The Archdruid Report - Archive

The mythic role assigned to progress in today’s popular culture has any number of odd effects, but one of the strangest is the blindness to the downside that clamps down on the collective imagination of our time once people become convinced that something or other is the wave of the future. It doesn’t matter in the least how many or obvious the warning signs are, or how many times the same tawdry drama has been enacted.  Once some shiny new gimmick gets accepted as the next glorious step in the invincible march of progress, most people lose the ability to imagine that the wave of the future might just do what waves generally do: that is to say, crest, break, and flow back out to sea, leaving debris scattered on the beach in its wake.

It so happens that I grew up in the middle of just such a temporary wave of the future, in the south Seattle suburbs in the 1960s, where every third breadwinner worked for Boeing. The wave in question was the supersonic transport, SST for short: a jetliner that would fly faster than sound, cutting hours off long flights. The inevitability of the SST was an article of faith locally, and not just because Boeing was building one; an Anglo-French consortium was in the lead with the Concorde, and the Soviets were working on the Tu-144, but the Boeing 2707 was expected to be the biggest and baddest of them all, a 300-seat swing-wing plane that was going to make commercial supersonic flight an everyday reality.

Long before the 2707 had even the most ghostly sort of reality, you could buy model kits of the plane, complete with Pan Am decals, at every hobby store in the greater Seattle area. For that matter, take Interstate 5 south from downtown Seattle past the sprawling Boeing plant just outside of town, and you’d see the image of the 2707 on the wall of one of the huge assembly buildings, a big delta-winged shape in white and gold winging its way through the imagined air toward the gleaming future in which so many people believed back then.

There was, as it happened, a small problem with the 2707, a problem it shared with all the other SST projects; it made no economic sense at all. It was, to be precise, what an earlier post here called  a subsidy dumpster: that is, a project that was technically feasible but economically impractical, and existed mostly as a way to pump government subsidies into Boeing’s coffers. Come 1971, the well ran dry: faced with gloomy numbers from the economists, worried calculations from environmental scientists, and a public not exactly enthusiastic about dozens of sonic booms a day rattling plates and cracking windows around major airports, Congress cut the project’s funding.

That happened right when the US economy generally, and the notoriously cyclical airplane industry in particular, were hitting downturns. Boeing was Seattle’s biggest employer in those days, and when it laid off employees en masse, the result was a local depression of legendary severity. You heard a lot of people in those days insisting that the US had missed out on the next aviation boom, and Congress would have to hang its head in shame once Concordes and Tu-144s were hauling passengers all over the globe. Of course that’s not what happened; the Tu-144 flew a handful of commercial flights and then was grounded for safety reasons, and the Concorde lingered on, a technical triumph but an economic white elephant, until the last plane retired from service in 2003.

All this has been on my mind of late as I’ve considered the future of the internet. The comparison may seem far-fetched, but then that’s what supporters of the SST would have said if anyone had compared the Boeing 2707 to, say, the zeppelin, another wave of the future that turned out to make too little economic sense to matter. Granted, the internet isn’t a subsidy dumpster, and it’s also much more complex than the SST; if anything, it might be compared to the entire system of commercial air travel, which we still have with us or the moment. Nonetheless, a strong case can be made that the internet, like the SST, doesn’t actually make economic sense; it’s being propped up by a set of financial gimmickry with a distinct resemblance to smoke and mirrors; and when those go away—and they will—much of what makes the internet so central a part of pop culture will go away as well.

It’s probably necessary to repeat here that the reasons for this are economic, not technical. Every time I’ve discussed the hard economic realities that make the internet’s lifespan in the deindustrial age  roughly that of a snowball in Beelzebub’s back yard, I’ve gotten a flurry of responses fixating on purely  technical issues. Those issues are beside the point.  No doubt it would be possible to make something like the internet technically feasible in a society on the far side of the Long Descent, but that doesn’t matter; what matters is that the internet has to cover its operating costs, and it also has to compete with other ways of doing the things that the internet currently does.

It’s a source of wry amusement to me that so many people seem to have forgotten that the internet doesn’t actually do very much that’s new. Long before the internet, people were reading the news, publishing essays and stories, navigating through unfamiliar neighborhoods, sharing photos of kittens with their friends, ordering products from faraway stores for home delivery, looking at pictures of people with their clothes off, sending anonymous hate-filled messages to unsuspecting recipients, and doing pretty much everything else that they do on the internet today. For the moment, doing these things on the internet is cheaper and more convenient than the alternatives, and that’s what makes the internet so popular. If that changes—if the internet becomes more costly and less convenient than other options—its current popularity is unlikely to last.

Let’s start by looking at the costs. Every time I’ve mentioned the future of the internet on this blog, I’ve gotten comments and emails from readers who think that the price of their monthly internet service is a reasonable measure of the cost of the internet as a whole. For a useful corrective to this delusion, talk to people who work in data centers. You’ll hear about trucks pulling up to the loading dock every single day to offload pallet after pallet of brand new hard drives and other components, to replace those that will burn out that same day. You’ll hear about power bills that would easily cover the electricity costs of a small city. You’ll hear about many other costs as well. Data centers are not cheap to run, there are many thousands of them, and they’re only one part of the vast infrastructure we call the internet: by many measures, the most gargantuan technological project in the history of our species.

Your monthly fee for internet service covers only a small portion of what the internet costs. Where does the rest come from? That depends on which part of the net we’re discussing. The basic structure is paid for by internet service providers (ISPs), who recoup part of the costs from your monthly fee, part from the much larger fees paid by big users, and part by advertising. Content providers use some mix of advertising, pay-to-play service fees, sales of goods and services, packaging and selling your personal data to advertisers and government agencies, and new money from investors and loans to meet their costs. The ISPs routinely make a modest profit on the deal, but many of the content providers do not. Amazon may be the biggest retailer on the planet, for example, and its cash flow has soared in recent years, but its expenses have risen just as fast, and it rarely makes a profit. Many other content provider firms, including fish as big as Twitter, rack up big losses year after year.

How do they stay in business? A combination of vast amounts of investment money and ultracheap debt. That’s very common in the early decades of a new industry, though it’s been made a good deal easier by the Fed’s policy of next-to-zero interest rates. Investors who dream of buying stock in the next Microsoft provide venture capital for internet startups, banks provide lines of credit for existing firms, the stock and bond markets snap up paper of various kinds churned out by internet businesses, and all that money goes to pay the bills. It’s a reasonable gamble for the investors; they know perfectly well that a great many of the firms they’re funding will go belly up within a few years, but the few that don’t will either be bought up at inflated prices by one of the big dogs of the online world, or will figure out how to make money and then become big dogs themselves.

Notice, though, that this process has an unexpected benefit for ordinary internet users: a great many services are available for free, because venture-capital investors and lines of credit are footing the bill for the time being. Boosting the number of page views and clickthroughs is far more important for the future of an internet company these days than making a profit, and so the usual business plan is to provide plenty of free goodies to the public without worrying about the financial end of things. That’s very convenient just now for internet users, but it fosters the illusion that the internet costs nothing.

As mentioned earlier, this sort of thing is very common in the early decades of a new industry. As the industry matures, markets become saturated, startups become considerably riskier, and venture capital heads for greener pastures.  Once this happens, the companies that dominate the industry have to stay in business the old-fashioned way, by earning a profit, and that means charging as much as the market will bear, monetizing services that are currently free, and cutting service to the lowest level that customers will tolerate. That’s business as usual, and it means the end of most of the noncommercial content that gives the internet so much of its current role in popular culture.

All other things being equal, in other words, the internet can be expected to follow the usual trajectory of a maturing industry, becoming more expensive, less convenient, and more tightly focused on making a quick buck with each passing year. Governments have already begun to tax internet sales, removing one of the core “stealth subsidies” that boosted the internet at the expense of other retail sectors, and taxation of the internet will only increase as cash-starved officials contemplate the tidal waves of money sloshing back and forth online. None of these changes will kill the internet, but they’ll slap limits on the more utopian fantasies currently burbling about the web, and provide major incentives for individuals and businesses to back away from the internet and do things in the real world instead.

Then there’s the increasingly murky world of online crime, espionage, and warfare, which promises to push very hard in the same direction in the years ahead.  I think most people are starting to realize that on the internet, there’s no such thing as secure data, and the costs of conducting business online these days include a growing risk of having your credit cards stolen, your bank accounts looted, your identity borrowed for any number of dubious purposes, and the files on your computer encrypted without your knowledge, so that you can be forced to pay a ransom for their release—this latter, or so I’ve read, is the latest hot new trend in internet crime.

Online crime is one of the few fields of criminal endeavor in which raw cleverness is all you need to make out, as the saying goes, like a bandit. In the years ahead, as a result, the internet may look less like an information superhighway and more like one of those grim inner city streets where not even the muggers go alone. Trends in online espionage and warfare are harder to track, but either or both could become a serious burden on the internet as well.

Online crime, espionage, and warfare aren’t going to kill the internet, any more than the ordinary maturing of the industry will. Rather, they’ll lead to a future in which costs of being online are very often greater than the benefits, and the internet is by and large endured rather than enjoyed. They’ll also help drive the inevitable rebound away from the net. That’s one of those things that always happens and always blindsides the cheerleaders of the latest technology: a few decades into its lifespan, people start to realize that they liked the old technology better, thank you very much, and go back to it. The rebound away from the internet has already begun, and will only become more visible as time goes on, making a great many claims about the future of the internet look as absurd as those 1950s articles insisting that in the future, every restaurant would inevitably be a drive-in.

To be sure, the resurgence of live theater in the wake of the golden age of movie theaters didn’t end cinema, and the revival of bicycling in the aftermath of the automobile didn’t make cars go away. In the same way, the renewal of interest in offline practices and technologies isn’t going to make the internet go away. It’s simply going to accelerate the shift of avant-garde culture away from an increasingly bleak, bland, unsafe, and corporate- and government-controlled internet and into alternative venues. That won’t kill the internet, though once again it will put a stone marked R.I.P. atop the grave of a lot of the utopian fantasies that have clustered around today’s net culture.

All other things being equal, in fact, there’s no reason why the internet couldn’t keep on its present course for years to come. Under those circumstances, it would shed most of the features that make it popular with today’s avant-garde, and become one more centralized, regulated, vacuous mass medium, packed to the bursting point with corporate advertising and lowest-common-denominator content, with dissenting voices and alternative culture shut out or shoved into corners where nobody ever looks. That’s the normal trajectory of an information technology in today’s industrial civilization, after all; it’s what happened with radio and television in their day, as the gaudy and grandiose claims of the early years gave way to the crass commercial realities of the mature forms of each medium.

But all other things aren’t equal.

Radio and television, like most of the other familiar technologies that define life in a modern industrial society, were born and grew to maturity in an expanding economy. The internet, by contrast, was born during the last great blowoff of the petroleum age—the last decades of the twentieth century, during which the world’s industrial nations took the oil reserves that might have cushioned the transition to sustainability, and blew them instead on one last orgy of over-the-top conspicuous consumption—and it’s coming to maturity in the early years of an age of economic contraction and ecological blowback.

The rising prices, falling service quality, and relentless monetization of a maturing industry, together with the increasing burden of online crime and the inevitable rebound away from internet culture, will thus be hitting the internet in a time when the global economy no longer has the slack it once did, and the immense costs of running the internet in anything like its present form will have to be drawn from a pool of real wealth that has many other demands on it. What’s more, quite a few of those other demands will be far more urgent than the need to provide consumers with a convenient way to send pictures of kittens to their friends. That stark reality will add to the pressure to monetize internet services, and provide incentives to those who choose to send their kitten pictures by other means.

It’s crucial to remember here, as noted above, that the internet is simply a cheaper and more convenient way of doing things that people were doing long before the first website went live, and a big part of the reason why it’s cheaper and more convenient right now is that internet users are being subsidized by the investors and venture capitalists who are funding the internet industry. That’s not the only subsidy on which the internet depends, though. Along with the rest of industrial society, it’s also subsidized by half a billion years of concentrated solar energy in the form of fossil fuels.  As those deplete, the vast inputs of energy, labor, raw materials, industrial products, and other forms of wealth that sustain the internet will become increasingly expensive to provide, and ways of distributing kitten pictures that don’t require the same inputs will prosper in the resulting competition.

There are also crucial issues of scale. Most pre-internet communications and information technologies scale down extremely well. A community of relatively modest size can have its own public library, its own small press, its own newspaper, and its own radio station running local programming, and could conceivably keep all of these functioning and useful even if the rest of humanity suddenly vanished from the map. Internet technology doesn’t have that advantage. It’s orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than a radio transmitter, not to mention the 14th-century technology of printing presses and card catalogs; what’s more, on the scale of a small community, the benefits of using internet technology instead of simpler equivalents wouldn’t come close to justifying the vast additional cost.

Now of course the world of the future isn’t going to consist of a single community surrounded by desolate wasteland. That’s one of the reasons why the demise of the internet won’t happen all at once. Telecommunications companies serving some of the more impoverished parts of rural America are already letting their networks in those areas degrade, since income from customers doesn’t cover the costs of maintenance.  To my mind, that’s a harbinger of the internet’s future—a future of uneven decline punctuated by local and regional breakdowns, some of which will be fixed for a while.

That said, it’s quite possible that there will still be an internet of some sort fifty years from now. It will connect government agencies, military units, defense contractors, and the handful of universities that survive the approaching implosion of the academic industry here in the US, and it may provide email and a few other services to the very rich, but it will otherwise have a lot more in common with the original DARPAnet than with the 24/7 virtual cosmos imagined by today’s more gullible netheads.

Unless you’re one of the very rich or an employee of one of the institutions just named, furthermore, you won’t have access to the internet of 2065.  You might be able to hack into it, if you have the necessary skills and are willing to risk a long stint in a labor camp, but unless you’re a criminal or a spy working for the insurgencies flaring in the South or the mountain West, there’s not much point to the stunt. If you’re like most Americans in 2065, you live in Third World conditions without regular access to electricity or running water, and you’ve got other ways to buy things, find out what’s going on in the world, find out how to get to the next town and, yes, look at pictures of people with their clothes off. What’s more, in a deindustrializing world, those other ways of doing things will be cheaper, more resilient, and more useful than reliance on the baroque intricacies of a vast computer net.

Exactly when the last vestiges of the internet will sputter to silence is a harder question to answer. Long before that happens, though, it will have lost its current role as one of the poster children of the myth of perpetual progress, and turned back into what it really was all the time: a preposterously complex way to do things most people have always done by much simpler means, which only seemed to make sense during that very brief interval of human history when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap.

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I've commented before in these posts that writing is always partly a social activity. What Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the dance of ideas down the corridors of the centuries, shapes every word in a writer’s toolkit; you can hardly write a page in English without drawing on a shade of meaning that Geoffrey Chaucer, say, or William Shakespeare, or Jane Austen first put into the language. That said, there’s also a more immediate sense in which any writer who interacts with his or her readers is part of a social activity, and one of the benefits came my way just after last week’s post.

That post began with a discussion of the increasingly surreal quality of America’s collective life these days, and one of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Anton Mett—had a fine example to offer. He’d listened to an economic report on the media, and the talking heads were going on and on about the US economy’s current condition of, ahem, “negative growth.” Negative growth? Why yes, that’s the opposite of growth, and it’s apparently quite a common bit of jargon in economics just now.

Of course the English language, as used by the authors named earlier among many others, has no shortage of perfectly clear words for the opposite of growth. “Decline” comes to mind; so does “decrease,” and so does “contraction.” Would it have been so very hard for the talking heads in that program, or their many equivalents in our economic life generally, to draw in a deep breath and actually come right out and say “The US economy has contracted,” or “GDP has decreased,” or even “we’re currently in a state of economic decline”? Come on, economists, you can do it!

But of course they can’t. Economists in general are supposed to provide, shall we say, negative clarity when discussing certain aspects of contemporary American economic life, and talking heads in the media are even more subject to this rule than most of their peers. Among the things about which they’re supposed to be negatively clear, two are particularly relevant here; the first is that economic contraction happens, and the second is that that letting too much of the national wealth end up in too few hands is a very effective way to cause economic contraction. The logic here is uncomfortably straightforward—an economy that depends on consumer expenditures only prospers if consumers have plenty of money to spend—but talking about that equation would cast an unwelcome light on the culture of mindless kleptocracy entrenched these days at the upper end of the US socioeconomic ladder. So we get to witness the mass production of negative clarity about one of the main causes of negative growth.

It’s entrancing to think of other uses for this convenient mode of putting things. I can readily see it finding a role in health care—“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the doctor says, “but your husband is negatively alive;” in sports—“Well, Joe, unless the Orioles can cut down that negative lead of theirs, they’re likely headed for a negative win;” and in the news—“The situation in Yemen is shaping up to be yet another negative triumph for US foreign policy.” For that matter, it’s time to update one of the more useful proverbs of recent years: what do you call an economist who makes a prediction? Negatively right.

Come to think of it, we might as well borrow the same turn of phrase for the subject of last week’s post, the deliberate adoption of older, simpler, more independent technologies in place of today’s newer, more complex, and more interconnected ones. I’ve been talking about that project so far under the negatively mealy-mouthed label “intentional technological regress,” but hey, why not be cool and adopt the latest fashion? For this week, at least, we’ll therefore redefine our terms a bit, and describe the same thing as “negative progress.” Since negative growth sounds like just another kind of growth, negative progress ought to pass for another kind of progress, right?

With this in mind, I’d like to talk about some of the reasons that individuals, families, organizations, and communities, as they wend their way through today’s cafeteria of technological choices, might want to consider loading up their plates with a good hearty helping of negative progress.

Let’s start by returning to one of the central points raised here in earlier posts, the relationship between progress and the production of externalities. By and large, the more recent a technology is, the more of its costs aren’t paid by the makers or the users of the technology, but are pushed off onto someone else. As I pointed out a post two months ago, this isn’t accidental; quite the contrary, as noted in the post just cited, it’s hardwired into the relationship between progress and market economics, and bids fair to play a central role in the unraveling of the entire project of industrial civilization.

The same process of increasing externalities, though, has another face when seen from the point of view of the individual user of any given technology. When you externalize any cost of a technology, you become dependent on whoever or whatever picks up the cost you’re not paying. What’s more, you become dependent on the system that does the externalizing, and on whoever controls that system. Those dependencies aren’t always obvious, but they impose costs of their own, some financial and some less tangible. What’s more, unlike the externalized costs, a great many of these secondary costs land directly on the user of the technology.

It’s interesting, and may not be entirely accidental, that there’s no commonly used term for the entire structure of externalities and dependencies that stand behind any technology. Such a term is necessary here, so for the present purpose,  we’ll call the structure just named the technology’s externality system. Given that turn of phrase, we can restate the point about progress made above: by and large, the more recent a technology is, the larger the externality system on which it depends.

An example will be useful here, so let’s compare the respective externality systems of a bicycle and an automobile. Like most externality systems, these divide up more or less naturally into three categories: manufacture, maintenance, and use. Everything that goes into fabricating steel parts, for instance, all the way back to the iron ore in the mine, is an externality of manufacture; everything that goes into making lubricating oil, all the way back to drilling for the oil well, is an externality of maintenance; everything that goes into building roads suitable for bikes and cars is an externality of use.

Both externality systems are complex, and include a great many things that aren’t obvious at first glance. The point I want to make here, though, is that the car’s externality system is far and away the more complex of the two. In fact, the bike’s externality system is a subset of the car’s, and this reflects the specific historical order in which the two technologies were developed. When the technologies that were needed for a bicycle’s externality system came into use, the first bicycles appeared; when all the additional technologies needed for a car’s externality system were added onto that foundation, the first cars followed. That sort of incremental addition of externality-generating technologies is far and away the most common way that technology progresses.

We can thus restate the pattern just analyzed in a way that brings out some of its less visible and more troublesome aspects: by and large, each new generation of technology imposes more dependencies on its users than the generation it replaces. Again, a comparison between bicycles and automobiles will help make that clear. If you want to ride a bike, you’ve committed yourself to dependence on all the technical, economic, and social systems that go into manufacturing, maintaining, and using the bike; you can’t own, maintain, and ride a bike without the steel mills that produce the frame, the chemical plants that produce the oil you squirt on the gears, the gravel pits that provide raw material for roads and bike paths, and so on.

On the other hand, you’re not dependent on a galaxy of other systems that provide the externality system for your neighbor who drives. You don’t depend on the immense network of pipelines, tanker trucks, and gas stations that provide him with fuel; you don’t depend on the interstate highway system or the immense infrastructure that supports it; if you did the sensible thing and bought a bike that was made by a local craftsperson, your dependence on vast multinational corporations and all of their infrastructure, from sweatshop labor in Third World countries to financial shenanigans on Wall Street, is considerably smaller than that of your driving neighbor. Every dependency you have, your neighbor also has, but not vice versa.

Whether or not these dependencies matter is a complex thing. Obviously there’s a personal equation—some people like to be independent, others are fine with being just one more cog in the megamachine—but there’s also a historical factor to consider. In an age of economic expansion, the benefits of dependency very often outweigh the costs; standards of living are rising, opportunities abound, and it’s easy to offset the costs of any given dependency. In a stable economy, one that’s neither growing nor contracting, the benefits and costs of any given dependency need to be weighed carefully on a case by case basis, as one dependency may be worth accepting while another costs more than it’s worth.

On the other hand, in an age of contraction and decline—or, shall we say, negative expansion?—most dependencies are problematic, and some are lethal. In a contracting economy, as everyone scrambles to hold onto as much as possible of the lifestyles of a more prosperous age, your profit is by definition someone else’s loss, and dependency is just another weapon in the Hobbesian war of all against all. By many measures, the US economy has been contracting since before the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008; by some—in particular, the median and modal standards of living—it’s been contracting since the 1970s, and the unmistakable hissing sound as air leaks out of the fracking bubble just now should be considered fair warning that another round of contraction is on its way.

With that in mind, it’s time to talk about the downsides of dependency.

First of all, dependency is expensive. In the struggle for shares of a shrinking pie in a contracting economy, turning any available dependency into a cash cow is an obvious strategy, and one that’s already very much in play. Consider the conversion of freeways into toll roads, an increasingly popular strategy in large parts of the United States. Consider, for that matter, the soaring price of health care in the US, which hasn’t been accompanied by any noticeable increase in quality of care or treatment outcomes. In the dog-eat-dog world of economic contraction, commuters and sick people are just two of many captive populations whose dependencies make them vulnerable to exploitation. As the spiral of decline continues, it’s safe to assume that any dependency that can be exploited will be exploited, and the more dependencies you have, the more likely you are to be squeezed dry.

The same principle applies to power as well as money; thus, whoever owns the systems on which you depend, owns you. In the United States, again, laws meant to protect employees from abusive behavior on the part of employers are increasingly ignored; as the number of the permanently unemployed keeps climbing year after year, employers know that those who still have jobs are desperate to keep them, and will put up with almost anything in order to keep that paycheck coming in. The old adage about the inadvisability of trying to fight City Hall has its roots in this same phenomenon; no matter what rights you have on paper, you’re not likely to get far with them when the other side can stop picking up your garbage and then fine you for creating a public nuisance, or engage in some other equally creative use of their official prerogatives. As decline accelerates, expect to see dependencies increasingly used as levers for exerting various kinds of economic, political, and social power at your expense.

Finally, and crucially, if you’re dependent on a failing system, when the system goes down, so do you. That’s not just an issue for the future; it’s a huge if still largely unmentioned reality of life in today’s America, and in most other corners of the industrial world as well. Most of today’s permanently unemployed got that way because the job on which they depended for their livelihood got offshored or automated out of existence; much of the rising tide of poverty across the United States is a direct result of the collapse of political and social systems that once countered the free market’s innate tendency to drive the gap between rich and poor to Dickensian extremes. For that matter, how many people who never learned how to read a road map are already finding themselves in random places far from help because something went wrong with their GPS units?

It’s very popular among those who recognize the problem with being shackled to a collapsing system to insist that it’s a problem for the future, not the present.  They grant that dependency is going to be a losing bet someday, but everything’s fine for now, so why not enjoy the latest technological gimmickry while it’s here? Of course that presupposes that you enjoy the latest technological gimmicry, which isn’t necessarily a safe bet, and it also ignores the first two difficulties with dependency outlined above, which are very much present and accounted for right now. We’ll let both those issues pass for the moment, though, because there’s another factor that needs to be included in the calculation.

A practical example, again, will be useful here. In my experience, it takes around five years of hard work, study, and learning from your mistakes to become a competent vegetable gardener. If you’re transitioning from buying all your vegetables at the grocery store to growing them in your backyard, in other words, you need to start gardening about five years before your last trip to the grocery store. The skill and hard work that goes into growing vegetables is one of many things that most people in the world’s industrial nations externalize, and those things don’t just pop back to you when you leave the produce section of the store for the last time. There’s a learning curve that has to be undergone.

Not that long ago, there used to be a subset of preppers who grasped the fact that a stash of cartridges and canned wieners in a locked box at their favorite deer camp cabin wasn’t going to get them through the downfall of industrial civilization, but hadn’t factored in the learning curve. Businesses targeting the prepper market thus used to sell these garden-in-a-box kits, which had seed packets for vegetables, a few tools, and a little manual on how to grow a garden. It’s a good thing that Y2K, 2012, and all those other dates when doom was supposed to arrive turned out to be wrong, because I met a fair number of people who thought that having one of those kits would save them even though they last grew a plant from seed in fourth grade. If the apocalypse had actually arrived, survivors a few years later would have gotten used to a landscape scattered with empty garden-in-a-box kits, overgrown garden patches, and the skeletal remains of preppers who starved to death because the learning curve lasted just that much longer than they did.

The same principle applies to every other set of skills that has been externalized by people in today’s industrial society, and will be coming back home to roost as economic contraction starts to cut into the viability of our externality systems. You can adopt them now, when you have time to get through the learning curve while there’s still an industrial society around to make up for the mistakes and failures that are inseparable from learning, or you can try to adopt them later, when those same inevitable mistakes and failures could very well land you in a world of hurt. You can also adopt them now, when your dependencies haven’t yet been used to empty your wallet and control your behavior, or you can try to adopt them later, when a much larger fraction of the resources and autonomy you might have used for the purpose will have been extracted from you by way of those same dependencies.

This is a point I’ve made in previous posts here, but it applies with particular force to negative progress—that is, to the deliberate adoption of older, simpler, more independent technologies in place of the latest, dependency-laden offerings from the corporate machine. As decline—or, shall we say, negative growth—becomes an inescapable fact of life in postprogress America, decreasing your dependence on sprawling externality systems is going to be an essential tactic.

Those who become early adopters of the retro future, to use an edgy term from last week’s post, will have at least two, and potentially three, significant advantages. The first, as already noted, is that they’ll be much further along the learning curve by the time rising costs, increasing instabilities, and cascading systems failures either put the complex technosystems out of reach or push the relationship between costs and benefits well over into losing-proposition territory. The second is that as more people catch onto the advantages of older, simpler, more sustainable technologies, surviving examples will become harder to find and more expensive to buy; in this case as in many others, collapsing first ahead of the rush is, among other things, the more affordable option.

The third advantage? Depending on exactly which old technologies you happen to adopt, and whether or not you have any talent for basement-workshop manufacture and the like, you may find yourself on the way to a viable new career as most other people will be losing their jobs—and their shirts. As the global economy comes unraveled and people in the United States lose their current access to shoddy imports from Third World sweatshops, there will be a demand for a wide range of tools and simple technologies that still make sense in a deindustrializing world. Those who already know how to use such technologies will be prepared to teach others how to use them; those who know how to repair, recondition, or manufacture those technologies will be prepared to barter, or to use whatever form of currency happens to replace today’s mostly hallucinatory forms of money, to good advantage.

Is it just me, or has the United States taken yet another great leap forward into the surreal over the last few days? Glancing through the news, I find another round of articles babbling about how fracking has guaranteed America a gaudy future as a petroleum and natural gas exporter. Somehow none of these articles get around to mentioning that the United States is a major net importer of both commodities, that most of the big-name firms in the fracking industry have been losing money at a rate of billions a year since the boom began, and that the pileup of bad loans to fracking firms is pushing the US banking industry into a significant credit crunch, but that’s just par for the course nowadays.

Then there’s the current tempest in the media’s teapot, Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. I’ve come to think of Clinton as the Khloe Kardashian of American politics, since she owed her original fame to the mere fact that she’s related to someone else who once caught the public eye. Since then she’s cycled through various roles because, basically, that’s what Famous People do, and the US presidency is just the next reality-TV gig on her bucket list. I grant that there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained from watching this child of privilege, with the help of her multimillionaire friends, posturing as a champion of the downtrodden, but I trust that none of my readers are under the illusion that this rhetoric will amount to anything more than all that chatter about hope and change eight years ago.

Let us please be real: whoever mumbles the oath of office up there on the podium in 2017, whether it’s Clinton or the interchangeably Bozoesque figures currently piling one by one out of the GOP’s clown car to contend with her, we can count on more of the same: more futile wars, more giveaways to the rich at everyone else’s expense, more erosion of civil liberties, more of all the other things Obama’s cheerleaders insisted back in 2008 he would stop as soon as he got into office.  As Arnold Toynbee pointed out a good many years ago, one of the hallmarks of a nation in decline is that the dominant elite sinks into senility, becoming so heavily invested in failed policies and so insulated from the results of its own actions that nothing short of total disaster will break its deathgrip on the body politic.

While we wait for the disaster in question, though, those of us who aren’t part of the dominant elite and aren’t bamboozled by the spectacle du jour might reasonably consider what we might do about it all. By that, of course, I don’t mean that it’s still possible to save industrial civilization in general, and the United States in particular, from the consequences of their history. That possibility went whistling down the wind a long time ago. Back in 2005, the Hirsch Report showed that any attempt to deal with the impending collision with the hard ecological limits of a finite planet had to get under way at least twenty years before the peak of global conventional petroleum reserves, if there was to be any chance of avoiding massive disruptions. As it happens, 2005 also marked the peak of conventional petroleum production worldwide, which may give you some sense of the scale of the current mess.

Consider, though, what happened in the wake of that announcement. Instead of dealing with the hard realities of our predicament, the industrial world panicked and ran the other way, with the United States well in the lead. Strident claims that ethanol—er, solar—um, biodiesel—okay, wind—well, fracking, then—would provide a cornucopia of cheap energy to replace the world’s rapidly depleting reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas took the place of a serious energy policy, while conservation, the one thing that might have made a difference, was as welcome as garlic aioli at a convention of vampires.

That stunningly self-defeating response had a straightforward cause, which was that everyone except a few of us on the fringes treated the whole matter as though the issue was how the privileged classes of the industrial world could maintain their current lifestyles on some other resource base.  Since that question has no meaningful answer, questions that could have been answered—for example, how do we get through the impending mess with at least some of the achievements of the last three centuries intact?—never got asked at all. At this point, as a result, ten more years have been wasted trying to come up with answers to the wrong question, and most of the  doors that were still open in 2005 have been slammed shut by events since that time.

Fortunately, there are still a few possibilities for constructive action open even this late in the game. More fortunate still, the ones that will likely matter most don’t require Hillary Clinton, or any other member of America’s serenely clueless ruling elite, to do something useful for a change. They depend, rather, on personal action, beginning with individuals, families, and local communities and spiraling outward from there to shape the future on wider and wider scales.

I’ve talked about two of these possibilities at some length in posts here. The first can be summed up simply enough in a cheery sentence:  “Collapse now and avoid the rush!”  In an age of economic contraction—and behind the current facade of hallucinatory paper wealth, we’re already in such an age—nothing is quite so deadly as the attempt to prop up extravagant lifestyles that the real economy of goods and services will no longer support. Those who thrive in such times are those who downshift ahead of the economy, take the resources that would otherwise be wasted on attempts to sustain the unsustainable, and apply them to the costs of transition to less absurd ways of living. The acronym L.E.S.S.—“Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation”—provides a good first approximation of the direction in which such efforts at controlled collapse might usefully move.

The point of this project isn’t limited to its advantages on the personal scale, though these are fairly substantial. It’s been demonstrated over and over again that personal example is far more effective than verbal rhetoric at laying the groundwork for collective change. A great deal of what keeps so many people pinned in the increasingly unsatisfying and unproductive lifestyles sold to them by the media is simply that they can’t imagine a better alternative. Those people who collapse ahead of the rush and demonstrate that it’s entirely possible to have a humane and decent life on a small fraction of the usual American resource footprint are already functioning as early adopters; with every month that passes, I hear from more people—especially young people in their teens and twenties—who are joining them, and helping to build a bridgehead to a world on the far side of the impending crisis.

The second possibility is considerably more complex, and resists summing up so neatly. In a series of posts here  in 2010 and 2011, and then in my book Green Wizardry, I sketched out the toolkit of concepts and approaches that were central to the appropriate technology movement back in the 1970s, where I had my original education in the subjects central to this blog. I argued then, and still believe now, that by whatever combination of genius and sheer dumb luck, the pioneers of that movement managed to stumble across a set of approaches to the work of sustainability that are better suited to the needs of our time than anything that’s been proposed since then.

Among the most important features of what I’ve called the “green wizardry” of appropriate tech is the fact that those who want to put it to work don’t have to wait for the Hillary Clintons of the world to lift a finger. Millions of dollars in government grants and investment funds aren’t necessary, or even particularly useful. From its roots in the Sixties counterculture, the appropriate tech scene inherited a focus on do-it-yourself projects that could be done with hand tools, hard work, and not much money. In an age of economic contraction, that makes even more sense than it did back in the day, and the ability to keep yourself and others warm, dry, fed, and provided with many of the other needs of life without potentially lethal dependencies on today’s baroque technostructures has much to recommend it.

Nor, it has to be said, is appropriate tech limited to those who can afford a farm in the country; many of the most ingenious and useful appropriate tech projects were developed by and for people living in ordinary homes and apartments, with a small backyard or no soil at all available for gardening. The most important feature of appropriate tech, though, is that the core elements of its toolkit—intensive organic gardening and small-scale animal husbandry, homescale solar thermal technologies, energy conservation, and the like—are all things that will still make sense long after the current age of fossil fuel extraction has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Getting these techniques into as many hands as possible now is thus not just a matter of cushioning the impacts of the impending era of crisis; it’s also a way to start building the sustainable world of the future right now.

Those two strategies, collapsing ahead of the rush and exploring the green wizardry of appropriate technology, have been core themes of this blog for quite a while now. There’s a third project, though, that I’ve been exploring in a more abstract context here for a while now, and it’s time to talk about how it can be applied to some of the most critical needs of our time.

In the early days of this blog, I pointed out that technological progress has a feature that’s not always grasped by its critics, much less by those who’ve turned faith in progress into the established religion of our time. Very few new technologies actually meet human needs that weren’t already being met, and so the arrival of a new technology generally leads to the abandonment of an older technology that did the same thing. The difficulty here is that new technologies nowadays are inevitably more dependent on global technostructures, and the increasingly brittle and destructive economic systems that support them, than the technologies they replace. New technologies look more efficient than old ones because more of the work is being done somewhere else, and can therefore be ignored—for now.

This is the basis for what I’ve called the externality trap. As technologies get more complex, that complexity allows more of their costs to be externalized—that is to say, pushed onto someone other than the makers or users of the technology. The pressures of a market economy guarantee that those economic actors who externalize more of their costs will prosper at the expense of those who externalize less. The costs thus externalized, though, don’t go away; they get passed from hand to hand like hot potatoes and finally pile up in the whole systems—the economy, the society, the biosphere itself—that have no voice in economic decisions, but are essential to the prosperity and survival of every economic actor, and sooner or later those whole systems will break down under the burden.  Unlimited technological progress in a market economy thus guarantees the economic, social, and/or environmental destruction of the society that fosters it.

The externality trap isn’t just a theoretical possibility. It’s an everyday reality, especially but not only in the United States and other industrial societies. There are plenty of forces driving the rising spiral of economic, social, and environmental disruption that’s shaking the industrial world right down to its foundations, but among the most important is precisely the unacknowledged impact of externalized costs on the whole systems that support the industrial economy. It’s fashionable these days to insist that increasing technological complexity and integration will somehow tame that rising spiral of crisis, but the externality trap suggests that exactly the opposite is the case—that the more complex and integrated technologies become, the more externalities they will generate. It’s precisely because technological complexity makes it easy to ignore externalized costs that progress becomes its own nemesis.

Yes, I know, suggesting that progress isn’t infallibly beneficent is heresy, and suggesting that progress will necessarily terminate itself with extreme prejudice is heresy twice over. I can’t help that; it so happens that in most declining civilizations, ours included, the things that most need to be said are the things that, by and large, nobody wants to hear. That being the case, I might as well make it three for three and point out that the externality trap is a problem rather than a predicament. The difference, as longtime readers know, is that problems can be solved, while predicaments can only be faced. We don’t have to keep loading an ever-increasing burden of externalized costs on the whole systems that support us—which is to say, we don’t have to keep increasing the complexity and integration of the technologies that we use in our daily lives. We can stop adding to the burden; we can even go the other way.

Now of course suggesting that, even thinking it, is heresy on the grand scale. I’m reminded of a bit of technofluff in the Canadian media a week or so back that claimed to present a radically pessimistic view of the next ten years. Of course it had as much in common with actual pessimism as lite beer has with a pint of good brown ale; the worst thing the author, one Douglas Coupland, is apparently able to imagine is that industrial society will keep on doing what it’s doing now—though the fact that more of what’s happening now apparently counts as radical pessimism these days is an interesting point, and one that deserves further discussion.

The detail of this particular Dystopia Lite that deserves attention here, though, is Coupland’s dogmatic insistence that “you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.” That’s a common bit of rhetoric out of the mouths of tech geeks these days, to be sure, but it isn’t even remotely true. I know quite a few people who used to be active on social media and have dropped the habit. I know others who used to have allegedly smart phones and went back to ordinary cell phones, or even to a plain land line, because they found that the costs of excess connectedness outweighed the benefits. Technological downshifting is already a rising trend, and there are very good reasons for that fact.

Most people find out at some point in adolescence that there really is such a thing as drinking too much beer. I think a lot of people are slowly realizing that the same thing is true of connectedness, and of the other prominent features of today’s fashionable technologies. One of the data points that gives me confidence in that analysis is the way that people like Coupland angrily dismiss the possibility. Part of his display of soi-disant pessimism is the insistence that within a decade, people who don’t adopt the latest technologies will be dismissed as passive-aggressive control freaks. Now of course that label could be turned the other way just as easily, but the point I want to make here is that nobody gets that bent out of shape about behaviors that are mere theoretical possibilities. Clearly, Coupland and his geek friends are already contending with people who aren’t interested in conforming to the technosphere.

It’s not just geek technologies that are coming in for that kind of rejection, either. These days, in the town where I live, teenagers whose older siblings used to go hotdogging around in cars ten years ago are doing the same thing on bicycles today. Granted, I live in a down-at-the-heels old mill town in the north central Appalachians, but there’s more to it than that. For a lot of these kids, the costs of owning a car outweigh the benefits so drastically that cars aren’t cool any more. One consequence of that shift in cultural fashion is that these same kids aren’t contributing anything like so much to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or to the other externalized costs generated by car ownership.

I’ve written here already about deliberate technological regression as a matter of public policy. Over the last few months, though, it’s become increasingly clear to me that deliberate technological regression as a matter of personal choice is also worth pursuing. Partly this is because the deathgrip of failed policies on the political and economic order of the industrial world, as mentioned earlier, is tight enough that any significant change these days has to start down here at the grassroots level, with individuals, families, and communities, if it’s going to get anywhere at all; partly, it’s because technological regression, like anything else that flies in the face of the media stereotypes of our time, needs the support of personal example in order to get a foothold; partly, it’s because older technologies, being less vulnerable to the impacts of whole-system disruptions, will still be there meeting human needs when the grid goes down, the economy freezes up, or something really does break the internet, and many of them will still be viable when the fossil fuel age is a matter for the history books.

Still, there’s another aspect, and it’s one that the essay by Douglas Coupland mentioned above managed to hit squarely: the high-tech utopia ballyhooed by the first generation or so of internet junkies has turned out in practice to be a good deal less idyllic, and in fact a good deal more dystopian, than its promoters claimed. All the wonderful things we were supposedly going to be able to do turned out in practice to consist of staring at little pictures on glass screens and pushing buttons, and these are not exactly the most interesting activities in the world, you know. The people who are dropping out of social media and ditching their allegedly smart phones for a less connected lifestyle have noticed this.

What’s more, a great many more people—the kids hotdogging on bikes here in Cumberland are among them—are weighing  the costs and benefits of complex technologies with cold eyes, and deciding that an older, simpler technology less dependent on global technosystems is not just more practical, but also, and importantly, more fun. True believers in the transhumanist cyberfuture will doubtless object to that last point, but the deathgrip of failed ideas on societies in decline isn’t limited to the senile elites mentioned toward the beginning of this post; it can also afflict the fashionable intellectuals of the day, and make them proclaim the imminent arrival of the future’s rising waters when the tide’s already turned and is flowing back out to sea.

It occurred to me the other day that quite a few of the odder features of contemporary American culture make perfect sense if you assume that everybody knows exactly what’s wrong and what’s coming as our society rushes, pedal to the metal, toward its face-first collision with the brick wall of the future. It’s not that they don’t get it; they get it all too clearly, and they just wish that those of us on the fringes would quit reminding them of the imminent impact, so they can spend whatever time they’ve got left in as close to a state of blissful indifference as they can possibly manage.  
 

I grant that this realization probably had a lot to do with the context in which it came to me. I was sitting in a restaurant, as it happens, with a vanload of fellow Freemasons. We’d carpooled down to Baltimore, some of us to receive one of the higher degrees of Masonry and the rest to help with the ritual work, and we stopped for dinner on the way back home. I’ll spare you the name of the place we went; it was one of those currently fashionable beer-and-burger joints where the waitresses have all been outfitted with skirts almost long enough to cover their underwear, bare midriffs, and the sort of push-up bras that made them look uncomfortably like inflatable dolls—an impression that their too obviously scripted jiggle-and-smile routines did nothing to dispell.

Still, that wasn’t the thing that made the restaurant memorable. It was the fact that every wall in the place had television screens on it. By this I don’t mean that there was one screen per wall; I mean that they were lined up side by side right next to each other, covering the upper part of every single wall in the place, so that you couldn’t raise your eyes above head level without looking at one. They were all over the interior partitions of the place, too. There must have been forty of them in one not too large restaurant, each one blaring something different into the thick air, while loud syrupy music spattered down on us from speakers on the ceiling and the waitresses smiled mirthlessly and went through their routines. My burger and fries were tolerably good, and two tall glasses of Guinness will do much to ameliorate even so charmless a situation; still, I was glad to get back on the road.

The thing I’d point out is that all this is quite recent. Not that many years ago, it was tolerably rare to see a TV screen in an American restaurant, and even those bars that had a television on the premises for the sake of football season generally had the grace to leave the thing off the rest of the time. Within the last decade, I’ve watched televisions sprout in restaurants and pubs I used to enjoy, for all the world like buboes on the body of a plague victim: first one screen, then several, then one on each wall, then metastatizing across the remaining space. Meanwhile, along the same lines, people who used to go to coffee shops and the like to read the papers, talk with other patrons, or do anything else you care to name are now sitting in the same coffee shops in total silence, hunched over their allegedly smart phones like so many scowling gargoyles on the walls of a medieval cathedral.

Yes, there were people in the restaurant crouched in the gargoyle pose over their allegedly smart phones, too, and that probably also had something to do with my realization that evening.  It so happens that the evening before my Baltimore trip, I’d recorded a podcast interview with Chris Martenson on his Peak Prosperity show, and he’d described to me a curious response he’d been fielding from people who attended his talks on the end of the industrial age and the unwelcome consequences thereof. He called it “the iPhone moment”—the point at which any number of people in the audience pulled that particular technological toy out of their jacket pockets and waved it at him, insisting that its mere existence somehow disproved everything he was saying.

You’ve got to admit, as modern superstitions go, this one is pretty spectacular.  Let’s take a moment to look at it rationally. Do iPhones produce energy? Nope. Will they refill our rapidly depleting oil and gas wells, restock the ravaged oceans with fish, or restore the vanishing topsoil from the world’s fields? Of course not. Will they suck carbon dioxide from the sky, get rid of the vast mats of floating plastic that clog the seas, or do something about the steadily increasing stockpiles of nuclear waste that are going to sicken and kill people for the next quarter of a million years unless the waste gets put someplace safe—if there is anywhere safe to put it at all? Not a chance. As a response to any of the predicaments that are driving the crisis of our age, iPhones are at best irrelevant.  Since they consume energy and resources, and the sprawling technosystems that make them function consume energy and resources at a rate orders of magnitude greater, they’re part of the problem, not any sort of a solution

Now of course the people waving their iPhones at Chris Martenson aren’t thinking about any of these things. A good case could be made that they’re not actually thinking at all. Their reasoning, if you want to call it that, seems to be that the existence of iPhones proves that progress is still happening, and this in turn somehow proves that progress will inevitably bail us out from the impacts of every one of the predicaments we face. To call this magical thinking is an insult to honest sorcerers; rather, it’s another example of the arbitrary linkage of verbal noises to emotional reactions that all too often passes for thinking in today’s America. Readers of classic science fiction may find all this weirdly reminiscent of a scene from some edgily updated version of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau: “Not to doubt Progress: that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

Seen from a certain perspective, though, there’s a definite if unmentionable logic to “the iPhone moment,” and it has much in common with the metastatic spread of television screens across pubs and restaurants in recent years. These allegedly smart phones don’t do anything to fix the rising spiral of problems besetting industrial civilization, but they make it easier for people to distract themselves from those problems for a little while longer. That, I’d like to suggest, is also what’s driving the metastasis of television screens in the places that people used to go to enjoy a meal, a beer, or a cup of coffee and each other’s company. These days, that latter’s too risky; somebody might mention a friend who lost his job and can’t get another one, a spouse who gets sicker with each overpriced prescription the medical industry pushes on her, a kid who didn’t come back from Afghanistan, or the like, and then it’s right back to the reality that everyone’s trying to avoid. It’s much easier to sit there in silence staring at little colored pictures on a glass screen, from which all such troubles have been excluded.

Of course that habit has its own downsides. To begin with, those who are busy staring at the screens have to know, on some level, that sooner or later it’s going to be their turn to lose their jobs, or have their health permanently wrecked by the side effects their doctors didn’t get around to telling them about, or have their kids fail to come back from whatever America’s war du jour happens to be just then, or the like. That’s why so many people these days put so much effort into insisting as loudly as possible that the poor and vulnerable are to blame for their plight. The people who say this know perfectly well that it’s not true, but repeating such claims over and over again is the only defense they’ve got against the bitter awareness that their jobs, their health, and their lives or those of the people they care about could all too easily be next on the chopping block.

What makes this all the more difficult for most Americans to face is that none of these events are happening in a vacuum.  They’re part of a broader process, the decline and fall of modern industrial society in general and the United States of America in particular. Outside the narrowing circles of the well-to-do, standards of living for most Americans have been declining since the 1970s, along with standards of education, public health, and most of the other things that make for a prosperous and stable society. Today, a nation that once put human bootprints on the Moon can’t afford to maintain its roads and bridges or keep its cities from falling into ruin. Hiding from that reality in an imaginary world projected onto glass screens may be comforting in the short term; the mere fact that realities don’t go away just because they’re ignored does nothing to make this choice any less tempting.

What’s more, the world into which that broader process of decline is bringing us is not one in which staring at little colored pictures on a glass screen will count for much. Quite the contrary, it promises to be a world in which raw survival, among other things, will depend on having achieved at least a basic mastery of one or more of a very different range of skills. There’s no particular mystery about those latter skills; they were, in point of fact, the standard set of basic human survival skills for thousands of years before those glass screens were invented, and they’ll still be in common use when the last of the glass screens has weathered away into sand; but they have to be learned and practiced before they’re needed, and there may not be all that much time left to learn and practice them before hard necessity comes knocking at the door.

I think a great many people who claim that everything’s fine are perfectly aware of all this. They know what the score is; it’s doing something about it that’s the difficulty, because taking meaningful action at this very late stage of the game runs headlong into at least two massive obstacles. One of them is practical in nature, the other psychological, and human nature being what it is, the psychological dimension is far and away the most difficult of the two.

Let’s deal with the practicalities first. The non-negotiable foundation of any meaningful response to the crisis of our time, as I’ve pointed out more than once here, can be summed up conveniently with the acronym L.E.S.S.—that is, Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation. We are all going to have much less of these things at our disposal in the future.  Using less of them now frees up time, money, and other resources that can be used to get ready for the inevitable transformations. It also makes for decreased dependence on systems and resources that in many cases are already beginning to fail, and in any case will not be there indefinitely in a future of hard limits and inevitable scarcities.

On the other hand, using L.E.S.S. flies in the face of two powerful forces in contemporary culture. The first is the ongoing barrage of advertising meant to convince people that they can’t possibly be happy without the latest time-, energy-, and resource-wasting trinket that corporate interests want to push on them. The second is the stark shivering terror that seizes most Americans at the thought that anybody might think that they’re poorer than they actually are. Americans like to think of themselves as proud individualists, but like so many elements of the American self-image, that’s an absurd fiction; these days, as a rule, Americans are meek conformists who shudder with horror at the thought that they might be caught straying in the least particular from whatever other people expect of them.

That’s what lies behind the horrified response that comes up the moment someone suggests that using L.E.S.S. might be a meaningful part of our response to the crises of our age. When people go around insisting that not buying into the latest overhyped and overpriced lump of technogarbage is tantamount to going back to the caves—and yes, I field such claims quite regularly—you can tell that what’s going on in their minds has nothing to do with the realities of the situation and everything to do with stark unreasoning fear. Point out that a mere thirty years ago, people got along just fine without email and the internet, and you’re likely to get an even more frantic and abusive reaction, precisely because your listener knows you’re right and can’t deal with the implications.

This is where we get into the psychological dimension. What James Howard Kunstler has usefully termed the psychology of previous investment is a massive cultural force in today’s America. The predicaments we face today are in very large part the product of a long series of really bad decisions that were made over the last four decades or so. Most Americans, even those who had little to do with making those decisions, enthusiastically applauded them, and treated those who didn’t with no small amount of abuse and contempt. Admitting just how misguided those decisions turned out to be thus requires a willingness to eat crow that isn’t exactly common among Americans these days. Thus there’s a strong temptation to double down on the bad decisions, wave those iPhones in the air, and put a few more television screens on the walls to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay for a little while longer.

That temptation isn’t an abstract thing. It rises out of the raw emotional anguish woven throughout America’s attempt to avoid looking at the future it’s made for itself. The intensity of that anguish can be measured most precisely, I think, in one small but telling point: the number of people whose final response to the lengthening shadow of the future is, “I hope I’ll be dead before it happens.”

Think about those words for a moment. It used to be absolutely standard, and not only in America, for people of every social class below the very rich to work hard, save money, and do without so that their children could have a better life than they had. That parents could say to their own children, “I got mine, Jack; too bad your lives are going to suck,” belonged in the pages of lurid dime novels, not in everyday life. Yet that’s exactly what the words “I hope I’ll be dead before it happens” imply.  The destiny that’s overtaking the industrial world isn’t something imposed from outside; it’s not an act of God or nature or callous fate; rather, it’s unfolding with mathematical exactness from the behavior of those who benefit from the existing order of things.  It could be ameliorated significantly if those same beneficiaries were to let go of the absurd extravagance that characterizes what passes for a normal life in the modern industrial world these days—it’s just that the act of letting go involves an emotional price that few people are willing to pay.

Thus I don’t think that anyone says “I hope I’ll be dead before it happens” lightly. I don’t think the people who are consigning their own children and grandchildren to a ghastly future, and placing their last scrap of hope on the prospect that they themselves won’t live to see that future arrive, are making that choice out of heartlessness or malice. The frantic concentration on glass screens, the bizarre attempts to banish unwelcome realities by waving iPhones in their faces, and the other weird behavior patterns that surround American society’s nonresponse to its impending future, are signs of the enormous strain that so many Americans these days are under as they try to keep pretending that nothing is wrong in the teeth of the facts.

Denying a reality that’s staring you in the face is an immensely stressful process, and the stress gets worse as the number of things that have to be excluded from awareness mounts up. These days, that list is getting increasingly long. Look away from the pictures on the glass screens, and the United States is visibly a nation in rapid decline: its cities collapsing, its infrastructure succumbing to decades of malign neglect, its politics mired in corruption and permanent gridlock, its society frayed to breaking, and the natural systems that support its existence passing one tipping point after another and lurching through chaotic transitions.

Oklahoma has passed California as the most seismically active state in the Union as countless gallons of fracking fluid pumped into deep disposal wells remind us that nothing ever really “goes away.” It’s no wonder that so many shrill voices these days are insisting that nothing is wrong, or that it’s all the fault of some scapegoat or other, or that Jesus or the Space Brothers or somebody will bail us out any day now, or that we’re all going to be wiped out shortly by some colorful Hollywood cataclysm that, please note, is never our fault.

There is, of course, another option.

Over the years since this blog first began to attract an audience, I’ve spoken to quite a few people who broke themselves out of that trap, or were popped out of it willy-nilly by some moment of experience just that little bit too forceful to yield to the exclusionary pressure; many of them have talked about how the initial burst of terror—no, no, you can’t say that, you can’t think that!—gave way to an immense feeling of release and freedom, as the burden of keeping up the pretense dropped away and left them able to face the world in front of them at last.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that a great many more people are going to be passing through that transformative experience in the years immediately ahead. A majority? Almost certainly not; to judge by historical precedents, the worse things get, the more effort will go into the pretense that nothing is wrong at all, and the majority will cling like grim death to that pretense until it drags them under. That said, a substantial minority might make a different choice: to let go of the burden of denial soon enough to matter, to let themselves plunge through those moments of terror and freedom, and to haul themselves up, shaken but alive, onto the unfamiliar shores of the future.

When they get there, there will be plenty of work for them to do. I’ve discussed some of the options in previous posts on this blog, but there’s at least one that hasn’t gotten a detailed examination yet, and it’s one that I’ve come to think may be of crucial importance in the decades ahead. We’ll talk about that next week.

If you’re like most Atlanteans these days, you’ve heard all sorts of unnerving claims about the future of our continent. Some people are even saying that recent earth tremors are harbingers of a cataclysm that will plunge Atlantis to the bottom of the sea. Those old prophecies from the sacred scrolls of the Sun Temple have had the dust blown off them again, adding to the stew of rumors.

So is there anything to it? Should you be worried about the future of Atlantis?

Not according to the experts. I visited some of the most widely respected hierarchs here in the City of the Golden Gates yesterday to ask them about the rumors, and they assured me that there’s no reason to take the latest round of alarmist claims at all seriously.

***

My first stop was the temple complex of black orichalcum just outside the Palace of the Ten Kings, where Nacil Buper, Grand Priestess of the Temple of Night, took time out of her busy schedule to meet with me. I asked her what she thought about the rumors of imminent catastrophe. “Complete and utter nonsense,” she replied briskly. “There are always people who want to insist that the end is nigh, and they can always find something to use to justify that sort of thing. Remember a few years ago, when everyone was running around insisting that the end of the Forty-First Grand Cycle of Time was going to bring the destruction of the world? This is more of the same silliness.”

Just at that moment, the floor shook beneath us, and I asked her about the earth tremors, pointing out that those seem to be more frequent than they were just a few years back.

“Atlantis has always had earthquakes,” the Grand Priestess reminded me, gesturing with her scepter of human bone.  “There are natural cycles affecting their frequency, and there’s no proof that they’re more frequent because of anything human beings are doing. In fact, I’m far from convinced that they’re any more frequent than they used to be. There are serious questions about whether the priests of the Sun Temple have been fiddling with their data, you know.”

“And the claim from those old prophecies that offering human sacrifices to Mu-Elortep, Lord of Evil, might have something to do with it?” I asked. 

“That’s the most outrageous kind of nonsense,” the Grand Priestess replied. “Atlanteans have been worshipping the Lord of Evil for more than a century and a half. It’s one of the foundations of our society and our way of life, and we should be increasing the number of offerings to Mu-Elortep as rapidly as we can, not listening to crazies from the fringe who insist that there’s something wrong with slaughtering people for the greater glory of the Lord of Evil. We can’t do without Mu-Elortep, not if we’re going to restore Atlantis to full prosperity and its rightful place in the world order, and if that means sacrifices have to be made—and it does—then sacrifices need to be made.”

She leaned forward confidentially, and her necklace of infant’s skulls rattled. “You know as well as I do that all this is just another attempt by the Priests of the Sun to dodge their responsibility for their own bad policies. Nobody would care in the least about all these crazy rumors of imminent doom if the Sun Priest Erogla hadn’t made such a fuss about the old prophecies in the scrolls of the Sun Temple a few years back. The Sun Temple’s the real problem we face. Fortunately, though, we of the Temple of Night have a majority in the Council of the Ten Kings now. We’re working on legislation right now to eradicate poverty in Atlantis by offering up the poor to Mu-Elortep in one grand bonfire. Once that’s done, I’m convinced, Atlantis will be on the road to a full recovery.”

***

After my conversation with the Grand Priestess, I went uphill to the foot of the Sacred Mountain, where the Sun Temple rises above the golden-roofed palaces of the Patricians of Atlantis. I had made an appointment to see Tarc Omed, the Hierophant of the Priests of the Sun; he met me in his private chamber, and had his servants pour us purple wine from Valusia as we talked.

“I know the kind of thing you must have heard from the Temple of Night,” the Hierophant said wearily. “It’s all our fault the economy’s in trouble. Everything’s our fault. That’s how they avoid responsibility for the consequences of the policies they’ve been pursuing for decades now.”

I asked him what he thought of Nacil Buper’s claim that offering up the poor as human sacrifices would solve all the problems Atlantis faces these days.

“Look,” he said, “everybody knows that we’ve got to wean ourselves off making human sacrifices to the Lord of Evil one of these days. There’s no way we can keep that up indefinitely, and it’s already causing measurable problems. That’s why we’re proposing increased funding for more sustainable forms of worship directed toward other deities, so we can move step by step to a society that doesn’t have to engage in human sacrifice or deal with Mu-Elortep at all.”

And the ground tremors? Do they have anything to do with the sacrifices?

“That’s a good question. It’s hard to say whether any particular burst of tremors is being caused by the prophesied curse, you know, but that’s no reason for complacency.”

A tremor shook the room, and we both steadied our golden goblets of wine on the table. “Doesn’t that lend support to the rumors that Atlantis might sink soon?” I asked.

Tarc Omed looked weary again, and leaned back in his great chair of gold and ivory. “We have to be realistic,” he said. “Right now, Atlantean society depends on human sacrifice, and transitioning away from that isn’t something we can do overnight. We need to get those more sustainable forms of worship up and running first, and that can’t be done without negotiated compromises and the support of as many stakeholders as possible. Alarmism doesn’t further that.”

I thought of one of the things Nacil Buper had said. “But aren’t the prophecies of doom we’re discussing right there in the sacred scrolls of the Sun Temple?”

“We don’t consider that relevant just now,” the Hierophant told me firmly. “What matters right at the moment is to build a coalition strong enough to take back a majority in the Council of the Ten Kings, stop the Temple of Night’s crazy plan to sacrifice all of the poor to Mu-Elortep, and make sure that human sacrifices are conducted in as painless and sanitary a fashion as possible and increased only at the rate that’s really necessary, while we work toward phasing out human sacrifice altogether. Of course we can’t continue on our current path, but I have faith that Atlanteans can and will work together to stop any sort of worst-case scenario from happening.”

***

From the Temple of the Sun I walked out of the patrician district, into one of the working class neighborhoods overlooking the Old Harbor. The ground shook beneath my feet a couple of times as I went. People working in the taverns and shops looked up at the Sacred Mountain each time, and then went back to their labor. It made me feel good to know that their confidence was shared by both the hierarchs I’d just interviewed.

I decided to do some person-in-the-street interviews for the sake of local color, and stepped into one of the taverns. Introducing myself to the patrons as a reporter, I asked what they thought about the rumors of disaster and the ongoing earth tremors.

“Oh, I’m sure the Priests of the Sun will think of something,” one patron said. I wrote that down on my wax tablet.

“Yeah,” agreed another. “How long have these prophecies been around? And Atlantis is still above water, isn’t it? I’m not worried.”

“I used to believe that stuff back in the day,” said a third patron. “You know, you buy into all kinds of silly things when you’re young and gullible, then grow out of it once it’s time to settle down and deal with the real world.  I sure did.”

That got nods and murmurs of approval all around. “I honestly think a lot of the people who are spreading these rumors actually want Atlantis to sink,” the third patron went on. “All this obsessing about those old prophecies and how awful human sacrifice is—I mean, can we get real, please?”

“You can say that again,” said the second patron. “I bet they do want Atlantis to sink. I bet they’re actually Lemurian sympathizers.”

The third patron turned to look at him.  “You know, that would make a lot of sense—”

Just then another tremor, a really strong one, shook the tavern. The whole room went dead silent for a moment. As the tremor died down, everybody started talking loudly all at once. I said my goodbyes and headed for the door.

As I stopped outside to put my wax tablet into the scribe’s case on my belt, one of the other patrons—a woman who hadn’t said anything—came through the door after me. “If you’re looking for a different point of view,” she told me, “you ought to go down to the Sea Temple. They’ll give you an earful.”

I thanked her, and started downhill toward the Old Harbor.

***

I’d never been to the Sea Temple before; I don’t think most Atlanteans ever go there, though it’s been right there next to the Old Harbor since time out of mind. When I got there, the big doors facing the harbor were wide open, but the place seemed empty; the only sounds were the flapping of the big blue banners above the temple and the cries of sea birds up overhead.

As another tremor rattled the city, I walked in through the open doors. I didn’t see anyone at first, but after a few moments a woman in the blue robes of a Sea Priestess came out of the sanctuary further inside and hurried toward me. She had a basket of scrolls in her arms.

I introduced myself, explained that I was a journalist, and asked if she minded answering some questions.

“Not if you don’t mind walking with me to the harbor,” she said. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“Sure,” I told her. “So what do you think about all these scary rumors? Do you really think Atlantis could end up underwater?”

We left the temple and started across the plaza outside, toward the harbor. “Have you read the prophecies of Emor Fobulc?” she asked me.

“Can’t say I have.”

“They predicted everything that’s happened: the rise of the cult of Mu-Elortep, the sacrifices, the earth tremors, and now the Sign.”

“The what?”

“When’s the last time you looked at the top of the Sacred Mountain?”

I stopped and looked right then. There was a plume of smoke rising from the great rounded peak. After a moment, I hurried to catch up to her.

“That’s the Sign,” she told me. “It means that the fires of Under-Earth have awakened and Atlantis will soon be destroyed.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

I thought about it for a moment as we walked, and the ground shook beneath our feet. “There could be plenty of other explanations for that smoke, you know.”

The priestess looked at me for a long moment. “No doubt,” she said dryly. 

By then we were near the edge of the quay, and half a dozen people came hurrying down the gangplank from a ship that was tied up there, an old-fashioned sailing vessel with a single mast and the prow carved to look like a swan. One of them, a younger priestess, bowed, took the basket of scrolls, and hurried back on board the ship. Another, who was dressed like a mariner, bowed too, and said to the priestess I’d spoken with, “Is there anything else, Great Lady?”

“Nothing,” she said. “We should go.” She turned to me. “You may come with us if you wish.”

“I need to have this story back to the pressroom before things shut down this afternoon,” I told her. “Are you going to be coming back within two hours or so?”

I got another of her long silent looks. “No,” she said. “We’ll be much longer than that.”

“Sorry, then—I hate to turn down a cruise, but work is work.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that, and the others more or less bundled her up the gangplank onto the ship. A couple of sailors untied the cables holding the ship against the quay and then climbed on board before it drifted away. A few minutes later the ship was pulling out into the Old Harbor; I could hear the oarsmen belowdecks singing one of their chanteys while the sailors climbed aloft and got the sail unfurled and set to the breeze.

After a few more minutes, I turned and started back up the hill toward the middle of town. As I climbed the slope, I could see more and more of the City of the Golden Gates around me in the afternoon sun: the Palace of the Ten Kings with the Temple of Night beside it, the Sun Temple and the golden roofs of the patricians’ palaces higher up the slope. The ground was shaking pretty much nonstop, but I barely noticed it, I’d gotten so used to the tremors.

The view got better as I climbed. Below, the Old Harbor spread out to one side and the New Harbor to the other. Next to the New Harbor was the charnel ground of Elah-Slio, where smoke was rising from the altars and long lines of victims were being driven forward with whips to be offered up as sacrifices to Mu-Elortep; off the other way, beyond the Old Harbor, I spotted twenty or so sails in the middle distance, heading away from Atlantis, and the ship with the priestess on it hurrying to join them.

That’s when it occurred to me that the Sea Priestess couldn’t have been serious when she said that Atlantis would soon be destroyed. Surely, if the prophecies were true, the Sea Priestesses would have had more important things to do than go on some kind of long vacation cruise. I laughed at how gullible I’d been there for a moment, and kept climbing the hill into the sunlight.

Above the Sacred Mountain, the cloud of smoke had gotten much bigger, and it looked as though some kind of red glow was reflecting off the bottom of it. I wondered what that meant, but figured I’d find out from the news soon enough. It certainly made me feel good to know that there was no reason whatever to worry about the far-fetched notion that Atlantis might end up at the bottom of the sea.