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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   21611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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No, I don't think institutions are "perfectly stable" — practically the opposite — but that they are indeed "practically invincible" against takeover by human forces. There aren't "literally 0 remaining possibilities," there's one and only one inevitable possibility — that they eventually collapse utterly. But there's a lot of ruin in a nation, the market can remain irrational…, et cetera, et cetera, so I expect them to keep the plates spinning for at least a generation or two. It's why many of the people in circles on the right I interact with have given up on any politics other than "Benedict Option" style 'have a bunch of kids and pass on as much of our values and knowledge to them as we can, in hopes that they'll do the same, and their kids the same, until, eventually after the collapse has finished and the depths of the new dark age are here, our descendants are better prepared for the task of rebuilding.

Except that I expect the regime to increasingly resemble a star entering it's red giant days, expanding and engulfing more and more around it as it dies, consuming more and more civilizational "seed corn" to prop itself up. Thus, when it goes, even if our species manages to survive the resulting conflicts at all, I expect the collapse to do so much damage to civilizational infrastructure both tangible and intangible, to knock the planet so far back that, due to the Industrial Revolution being a once-per-planet event (due to depletion of the non-renewable "low-hanging fruit" resources accessible at positive EROI with 1500s technology), we will simply never recover. That, as someone on a podcast recently put it, the machines in The Matrix were right that the late 90's were the absolute peak of human civilization — and that we have no hope whatsoever of attaining such heights ever again. That there's nothing in the future to look forward to, only irreversible decline into a Dark Age that only ends with humanity's eventual extinction.

(Of course, I've encountered some people on the far-right who think this is a great outcome, because 1500s technology and economies cannot support much Progressivism, and therefore giving up for all time things like electricity, running water, medicine that works, having less than 90% of your population engaged in back-breaking farm labor, etc. is a small price to pay to "own the libs" forever, but I don't agree with them.)

Thus, when it goes, even if our species manages to survive the resulting conflicts at all, I expect the collapse to do so much damage to civilizational infrastructure both tangible and intangible, to knock the planet so far back that, due to the Industrial Revolution being a once-per-planet event (due to depletion of the non-renewable "low-hanging fruit" resources accessible at positive EROI with 1500s technology), we will simply never recover. That, as someone on a podcast recently put it, the machines in The Matrix were right that the late 90's were the absolute peak of human civilization — and that we have no hope whatsoever of attaining such heights ever again.

Toby Ord takes an axe to this argument in The Precipice; I'll summarise with some of my own points as well.

  1. Metals and similar are only non-renewable while they're in use. If there's a collapse, the ruins are themselves now mines - indeed, better mines than we've had for a long time.
  2. In a lot of cases with fossil fuel, the work to render it accessible is already done and won't be undone. An open-cut mine, for instance, is not going away; the resource is at the surface now. Plenty of open-cut coal mines in Australia. Moreover, you don't really need these for anything except making plastic, due to renewables and to some extent even uranium (see below).
  3. Phosphate... okay, that's a thing, but there are still decent amounts of it and it is renewable on a much-shorter timescale than fossil fuels.
  4. Remember that the Industrial Revolution required that the 1.0 version of machines be useful. A rediscovery doesn't need that, because the knowledge of how to build much-more-efficient machines will not be lost (I'm very confident of that; there was literally one technology actually lost in the fall of Rome i.e. Roman concrete). Even if it were, people would at least know it was possible, which is half the issue.

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