Out west in Nevada Cliven Bundy 'won' his standoff with the BLM officers who tried to repossess cattle improperly grazing on protected land. He refused to pay grazing fees for 20 years, and after all of the court cases were decided against him, he owes the Government more than a million dollars in fees and penalties. So, insofar as he gets to continue doing what he's doing, he 'won' that particular conflict. Of course, to do it, he had to rile up as many disaffected anti authority gun nuts as he could, in order to momentarily outgun the Feds.
Which of course means the public at large loses. We lose the million dollars he owes us, we lose respect for lawfully constituted authority, we lose protected habitat for endangered desert tortoises, his neighboring ranchers who abide by the law have to compete in the marketplace with someone who doesn't have to deal with the costs of lawfully doing business. What do we gain? we gain a political movement that doesn't hesitate to use threats of deadly violence to advance their agenda.
If the Feds were wearing their thinking caps, every person who took up arms and stood with Mr. Bundy will get added to a list of potential domestic terrorists. I fear that in the future, more people will chose to defy the federal government in a similar fashion and someone, or a lot of someones will get killed. In this instance the Feds probably chose correctly, when they elected not start shooting. The tortoises that live on the land probably are safer from Mr. Bundy's cattle than they are from retaliation minded rednecks in the event of violence.
The BLM is nothing if not patient, and by working with the IRS and the court system, they will no doubt eventually be able to thwart Mr Bundy, especially given his habit of going on record with ignorant racist bilge. If the reactionary wing of the American right thinks they have a champion in Mr Bundy, they are mistaken. His appeal is limited to the people who thought Archie Bunker was the hero of 'All in the Family'.
So when the next bunch of 'patriots' openly defies the feds, will it be in the Nevada desert? or will it be closer to home? Who watched the situation play out on their TV and will decide that they too can fight the law and win? If this leads to more violence down the road, are we going to look back and see this as a missed opportunity?
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Contemplating the future
The end of the world is in again. After the cold war failed to deliver a hot sequel and y2k landed with a wet flop instead of a bang, I thought the end of the world might fall out of fashion. It is not so. In the last few years, the rapture has become bigger than ever, the zombie apocalypse has become a national obsession, and peak oil and the singularity round out the list of popular end of the world scenarios. Digging a little deeper we can look at global climate change and various local secession movements for equally grim situations.
And looking at the problems facing the US and the modern world there are ample grounds for pessimism. The world's population of humans has never been larger, the climate has never been hotter (in human history) and most of the easily exploited fossil energy resources have been exploited right out of existence.
But the key thing to remember is that despite the wishes of an apocalyptic few, there are 7+ billion of us who have a vested interest in improving the status quo. Survivalists and secessionists both labor under the same delusion, that the reason they aren't more successful is that more powerful forces are holding them down. Survivalists, imagine a world in which their carefully hoarded AR-15 and pallet of ammo are worth more than a well-paying job [even more so than a supportive community of friends and family]. Preppers imagine roughly the same scenario only their power flows from a diesel generator or cache of canned food. Secessionists imagine the only thing separating them from their own kingdom where they get to make the rules and taxes are merely an unpleasant memory is the boot-heel of the federal government.
But the answer to powerlessness in the face of government or corporate exploitation isn't building a separate microcosm of society. If the civilization were to crumble tomorrow, by next week the people running what's left would not be the back to nature farmers, the paramilitary militias or the jack-of-all-trades preppers. The people running the show will be the organizers, the business people, and the leaders, who pretty much are running the show already. Organizing in the wake of disaster is what governments live for. It's why the army corps of engineers gets to redesign the Mississippi river every decade or two. Its why New Orleans isn't a ghost town. Its why New Jersey and New York are rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy and why Florida is inhabitable at all.
Acute national disasters are the local's worst nightmare but the aspiring administrator's opportunity. FEMA is pretty freaking good at what it does. The National guard and the Red Cross do a bang up job at getting to where the action is, rescuing the distressed and giving them a hot meal, a place to poop and a place to sleep. Even the government's belated and half-assed response to hurricane Katrina, saved far more people than it failed. And insofar at it failed, it is rightly seen as a disgraceful lapse, rather than business as usual.
This is why, in the face of global climate change, and all of attendant food shortages, water shortages, plagues and brushfire wars of the coming century our best bet isn't to stockpile guns or canned food. Our best bet is to meet our neighbors, and work together to build a more resilient civilization. We need to build and remodel houses and multi-family residences that are liveable year round, where a power grid failure would be an annoyance not a catastrophe whether it happens in January or July. We need neighborhoods where residents can build a real sense of community. We need power and water not dependent of the price of ever more expensive carbon.
And looking at the problems facing the US and the modern world there are ample grounds for pessimism. The world's population of humans has never been larger, the climate has never been hotter (in human history) and most of the easily exploited fossil energy resources have been exploited right out of existence.
But the key thing to remember is that despite the wishes of an apocalyptic few, there are 7+ billion of us who have a vested interest in improving the status quo. Survivalists and secessionists both labor under the same delusion, that the reason they aren't more successful is that more powerful forces are holding them down. Survivalists, imagine a world in which their carefully hoarded AR-15 and pallet of ammo are worth more than a well-paying job [even more so than a supportive community of friends and family]. Preppers imagine roughly the same scenario only their power flows from a diesel generator or cache of canned food. Secessionists imagine the only thing separating them from their own kingdom where they get to make the rules and taxes are merely an unpleasant memory is the boot-heel of the federal government.
But the answer to powerlessness in the face of government or corporate exploitation isn't building a separate microcosm of society. If the civilization were to crumble tomorrow, by next week the people running what's left would not be the back to nature farmers, the paramilitary militias or the jack-of-all-trades preppers. The people running the show will be the organizers, the business people, and the leaders, who pretty much are running the show already. Organizing in the wake of disaster is what governments live for. It's why the army corps of engineers gets to redesign the Mississippi river every decade or two. Its why New Orleans isn't a ghost town. Its why New Jersey and New York are rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy and why Florida is inhabitable at all.
Acute national disasters are the local's worst nightmare but the aspiring administrator's opportunity. FEMA is pretty freaking good at what it does. The National guard and the Red Cross do a bang up job at getting to where the action is, rescuing the distressed and giving them a hot meal, a place to poop and a place to sleep. Even the government's belated and half-assed response to hurricane Katrina, saved far more people than it failed. And insofar at it failed, it is rightly seen as a disgraceful lapse, rather than business as usual.
This is why, in the face of global climate change, and all of attendant food shortages, water shortages, plagues and brushfire wars of the coming century our best bet isn't to stockpile guns or canned food. Our best bet is to meet our neighbors, and work together to build a more resilient civilization. We need to build and remodel houses and multi-family residences that are liveable year round, where a power grid failure would be an annoyance not a catastrophe whether it happens in January or July. We need neighborhoods where residents can build a real sense of community. We need power and water not dependent of the price of ever more expensive carbon.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Re-mold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
I am not the only person who notices that things cannot continue as they are. Changes need to be made. In the US, the productivity gains of the last 30 years have gone straight into the wallets of the richest .01% of us. In real terms the purchasing power of the average American has been in decline since the late 1970s. That isn't just a problem for the middle class, that isn't just a problem for the lower class, it is a problem for every American.
And it isn't just the US. The manufacturing jobs that let anyone with a high school education support a family and buy a house on a single income are long gone. They were the backbone of the economy, they won us two world wars and they were an escalator out of poverty. Investors in the US thought it would be better to move those jobs overseas so they didn't have to deal with unions and American environmental and safety regulation. Now we get cheap electronics and the Foxconn employees that make it are committing suicide to escape the misery of 21st century indentured servitude.
Wealth is brought into the economy in two basic ways, harvest or extraction. You can broadly characterize them as agriculture vs mining, but that's an oversimplification. Harvest is the sustainable production of a good or service in a way that means it can happen year in and year out. When farmers produce crops year after year, and take care to guard against erosion and rotate their crops and even leave fields fallow to protect the soil, that's harvest. However if the farmer plants the most lucrative crop year after year, fertilizing and spraying pesticide as much as they can to maximize yield without giving any consideration to runoff or soil erosion or anything that would cost him an additional cent, that would be extraction, that farmer is trading in the long term viability of that farm for an immediate paycheck.
Mining is, by definition, extraction. Mining is also necessary and central to our current economy. But
even mining could be better. Some plants bio-concentrate heavy metals, they could be grown on beds of crushed ore, and later burned and smelted for a dramatic reduction of energy input to produce metal. Smelters themselves need not use coal fired furnaces, they could just as easily run from wind power or solar arrays.
Extraction is attractive to financiers and investors, it maximizes the return on up front investment and
pushes off negative externalities onto local communities. It is less attractive to those local communities, because of those same negative externalities, like communities full of underpaid workers, piles of coal dust, mine tailings and smokestacks belching smoke.
Leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers and stockholder lawsuits are all the result of investors demanding higher return on investment, which is to say a shift to extraction, or to double down on it. If you examine what used to be considered the hallmarks of a well run company, e.g. a well trained, prosperous work force, production capital that was wholly owned, not mortgaged or rented, a well staffed R&D department busily developing new products and production methods and a pension fund that was fully funded and invested in safe investments. Every single one of those things is something a buyout artist will liquidate for a quick payout. Workers will be downsized or outsourced, facilities will be sold and rented back or mortgaged, and pension funds will be raided.
For a current example I invite you to read this article on what Bain Capital is doing to Guitar Center, the "big box" merchant of musical instruments.
http://www.ericgarland.co/2014/03/29/parasite-economy/ (I am a fan of knowing where a hyperlink will send you, sono shortened links here!) Guitar Center is just another example of a company that is being squeezed to death by too much attention from investors.
When big finance turned its attention to real estate, we got credit default swaps, the ongoing recession and millions of Americans bankrupted and evicted. Every step of that process was squeezed for maximum upfront payoff, which is why banks got in trouble for foreclosing on everyone they could, even those eligible for assistance. They wanted the immediate payout of a short sale.
Now, big finance has turned it's eye to post secondary education. State financial support for public universities has collapsed since the seventies, so prices have ballooned, college loans are easy to get and federally subsidized, so for-profit colleges of doubtful utility have bloomed like mushrooms in manure, private college loans are ruinously expensive and now college debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. From an economic standpoint, we have another situation akin to a pile of oily rags stacked next to a leaky furnace (hmm, it's almost like someone's out there doing this on purpose). The result is millions of young people have huge amounts of debt they that many of them will never earn enough to discharge.
We need a way to insulate our institutions from the financial sector. We need a way to shield a boring profitable business from the investors that will break it up for a quick payday. We need a way to stop propping up businesses that take government money in one hand and beat up their workforce and outsource and send profit off shore (...with their other three hands? metaphors are not an exact science)
And it isn't just the US. The manufacturing jobs that let anyone with a high school education support a family and buy a house on a single income are long gone. They were the backbone of the economy, they won us two world wars and they were an escalator out of poverty. Investors in the US thought it would be better to move those jobs overseas so they didn't have to deal with unions and American environmental and safety regulation. Now we get cheap electronics and the Foxconn employees that make it are committing suicide to escape the misery of 21st century indentured servitude.
Wealth is brought into the economy in two basic ways, harvest or extraction. You can broadly characterize them as agriculture vs mining, but that's an oversimplification. Harvest is the sustainable production of a good or service in a way that means it can happen year in and year out. When farmers produce crops year after year, and take care to guard against erosion and rotate their crops and even leave fields fallow to protect the soil, that's harvest. However if the farmer plants the most lucrative crop year after year, fertilizing and spraying pesticide as much as they can to maximize yield without giving any consideration to runoff or soil erosion or anything that would cost him an additional cent, that would be extraction, that farmer is trading in the long term viability of that farm for an immediate paycheck.
Mining is, by definition, extraction. Mining is also necessary and central to our current economy. But
even mining could be better. Some plants bio-concentrate heavy metals, they could be grown on beds of crushed ore, and later burned and smelted for a dramatic reduction of energy input to produce metal. Smelters themselves need not use coal fired furnaces, they could just as easily run from wind power or solar arrays.
Extraction is attractive to financiers and investors, it maximizes the return on up front investment and
pushes off negative externalities onto local communities. It is less attractive to those local communities, because of those same negative externalities, like communities full of underpaid workers, piles of coal dust, mine tailings and smokestacks belching smoke.
Leveraged buyouts, and hostile takeovers and stockholder lawsuits are all the result of investors demanding higher return on investment, which is to say a shift to extraction, or to double down on it. If you examine what used to be considered the hallmarks of a well run company, e.g. a well trained, prosperous work force, production capital that was wholly owned, not mortgaged or rented, a well staffed R&D department busily developing new products and production methods and a pension fund that was fully funded and invested in safe investments. Every single one of those things is something a buyout artist will liquidate for a quick payout. Workers will be downsized or outsourced, facilities will be sold and rented back or mortgaged, and pension funds will be raided.
For a current example I invite you to read this article on what Bain Capital is doing to Guitar Center, the "big box" merchant of musical instruments.
http://www.ericgarland.co/2014/03/29/parasite-economy/ (I am a fan of knowing where a hyperlink will send you, sono shortened links here!) Guitar Center is just another example of a company that is being squeezed to death by too much attention from investors.
When big finance turned its attention to real estate, we got credit default swaps, the ongoing recession and millions of Americans bankrupted and evicted. Every step of that process was squeezed for maximum upfront payoff, which is why banks got in trouble for foreclosing on everyone they could, even those eligible for assistance. They wanted the immediate payout of a short sale.
Now, big finance has turned it's eye to post secondary education. State financial support for public universities has collapsed since the seventies, so prices have ballooned, college loans are easy to get and federally subsidized, so for-profit colleges of doubtful utility have bloomed like mushrooms in manure, private college loans are ruinously expensive and now college debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. From an economic standpoint, we have another situation akin to a pile of oily rags stacked next to a leaky furnace (hmm, it's almost like someone's out there doing this on purpose). The result is millions of young people have huge amounts of debt they that many of them will never earn enough to discharge.
We need a way to insulate our institutions from the financial sector. We need a way to shield a boring profitable business from the investors that will break it up for a quick payday. We need a way to stop propping up businesses that take government money in one hand and beat up their workforce and outsource and send profit off shore (...with their other three hands? metaphors are not an exact science)
Saturday, March 29, 2014
More on the injustice of uncool
Over at Sadly no, in the post Cool Schmool Cerb takes Greg Gutfield to task for claiming that hipsters are using cool as a weapon to fight those nasty right wing conservatives, I have some thoughts of my own on that issue.
I don't know when cool became cool. It certainly became a nationwide obsession in the 1950s. My guess is that after a huge number of Americans got a first hand taste of combat in WWII and Korea, the idea of being 'cool under fire', i.e. a soldier apparently unbothered by incoming gunfire, gained a large amount of cultural capital. Certainly, in combat, the ability to attack or face an attack without becoming enraged or terrified, is a survival trait, it's something commanders ask of their troops, troops ask of their commanders and soldiers ask of each other. I think that got changed through a decade of war movies and fiction into the idea that being calm and confident and purposeful in all situations was the ideal, and that over the years was further was changed into the idea that being visibly excited about things was 'uncool'. Furthermore I think there is a difference between cool and hip. The term cool is often applied to novelties in fashion or technology, when a more exact phrase would be 'aesthetically pleasing' or 'new and exciting'.
Gutfield gleefully switches back and forth between definitions of cool as he tries to make whatever point it is that he thinks he's making. It's OK, to examine change with a skeptical eye. The economy and society that supports Gutfield at the trough of wingnut welfare is a contrived and delicate thing. Changing any one of a number of factors might mean that his employer might find it more expedient to toss him out on his ass to fend for himself than to continue to employ such an unpersuasive hack. Some things that might make an employer consider that? breaking up broadcast monopolies like Clear Channel, bringing back 'balance' laws in broadcast news', making news organizations criminally liable for spreading untruths, the list goes on. But at some point one has to draw the line, how much harm is he willing to perpetrate or promote, to earn a living?
To, broaden the scope to Americans in general; there are many of us in a similar situation, in that the only thing that keeps us in our station is the lack of meaningful examination of the American economy and way of life with an eye towards constructive reform. How many of us could afford meat at every meal if all meat produced or imported had to face meaningful environmental, sanitary, and animal care standards that were diligently and vigorously enforced? The American experience is as nice as it is for some people, because other people have to do without or cut corners that the rest of us really think they shouldn't.
Gutfield is sad that conservatives are labeled 'uncool'. He should be pleased as hell to be 'uncool', it's a far more gentle adjective than he and the reactionaries on the far right deserve. It's uncool to work for people who are deliberately trying to disenfranchise American citizens, to destroy regulations on pollution, on, workplace safety, on electoral fundraising, on financial malfeasance. It's uncool to start foreign wars to benefit the bottom line of big defense contractors and oil companies And it's uncool to attempt to pay for all of that by gutting the already threadbare social safety net and to blame poverty on the poor while perpetuating the abuses that impoverish them. But besides uncool, its also, lying, mendacious, malicious, malevolent, pernicious, deceptive, perverted, and sometimes treasonous.
And ultimately, I think that's why we've seen a never ending war on 'hippies' since the sixties. They had the temerity to point out, that the American dream wasn't equally accessible to all Americans. They pointed out the game was rigged in favor of older white christian men, and that every other group was part of a hierarchy of lesser Americans whose influence and power diminished with every step away from white, straight, wealthy, christian or male ideal. They saw that the rules would have to change so that everyone could participate meaningfully in culture and politics and the economy and the academy.
And the for all that conservatives claim to want a meritocracy, that everyone be judged and rewarded on the basis of their capability and contributions, the establishment of a true meritocracy is their worst nightmare. The last thing that the low level shills and propagandists of conservative America want is to have to compete with each other on the basis of results. They are employed as cheerleaders and demagogues to rally the faithful and castigate the unrighteous and to faithfully parrot the alleged merits of unrestricted capitalism (and highly restricted voting) to America. Their job is far more about reassuring their employers than it is about making a convincing argument for lower taxes on millionaires.
I don't know when cool became cool. It certainly became a nationwide obsession in the 1950s. My guess is that after a huge number of Americans got a first hand taste of combat in WWII and Korea, the idea of being 'cool under fire', i.e. a soldier apparently unbothered by incoming gunfire, gained a large amount of cultural capital. Certainly, in combat, the ability to attack or face an attack without becoming enraged or terrified, is a survival trait, it's something commanders ask of their troops, troops ask of their commanders and soldiers ask of each other. I think that got changed through a decade of war movies and fiction into the idea that being calm and confident and purposeful in all situations was the ideal, and that over the years was further was changed into the idea that being visibly excited about things was 'uncool'. Furthermore I think there is a difference between cool and hip. The term cool is often applied to novelties in fashion or technology, when a more exact phrase would be 'aesthetically pleasing' or 'new and exciting'.
Gutfield gleefully switches back and forth between definitions of cool as he tries to make whatever point it is that he thinks he's making. It's OK, to examine change with a skeptical eye. The economy and society that supports Gutfield at the trough of wingnut welfare is a contrived and delicate thing. Changing any one of a number of factors might mean that his employer might find it more expedient to toss him out on his ass to fend for himself than to continue to employ such an unpersuasive hack. Some things that might make an employer consider that? breaking up broadcast monopolies like Clear Channel, bringing back 'balance' laws in broadcast news', making news organizations criminally liable for spreading untruths, the list goes on. But at some point one has to draw the line, how much harm is he willing to perpetrate or promote, to earn a living?
To, broaden the scope to Americans in general; there are many of us in a similar situation, in that the only thing that keeps us in our station is the lack of meaningful examination of the American economy and way of life with an eye towards constructive reform. How many of us could afford meat at every meal if all meat produced or imported had to face meaningful environmental, sanitary, and animal care standards that were diligently and vigorously enforced? The American experience is as nice as it is for some people, because other people have to do without or cut corners that the rest of us really think they shouldn't.
Gutfield is sad that conservatives are labeled 'uncool'. He should be pleased as hell to be 'uncool', it's a far more gentle adjective than he and the reactionaries on the far right deserve. It's uncool to work for people who are deliberately trying to disenfranchise American citizens, to destroy regulations on pollution, on, workplace safety, on electoral fundraising, on financial malfeasance. It's uncool to start foreign wars to benefit the bottom line of big defense contractors and oil companies And it's uncool to attempt to pay for all of that by gutting the already threadbare social safety net and to blame poverty on the poor while perpetuating the abuses that impoverish them. But besides uncool, its also, lying, mendacious, malicious, malevolent, pernicious, deceptive, perverted, and sometimes treasonous.
And ultimately, I think that's why we've seen a never ending war on 'hippies' since the sixties. They had the temerity to point out, that the American dream wasn't equally accessible to all Americans. They pointed out the game was rigged in favor of older white christian men, and that every other group was part of a hierarchy of lesser Americans whose influence and power diminished with every step away from white, straight, wealthy, christian or male ideal. They saw that the rules would have to change so that everyone could participate meaningfully in culture and politics and the economy and the academy.
And the for all that conservatives claim to want a meritocracy, that everyone be judged and rewarded on the basis of their capability and contributions, the establishment of a true meritocracy is their worst nightmare. The last thing that the low level shills and propagandists of conservative America want is to have to compete with each other on the basis of results. They are employed as cheerleaders and demagogues to rally the faithful and castigate the unrighteous and to faithfully parrot the alleged merits of unrestricted capitalism (and highly restricted voting) to America. Their job is far more about reassuring their employers than it is about making a convincing argument for lower taxes on millionaires.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Singular Societies
I missed the Q&A with the folks from Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Institute, so I'm posting my questions here.
The singularity sounds different every time it is described. If we define it as a the emergence of a distinct society based on blurring the line between human and machine intelligence, will that society will emerge spontaneously once a certain level of technology has been achieved, or would it have to be consciously created by people attracted to that idea? Will there be only one singularity society or multiple? Will that or those culture(s) eventually encompass all of humanity or just a fraction, and how might those proportions shake out? Where will this begin first and where will it be most eagerly adopted? Will there be push back against singularity (sub)culture from society as it currently exists? Will a singularitean society/(sub)culture(s) acknowledge legitimate criticisms of human-computer integration and address valid concerns? Will the effects of global climate change endanger the emergence of the singularity? why or why not?
For extra credit, show your work.
The singularity sounds different every time it is described. If we define it as a the emergence of a distinct society based on blurring the line between human and machine intelligence, will that society will emerge spontaneously once a certain level of technology has been achieved, or would it have to be consciously created by people attracted to that idea? Will there be only one singularity society or multiple? Will that or those culture(s) eventually encompass all of humanity or just a fraction, and how might those proportions shake out? Where will this begin first and where will it be most eagerly adopted? Will there be push back against singularity (sub)culture from society as it currently exists? Will a singularitean society/(sub)culture(s) acknowledge legitimate criticisms of human-computer integration and address valid concerns? Will the effects of global climate change endanger the emergence of the singularity? why or why not?
For extra credit, show your work.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Futurism Part II: The Electric Boogalooening
I wish I could make sweeping predictions about a golden age to come. Sadly, I don't see it happening without more than a few growing pains. The 22nd century will look back at us and be astonished by our greed, our pollution, our deliberate blindness to the problems we thoughtlessly create.
The world is changing in unexpected ways and the country today, is not the country we were led to believe we'd have when adults first told us about the future. But to look at the world today with it's almost unimaginable changes from the dark days of the cold war, and conclude that it's terrible and getting worse, is willful ignorance.
Which is not to say that we don't face serious problems, of course we do, mostly related to climate change and resources depletion, but that's never what these reactionaries are upset about. Civil rights, gay marriage, government regulation, imaginary gun control, the black dude in the white house and Obamacare, and a laundry list more of resentments that add up to they don't get to win just by showing up anymore. I'm not even sure there is a way to wake them up and have them see the world without the blinders of prejudice and resentment.
Sometimes it takes a shock to the system, to wake us up and change our lives. Some people see the shock and double down. My aunt lost her leg to diabetes, and rather than take that crystal clear warning sign to heart and begin to exercise and diet and monitor her blood sugar, she didn't change a thing because "doctors don't know anything". She died two years later when gangrene took her other leg. So some of us aren't going to make it to the other side of our current energy and food and water crisis. Some people will sit in coastal houses even when the storm surge rolls in. Some will use their last drop of water to irrigate their desert lawns. Many more will survive because their loved ones and neighbors have dragged them kicking and screaming into a future where recycling and renewable energy are a way of life instead of quaint environmentalist hobbies.
The world is changing in unexpected ways and the country today, is not the country we were led to believe we'd have when adults first told us about the future. But to look at the world today with it's almost unimaginable changes from the dark days of the cold war, and conclude that it's terrible and getting worse, is willful ignorance.
Which is not to say that we don't face serious problems, of course we do, mostly related to climate change and resources depletion, but that's never what these reactionaries are upset about. Civil rights, gay marriage, government regulation, imaginary gun control, the black dude in the white house and Obamacare, and a laundry list more of resentments that add up to they don't get to win just by showing up anymore. I'm not even sure there is a way to wake them up and have them see the world without the blinders of prejudice and resentment.
Sometimes it takes a shock to the system, to wake us up and change our lives. Some people see the shock and double down. My aunt lost her leg to diabetes, and rather than take that crystal clear warning sign to heart and begin to exercise and diet and monitor her blood sugar, she didn't change a thing because "doctors don't know anything". She died two years later when gangrene took her other leg. So some of us aren't going to make it to the other side of our current energy and food and water crisis. Some people will sit in coastal houses even when the storm surge rolls in. Some will use their last drop of water to irrigate their desert lawns. Many more will survive because their loved ones and neighbors have dragged them kicking and screaming into a future where recycling and renewable energy are a way of life instead of quaint environmentalist hobbies.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
In the 21st Century We Will All Have Flying Cars
I love the idea of becoming a futurist. Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others all got to leave an indelible mark on the way their times imagined the coming decades. I love the idea of painting a picture with nothing but Utopian optimism as if resources would be dedicated to building a future for the betterment of mankind with no tawdry commercialism marring the perfection of cloud piercing skyscrapers with ads for light beer. I love the idea that we'd all drive around in flying cars powered by itty bitty fission reactors on the way to our office jobs where we'd use slide rules to plot our business class flight to the moon.
I love the way 20th century futurists would imagine 20 lane elevated freeways filled with aerodynamic bubble cars traveling at 200 mph under a flawless blue sky. I turned the pages of Popular Mechanics and OMNI magazines, jaw dropping at each fabulous new supersonic passenger jet, or Single Stage To Orbit reusable rocket. I love the way those landscapes never feature so much as a gas station, or a road crew, or traffic jam, or smog.
I love the optimism, the vision of cooperation, the sense that 20th century progress would free us from the perils of communism, and the specter of hunger, greed and want.
But there are still futurists working today. Ray Kurzweil has made a career of predicting the coming 'singularity' where computing is ubiquitous, inexpensive, and possessed of superhuman intelligence; leading inexorably to a fusion of of biological and machine intelligence which will empower us all and free us from the petty limitations of biological incarnation and inevitable death.
My experience of the 21st century has been a bit of a letdown by those standards.
Because, as it turns out there are no flying cars. There are technological curiosities that manage to be both airworthy and street legal, but they only prove to demonstrate that the conflicting requirements of air and ground travel, basically preclude the existence of a practical and cheap flying car.
Nuclear power, is still limited to aging and dangerous fission reactors that threaten to poison us all with their all but eternally dangerous waste products. Fusion is a sideshow, perennially 20 years from commercial power generation. Forty years have passed since the energy crisis and gas guzzling muscle cars blanket the highways like they never left. Oil companies and coal companies still dictate our nation's energy policy.
The computer revolution's early promise has been squandered. The efficiency gains in finance and manufacturing that could have given us full employment and 20 hour work weeks have only served to enrich the already wealthy, and convince the rest of us to work twice as hard or our job will be the next to move across the Rio Grande or the Pacific. The power to deliver the sum of human experience cheaply to our desks, and our pockets, has been prostituted to sell us boner pills. Internet service providers and social media have colluded with the darkest parts of the national security apparatus to create a series of interlocking panopticons where our commercial transactions, our medical records, our browsing habits, and even our movements are stored away for the perusal of paranoid authoritarians and their favorite commercial catspaws... I mean contractors.
But the situation isn't hopeless, just less hopeful. We probably won't finish out the 21st century with thriving cities on the moon, but with a little luck, we might have some here on earth.
I love the way 20th century futurists would imagine 20 lane elevated freeways filled with aerodynamic bubble cars traveling at 200 mph under a flawless blue sky. I turned the pages of Popular Mechanics and OMNI magazines, jaw dropping at each fabulous new supersonic passenger jet, or Single Stage To Orbit reusable rocket. I love the way those landscapes never feature so much as a gas station, or a road crew, or traffic jam, or smog.
I love the optimism, the vision of cooperation, the sense that 20th century progress would free us from the perils of communism, and the specter of hunger, greed and want.
But there are still futurists working today. Ray Kurzweil has made a career of predicting the coming 'singularity' where computing is ubiquitous, inexpensive, and possessed of superhuman intelligence; leading inexorably to a fusion of of biological and machine intelligence which will empower us all and free us from the petty limitations of biological incarnation and inevitable death.
My experience of the 21st century has been a bit of a letdown by those standards.
Because, as it turns out there are no flying cars. There are technological curiosities that manage to be both airworthy and street legal, but they only prove to demonstrate that the conflicting requirements of air and ground travel, basically preclude the existence of a practical and cheap flying car.
Nuclear power, is still limited to aging and dangerous fission reactors that threaten to poison us all with their all but eternally dangerous waste products. Fusion is a sideshow, perennially 20 years from commercial power generation. Forty years have passed since the energy crisis and gas guzzling muscle cars blanket the highways like they never left. Oil companies and coal companies still dictate our nation's energy policy.
The computer revolution's early promise has been squandered. The efficiency gains in finance and manufacturing that could have given us full employment and 20 hour work weeks have only served to enrich the already wealthy, and convince the rest of us to work twice as hard or our job will be the next to move across the Rio Grande or the Pacific. The power to deliver the sum of human experience cheaply to our desks, and our pockets, has been prostituted to sell us boner pills. Internet service providers and social media have colluded with the darkest parts of the national security apparatus to create a series of interlocking panopticons where our commercial transactions, our medical records, our browsing habits, and even our movements are stored away for the perusal of paranoid authoritarians and their favorite commercial catspaws... I mean contractors.
But the situation isn't hopeless, just less hopeful. We probably won't finish out the 21st century with thriving cities on the moon, but with a little luck, we might have some here on earth.
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