Among the interesting benefits of writing a blog like this,
focusing as it does on the end of industrial civilization, are the opportunities
it routinely affords for a glimpse at the stranger side of the collective thinking
of our time. The last few weeks have been an unusually good source of that
experience, as a result of one detail of the Retrotopia narrative I’ve been
developing in the posts here.
The detail in question is the system by which residents of
my fictional Lakeland Republic choose how much infrastructure they want to have
and, not incidentally, to pay for via their local tax revenues. It’s done on a
county-by-county basis by majority vote. The more infrastructure you want, the
higher your taxes are; the more infrastructure you can do without, the less of
your income goes to the county to pay for it. There are five levels, called
tiers, and each one has a notional date connected to it: thus tier five has the
notional date of 1950, and corresponds to the infrastructure you’d expect to
find in a county in the Midwestern states of the US in that year: countywide
electrical, telephone, water, and sewer service; roads and related
infrastructure throughout the county capable of handling heavy automobile use;
and mass transit—specifically, streetcars—in the towns.
The other tiers have less infrastructure, and
correspondingly lower taxes. Tier four has a notional date of 1920, tier three
of 1890, tier two of 1860, and tier one of 1830. In each case, the infrastructure
you’d find in such a county is roughly what you’d find in a midwestern American
county in that year. With tier one, your county infrastructure consists of dirt
roads and that’s about it. All the other functions of county government exist
in tier one, tier five, and everything in between; there are courts, police,
social welfare provisions for those who are unable to take care of themselves,
and so forth—all the things you would expect to find in any midwestern county
in the US at any point between 1830 and 1950. That’s the tier system: one small detail of the imaginary future I’ve
been sketching here.
Before we go on, I’d like my readers to stop and notice that
the only things that are subject to the tier system are the elements of local
infrastructure that are paid for by local tax revenues. If you live in a county
that voted to adopt a certain tier level, that tells you what kind of infrastructure will be funded by local tax
revenues, and therefore what the tax bills are going to be like. That’s all it
tells you. In particular, the tier system doesn’t apply to privately owned
infrastructure—for example, railroads in the Lakeland Republic are privately
owned, and so every county, whatever its tier, has train stations in any town
where paying passengers and freight may be found in sufficient quantity to make
it worth a railroad’s while to stop there.
The tier system also, and crucially, doesn’t determine what
kind of technology the residents can use. If you live in a tier one county, you
can use all the electrical appliances you can afford to buy, as long as you
generate the electricity yourself. Some technologies that are completely
dependent on public infrastructure aren’t going to work in a low tier
county—for example, without paved roads, gas stations, huge government
subsidies for petroleum production, military bases all over the Middle East,
and a great deal more, cars aren’t much more than oversized paperweights—but
that’s built into the technology in question, not any fault of the tier system.
Furthermore, the tier system doesn’t determine social customs and mores. If you live in a tier four county, for
example, no law requires you to dress in a zoot suit or a flapper dress, drink
bootleg liquor, and say things like “Hubba hubba” and “Twenty-three skidoo!”
This may seem obvious, but trust me, it’s apparently far from obvious to a
certain portion of my readers.
I can say this because, ever since the tier system first got
mentioned in the narrative, I’ve fielded a steady stream of comments from people
who wanted to object to the tier system because it forcibly deprives people of
access to technology. I had one reader insist that the tier system would keep
farmers in tier one counties from using plastic sheeting for hoop houses, for
example, and another who compared the system to the arrangements in former
Eastern Bloc nations, where the Communist Party imposed rigid restrictions on
what technologies people could have. The mere facts that plastic sheeting for
hoop houses isn’t infrastructure paid for by tax revenues, and that the tier
system doesn’t impose rigid restrictions on anybody—on the contrary, it allows
the voters in each county to choose for themselves how much infrastructure
they’re going to pay for—somehow never found their way into the resulting
diatribes.
What made all this even more fascinating to me is that no
matter how often I addressed the points in question, and pointed out that the
tier system just allows local voters to choose what infrastructure gets paid
for their by tax money, a certain fraction of readers just kept rabbiting on
endlessly along the same lines. It wasn’t that they were disagreeing with what
I was saying. It’s that they were acting as though I had never said anything to
address the subject at all, even when I addressed it to their faces, and
nothing I or anyone else could say was able to break through their conviction
that in imagining the tier system, I must be talking about some way to deprive
people of technology by main force.
It was after the third or fourth round of comments along
these lines, I think it was, that a sudden sense of deja vu reminded me that
I’d seen this same sort of curiously detached paralogic before.
Longtime readers of this blog will remember how, some years
ago, I pointed out in passing that the survival of the internet in the
deindustrial age didn’t depend on whether there was some technically feasible
way to run an internet in times of energy and resource limits, much less on how
neat we think the internet is today. Rather, I suggested, its survival in the
future would depend on whether it could make enough money to cover its
operating and maintenance costs, and on whether it could successfully keep on
outcompeting less complex and expensive ways of providing the same services to its
users. That post got a flurry of responses from the geekoisie, all of whom
wanted to talk exclusively about whether there was some technically feasible
way to run the internet in a deindustrial world, and oh, yes, how incredibly
neat the internet supposedly is.
What’s more, when I pointed out that they weren’t discussing
the issues I had raised, they didn’t argue with me or try to make an opposing
case. They just kept on talking more and
more loudly about the technical
feasibility of various gimmicks for a deindustrial internet, and by the way,
did we mention yet how unbelievably neat the internet is? It was frankly rather
weird, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
It felt at times as though I’d somehow managed to hit the off switch on
a dozen or so intellects, leaving their empty husks to lurch mindlessly through
a series of animatronic talking points with all the persistence and irrelevance
of broken records.
It took a while for me to realize that the people who were
engaged in this bizarre sort of nonresponse understood perfectly well what I
was talking about. They knew at least as well as I did that the internet is the
most gargantuan technostructure in the history of our species, a vast,
sprawling, unimaginably costly, and hopelessly unsustainable energy- and
resource-devouring behemoth that survives only because a significant fraction
of the world’s total economic activity goes directly and indirectly toward its
upkeep. They knew about the slave-worked open pit mines, the vast grim
factories run by sweatshop labor, and the countless belching smokestacks that
feed its ravenous appetite for hardware and power; they also know about the
constellations of data centers scattered across the world that keep it running,
each of which uses as much energy as a small city, and each of which has to
have one semi-truck after another pull up to the loading dock every single day
to offload pallets of brand new hard drives and other hardware, in order to
replace those that will burn out the next day.
They knew all this, and they knew, or at least suspected,
just how little of it will be viable in a future of harsh energy and resource
constraints. They simply didn’t want to
think about that, much less talk about it, and so they babbled endlessly about
other things in a frantic attempt to drown out a subject they couldn’t bear to
hear discussed openly.
I’m pretty sure that this is what’s going on in the present
case, too, and an interesting set of news stories from earlier this year points
up the unspoken logic behind it.
Port Townsend is a pleasant little town in Washington State,
perched on a bluff above the western shores of Puget Sound. Due to the vagaries
of the regional economy, it basically got bypassed by the twentieth century,
and much of the housing stock dates from the Victorian era. It so happens that
one couple who live there find Victorian technology, clothing, and personal
habits more to their taste than the current fashions in these things, and they
live, as thoroughly as they can, a Victorian lifestyle. The wife of the couple,
Sarah Chrisman, recently wrote a book about her experiences, and got her
canonical fifteen minutes of fame on the internet and the media as a result.
You might think, dear reader, that the people of Port
Townsend would treat this as merely a harmless eccentricity, or even find it
pleasantly amusing to have a couple in Victorian cycling clothes riding their
penny-farthing bicycles on the city streets. To some extent, you’d be right,
but it’s the exceptions that I want to discuss here. Ever since they adopted
their Victorian lifestyle, the Chrismans have been on the receiving end of
constant harassment by people who find their presence in the community
intolerable. The shouted insults, the in-your-face confrontations, the death
threats—they’ve seen it all. What’s more, the appearance of Sarah Chrisman’s
book and various online articles related to it fielded, in response, an
impressive flurry of spluttering online denunciations, which insisted among
other things that the fact that she prefers to wear long skirts and corsets
somehow makes her personally responsible for all the sins that have ever been
imputed to the Victorian era.
Why? Why the fury, the brutality, and the frankly irrational
denunciations directed at a couple whose lifestyle choices have got to count
well up there among the world’s most harmless hobbies?
The reason’s actually very simple. Sarah Chrisman and her
husband have transgressed one of the modern world’s most rigidly enforced
taboos. They’ve shown in the most irrefutable way, by personal example, that
the technologies each of us use in our own lives are a matter of individual
choice.
You’re not supposed to say that in today’s world. You’re not
even supposed to think it. You’re allowed, at most, to talk nostalgically about
how much more pleasant it must have been not to be constantly harassed and
annoyed by the current round of officially prescribed technologies, and
squashed into the Procrustean bed of the narrow range of acceptable lifestyles
that go with them. Even that’s risky in many circles these days, and risks
fielding a diatribe from somebody who just has to tell you, at great length and
with obvious irritation, all about the horrible things you’d supposedly suffer
if you didn’t have the current round of officially prescribed technologies
constantly harassing and annoying you.
The nostalgia in question doesn’t have to be oriented toward
the past. I long ago lost track of the number of people I’ve heard talk
nostalgically about what I tend to call the Ecotopian future, the default
vision of a green tomorrow that infests most minds on the leftward end of
things. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last forty years, you
already know every detail of the Ecotopian future. It’s the place where wind turbines and solar
panels power everything, everyone commutes by bicycle from their
earth-sheltered suburban homes to their LEED-certified urban workplaces,
everything is recycled, and social problems have all been solved because
everybody, without exception, has come to embrace the ideas and attitudes
currently found among upper-middle-class San Francisco liberals.
It’s far from rare, at sustainability-oriented events, to
hear well-to-do attendees waxing rhapsodically about how great life will be
when the Ecotopian future arrives. If you encounter someone engaging in that
sort of nostalgic exercise, and are minded to be cruel, ask the person who’s
doing it whether he (it’s usually a man) bicycles to work, and if not, why not.
Odds are you’ll get to hear any number of frantic excuses to explain why the
lifestyle that everyone’s going to love in the Ecotopian future is one that he
can’t possibly embrace today. If you want a look behind the excuses and
evasions, ask him how he got to the sustainability-oriented event you’re
attending. Odds are that he drove his SUV, in which there were no other
passengers, and if you press him about that you can expect to see the dark
heart of privilege and rage that underlies his enthusiastic praise of an
imaginary lifestyle that he would never, not even for a moment, dream of
adopting himself.
I wish I were joking about the rage. It so happens that I
don’t have a car, a television, or a cell phone, and I have zero interest in
ever having any of these things. My defection from the officially prescribed
technologies and the lifestyles that go with them isn’t as immediately obvious
as Sarah Chrisman’s, so I don’t take as much day to day harassment as she does.
Still, it happens from time to time that somebody wants to know if I’ve seen
this or that television program, and in the conversations that unfold from such
questions it sometimes comes out that I don’t have a television at all.
Where I now live, in an old red brick mill town in the north
central Appalachians, that revelation rarely gets a hostile response, and it’s
fairly common for someone else to say, “Good for you,” or something like that.
A lot of people here are very poor, and thus have a certain detachment from
technologies and lifestyles they know perfectly well they will never be able to
afford. Back when I lived in prosperous Left Coast towns, on the other hand,
mentioning that I didn’t own a television routinely meant that I’d get to hear
a long and patronizing disquisition about how I really ought to run out and buy
a TV so I could watch this or that or the other really really wonderful
program, in the absence of which my life must be intolerably barren and
incomplete.
Any lack of enthusiasm for that sort of disquisition very
reliably brought out a variety of furiously angry responses that had precisely
nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is that I simply don’t enjoy the
activity of watching television. Oh, and it’s not the programming I find
unenjoyable—it’s the technology itself; I get bored very quickly with the
process of watching little colored images jerking about on a glass screen, no
matter what the images happen to be. That’s another taboo, by the way. It’s
acceptable in today’s America to grumble about what’s on television, but the
technology itself is sacrosanct; you’re not allowed to criticize it, much less
to talk about the biases, agendas, and simple annoyances hardwired into
television as a technological system. If you try to bring any of that up,
people will insist that you’re criticizing the programming; if you correct
them, they’ll ignore the correction and keep on talking as though the programs
on TV are the only thing under discussion.
A similar issue drives the bizarre paralogic surrounding the
nonresponses to the tier system discussed above. The core premises behind the
tier system in my narrative are, first, that people can choose the
technological infrastructure they have, and have to pay for—and second, that
some of them, when they consider the costs and benefits involved, might
reasonably decide that an infrastructure of dirt roads and a landscape of
self-sufficient farms and small towns is the best option. To a great many
people today, that’s heresy of the most unthinkable sort. The easiest way to deal with the heresy in question,
for those who aren’t interested in thinking about it, is to pretend that
nothing so shocking has been suggested at all, and force the discussion into
some less threatening form as quickly as possible. Redefining it in ways that
erase the unbearable idea that technologies can be chosen freely, and just as
freely rejected, is quite probably the easiest way to do that.
I’d encourage those of my readers who aren’t blinded by the
terror of intellectual heresy to think, and think hard, about the taboo against
technological choice—the insistence that you cannot, may not, and must not make
your own choices when it comes to whatever the latest technological fad happens
to be, but must do as you’re told and accept whatever technology the consumer
society hands you, no matter how dysfunctional, harmful, or boring it turns out
to be. That taboo is very deeply ingrained, far more potent than the handful of
relatively weak taboos our society still applies to such things as sexuality,
and most of the people you know obey it so unthinkingly that they never even
notice how it shapes their behavior. You may not notice how it shapes your
behavior, for that matter; the best way to find out is to pick a technology
that annoys, harms, or bores you, but that you use anyway, and get rid of it.
Those who take that unthinkable step, and embrace the heresy
of technological choice, are part of the wave of the future. In a world of
declining resource availability, unraveling economic systems, and destabilizing
environments, Sarah Chrisman and the many other people who make similar
choices—there are quite a few of them these days, and more of them with each
year that passes—are making a wise choice. By taking up technologies and
lifeways from less extravagant eras, they’re decreasing their environmental
footprints and their vulnerability to faltering global technostructures, and
they’re also contributing to one of the crucial tasks of our age: the
rediscovery of ways of being human that don’t depend on hopelessly
unsustainable levels of resource and energy consumption.
