The First Step's a Doozy

It is ironic that 1974, the year that John Michael Greer ascribes to the commencement of our catabolic collapse, corresponds to the emergence of tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who brought IT into homes, cubicles, and pockets all over the globe. Collapse was taking place in the rust belt industries as silicon became the raw material of choice. The industrial sector giving way to the information sector is not unlike farmers abandoning the plow and moving to the city. It doesn't necessarily indicate impending collapse. Instead, it marks a point when the underlying economic elements of one era have matured to the point where more of the same isn't essential to sustaining society.

Nonetheless, if our industries continue to undergo neglect and decay, the scene could begin to look like a William Gibson novel with all manner of esoteric virtual reality gadgets strewn among the detritus of the Industrial Age.  The SXSW festival itself is something of a virtual reality experience (a vicarious one, at that, for most), this year carting out systems that give kids VR parents, adventurers the bodily experience of flying, and aging queens a magic mirror. As the collapse rumbles along, these small reminders of our former heights of progress will fall out of closets and show up piecemeal in second-hand stores. Their development and entry in the marketplace only serves as a distraction from the reality of rot in the underlying industrial base.

By Bummy Doublez

If catabolic collapse retraces our progress in stages until we become herders and cultivators, the next redux for the U.S. should be industrialism, while we abandon the tech fantasies that have raptured us these past few decades. Perhaps this had something to do with JMG's decision to end his weekly posts on The Archdruid Report. That will probably be the case with this blog in the near future, but I would prefer to have an IT exit strategy that would prioritize and sequence my divorce from electronica.

With Trump getting us back to basics like steel made in America, more coal, and a trillion dollars spent on infrastructure, heavy industry could be somewhat strengthened. Yet, collapse will proceed inexorably, driven by factors modeled in the Limits to Growth study. Though the collapse is worldwide, since ours is such a large portion of the global economic pie, America will have to reverse course on buying extravagantly expensive electronic weapons systems and building the Internet of Things.

The collapse of information networks could come from EMP weapons or from financial disaster. It hardly matters in terms of the end result. In the coming decade, we should expect to lose a century or more of pervasive technological capability following civilization's first major landslide. To many, it will seem like the end of the world.

In the meantime, the choice of whether we as a people cling to the sophistication of IT while allowing other industries to crumble, is subject to the dictates of Maslow's hierarchy. Maslow's pyramidal hierarchy of needs applies to the relative wealth of society's members. Consumer electronics and ubiquitous cyber communication fit mostly into the top three categories of belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. As the ranks of the middle class thins out, the aspects of electronic communication relevant to belonging and relationships will lose customers. After we collapse into industrialism, demand for high tech toys like 3-D VR bedtime story machines could continue among the elites, while the hoi polloi settle for old fashioned family time. Until then, a growing percentage of people with limited means will come to recognize that face-to-face communications with loved ones is more economical and satisfying than communicating for a fee with virtual friends and strangers.

Greer noted back in 2009 that the Information Age was on borrowed time, mainly because it would not be economically feasible in a time of diminishing resources. With the recent wikileak about the CIA's cyber snooping tools, security looks like another limiting factor. As Admiral Mike Rogers said back in 2014, we have reached a tipping point for cyber security. Electronic information of any kind is becoming less and less secure. This begins to intrude on an even more basic need in Maslow's hierarchy - security. Avoidance may be the best strategy until life becomes a degree simpler for everyone.

Bye-Bye Miss American PI (Post-Industrialism)

Back around 2011, when I first began reading The Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer detailed his outlook for America in posts about "catabolic collapse." He throws that term out often and even describes it in macroeconomic terms, but all it means is collapse that feeds on itself, just as the opposite (anabolic growth) means compounding growth caused by self-reinforcing vitality. Though Greer frames his analysis around individual civilizations, he arrives at pretty much the same place I did by drawing from the World3 (Limits to Growth) and BEST models - America eventually becomes a herder/cultivator society. He sees America's collapse starting in 1974 when the rust belt started seriously rusting, and occurring thereafter in stages wherein America devolves into a contented third world country (or several countries) as early as 2030 and continuing to decline if we ...

Fast forward another few decades, and another round of crises arrives, followed by another respite, and another round of crises, until finally peasant farmers plow their fields in sight of the crumbling ruins of our cities.

Though this collapse takes decades, it is many times faster than the centuries-long rise from wilderness settlements to superpowerdom. Greer's description doesn't distinguish between a herder/cultivator and an agrarian society (I edited my own oversight two posts back), but according to  The BEST Model (pg. 1-9), one of the distinguishing differences is that agrarians have the advantage of farming with fossil fuels and metal tools. Agrarians can still form empires, but the best herder/cultivators can do is organize groups of villages.

Perhaps schools today should be training kids on how to get by on the terms they are likely to encounter in their adulthood, but for those reading this today, let us consider the near-term implications of  the world collapsing relatively quickly from an integrative post-industrial economy with international democratic organizations to industrial economies with nationalist democracies. This is the destination Trumpist isolationism appears to favor. Soon after we have re-industrialized, more collapse will likely thrust us further down the chain so that, come 2030 or so, we may find ourselves rediscovering agrarianism under autocratic governments (Russia today) and decades later, after fossil fuels are no longer available, back in the herder/cultivator stage under familial rule.

Photo by 1nelly

Seeing as how we should expect further collapse of our post-industrial system back to a straight industrial system in the next decade, factory jobs should be prized by jobseekers. At least Trump is aiming to bring those jobs back home. Small business manufacturing is a good way to go - for the environment, cultivation of long-term relationships, and adjustment to a more fragmented nation. Employment at a factory out in the countryside might offer a chance to segue into agriculture when the factory shuts down. Ideally, living among relatives engaged in small farming or other sustainable vocations would position one for the next level of collapse to hunter/cultivator villages. Ecoforestry is ideal for this latter stage. Since all of these changes could take place over just a few decades, it will be important to have a job with enough time off to allow one to acquire the tools and skills that will enable one to live in the future as it spirals down. We are 42 years into the catabolic collapse and only have a few decades left before America begins to look like it did before the Europeans arrived.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

The disclosure of how Russian hackers have systematically undermined democracy in the U.S. by flooding the Internet with false or misleading stories has unmoored me. Not that I think the U.S. doesn't sometimes intentionally deceive Russians, but it would be hard to curate a portfolio of our blatant lies on the Internet as mendacious as that of the Russians. Besides, information fed to the Russian people weighs far less than that fed to the American public, since Russians are less empowered than U.S. citizens to influence or participate in their government. It's OK, though. I get it. Even if your country is defeated economically, information is one other means to conduct a cold war.

The cold war was plainly on again after Russia helped take down Malaysian flight MH17 over Ukraine. It was then that I noticed many of the websites that I was using to help make sense of current events accepted the Russian version of things with no hesitation. Regardless, I persisted for years in reading many of their views, dismissing their Russophilia as misdirected, but not malign. Now that the Russians' schemes are patent from investigative reports, I realize that these websites are, for whatever reason, beholden to the Russian disinformation apparatus and many are not worth visiting.

I dropped Club Orlov years ago, as I noticed Dmitry was not only too ardently defending Russian misdeeds, but also those of other U.S. enemies and denigrating our military. I first heard Orlov on James Howard Kunstler's podcast, whose Clusterfuck Nation blog this week pooh-poohs Russian hacking as an excuse mainstream news organizations are using for not noticing Trump's ascendancy among the electorate. To his credit, he doesn't deny the impact fake news may have had on the election, so I will keep him on my reading list. Another of my favorite writers, +Albert Bates, is too chummy with Dmitry and RT for me to trust his opinion as untainted, so I will have to stop reading his blog, too.

Photo by Sophie

A website that Kunstler put me onto, The Automatic Earth, has always helped me to wake up with a pessimistic view of the financial quagmire we are in. With its constant defense of Russian virtue and links to Zero Hedge and various other false news websites, I am glad to be rid of it. I will subscribe to the Washington Post again and get my morning news from the American media establishment rather than the apparatchiki. Another writer I located through Kunstler, John Michael Greer, has been mentioned in a few of my blogs as a fellow Marylander. He is on probation now, having soured me by a recent post in which he wondered why his blog wasn't on the list of 200+ websites showing evidence of heavy Russian fake news propagation. Come on, John! I know you think the best thing for us now is to have a million points of light shining in as many directions, but by toying with ideas from the heads of Russian hackers, you are just entering a hall of mirrors.

Jill Stein is doing something especially patriotic in fighting for vote recounts based, in part, on suspicions of Russian tampering. It is keeping the issue elevated long enough for us to realize that we need to all work harder at filtering information and that we need to protect our society from the effects of falsehoods at all levels of decision-making. I suspect that a lot of the push-back she received from fellow Greens was because many on the left became too invested in the narratives that originated in Moscow to the point that they subconsciously shifted their allegiance in favor of Russian tales to the detriment of their reliance on manifest truths.

Don't Wait for the Lifeboats

The Brown- and Green-tech scenarios David Holmgren postulates are only half of the picture.  When you factor in the effects of a rapid decline in worldwide oil production, the scenarios become "Lifeboats" and "Earth Steward," respectively, with Earth Steward being the lesser of four evils. Murphy's law favors the greater of the four evils, especially as we find oil production to be past peak with no viable substitute.  Assuming oil production will decline more rapidly than our ability to power down in a controlled fashion gives us the Lifeboat scenario, where civilization fragments and humans die off by half.  If you think it couldn't get any worse than that, read Revelation or Dante's Inferno or a Cormac McCarthy novel; our capacity for suffering seems almost unlimited.  Yet, it is so troubling to plan for the Lifeboat scenario, much less act on that premise, that we are loath to even consider it.

Holmgren's solution to our predicament is to accelerate the collapse of the capitalistic system that now bewitches us in order to fail into a Green-tech future before a climate tipping point occurs, e.g. melting of arctic tundra permafrost, which would void the possibility of either of the more benign outcomes. Holmgren is Australian, which is far enough removed from our locale to make you think that it might be different for us here.  Maryland author and permaculturist John Michael Greer doesn't think so. His projections for our future are as frightening as Lifeboats.  His solution also mimics Holmgren's - Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush.

Maryland is due to update their own projections of local sea-level rise in early 2016.  I doubt they will include many of the positive feedback effects and climate tipping points that may arise in the years ahead.  This hot December is even making me wonder if we've already encountered one. While we are on high enough ground to not require a real lifeboat, it's a good thing we have access to the Navy base nearby in case we need a metaphorical one.