Book Announcement: The Five Stages of Collapse

Starting next Tuesday and for the next three months this book will be available for pre-order right on this blog. (It will also be available elsewhere, but on terms that don't come close to making book-writing a sustainable proposition, so if you want me to keep writing you should get the book directly from me.) As the publication date nears, I will also be publishing some excerpts. [Minor note: there has been some confusion regarding the book's subtitle; please ignore it.]

This book is based on the identically titled article I published on this blog in February of 2008, just as financial collapse was starting to gather steam. Since then, this article has been read nearly 100,000 times on this blog alone (it has been reposted on many other web sites) and it is its enduring popularity that has convinced me to write a book-length treatment.

The Ecology of Hell

The End of Fun

A few days ago I went to the St. Petersburg State Hermitage, again, this time to see a rather extraordinary exhibit. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a work by Jake and Dinos Chapman, two English artists. Titled The End of Fun, it is an elaborate tableau of hell, carved up into nine rectangular sub-tableaux, each piece placed in a glass case. (It is a recreation of a previous work, titled Hell, which was lost in a warehouse fire.) The glass cases are, in turn, arranged in the shape of a swastika. The effect of viewing each one is like that of peering into a terrarium in some sort of menagerie where the animals—at the time the clock stopped—were busy torturing and killing each other in maximally cruel and unusual, highly ritualized and choreographed ways.

Interview on Business Matters

In this interview, recorded late last year, I discuss the differences in orientation between Russia, which is changing perhaps too swiftly, and the US, which remains stuck in the past. I also talk about community, and about lack of it, and what it means to live among people who insist on their right to remain strangers and who expect nothing from each other or their public officials. I also mention the force behind American political and social stasis: the desperate wish for a future that resembles the past—the American equivalent of Soviet nostalgia.

The Image of the Enemy

During my brief winter sojourn in Russia a tiny cold war has erupted between Russia and the USA. First, Mitt Romney calls Russia “our number one enemy” during the presidential election campaign. Then, after the election, the US passes the “Magnitsky Act” which promises to arrest funds and deny visas to certain Russian officials based on a secret list. The Russian legislature then responds with the “Dima Yakovlev Bill,” named after a Russian boy who died of heat stroke after his American adoptive parents left him locked in a car for nine hours. In addition to vaguely symmetric retaliatory measures, this bill bans Americans from adopting Russian orphans. This last little add-on may initially seem rather daft as state policy, but it has some interesting properties as Russian propaganda, of which you may not be aware. Although from the US perspective this move has an inane “...or I will shoot my dog” element to it, spun around the other way it makes it look as if valiant Russian politicians are trying to stop American fiends from torturing and killing innocent Russian orphans.

Out of Ideas

It's the first of the year, which is a traditional time for prognosticators to do some prognosticating. Since I have already explained at length why it is quite possible to accurately predict that something will eventually happen, but near-impossible to predict when it will happen (due to total lack of relevant data on which to base such predictions) I won't repeat myself here. Nor will I offer any predictions as to the timing of various stages of collapse. (I know that the USA will collapse politically, financially and commercially, but I don't know when; nor does anyone else.) Instead, I would like to point out what I think is unlikely to happen in 2013: I find it unlikely that this will be the year when the various elites running the show here (elected and unelected officials, academic authorities, corporations, think-tanks, mass media, etc.) will admit defeat: “The financial collapse of 2008 was the end of an era. What came before cannot be brought back. We have been pretending that it can be brought back for half a decade, but now we give up. Let's let the whole house of cards fall down, so that we can start over.” Do you see any of them rising up and saying something like that? I don't.

Geoffrey West on From Alpha to Omega

An excellent summary of Prof. West's research into complexity theory and the scaling laws that determine the lifetimes of both biological organisms and socioeconomic systems. I have referred to his work here to try to explain why large-scale, hierarchically organized socioeconomic systems (cities, economies, nation-states, etc.) exhibit superexponential growth, for a time, but then inevitably run out of resources, be they fossil fuels, fresh water and farmland or fresh ideas and cultural innovations, and collapse.

For those of you who are justifiably wary of mathematical models, please understand that this is different. These are not attempts to model one complex system using another complex system, such as the models used by economists and climate scientists. (The climate models are far from worthless, but they do seem to have significantly underestimated the effects of anthropogenic climate change, while the models the economists use are in fact complete garbage.) Prof. West uses simple math, which takes into account such basic elements as the dimensionality of spacetime and the fractality of networks, to make accurate predictions about the behavior of complex systems.


Incidentally, in listening to this podcast I found out that Prof. West and I both left the field of high-energy physics for the same general reason: the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider experiment, which can certainly be viewed as a collapse of a complex socioeconomic system. The project got canned as the size of its budget showed signs of approaching a singularity. From collapse to collapse, if you will—from alpha to omega.

Oh, and Happy New Year to all 19,469 of you who have visited this blog over the past month, as well the rest of my 991,615 visitors, should any of you decide to stop by.

Escape from the Merry Christmas Zone

Feng Zhu
Santa

I am not in the US at the moment, but in Russia. This means several things. First, today is not Christmas. (Christmas is on January 7th, having something to do with the Julian calendar. It is 3/4 of a day per century fast, but since it is only used for religious holidays, nobody cares.) Second, even for the Christians here, Christmas is a minor feast, far behind Easter. This is quite understandable: sure, virgin birth (not to be confused with immaculate conception, as some technical-minded reader has pointed out) is a bit of a trick, but it is nothing compared to the trick of rising from the dead after being crucified. Now that is one act you just never want to follow!

Third, the big holiday here is not Christmas but the New Year, which I much prefer. Actually, I would prefer to celebrate Winter Solstice, which is an actual observable astronomical event rather than an artificial date on an artificial calendar. That is what these holidays really were before the priests co-opted them: celebrations of light. Christmas was Winter Solstice, and Easter was Spring Equinox. And so, for once, I don't feel compelled to even pretend that Christmas exists. But since this just happens to be the 25th of December—the day many readers of this blog happen to celebrate Christmas—and since this year it happens to fall on a Tuesday—the day of the week on which I publish a blog post—today I will blog about Christmas.

In all the years I've spent living in the US, I have always felt the urge to get the hell out of the country whenever Christmas approached. This is because it is a season when Americans are "struggling to celebrate the holiday with some semblance of normalcy" (I just heard this very phrase on NPR's All Things Considered. The context is the mass murder of schoolchildren in Connecticut, but I find that it applies every year.) It is a stressful time when people rush around trying to find presents on which to deplete their meager savings (or, more likely, run up some more credit card debt) in order to maintain a commercially imposed fiction of normal family life. This often causes them to be overcome by feelings of alienation, depression and despair. As with that other great American holiday, Thanksgiving, people compensate for their misery with a bout of pathetic, self-destructive gorging.

Now, I am certainly not against celebrating, whatever it is you want to celebrate; celebrating is good. I am not even opposed to celebrating Christmas (as I mentioned, immaculate conception is quite a trick, although the Egyptian god Horus clearly did it first). But I am against celebrating this most toxic of all American holidays: the holiday of Christmasshopping. Please kill it, and in so doing celebrate your vaunted freedom of which I have heard so much but seen so little. It shouldn't be that hard: there is already a tradition of company Christmas parties, which are never held on December 25th. Now, just extend it to family Christmas parties. Hold them some time in January. Do buy some presents, if you wish, but be sure to buy them after Christmas, when the prices are lower. Use the savings to rent a hall, hire a band and have the occasion catered. Include not just the family but friends and neighbors. As for December 25th, throw a zombie party or something. Everyone loves zombies nowadays. Then maybe I'll stop trying to flee the country every Christmas season.

Regularly Scheduled Programming

Horsemen of the Apocalypse
on Parade
Red Suqare, Moscow

Regular readers of this blog must have noticed by now that for the past few weeks we have been off on a bit of a tangent from the usual fare of collapse-related social and economic commentary. There are several reasons for this.

Applied Anarchy Part III: The Design Phase

[Six-month update. The project is alive. To see what it looks like now, scroll down.]

[Update: There is now a reasonable bitmap font that hints of brush calligraphy; the chart and the sample below have been updated. The sample now shows stressed vowels as elongated.]

[Update: By popular demand, I included a little poem at the end, so that it's clear what text looks like, and for your deciphering pleasure. Please note that font design is yet to be done.]

If you have been following along for the last two weeks, you probably have some idea of what happens next; if not, you will need to catch up: here is a description of why English spelling a problem, and here is an explanation of what can be done about it. In short, English has the world's worst orthographic system that happens to be in common use, and it causes a great deal of damage. Just the cost of the several extra years of schooling needed to learn English spelling (much of it to no avail), together with the opportunity cost of not learning something more useful, runs into many billions of dollars a year. The economic damage caused by widespread functional illiteracy is harder to quantify.

There has been a lot of discussion since I published these two posts, along with numerous expressions of support. Several software developers who are also linguists stepped forward with offers of help. Given this level of interest, I intend to push forward with this project.

The task at hand is to create a new, better way of writing and reading English (of the General American variety)—one that is entirely regular and represents each psychologically real speech sound (phoneme) with exactly one symbol (glyph) and, unlike the current system, takes a minimal amount of time to learn for either a native speaker or a student of English. The goal is to design and write software that will provide an alternative way of rendering English text and to make it available for web sites, electronic books and electronic documents of all kinds.

Applied Anarchy

Jean Julien

A lot of people have been wondering aloud what prompted last week's diatribe against the inanity of English spelling; others found it accurate and refreshing. I suppose I should come clean about what motivated me to write it. Along the way, I also want to spell out (pardon the pun) what it is I specifically think can be achieved.