October 29, 2013
by Ian Welsh
Today I read this article on how the Ocean is dead: how the fish and birds are gone from huge swathes of it. You should read it.
Most people are absolutely lousy system thinkers, they don’t understand break-points: how you get long trends that suddenly break up or down, how self-reinforcing cycles work, and so on.
For some time my baseline scenario has been as follows: we are so screwed.
We can expect a complete collapse of the Ocean’s ability to provide fish. Japan, the worst offender in this, will also be the worst hit. That doesn’t make me happy, but it does make me laugh. This effects the oxygen cycle and worst case we could kill ourselves off entirely. Assuming we don’t, however…
We are currently seeing a hiatus in Climate Change. My friend Stirling predicted that years ago, and predicted it would be used to simply double down on stupidity like fracking. It is being. If/when the sun warms up, we are fried. Various processes are past the point of no return, we are going to see huge methane releases from Russia, for example. We are going to have worse global warming than the worst mainstream predictions.
Climate change will continue to show up as more and worse extreme weather events, like the nasty hurricanes we’ve been seeing hitting further and further north. We are going to also see changes in rainfall patterns, these will continue to devastate agriculture.
Aquifers are being drained dry, in ways that permanently damage them. This is happening in China, the US, India and other places. This water will not come back. Large areas that are currently agriculturally productive will not be, independent of climate change.
We will see huge dust bowls form, including in India, China and the US.
There will be widespread hunger, because agriculture is going to fail. Period. Right now hunger is due to distribution issues: we grow more than enough food to feed everyone, we just don’t care about feeding everyone. In twenty to thirty years this will not be the case: we will just not have enough food.
Water will be as precious as hydrocarbons, which is, in part, because creating hydrocarbons requires water. Expect much of the world not just to be hungry but thirsty.
All of this is baked into the cake: we are past the decision points on all of these items—they will happen, they can no longer be stopped. Even if you take the most optimistic scenarios we would need to act radically, right now, and we aren’t going to.
Let us now move the social sphere. We are creating an unprecedented panopticon state: one in which various technologies will conspire to make it so that individuals are tracked nearly 24/7, not just online but physically. Linking all the various cameras, RFID tags, aerial drones, sattelites, phones that act as spies in our pockets and so on, with algorithims which recognize our gait, our heat profile, our face and so on, is a project which is well underway. The NSA may be the best at this, but every major Western government is playing this game, the NSA is merely the worst or best. Private tracking is likewise ubiquitous: companies have cameras which link your face to your credit card and purchase as you pay at the cashier, for example. Everything is tied together, and anyone stupid enough to think that these companies don’t share your information is a fool.
The preferred business model today is to make it so that no one owns anything: everything is unbundled, instead of owning it, your lease or rent it and the moment you can’t pay it all goes away. This is what “cloud” computing is about: a revenue stream. Lose your revenue, lose everything. Ownership of DNA sequences, ownership of seeds, effective ownership of your intellectual property because it appears in someone else’s pipe (like Google using people’s endorsements without compensating them), you will own nothing, and all surplus value you produce in excess of what you need to (barely) survive will be taken from you.
To put it another way, the current business model is value stripping. All excess value is stripped from the social sphere (as with google taking almost all of the value that content producers create by taking almost all of the value of ads, and they control almost the entire ad market.) People who cannot gain enough of the excess value they create become economic cripples. Since the companies that make almost all the profit today are either financial companies, IP exploitation companies or are taking value from the environment (like oil companies), there is not enough real economic growth, whatever the GDP numbers show (financial innovation isn’t, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs profits actually damage the real economy, stripping out value, not creating it.)
There is no coherent ideology opposing this, there is no coherent alternative. Marxism died with the USSR, whether it should have or not. No new alternative to what is laughably called “capitalism” (it isn’t) has arisen. The closest we have seen is the Pirate Party, but their ideology is too far from comprehensive and has too many holes in it, since they are concerned almost entirely with a set of issues around IP and Privacy, which while important, are not sufficient to create a new society complete with a new, humane and ecologically sensible mode of production.
So we have runaway asset and value stripping, combined with truly insane damage to the conditions for production of food and energy. And no, photovoltaic Solar is not going to save us. Certainly it is better than coal or natural gas or oil, but most energy use in the world is not electrical, and Solar PV cannot produce the necessary baseline. Thermal solar and improved nuclear power made in breeder reactors are probably necessary for the transition, but the word “nuclear” scares everyone spitless, not without reason, so that’s off the table. And we’re going to burn.
There are always counter-reactions. I expect one when the Millenials come of political age, in the early 2020s. And I expect that the first round will fail, since it will be run by Millenials picked by their elders. The second round may succeed, but at that point we are into the 2030s.
While much of this is unavoidable, the amount of death and suffering is variable. We could lose a few hundred millions over the next eighty years whom we shouldn’t have lost: or we could lose a few billion. We could see billions descend into hunger and poverty, or we could find solutions which avoid most of that.
We will not avoid it if we continue with our current ideology of, simply, Greed. As long as we put ourselves first, as long as we decide that what is good for someone is what they’re entitled to do so long as the courts don’t actually put them in jail (and we don’t even enforce the laws on the book), we are not going to manage this to come in on the optimistic side of estimates.
We will need to create a whole new ideology, we will need to radically revamp our societies and we will need to give up much we have cherished. Fortunately much of what we have cherished has been, objectively, bad for us. People may want to live in suburbia, but it isolates them socially and makes them fat, sick and unhappy. People may think they want pretty plastic packaging, but it’s why they won’t have fish to eat that aren’t lice infested. People may think they want healthcare, but what they need is to be healthy, and that means healthy food and an environment that isn’t laden with unhealthy chemicals. People may think they want jobs, but what they need and would be happier with is the ability to produce what they need without working for a pointy-headed boss.
We’re going to run into this wall. But whether we run into it at a hundred miles an hour and go splat or hit it and ten miles an hour and get bruised and pick ourselves up is our choice. So far our choice is to run faster, but we can make another choice.
Most people who read this website are middle aged or older. If so, you’ll miss a lot of the worst of this. Your kids won’t. Your job, if you’re old, is ideological: to help create the ideas that are lying on the floor, the ideas that are used when people are desperate. When things change in crisis, they change fast, and the ideas that are used are the ones lying around. If all that’s lying around is neo-liberalism, that’s what will be used. Of course ideology isn’t enough, people can still choose the wrong ideology, the wrong ideas (and often have, don’t tell me otherwise), but if it isn’t there, all they can do is pick up what is there. That’s when you start getting idiots talking about “bending the curve”, as if slow incremental change won’t be overwhelmed by vicious cycles already in play, as if we aren’t already past key decision points, as if we shouldn’t already be in crisis mode and doing not dishwater reforms but a radical remake of our societies.
We’re going to hit the wall. We’re going to have fight a dystopic panopticon police state in which ordinary people are not allowed to own anything of real value, let alone keep any of the real value they create. We’re going to do this while the environment comes apart, while we get battered by “extreme weather events”, droughts, water shortages and hunger.
That’s the baseline scenario. That’s what we have to be ready to deal with, to change as much as we can, to radically mitigate to save hundreds of millions or billions of lives, and to make billions of lives good, instead of meaningless existential hells.
from → How to think, Revolution
Today I read this article on how the Ocean is dead: how the fish and birds are gone from huge swathes of it. You should read it.
Most people are absolutely lousy system thinkers, they don’t understand break-points: how you get long trends that suddenly break up or down, how self-reinforcing cycles work, and so on.
For some time my baseline scenario has been as follows: we are so screwed.
We can expect a complete collapse of the Ocean’s ability to provide fish. Japan, the worst offender in this, will also be the worst hit. That doesn’t make me happy, but it does make me laugh. This effects the oxygen cycle and worst case we could kill ourselves off entirely. Assuming we don’t, however…
We are currently seeing a hiatus in Climate Change. My friend Stirling predicted that years ago, and predicted it would be used to simply double down on stupidity like fracking. It is being. If/when the sun warms up, we are fried. Various processes are past the point of no return, we are going to see huge methane releases from Russia, for example. We are going to have worse global warming than the worst mainstream predictions.
Climate change will continue to show up as more and worse extreme weather events, like the nasty hurricanes we’ve been seeing hitting further and further north. We are going to also see changes in rainfall patterns, these will continue to devastate agriculture.
Aquifers are being drained dry, in ways that permanently damage them. This is happening in China, the US, India and other places. This water will not come back. Large areas that are currently agriculturally productive will not be, independent of climate change.
We will see huge dust bowls form, including in India, China and the US.
There will be widespread hunger, because agriculture is going to fail. Period. Right now hunger is due to distribution issues: we grow more than enough food to feed everyone, we just don’t care about feeding everyone. In twenty to thirty years this will not be the case: we will just not have enough food.
Water will be as precious as hydrocarbons, which is, in part, because creating hydrocarbons requires water. Expect much of the world not just to be hungry but thirsty.
All of this is baked into the cake: we are past the decision points on all of these items—they will happen, they can no longer be stopped. Even if you take the most optimistic scenarios we would need to act radically, right now, and we aren’t going to.
Let us now move the social sphere. We are creating an unprecedented panopticon state: one in which various technologies will conspire to make it so that individuals are tracked nearly 24/7, not just online but physically. Linking all the various cameras, RFID tags, aerial drones, sattelites, phones that act as spies in our pockets and so on, with algorithims which recognize our gait, our heat profile, our face and so on, is a project which is well underway. The NSA may be the best at this, but every major Western government is playing this game, the NSA is merely the worst or best. Private tracking is likewise ubiquitous: companies have cameras which link your face to your credit card and purchase as you pay at the cashier, for example. Everything is tied together, and anyone stupid enough to think that these companies don’t share your information is a fool.
The preferred business model today is to make it so that no one owns anything: everything is unbundled, instead of owning it, your lease or rent it and the moment you can’t pay it all goes away. This is what “cloud” computing is about: a revenue stream. Lose your revenue, lose everything. Ownership of DNA sequences, ownership of seeds, effective ownership of your intellectual property because it appears in someone else’s pipe (like Google using people’s endorsements without compensating them), you will own nothing, and all surplus value you produce in excess of what you need to (barely) survive will be taken from you.
To put it another way, the current business model is value stripping. All excess value is stripped from the social sphere (as with google taking almost all of the value that content producers create by taking almost all of the value of ads, and they control almost the entire ad market.) People who cannot gain enough of the excess value they create become economic cripples. Since the companies that make almost all the profit today are either financial companies, IP exploitation companies or are taking value from the environment (like oil companies), there is not enough real economic growth, whatever the GDP numbers show (financial innovation isn’t, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs profits actually damage the real economy, stripping out value, not creating it.)
There is no coherent ideology opposing this, there is no coherent alternative. Marxism died with the USSR, whether it should have or not. No new alternative to what is laughably called “capitalism” (it isn’t) has arisen. The closest we have seen is the Pirate Party, but their ideology is too far from comprehensive and has too many holes in it, since they are concerned almost entirely with a set of issues around IP and Privacy, which while important, are not sufficient to create a new society complete with a new, humane and ecologically sensible mode of production.
So we have runaway asset and value stripping, combined with truly insane damage to the conditions for production of food and energy. And no, photovoltaic Solar is not going to save us. Certainly it is better than coal or natural gas or oil, but most energy use in the world is not electrical, and Solar PV cannot produce the necessary baseline. Thermal solar and improved nuclear power made in breeder reactors are probably necessary for the transition, but the word “nuclear” scares everyone spitless, not without reason, so that’s off the table. And we’re going to burn.
There are always counter-reactions. I expect one when the Millenials come of political age, in the early 2020s. And I expect that the first round will fail, since it will be run by Millenials picked by their elders. The second round may succeed, but at that point we are into the 2030s.
While much of this is unavoidable, the amount of death and suffering is variable. We could lose a few hundred millions over the next eighty years whom we shouldn’t have lost: or we could lose a few billion. We could see billions descend into hunger and poverty, or we could find solutions which avoid most of that.
We will not avoid it if we continue with our current ideology of, simply, Greed. As long as we put ourselves first, as long as we decide that what is good for someone is what they’re entitled to do so long as the courts don’t actually put them in jail (and we don’t even enforce the laws on the book), we are not going to manage this to come in on the optimistic side of estimates.
We will need to create a whole new ideology, we will need to radically revamp our societies and we will need to give up much we have cherished. Fortunately much of what we have cherished has been, objectively, bad for us. People may want to live in suburbia, but it isolates them socially and makes them fat, sick and unhappy. People may think they want pretty plastic packaging, but it’s why they won’t have fish to eat that aren’t lice infested. People may think they want healthcare, but what they need is to be healthy, and that means healthy food and an environment that isn’t laden with unhealthy chemicals. People may think they want jobs, but what they need and would be happier with is the ability to produce what they need without working for a pointy-headed boss.
We’re going to run into this wall. But whether we run into it at a hundred miles an hour and go splat or hit it and ten miles an hour and get bruised and pick ourselves up is our choice. So far our choice is to run faster, but we can make another choice.
Most people who read this website are middle aged or older. If so, you’ll miss a lot of the worst of this. Your kids won’t. Your job, if you’re old, is ideological: to help create the ideas that are lying on the floor, the ideas that are used when people are desperate. When things change in crisis, they change fast, and the ideas that are used are the ones lying around. If all that’s lying around is neo-liberalism, that’s what will be used. Of course ideology isn’t enough, people can still choose the wrong ideology, the wrong ideas (and often have, don’t tell me otherwise), but if it isn’t there, all they can do is pick up what is there. That’s when you start getting idiots talking about “bending the curve”, as if slow incremental change won’t be overwhelmed by vicious cycles already in play, as if we aren’t already past key decision points, as if we shouldn’t already be in crisis mode and doing not dishwater reforms but a radical remake of our societies.
We’re going to hit the wall. We’re going to have fight a dystopic panopticon police state in which ordinary people are not allowed to own anything of real value, let alone keep any of the real value they create. We’re going to do this while the environment comes apart, while we get battered by “extreme weather events”, droughts, water shortages and hunger.
That’s the baseline scenario. That’s what we have to be ready to deal with, to change as much as we can, to radically mitigate to save hundreds of millions or billions of lives, and to make billions of lives good, instead of meaningless existential hells.
from → How to think, Revolution
Monday, October 07, 2013
FrankTrollman
Serious Badass
Joined: 07 Mar 2008
Posts: 21540
PostPosted: Mon Oct 07, 2013 4:59 pm Post subject: Reply with quote Add User to Ignore List
Chamomile wrote:
I am reasonably certain that historians will look back and say 2008 was the peak of the United States' power.
I'm virtually positive that historians will look back and say that US power peaked in 2003. That is when the President of the United States was able to get the Dominican Republic, Latvia, and the Federated States of Micronesia to invade Iraq, despite none of those countries sharing a continent or ocean with that country, having no causus belli, having no occupation plan, having no exit strategy, having no quantifiable goals, Iraq being no especial threat to anyone, it being clear that there would be heavy losses, and the United Nations officially condemning the invasion before it even happened. That is some massive brass balls of power.
Of course, that all failed horribly, the US was subsequently unable to even take care of its own hurricane, economic collapse, political paralysis, and all that shit. But in 2003, the President of the United States could have done absolutely anything no matter how stupid and gotten away with it. We know this because he literally did the most ridiculous that any empire has ever done. No other empire in human history could have pulled off something that stupid, and probably no country in the world (including the present day United States) could do it now.
-Frank
Serious Badass
Joined: 07 Mar 2008
Posts: 21540
PostPosted: Mon Oct 07, 2013 4:59 pm Post subject: Reply with quote Add User to Ignore List
Chamomile wrote:
I am reasonably certain that historians will look back and say 2008 was the peak of the United States' power.
I'm virtually positive that historians will look back and say that US power peaked in 2003. That is when the President of the United States was able to get the Dominican Republic, Latvia, and the Federated States of Micronesia to invade Iraq, despite none of those countries sharing a continent or ocean with that country, having no causus belli, having no occupation plan, having no exit strategy, having no quantifiable goals, Iraq being no especial threat to anyone, it being clear that there would be heavy losses, and the United Nations officially condemning the invasion before it even happened. That is some massive brass balls of power.
Of course, that all failed horribly, the US was subsequently unable to even take care of its own hurricane, economic collapse, political paralysis, and all that shit. But in 2003, the President of the United States could have done absolutely anything no matter how stupid and gotten away with it. We know this because he literally did the most ridiculous that any empire has ever done. No other empire in human history could have pulled off something that stupid, and probably no country in the world (including the present day United States) could do it now.
-Frank
Friday, October 04, 2013
http://hecatedemeter.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/an-old-witch-tells-the-president-what-to-do/link
I've been fantasizing along these lines myself.
I've been fantasizing along these lines myself.
Thursday, October 03, 2013
WASHINGTON, United States—The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city. Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. Money-changers are not yet buying stacks of useless greenbacks on the street.
Advertisement
But the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink. Because, at midnight Monday night, the government of this intensely proud and nationalistic people will shut down, a drastic sign of political dysfunction in this moribund republic.
The capital’s rival clans find themselves at an impasse, unable to agree on a measure that will allow the American state to carry out its most basic functions. While the factions have come close to such a shutdown before, opponents of President Barack Obama’s embattled regime now appear prepared to allow the government to be shuttered over opposition to a controversial plan intended to bring the nation’s health care system in line with international standards.
Six years into his rule, Obama’s position can appear confusing, even contradictory. Though the executive retains control of the country’s powerful intelligence service, capable of the extrajudicial execution of the regime’s opponents half a world away, the president’s efforts to govern domestically have been stymied in the legislature by an extremist rump faction of the main opposition party.
The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity. Activity in the legislature ground to a halt last week for a full day as Cruz insisted on performing a time-honored American demonstration of stamina and self-denial, which involved speaking for 21 hours, quoting liberally from science fiction films and children’s books. The gesture drew wide media attention, though its political purpose was unclear to outsiders.
With hours remaining until the government of the world’s richest nation runs out of money, attention now focuses on longtime opposition leader John Boehner, under pressure from both the regime and the radical elements of his own movement, who may be the only political figure with the standing needed to end the standoff.
While the country’s most recent elections were generally considered to be free and fair (despite threats against international observers), the current crisis has raised questions in the international community about the regime’s ability to govern this complex nation of 300 million people, not to mention its vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Americans themselves are starting to ask difficult questions as well. As this correspondent’s cab driver put it, while driving down the poorly maintained roads that lead from the airport, “Do these guys have any idea what they’re doing to the country?”
Advertisement
But the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink. Because, at midnight Monday night, the government of this intensely proud and nationalistic people will shut down, a drastic sign of political dysfunction in this moribund republic.
The capital’s rival clans find themselves at an impasse, unable to agree on a measure that will allow the American state to carry out its most basic functions. While the factions have come close to such a shutdown before, opponents of President Barack Obama’s embattled regime now appear prepared to allow the government to be shuttered over opposition to a controversial plan intended to bring the nation’s health care system in line with international standards.
Six years into his rule, Obama’s position can appear confusing, even contradictory. Though the executive retains control of the country’s powerful intelligence service, capable of the extrajudicial execution of the regime’s opponents half a world away, the president’s efforts to govern domestically have been stymied in the legislature by an extremist rump faction of the main opposition party.
The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity. Activity in the legislature ground to a halt last week for a full day as Cruz insisted on performing a time-honored American demonstration of stamina and self-denial, which involved speaking for 21 hours, quoting liberally from science fiction films and children’s books. The gesture drew wide media attention, though its political purpose was unclear to outsiders.
With hours remaining until the government of the world’s richest nation runs out of money, attention now focuses on longtime opposition leader John Boehner, under pressure from both the regime and the radical elements of his own movement, who may be the only political figure with the standing needed to end the standoff.
While the country’s most recent elections were generally considered to be free and fair (despite threats against international observers), the current crisis has raised questions in the international community about the regime’s ability to govern this complex nation of 300 million people, not to mention its vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Americans themselves are starting to ask difficult questions as well. As this correspondent’s cab driver put it, while driving down the poorly maintained roads that lead from the airport, “Do these guys have any idea what they’re doing to the country?”
