Up to Speed

I know I blindsided some people with the whole oil situation, so I thought it might be fair to share this, which is a good overview of the fundamentals. Just ignore the subtitles.  I’ll have the next thing before too long.

Tell me I’m wrong…

I keep wanting to say something about ‘current events’, or perhaps to be more clear, the ever accelerating deterioration of current events. But it’s a very difficult subject for me now.

But in practical fact, it may simply be too late to change anyone’s mind about anything, and even if they do, it may be too late for them to understand what needs to be done. And even if they do, if may be too late to actually do any of it. And even if it isn’t, what little can be done, may not matter much.

One of the hard truths of being a healer, no matter what kind of a healer you happen to be, is that you don’t fix problems without the cooperation of the involved party. It just doesn’t happen, and trying only drains and damages you, emotionally, spiritually and physically.

Too much of the world is simply not involved in fixing what is going on. They have opted out of that possibility and like I say, it may be too late for some people to opt back in. So trying to fix something beyond what little sphere of consent you happen to operate in, is probably a tragic mistake.

This is not fatalism, or pessimism or cynicism. It simply is what it is. There will be more than enough exceptions to prove the rule. Unless something dramatically changes the established pattern of human behavior in extremely short order, much of the world is simply going to die.

How much of our existing food supply is inextricably tied to our fossil energy outputs? Let’s be charitable and say 70%. It’s probably closer to 80 or 90 actually, at this point, but let’s just err on the side of optimism.

The most absolutely conservative estimates in terms of decline in oil fields that have passed peak say a 3% loss of output, year on year is what we can expect. We already have examples of super giant fields that are closer to 5-10% a year. But again, let’s just say 3%. And we’ll just forget about demand increase altogether, which would probably yield a year on year net-shortfall of more like 6%.

Again, the most wildly optimistic estimates have it that if we had a working alternative liquid fuel source today, and we committed to retrofitting our infrastructure completely to this new source, it would take about 20 years to ramp up to anything like today’s production levels.

And finally, let’s be really optimistic and say that we haven’t actually hit the back of the oil production curve yet, and we still have a couple years before we go over the decline cliff. This would be ignoring basically all the evidence since 2005 that indicates we have already peaked, but I’ll be generous.

So starting in a couple years time, we would have our 3% energy shortfall, and let us again say that optimistically, this shortfall is allocated evenly across all regions and all sectors of use. There’s not the slightest fucking chance of that, my friends, but let’s all try and sleep tonight, what do you say?

So that’s a 3% loss of energy inputs to all food production and distribution, everywhere, in the first year. And let’s pretend that this will be a totally linear impact and that supply chains will not simply collapse, that farmers will not simply go bankrupt and abandon their plots, that economic instability will not close borders, or any number of things. I think we’ve already seen how in a hyper connected global system that you cannot contain chaos, and indeed, it infects everything around it at the speed of light.

The relation of energy inputs to caloric production is a bit nebulous, but again, I think I’m being quite optimistic here: let’s just imagine in a perfect world that everyone simply reduces their net caloric intake by 3%. I know for myself, that I’ve probably done that in the last year already, just in terms of certain foods that are getting beyond the price range I’m comfortable with. It’s a trivial, and probably healthy, loss, which I could replace, if I felt like spending the extra money, but the bottom line is, I need to spend more ‘energy’ to stay in the same place. And if this effect is steady and cumulative, sooner or later I couldn’t. Imagine what those people rioting over tortillas or soybeans are thinking. same line, different points.

I’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. For awhile. But how many people in the world are living on the edge of starvation already? How many people die when you slice their caloric intake by just 3% ( and let’s just remember that it’s probably more like 6%, if you spread it evenly, and upwards of 20% if we admit that it will be concentrated in certain areas, at least at first ) ? We’ve got around 40 000 starvation deaths per day already.

Now let’s compound it. Because every year if we’re lucky, for the next ten-twenty years at least, those energy inputs will continue to fall. After ten years, you and everyone else has had your caloric intake reduced by upwards of 30%, and after 20 years, 60%. The average westerner/european can still live on this but much of the rest of the world is simply gone.

The world average caloric intake is currently about 2700 calories per day. 1500 is pushing it and 1200 is in starvation mode. This is not complex math. the best case is that hundreds of millions of marginally-fed people are wiped out, year on year, for about 15-20 years. the worst case is the population gets cut by about half in 6-7 years, and we bottom out some where around pre-green revolution levels.

I may be overestimating this, but I’m not completely wrong. Like I say, I’ve fudged all these numbers wildly in the positive direction. If I am just missing something, I’d sure like to hear how and why. please, be my guest…

The gnostic space opera rides again…

I’m noticing a resurgence of interest these days in the whole counter-initiatory, gnostic paranoia, school of analysis out on the internets these days, and I suppose that’s natural when all the bleakest wet dreams of malthusians, libertarian psychotics and primitivists all appear to unfolding on schedule.

I can’t really point the finger, because I arguably played a major role in taking this stuff to another level. At least among left wing occultists, and spiritually minded social liberals. Let’s just call it the Jeff Wells school.

To me it’s just a bit of fun. Adds some color to the otherwise gut-wrenching parade of daily tragedies and cycling through the dukkha nanas of insight practice, so let us dance around a bit.

It’s important to remember that the core feature of gnosticism, at least the branch that concerns us here, is the predominance of dualistic themes of ignorance, and knowledge, evil and good, light and darkness, etc. The more modern re constructionist tendencies in the gnostic community tend more towards something that resembles mahayanna buddhism for Christians, only without the clear practice instructions, but that’s neither here nor there.

Historically gnosticism is absolutely and unequivocally an offshoot of the hellenistic philosophies. All you have to do is look at their terminology. “demiurgos” is straight out of platonism, for example. Their cosmology is likewise straight up neo-platonism, like most early Christianity. Modern scholarship leads us to believe that jesus himself was a hellenistic philosopher, not a judaic rabbi, or an independent flowering of some kind, so there’s no reason to think gnosticism is anything but another side branch of greek thought.

Where these derivations stray is that platonism doesn’t invest in dualism, which is basically a recipe for ideological trench warfare that goes nowhere. There is only the One, also known as the Good, and anything else is only absence of the good, or of oneness. There is no opposing force. Full stop.

So really the gnostic paranoid notion of evil, or the neo-traditionalist pattern of degeneration is only a perceptual phenomenon, not an actuality. Which is a safer and saner way of dealing with this stuff: as a perceptual filter, not an ontological reality.

To me, whether or not the most wildly depraved thing in the universe actually happens or not, is an open question. What isn’t open is whether or not people think that they happen, which in and of itself opens up some rather disturbing and interesting areas of inquiry. For instance: whether or not aliens actually exist, you have a profound number of people who really do think that aliens exist and interact with them, physically. That’s not a curiosity, it’s a psychic epidemic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I thought I’d spend a little time on a more top-down view of this then you usually get, and march it down through a few layers until we get to the ground level.

So we start with the one, also known as the good.  What makes things one unto themselves, and thus provides for their existence. What provides for existence is the highest good and hence the two terms are considered the same. And because it is “The One”, not “A One”, when you talk about it in this way, there is no other, and hence the one encompasses everything. Hence, everything is good. Period. It is the principle of absolute unity and non-duality.

Now, here’s where we get into gnostic territory: at some point the One decides to make something. Because it is the only thing that exists, and because it is good, it can only make something good, and can only use itself as a model for that making. It thus generates a copy of itself that will be the ‘idea in the mind of god’ that will serve as the model for creation itself, also known as the Logos, or the Word. In every case  of a rational principle at work there must be intent, which requires a model for actions, or the ideal goal, thus the model must precede the copy, which in this case means the One must precede the logos, and the logos must precede the creation of the material universe.

But a funny thing happens when the one does this: because it possesses the quality known as Ousia, it is fully transparent to itself, it can turn on itself and know itself in all ways ( this is the analogous principle to mindfulness in humans) and thus can lend all of it’s features to the model, with a major and profound exception: Because as soon as there are two things, the creator and the creation, there is no longer “The One”, but rather two things that are “ones-unto-themselves”, so to that extent, neither one of them is any longer the perfect one, or likewise, the perfect good, at least when regarded in this way.

From the first perspective, nothing has actually changed, and “The One” is still the same, and indeed, the one lacks any qualities that would allow it to change in any way, as any change can only deviate from perfection. Complex eh?

So from our second perspective, there are now two things: the transcendant maker, also known as the demiurge, and the first creation, also known as the logos. Both are subordinate to the one, and can thus both be regarded as creations of the one.

So even here, at this early stage, there is no dualism, but a trinity. The One, the demiurge, and the logos. And every further step from the perfect one, no matter how perfect of a copy it is, can only be less and less a perfect good, because each new thing only introduces new division and new disunity. Just as when the one tries to reproduce itself and loses the quality of perfect oneness, because every copy can theoretically reproduce everything except that which makes a thing what is it is unto itself, every copy is slightly distorted from its model. Thus, the farther you go down this chain of perception, the less good there is.

This is where we get the illusion of evil.

to be continued…

The Mosaic Effect: season 2,episode 7: it’s just a myth

     this one’s gift-wrapped for all my fundamentalist friends out there…

  a slightly out of sequence podcast, but it took me a couple weeks to edit down to something reasonable, wherein we examine the mania for true facts and the mistaken belief that this is always a good thing.

 And by way of illustration we bump that up against some recent research I’ve been doing into christian scholarship, and we can look forward to delighting our dispensationalist friends with a bunch of things that they probably won’t understand, but it’s probably better that they don’t, anyway. That’s how we got into this mess.

 and therein lies the point…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.7-its_just_a_myth.mp3

The Mosaic Effect: season 2,episode 6: nothing can ever really happen again

A few false starts, and some distractions, but here we are again, such as it is…

   we diagnose a certain cultural condition where people embrace apocalyptic thinking, but shy away from any action. In so doing, we reference various cults and fads such as peak oil, evangelical christianity and the singularity, pulp fiction and the simpsons, and then tie it up with my main man, the marshall mcluhan.

A meandering podcast that maybe doesn’t get anywhere that talks about how culture meanders and never quite goes anywhere. oh the irony…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.6-nothing_ever_happens.mp3

The Mosaic Effect:season 2,episode 4: choose your poison

     I put on my cultural imperialist, racist and reactionary progressive hat, in order to talk about why nobody can seem to resist our toxic way of life.

  In so doing we touch on memetics, guns, germs and steel, the myth of the noble primitive, and how the monoculture is exterminating a whole new round of vulnerable people, and why it might be a good thing.

 podcast page here

TME2.4-choose_your_poison.mp3

It’s a good thing I don’t do this to make friends…

The Mosaic Effect: season 2, episode 3: chaos theory

  What do Richard Branson, Howard Bloom and ‘the Elders’ all have in common? and how does it portent the disintegration of the global human superorganism?

  I’m sure you’ve all laid awake at night wondering what the answer to that one might be…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.3-chaos_theory.mp3

The Mosaic Effect: season 2 , episode 2: start with yourself

 

A bit more of a rant than usual. we start off with a bit of a tip of the hat to world war III and rapidly diverge into situationism and guy debord, addiction to spectacle, and the longing for chaos that comes from thwarted evolution, leading to the only real solution to feeling like crap.

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.2-start_with_yourself.mp3

Producing the Means for Seizure

part two: life on the edge of the power curve 2012-2050

Okay, so let’s change our approach a little bit. I’m assuming you can and have read this… so what might that look like, in a little more detail?

  Let’s start with the basics: chances are, within a few years, you will have been more or less priced out of the market for oil and gas. You might be able to snag a bit for emergency use, or critical transport, but most everyone has to carpool, bike or bus it. If you’re fortunate enough to have trains where you live, then that’s great. This trend gets worse as time goes on. Expect something similar to cuba, where traffic cops routinely stop and stuff cars with extra seats, or huge flatbed trucks take on the function of busses.

  The good news is, the cottage industry for ethanol is ramping up. And no, I don’t mean this corn ethanol bullshit. I mean decomposing waste matter into alcohol on a radically decentralised basis. Eventually this becomes an integrated part of all farming operations, as the technology for alcohol distillation is refined and the design of organisms that digest sugar ( and eventually cellulose)  efficiently become more common.  There will almost certainly never be enough of this to replace all the gas we used to use, but it will be able to take over the critical stuff. The need will create the results. This is not new technology mind you. The first diesel engines were made to work on alcohol, after all, and it’s only a historical curveball that hooked us into ‘rock oil’. Most people will eventually have something the size of a rainbarrel that breaks down kitchen waste and dead plant matter into usable fuel. You will occasionally have to deal with the nuisance of these mutant bugs eating holes in your clothes, or some minor structural damage to wood objects… but hey, shit happens.

  Something similar starts to happen with food. A combination of price inflation,  wage deflation and contraction of economic activity makes imports of food pretty dodgy, and expensive. Wall mart, Safeway, all the globalised chains…these all go away. Food in general gets more expensive, and most people take up gardening on their balcony, backyard or community park. 

  This is all well and good until people start actually starving. You’d yank a couple tomatoes if you were starving, right? Eventually a combination of food riots, influxes of starving refugees, and general anxiety lead to most communities, or even neighborhoods, to form up into gangs/militias for self protection, and preservation of resources. You will probably have to deal with the sad spectacle of families going door to door begging for food, or offering to work for it.

  One starts to spend a lot of time pulling up pavement to expose useful soil, composting waste and capturing rainwater. There’s a pretty good chance you don’t have a job anyway. If you do, you probably work from home. It’s cheaper for everyone that way.

 Which brings us to the low end of the technology situation. I mean, we have iphones now, and wireless broadband is becoming ubiquitous. Eventually technology will be cheaper than food. You can already talk to anyone on earth with a device in your pocket, and carry around every piece of music you own. Eventually it’ll be all the music, all the video, all the pictures and all the books. In your pocket. You can put on a headset and carry on a conversation as if you were in the same room with anyone, or any number of anyones, from anywhere. Why even leave the house? Except to harvest the garlic, that is. The ability to make and hyperdistribute your own cultural material worldwide only accelerates the breakdown of centralised forms of media.

  A small blip occurs when the rolling blackouts start. Or depending on where you live, they started a long time ago, and become permanent. Most of the essential widgets are run by efficient integrated solar panels, and everything else gets run by ethanol generators. Once again, not enough electricity to run your air conditioning, or baseboard heaters; but enough for the lights, the cooking and to recharge your widgets.

 Now all of this so far presumes that you’re really lucky and you live in a (reasonably) sane part of the world. Either that, or you’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall and get the fuck out of dodge when things get bad. A lot of places will be subject to the no-go zone effect. The government loses the ability to project force, and provide services to a region, and said region is simply dispensed with. No cops, no soldiers, no utilities, and no trucks bringing anything. It is entirely possible to fill in all those parts of the equation, as I’ve said above, but the story of any particular place comes in how well that happens, or doesn’t.

  All of this really means a radical redefinition of the power dynamics in society and in the world. What happens when you have the ability to provide your own security, your own services, your own food, energy, culture? Whether by your choice or not, this is what is going to happen. Embracing it will make it easier. The whole idea of  ‘top down’ is going to fall by the wayside. Technology, the proliferation of ideas and institutional de-evolution will level the power curve for everyone to large degree.

   No, you won’t have cruise missiles, tanks and stealth bombers, but within a short time those things will be mostly irrelevant, just as they are mostly irrelevant in iraq or afghanistan. You don’t subdue a wireless, super-empowered, self-sufficient open source retribalised 21st century hyperculture with tanks and bombs. It’s impossible.

  But there are bound to be those stupid enough to try, and this is where it gets a bit scary. You see, it’s already possible right now, for someone of modest education and skills to manufacture a deadly infectious pathogen and it’s only going to get easier. The kind of people who do this are mostly dysfunctional reactionaries, but when you place the whole world in a hyper-connected echo chamber of threatening ideas, there will be no shortage of people with intelligence, equipment, and substandard coping skills.

  The biotech revolution is following an accelerating curve even faster than the one for computing. Eventually, you will know at least a few people who are running a gene sequencer in the basement. Which is good for when some fuckstick lets loose a hemorrhagic fever in your vicinity, and you need a vaccine, but not so good when the backlash comes from what remains of the ‘powers that be’, and a platoon of special forces drops out of a helicopter to machine gun you and burn down your neighborhood. 

 I mean, yeah we expect government to protect us from psychotic people with bioweapons, that’s a good thing. But they won’t discriminate. The crackdown against biotech will threaten to take away the radical life extension, disease elimination, stem-cell regeneration and every kind of weird gene alteration imaginable being cooked up in an environment like this.

  The instructive analogy is filesharing. Every so often, the big boys smash a central hub of filesharing with lawsuits, raids and jail time. And then what? They can’t arrest everyone, they can’t even find everyone, so all that happens is darwinism. The survivors get smarter, sneakier, harder to track and develop more and better ways to keep filesharing.

   But what if that file is a complete genome? And if people these days can crack iphones, they will sure as hell be able to make biotech equipment, when the time comes.

  The sort of chaos you see in the world of intellectual property, will soon be the chaos of our own genetics. And all of this taking place in the social and political chaos of what was the world we once knew. And this is chaos in the mathematical sense, which opens the doorway to a hidden order…

next???

It’s (still) only the end of the world again: 2008

Part 1: the curbstomping at the end of history

Who’d have thought the future would get here so soon?

  I’d been thinking for awhile of formally checking in on my future predictions series, to see how far along we’ve come ( not so much the later series which is really more about my method of discerning future trends). And perhaps adjust my thinking a bit.

 What  I found alarming was that, not only are my predictions for the next five years on track, but things I thought were at least ten, maybe even twenty years out, are starting to happen now. Also my long term, conceptual view has gained a few wrinkles, which I’ll clarify shortly.

  I would obviously suggest you read the original three articles ( and indeed most of the stuff in my futurism category, to get a feeling for where I’m coming from ), but if you can’t be bothered here’s the capsule summary for the first bit. The next two parts to follow…

 the next five years(written in 2006, so that covers up till mid 2011, I guess):

-  past peak of oil and gas extraction

- economic meltdown due to loss of confidence in the dollar, among other things.

- political implosion of the neocon regime and the republican party in general, with a possible realignment of US politics in general, most likely towards some kind of reactionary neo-fascism.

-general war in the middle east and africa, which is really more of an open source guerrilla style bloodbath, and metastasizing into other locations.

  Now, none of these are rocket science, at least not in my book. The writing has been on the wall for some years before I even wrote that old piece.

 If I remember correctly, oil was at around 60$ a barrel in 2006, and now it’s hovering around a 100$. All promises to open up the taps from saudi arabia and whatnot have been proven just hot air. The noise about alternative energy just gets louder and louder, and the price of oil and gas just keeps going up.

  We’re probably in the plateau phase, where all the spare capacity gets used up, as supply starts to shrink and demand grows at the usual steady rate. I have no problem putting off a serious demand crunch for another few years, as there is a lot of slack in the system and waste to be stripped out, before we really start hitting a wall here. People in other parts of the world are already fucked, mind you, but that is, unfortunately, not much new.

Don’t worry, we’re fucked too, just not right away. When that crunch hits and there is an estimated 3% growth in demand every year, matched with a 3% decline in supply, then you’re looking at super spikes in price and what they call ‘demand destruction’, Where whole supply chains start to collapse because they’ve been priced out of the market.

 Keep in mind that 3% is being cautious. The third biggest field in the world is looking at a fifty percent decline over three years. That’s not a decline. That’s a cliff.

 The skeptics in the area are welcome to their opinions, but in every case, they always think in terms of ( usually falsified) proven reserves and static numbers, rather than flow rates, which is what it’s really about. So buckle up.

 Moving on, anyone who thinks we aren’t in major economic meltdown isn’t paying attention. I scarcely need to comment on this, do I?

 This is a bit dated now, but do lets watch Jim Cramer have a nervous breakdown on television, and you can judge the level of feeling in the financial community.

…and bear in mind, things have gotten a lot worse since then. They will have to invent new words for the combination of inflationary and deflationary effects that we will be experiencing in short order.

 Moving on to politics, it looks at this point like the republican choice is going to be the lunatic john mccain. Not only is his support in the world of reactionary partisan politics somewhat shaky, ( he appears to have some actual principles) not to mention his weak appeal to backwards ‘christians’, but he’s also prone to fits of rage and bizarre outbursts. Probably down to his advanced age, and the time he spent in a Vietnamese POW camp.

If anyone thought that the christopher walken character in the deer hunter would make a good president…well there he is.

  The republican chances of winning the presidency again just went from slim to none. The reactionary southern strategy that propelled the republicans from nixon on up has run it’s course and it’s ideology in general has arguably been a spent force since Reagan, so you can be sure when they lose this time around, they will be looking to fuck each other with knives. Good riddance.

 Not that Obama or Mrs. Clinton is really gonna help much either. I will concede that electing a white woman or a black man to the presidency is a huge step for the united states, in principle, but I seriously doubt either one of them is really equipped to deal with what’s happening. They would have to demonstrate some understanding of it first, but that hasn’t happened, and probably never will. So four years from now, look for the democrats to implode too.

And finally, we have what we will eventually know as world war III, but won’t recognise till long after the fact. Everyone is expecting that we have to have nuclear tipped ICBMs flying around to have world war, but what we’re going to get is general breakdown of the nation state and regression to primary loyalties ( that’s another word for ‘tribalism’). It’s not going to be about issues large enough to launch nuclear weapons over, or between bodies large enough to command them. Iraq, Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan, Columbia, Chechnya… same shit, different languages. When war is happening everywhere, that’s called a world war.

 I reffer you to the brilliant and insightful John Robb of global guerrillas who examines this trend in minute detail and echoes my own thinking in many ways.

 long story short: the war of all against all, with semtex and ak-47’s. And that’s if we’re lucky. Because once we kick over into 2012 or so, you’re gonna be nostalgic for the days of car bombs and drive by shootings.

next: 2012-2050?