The Future is Rated “B”

[Auf Deutsch: "Ich hoffe sie erkennen hier das Muster; Zuerst wird eine Nation ein bisschen senil, dann offensichtlich dement, dann komplett durchgedreht nacktherum-rennend-sich-mit-eigenen-Fäkalien-einschmierend wahnsinnig. Danach schadet sie sich selbst." Vielen Dank, Alexander!]

[In italiano, a cura di Roberta Papaleo: Spero che stiate cominciando a vederci uno schema: prima un paese diventa un po’ senile, poi un notevole demente, poi un completo pazzo da legare che se ne va in giro nudo ad imbrattarti di feci. Poi si fa del male da solo.]

My voluminous fan mail has made me aware of a curious fact: many of my readers seem persuaded that the future is either Mad Max or Waterworld. As far as they are concerned, there just aren't any other options. What's more, some people have even tried to venture a guess as to which of the two it shall be by watching what I do. I live on a boat, and that is apparently an indication that the future must be Waterworld-like. But I have also been seen rattling around town on a rusty old motorcycle, and that is taken as an indication of a more Mad Max-like future.

It saddens me that so few people bring up the film Blade Runner, and it is even more sad that George Lucas's THX 1138 or Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville are almost never mentioned, because these particular films have in many ways proven to be predictive of the present rather than just the future. Take THX 1138 for example: it is about some people who live in a sealed-off climate-controlled environment, are on a compulsory regimen of psychoactive drugs, are assigned their mates by a computer program, and watch pornography that is piped into their living rooms in order to relax after work. When they refuse to take their meds, they are abused by robot-like police armed with electric cattle-prods. When one of them escapes into the wilderness, it turns out that the police lack the budget to hunt him down. That may have seemed a bit exotic and futuristic back in 1971 when Lucas filmed it, but now describes the people who live down the street. Alphaville, on the other hand, is vaguely reminiscent of some of my more interesting business trips.

People seem uncomfortable with the idea that works of fiction can predict the present, because the present is supposed to be reality, not fiction. The future, on the other hand, is fair game, because it is supposed to be purely fictional: it is common wisdom, you see, that the future is unknowable. The artists are free to paint the future any color they like, while the more scientifically-minded approach it by formulating alternative scenarios. It is useless to try to tell them that there is just the one scenario, apparently written by some incompetent hack, and that, even though it stinks, it is high time they stopped flapping their gums about alternative ones and started auditioning for a role in this one, since it happens to be the only one that is actually being produced.

For the benefit of those who believe that the future is fictional but that the present is real it may be helpful to point out that the present is largely fictional as well. Here's a perfectly good example: do you remember those valiant freedom-fighters who expelled foreign invaders from their ancient land—the mujahideen? What do you think happened to them? Well, they've been rebranded as the Taleban, and are now evil. Same Pashtun tribesmen (or their sons) toting the same AK-47s and carrying out the same missions against strangely similar infidel invaders are, by the simple act of renaming, transformed from valiant warriors to cowardly fiends.

The people whose job it is to write the fiction that we are expected to accept as our one real and true present don't seem to have much of an imagination. They also seem to have had a rather short reading list and lift their ideas from just a handful of slender volumes. George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are their particular favorites, along with Franz Kafka's The Trial. Take, for instance, the cult of Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks: it is an image of the perpetual enemy of the state lifted straight out of Orwell. Osama was a sickly CIA operative who succumbed to renal failure a long time ago and who was posthumously demonized using some grainy amateur videos and some muffled audio tapes featuring some other CIA operative. For years now Osama's restless and lonely ghost, clad in white robes and towing a broken dialysis machine across rugged and bare mountain passes of Waziristan has been relentlessly hunted by a swarm of endlessly circling Predator drones. The war in Afghanistan is currently costing the US a billion dollars a day. Sorry to bring up yet another “B” movie, but how much did Ghostbusters charge per visit?

I have no wish to debate these topics, and would urge you to shy away from them as well. There are just a few people who know enough about them, and they generally have no wish to debate them either. There is nothing in it for them—or anyone else. Just about everyone else is either wallowing in blissful ignorance or has been subjected to a mind control process used in advertising: proof through repetition. Here is a contemporary example: a purely fictional phenomenon from the 9/11-season of 2010 known as “The mosque at Ground Zero.” The kernel of truth behind this mainly fictional story is the proposed Islamic cultural center, not a mosque, to be built at a location that is nowhere near Ground Zero, but we now live in a realm of compulsory fiction, reinforced through repetition in the echo-chamber of the media, which makes truth irrelevant. Once the media start ranting and raving like that, it becomes hard for them to stop, and next they trot out some obscure evangelical pastor from Florida who wants to burn a stack of Korans, and they cannot for the life of them stop talking about him either. When in response violent demonstrations erupt in already violent places that are patrolled by US soldiers, that just adds spice to this already wonderful story. I hope that you are beginning to see a pattern here: first a country goes a little bit senile, then noticeably demented, then completely stark raving running-around-naked-smearing-feces-all-over-yourself insane. Then it hurts itself. Individual insanity is rare, but group insanity is, unfortunately, the bane of societies that are nearing their end.

It would seem that, if you are a certain kind of popular author, a good way to ensure that the future comes to resemble your worst nightmares is to write a novel about them. This has certainly worked for Orwell, Huxley and Kafka. But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction instead of accepting anyone else's, then go ahead and turn it into reality. A good first step might be to write a short story. It can be very short, and it doesn't even have to be particularly interesting. Something as trivial as this might do for starters: “The next morning she woke up and, instead of having a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for breakfast, she fasted until sundown.” And then, the next morning, she woke up, and something curious happened: this short story came to life, and so it came to pass. Next came other stories, each a bit longer than the previous one, bridging the present and the future in new ways, and eventually spanning decades. And as these decades rolled by, these stories too came to life.

This, as I see it, is the best way forward in a depressed and increasingly demented and accident-prone country that is heading straight for collapse, where the present (reality, what people think is going on, common notions of the state of things) is degenerating into useless noise—the clamor of clueless but self-important people desperately begging you to continue giving them your attention, so that they can stuff your head with more “B”-rated trash. But if you ignore them long enough, they will go away. Don't hope, don't wish, don't dream, but do write your own fiction and use it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go ahead and live in them. You don't have to settle for anyone else's “B”-rated nonsense. And don't let anyone tell you that you are crazy or that you are living in a dream. It's not a dream, dammit, it's a work of fiction!

Poverty of Imagination in an Age of Deminishing Resources

Slide show from the talk I just gave at Community Action Partnerships Annual Convention.

Le despotisme de l'image

Traduit par Tancrède Bastié

Le but ostensible de ce site, et de la petite mais enthousiaste communauté qui l'entoure, est de changer la culture. Nous reconnaissons tous que la culture dominante contemporaine de sur-consommation et de croissance incontrôlée est toxique à tous les niveaux — physique, émotionnel et culturel — et qu'elle accélère sur une trajectoire de collision avec l'épuisement des ressources, le dérèglement du climat et la dévastation environnementale. Nous voulons tous en sauter au bon moment, ou, manquant peut-être du courage nécessaire, nous trouver assez chanceux pour être éjectés. 

Ce que cela signifie en réalité est tout sauf clair... [www.orbite.info]

Miserable Pursuits

[Auf Deutsch. Vielen Dank, Mrs. Mop] 

As I write this, I am on the train to Washington, to attend a conference sponsored by the Community Action Partnership on "The New Reality: Preparing Poor America for Harder Times Ahead." The agenda will include in-depth discussions of employment, food, housing, health care, security, education, transportation, and even the somewhat touchy-feely subjects of community cohesion, communication, and, last but not least, right before the cocktail hour, culture. The recommendations will be rolled into a report and the conclusions will be presented at CAP's annual conference later this month.

Poor America would conceivably be a place of few good jobs, nasty food, dilapidated housing, unaffordable health care, oppressive yet ineffectual security, education programs replete with dinosaur-riding Jesuses, transportation networks composed of run-down pickup trucks and potholed roads, not much more community cohesion than there is now, and communication still dominated by the corporate media.

But then what about that strange little topic showing up at the very bottom of the list—culture? We'd expect the poor to be uncultivated, unlettered and uncouth, but beyond that, shouldn't we expect a culture of poverty to evolve, as an adaptation to being poor? To an anthropologist, culture is an adaptive mechanism that evolves in order to enable humans to survive and thrive in a wide variety of environments. To others, it may be a matter of dancing a jig or of strumming an instrument while crooning. To me, culture is, first and foremost, a matter of literature.

The Russian author Eduard Limonov wrote of his experiences with poverty in America. To his joy, he discovered that he could supplement his cash earnings with public assistance. But he also quickly discovered that he had to keep this joy well hidden when showing up to collect his free money. It is a curious fact that in America public assistance is only made available to the miserable and the downtrodden, not to those who are in need of some free money but are otherwise perfectly content. Although it is just as possible to be poor and happy in America as anywhere else, here one must make a choice: to avoid any number of unpleasant situations, one must be careful to hide either the fact that one is poor, or the fact that one is happy. If free public money is to be obtained, then only the latter choice remains.

It is another curious fact that vast numbers of Americans, both rich and poor, would regard Limonov's behavior as nothing short of despicable: a foreign author living in America on public assistance while also earning cash! It seems reasonable that the rich should feel that way; if the poor can't be made miserable, then what exactly is the point of being rich? But why should the poor particularly care? Another cultural peculiarity: what dismays them is not the misappropriation of public funds. Tell them about the billions wasted on useless military projects, and they will reply with a yawn that this is just business as usual. But tell them that somewhere some poor person is eating a free lunch, and they will instantly wax indignant. Amazingly, Americans are great believers in Lenin's revolutionary dictum: "He who does not work, does not eat!" One of the rudest questions you might hear from an American is "What do you do for a living?" The only proper response is "Excuse me?" followed by a self-satisfied smirk and a stony silence. Then they assume that you are independently wealthy and grovel shamefully.

Most shockingly, there are many poor Americans who are too proud to accept public assistance in spite of their obvious need for it. Most Russians would regard such a stance as absurd: which part of "free money" don't these poor idiots like—the fact that it's money, or the fact that it's free? Some Russians who are living in the US and, in trying to fit in to American society, have internalized a large dose of the local hypocrisy, might claim otherwise, but even they, in their less hypocritical moments, will concede that it is downright foolish to turn down free money. And rest assured, they will mop up every last penny of it. Mother Russia didn't raise any dummies.

But let us not blame the victim. What causes these poor souls to leave money on the table is just this: they have been brainwashed. The mass media, most notably television and advertising, are managed by the well-to-do, and incessantly hammer home the message that hard work and self-sufficiency are virtuous while demonizing the idle and the poor. The same people who have been shipping American jobs to China and to India in order to enhance their profits want it to be generally understood that the resulting misery is entirely the fault of the miserable. And while the role of the pecuniary motive may be significant, let us not neglect to mention the important fact that producing mass misery is a high-priority objective in and of itself.

You see, these are very difficult times to be rich. It used to be that having a million dollars made you a millionaire—but not any more! Now, to be perfectly safe and completely insulated from economic reality you need at least ten million, if not more, and the more you have, the more unnerving become the wild undulations of the financial markets and the dire prognostications of the experts. It is getting to the point that you can make a plausible guess at a person's net worth based on how nervous and miserable they look.

Recently, I had a chance to see this misery on display. We spent a week vacationing on outer Cape Cod. We sailed there and back (the wind is free) and anchored while there (the municipal moorings are quite affordable). We rowed ourselves ashore and back in our home-made plywood dink and bicycled around picking edible mushrooms along the bike path. This time of year, this part of Massachusetts is overrun by stampedes of shiny late-model SUVs with New York and New Jersey license plates. They are driven by various subspecies of the middle-aged well-to-do American Office Ogre—the lawyer, the doctor, the dentist, the banker, the lobbyist and the corporate businessman—the people who are attempting to run off with all the loot. The majestic scenery is somewhat spoiled by these surly, scowling, raspy-voiced ogres and their flabby, overmedicated wives with voices like an unoiled hinge. When not aimlessly driving around, they sit in upscale restaurants, toying with their food and gossiping menacingly. They have long forgotten what it means to be happy and carefree, and their labored attempts at feigning enjoyment are painful to watch. You can be sure that the sight of poor but happy people makes them quite livid.

I am not gloating. I do feel sorry for these poor rich people, and I even have good news for them: their condition is far from incurable. I know people who went prematurely gray, lost weight and often woke up screaming while watching their last $500,000 in savings dwindle to nothing, buried under a pile of debt, but once the cash is burned off and the dour creditors abscond with what remains of the property, there is much less for them to worry about, and this gives them a chance to reevaluate what is important, what is essential, and what gives them pleasure. And so, where there is sorrow there is also joy, and we need not grieve for the poor rich people excessively, because the way things are going their problems are likely to resolve themselves spontaneously. Keep in mind that, compared to the formidable, often insurmountable challenges faced by those who attempt to escape poverty, becoming downwardly mobile is as easy as falling off a log, and, with a bit of foresight, can be done in comfort and style.

I have good news for America's poor as well. Although they are exceedingly unlikely to ever become any richer, they are, in fact, quite rich enough already. Recently I heard a story on NPR about a poor family that went around looking for discounted food items at various groceries and stopping at the food pantry—in their own private minivan! And so here is a poor family that owns what in many parts of the world would amount to a bus company! When they couldn't find enough discounted foods to buy, they still had enough to feed their children, while the adults skipped meals. This is healthy: hunger is symptomatic of a good appetite, and, given the excessive girth of most Americans, periodic fasting is a prudent choice. What's more, they sounded reasonably happy about their lot in life.

And so, a poor but happy and carefree future may yet await a great many of us, both idle rich and idle poor—one happy though rather impoverished family. But in order to achieve that we would have to change the culture. Let it be known that free lunch is a very good thing indeed, no mater who's eating it or why, and never mind that Lenin said that "He who does not work, does not eat." And while we are at it, let's also dispense with the hackneyed adage that "Work will set you free" (Arbeit Macht Frei) which the Nazis liked to set in wrought iron atop the gates of their concentration camps. Let us consign the communists and the fascists and the capitalists to the proverbial scrapheap of history! Let us instead gratuitously quote Jesus: "Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow. They labor not, neither spin. And yet for all that I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his royalty, was not arrayed like unto one of these... Therefore take no thought saying: What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or Wherewith shall we be clothed? ... Care not therefore for the day following. For the day following shall care for itself. Each day's trouble is sufficient for the same self day." Amen.

Google Forms GoogleEnergy™

Ariel Schwartz at FastCompany has the story.

Funny thing is, here is a slide I showed during a talk I gave at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The title of the conference was "Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma." Look at the second item on the right. Uncanny, is it not? (I believe it is sometimes acceptable to tootle your own horn, provided you do it softly, without startling any of the neighbors.)

I said: A private sector solution is not impossible; just very, very unlikely. Certain Soviet state enterprises were basically states within states. They controlled what amounted to an entire economic system, and could go on even without the larger economy. They kept to this arrangement even after they were privatized. They drove Western management consultants mad, with their endless kindergartens, retirement homes, laundries, and free clinics. These weren't part of their core competency, you see. They needed to divest and to streamline their operations. The Western management gurus overlooked the most important thing: the core competency of these enterprises lay in their ability to survive economic collapse. Maybe the young geniuses at Google can wrap their heads around this one, but I doubt that their stockholders will.

Well, it appears that I have been wrong, for once. Is it a realistic plan after all? I am riddled with self-doubt, you see. My crystal ball is all scuffed up.

Perhaps some of you would want to venture a guess on which one will come next. If so, please make a wager. Will it be GoogleSchools™, or will it be GoogleHealth™? Do you believe in a bright future... for Google? (Google employees and their families are not allowed to participate.)

[Update: It's GoogleMoney. Alas, it wasn't even on my list. None of us here called it. Google moves in mysterious ways.]

Thinking in Straight Lines

Let’s face it, we, the civilized, educated, enlightened part of humanity like things to be straight. Let primitive tribesmen live in picturesque and practical round huts—we require abstract boxes of steel and concrete clad in plate glass, with plenty of nice straight lines, true vertical and horizontal planar surfaces and lots of ninety-degree angles to please the eye. Let these tribesmen spend their days meandering up and down picturesque winding paths laid down by grazing animals—when we build a road, we take a map and apply a ruler to it, and anything that’s in the way of that ruler, picturesque or not, must be dynamited and bulldozed because everyone knows that traveling in straight lines is more efficient.

This is good enough for most of us, and so we have come to regard straight lines as natural. In fact, in our world there are just two types of natural phenomena that give rise to straight lines: objects drop or hang down in straight vertical lines, and light beams travel in straight lines; beyond plumb lines and lines of sight everything is either a curve or a squiggle. But since most of our environment is artificial—and crammed full of straight lines and flat horizontal and vertical surfaces—we hardly ever have to confront this fact. Of course, the more scientifically astute among us know that straight lines are but a convenient fiction. We start with a conceptual framework of space that consists of x, y and z axes, and proceed to coerce our observations to fit this framework until the mismatch becomes too obvious to ignore, as with objects dropped from orbit, or with light from far-away galaxies that’s so warped by nearby galaxies that the image looks like a smear.

But the fiction is indeed very convenient. To start with, all straight lines are interchangeable and compatible. When we build, we tend to put things either on top of or next to other things, and if they involve straight lines, then no intricate fitting is involved—we can just slap it together any which way and efficiently move on to our next box-building exercise. When we go to a lumberyard, what we buy is not so much wood as straight lines cut through wood. Trees know a lot more than we do about constructing maximally efficient structures out of wood, but we like straight lines, and so we cut through the strongest part of the tree—the concentric rings of wood that make up the trunk—for the sake of making a perfectly straight stick. We could build beautiful, strong, long-lasting structures using round timbers grown to order (as some of us do) but generally we don’t because we are mentally lazy, always in too much of a hurry, and have made a fetish of straight lines.

Quite unsurprisingly, our preference for straight lines carries over into the way we think about relationships between things—the mental models we construct of our world. For instance, we consider it a matter of moral rectitude and straight dealing that the price be linearly proportional to the amount of stuff we get: if you pay twice as much, you should get twice as many potatoes. Quantity discounts are acceptable and sometimes expected, but pricing on a curve is generally seen as underhanded. We mistrust curves. Stepwise functions are fine, though, because they are made up of straight line segments. We can put up with having tax brackets, but try taxing people based on a nonlinear formula, and there is sure to be a tax revolt. Were the potato market a product of biological evolution rather than of human artifice, it would perhaps work like this: the price would be some nonlinear function that’s directly proportional to the customer’s net worth, and the number of potatoes dispensed would be some nonlinear function that’s inversely proportional to his net girth. Place your moneybags on one sliding scale, your flab-bags on the other, and some potatoes come out. Such a natural regulatory mechanism would prevent fat, rich gluttons from out-eating the rest of us, but it cannot be, for we have a very strong cultural preference for a simple linear relationship between price and quantity.

Straight lines are popular with grocers and their customers, but nobody loves a straight-edge more than the technocrat. Real-world data generally look like a collection of unique artifacts described by a multitude of qualitatively dissimilar properties and inferred relationships, all fluctuating unpredictably over time in a way that resists the direct application of the straight-edge. Therefore, the first step is to quantify the properties and, if at all possible, ignore the relationships. The next step is to choose just two parameters and to plot these artifacts as points on a piece of graph paper. Then, finally, a technocrat can grab a straight-edge, slap it down on the piece of paper, move it around a bit to find what looks like a good fit, and draw a straight line. Voilà: a linear relationship between two complex phenomena has been found, which can now be treated as real and objective—something that can be shared with one’s colleagues and be used as a basis for setting policy—because it involves a straight line which tells that one thing is proportional to some other thing, so that we know what result to expect when we perturb one or the other.

Straight lines are popular with engineers as well. Engineers work hard to design linear, time-invariant systems in which the output is directly proportional to the input any time you like. To them, deviations from linear behavior are defects. They are to us as well: we can hear it if the audio amplifier has nonlinear effects because it distorts the sound, and we can see it if the optics distorts the image. We can tell a straight line from a crooked one without any tools. But the mathematical tools which engineers use when they design these linear time-invariant systems are particularly good, as mathematical tools go. Mathematics can be quite fun as a sort of advanced parlor game for philosophers, but most math is rather problematic from an engineer’s point of view. You can describe just about anything using a set of differential equations, but most of the interesting phenomena—the behavior of an airfoil in an airstream, for instance, or the behavior of high-temperature gases in a combustion chamber—produce equations that can’t be solved analytically, and can only be approached using numerical methods, using a computer. A mathematical model is constructed, and random numbers are thrown at it to see what comes out. But linear time-invariant systems are described using a singularly well-behaved class of differential equations which do have closed-form, analytical solutions that directly provide answers to design questions, and so engineering students are drilled in them ad naseam and then go on to design and build all kinds of machinery that behaves as linearly as possible, from humble volume knobs to complex aircraft control surfaces. In turn, this well-behaved, predictable machinery allows us to achieve linear effects within the economy: build more stuff—get proportionally more money; spend more money—get proportionally more stuff. But, just as one might suspect, this only works up to a point.

Let us recall: straight lines are but a convenient fiction. There is no physical analogue of a mathematical straight line that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity. The best we can do is use all of our artifice to create relatively short straight line segments. Truth be told, the engineers can’t create linear systems; they can only create systems that exhibit linear behavior in their linear region. Outside of that region, nature does what it always does: make crazy curves and squiggles and generally behave in random and unpredictable ways. An example of what happens when we exceed the limits of the linear region from our everyday experience is the phenomenon of overloading an audio amplifier. The resulting effect is called clipping, and it sounds like a particularly unpleasant, harsh, grating noise. There are only two solutions: turn down the volume (return to the linear region), or get a more powerful amplifier.

In the economic realm, the effects of exceeding the limits of the linear region can be even more unpleasant. While within that region, building more houses generates more wealth, but just outside of that region strange things begin to happen rather quickly: house prices crash, mortgages go bad, and building any more houses becomes a singularly bad idea. In the linear region, having more money makes you richer, in the sense of being able to buy more stuff, but outside of that region one is forced to realize that since most money has been loaned into existence, it is in fact composed of debt, and once this debt goes bad, no matter how good your net worth looks on paper you are still facing destitution, greatly exacerbated by the fact that you are out of practice when it comes to being poor. In the linear region, investing more money in energy production produces more energy, but just outside that region it produces less energy, and may also inadvertently destroy entire industries and ecosystems.

If linearity is a fiction that is only useful up to a point, then what about time-invariance? Clearly, it too must have its limits. Stepping on the accelerator may produce the same acceleration every time, but the amount of fuel in the tank decreases monotonically until there is none left. When it comes to more complex, dynamic systems—industries, economies, societies—they may continue to respond to external stimuli in a linear and time-invariant manner up to a point, but behind this stable façade their capabilities erode, their resources dwindle, their complexity increases, and beyond a certain point an entirely different process begins: the process of collapse. Such systems generally do not become smaller, spontaneously become less complex or reduce their resource use while continuing to respond to external stimuli in a controlled, linear manner.

But so strong and so deeply ingrained is our habit of thinking in straight lines that often we cannot imagine that we can ever leave the linear region, or, once we do, that we have done so, even when the evidence is staring us in the face. Forensic analyses of airplane crashes have revealed that sometimes, as his last act, the pilot ripped the control console off the cockpit floor—an act that requires superhuman strength—so hard was he pulling back on the yoke to bring up the airplane’s nose. I am sure that there are plenty of pilots—in all walks of life—who will prefer to crash, gripping the controls with all their might, gaze fixed on the distant, irrelevant or fictional horizon, than to push the eject button. Their entire life’s experience has been confined to the linear region, and so they cannot imagine that it can ever end.

One particularly significant example of this thinking is the belief in Peak Oil, generally expressed as the idea that global oil production already has or will soon reach an all-time peak, and will then gradually decrease over a time span of several decades. Oil depletion is being modeled as a linear function of oil production: a few percent a year, holding more or less steady from one year to the next. At the same time, the use of oil by industrialized societies is often quite usefully characterized as an addiction. Let us exercise this metaphor a bit and see where it takes us. Suppose you have a junkie who has an ever-increasing heroin habit and who has to go out and hustle harder and harder to score his next fix. Now, suppose global heroin production peaks, prices go up, supply dwindles, and our junkie has to start cutting the dose. Not too far along what you then have is a sick junkie, in withdrawal, who cannot go out and hustle for his next fix. And very soon after that you have a collapse of the heroin market because the junkies have all been forced to kick the habit to one extent or another. This disruption of the heroin market, even if temporary, causes heroin production to decrease even faster, production costs and associated risks to go up, and so forth. Beyond a certain point, the heroin market would no longer be characterized as a linear, time-invariant system where the more you pay the more of it you get any time you like, because there would be so little of it around.

Similarly with oil. Right after Hurricane Katrina there was some disruption of gasoline supplies in some of the southern US states. People have written to me to tell me that the result was instant mayhem: society at all levels swiftly stopped functioning. The shortage was temporary and was quickly forgotten, but were it a long-term, systemic shortage, we would no doubt observe all the usual effects: much extra fuel evaporated from topping off fuel tanks and burned from driving around with a full tank and full jerrycans in the trunk, much fuel wasted from driving around looking for gasoline and from idling in long lines at filling stations, a lot of siphoning of gas from tanks and motorists left stranded as a result, a lot of people unable to get to work, and, shortly after that, hoarding, looting and rioting, commerce at a standstill, use of federal troops to restore public order, curfews and limitations on all travel, bank holidays and a balance of payments crisis, and, finally, the general inability to pay for further oil production or imports. All of these disruptions cause oil production to fall even faster, along with all other economic activity, until there is simply not that much demand for the stuff. As much of the global oil industry is idled, drilling rigs, refineries and pipelines fall into disuse and become inoperable. Instead of a nice few-percent-a-year gradual decline, we would have what Douglas Adams would have described as a “spontaneous existence failure.”

I am sure that some people would like me to whip out my straight-edge, plot some straight lines and make some projections: What is my price forecast? What production numbers are we talking about, ten or twenty years out? Well, that to me feels like a complete waste of time. I’d rather spend time learning how to train trees for round timber construction. The future is certain to be nonlinear, but I am quite sure that there will be trees in it. The reason I bring this up is that there are a few of pilots out there who I hope will have the presence of mind to push the eject button instead of clutching at the controls with their eyes locked on the artificial horizon.

C-Realm Podcast: Technogenic Catastrophe

"If you translate "industrial accident" into Russian and then back into English, you're likely to end up with "technogenic catastrophe." Might the Gulf Oil Spill be the American Chernobyl? KMO welcomes Dmitry Orlov back to the podcast to examine these questions and to explain why collapse is still the optimistic scenario, why it isn't necessary or even helpful for his message to find a mainstream audience, and why working for reform of the current political establishment is not a credible or worthwhile activity. Music by Tibet2Timbuk2."

US Swaps Russian Spies for... Russian Spies

A couple of weeks ago I was amused to see a large hammer and sickle on the cover of the local subway rag: Spy scandal! Cold war is back on! Happy days are here again!

The truth, of course, is much less amusing. The FBI, after years and years of assiduous investigation, nailed a handful of Russians for failing to register as foreign agents. (Reminds me, got to get my fishing license renewed.) These Russians have been living boring suburban American lives under assumed Anglo names trying to infiltrate posh cocktail parties. They never succeeded. Yawn.

But eventually the story gets interesting when Washington agrees to a spy swap with Moscow, exchanging these hapless nobodies with... some actual Russian spies—Russians who have been caught spying for the US and have been cooling their heels in Russian jails.

Out with the party crashers, in with some real honest-to-goodness traitors, who will now be hosted in the US at taxpayer expense. Maybe they can do some spying for Moscow now. Being traitors, they should have zero moral qualms. Be sure to look for them at forthcoming cocktail parties.

Update: The bulk of comments submitted for this post attest to two salient facts:

1. Many Americans have a knee-jerk hatred of Russia—not surprising, since this is what American mass media has been trying to instill in many generations of them. Loyal Americans establish their loyalty by bad-mouthing people in other countries. Since this is largely a display of ignorance, it is not even threatening—just pathetic.

2. More interestingly, many Americans no longer even understand the concepts of loyalty and treason—again, not surprising, since for a few generations now they have been ruled by traitors, whose routine acts of betrayal are designed to benefit just about anyone—from Israeli arms smugglers to Afghani heroin dealers—except the people who supposedly elect them to office.

Since most of my readers apparently feel no compulsion to trash-talk Russia or to demonstrate their ignorance of the concept of treason—or to submit comments—I am killing the comments for this post.

Checkmate

In all of the descriptions of perilous situations that I have studied, arising during adventures on the high seas or in the high mountains, or during armed conflict, a single mistake rarely proves fatal. More often than not, death comes as a result of a sequence of bad choices which reinforce each other. These choices may not appear bad at the time—but they certainly do in retrospect! The end result is a situation in which no further steps can be taken that would not be either harmful or futile. This is the essence of checkmate: no moves left. At that point, none of the previous moves can be undone. Nor do they even exist, really: they have gone off to an imaginary universe populated by the regretful ghosts of those who didn't make it.

As one should expect from a natural phenomenon, failure is fractal—observable at every scale. The same pattern of maladaptive strategy leading to untimely demise constantly replays itself at the level of viruses and bacteria, and all the way to individual plants and animals, populations, societies, countries and civilizations. Nature moves forward by canceling its unsuccessful experiments, which far outnumber its successes. Most people have come to terms with the theory of natural selection, and can understand individual and group failure. But over the last few decades—quite recently, in fact—it has become unacceptable to speak of accepting the failure of very large corporations, societies and countries as a terminal state. They are always considered to be in need of bail-out, reorganization, aid, reform, reconstruction, development and so forth. Perpetual degradation and decay followed by a headlong plunge into merciful oblivion is simply not on offer. Haiti will one day be prosperous, Somalia a model democracy, and perhaps even low-lying coastal and island nations can have a bright though wet future, provided the people there are fitted with snorkels to help them cope with rising ocean levels. When attempting to come to terms with the regularly observable demise of civilizations, and the forthcoming demise of this one, our failure to cope is complete: ancient pagan archetypes take over our thinking, our unconscious mind takes over, and we are transported to a realm of second-rate fantasy films. All reasonable people agree that the future is either Mad Max or Waterworld; take your pick, end of discussion.

The concept of strategy, and of games of strategy, is a useful one, although when applying it to serious matters (instead of childish distractions like sports) our thinking tends to be distorted by the bad habits that sports instill in us. We tend to think of games as enjoyable learning experiences that teach us to play better the next time. The idea that there always has to be the next time is insidious. The vast majority of the games we can observe being played out, both in nature and in society, are played specifically to determine whether there should be a next time. "But I have learned my lessons and the next time we play I will win!" says the defeated champion. "That won't be necessary," says Death. "We must hurry. There is a horny old man who's dying to meet you. He'll be your personal trainer for the rest of eternity." But even this ageless little narrative has a flaw, for Death is rarely in much of a hurry, and the leading edge of eternity is quite fuzzy. Defeat overlaps decay, which overlaps demise. We continue playing far beyond the point at which our defeat would have become clear to us in retrospect. In the meantime, we come to accept our personal trainer as the devil that we know, and might even delude ourselves into thinking that we are winning.

It is a serious matter that much of life has been recast in terms of sport. We are all supposed to be good sports, team players, when we fail we pick ourselves up and try again, or fall into a safety net. When we get into trouble we can always call for rescue. When someone dies, it is always the result of an accident, never the inevitable result of bad judgment. People who fail repeatedly yet always try again are lauded for their persistence, never mind that they are serial failures. This isn't necessarily bad; people should and do safeguard each other. What's worse is that the higher in society one goes, the more dilute the consequences of failure tend to become, until we rise up to those exalted places whose existence is safeguarded by the magic incantation "too big to fail." This incantation is quite effective: many people are hypnotized by it. It prevents them from seeing something quite obvious: when serial failures are continually rescued, this allows them to bloat up until they are too large for the rescuers to deal with, at which point they become too big to not fail. When any one of them can no longer be rescued, the result is a cascaded failure that overwhelms the rest, and failure becomes crippling. Past that point, nobody gets to try much of anything ever again: society has checkmated itself.

What happens after that point bears a striking resemblance to what came before. After all, there were many insoluble problems before, and many degenerative cultural trends could be observed. It's just that there are more of them afterward, and they are more severe, but there may not be an obvious qualitative difference. It may not be immediately apparent that checkmate has arrived, and the specific point in time can become visible only in retrospect, if at all. Emergencies come and go, and people get used to the fact that the beaches are black and sometimes catch fire and burn for weeks, or that there is a ravine running through the center of town where the riverfront used to be, or that electricity is only on for a couple of hours a day. Dogs and children turn feral, but nobody remembers when that started happening, so everyone assumes that that's the way it's always been. Nor does anyone remember when it became fashionable to tattoo corporate logos on one's scalp, or to proudly display one's naked buttocks in public. An expatriate who leaves and later comes back might think that this now is a completely different country, but those who stay would be at pains to detect the difference because for them changes were too slow to rise above the threshold of perception.

The population can dwindle quite rapidly, but this too is often imperceptible. Large swaths of the landscape become depopulated, but that is not noticed by anyone because nobody goes there any more. When births exceed deaths, population increases exponentially. When deaths exceed births, population declines exponentially. There are always some maternities, and there are always some funerals; the change in the ratio of the two is not something that can be directly perceived. Societal extinction doesn't make any noise when it finally happens. Survivors simply move on. Non-survivors might as well have not existed, and the more gullible survivors come to believe the extravagant ruins they left behind to have been the work of extraterrestrials.

How does a society go about checkmating itself? There is no shortage of real-world examples, but real life is complicated, so here is a simple allegory. Let's suppose that there is a tribe called the Merkanoids, which remains quite ordinary for most of its history, but which at some point undergoes a strange cultural mutation. An accidental synergy between atmospheric electricity and chemicals in the water produces a strange effect on their minds that causes them to decamp from the towns and villages wherein they had hitherto happily dwelt, and take up residence in little huts scattered throughout the surrounding pasture, fields and woods. They then proceed to move around and switch huts a lot, until few of them know or trust their neighbors. This makes them feel rather unsafe, and the way the Merkanoids decide to make themselves feel safer is by burying land mines about their property and posting signs that read "No trespassing! Land mines!"

This makes them feel a whole lot safer while in fact making them much less so: the social predators among them become reasonably good at avoiding land mines, while the rest of the population generally does not, producing a large subclass of people whose legs have been blown off. These, being relatively immobile and defenseless, present an even more desirable target to the social predators, and naturally compensate by acquiring more and bigger land mines. This cycle repeats a few times, until two-legged people become the minority. Since people who are missing a lower limb or two are somewhat less productive than two-legged ones, in due course the Merkanoid economy can no longer produce the surplus necessary to invest in anything beyond more land mines (which they now find it cheaper to import from China on credit than to manufacture themselves). As debt service swallows up more and more of the Merkanoids income, their disposable income plummets. As a consequence, crutches, wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs became luxury items which fewer and fewer of them can afford. Without these devices the ever more numerous legless people can no longer move around, making it more difficult for them to remain productive members of the Merkanoid economy, causing economic output to plunge even faster.

When this vicious cycle becomes too obvious for any half-intelligent Merkanoid to ignore, a reform movement springs up. Activists organize community de-mining activities and promote the idea of an annual "land mine-free week." Entrepreneurs work to develop "green mines" which stun people instead of maiming them, but these come to be regarded as less effective and therefore unsafe. Some political extremists take the radical step of de-mining their own properties. A lot of them then find their huts repeatedly burgled and quietly put the land mines back in. At one point a brilliant Merkanoid visionary has an epiphany and exclaims: "It's not the land-minds that are killing us! It's the huts!" Everyone thinks that he had gone off the deep end: how can anyone not live in one's own private hut? It's the Merkanoid way of life!

In the meantime, small groups of as yet two-legged people begin to band together on the margins of Merkanoid society. Instead of living in widely dispersed huts, they live compactly in tents, moving about the non-mined parts of the landscape. They eschew land mines and defend themselves (and each other) by keeping a sharp look-out at all times, and, if necessary, with pointed sticks. They also spontaneously develop a sort of crazy talk that turns out to be highly disruptive to the mainstream Merkanoid mentality. So disruptive is this effect that Merkanoid society, having no energy to oppose these outside groups, is forced to strenuously deny their existence. In turn, the outsiders happily ignore much of Merkanoid society, patiently waiting for it to fade from view, which, in due course, it does.

I hope that the meaning of my little parable is clear. A society takes a series of bad turns (which may not seem bad at the time). Once that happens, it's all over but for the waiting. The turns are irreversible, and attempting to make a society undo them is futile. In this situation, the only adaptive thing any of us can do is to learn to live as if these turns had never been made in the first place. This, of course, is very difficult and, should you succeed, will make you unpopular, so you should definitely consider the alternative: do nothing. In the timeless words of the I Ching, "Perseverance does not further. No blame."

Lost Leaders

[Update June 14: It is becoming apparent to all good and knowledgeable people that the well bore structure is compromised "down-hole" (or, as I put it here earlier, "there is no oil well—just a large, untidy hole in the sea bottom with hydrocarbons spewing out of it."]

It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what's really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust. After that, these leaders might as well limit their public pronouncements to the traditional "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner fudge is made." Whatever they say, the universal reaction becomes: "What leaders? We don't have any."

Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can. This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost. After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."
2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"
3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."
4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and 
5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold."

Some people don't survive, some do; the difference in outcome turns out to have precious little to do with skill or training, and everything to do with motivation—the desire to survive no matter how much pain and discomfort that involves—and the mental flexibility to adjust one's mental map on the fly to fit the new reality, and to reach stage 5 quickly. Those who go on attempting to operate based on an outdated mental map tend to die in utter bewilderment.

Working with an outdated mental map is a big problem for anyone; for a leader, it may very well spell the end of the position of leadership. After the catastrophe at Chernobyl, the Soviet leaders attempted to operate, for as long as possible, with a mental map that included a relatively intact and generally serviceable nuclear reactor called "Chernobyl Energy Block No. 4". "The reactor has been shut down and is being cooled," went the official pronouncements from the Kremlin, "we are pumping in water to cool it." After a while it became known that there is no reactor—just a smoldering, molten hole spewing radioactive smoke—and the coolant water, prodigious quantities of which were indeed pumped in and spilled in its general vicinity. It instantly boiled away into radioactive steam (which drifted downwind and eventually rained out, poisoning even more of the land). The rest of it leaked out, forming radioactive settling ponds and threatening to further leak into and poison the river that flows through Kiev. As you might imagine, that little episode turned out to be just a little bit embarrassing. Anyone who could think started to think: "Following these leaders is not conducive to survival. Let's make our own plans." Gorbachev went on with his usual long-winded blah-blahs, but the milk-milk-lemonade routine would have served him just as well.

More recently, we have been exposed to the spectacle of corporate leaders and public officials attempting to operate, for as long as possible, with a mental map that includes a blown-out but otherwise serviceable deep-water oil well in the Gulf of Mexico variously called "Deepwater Horizon" or "Macondo" or "MC252". A number of unsuccessful attempts have been made to capture the oil and gas that have been escaping from it using at least three different techniques. BP—the well's owner—is an oil company, and so their first reaction was to get and sell that oil no matter what. They tried to fit the well with a "top hat" to get all of the oil, but when their contraption didn't work because it got clogged by methane hydrate crystals they stuck a smaller pipe into the leak, just to get and sell some of the oil, and when that worked it made them happy. But, coming under pressure to do something about all the oil leaking out and poisoning the environment, they finally decided to try shutting down the well by squiring various substances into it. The procedures they've tried, going by idiotic Top Gun names like "junk shot" and "top kill"—have all been to no avail. At some point it becomes clear that there is no oil well—just a large, untidy hole in the sea bottom with hydrocarbons spewing out of it, forming huge surface slicks and underwater plumes of oil that kill all they encounter and eventually wash up on land to continue the damage there, turning the Gulf Coast into a disaster area. Starting in another month or so the toxic soup composed of oily tropical seawater and decomposing coastal vegetation and sea life will be stirred up and driven inland by tropical storms and hurricanes. Gulf Coast oil-grunge will become the de facto new national style: oil-streaked skin and clothing and perhaps a dead pelican for a sunhat.

 When things go horribly wrong, it is natural for us mere mortals to try to obtain a bit of psychological comfort by holding on to familiar images. A person who has totaled his car tends to continue to refer to the twisted wreckage as "my car" instead of "the wreckage of my car." In the case someone's wrecked car, this may be accepted as mere shorthand, but in many other cases this tendency results in people working with an outdated mental map which leads them astray, because the properties of a wreck are quite different from those of an intact object. For example, our lost leaders are continuing to refer to "the financial system" instead of "the wreck of the financial system." If they had the flexibility to make that mental switch, perhaps they wouldn't insist on continuing to pump in more and more public debt, only to watch it spew out again through a tangle of broken pipes so horrific that it defies all understanding, with quite a lot of it mysteriously dribbling into the vaults and pockets of bankers and billionaire investors. It will be interesting to watch their attempts at a financial "top kill" or "junk shot" to plug the ensuing geyser of toxic debt.

It is natural for us to naïvely expect our leaders—be they corporate executives or their increasingly decorative and superfluous adjuncts in government—to be our betters, having been picked for leadership positions by their ability to lead us through difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We expect them to have the mental agility and flexibility to be able to revise their mental maps as the circumstances dictate. We don't expect them to be stupid, and are surprised to find that indeed they are. How is that possible? Mental enfeeblement of the ruling class of a collapsing empire is not without precedent: the British imperial experiment was clearly doomed as early as the end of World War I, but it took until well into World War II for this fact to register in the enfeebled brains of the British ruling class. In his 1941 essay England your England, George Orwell offers the following explanation:

...[T]he British ruling class obviously could not admit that their usefulness of was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate...  Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though it was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on [a]round them."

And so it is now: as the American empire has been crumbling, its leaders, both corporate and corporatist, were being specially selected for being unable to draw their own conclusions based on their own independent reasoning or on the evidence of their own senses, relying instead on "intelligence" that is second-hand and obsolete. These leaders are now attempting to lead us all on a dream-walk to oblivion.

Back in 2008 I published the prediction that while Chernobyl was rather decisive in putting paid to the Soviet scientific/technological program and in dispelling all remaining trust in the Soviet political establishment, the US program of scientific/technological progress and ruthless exploitation of nature is more likely to suffer a death by a thousand cuts. But if one of these cuts hits an artery early on, a thousand cuts would be overkill. Just as with any wreck, the properties of a radically phlebotomized body politic are rather different from those of a healthy one, or even a sick one—not that our lost leaders could notice something like that! They will no doubt go on going on about money and oil (and the predictable lack thereof), but they might as well be telling us about their milk and lemonade, and please hold the drilling mud. How embarrassing!