The Four Obstructions

(the title is an obscure reference to the lars van trier film, which I liked, but you may ignore otherwise…)

okay, so moving along with our fractal future meanderings:

Since we haven’t really altered our four first premises, we’ll proceed with them. Once again, in each instance, we will briefly articulate a clear best case/worst case, so as to combine them iteratively farther along. The hows and whys change from scenario to scenario, so we won’t go into that too much here.

First variable: Population

Best case- the slow increase of education and economic opportunities for the poor, along with rising living standards and medicine, continue to contribute to an overall negative trend in birthrate. Population tops out around 10 billion in the middle of the century and starts to decline gradually as we reel in our reproductive habits. By 2100 we’re back down to 8 billion and on our way to 6 or lower in the next century.

Worst case- global anxiety and uncertainty continues to undermine living standards to the point where people do not reign in reproduction, and in fact speed it up. Population continues to grow exponentially, until we hit 12 billion by mid century, putting outrageous pressure on our resource base. By 2100 the global standard of living per person is somewhere around that of a present day Chinese peasant farmer, and there aint much room left.

Second variable: Climate

Best case- things stay pretty stable overall. We in fact are overdue for a cooling period and our current hot spell is a blip. Global warming hysteria is replaced by global cooling hysteria ( as it was in the 70’s ), and we start expelling co2 flagrantly all over again, in hopes of stopping us all from freezing to death, supposedly.

Worst case- ‘the day after tomorrow’ scenario. Turns out it’s not co2 that’s the problem, it’s methane, which is a lot harder to track and control than co2, and has a much greater impact on global warming. The temperature shift tips the balance of fresh water in the oceans, and causes a global catastrophe as the atlantic conveyor stops bringing warm air to northern europe, plunging it into an ice age. Super-storms proliferate wildly, and the gulf of mexico turns into a permanent hurricane disaster area, fit only for refugees and madmen. All coastal areas go swimming.

Third variable: Energy

Best case- Whether by zero-point, nuclear fusion, steorn perpetual motion machines, or nano engineered solar, energy becomes so cheap that charging for it makes no sense. Everyone has all the electricity they need, and most other resource related problems fall into line behind this. Standards of living rise astronomically, and the world buys a coke.

Worst case- the olduvai cliff. through a combination of peak oil and gas, diminishing returns on technology and thermodynamic constraints, per-capita energy use continues to decline, until rolling blackouts become the norm, leading to permanent blackouts by the late 21st century. Some pockets of energy use remain, but they too are subject to the same diminishing returns on a fractal scale. Shit happens, grow some soybeans.

Fourth variable: Technology

Best case- A positive singularity. Explosive growth in computing power, biotech and nanotech render us superintelligent, telepathic and functionally immortal. We restore the earth to an edenic state, (because we can) and spend our time either exploring virtual words, or venturing into the universe at large.

Worst case- A negative singularity. Same as above, just minus any compassion, love, or human values. A planet full of godlike immortal psychopaths, and genocidal AI’s who want to turn baseline humans into fertiliser. Alternately, a bioengineered global pandemic kills everyone, or the grey goo scenario converts the earth into food for rogue nanomachines. A scenario where technology simply sputters out falls under the olduvai cliff, above.

…so in our next installment, we start to spin these together and see what comes out.

the octagonal dipyramid at the end of history…

Well, seeing as how I’m on another futurism kick lately, I thought we’d play a little game, suggested by the laboritarian.

It’s rather simple: we pick a few of the most important variables that effect the future. Let’s say four, for the sake of brevity. I’m prepared to entertain others, but for our purposes I’d say the big four for this century are energy, technology, population and climate. You may come up with a different or more nuanced list, but I’m willing to say that those others are mostly, and will mostly, be determined by the first four. I’d say politics and economics are more a function of energy and technolgy than determinants in and of themselves, for instance.

In each case we come up with a best case and worst case scenario. Lets say for energy, the best case scenario is limitless free energy from some magnetic Steorn widget or some-such, or simply another middle east found under the hills of Wichita, or something. The worst case is the peak oil and gas hypothesis, specifically the olduvai gorge thesis, which more or less states that the lifespan of industrialised civilisation is 100 years. After which we cascade down a thermodynamic cliff into the stone age. We repeat this best case/ worst case for all the chosen variables.

Now if we do this just once it’s kind of digital, and one dimensional. If we apply two variables simultaneously we end up with a grid of four possible futures. And if we include four variables, which I think are the minimum to even begin to apprehend the scope of complexity available to us, we have 2×2x2×2= 16 possible futures.

So before we start, I’m prepared to hear out some thoughts on what other, more pressing variables might be, and if they’re radically different than these, some thoughts on what a best/worst case might consist of…

Otherwise, let the fractal chaos commence!

Into the Vortex

It’s only the end of the world again, part the third.

I’m wired to the world
That’s how I know everything
I’m superbrain
That’s how they made me

Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia

-Goldfrapp

Okay. So far we’ve had the catastrophic dissolution of society as we know it, followed by the dissipative reformation into a post gibsonian neo tribalist global garage sale.

This isn’t even science fiction, really. All you’re doing is playing out what’s already happened in places like the sudan or the former soviet union on a global scale.

All I’ve really added is the ( possibly baseless ) assumption that while many, perhaps even most, human beings are too fucking stupid to think their way out of a dead end of innovation such as our current society represents, quite a few are in fact smart enough. The whole anarcho primitivist position that we’re returning to the dark ages because of diminishing returns in social complexity only holds water if you presume that NOBODY on earth is able to come up with a working idea. Doubtful. We figured a way through the fucking ice age dude. Several of them actually. We bootstrapped our way up from flint cobbles to spaceflight. Take a chill pill and face facts. Humans are smart.

Which is really the point of our final installement. If you look at history, at least from a material standpoint, one thing is quite clear: we have been engaged in what mark pesce would call the progressive ingression of intelligence into matter. We have, essentially, been projecting our minds into the material strata of the word, with ever increasing scope and resolution, from bashing rocks to moving single atoms with lasers. The physical world becomes projection of the mind. And hence, when a new mind comes into this world, it is programmed by the assumptions that we have built into our environment from the ground on up. It’s mcluhan again. It’s all a medium, and it shapes us a surely as we shape it.

You could think of the first cities, or even the first cave art displays as a kind of virtual reality. An intentionally created environment that reflects the contents of mental perception. In spite of all that, our minds have remained more or less our minds as they’ve always been. We’ve completely reformatted the material backdrop, but our organic substrate is pretty much the same as it was when we were dragging an elk carcass over the hill from the paleolithic grassland where we brought it down with our spear.

And in some circles there seems to be the assumption that this is going to carry on right up until we gain complete control of our genetic code, followed shortly by our nanotechnological control of single atoms, until we have the power to turn the entire universe into a reflection of our same old paleolithic hunter gatherer brains.

And this is where transhumanists tend to gap out, because they have no answer to whether it’s a good thing to give million year old killer monkey brains unlimited power. To them, it’s all a question of processing speed, pattern recognition, bandwidth, and computational substrates. The ghost in the machine is a complete mystery.

From the mcluhan perspective, these technologies would be just like any other. Assimilated uncritically, they plunge us into the same unconscious relationship you have with your car or your television, only more pervasive and more utterly invisible to us.

And this is a huge issue, the issue of consciousness. We weren’t, by and large, aware of how language affected our minds, nor writing, nor printing, nor anything else for that matter. It’s our tragic blindspot. We just assume that the ghost in the machine does whatever it is that it’s been doing all along.

But of course that’s not true. When we check out, or at least allow ourselves to forget our awareness of things, we hand ourselves over to deeply ingrained patterns of unconscious habit. And as we’ve discussed elsewhere, these patterns that step in when we step out, are not always in our best individual interest. Further more, they are often much more complex than we would like to admit.

It’s the difference between superintelligence and superconsciousness. Between a technical genius and a zen master. One is an engine built for speed and power, and the other is built for internal transparency and reflective awareness. They are not the same thing and never have been. One does not lead to the other, necessarily. Actually, the tendency is for a real genius to have no idea how he or she does what they do. That’s the very definition of unconsciousness.

For example, you may have heard the adage about ‘it’s steam engines when it’s steam engine time’ ? A lot of major inventions have come about from multiple unconnected sources simultaneously. We have no explanation for that, except maybe that certain ideas emerge at the prompting of some higher order pattern in our collective unconscious. So, at the end of the day, the superbrains jump to the same tune as all the rest of us.

Which is all fine, if you don’t mind our species being steered by a self reinforcing swarm logic that spits out innovations on schedule. We become a howard bloom-esque global superorganism run by archetypal software, while any given one of us is a sleeping ant in the ant hill.

But I’m going to presume that ‘any given one of us’ is a bit of a issue, when that given one is you, or me.

Because that pattern protects itself fiercely. It operates on a time table of millenia, and a scale of billions. It doesn’t give a shit about who gets plugged into the swarm. Individual life is cheap and these archetypal cycles swap players in and out like disposable cogs. And any cog that threatens to wake up is a potential danger to the system.

You may be thinking my ‘future time line’ has jumped the fuckin’ tracks just now, but here’s the point: because we’re getting to that point where the end of our current cycle is about to come down on us like an axe. Our unconsciously constructed machine is about to fling itself over the cliff and take us all back to the middle ages till we get it together to try again.

Because it’s an interesting paradox: the overall drift is towards higher consciousness, greater reflection, deeper insight. One need look no further than the works of ken wilber and spiral dynamics for an illustration of this phenomena. But there seems to be a safety mechanism to make sure the rousing monkeys don’t abort the biosphere with their crazy monkey tools. We walk this tightrope between the telos that drags us to a singularity of transcendant hyperconsciousness, and the failsafe that will cut our legs out if we aren’t quite ready to leave the nest. Kind of like a really tough parent confiscating your car keys. You have to prove you can stand on your own, and part of proving that is toppling the scary parent figure who keeps you down. They want you to succeed in the end but they have to make it hard enough that you will learn to survive. And if you can’t hack it, they beat you down, for your own good.

In a nutshell that’s the future; we’re stepping up to take a run at our species rite of passage. We may have already fucked this up and been beaten down before. So long ago we don’t remember, in fact. But here we are again, tools in hand, and brains frothing with millenia of yogic hypertech that we’re not quite sure we know how to use.

And in our path are the archetypal scary parents: Chronus and Absu, Kali and Tiamat. The dragon Sorat, and his twin arms, Lucifer and Ahriman.

All the weird catastrophic fractal complexity up till this point is just the roiling surface of the ocean, as these archetypal leviathans heave themselves up into our view.

In more nuts and bolts human terms, this is what we mean when we talk about the counter initiation. It’s this ongoing backlash against our own process of waking up. It’s the dreaming machine with it’s boot on our necks, and this is when it will show it’s true face.

Most singularity theorists aim for the point when some kind of AI or machine human interface produces a kind of hyperintelligence that tips over the apple cart of human history. The more plausible figures place this event somewhere around the mid to late twenty-first century. But again they’re missing their own blind spot. Long before we have functional AI or universal assemblers or even physical immortality through genetics, we’ll have the capability to make permanent changes to that million year old monkey brain, and those changes will emanate through the material world in turn, and that reformatted world will shape the minds that exist in that medium. In short, the dynamic that has existed since the dawn of humanity will suddenly reverse. Instead of our minds shaping our tools and environment, the tools will now have the power to shape our minds, irrevocably and totally.

This is the real promise and the real danger. No matter how fucked up things have gotten here, our brains are still our brains and every human has essentially the same hardware, and the same potential.

But what happens when the counter initiation gets the ability to hardwire you into some permanent dead-end bliss state that you neither care to leave nor have the wiring to even do so anyway? Your fluid transcendent non material consciousness is untouchable, sure, but even the Buddha in a hopelessly hobbled brain can’t do much. If you’re too zonked by endorphins and frontal lobe reformatting to experience suffering, there’s not much chance you’ll give a damn about ‘enlightenment’ especially when the reality priesthood has told you you’re already enlightened anyway, just like everyone else.

But conversely, there is also the avenue to modify our brains to give us more flexibility, greater potential for consciousness, more room to move. There’s nothing written in stone that human brains have to be wired exactly the way they are. Suppose we had a corpus collosum three times the size of the one we have now? What would you do with that level of hemispheric integration? Or suppose you could shut your predatory lizard brain on and off at will?

And this is the rub. You have the tools to control everything you think and feel. Who holds the controls? I don’t mind modifying my own brain, but I sure as shit don’t want anyone else doing it. And I want the option to reverse it, obviously.

Long before the predicted takeoff point of singularity technology, this question will become the real issue. We’re talking fairly simple single gene manipulations and dead easy brain implants. This could probably, and is probably, being done now. But when it becomes a mass scale phenomena, you’ll have these two massive attractors coming into view; self modifying towards hyperconsciousness, and top down modification towards totally gridlocked hyperconditioning. Anyone subjected to the latter becomes an essentially permanent cog in the global hyperbrain as it spins out it’s archetypal program.

That’s the real singularity, the point beyond which no real prediction is possible, and it’s nature is much different than anyone is imagining. This battle has almost certainly happened before, in some form, on some smaller scale, but now the tools exist to make the victory for one or another all but permanent. Either the dragon devours us and casts us into permanent virtual la la land, a headfucked-drone borg swarm as we lift off into interstellar locust mode… or we unleash the holy guardian angel en masse. The inner genius in us all unchained forever, and set free to make art in this world and all the others, all the way up and down the spiral.

I doubt it will be all or nothing, only nearly so. In the former case it may be tens of thousands of years before one of those headfucked borg drones pulls a Gotama Siddharta and starts the whole thing over again. In the latter, there’s always the chance some new life that we create will take a wrong turn and kick off a new cycle of unconscious pathology, or maybe our transcendent hypercivilisation will fall into some kind of decline and ennui as we get too lazy to network our awakened consciousness efficiently enough to stave off the dragon’s resurgence.

I don’t think there is a final solution, in either case. Only the long game. The real story is always your own, and the ending is what you make it.

Full Spectrum Catastrophe

It’s Only the End of the World, Again: part the second
or;
watch zac calculate innumerable factors and lose his shit completely
_____

As we move past playing out the contradictions in the existing system, it becomes harder to make broad stroke predictions, as the driving forces that take over favour the individual and their actions, as opposed to large bodies such as governments. Indeed, governments will be beginning to unravel at exponential speeds, leaving many people to determine the course of their own lives for the first time.

First, We need to pause to talk about technology for a minute, because by 2011 or so, we’re getting to the sharp turn in the exponential growth curve of computing, biology and a whole host of other things you have new driving forces taking over, namely the individual, empowered by technology vs central authority vs the drive towards decentralisation

A lot of the tension I talked about in terms of the 20th century related to the way technology changed the power relations between the government and the individual. From the printing press, the telegraph, telephone, radio, mass media, and free education, centralised power has been playing catch up to the individual breaking out into new spaces and only just keeping up. and that’s only because we’ve been in the slow part of the curve. It’s happened so slowly that you can forget about the separation of church and state, the growth of literacy and social consciousness, even the idea of rulers being accountable to the ‘public’ is a result of the printing press, for example.

Do you suppose the elites want to tap dance around things like hurricane katrina, and abu ghraib? Of course they don’t, but technology won’t permit them to avoid it. The upheavals of the 1960’s we’re a fore-shock of what happens when you educate a whole generation of first world youth up to a high standard. The rest of the century had been the oligarchical backlash from the unexpected consequences of universal education. And that worked, up to a point, because everyone was still mostly dependant on the central government for structure and direction. A lot of millennial culture is a kind of ironic wallowing in that climate of imposed ignorance and misinformation. But again, that can’t last, nor will it.

For that reason, the principles that hold true are going to be the ones that relate to the way individuals react to change, because things will change, often and significantly.

In the case of major changes you have three general paths it can take for a person; there are those who will embrace the new reality, those who will reject it, and those who either don’t comprehend, or don’t notice it at all.

For example in the case of september 11 you have dramatic polarisation between those who recognise the changes that event wrought on the social, political, and moral landscape, those who see it only as a threat to the status quo, whose implications are to be fought and resisted, and those who don’t really see that anything has changed, except maybe an upping of the intensity of an already existing dynamic.

The neoconservatives have made off like bandits by embracing the post 911 reality, arguably because they helped engineer it in the first place. Meanwhile knowledgeable activists who understand that something like this represents a watershed loss of legitimacy for the United states government and it’s covert policy implementation, have also embraced this new situation at least insofar as it affects the planning they have to implement to lead their lives, and survive into the future.

The greater mass of activists fall into the category of those who go into hysterics over the outrageous excesses of the bush administration, and want everything to go back to the halcyon days of bill clinton and cruise missiles over kosovo, or something. Or they’ve already dug their heels in over 90’s globalisation or nuclear power and would like us to run back the clock to the paleolithic era. Not that ideas like this lack all merit, but it’s clear in many cases that this represents a failure to grasp the true dynamics of the situation.

And lastly some people remain clueless. Things are just as lovely or fucked up as they have ever been and the only change has been a slight shift in the level of loveliness or fucked-up-ness. It’s either the latest battle in the noble struggle to maintain the status quo, or the latest outrage perpetrated by the corrupt bastards who have always run things and probably always will. In either case, nothing to take your mind off what you were already doing, at least not for long.

Now that’s just one example, and for most of the 20th century, these epochal changes tended to be few and far between and easy to overlook for the most part until you were already swimming in them. And that’s fine, but the 21st isn’t going to be like that. It isn’t going to be a major war or catastrophe or technological innovation every ten years or so that you succeed in getting your head around or not. It’ll be one every 2 or 3 years, then every year, then every 6 months, then every time you care to look there will be some radical redefinition of your status quo… IF you’re still willing to look at it, which is the key point.

So really the only question that matters is how much rapid change can any particular person handle before they shut down their awareness of the outside world completely, and go into some self generated cocoon? Before too long technology will make it utterly feasible for the average person to retreat entirely into video games, virtual sex, torrented entertainment and instant messaging. If you have a job at all, you’ll be working from your home, thanks to telepresence technologies, and thus there will be no reason to leave it all.

Or at the very least you can fuck off to the countryside and dig a well while things continue to cascade out of control without you. Sadly a lot of primitivists or eco conservatives imagine that when they finally do opt out of the future, then everyone else will have to as well, for the exact same reasons they have, but it just aint true and never has been. It will be true for a lot of people in a lot of places, just like it is right now, but it will never be true everywhere, or even most places.

By way of illustration, lets consider the global milieu a bit. As the slow dwindling of energies and the concomitant destruction of delivery infrastructure by guerrilla warfare and systemic decay marches on, you’ll have a playing out of the no-go zone effect. As the central authorities start to lose the ability to project force and/or deliver services, certain regions will progressively and quietly be dubbed expendable and chucked out of the exit hatch of global monoculture and mass media spectacular discourse. While those that remain will circle the wagons and turn in on themselves.

These lost regions will be treated much like the aftermath of hurricane katrina, or a modern day slum of any stripe. If you happen to live in one of these places, one day the cops and soldiers will stop showing up, the rolling blackouts will start, ( if they haven’t already) , and then become permanent as the utility conglomerates amalgamate and reallocate resources, the local utility company having long since been privatised and gutted. Around the same time the local wallmart will fold up, along with the big grocery store chain, and anything else that relies on trucking or air traffic to supply.

And then what? Then nothing. If you’re still there, they’ll assume it’s your choice to live off the grid and forget about you. You could complain but there won’t be anyone to complain to. You won’t be able to drive anywhere to talk to someone in authority and they wouldn’t be able to do jack shit anyway. And besides, travel in anything but large well armed groups will quickly be an invitation to opportunistic bandit gangs to have their way with you. The public disgrace to the local government will be efficiently ignored and your options will be either shut the fuck up and deal with it, or pull up stakes for somewhere where nobody wants you and nobody has much sympathy left to go around.

On the plus side while you probably won’t be able to fill your gas tank very often, you and everyone you know will already have a number of extremely small, cheap and powerful computing devices on your person at all times, connected by essentially free wireless broadband, and powered by efficient integrated solar panels. If you’re not in the satellite footprint for connectivity you won’t have to go far to do so from a tower. Anything you care to know about pretty much anything will be distributed massively, instantly and for free. Interactive courseware from the major universities will be available to the poorest of the poor, and pretty much everyone who cares to do so will be a producer of culture and media. Any significant event will be broadcast around the world instantly to anyone who cares to know about it. Employers will encourage you to work from your home, to save money and fuel, and most people will be spending a lot of time downloading information on how to grow food and cultivate local economies. High end voice recognition software will make text creation faster than ever. Massively parallel computing will make it possible for anyone with a internet connection to access absurd levels of computational power, such as sequencing a genome in a matter of days, or generating totally lifelike graphics and sound. A lot of fucking power for the individual basically. if you can handle it.

If you’re not living in one of the disappeared no-go zones you’ll be in one of two places probably. On the one hand you have the sustainable ecovillage, where most of the food will eventually be grown. Shoveling horeshit and growing really bitchin tomatoes while the world races toward a technological singularity or something. And they’re not necessarily exclusive either; a lot of people will be picking tomatoes by day and fucking a virtual monica bellucci and/or orlando bloom at night.

The other trend will be for those who have the money to do so, to withdraw into either densly popluated urban centers full of heavily armed cops and soldiers, fed by tributary croplands and urban gardens, or to smaller walled enclaves protected by even more heavily armed private security and fed by still more more tributary croplands.

Said croplands will be administered by the poor and former middle class, who will have decanted there to ‘get back to the land’, only to find that you have to contend with gangs, bandits, starving mobs, and the extortion efforts of the local military outpost. The federal, or even state level government having lost the ability to do much of anything of note, except to maintain the illusion that a singular country is still a reality.

As ghastly and unthinkable as all this sounds, it won’t seem very different to most people. A lot have already checked out of understanding or acknowledging what’s happening around them. Almost by definition the clueless segment of the population have already done that. Don’t know, don’t need to know. Once you jump off the ride, it’s hard to get back on. The same kind of people who don’t notice the erosion of civil liberties now, probably still won’t 10 years from now.

Most americans are terrified of random violence already, and used to the encroaching presence of cops and gangs. Whereas the fear was mostly imaginary before, it will now be an accepted fact of life. The people who are really shit out of luck won’t be the ones in the cities, who will remain insulated in their urban paranoia, or the the ones in the country who who will live pretty much the same way feudal serfs have always lived… it will be the people in the fringes. The ones who don’t hold productive land, who don’t live next to a nuclear reactor or port that needs protection, but rather live in some godforsaken hellhole suburb that merits no protection, no resource delivery and sits next to nothing in the way of water or growing plants. Like phoenix, or las vegas. Or maybe you’re the wretched rabble who cling to the old highways, hoping to hijack a supply truck, or waylay some travellers, or raise chickens on wasted scrubland and try to keep the coyotes away.

In every case, you’ll probably still be able to tune in cnn or fox to find out how you favorite political or celebrity scandal is going, or torrent up the latest episode of your favorite cable tv show.

Eventually pretty much everyone who isn’t actively working to adapt and change with the times, or actively fighting it, will have opted out of any meaningful interaction with the future.

…and so it will go, in the ‘civilised’ world.

Meanwhile WW III will still be going on, but it will have mutated into open source tribal slaughter ver3.0. Sunnis will be killing Shiites, rich will be killing poor, races ( however loosely defined) will be killing other races, and any pretext for resentment will be followed by an AK-47 and some improvised explosives. This shit will spread everywhere that it can spread to. The unraveling of governments and resource distribution. and the poor state of the underlying social fabric in many post-colonial countries will make sure of it.

Not that the ‘developed world’ is off the hook either. Most of those countries will be going through a succession of military coups, conservative/luddite/fundamentalist political backlashes, and varying degrees of armed insurgency/domestic terrorism/civil war. Most of this shit will be fuelled by fear, rank stupidity and dashed expectations of the first world citizen to maintain their first world lifestyles without disruption.

As strange as it sounds in a global state of affairs like this one, innovation and technical progress doesn’t slow down. It actually speeds up. A lot. As we’ve said there will always remain pockets of well protected industrial and technical capacity to plug away at the usual obsessions and these will be the last things to lose resources or funding. Do you think they’re going to quit funding DARPA because poor people are starving and lightless? Yeah whatever. They’ll be rushing to perfect targeted bioweapons, microwave crowd suppression technology, and brain implants for soldiers.

And in the fringes things will be going faster and faster as well. As connectivity through computers accelerates, and legal restrictions lose efficacy, you also have the global fire sale as technical equipment from corporations and universities is ‘lost’ in the shuffle and ends up in someone’s basement. You’ll be able to trade a truckload of potatoes for several million dollars worth of gene-sequencing or nano engineering equipment. This stuff will only get smaller, cheaper and more energy efficient as time goes on, after all.

Eventually you’ll have numerous pockets of advanced technical capability running without any oversight or central authority supervising them. When it becomes possible for anyone to engage in virtual dialouge with experts all over the world in many fields anonymously, on all kinds of terms and for all kinds of reasons, things will get very strange very quickly.

Certainly, as just one example, psychedelic subcultures will have a field day in semi-tribal enclaves where you can use lab-grade facilities to mass produce dmt or ayahuasca analogues for whatever purpose. Drug use in general isn’t exactly going to fade away either. In many ways the future will be quite drug-friendly, saturated with dirt cheap crystal meth, lsd or heroin.

In some ways this period can and will be thought of as a dark age, because a lot of what goes on will never be known about by much of the world. Not for lack of communication bandwidth, but simply because everyone will be too immersed in their own concerns to care what someone else is doing. Material life will take on a character of hardship, austerity,and occasional brutality, as people rapidly cobble together piecemeal answers to local resource problems. Meanwhile people’s private lives will be exploding in diversity and strangeness, as escapism and outlet, and playground for creativity where lack of energy and materials makes no difference. Most people will have entire alternate virtual lives, and that will come to be seen by many, possibly most, as the arena where human cultural evolution is truly still taking place.

I don’t really see this lasting more than twenty years or so. By the 2030’s at the latest, the unraveling will have gone as far as it can, most wars will have simply exhausted themselves in pointless guerrilla bloodbaths, useless and tragic nuclear exchanges, and the odd biowarfare epidemic. Alternative energy will have by this point taken up the slack from oil and gas. It will be then that all the incubating energy-starved strangeness that people have been trying to ignore will explode outward, and the post-powerdown world becomes the world of the posthuman arms race. And it won’t be the sort of thing that anyone will be able to ignore.

next: the pandaemon aeon

It’s Only the End of the World, Again

Preamble indefensible rant:

It really breaks my heart to see all the hysterical hand-waving and hair pulling over the latest psychotic war-mongering on the part of the neocon reality-priesthood. I would have hoped more people would be smarter than to fall for the same old trick again and again. If you can be induced into reacting, rebelling, opposing or railing away incoherently against someone else’s agenda, then you’ve pretty much eliminated the possibility of making any progress on your own agenda.

Contrary to what you might think, digging in and defining oneself in adversarial stance to anything else makes you an accessory to their plans, not an obstacle. Arguing against something only lends it credibility, rather than leaving it to rise and fall on it’s own merits as the crazy blood thirsty bullshit that it is. It’s like arguing against ethnic cleansing: do we needto argue against ethnic cleansing? Do we really want to give the maniacs who spout that kind of shit any more credibility by standing across the line from them? No fucking way. They’ll just suck you into their hellworld of mass murder and make you the token resistance in it. Fuck them and fuck their fantasies. Envision something positive and make them fight you for a change. They’re cowards and they’ll lose in the end. Guaranteed.

The sad fact is, very few of us are willing to fight for anything except the the right to be oblivious to the world, letting someone else handle it, and not having to make a real sacrifice for your convictions. Provided you happen to have any, and not just the usual list of liberal aversions and sentimental delusions. If you’re so scared of nuclear war then get busy building a better alternative, because not doing so only opts for hell on earth because you’re too gutless to come up with some new ideas. End of rant.

Part the first: A Gun on the Table has to Go Off

Let’s play the timeline game shall we? I realise it’s kind of unfair to bitch everyone out for not making real choices when the playing field seems so unclear. It’s like a twelve car pileup of catastrophic changes in the making out there, and even if you don’t buy into them uncritically, it’s obviously helpful to know which way the wind is blowing.

My thinking is that determining the outcome of specific events is pretty hard, but knowing the sweep of trends is rather easy. In that vein, my first section deals with the next five years, or so. There are so many chaotic processes going on that there’s no way of knowing what order or manner they will play out, but you can be pretty sure where we’ll be overall by the time they all do. The big three strands, all intertwined of course, are global financial crises, geopolitics, and governmental legitimacy.

For at least the last several decades, the dominant power has had within it a strand of lawlessness, a kind of oligarchical consensus that implements it’s will through an old boy network of gangsters, drug runners, ideological moles, and spooks. The true conceptual core is simply greed, and fear of losing vast fortunes and privilege to the whims of the herd. This used to have it’s public face as the fear of communism, but now manifests as a general contempt for education and raising living standards for the poor and underprivileged everywhere. The problem with this style is that it depends for it’s survival on the legitimacy of the system it parisitises. if the general public were to catch on that the game is rigged and totally corrupt, the backroom players stand to lose everything. Unfortunately, the system they exploit is founded on several instabilities that are just now coming to a head. In order to avert this eventual restructuring crsis, the oligarchs must recourse to ever more blatant displays of string pulling to keep the game going. It’s not that elections were never fixed before, or that markets were never manipulated before, or terrorism was never state-sponsored false flag provocation before. It’s simply that it’s never been used as extensively and as desperately as it has been now. Which ought to be a sign that that things are coming unglued at record speed.

The only reason that george can go on tv and make one ridiculous pronouncement after another and get away with it is not that we’re stupid and complacent, and apathetic. It’s simply the moment in time where the crooked players are forced to cheat blatantly and you sit there in shock not wanting to believe that that’s what’s been going on all along. But that’s exactly what it’s always been. And that shock is not going to last much longer. Eventually this overreach of manipulation and illegal influence will result in the de-legitimation of (at the very least) the neocon regime, but more likely the self destruction of the republican party, and possibly even the general recasting of the political landscape in the united states altogether, not necessarily for the better, either. It largely depends on how badly the mid terms gut the republican position, and secondarily on how soon the economy goes massively pear shaped. And if neither of those does it, simply three more years of this shit in general will serve to destroy the status quo once and for all.

Which brings us to the war question: believe it or not, Iran’s current leadership probably does want a war and probably does realise it can’t win. Leaving aside neocon spin, these are legitimate jihadist fanatics, not fantasy projections to justify struassian dialectics, or business-minded secular dictators like saddam, and that probably explains the reticence of some to attack them outright, because once you start that war, you’re not fighting poor starving insurgents in fallujah who hide in the basement, and hate americans becuase you dropped a cluster bomb on their aunt and uncle. You’re fighting religious fanatics who truly want to kill and die for allah. Sad to say it, but sometimes the stereotype is true. Iran probably wants this war because as bad as they will come out of it, the united states and israel will come away so much worse it’s not even funny. Their economies will be wrecked, their militaries stretched to breaking point, their security situations permanently turned to dust and ashes. Meanwhile these fanatics believe they’ll be hanging in paradise, having launched islam back to it’s proper position of glory. The western powers manufactured islamic fundamentalism, fed it , and turned it loose. And now here it is.

The sophisticated neocon thinker believes that civilisation needs some kind of underlying moral narrative to prevent terminal stagnation. This then justifies deceit and corruption in the name of preventing us poor fuddles from sinking into a morass of self satisfied socialist apathy. Hence the obsession with manufactured enemies, and simplistic expainations for complex grievances.

This is just the latest face on the totalitarian backlash that haunted the 20th century front to back. The 20th was probably the most kneejerk retrograde century there ever was, in terms of paranoid recoil from political and philosophical forward motion. History has been slow, but always forward moving. It’s not very often you see the level of backsliding we’ve had in the last 60 years or so. Being born in it makes it hard to see that so much of the last hundred years was about severe disillusionment with the progressive growth of education, technology and liberalism. In many ways it’s been the resurgence of provincialism, tribalism, xenophobia and race hatred on a massive scale. Most of what we think of as modern, or post modern thinking was totally worked out by the 1930’s. Dada, Jazz, Existentialism, Quantum Physics, and certainly by the 1950’s there wasn’t much left to do. But then things ground to a halt, and haven’t really moved since. It’s important to recognise our era as a departure from the general trend of history, so that when that trend reestablishes itself, you understand why.

So don’t rely on common sense and tact to head this shit off, because it aint going to happen. Everybody wants this war, for entirely different stupid reasons, and sooner or later they’re going to get it.

When it does go down, you’ll probably get a general war in the middle east both in terms of anti-infidel jihad, and sectarian muslim civil war which will probably drag in the whole world after a few months, or maybe a couple years at the most, once it becomes clear that stabilising the middle east is only thing that will prevent that global economy from dissolving entirely.

From the perspective of economics there’s not a whole lot you can do to change the fact that your energy supply has peaked, and the change over to anything else will take a decade at the least. Similarly you can’t do much to change that most of the money out there is worthless paper holding you hostage to a world power that is rapidly proving itself totally untrustworthy and and little more than the global bully.

Again, the chaos we see now is simply the confusion as everyone tries to pretend it isn’t happening. but that can’t last much longer. Sooner or later a real decision is going to have be made, by everyone. Once it’s understood that there’s isn’t going to be any end of the world, just a bigger deeper hole to climb out of.

So in summary, by 2011, you’ve got ongoing and expanding world war, fueled by the dissolution of the world economy probably in favour of permanent war footing combined with currency backed by confiscated precious metals. The only thing holding any of this in check is probably the fact that popular backlash will eventually destroy the war effort for the united states, along with the parties that support it. It doesn’t mean american troops won’t be there, but simply that it will be an ongoing morass with no clear victory conditions, only the fantasy of restoring stability, and no political will to win, and no stomach to get out, for fear of making hard times even worse. Basically iraq, but everywhere it can go, all at the same time.

It won’t be about high minded platitudes anymore. It’ll be about feeding your kids and paying for parents medical care. This phase ends when it becomes clear that the old ideas have exhausted themselves, politically and economically. Or more accurate, that they have been exhausted for the last several decades and haven’t had the guts to admit it. It will be manifestly obvious that, as Marshall Mcluhan said, the owners of society have no belief in it, and haven’t for a long time.

and that’s when the real scary shit kicks in.

next: terror and transhumanism