Category Archives: Utopian Speculations

A Nation’s Debts (beyond the fiscal)

Posted on February 20 | 6 Comments
Landfill debt.

Landfill debt.

Software coders use the phrase “technical debt” to refer to aspects of an application that are poorly designed and might cause trouble down the road. Hard-coded references, non-normalized data-structures, and opaque functions that do too many things all contribute to a project’s technical debt.

It’s a helpful concept, and one that makes me consider kinds of debt beyond fiscal/financial.

The national debt consists of public debt (money the U.S. government owes its citizens, corporations, and foreign governments) and debt held by governmental accounts, including the Social Security Trust fund. Here’s a simple breakdown of U.S. Federal Debt compiled by Steve Conover of The Skeptical Optimist, taken from this article:

Who do we owe?

Who do we owe?

The current U.S. debt is about the same as our annual GDP. This worries some people. I don’t know enough about economics to know if I should worry about this statistic or not. Economists who seem credible to me seem to lean towards reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio by encouraging economic growth. Gold-bugs like Ron Paul and the bears over at zerohedge.com are totally freaking out about the size of the national debt and are hoarding gold coins, canned food, and bullets. They insist we’re “past the point of no return” in terms of a bloated out-of-control fiat currency and that Nigerian-style hyperinflation and social collapse are right around the corner.

Who to believe?

While I will admit to a small hoard of canned food and gold coins, it’s not the fiscal debt that worries me most. There are other kinds of national debt that reduce a nation’s productivity and can even edge it towards collapse.

Like what?

The U.S. carries a large infrastructure debt, with an aging, inefficient power grid, laughably slow internet, and old-ass railways and airports. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a “D” grade back in 2009 (the next infrastructure report will be released March 19th). I think Obama missed a huge opportunity by not pushing for more and bigger public works programs after the 2008 economic crisis (which would have also boosted employment).

As a nation we carry several kinds of social debt too. Racial debt, for being a country that has had legal slavery for 38% of its short history. Another is income inequality, which breeds resentment and dissatisfaction among neighbors and neighboring communities.

We carry a health debt; more and more we are a nation of obese people with respiratory, cardiovascular, and blood-sugar control problems.

Other countries carry far more debt than we do in certain areas. India carries a huge debt in terms of women’s rights and safety. China carries huge debts in terms of pollution, government corruption, and income inequality. Japan has a serious demographic debt (too many old people and not enough young people).

Environmentally we’re doing much better than China, but there are signs of serious regress with our new love of fracking, and the transfer of public lands to private interests.

What about moral debt? For decades, after World War 2, the United States held the world’s moral high ground. More recently, adventurism in the Middle East, our freedom-eroding “end justifies the means” war against terrorism, and remote control drone strikes that murder civilians have all eroded our pride. So has our mediocre treatment of the innocent poor (children) within our own borders.

How do we pay our debts? It’s a lot of work, but not complicated. We rein in the most severe of our budget excesses (foreign invasions), and launch massive (but relatively cheap) preventative health campaigns to reduce long-term medical costs. We invest in infrastructure, education, and scientific research, which all pay huge dividends a few decades down the road. We make our tax system more progressive to curb income inequality.

How do we repay our moral/ethical debts, and regain the moral high ground in our own eyes and the eyes of the world?

We should fund, build, and discover things that contribute to the welfare of all humankind. An effective asteroid tracking program. A space elevator, so we don’t have a waste a buttload of rocket fuel every time we want to get up out of our gravity armchair. Publicly-funded scientific research that goes into the global public domain. A mission to Tau Ceti.

Big, expensive projects? Definitely — but all excellent investments in our economy and national spirit.

If we don’t pay our debts and come up with a new sense of national purpose, inertia will lead us to more divisiveness, mediocrity, isolationism, cultural Balkanization, dirty energy, bankruptcy (of every kind), and boring, purposeless lives. If not outright collapse, then gradual, depressing decline.

So let’s get our shit together, unite, and get some cool stuff done.

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Tau Ceti — let’s go!

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Rehabilitating “Progress” and Envisioning “Messy Utopias”

Posted on October 20 | 14 Comments

The original “classic” utopia.

I took away three main points from Steven Pinker’s recent Long Now lecture discussing the ideas behind his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.

  1. His outrageous and counter-intuitive proposition that death by violence among human beings has been unevenly but steadily declining throughout history (he provides a great deal of compelling evidence, some of which I discussed in my last post).
  2. His suggestion that intellectuals and academia (especially in the humanities) reconsider their general view that human progress does not exist and is a false ideal.
  3. His point that some of the most horrific genocidal actions in human history have been in pursuit of idealized utopian societies (such as Nazism, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Stalin’s Communism).

The Messy Utopia

Let’s assume for a minute that the human race avoids destroying itself within the next 100 years. Somehow we’ve made it through global warming, peak oil, massive financial deleveraging, food shortages, our population peaking, droughts and floods, supervolcanoes, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, corporate malfeasance, extreme concentrations of wealth, ocean acidification and coral reef destruction and the collapse of natural fisheries. Some of these things turned out to be more serious than we thought, some less so, and a whole bunch of other stuff happened that we didn’t even consider or predict at all.

But we’re still here. Maybe 9 billion of us in 2112. Maybe significantly fewer if things have gotten really bad. But still quite a few human beings either way.

So what kind of world do we want to be living in, 100 years from now?

History has shown us pretty clearly that the single-minded relentless pursuit of a “perfect” idealized society is a terrible idea. When the “end” is conceived as infinitely good, that opens up the “means” to be pretty awful (forced relocations, prison camps, and outright genocide, for example).

But that doesn’t mean we have to throw out the idea of progress altogether, or stop trying to envision a better society. Is there room for the pursuit of “messy” utopias?

Here’s how I would contrast a “messy utopia” vs. a “classic utopia”:

Classic Utopia Messy Utopia
-homogenous population
-rural/pastoral
-clean slate/new land
-one right way of doing things
-static/fixed
-ignores empirical evidence
-anti-elite/anti-intellectual
-disregards less-abled
-attempts to eliminate problems
-demands moral standards
-traditional social roles
-draconian state power		 -diverse population
-capitalizes on efficiencies of cities
-builds/improves on what exists
-many good ways of doing things
-constantly evolving
-uses empirical evidence
-integrates/uses elites
-accommodates and cares for less-abled
-develops systems for coping with problems
-encourages moral behavior
-wildly divergent social roles
-judicious use of state power

The “classic utopia” comes in many flavors. Some are secular, others are religious. Some are conservative and some are liberal. All of them are fantastical and not firmly grounded in a realistic view of the world. Here are some examples:

  • Ayn Rand’s “Galt’s Gulch” from Atlas Shrugged (a secluded enclave protected by energy beams, where residents never borrow things from each other, but instead pay rent for usage)
  • Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia … a racially segregated secessional nation in which people love arts and crafts, hate TV and professional sports, don’t gossip, smoke a lot of weed, have lots of non-monogamous sex, and plant hidden WMD’s in major non-ecotopian cities as a deterrent to revanchism.
  • Joel Salatin is the intensive-polyculture farmer featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma). His libertarian Christian utopia would have no use for cities, and would demand extremely traditional gender roles.

One could go on with visions of libertarian floating city tax havens, anarchist freegan collectives, and so on. These movements, books, and views are not dangerous — what is dangerous is when a powerful insane individual or government tries to implement any kind of utopia with a top-down authoritative approach.

Realism and Optimism Can Co-Exist

I like the idea of envisioning a multitude of messy utopias. Here are my thoughts on rehabilitating the word “progress”:

  • progress isn’t inevitable, but it is possible
  • progress isn’t unidirectional, it’s multi-directional
  • progress can occur even if human nature doesn’t change
  • progress isn’t smooth, rather it is interrupted by sharp spikes of regress
  • not all cultures see progress the same way, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t universal values that most of us embrace
  • qualities that, when developed in individuals, might lead to progress on a social level might include empathy, reason, connectedness, and purpose
  • values that many people might agree represent progress on a social level could include more knowledge and understanding (education), less death by violence, public health and safety, more personal freedom, higher social trust, safety nets for families and communities, egalitarianism, rich arts and culture, scientific research and exploration, robust trade, and so forth

What do you think?

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Steven Pinker — Violence Is Down (But What About Oakland?)

Posted on October 17 | 6 Comments

Steven Pinker and David M. Kennedy

Recently I attended Steven Pinker’s lecture discussing his latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” This nytimes review provides a great summary if you’re not familiar with it. The talk was part of the Long Now seminar series, hosted by Steward Brand.

Very short summary: death from violence has been declining throughout history, and we are currently experiencing an unprecedented “long peace.”

It’s a counterintuitive proposition. The world often seems on the brink of mass destruction.

But the evidence Pinker presents is compelling. Walking down Market in San Francisco at night (which I did to get to the lecture, past dice games, thuggish types lurking in the shadows, anarchists in hoodies, etc.) is much safer than the Mongol steppes under the reign of the Khans, or Europe during World War II.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Utopian Speculations, Culture Rant

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The Natural End of Capitalism

Posted on August 14 | 11 Comments

The bull’s run is over.

Capitalism, as we know it, is reaching the natural end of its global life cycle.

Human beings will retain some of the better aspects of capitalism, including the right to private property, competition in well-regulated markets, robust trade, reasonable compensation for intellectual property, and a modified corporate structure.

The aspects of capitalism that are not long for this world include:

  1. Ayn Rand/Gordon Gecko-style individualism, “greed is good,” disdain for cooperative efforts and collectivist values.
  2. Crass materialism and consumerism as acceptable social norms.
  3. Acceptance of worker exploitation, dehumanizing working conditions, extreme poverty, homelessness, poor nutrition, limited access to healthcare, and substandard education as “necessary costs” in a “free” market economy.
  4. The “predator/sociopathic” corporate charter model, under which corporations are legally obligated to prioritize profit-making over the environment, public health, worker health and safety, research and innovation, public and community wealth, and everything else.

In short, we’re moving towards humane markets (providing for each other) and away from human markets (exploiting each other).

Why is predatory, consumeristic capitalism on its way out? A number of factors are simultaneously converging:

  1. Human population growth is tapering off. Many people alive today will be alive to witness the most significant moment in our collective history — the human population peak. Capitalism is based on perpetual growth, which is not compatible with permanent population decline. Some of the challenges related to population decline will include abandoned cities, rewilding, and permanent economic shrinkage.
  2. We are running into severe environmental limitations. We have triggered the Anthropocene, a geological age characterized by mass extinctions, radical changes in local climates, overall global warming, acidification of oceans from excess CO2 absorption (which will result in almost no fish or coral reefs, but lots of jellyfish and algae), rising sea levels (and massive floods), endless droughts (resulting in the current Dustbowlification of the central US), deforestation, chemical pollution, gargantuan gyres of plastic detritus, and overall ecological shittiness. These problems are a direct result of a devouring capitalist system that sidelines such considerations as “externalities.”
  3. We are in the midst of a radical reorganization of production methods. More and more things are essentially free to produce and distribute, and can be shared/co-created via networks and decentralized production centers (home workshops, personal computers, 3D printers). Open-source production methods, freeware, and peer-to-peer distribution methods directly threaten top-down, strictly controlled capitalistic profit-generation models. Open-source is upending capitalism. Edit – as a commenter on Facebook pointed out, automation (scripting) is doing the same thing for services as peer-to-peer, open source, and 3D printing are doing for products. Humans optional.
  4. Attitudes toward capitalism are changing. The United States, the world’s glowing beacon of capitalistic success, is no longer so shiny. Vast regions of our country display decrepit infrastructure. Cities are going bankrupt. Unemployment is high and underemployment is rampant. Millions go without access to professional healthcare. Our educational system produces only middling results. Wealth inequality is extremely high, and the tax-dodging, politically manipulating plutocrats are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their ill-gotten gains and privileges. Meanwhile, nations that lean more towards social democracy sport better infrastructure, better educated kids, nicer looking cities, cleaner environments, and healthier, happier citizens.

In summary, the 10,000-year pyramid scheme that has been generating wealth at the expense of non-renewable planetary resources has reached its limit. We have exhausted, in order, mega-fauna, pristine virgin forests, fossil fuels, free food from the ocean, fresh water sources, and an atmosphere that regulates temperature, rainfall, and local weather patterns. We have even used up some elements (like helium, which permanently escapes into outer space), and destroyed entire landscapes to extract gold, silver, copper, and rare metals.

The free ride is over, and now we begin a slow, painful deleveraging (both ecological and financial/economic) as we attempt to repair ecological systems and weather our own population peak (in other words, taper off, and not collapse).

So what do we do now? Is all hope lost?

The alternatives to consumeristic predatory capitalism are not mysterious, nebulous, or theoretical. They are already operating and established in many ways, on both large and small scales. Some examples include:

  1. Dozens of countries (including most European countries, but also Canada and Japan) operate more or less as social democracies, and manage to provide healthcare, education, public safety, and other benefits to all of their citizens. Taxes are higher, but income and social inequality are lower. Social trust and happiness tend to be higher in functioning social democracies, which has a lot to do with more income equality.
  2. Large-scale cooperatives such as the Mondragon Corporation provides models for how to simultaneously achieve business excellence and social responsibility.
  3. Open-Source Ecology and their audacious Global Village Construction Set project provide a window into the future of open-source production and distribution methods (beyond information products and into the realm of functioning machines).

Some citizens of the United States are slavishly dedicated to right-wing “winner take all” capitalism, and are outrageously fearful of the lefty pinko “welfare state.” What is really threatening the wealth of our country is not worker benefits, food stamps, public schools, and national healthcare, but rather unfunded long-term invasions of foreign countries, Wall Street bailouts, and ultra-rich tax dodgers.

The Way Forward

Globally, we’ve already explored the consequences of extreme collectivism. We’re not going back. Reasonably regulated free markets are more efficient and generate more wealth than markets that are owned and operated by the state, with no private incentives. I’m not arguing for communism, an end to private ownership, or for “all information to be free” (no intellectual property rights).

What I’m pointing out is that the unstoppable trends of human population peak, the Anthropocene, and open-source production and distribution leave us no choice but to provide for each other during the big deleveraging. Nations that prioritize the health and wealth of citizens over the health and wealth of corporations will fare better during the approaching epoch of restoration, repair, and rewilding.

Is the future of humanity bright? I think it is, especially in terms of scientific and technological progress.

Is consumeristic “winner take all” capitalism the best system for ushering in a bright future for humanity? The Libertarian Space Men think so. I’m placing my bets with the Gaia Collective.

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Your Mind is Being Controlled by Alien Invaders

Posted on May 31 | 1 Comment

We’ve voluntarily created our own non-human enemy entities.

You might be familiar with David Icke’s theory that reptilian overlords control planet Earth by masquerading as powerful celebrities, like the Queen of England.

While Icke is clearly unhinged, the truth is even stranger.

As Charlie Stross has pointed out, “we are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.”

The non-human entity is the corporation, a powerful entity devoid of empathy, incapable of long-term holistic thinking, and ruthless in the pursuit of profit.

These “alien invaders” use mind-control via television and other media formats (not just advertising, but also cultural norms implicit in the programming or “content”). What kind of beliefs do they implant in our subconscious minds, in order to ensure their own survival?

1. Your self-esteem should be determined not by your values and behavior, but rather by the brands of the products you own.

2. Your expendable income should be entirely dedicated to purchasing corporate goods and services, as opposed to additional leisure time, charitable giving, or goods and services purchased from local non-corporate providers.

3. You should attribute less value to goods that are old, even if they are in excellent condition and function perfectly.

4. You should accept as “normal” products that deteriorate or break after a few years (or less).

5. “Loyalty” to a particular brand or corporation is a positive value with meaning.

6. Economic growth is a positive quality. Reduced consumption of goods and services is a bad thing, even if unemployment is low and quality of life is high.

7. Quality of life, the environment, and everything else is less important than economic growth and corporate profits.

8. Corporations deserve the same rights as human beings, and need those rights to function efficiently and effectively.

9. There are no viable economic alternatives to corporate structure in its current form.

10. You should not be alarmed that corporations control the planet, buy off politicians, bend the law to serve their own needs, and extract wealth from the remaining middle classes into the hands of the 0.01% richest global elite.

I’m generally a political centrist, and I think free-ish market with reasonable regulations in democratic societies are a pretty good idea. But the current situation is deeply alarming.

How do we fix it? Corporate charter reform is a good start. Corporations should not have free speech, but they should be free, and in some cases required, to sometimes put other priorities (like the environment, worker health, and public safety) ahead of the bottom line.

How do we stop corporations from controlling the political process and buying off politicians? Stop allowing corporations to finance political campaigns or hire lobbyists. If corporations have extra money, they should give it back to investors in the form of dividends, or invest it in R&D.

/rant.

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