It was probably inevitable that last week’s discussion of
the way that contemporary science is offering itself up as a sacrifice on the
altar of corporate greed and institutional arrogance would field me a flurry of
responses that insisted that I must hate science. This is all the more ironic in that the
shoddy logic involved in that claim also undergirded George W. Bush’s famous
and fatuous insistence that the Muslim world is riled at the United States because
“they hate our freedom.”
In point of fact, the animosity felt by many Muslims toward
the United States is based on specific grievances concerning specific acts of
US foreign policy. Whether or not those grievances are justified is a matter I
don’t propose to get into here; the point that’s relevant to the current
discussion is that the grievances exist, they relate to identifiable actions on
the part of the US government, and insisting that the animosity in question is
aimed at an abstraction instead is simply one of the ways that Bush, or for
that matter his equally feckless successor, have tried to sidestep any
discussion of the means, ends, and cascading failures of US policy toward the
Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world.
In the same way, it’s very convenient to insist that people
who ask hard questions about the way that contemporary science has whored
itself out to economic and political interests, or who have noticed gaps
between the claims about reality made by the voices of the scientific
mainstream and their own lived experience of the world, just hate science. That
evasive strategy makes it easy to brush aside questions about the more
problematic dimensions of science as currently practiced. This isn’t a strategy
with a long shelf life; responding to a rising spiral of problems by insisting
that the problems don’t exist and denouncing those who demur is one of
history’s all-time bad choices, but intellectuals in falling civilizations all
too often try to shore up the crumbling foundations of their social prestige
and privilege via that foredoomed approach.
Central to the entire strategy is a bit of obfuscation that
treats “science” as a monolithic unity, rather than the complex and rather
ramshackle grab-bag of fields of study, methods of inquiry, and theories about
how different departments of nature appear to work. There’s no particular
correlation between, let’s say, the claims made for the latest heavily marketed
and dubiously researched pharmaceutical, on the one hand, and the facts of
astronomy, evolutionary biology, or agronomy on the other; and someone can
quite readily find it impossible to place blind faith in the pharmaceutical and
the doctor who’s pushing it on her, while enjoying long nights observing the
heavens through a telescope, delighting in the elegant prose and even more
elegant logic of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, or running
controlled experiments in her backyard on the effectiveness of compost as a
soil amendment. To say that such a person “hates science” is to descend from
meaningful discourse to thoughtstopping noise.
The habit of insisting that science is a single package,
take it or leave it, is paralleled by the equivalent and equally specious
insistence that there is this single thing called “technology,” that objecting
to any single component of that alleged unity amounts to rejecting all of it,
and that you’re not allowed to pick and choose among technologies—you have to
take all of it or reject it all. I field this sort of nonsense all the time. It
so happens, for example, that I have no interest in owning a cell phone, never
got around to playing video games, and have a sufficiently intense fondness for
books printed on actual paper that I’ve never given more than a passing thought
to the current fad for e-books.
I rarely mention these facts to those who don’t already know
them, because it’s a foregone conclusion that if I do so, someone will ask me
whether I hate technology. Au
contraire, I’m fond of slide rules, love rail travel, cherish an as
yet unfulfilled ambition to get deep into letterpress printing, and have an
Extra class amateur radio license; all these things entail enthusiastic
involvement with specific technologies, and indeed affection for them; but if I
mention these points in response to the claim that I must hate technology, the
responses I get range from baffled incomprehension to angry dismissal.
“Technology,” in the mind of those who make such claims,
clearly doesn’t mean what the dictionary says it means. To some extent, of course, it amounts to
whatever an assortment of corporate and political marketing firms want you to
buy this week, but there’s more to it than that. Like the word “science,”
“technology” has become a buzzword freighted with a vast cargo of emotional,
cultural, and (whisper this) political meanings. It’s so densely entangled with passionately
felt emotions, vast and vague abstractions, and frankly mythic imagery that
many of those who use the word can’t explain what they mean by it, and get angry
if you ask them to try.
The flattening out of the vast diversity of technologies, in
the plural, into a single monolithic shape guarded by unreasoning emotions
would be problematic under any conditions. When a civilization that depends on
the breakneck exploitation of nonrenewable resources is running up against the
unyielding limits of a finite planet, with resource depletion and pollution in
a neck-and-neck race to see which one gets to bring the industrial project to
an end first, it’s a recipe for disaster. A sane response to the predicament of
our time would have to start by identifying the technological suites that will
still be viable in a resource-constrained and pollution-damaged environment,
and then shift as much vital infrastructure to those as possible with the
sharply limited resources we have left. Our collective thinking about
technology is so muddled by unexamined emotions, though, that it doesn’t matter
now obviously necessary such a project might be: it remains unthinkable.
Willy-nilly, though, the imaginary monolith of “technology”
is going to crumble, because different technologies have wildly varying
resource requirements, and they vary just as drastically in terms of their
importance to the existing order of society. As resource depletion and economic
contraction tighten their grip on the industrial world, the stock of existing
and proposed technologies face triage in a continuum defined by two axes—the
utility of the technology, on the one hand, and its cost in real (i.e., nonfinancial)
terms on the other. A chart may help show how this works.
This is a very simplified representation of the frame in
which decisions about technology are made. Every kind of utility from the
demands of bare survival to the whims of fashion is lumped in together and
measured on the vertical axis, and every kind of nonfinancial cost from energy
and materials straight through to such intangibles as opportunity cost is
lumped in together and measured on the horizontal axis. In an actual analysis,
of course, these variables would be broken out and considered separately; the
point of a more schematic view of the frame, like this one, is that it allows
the basic concepts to be grasped more easily.
The vertical and horizontal lines that intersect in the
middle of the graph are similarly abstractions from a complex reality. The
horizontal line represents the boundary between those technologies which have
enough utility to be worth building and maintaining, which are above the line,
and those which have too little utility to be worth the trouble, which are
below it. The vertical line represents the boundary between those technologies
which are affordable and those that are not. In the real world, those aren’t
sharp boundaries but zones of transition, with complex feedback loops weaving
back and forth among them, but again, this is a broad conceptual model.
The intersection of the lines divides the whole range of
technology into four categories, which I’ve somewhat unoriginally marked with
the first four letters of the alphabet. Category A consists of things that are
both affordable and useful, such as indoor plumbing. Category B consists of
things that are affordable but useless, such as electrically heated underwear
for chickens. Category C consists of things that are useful but unaffordable,
such as worldwide 30-minute pizza delivery from low earth orbit. Category D,
rounding out the set, consists of things that are neither useful nor
affordable, such as—well, I’ll let my readers come up with their own nominees
here.
Now of course the horizontal and vertical lines aren’t
fixed; they change position from one society to another, from one historical
period to another, and indeed from one community, family, or individual to
another. (To me, for example, cell phones belong in category B, right next to
the electrically heated chicken underwear; other people would doubtless put
them in somewhere else on the chart.) Every society, though, has a broad
general consensus about what goes in which category, which is heavily
influenced by but by no means entirely controlled by the society’s political
class. That consensus is what guides its
collective decisions about funding or defunding technologies.
With the coming of the industrial revolution, both of the
lines shifted substantially from their previous position, as shown in the
second chart. Obviously, the torrent of cheap abundant energy gave the world’s
industrial nations access to an unparalleled wealth of resources, and this pushed
the dividing line between what was affordable and what was unaffordable quite a
ways over toward the right hand side of the chart. A great many things that had
been desirable but unaffordable to previous civilizations swung over from
category C into category A as fossil fuels came on line. This has been
discussed at great length here and elsewhere in the peak oil blogosphere.
Less obviously, the dividing line between what was useful
and what was useless also shifted quite a bit toward the bottom of the chart,
moving a great many things from category B into category A. To follow this,
it’s necessary to grasp the concept of technological suites.
A technological suite is a set of interdependent technologies that work
together to achieve a common purpose. Think of the relationship between cars
and petroleum drilling, computer chips and the clean-room filtration systems
required for their manufacture, or commercial airliners and ground control
radar. What connects each pair of technologies is that they belong to the same
technological suite. If you want to have the suite, you must either have all
the elements of the suite in place, or be ready to replace any absent element
with something else that can serve the same purpose.
For the purpose of our present analysis, we can sort out the
component technologies of a technological suite into three very rough
categories. There are interface technologies, which are the
things with which the end user interacts—in the three examples just listed,
those would be private cars, personal computers, and commercial flights to
wherever you happen to be going. There are support
technologies, which are needed to produce, maintain, and operate the
output technologies; they make up far and away the majority of technologies in
a technological suite—consider the extraordinary range of technologies it takes to manufacture a car
from raw materials, maintain it, fuel it, provide it with roads on which to
drive, and so on. Some interface technologies and most support technologies can
be replaced with other technologies as needed, but some of both categories
can’t; we can put those that can’t be replaced bottleneck
technologies, for reasons that will become clear shortly.
What makes this relevant to the charts we’ve been examining
is that most support technologies have no value aside from the technological
suites to which they belong and the interface technologies they serve. Without
commercial air travel, for example, most of the specialized technologies found at
airports are unnecessary. Thus a great many things that once belonged in
category B—say, automated baggage carousels—shifted into category A with the
emergence of the technological suite that gave them utility. Thus category A
balloons with the coming of industrialization, and it kept getting bigger as
long as energy and resource use per capita in the industrial nations kept on
increasing.
Once energy and resource use per capita peak and begin their
decline, though, a different reality comes into play, leading over time to the
situation shown in the third chart.
As cheap abundant energy runs short, and it and all its
products become expensive, scarce, or both, the vertical line slides inexorably
toward the left. That’s obvious enough. Less obviously, the horizontal line
also slides upwards. The reason, here again, is the interrelationship of
individual technologies into technological suites. If commercial air travel
stops being economically viable, the support technologies that belong to that
suite are no longer needed. Even if they’re affordable enough to stay on the
left hand side of the vertical line, the technologies needed to run automated
baggage carousels thus no longer have enough utility to keep them above the
horizontal line, and down they drop into category B.
That’s one way that a technology can drop out of use. It’s
just as possible, of course, for something that would still have ample utility
to cost too much in terms of real wealth to be an option in a contracting
society, and slide across the border into category C. Finally, it’s possible
for something to do both at once—to become useless and unaffordable at
something like the same time, as economic contraction takes away the ability to
pay for the technology and the ability to make use of it at the same time.
It’s also possible for a technology that remains affordable,
and participates in a technological suite that’s still capable of meeting
genuine needs, to tumble out of category A into one of the others. This can happen
because the cost of different technologies differ qualitatively, and not just
quantitatively. If you need small amounts of niobium for the manufacture of
blivets, and the handful of niobium mines around the world stop
production—whether this happens because the ore has run out, or for some other
reason, environmental, political, economic, cultural, or what have you—you
aren’t going to be able to make blivets any more. That’s one kind of difficulty
if it’s possible to replace blivets with something else, or substitute some
other rare element for the niobium; it’s quite another, and much more
challenging, if blivets made with niobium are the only thing that will work for
certain purposes, or the only thing that makes those purposes economically
viable.
It’s habitual in modern economics to insist that such
bottlenecks don’t exist, because there’s always a viable alternative. That sort
of thinking made a certain degree of sense back when energy per capita was
still rising, because the standard way to get around material shortages for a
century now has been to throw more energy, more technology, and more complexity
into the mix. That’s how low-grade taconite ores with scarcely a trace of iron
in them have become the mainstay of today’s iron and steel industry; all you
have to do is add fantastic amounts of cheap energy, soaring technological
complexity, and an assortment of supply and resource chains reaching around the
world and then some, and diminishing ore quality is no problem at all.
It’s when you don’t have access to as much cheap energy,
technological complexity, and baroque supply chains as you want that this sort
of logic becomes impossible to sustain. Once this point is reached, bottlenecks
become an inescapable feature of life. The bottlenecks, as already suggested,
don’t have to be technological in nature—a bottleneck technology essential to a
given technological suite can be perfectly feasible, and still out of reach for
other reasons—but whatever generates them, they throw a wild card into the process
of technological decline that shapes the last years of a civilization on its
way out, and the first few centuries of the dark age that follows.
The crucial point to keep in mind here is that one
bottleneck technology, if it becomes inaccessible for any reason, can render an
entire technological suite useless, and compromise other technological suites
that depend on the one directly affected. Consider the twilight of ceramics in
the late Roman empire. Rome’s ceramic industry operated on as close to an
industrial scale as you can get without torrents of cheap abundant energy;
regional factories in various places, where high-quality clay existed, produced
ceramic goods in vast amounts and distributed them over Roman roads and sea
lanes to the far corners of the empire and beyond it. The technological suite
that supported Roman dishes and roof tiles thus included transport
technologies, and those turned out to be the bottleneck: as long-distance
transport went away, the huge ceramic factories could no longer market their
products and shut down, taking with them every element of their technological
suite that couldn’t be repurposed in a hurry.
The same process affected many other technologies that
played a significant role in the Roman world, and for that matter in the
decline and fall of every other civilization in history. The end result can
best be described as technological fragmentation: what had been a more or less
integrated whole system of technology, composed of many technological suites
working together more or less smoothly, becomes a jumble of disconnected
technological suites, nearly all of them drastically simplified compared to
their pre-decline state, and many of them jerry-rigged to make use of
still-viable fragments of technological suites whose other parts didn’t survive
their encounter with one bottleneck or another.
In places where circumstances permit, relatively advanced technological
suites can remain in working order long after the civilization that created
them has perished—consider the medieval cities that got their water from
carefully maintained Roman aqueducts a millennium after Rome’s fall—while other
systems operate at far simpler levels, and other regions and communities get by
with much simpler technological suites.
All this has immediate practical importance for those who
happen to live in a civilization that’s skidding down the curve of its decline
and fall—ours, for example. In such a time, as noted above, one critical task
is to identify the technological suites that will still be viable in the
aftermath of the decline, and shift as much vital infrastructure as possible
over to depend on those suites rather than on those that won’t survive the
decline. In terms of the charts above, that involves identifying those technological
suites that will still be in category A when the lines stop shifting up and to
the left, figuring out how to work around any bottleneck technologies that
might otherwise cripple them, and get the necessary knowledge into circulation
among those who might be able to use it, so that access to information doesn’t
become a bottleneck of its own
That sort of analysis, triage, and salvage is among the most
necessary tasks of our time, especially for those who want to see viable
technologies survive the end of our civilization, and it’s being actively
hindered by the insistence that the only possible positive attitude toward
technology is sheer blind faith. For connoisseurs of irony, it’s hard to think
of a more intriguing spectacle. The impacts of that irony on the future,
though, are complex, and will be the subject of several upcoming posts here.
