Full-Spectrum Dominance

Even without being a historian (you or me), it’s easy to recognize seminal figures in U.S. history who have articulated the basic ideology behind what has grown to be a maniacal notion of what a world power can and should be. For instance, not very long after the American Revolution and the purported end of the Colonial Era, President James Monroe established the Monroe Doctrine, claiming the entire Western Hemisphere as being within America’s sphere of influence and warning others across the Atlantic not to intervene. Later in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln responded to the Southern Secession by launching the American Civil War, establishing that no state could leave the Union. A period of isolationism followed, broken when the U.S. joined WWI (unclear to me why the U.S. fought that war). Woodrow Wilson laid out the principles of liberal internationalism in 1917:

The American military, the president told a joint session of Congress, was a force that could be used to make the world “safe for democracy” … Wilson’s doctrine was informed by two main ideas: first, the Progressive Era fantasy that modern technologies and techniques — especially those borrowed from the social sciences — could enable the rational management of foreign affairs, and second, the notion that “a partnership of democratic nations” was the surest way to establish a “steadfast concert for peace.”

from “Empire Burlesque” by Daniel Bessner (Harper’s Magazine, July 2022)

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Note that that bit of rhetoric, “safe for democracy,” has been trotted out for over a century now yet shows no sign of losing its mojo. It helps, of course, that no one really knows what democracy is anymore. The public is subjected to relentless narrative spin and propaganda, bread and circuses, and inferior to nonexistent education that muddies the concept beyond recognition. Ten months prior to the U.S. entry into the next world war, influential American magazine publisher (Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated) Henry Luce added further justification for growing U.S. geopolitical ambitions:

… the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States, which had already been aiding the Allies, officially entered the war. Over the next four years, a broad swath of the foreign policy elite arrived at Luce’s conclusion [from just before the war]: the only way to guarantee the world’s safety was for the United States to dominate it. By the war’s end, Americans had accepted this righteous duty, of becoming, in Luce’s words, “the powerhouse … lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.”

from “Empire Burlesque” by Daniel Bessner (Harper’s Magazine, July 2022)

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There has since been no going back, only solidification and strengthening of what is called The American Century (thanks again to Luce) but really represents the spread of a global empire. So much for the end of colonialism, now pursued primarily through other means but still reverting to overt militarism whenever and wherever necessary. Just like civilizations, empires have come and gone throughout human history with power centers shifting somewhat reliably if unpredictably. The American Empire will undoubtedly join others in the dustbin of history no matter whether anyone survives the 21st century to survey the wreckage. Moreover, the illusion that The American Century can be extended is handily dispelled by the Macrofutilist, noting that corporations are leading the charge into the abyss:

Humans have no agency in this world dominated, at every institution and at every level of those institutions, by corporations and states that function as corporations. Under the rubric of the corporation, every public good or resource is under relentless exploitation, subject only to the fictional “control” by political or legal structures. Bolstered by near-total capture of every ancillary human social event or condition, corporations are wonderfully positioned to lead humanity off its cliff of resource degradation and impending scarcity … The horror is so monumental, so vast in its iniquity, so above any moderation, so all-consuming in its reach, so supreme in its command, that the subject of corporate ownership of the means of species destruction risks becoming boring. Who has the right to speak of “resistance” or “change” or “giving back” when all forms of social control are under obdurate corporate ownership?

from Corporations Are the Perfect Vehicle to Drive Humanity to Its Self-Extinction

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Although it’s impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt who’s actually driving the bus — corporations, the military-industrial complex (those two form a tautology by now), elected members of government, the Deep State, or some other nefarious cabal — it’s probably fair to say that members of each group have taken into their hearts the desire for full-spectrum dominance. That term originally meant complete military control of a theater of war. However, as its very name frankly admits, activities of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government signal a new style of Hobbesian war of all against all has begun. Indeed, what I used to call creeping fascism no longer needs the modifier creeping. The end game may have finally arrived, the evidence being everywhere if one has the fortitude to look.

Chatbots Gone Wild!

Although I’m not paying much attention to breathless reports about imminent strong AI, the Singularity, and computers already able to “model” human cognition and perform “impressive” feats of creativity (e.g., responding to prompts and creating “artworks” — scare quotes intended), recent news reports that chatbots are harassing, gaslighting, and threatening users just makes me laugh. I’ve never wandered over to that space, don’t know how to connect, and don’t plan to test drive for verification. Isn’t it obvious to users that they’re interacting with a computer? Chatbots are natural-language simulators within computers, right? Why take them seriously (other than perhaps their potential effects on children and those of diminished capacity)? I also find it unsurprising that, if a chatbot is designed to resemble error-prone human cognition/behavior, it would quickly become an asshole, go insane, or both. (Designers accidentally got that aspect right. D’oh!) That trajectory is a perfect embodiment of the race to the bottom of the brain stem (try searching that phrase) that keeps sane observers like me from indulging in caustic online interactions. Hell no, I won’t go.

The conventional demonstration that strong AI has arisen (e.g., Skynet from the Terminator movie franchise) is the Turing test, which is essentially the inability of humans to distinguish between human and computer interactions (not a machine-led extermination campaign) within limited interfaces such as text-based chat (e.g., the dreaded digital assistance that sometimes pops up on websites). Alan Turing came up with the test at the outset of computing era, so the field was arguably not yet mature enough to conceptualize a better test. I’ve always thought the test actually demonstrates the fallibility of human discernment, not the arrival of some fabled ghost in the machine. At present, chatbots may be fooling no one into believing that actual machine intelligence is present on the other side of the conversation, but it’s a fair expectation that further iterations (i.e., ChatBot 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.) will improve. Readers can decide whether that improvement will be progress toward strong AI or merely better ability to fool human interlocutors.

Chatbots gone wild offer philosophical fodder for further inquiry into ebbing humanity as the drive toward trans- and post-human technology continue refining and redefining the dystopian future. What about chatbots make interacting with them hypnotic rather than frivolous — something wise thinkers immediately discard or even avoid? Why are some humans drawn to virtual experience rather than, say, staying rooted in human and animal interactions, our ancestral orientation? The marketplace already rejected (for now) the Google Glass and Facebook’s Meta resoundingly. I haven’t hit upon satisfactory answers to those questions, but my suspicion is that immersion in some vicarious fictions (e.g., novels, TV, and movies) fits well into narrative-styled cognition while other media trigger revulsion as one descends into the so-called Uncanny Valley — an unfamiliar term when I first blogged about it though it has been trending of late.

If readers want a really deep dive into this philosophical area — the dark implications of strong AI and an abiding human desire to embrace and enter false virtual reality — I recommend a lengthy 7-part Web series called “Mere Simulacrity” hosted by Sovereign Nations. The episodes I’ve seen feature James Lindsay and explore secret hermetic religions operating for millennia already alongside recognized religions. The secret cults share with tech companies two principal objectives: (1) simulation and/or falsification of reality and (2) desire to transform and/or reveal humans as gods (i.e., ability to create life). It’s pretty terrifying stuff, rather heady, and I can’t provide a reasonable summary. However, one takeaway is that by messing with both human nature and risking uncontrollable downstream effects, technologists are summoning the devil.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 03

I continue against my better judgment listening in fits and starts to Jordan Peterson on YouTube. No doubt he’s prolific, influential, interesting, infuriating, and by all accounts, earnest. I often come away frustrated, recognizing how I’ve been fed an extended line of BS in some sort of confidence game run by an overconfident intellectual bully. Because he’s the host inviting others onto his own platform, at least of late, everyone is very polite and disagreement — if it occurs — is quite tame, which allows Peterson to elide corrections smoothly. (Live conversation runs that way: piling on top of what was already said displaces and obscures ideas because memory is limited and the most recent utterance typically assumes primacy.) I avoid some topics on Peterson’s webcasts because they’re simply too far outside his expertise to be worthwhile, which he openly admits then stomps right in anyway. For example, Peterson has a series with the caption “Climategate” (putting the conclusion before the discussion, or is that biasing his audience?). Episode 329 (which I do not embed) is titled “The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong.” His guest is Dr. Judith Curry. I should have avoided this one, too. In the course of the 1.5-hour episode, Peterson repeatedly offers a characterization of some aspect of the climate emergency, to which Dr. Curry responds “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way.” Better characterizations may follow, but that’s neither the tone nor the takeaway.

One of Peterson’s contentions is that, if indeed humans inhabit and treat the surface of the planet problematically, the best way to address the problem is to raise out of poverty those billions of people still struggling to survive. Then they, too, will be ontologically secure and positioned to start caring more about the environment. Sure, just like all those secure, multimillionaire CEOs care while running corporations that extract resources and pollute. (Incidentally, someone in a recent DarkHorse Podcast Q&A asked if Peterson’s hypothetical solution makes any sense. Disappointingly, and perhaps because DarkHorse hosts are chummy with Peterson, they said it depends on how the solution is implemented, which I take to mean that the stars must align and everyone start rowing in unison. Yeah, right.) Peterson follows up his climate solution with the indignant question “Who are we to deny those struggling to raise themselves out of poverty their chance?” Which brings me round to the title of this multipart blog.

Survival is by no means an idle notion but poses a struggle everywhere, even in the affluent West. Just ask the burgeoning homeless population or those laboring frantically to keep mortgages or rent paid so they don’t also become homeless (unhoused is the new euphemism, fooling exactly no one). Even a casual look history reveals that competition among peoples and nations to survive and prosper has wildly uneven and shifting results. Some “succeed” earlier than others or not at all and winners may in time lose their preeminence. Never has there been an all-men-are-brothers approach to competition, though temporary alliances may form. Someone (us, not them) or something (profit, not unspoilt nature) is inevitably privileged. In this context, Peterson’s “Who are we to …?” question is a non sequitur, though it may pull on heartstrings because of quite recent embrace of the idea of equity. A glib answer might be that “we are we, not them,” so of course “we” get available spoils before anyone else. Doesn’t the leader of a pack of wolves eat first? Isn’t that dynamic repeated throughout nature? Aren’t humans embedded in nature just like all other species? Don’t we privilege human life above, say, food animals we farm for sustenance? (We eat them, they rarely eat us until we die and microbes — but nothing else — consume us. Or we give ourselves up to flames, denying even the microbes. We’re selfish that way.) It’s also why the rare individual who gives away all his or her money to charity and winds up penniless is regarded as mental. For nearly all of us, it’s always me (or my progeny) first. Another way to put this that Peterson should understand is that hierarchies exist in nature. Hierarchy and privilege are impossible to disentangle, and attempts to redistribute equitably borne out of ideology tend to devolve into tyranny.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I heard another webcast where the interviewer (Nate Hagens I believe) asked his guest what do you value (i.e., privilege) above all other things? (The word all invites an unbalanced reply.) The extended answer rather took me aback. The guest values life in all its profundity yet declined to privilege human life. In the context of the webcast, which was about the climate emergency and anticipated human die-off and/or extinction, that answer sorta made sense. Should humans survive, even if we eventually sacrifice everything else (our current operational strategy)? Or do we leave the Earth to hardier competitors such as cockroaches and rats? Most people (humans) would unhesitatingly choose us over them as, well, um, always. It’s a strange hypothetical to ponder. Taken to its extreme, if one doesn’t privilege one life form over another, then what’s the problem with criminals, scavengers, and parasites winning the battle for survival? Or more colorfully, why not give zombies and vampires their bite at the apple? They may be undead but their basic strategy for propagation is undoubtedly a winning one.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 02

Continuing from pt. 01, the notion of privilege took an unexpected turn for me recently when the prospect inevitability of demographic collapse came back onto my radar. I scoffed at the demographer’s crystal ball earlier not because I disagree with the assessments or numbers but because, like so many aspects of the collapse of industrial civilization, demographic collapse lies squarely beyond anyone’s control. My questions in reply are basically Yeah? And? So? Do a search on demographic collapse and it will reveal a significant number of reports, with reporters themselves (including the worst contemporary media whore and glory hound who shall forever remain unnamed at this site) freaking out and losing their collective minds, on the hows, whys, wheres, and whens population will crash. The most immediate worrisome aspect is anticipated inversion of the youngest being the most numerous, the usual state of affairs, to the oldest being the most numerous and flatly unsupportable by the young. This has been the basic warning about Social Security for decades already: too few paying in, too many granted benefits. See also this documentary film being prepared for imminent release. I suspect supporting annotations will appear in time.

Probably not fair to call capitalism and its support structures a Ponzi scheme (latecomers to the scheme supporting earlier entrants), but the desire to perpetuate historical demographic distributions (as opposed to what? yielding to the drift of history?) is clearly part of the perpetual growth mentality. Traditionally, prior to the 20th century in the West, when the vast majority of people participated in agrarian and/or subsistence economies instead of the money economy, children were desirable not least because they provided free labor until they were grown, were positioned to take over family farms and businesses, and cared for oldsters when that time came. Intergenerational continuity and stability were maintained and it was generally accepted that each generation would supplant the previous through the seasons of life. The money economy destroyed most of that. Many young adult children now exercise their options (privilege) and break away as soon as possible (as I did) in search of economic opportunity in cities and form their own families (or don’t, as I didn’t). Estrangement and abandonment may not be complete, but families being spread across the continent certainly limits extended family cohesion to holidays and occasional visits. Oldsters (in the affluent West anyway) are now typically shuttled off to (euphemism alert) retirement homes to be warehoused prior to dying. Easier to pay someone to perform that service than to do it oneself, apparently. So if older people are currently privileged over the young (in some ways at least), that condition is being reversed because, dammit, children are in short supply yet needed desperately to keep growth on track.

Demographers point to a number of factors that have conspired to create the crisis (one of many interlocking crises some intellectuals have begun calling the polycrisis). The two main factors are declining fertility and reproductive choice. My suspicion is that the toxic environment, one result of centuries of industrial activity with plastics and drugs now found in human bodies where they don’t belong, accounts for many fertility issues. Add to that poor food quality (i.e., malnutrition, not just poor diets) and it’s easy to understand why healthy pregnancies might be more difficult in the 21st century than before. I’m not qualified to support that assessment, so take it for what it’s worth. Reproductive choice, another recently acquired female privilege (in historical terms), is a function of several things: financial independence, educational attainment, and availability of birth control. Accordingly, more women are choosing either to defer having children while they establish careers or choose not to have children at all. (Men make those choices, too.) Delays unexpectedly leave lots of women unable to have children for failure to find a suitable mate or having spent their best reproductive years doing other things. As I understand it, these correlations are borne out in some harrowing statistics. As the polycrisis deepens, a philosophical choice not to bring children into the world (just to suffer and die young) is also a motivation to remain childless.

Safely Distanced

/rant on

New Year’s Day (or just prior) is the annual cue for fools full of loose talk to provide unasked their year-in-review and “best of” articles summarizing the previous calendar year. I don’t go in for such clichéd forms of curation but certainly recognize an appetite among Web denizens for predigested content that tells them where to park their attention and what or how to think rather than thinking for themselves. Considering how mis- and under-educated the public has grown to be since the steady slippage destruction of educational standards and curricula began in the 1970s (says me), I suppose that appetite might be better characterized as need in much the same way children needs guidance and rules enforced by wizened authorities beginning with parents yet never truly ending, only shifting over to various institutions that inform and restrain society as a whole. I continue to be flabbergasted by the failure of parents (and teachers) to curb the awful effects of electronic media. I also find it impossible not to characterize social media and other hyperstimuli as gateways into the minds of impressionable youth (and permanent adult children) very much like certain drugs (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis) are characterized as gateways to even worse drugs. No doubt everyone must work out a relationship with these unavoidable, ubiquitous influences, but that’s not equivalent to throwing wide open the gate for everything imaginable to parade right in, as many do.

Hard to assess whether foundations below American institutions (to limit my focus) were allowed to decay through neglect and inattention or were actively undermined. Either way, their corruption and now inter-generational inability to function effectively put everyone in a wildly precarious position. The know-how, ambition, and moral focus needed to do anything other than game sclerotic systems for personal profit and acquisition of power are eroding so quickly that operations requiring widespread subscription by the public (such as English literacy) or taking more than the push of a button or click of a mouse to initiate preprogrammed commands are entering failure mode. Like the accidental horror film Idiocracy, the point will come when too few possess the knowledge and skills anymore to get things done but can only indulge in crass spectacle with their undeveloped minds. Because this is a date-related blog post, I point out that Idiocracy depicts results of cultural decay 500 years hence. It won’t take nearly that long. Just one miserable example is the fascist, censorious mood — a style of curation — that has swept through government agencies and Silicon Valley offices intent on installing unchallenged orthodoxies, or for that matter, news junkies and social media platform users content to accept coerced thinking. Religions of old ran that gambit but no need to wait for a new Inquisition to arise. Heretics are already persecuted via cancel culture, which includes excommunication social expulsion, suspension and/or cancellation of media accounts, and confiscation of bank deposits.

A similar point can be made about the climate emergency. Fools point to weather rather than climate to dispel urgency. Reports extrapolating trends often focus on the year 2100, well after almost all of us now alive will have departed this Earth, as a bogus target date for eventualities like disappearance of sea and glacial ice, sea level rise, unrecoverable greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pH imbalance in the oceans, and other runaway, self-reinforcing consequences of roughly 300 years of industrial activity that succeeded unwittingly in terraforming the planet, along the way making it fundamentally uninhabitable for most species. The masses labor in 2023 under the false impression that everyone is safely distanced from those outcomes or indeed any of the consequences of institutional failure that don’t take geological time to manifest fully. Such notions are like assurances offered to children who seek to understand their own mortality: no need to worry about that now, that’s a long, long way off. Besides, right now there are hangovers to nurse, gifts to return for cash, snow to shovel, and Super Bowl parties to plan. Those are right now or at least imminent. Sorry to say, so is the full-on collapse of institutions that sustain and protect everyone. The past three years have already demonstrated just how precarious modern living arrangements are, yet most mental models can’t or won’t contemplate the wholesale disappearance of this way of life, and if one has learned of others pointing to this understanding, well, no need to worry about that just yet, that’s a long, long way off. However, the slide down the opposite side of all those energy, population, and wealth curves won’t take nearly as long as it took to climb up them.

/rant off

Eight Billion Day

According to some estimates, historical trends bring us to 8 Billion Day (human population) today (November 15, 2022), despite a slowing birthrate. Took only 11 years to add the next billion from 7 Billion Day and only 4 years to add the half billion from 7.5 Billion Day. That doesn’t look to me like deceleration; perhaps the last 3 years of Covid pandemic is the hinge of the trend reversal. Previous milestones are 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, and 6 billion in 1998. Projections are 9 billion in 2037 and 10 billion in 2058. Whereas past numbers are fixed, the future is IMO quite unlikely to produce those numbers on schedule if at all. Factors are many and unpredictable, such as the rise in excess deaths a/k/a all-cause mortality already being reported (but quietly lest panic ensue).

Various economists, demographers, and business leaders bemoan that many countries have already fallen below replacement rate, which poses a dramatic reduction in skilled, experienced labor as members of the Baby Boom retire and die off. Worse than that, however, is the recognition that in growth economies (now ubiquitous across the globe), the only way forward is to have a growing population, young people at the bottom supporting old people at the top. It’s a perfect Ponzi setup, replicated many times over in various institutions and destined to fail spectacularly as more women (in particular) are educated and opt out of motherhood entirely in favor of careers. Given that the Covid era has proven to be a baby bust, one can only wonder whether birth rates will spike as fears subside (which produced the Baby Boom after WWII) or population decline will be a permanent feature of society. I offer no predictions. Further, with myriad variables competing for primacy among doomers who forecast dire consequences of human behavior accumulated over several centuries , I admit being at a loss to know what to hope for. More people (and thus, more subsequent suffering) or fewer?

Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

Demographics is Destiny

A friend put in my hands a copy of Peter Zeihan’s book The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (2022) with instructions to read (and return) the book. Without a moment’s pause, I exclaimed “oh, that guy!” Zeihan has been making the rounds of various podcasts and interview shows hawking his book and its conclusions, so I had gotten the bullet, so to speak, a few times already. This is frequently and understandably the case with authors doing the promotional circuit and repeating the same talking points with each appearance. Some fare better in that regard, some worse. Zeihan is among the worse, partly because he has recently entered the doomosphere (or collapse space, if one prefers) publicly, whereas I’m not an ingénue on the subject so not easily led. Thus far, I’ve only read the introduction, so rather than book blogging, let me instead admit a few of my biases openly, mostly based on what I’ve learned about collapse over the past decade and a half, without any expectation that Zeihan will dispel or overcome them in the course of 475 pp. (not counting acknowledgements and index).

Measurement. As a demographer, Zeihan repeats one of the most basic conceptual errors in science, namely, that by taking the measure of something one can reveal its secrets. With human population trends in particular, measurement is unambiguous and easily mistaken for staring into a crystal ball — so long as history remains basically continuous. Thus, the phrase demographics is destiny gets batted around (sometimes disputed — do a search) as though the prophesied future is as inevitable and inescapable as the rising and setting sun. Well, demographics is in fact pretty reliable until the appearance of one or more metaphorical black swans. Flocks of them have been circling around the early 21st century.

Totality. The term globalization might be properly limited to use in economics, but it describes industrial civilization as well. When one collapses, so, too, does the other. They’re inextricably linked and form a unity or totality. No doubt different regions and/or geographies will collapse differently; that’s not in dispute. However, the title suggests grievous loss followed (immediately?) by opportunity. As I’ve understood various collapse scenarios (those parts that can be reliably anticipated), none permit a quick restart or global reset. Rather, the bottleneck will be severe enough, the loss of habitat and resources so egregious, that what remnants manage to survive (no assurances) will be tiny, barbarous, and extremely localized (including the bolthole billionaires, but then, calling them barbarous is a tautology) compared to the nearly eight billion global citizens now alive in the short-lived Age of Abundance. The beginning of what, exactly? After most species succumb just as in previous major extinction events (usually an extensive process but this time sped up by orders of magnitude), it will be a very quiet Earth for tens or hundreds of millions of years if it bounces back at all (no assurances).

Terraforming. Like it or not, human activity and ingenuity have essentially terraformed the planet, but not intentionally or for the better. Sure, we have skyscrapers, giant transportation and energy networks, enough archived knowledge and entertainment to sate even the most insatiable intellects consumers, and all the manifold material glories and know-how of the modern era. But on balance, our own refuse is littering literally every place around the Earth (air, water, soil, in orbit), a mixture of plastics and toxic waste in waterways and soils make water (beyond headwaters) undrinkable and many foods unhealthy, lacking in nutrition, and even carcinogenic, and subtle alterations in atmospheric chemistry are changing the climate. These are catastrophes so big and diffuse they might as well be invisible; many people simply can’t grok them. The terraformed planet is now a sacrifice zone, exploited and despoiled ruthlessly for short-term gain leaving no future worth living. Global supply chains are already breaking down and will not be able to adjust fast enough to avoid a megadeath pulse.

Hubris. Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist. Even if he’s correct in his analyses and prognostications, even if leaders heed his advice and prepare responsibly, even if all of humanity pulls together somehow to address cascade failure and eventual collapse, there is no reason to expect that history writ large can be steered toward desired outcomes to avoid worst case scenarios now barreling at us. That’s simply not the way history unfolds, and experience demonstrates that those who try to exert god-like influence over human affairs become maniacs, despots, and tyrants who generally manage to make matters worse. The world is already experiencing diasporas from politically, socially, economically, and ecologically destabilized regions, and the obvious, humane response (i.e., take them in) has been limited because those countries regarded as lifeboats (true or not) can’t haul them all aboard. The book’s Table of Contents doesn’t indicate consideration of that demographic effect and the index doesn’t list the term diaspora. Yet Zeihan’s got everything figgered well enough to offer strategic advice?

I support the idea of studying history to better understand ourselves in the present. But that can’t be the limit of a book with the tease “… just the beginning” right there in the title. Macrohistory is going to roll over all of us no matter what, and it’s wishful thinking to believe much can be done at this point to redirect the terrible consequences and momentum of past centuries. Although academics can recognize in hindsight major influences, technologies, ideologies, and inflection points that delivered us to this point in history, and perhaps even see how some near-term developments will break good or bad depending on fortuitous circumstance, no one planned, directed, or chose any of the epochal shifts of the past. Rather, human societies and civilizations muddle through and adapt continuously until — at last — they can’t anymore. Then they collapse. It’s happened over and over but never before (that can be ascertained) at a global scale. Yet Zeihan promises a new beginning. I, OTOH, can offer no assurances.

Offered Without Comment 19

From an article in City Journal by Andrey Mir (by way of Alan Jacob’s blog Snakes and Ladders) called “The Medium Is the Menace“:

Digital natives are fit for their new environment but not for the old one. Coaches complain that teenagers are unable to hold a hockey stick or do pull-ups. Digital natives’ peripheral vision — required for safety in physical space — is deteriorating. With these deficits come advantages in the digital realm. The eye is adjusting to tunnel vision — a digital native can see on-screen details that a digital immigrant can’t see. When playing video games, digital immigrants still instinctively dodge bullets or blows, but digital natives do not. Their bodies don’t perceive an imaginary digital threat as a real one, which is only logical. Their sensorium has readjusted to ignore fake digital threats that simulate physical ones. No need for an instinctive fear of heights or trauma: in the digital world, even death can be overcome by re-spawning. Yet what will happen when millions of young people with poor grip strength, peripheral blindness, and no instinctive fear of collision start, say, driving cars? Will media evolution be there in time to replace drivers with autopilots in self-driving vehicles?

Ten Things That Will Disappear

Got one of those chain e-mail messages from who knows who or where, ending with the exhortation to pass it on. My comments follow each of the titular things. Read at your peril. (I could nit-pick the awfulness of the writing of the quoted paragraphs, but I’ll just let that go.) Before commenting, however, let me point out that the anonymous writer behind this listicle assumes that systems will function long enough for predictions to prove out. The last two years have already demonstrated that the world is entering a period of extreme flux where many styles and functions of social organization will break down irreparably. Supply chain difficulties with computer chips (and relatedly, fossil fuels) are just one example of nonlinear change that is making owning and operating a personal vehicle far less affordable (soon impossible for many) than decades past. Impossible to predict when breakdown reaches critical mass, but when it does, all bets are off.

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills. 

Despite its popularity among the general public, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS link ends in .com, not .gov) has been under attack for generations already with the ostensible goal of privatizing it. Financial trouble is by design: the USPS is being driven to extinction so that its services can be handed off to for-profit alternatives, jacking up prices in the process. So yeah, it might fail and go away like other cherished American institutions.