Human Iterations

(#13: We do not live in a closed system.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

Although its certainly true our current mass infrastructure cannot and will not survive any prolonged contact with the basic laws of physics, a permanent or catastrophic collapse is not inevitable.

The biosphere is a complex nonlinear system and concrete parking lots are not. Because our most physically dominant technologies are less 'complex' (or, as I have been using the term, 'dynamic') than their surrounding environment by relatively infinite orders of magnitude, they are deeply instable. Furthermore, the blunt macroscopic construction of our technological systems and infrstructure leaves them especially vulnerable to entropy as the easiest resources are depleted.

Our response to the inadequacies of our infrastructure's integration with its environment is to build ever more extended structure on top of it. Rather than abolishing and rebuilding, or just modifying our existing technologies, we add endlessly to them. Concrete upon concrete. Text upon text. Until the sheer mass of technostructure begins to rival the biomass around it.

Our structures eat up dynamicism and replace it with rigidity. But this process of expansion is the only thing that keeps those resulting rigid structures intact. We use up what we can get to easily but as those resources are depleted it becomes increasingly important to expend and commit an exponentially greater proportion of our net civilization towards the upkeep of what we've already built. Eventually, in a closed system, the basic mathematical realities of chaos theory and entropy will kick our ass and the catastrophic collapse of this rigid system we've paved over the face of the earth will become an inevitability. Due to the extremely over-extended and omnipresent nature of our infrastructure, there will be no faucet of life in the biosphere unaffected. Needless to say our 6.5 billion little frail sedentary bodies will not do so well.

In short, we are fucked.

...Except that we do not live in a closed system.

Although our civilization is in dire trouble and our technological infrastructure is a hideous embarrassment, we are not doomed. The crash is not an inevitability. And neither under the banner of "sustainability" are any fundamental restrictions, be they sociological or material, inevitable.

Although grinding into the Earth's crust for specific resources is a progressively harder and harder zero-sum game, the plain and simple reality is that we have the capability to reach huge swathes of resources in an extremely productive, cost-effective manner (far more efficient, in fact, than any previous process available us in history). Whatsmore, in an unprecedented (and probably unreasonable) act of forgiveness on behalf of the universe, we don't have to completely destroy our rotting civilization in order to start acquiring them. We can implement this new process of acquiring resources and use the proceeds to gradually fluidly abolish the horrific structural cancers of our civilization. All the while giving us footing to develop more dynamic and integratable technologies. And, if that weren't enough, the rigid structures we utilize in this process don't inherently replace biomass. Because we won't be mining our resources from within a dynamic biosphere.

We'll be chewing up God's little bite-sized gifts and breathing in the source of all energy on Earth, finally allowing us to bypass the middlemen and stop fucking things up for them.

Asteroids and solar energy.

It's a real simple and practical solution.

Stop doing your fucking around in an infinitely complex non-linear dynamic system you don't yet understand. In 2020 there's an asteroid that's going to swing by the Earth's doorstep carrying Twenty Trillion Dollars worth (today's market) of precious metals vital to our advanced electric circuitry based technology.

Said asteroid is one of millions of lifeless boulders spread across the sky. Rigid and desolate. Dead rocks waiting to be ingested into the seeds of life.

3554 Amun will be far easier to reach than the moon. If even the barest amount of today's tech is applied to its capture (and entrepreneurs are already lining up) it will completely devalue the world's financial markets. The roots of the limits and restrictions, the scarcities that keep the Third World under First World satellites, that keep the mythical "hundred dollar laptop" at something as high as one hundred dollars, will begin to dissolve.

That is, if all the people waiting for it are still there when it arrives.

If the world's superpowers and their multinational corporate apparatus are ready with legal restrictions, subsidies and financial treaties, the resulting materials will be funneled into existing power-structures and their material detritus (our progressively fucked up global infrastructure).

But far worse than such a continuance of today's near-fascist powerstructures is the possibility that no one will be waiting for 3554 Amun, or, for that matter, ever again look up at the sky with hope. That our global infrastructure will finally be forced to the point of absolute collapse.

Because, and here's the problem, Derrik Jensen is right. We are playing for the endgame. If our civilization collapses hard, it might very well be impossible to rebuild. If we crash once and we crash bad, civilization will be permanently limited. We will live in a closed system. A permanent ceiling to our technology, be it dynamic or rigid. Permanent restrictions felt in every aspect of society. Limits to what we can do, who we can be, where we can go, how we can experience... limits to our capacity to touch and understand.

The cheap resources that first spurred and allowed technological development will be effectively depleted, and the remains will progressively become useless. Our fossil fuels will be almost impossible to reach and the little we acquire will have to work far harder to build far less. If we fall there's a very real chance we will never be able to get up again. That will be it.

And make no mistake about it, the crash will suck.

Our lives will be, on the whole, more horrid than ever before in history. You see, what's being glossed over is that, though advanced technology in the form of WiFi mesh networks and space-elevators may disappear permanently, we simply won't lose all the technologies created by this civilization project. In fact, it looks like we'll default on Middle Ages technology. With all the oppression that makes for. And heavier restrictions on Anarchist organizing or resistance.

Serious metallurgy will peak as will, obviously, fossil fuels, but metal won't peak as much. When the last major nation states succumb to entropy and the survivalists' bullets have finally run out, the resulting tech level will not be pre-agrarian stone age, it will be a perpetual iron-age. Although complicated endeavors will be hindered, the loose distribution of scrap metal will democratize simplistic metallurgy. Oxidization will eventually deplete vast amounts of scrap iron, but enough mass deposits will remain immediately viable for millennia and enough modern metallurgical compounds will resist oxidization to likewise matter. Likewise, enough topsoil will be farmable in various ways for forms of agriculture to continue (and it will, because 6.5 Billion people don't just give in to reductions in food supply). Although it will be impossible to construct complicated circuits or analyze proteins, it will be very easy to construct swords, hoes, pitchforks, crossbows, and, to a lesser extent, guns. However the acquisition and smelting process will lend itself more to social hierarchies than to individualized knowledge. And with information technologies essentially annihilated, anarchists will drowned out by the fiefdoms around them. Paranoia stems from lackings in one's knowledge and, as information is restricted, old psychoses will take root. Some tribes, by sheer luck, will end up isolated from one another and will achieve some equilibrium of blandness. But most will not.

If civilization collapses what emerges will be pretty fucking simple. The gun-nuts won't fade away as their guns rust, they'll fucking expand little fiefdoms. If the crash is particularly bad on the environment this'll make for universal unending tribal violence (a few magnitudes worse than pre-Colombian Northern America, but granted, not hyperbolic road-warrior dystopia). If the crash is anything but utterly catastrophic it'll simply shatter the nation state system back into fuedal age principalities. The wealth, values and structures created by civilization will still exist. The same dread forces encapsulated by "civilization" will still exist. The only difference (besides the incredibly horrific living conditions and death rates within) will be the frail niche capacity for autonomous societies on the periphery.

But even if these autonomous zones are fully utilized, they will still be incredibly dependent upon the horrific society around them. Deeply intertwined in the ecology. They will be the new bourgeoisie. The suburban autonomist paradises. Nevermind that undermining the overpacked ministates (and consequently accepting or dealing with refugees from such) will not be in their best interests as the ecology couldn't handle influxes of hunter-gatherers our of slave-agrarian societies and that inside/outside dichotomies would kill any potential anarchism in the long term... The basic reality is that they will have lived through the most traumatic and vicious event in Human history and that, to even begin to function as a people, they will have to divorce themselves from the rest of humanity. They will have to create hierarchies of human value based upon relative positions and roles. “Diversity” in whatever jumble of associations one has, will not be desirable because it will not be sustainable. Small forms of localized and specialized change will be accepted while any form of serious deviation will carry with it a direct price in terms of energy or food.

And the ministates? They will simply assist in further ingraining the memes and cultural psychoses of our current society. The logical progression of our balkanized suburbs, a society that protectively contracts into little closed zones of ingrown hierarchies. They will finally know safety from the globalization process of communication and competing ideas. Although the trite physical comforts of modern civilization will disappear, it will ultimately be a huge relief to many. Social hierarchies and oppressions will continue free from dissonance, with reason to further march down the path of nihilistic mental rigidity.

Furthermore, any serious technological collapse will bring with it a vast ecological collapse.

And it's a perfectly reasonable possibility that humanity, or even mammals, will not survive such. Never mind the very real possibility of nuclear winter (and no, your survival skills are not going to be able to protect you from that kind of radiation) or the windows finally cracking on the Pentagon's biowarfare lab, the plain and simple reality is that we're in the middle of the greatest alteration to the biosphere since before the fucking dinosaurs. And, as the computer guts decompose in the abandoned suburban homes, as the last bits of localization self-imposed by our civilization's infrastructure breaks down and the sheer energy of our chemical blasphemy finally merges into Earth's outer fluid, a fucking gazillion butterfly wings are going to flap with all their might. As the biosphere's non-linear dynamics reaction to these last few centuries of sudden and violent alteration plays itself out, the biosphere is going to change in a big way. You don't make that degree of drastic chemical and macro-physiological revisions without expecting turbulence. Whether or not we peaceably and instantaneously evolve past fossil fuels tomorrow or all die in some mega-collapse, the effect of the shit we've been stirring into the pot is going to become more pronounced. And on a biological level this is going to be catastrophic. See the only defining feature of the biosphere is that it's dynamic. A big bundle of scummy fluid. Taxonomic conceptual structures like “interdependent networks of species and fauna” are just incidental arrangements of macroscopic structures. Fuck, what makes you think DNA will naturally survive into the next iteration of the Earth's crust?

The Earth's scummy surface is just going through one mild iteration of entropic chemistry. Frail semblances of repetitive structures and mild plateaus in overall energetic interaction do not make for any realistic security. And with the rise of our civilization we've just kicked the shit out of whatever momentarily normalizing patterns may have been buffering us.

There is no magical restoring force of equilibrium in the biosphere to something in any way compatible with life, much less humanity. The “natural state of things” is a vicious myth propagated by the Church of Biology. There is no real probability that, come a collapse, there will be a role for us or anything like us. And there certainly won't be in a few more million years.

To embrace that is to embrace death. To push our dependents, the rest of society, our own dreams and desires beyond a periphery based on their relevance to immediate physical guides. To embrace role-filling within constraints. To embrace limitation. A finite set of possible existences. A normalization away from contact, experimentation and evolution in favor of immediate usefulness, our functionality as biological cogs.

The psychological and sociological effects of acceptance alone are reason alone to fight the crash till our last breath.

But hope is more than rational, it is almost justified.

The limitations presented by the Earth alone are not reasonable guidelines to the future. Vast and significant social forces, both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian are very much in the processes of following our desire for contact beyond our immediate puddle. And the consequences of such are anything but disregardable. Closed system analysis is simply an insufficient basis for declarations of inevitability.

Furthermore, such space expansion is far from a simple postponement of the same story. It's simply impossible to apply the systematic tendencies, constraints and realities of Earth to the heavens. Even if we do decide to expand rather than just utilize astral resources as a platform to fix our relationship with the biosphere, relativity will immediately quash any empire building or any centralized civilization. You see, the very nature of space-time dissolves rigid structures on truly macroscopic scales. There can never be any galactic empires (even ones that later crash from diminishing resource returns). It's impossible. Yet at the same time there can still be connection and enough individuals immediately connected as to dissolve regional oppression and authoritarianism. Furthermore, and here's the absolutely critical component, humanity will become truly distributed and redundant rather than intractably interdependent. No longer trapped within a biosphere pressed between walls of desolation and rigidity, we'll finally shed off this mistaken iteration of sedentary life and return as hunter-gatherers between the stars. Tribes of lessening of material interdependence, much larger sustainability and thus larger market pools for anarchy to blossom. With perpetually plentiful resources for every diverse desire.

Contrary to popular assertion, we are not machines grinding out the inevitable, consequences of our environment, ultimately controlled by everything around us. We are neither mere products of our food supply nor inconsequential components of an already written collapse. We're smart people and we can make choices. We can reach out, explore, learn and we can invent. We can choose connection rather than isolation and we can choose to see the externalities of our actions clearly. We do not yet live in a closed system. There is still hope.

Asserting otherwise does more than buy into insulting social mechanism, it develops and reinforces such.