I'd meant to devote this week’s post to exploring the way
that new religious movements so often give shape to emerging ideas and social
forms during the decline of civilizations, and to sketch out some of the
possibilities for action along those lines as industrial society moves further
along its own curve of decline and fall. Still, these essays are part of a
broader conversation about the future of today’s world, and now and then some
other part of that conversation brings up points relevant to the discussion
here.
That’s as much excuse as there is for this week’s detour. A
few weeks ago, the P2P Foundation website hosted a piece by Kevin Carson titled
When
Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell from Catabolic Collapse. Carson’s
piece got some attention recently in the peak oil blogosphere, not to mention
some pointed and by no means unjustified criticism. It seems to me, though,
that there’s a valid point tucked away in Carson’s essay; he’s got it by the
wrong end, and it doesn’t imply what he thinks it does, but the point is
nonetheless there, and important.
Getting to it, though, requires a certain tolerance for intellectual
sloppiness of a kind embarrassingly common in today’s culture. When Carson
talks about “the Jared Diamond/John Michael Greer/William Kunstler theory of
‘catabolic collapse,’” for example, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he
simply hasn’t taken the time to learn much about his subject. “Catabolic
collapse,” after all, isn’t a generic label for collapse in general; it’s the
name for a specific theory about how civilizations fall—those who are
interested can download a PDF here—which I developed between 2001 and 2004 and published
online in a 2005 essay, and the other two names he cited had nothing to do with
it.
Mind you, I would be delighted to hear that Jared Diamond
supports the theory of catabolic collapse, but as far as I know, he’s never
mentioned it in print, and the modes of collapse he discusses in his book
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed differ
significantly from my model. As for the third author, presumably Carson means
James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency and
Too Much Magic—very solid books about the approaching end
of the industrial age, though once again based on a different theory of
collapse—rather than William Kunstler, the late civil rights lawyer who
defended the Chicago Seven back in 1969, and who to the best of my knowledge
never discussed the collapse of civilizations at all.
This same somewhat casual relationship to matters of fact
pops up elsewhere in Carson’s essay, and leaves his argument rather the worse
for wear. Carson’s claim is that the
accelerating breakdown of the existing infrastructure of industrial society
isn’t a problem, because that infrastructure either is being replaced, or is sure
to be replaced (he is somewhat vague on this distinction), by newer, better and
cheaper high-tech systems. What Buckminster Fuller used to call
ephemeralization—defined, with Bucky’s usual vagueness, as “doing more with
less”—is, in Carson’s view, “one of the most central distinguishing
characteristics of our technology,” and guarantees that new infrastructures
will be so much less capital-intensive than the old ones that replacing the
latter won’t be a problem.
That’s a claim worth considering. The difficulty, though, is
that the example he offers—also borrowed from Fuller—actually makes the
opposite case. Replacing a global
network of oceanic cables weighing some very large amount with a few dozen
communications satellites weighing a few tons each does look, at first glance,
like a dramatic step toward ephemeralization, but that impression remains only
as long as it takes to ask whether the satellites are replacing those cables
all by themselves. Of course they’re not; putting those satellites up, keeping
them in orbit, and replacing them requires an entire space program, with all
its subsidiary infrastructure; getting signals to and from the satellites
requires a great deal more infrastructure. Pile all those launch gantries,
mission control centers, satellite dishes, and other pieces of hardware onto
the satellite side, and the total weight on that end of the balance starts
looking considerably less ephemeral than it did. Even if you add a couple of old-fashioned
freighters on the cable side—that’s the modest technology needed to lay and
maintain cables—it’s far from clear that replacing cables with satellites
involves any reduction in capital intensity at all.
All this displays one of the more troubling failures of
contemporary intellectual culture, an almost physiological inability to think
in terms of whole systems. I’ve long since lost count of the number of times
I’ve watched card-carrying members of the geekoisie fail to grasp that their
monthly charge for internet service isn’t a good measure of the whole
cost of the internet, or skid right past the hard economic fact that the long
term survival of the internet depends on its
ability to pay for itself.
This blindness to whole systems is all the more startling in that the
computer revolution itself was made possible by the creation of systems theory
and cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s, and whole-systems analysis is a central
feature of both these disciplines.
To watch the current blindness to whole systems in full
gaudy flower, glance over any collection of recent chatter about “cloud
computing.” What is this thing we’re calling “the cloud?” Descend from the airy realms of
cyber-abstractions into the grubby underworld of hardware, and it’s an
archipelago of huge server farms, each of which uses as much electricity as a
small city, each of which has a ravenous hunger for spare parts, skilled labor,
and many other inputs, and each of which must be connected to all the others by
a physical network of linkages that have their own inescapable resource
demands. As with Fuller’s satellite analogy, the ephemeralization of one part
of the whole system is accomplished at the cost of massive capital outlays and
drastic increases in complexity elsewhere in the system.
All this needs to be understood in order to put
ephemeralization into its proper context. Still, Carson’s correct to point out
that information technologies have allowed the replacement of relatively
inefficient infrastructure, in some contexts, with arrangements that are much
more efficient. The best known example is the replacement of old-fashioned
systems of distribution, with their warehouses, local jobbers, and the rest,
with just-in-time ordering systems that allow products, parts, and raw
materials to be delivered as they’re needed, where they’re needed. Since this
approach eliminates the need to keep warehouses full of spare parts and the
like, it’s certainly a way of doing more with less—but the consequences of
doing so are considerably less straightforward than they appear at first
glance.
To understand how this works, it’s going to be necessary to
spend a little time talking about catabolic collapse, the theory referenced
earlier. The basis of that theory is the uncontroversial fact that human
societies routinely build more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain.
During periods of prosperity, societies invest available resources in major
projects—temples, fortifications, canal or road systems, space programs, or
whatever else happens to appeal to the collective imagination of the age. As
infrastructure increases in scale and complexity, the costs of maintenance rise
to equal and exceed the available economic surplus; the period of prosperity
ends in political and economic failure, and infrastructure falls into ruin as
its maintenance costs are no longer paid.
This last stage in the process is catabolic collapse. Since the
mismatch between maintenance costs and economic capacity is the driving force
behind the cycle, the collapse of excess infrastructure has a silver lining—in
fact, two such linings. First, since ruins require minimal maintenance, the
economic output formerly used to maintain infrastructure can be redirected to
other uses; second, in many cases, the defunct infrastructure can be torn apart
and used as raw materials for something more immediately useful, at a cost
considerably lower than fresh production of the same raw materials would
require. Thus post-Roman cities in Europe’s most recent round of dark ages
could salvage stone from temples,
forums, and coliseums to raise walls against barbarian raiders, just as survivors
of the collapse of industrial society will likely thank whatever deities they
happen to worship that we dug so much metal out of the belly of the earth and
piled it up on the surface in easily accessible ruins.
Given a stable resource base, the long-term economic
benefits of catabolic collapse are significant enough that a new period of
prosperity normally follows the collapse, resulting in another round of
infrastructure buildup and a repetition of the same cycle. The pulse of anabolic expansion and catabolic
collapse thus defines, for example, the history of imperial China. The
extraordinary stability of China’s traditional system of village agriculture
and local-scale manufacturing put a floor under the process, so that each
collapse bottomed out at roughly the same level as the last, and after a
century or two another anabolic pulse would get under way. In some places along
the Great Wall, it’s possible to see the high-water marks of each anabolic
phase practically side by side, as each successful dynasty’s repairs and
improvements were added onto the original fabric.
Matters are considerably more troublesome if the resource
base lacks the permanence of traditional Chinese rice fields and workshops. A
society that bases its economy on nonrenewable resources, in particular, has
set itself up for a far more devastating collapse. Nonrenewable resource
extraction is always subject to the law of diminishing returns; while one
resource can usually be substituted by another, that simply means a faster
drawdown of still other resources—the replacement of more concentrated metal
ores with ever less concentrated substitutes, the usual example cited these
days for resource substitution, required exponential increases in energy inputs
per ton of metal produced, and thus hastened the depletion of concentrated
fossil fuel reserves.
As the usual costs of infrastructure maintenance mount up,
as a result, a society that runs its economy on nonrenewable resources also
faces rising costs for resource extraction. Eventually those bills can no
longer be paid in full, and the usual pattern of political and economic failure
ensues. It’s at this point that the real downside of dependence on nonrenewable
resources cuts in; the abandonment of excess infrastructure decreases one set
of costs, and frees up some resources, but the ongoing depletion of the nonrenewable resource base continues
implacably, so resource costs keep rising. Instead of bottoming out and setting
the stage for renewed prosperity, the aftermath of crisis allows only a
temporary breathing space, followed by another round of political and economic
failure as resource costs continue to climb. This is what drives the stairstep
process of crisis, partial recovery, and renewed crisis, ending eventually in
total collapse, that appears so often in the annals of dead civilizations.
Though he’s far from clear about it, I suspect that this is
what Carson meant to challenge by claiming that the increased efficiencies and
reduced capital intensity of ephemeralized technology make worries about
catabolic collapse misplaced. He’s quite correct that increased efficiency,
“doing more with less,” is a response to the rising spiral of infrastructure
maintenance costs that drive catabolic collapse; in fact, it’s quite a common
response, historically speaking. There are at least two difficulties with his
claim, though. The first is that efficiency is notoriously subject to the law
of diminishing returns; the low hanging fruit of efficiency improvement may be
easily harvested, but proceeding beyond that involves steadily increasing
difficulty and expense, because in the real world—as distinct from science
fiction—you can only do so much more with less and less. That much is widely
recognized. Less often remembered is that increased efficiency has an
inescapable correlate that Carson doesn’t mention: reduced resilience.
It’s only fair to point out that Carson comes by his
inattention to this detail honestly. It was among the central themes of the
career of Buckminster Fuller, whose ideas give Carson’s essay its basic frame.
Fuller had a well-earned reputation in the engineering field of his time as
“failure-prone,” and a consistent habit of pursuing efficiency at the expense
of resilience was arguably the most important reason why.
The fiasco surrounding Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion car is a case
in point. One of the car’s many novel
features was a center of mass that was extremely high compared to other cars,
which combined with an innovative suspension system to give the car an
extremely smooth ride. Unfortunately this same feature turned into a lethal
liability when a Dymaxion prototype was sideswiped by another vehicle. Then as
now, cars on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive bump into one another quite often, but
few of them flip and roll, killing the driver and seriously injuring everyone
else on board. That’s what happened in this case, and Chrysler—which had been
considering mass production of the Dymaxion car—withdrew from the project at
once, having decided that the car wasn’t safe to drive.
The rise and fall of Fuller’s geodesic dome architecture
traces the same story in a less grim manner. Those of my readers who were
around in the 1960s will recall the way geodesic domes sprang up like mushrooms
in those days. By the early 1970s, they were on their way out, for a telling
reason. Fuller’s design was extremely efficient in its use of materials, but
unless perfectly caulked—and in the real world, there is no such thing as
perfect caulking—geodesic domes consistently leaked in the rain. Famed
vernacular architect Lloyd Kahn, author of Domebooks 1 and
2, the bibles of the geodesic-dome fad, marked the end of
the road with his 1973 sourcebook Shelter, which subjected
the flaws of the geodesic dome to unsparing analysis and helped refocus the
attention of the nascent appropriate technology scene onto the less efficient
but far more resilient technology of shingled roofs. Nowadays geodesic domes
are only used in those few applications where their efficiency is more
important than their many practical problems.
The unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and resilience
can be understood easily enough by considering an ordinary bridge. All bridges
these days have vastly more structural strength than they need in order to
support their ordinary load of traffic. This is inefficient, to be sure, but it
makes the bridges resilient; they can withstand high winds, unusually heavy
loads, deferred maintenance, and other challenges without collapsing. Since the
cost of decreased resilience (a collapsed bridge and potential loss of life) is
considerably more serious than the cost of decreased efficiency (more tax
revenues spent on construction), inefficiency is accepted—and rightly so.
It’s one of the persistent delusions of contemporary
computer culture to claim that this equation doesn’t apply once modern
information technology enters into the picture. Nassim Taleb’s widely read
The Black Swan is chockfull of counterexamples. As he shows,
information networks have proven to be as effective at multiplying vulnerabilities
as they are at countering them, and can be blindsided by unexpected challenges
just as thoroughly as any other system. The 1998 failure of Long Term Capital
Management (LTCM), whose publicists insisted that its computer models could not
fail during the lifetime of the universe and several more like it, is just one
of many cases in point.
The history of any number of failed civilizations offers its
own mocking commentary on the insistence that efficiency is always a good
thing. In its final years, for instance, the Roman Empire pursued “doing more
with less” to a nearly Fulleresque degree, by allowing the manpower of
legionary units along the Rhine and Danube frontiers to decline to a fraction
of their paper strength. In peace, this saved tax revenues for critical needs
elsewhere; when the barbarian invasions began, though, defenses that had held
firm for centuries crumpled, and the collapse of the imperial system duly
followed.
In this context, there’s a tremendous irony in the label
Fuller used for the pursuit of efficiency.
The word “ephemeral,” after all, has a meaning of its own, unrelated to
the one Fuller slapped onto it; it derives from the Greek word
ephemeron, “that which lasts for only one day,” and its
usual synonyms include “temporary,” “transitory,” and “fragile.” A society dependent on vulnerable satellite
networks in place of the robust reliability of oceanic cables, cloud computing
in place of the dispersed security of programs and data spread across millions
of separate hard drives, just-in-time ordering in place of warehouses ready to
fill in any disruptions in the supply chain, and so on, is indeed more
ephemeral—that is to say, considerably more fragile than it would otherwise
be.
In a world facing increasingly serious challenges driven by
resource depletion, environmental disruption, and all the other unwelcome
consequences of attempting limitless growth on a relentlessly finite planet,
increasing the fragility of industrial society is also a good way to see to it
that it turns out to be temporary and transitory. In that sense, and only in
that sense, Carson’s right; ephemeralization is the wave of the future, and
it’s even harder to tell it apart from catabolic collapse than he thinks,
because ephemeralization is part of the normal process of collapse, not a way
to prevent it.
There’s an equal irony to be observed in the way that Carson
presents this preparation for collapse as yet another great leap forward on the
allegedly endless march of progress. As discussed earlier
in this series of posts, the concept of progress has no content of
its own; it’s simply the faith-based assumption that the future will be, or
must be, or at least ought to be, better than the present; and today’s
passionate popular faith in the inevitability and beneficence of progress makes
it embarrassingly easy for believers to convince themselves that any change you
care to name, however destructive it turns out to be, must be for the
best. As we continue down the familiar
trajectory of decline and fall, we can thus expect any number of people to
cheer heartily at the progress, so to speak, that we’re making toward the
endpoint of that curve.
