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Musings Report 2019-39 9-28-19 The Big Con: Technology + X Will Fix Everything
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The Big Con: Technology + X Will Fix Everything
We can't help wanting to keep everything the same if it benefits us. The high-energy-consumption, debt-based developed-world lifestyle suits most of us, despite our complaints and concerns, and so we are easy marks for the Big Con, which is that Technology plus X (with X being ideology, narrative, etc.) will fix everything so we can keep on having all the comforts we have today without sacrificing anything or having to undergo some wrenching change.
Anyone who has gone through bankruptcy, been dealt a permanent reduction in health or equivalent unwelcome shock goes through something like the Kubler-Ross process of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance.
What's left out of this process is falling for the Big Con, because none of us like to think of ourselves as easy marks for a con.
The essence of a sure-fire con is the credible promise that we'll get something we desire without any sacrifice or hard work, for example, getting rich quickly, getting cured overnight, and so on.
Smart people are conned all the time. Just look at the recent implosion of WeWork, a commercial real estate venture masquerading as a tech company (that was an essential part of the con). Venture capitalists and big-shot investors fell all over themselves to "invest" millions in a company with no credible plan to ever be profitable, a company that lost $1 billion in the past six months.
But the CEO was charismatic and the con was well-designed, so this fraudulent enterprise was set to go public with a valuation of $50 billion.
WeWork (shortened to We after the CEO charged the company $6 million for the completely illusory "rights" to the word "We") was a great con.
I've assembled a short list of articles that detail precisely why Technology + X will not fix everything and enable the present high-energy-consumption, debt-based developed-world lifestyle to continue untouched.
What makes this con different from a mere fantasy is that some people are actively seeking to get rich quick off the con (carbon credits being one example).
Vaclav Smil summarizes the situation very succinctly: "The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone."
These articles are well worth reading (if you haven't already):
Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’
Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap?
Societies that failed were seduced and undone by what I called a progress trap: a chain of successes which, upon reaching a certain scale, leads to disaster. The dangers are seldom seen before it’s too late. The jaws of a trap open slowly and invitingly, then snap closed fast.
Technocracy, Luddism, and the Environmental Crisis
The green movement needs to think about social power just as much as about technology.I believe the roots of the environmental crisis lie as much in the technocratic attitude towards nature expressed in Western cultures and technologies as in the capitalist drive for profit, growth, and accumulation. The power of industrial-capitalism is that its technological, social, and economic values mutually reinforce one another.
The Net Energy Pincer
Prior investment and psychological attachment prevent us from starting again from scratch. Instead, we employ ever more complex (and expensive) work-arounds in an attempt to make systems, institutions and infrastructure achieve things that they were not designed to do (such as keeping people alive into their 90s or providing 24/7 electricity using solar panels).
The irony, though, is that while the work-arounds across the entire system cost ever more in energy and monetary terms, individual components end up starved of resources. Infrastructure is left to decay even as infrastructure spending increases remorselessly. Reforms aimed at cutting the social security bill end up costing billions of pounds without lowering the full cost of social security payments. Carrying out repairs and maintenance on the cheap appears to save money... until a crisis point is reached.
Climate Change and Technology (via LaserLefty)
The question that isn’t being asked: what will the adverse consequences of these (alternative energy) technologies be? Climate change and mass extinction weren’t even imagined as consequences of the technologies that produced them. And again, a central drawback of the technologies being developed to address climate change is that they will adversely impact species loss and mass extinction. If the ‘solution’ to climate change means a catastrophic loss of biodiversity, what is to be gained by implementing it?
To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution
Big tech claims AI and digitization will bring a better future. But putting computers everywhere is bad for people and the planet. We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how AI and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet.
Highlights of the Blog This Week
Pets Are Now as Unaffordable As College, Housing and Healthcare 9/27/19
Here's How We Are Silenced by Big Tech 9/25/19
Financial Storm Clouds Gather 9/24/19
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Finished the edit/rewrite of my new book, now on to the cover.
From Left Field
The Financial Times' Martin Wolf Discovers that Rentier Capitalism and Financialization Increase Inequality and Hurt Growth
The American Working Man Still Isn’t Working: Our Economic Recovery Has Left Many Behind
Milton Friedman Was Wrong: The famed economist’s "shareholder theory" provides corporations with too much room to violate consumers’ rights and trust.
Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism
Overrated: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- and Heidegger too...
The west’s self-proclaimed custodians of democracy failed to notice it rotting away
If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?
The petty crime that kills the Green New Deal
Weekly Roundup: The Passion Of Saint iGNUcius Edition
Why I Changed my Opinion on China (12 min) (via John F.)
"It's not what you do some of the time that counts, it's what you do all of the time that counts." Jack LaLanne
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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