Is it just me, or has the United States taken yet another
great leap forward into the surreal over the last few days? Glancing through
the news, I find another round of articles babbling about how fracking has
guaranteed America a gaudy future as a petroleum and natural gas exporter.
Somehow none of these articles get around to mentioning that the United States
is a major net importer of both commodities, that most of the big-name firms in
the fracking industry have been losing money at a rate of billions a year since
the boom began, and that the pileup of bad loans to fracking firms is pushing
the US banking industry into a significant credit crunch, but that’s just par
for the course nowadays.
Then there’s the current tempest in the media’s teapot,
Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. I’ve come to think of Clinton as the Khloe
Kardashian of American politics, since she owed her original fame to the mere
fact that she’s related to someone else who once caught the public eye. Since
then she’s cycled through various roles because, basically, that’s what Famous
People do, and the US presidency is just the next reality-TV gig on her bucket
list. I grant that there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained from watching
this child of privilege, with the help of her multimillionaire friends,
posturing as a champion of the downtrodden, but I trust that none of my readers
are under the illusion that this rhetoric will amount to anything more than all
that chatter about hope and change eight years ago.
Let us please be real: whoever mumbles the oath of office up
there on the podium in 2017, whether it’s Clinton or the interchangeably
Bozoesque figures currently piling one by one out of the GOP’s clown car to
contend with her, we can count on more of the same: more futile wars, more
giveaways to the rich at everyone else’s expense, more erosion of civil
liberties, more of all the other things Obama’s cheerleaders insisted back in
2008 he would stop as soon as he got into office. As Arnold Toynbee pointed out a good many
years ago, one of the hallmarks of a nation in decline is that the dominant
elite sinks into senility, becoming so heavily invested in failed policies and
so insulated from the results of its own actions that nothing short of total
disaster will break its deathgrip on the body politic.
While we wait for the disaster in question, though, those of
us who aren’t part of the dominant elite and aren’t bamboozled by the spectacle
du jour might reasonably consider what we might do about it all. By that, of
course, I don’t mean that it’s still possible to save industrial civilization
in general, and the United States in particular, from the consequences of their
history. That possibility went whistling down the wind a long time ago. Back in
2005, the Hirsch Report showed that any attempt to deal with the impending
collision with the hard ecological limits of a finite planet had to get under
way at least twenty years before the peak of global conventional petroleum
reserves, if there was to be any chance of avoiding massive disruptions. As it
happens, 2005 also marked the peak of conventional petroleum production
worldwide, which may give you some sense of the scale of the current mess.
Consider, though, what happened in the wake of that
announcement. Instead of dealing with the hard realities of our predicament,
the industrial world panicked and ran the other way, with the United States
well in the lead. Strident claims that ethanol—er, solar—um, biodiesel—okay,
wind—well, fracking, then—would provide a cornucopia of cheap energy to replace
the world’s rapidly depleting reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas took the
place of a serious energy policy, while conservation, the one thing that might
have made a difference, was as welcome as garlic aioli at a convention of
vampires.
That stunningly self-defeating response had a
straightforward cause, which was that everyone except a few of us on the
fringes treated the whole matter as though the issue was how the privileged
classes of the industrial world could maintain their current lifestyles on some
other resource base. Since that question
has no meaningful answer, questions that could have been answered—for example,
how do we get through the impending mess with at least some of the achievements
of the last three centuries intact?—never got asked at all. At this point, as a
result, ten more years have been wasted trying to come up with answers to the
wrong question, and most of the doors
that were still open in 2005 have been slammed shut by events since that time.
Fortunately, there are still a few possibilities for
constructive action open even this late in the game. More fortunate still, the
ones that will likely matter most don’t require Hillary Clinton, or any other
member of America’s serenely clueless ruling elite, to do something useful for
a change. They depend, rather, on personal action, beginning with individuals,
families, and local communities and spiraling outward from there to shape the
future on wider and wider scales.
I’ve talked about two of these possibilities at some length
in posts here. The first can be summed up simply enough in a cheery
sentence: “Collapse now and avoid the
rush!” In an age of economic
contraction—and behind the current facade of hallucinatory paper wealth, we’re
already in such an age—nothing is quite so deadly as the attempt to prop up
extravagant lifestyles that the real economy of goods and services will no
longer support. Those who thrive in such times are those who downshift ahead of
the economy, take the resources that would otherwise be wasted on attempts to
sustain the unsustainable, and apply them to the costs of transition to less
absurd ways of living. The acronym L.E.S.S.—“Less Energy, Stuff, and
Stimulation”—provides a good first approximation of the direction in which such
efforts at controlled collapse might usefully move.
The point of this project isn’t limited to its advantages on
the personal scale, though these are fairly substantial. It’s been demonstrated
over and over again that personal example is far more effective than verbal
rhetoric at laying the groundwork for collective change. A great deal of what
keeps so many people pinned in the increasingly unsatisfying and unproductive
lifestyles sold to them by the media is simply that they can’t imagine a better
alternative. Those people who collapse ahead of the rush and demonstrate that
it’s entirely possible to have a humane and decent life on a small fraction of
the usual American resource footprint are already functioning as early adopters;
with every month that passes, I hear from more people—especially young people
in their teens and twenties—who are joining them, and helping to build a
bridgehead to a world on the far side of the impending crisis.
The second possibility is considerably more complex, and
resists summing up so neatly. In a series of posts here in 2010 and 2011, and then in my book Green
Wizardry, I sketched out the toolkit of concepts and approaches that
were central to the appropriate technology movement back in the 1970s, where I
had my original education in the subjects central to this blog. I argued then,
and still believe now, that by whatever combination of genius and sheer dumb
luck, the pioneers of that movement managed to stumble across a set of
approaches to the work of sustainability that are better suited to the needs of
our time than anything that’s been proposed since then.
Among the most important features of what I’ve called the
“green wizardry” of appropriate tech is the fact that those who want to put it
to work don’t have to wait for the Hillary Clintons of the world to lift a
finger. Millions of dollars in government grants and investment funds aren’t
necessary, or even particularly useful. From its roots in the Sixties
counterculture, the appropriate tech scene inherited a focus on do-it-yourself
projects that could be done with hand tools, hard work, and not much money. In
an age of economic contraction, that makes even more sense than it did back in
the day, and the ability to keep yourself and others warm, dry, fed, and
provided with many of the other needs of life without potentially lethal
dependencies on today’s baroque technostructures has much to recommend it.
Nor, it has to be said, is appropriate tech limited to those
who can afford a farm in the country; many of the most ingenious and useful
appropriate tech projects were developed by and for people living in ordinary
homes and apartments, with a small backyard or no soil at all available for
gardening. The most important feature of appropriate tech, though, is that the
core elements of its toolkit—intensive organic gardening and small-scale animal
husbandry, homescale solar thermal technologies, energy conservation, and the
like—are all things that will still make sense long after the current age of
fossil fuel extraction has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Getting these
techniques into as many hands as possible now is thus not just a matter of cushioning
the impacts of the impending era of crisis; it’s also a way to start building
the sustainable world of the future right now.
Those two strategies, collapsing ahead of the rush and
exploring the green wizardry of appropriate technology, have been core themes
of this blog for quite a while now. There’s a third project, though, that I’ve
been exploring in a more abstract context here for a while now, and it’s time
to talk about how it can be applied to some of the most critical needs of our
time.
In
the early days of this blog, I pointed out that technological
progress has a feature that’s not always grasped by its critics, much less by
those who’ve turned faith in progress into the established religion of our
time. Very few new technologies actually meet human needs that weren’t already
being met, and so the arrival of a new technology generally leads to the
abandonment of an older technology that did the same thing. The difficulty here
is that new technologies nowadays are inevitably more dependent on global
technostructures, and the increasingly brittle and destructive economic systems
that support them, than the technologies they replace. New technologies look more
efficient than old ones because more of the work is being done somewhere else,
and can therefore be ignored—for now.
This is the basis for what I’ve called the
externality trap. As technologies get more complex, that complexity
allows more of their costs to be externalized—that is to say, pushed onto
someone other than the makers or users of the technology. The pressures of a
market economy guarantee that those economic actors who externalize more of
their costs will prosper at the expense of those who externalize less. The
costs thus externalized, though, don’t go away; they get passed from hand to
hand like hot potatoes and finally pile up in the whole systems—the economy,
the society, the biosphere itself—that have no voice in economic decisions, but
are essential to the prosperity and survival of every economic actor, and
sooner or later those whole systems will break down under the burden. Unlimited technological progress in a market
economy thus guarantees the economic, social, and/or environmental destruction
of the society that fosters it.
The externality trap isn’t just a theoretical possibility.
It’s an everyday reality, especially but not only in the United States and
other industrial societies. There are plenty of forces driving the rising
spiral of economic, social, and environmental disruption that’s shaking the
industrial world right down to its foundations, but among the most important is
precisely the unacknowledged impact of externalized costs on the whole systems
that support the industrial economy. It’s fashionable these days to insist that
increasing technological complexity and integration will somehow tame that
rising spiral of crisis, but the externality trap suggests that exactly the
opposite is the case—that the more complex and integrated technologies become,
the more externalities they will generate. It’s precisely because technological
complexity makes it easy to ignore externalized costs that progress becomes its
own nemesis.
Yes, I know, suggesting that progress isn’t infallibly
beneficent is heresy, and suggesting that progress will necessarily terminate
itself with extreme prejudice is heresy twice over. I can’t help that; it so
happens that in most declining civilizations, ours included, the things that
most need to be said are the things that, by and large, nobody wants to hear.
That being the case, I might as well make it three for three and point out that
the externality trap is a problem rather than a predicament. The difference, as
longtime readers know, is that problems
can be solved, while predicaments can only be faced. We don’t have to
keep loading an ever-increasing burden of externalized costs on the whole
systems that support us—which is to say, we don’t have to keep increasing the
complexity and integration of the technologies that we use in our daily lives.
We can stop adding to the burden; we can even go the other way.
Now of course suggesting that, even thinking it, is heresy
on the grand scale. I’m reminded of a
bit of technofluff in the Canadian media a week or so back that
claimed to present a radically pessimistic view of the next ten years. Of
course it had as much in common with actual pessimism as lite beer has with a
pint of good brown ale; the worst thing the author, one Douglas Coupland, is
apparently able to imagine is that industrial society will keep on doing what
it’s doing now—though the fact that more of what’s happening now apparently
counts as radical pessimism these days is an interesting point, and one that
deserves further discussion.
The detail of this particular Dystopia Lite that deserves
attention here, though, is Coupland’s dogmatic insistence that “you can never
go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.” That’s a common bit of
rhetoric out of the mouths of tech geeks these days, to be sure, but it isn’t
even remotely true. I know quite a few people who used to be active on social
media and have dropped the habit. I know others who used to have allegedly smart
phones and went back to ordinary cell phones, or even to a plain land line,
because they found that the costs of excess connectedness outweighed the
benefits. Technological downshifting is already a rising trend, and there are
very good reasons for that fact.
Most people find out at some point in adolescence that there
really is such a thing as drinking too much beer. I think a lot of people are
slowly realizing that the same thing is true of connectedness, and of the other
prominent features of today’s fashionable technologies. One of the data points
that gives me confidence in that analysis is the way that people like Coupland
angrily dismiss the possibility. Part of his display of soi-disant pessimism is
the insistence that within a decade, people who don’t adopt the latest
technologies will be dismissed as passive-aggressive control freaks. Now of
course that label could be turned the other way just as easily, but the point I
want to make here is that nobody gets that bent out of shape about behaviors
that are mere theoretical possibilities. Clearly, Coupland and his geek friends
are already contending with people who aren’t interested in conforming to the
technosphere.
It’s not just geek technologies that are coming in for that
kind of rejection, either. These days, in the town where I live, teenagers
whose older siblings used to go hotdogging around in cars ten years ago are
doing the same thing on bicycles today. Granted, I live in a down-at-the-heels
old mill town in the north central Appalachians, but there’s more to it than
that. For a lot of these kids, the costs of owning a car outweigh the benefits
so drastically that cars aren’t cool any more. One consequence of that shift in
cultural fashion is that these same kids aren’t contributing anything like so
much to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or to the other
externalized costs generated by car ownership.
I’ve written here already about deliberate
technological regression as a matter of public policy. Over the last
few months, though, it’s become increasingly clear to me that deliberate
technological regression as a matter of personal choice is also worth pursuing.
Partly this is because the deathgrip of failed policies on the political and
economic order of the industrial world, as mentioned earlier, is tight enough
that any significant change these days has to start down here at the grassroots
level, with individuals, families, and communities, if it’s going to get
anywhere at all; partly, it’s because technological regression, like anything
else that flies in the face of the media stereotypes of our time, needs the
support of personal example in order to get a foothold; partly, it’s because
older technologies, being less vulnerable to the impacts of whole-system
disruptions, will still be there meeting human needs when the grid goes down,
the economy freezes up, or something really does break the internet, and many
of them will still be viable when the fossil fuel age is a matter for the
history books.
Still, there’s another aspect, and it’s one that the essay
by Douglas Coupland mentioned above managed to hit squarely: the high-tech
utopia ballyhooed by the first generation or so of internet junkies has turned
out in practice to be a good deal less idyllic, and in fact a good deal more
dystopian, than its promoters claimed. All the wonderful things we were
supposedly going to be able to do turned out in practice to consist of staring
at little pictures on glass screens and pushing buttons, and these are not
exactly the most interesting activities in the world, you know. The people who
are dropping out of social media and ditching their allegedly smart phones for
a less connected lifestyle have noticed this.
What’s more, a great many more people—the kids hotdogging on
bikes here in Cumberland are among them—are weighing the costs and benefits of complex
technologies with cold eyes, and deciding that an older, simpler technology
less dependent on global technosystems is not just more practical, but also,
and importantly, more fun. True believers in the transhumanist cyberfuture will
doubtless object to that last point, but the deathgrip of failed ideas on
societies in decline isn’t limited to the senile elites mentioned toward the
beginning of this post; it can also afflict the fashionable intellectuals of
the day, and make them proclaim the imminent arrival of the future’s rising
waters when the tide’s already turned and is flowing back out to sea.
