Monthly Archives: June 2012
The Stargazer Chronicles is a series of novels set in a fantasy world not unlike 13th century Europe. Historical in flavor and locale, it weaves medieval issues and life with magic as if the supernatural realm of medieval imagination was real. In a larger sense these things were real to those who lived steeped in the unknown and, at the time, unknowable.
Readers Wanted (publishers too for that matter)
Will the empire crumble? It seems obvious that in the long run it will be unable to maintain the fiction that continued growth is possible. It may be able to obscure that reality from the vast majority of the population and thus continue to survive, exhibiting a gravity defining cloud of suspended disbelief for some time after the changes on the ground are manifest to anyone who looks with unfiltered eyes.
Of all the writers, thinkers and just plain folk who realize the current lifestyles of the rich and famous American bourgeois cannot endure forever, there is no consensus how long the dwindling will take, nor what the end will look like. From apocalyptic collapse to simple belt tightening the veiled future holds many possible outcomes.
Which do you wish for or expect? Do you believe that an educated populace will forestall the march toward an uncertain future? Will science reverse the centuries old dependence upon non-renewable resources? Will religion offer a palliative alternative to shrinking income and increased unemployment?
Constrained as I am by my study of history, I see the changes that are looming before us not as an abrupt cataclysm but a long slow retreat from everything that defines the modern growth-dependent nation state. Post Modern political, economic and social changes will be fast, within a life time or so, but not so abrupt as to break a link to the past in the mind of those who live through the changes.
These changes have begun. Speculation on the end is fruitless, because there is no end as such, only the beginning of a different reality. However, speculation on the landscape of that new world is appropriate, if only to better prepare ourselves for the transition period we may be required to live through.
What will precipitate the fall, if fall is the right way to think about an inevitable change? Everyone has their pet problem that will lead to a less comfortable future, but just as no single event can be said to have brought down the civilization of ancient Rome, no single smoking gun will be found by historians for our demise as an empire and the decline of our living standard.
Yes Virginia there is climate change, but that will affect the poorer peoples of the world disproportionately, as rising food prices soar out of reach and populations collapse. Certainly crops will die, lowland regions will flood but the impact will first be felt by those societies less able to absorb the costs. This will result in undeveloped regions, which may contain much needed resources, being far too unstable to exploit effectively or within a reasonable cost structure.
The knowledge that it is mostly a looming third world crisis is what keeps the US from entering into any meaningful attempts to halt greenhouse gas emissions. The State Department and the Pentagon draw up contingency plans for the coming change and if it was the only threat on their plate, we could go about our business with little affect to the top tier nations.
Peak everything is shorthand for the fact that we have less of every important resource than we did yesterday. What’s more, today there are more people demanding those resources than there were yesterday. China, India and Brazil, to name a few, are demanding to be allowed into the club of the super-sized full-meal deal and we are no longer able to thwart their desires.
An economy built on cheap oil and raw materials will constrict as the reserves deplete and the competition for the remains intensifies. We have harvested the low hanging fruit of material resources so everything will become more and more expensive to extract. A constricting economy will mean less capital to invest in alternatives that might ameliorate the more dramatic effects of peak everything. On the other hand, a constricting economy might mean less pressure toward climate change as factories idle, so the race is on to see if the economy tanks before the lowlands flood.
Smart money is that both trends continue in a slow spiral toward worse weather for grain and more expensive energy. A sad comment on the knife edge we walk is that in the US we use 7 calories of energy for every 1 calorie of food we produce. Along with this is the fact that the very rare minerals that power our digital age are mostly controlled by China and you see a bumpy road ahead for business as usual.
Expensive food and fuel, idled factories and high unemployment can coexist with rising profit and the amassing of wealth, but will of course enlarge the gulf between those with and those without. It might be tempting to assume the class war declared by the rich upon the poor will stop short of dragging the middle class into the fray, but consider that real hardship is not needed for social upheaval. All that is required is a perceived loss of privilege, property or power.
It is more than likely that most the bourgeois will align with their masters in a vein attempt to hold onto their dwindling share of the loot as the plutocracy plunders the last of the movable wealth of the nation. Will they dare look behind the curtain before the kleptocrats decamp with their wealth to a new haven far from the turmoil their polices ensured?
Even if the middle class understands what is happening, their response may not be logical. Social upheaval is not known for its logical outcomes. As contending systems of beliefs will continue to vie for attention labels such a progressive and conservative will be shouted even louder. There is no way to predict that the people, once mobilized will follow their own best interests. The chance that their fear and greed will overwhelm collective action may mean that even if they realize the ship is sinking they will be unable to join together to bail it out and instead stomp on one another in their rush for the few remaining lifeboats.
What this will mean to the empire is that with income dramatically receding and people losing belief in the fiction of national unity the government will find it increasingly difficult to function. There will be no showdown merely a slowdown that leads to an atrophy of the machinery of the national state as the entropy of failed policy culminates in the beginning of an emergency in which each local polity will attempt, with more or less success, to forestall the change that is upon them.
Will conditions here degrade to the level of current failed states? That is an unlikely outcome, certainly in the short term. But how much of a reduction in your personal index of comfort will you accept before it seems unbearable? A restructuring of expectations will not be accepted, it will merely become real. How it becomes real might be very interesting.
That’s all well and good you say, but when will this happen? My response is to look around you. It is happening now, the question is how long will the transition take. It may well take decades to come to terms with the decline of living standards, absence of personal security and the sloughing off of a political structure no longer relevant to daily life.
What this transition will mean is general population collapse, not just in the third world. It will mean less globalization as energy costs outweigh the need to fly vast distances. It will mean more localization, less ready capital and that may mean a very marginal existence if you are unlucky enough to be stuck in a resource poor area.
It will certainly mean migration, and perhaps the wars of migration that such dislocation oft lead to. It may also mean most skills and professions we now take for granted will fade, but I doubt that technological society will utterly vanish. It will change, morph to new needs, as our horizons and options shrink. We will continue to use and use up the trappings of our modern life until they can either be replaced with local resources or done without.
Do I expect to see the real hard times in my life time? No. Then again, I had always assumed I would never live to see the beginning of the translation from empire to post-imperial disintegration and yet I have. It seems more than likely some of those alive today will witness the last good day for some decades to come. Of course if you ask someone unemployed for a year they may tell you they have already seen their last good day.
I don’t think I am alone in not liking to pay taxes. Yet like nearly everyone everywhere, I do. Why? If you leave out the actual threat of violence, the form of tax collection we humans have been subjected to for most of the arc of history, one is left with the realization that we pony up taxes in the abstract belief that through collective pooling of monetary resources the common weal is improved. Taxes are socialist in nature when the government claims to speak for the citizens.
Of course that was then and this is now. Now we seem inclined to the belief that taxes are not so much for the common weal as for individual’s benefit. That is to say we seem to apply the commercial paradigm of paying for something and getting an equal return on payment in exchange. Thus we feel unfairly used if we don’t receive back from a government exactly the services we pay for, like a transaction in the much vaunted marketplace. Likewise we are infuriated if someone receives back more then they paid for.
Everything now seems couched in terms of government waste and what that translates to is monies not returned to me in exact proportion to the monies I pay. Under that calculus I am screwed many times over as I own no car, collect no assistance, have no children in school and produce a fraction of the refuse of a normal family. Of course that is ridiculous math and yet seemingly not too ridiculous for the anti-tax zealots who feel all government should be a transaction and one should only pay for the services they use.
The concept that electric cars, that use no gas and thus pay no gas tax, should be made to pay a “fee” completely misses the point of taxes and attempts to codify the concept that consumers should only pay for the government they use. It abandons the idea that taxes should be used on services and policies that are in the common weal. While we are at it, why not require students to hand over cash every morning before they enter a classroom. Better yet, lets ask the police to bill citizens each time they respond to a call. Or like Stalin, charge the family of an executed prisoner the cost of the bullet.
It is easy to I point out the hypocrisy of the position of pay as you go regarding taxes. However, I am all for a pay as you go, as long as that means that local municipalities are allowed to keep all their tax income. If Seattle, or even King County kept all the taxes collected within their borders, all pot holes could be filled and other budget woes adverted since they produce the lion’s share of the state’s income. An income that is diverted to our needy neighbors. In a way these other locales are on the dole. They receive more tax dollars than they pay and thus it stands to reason that they deserver fewer services. Go ahead and add another fee to electric cars because they use the road, and then also charge the various areas of the state to repair their roads when their share of the tax base doesn’t cover the repair of their local highways.
I like robots. Robots of science fiction, robots of film and yes even robots of the lab and daily life, but this fondness is seasoned with knowledge that robots and associated computer systems are a game changer for humanity. There are serious social questions we will never really have time to ask before we rush into the future.
Robots have replaced workers in many areas of labor. They are an accepted fact of life on assembly lines and while their introduction did replace human labor, the fact that the labor was unskilled or semi-skilled caused little concern for the majority of the upper middle class and no concern at all for the upper classes. Robots have helped decrease the cost of goods while simultaneously increasing profits. On the bright side they consume no food so that they can continue to crank out plastic marvels long after a human work force has succumbed to starvation. Robots are the perfect proletariat and have been the holy grail of industry since before the Czech word, from robota compulsory labor, was used in fiction.
Well, perhaps not that perfect. Robots don’t buy goods. Henry Ford paid a living wage, for two reasons: forestall unionization and ensure a market for his products. Robots are not part of the consumer chain. Their labor ends the cycle of produce, consume, produce.
Still not to be worried. High unemployment whether related directly to robotized industry or other market forces really is helpful to the health of business as it reduces the value of labor and thus the profit margin. Besides, robots can not leverage their talents to make signification inroads into the professions or the office work place. Can they?
With the advent of marvels like IBM’s Watson the day that robots will be tapped to take on more than the mundane or dangerous tasks of society is fast approaching. I don’t blame robots for the state of the world’s economy. I only wish to suggest that the march to replace human labor did not stop on the assembly line floor. The pressure to replace labor with a machine is market driven. It is the old human story of if we can we will.
Already robots and computerized system have begun to replace highly skilled craftsmen. Next in line will be the soft skills that we like to think only human’s can provide. From interpreting MRI results to giving advice on case law, machines are being created to interact with humans on a eerily human level.
What should we think about the march toward robotization? Should we fear our redundancy, celebrate human creativity and invention as culminated in the robots of the future or resignedly embrace a world in which the commonly accepted social structure is turned upside down and poor humans, bereft of options for labor, are lower on the social spectrum than automatons who produce the goods demanded by those lucky enough to have the means to consume the products of the robot’s labor?