https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/09/12/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-four-power-down/

In part three of this essay, I set out the way in which the scale and complexity of government was enabled by the growth of communications and transport, and that this, in turn, was a product of the quantity and quality of energy available at any time. Modern policy making, which despite claims to the contrary, is anything but democratic, occurs at the supranational level, and is enabled by mass electronic communication and mass (mostly by air) movement of people. Policy legislation is devolved to national governments, while implementation and administration tend to be devolved to local authorities, NGOs, and private companies, all of which are equally dependent upon access to cheap communication and travel.

Critical mass is required on a global scale to make both communication and travel profitable – if it wasn’t for millions of people sharing holiday snaps, cat videos, and pictures of their dinner on social media, it would cost too much for legitimate journalism and illegitimate misinformation alike. And if, for whatever reason, the purchasing power – and thus the value to advertisers – of that mass of people were to decline, much of the modern communications we take for granted would begin to unravel. Notably, what we colloquially refer to as “Big Tech” has bet the house on machine learning tools – optimistically hyped as “AI” – which are already past peak – there is no more internet content left to scrape – and are proving to be a lot less useful than the hype suggested.

With the economy turning decisively downward in the wake of the self-harming lockdowns and self-defeating sanctions of the past couple of years, that critical mass is under threat. Peak smartphone happened nearly a decade ago, meaning that almost everyone who can afford the advertised products and subscription services which ultimately pay for the communications system, is already on board. Moreover, as the cost of essentials like housing, energy, and food have risen sharply in recent years, spending has switched away from these discretionary goods and services – this is most obvious on our boarded-up high streets, but online sales have also been hit.

This is going to get worse for years to come as government and corporations seek to claw back the losses they took during two years of sharp price increases. In the UK, energy, rail and water companies have announced yet more inflation-busting price increases, despite service quality declining. Rents and mortgage payments are still high. Car sales have fallen as costs – insurance, taxes and quasi-taxes, parking charges, and fuel – have all increased. Local authorities are raising local taxes and service charges to plug some of their debts. And central government has announced austerity cuts and tax increases to prop-up the international value of the pound. Lacking any means of avoiding or evading these increased costs – most of them compulsory or essential – and lacking the means to secure better wages, the mass of the population can only respond to this by cutting back even further on things like media subscriptions, discretionary goods, and holidays abroad… i.e., the very things that allow communication and travel as currently configured to exist in the first place.

So much for the demand side. Adding to the woes of Big tech and Big Aviation, are increases in the cost of components and, especially, increases in the cost of energy. For the average social media user, these costs are largely hidden. The electricity required to run the average computer is tiny – no more than £1.00 per day. And, at least for now, as a result of good quality control, it is rare for hardware to fail. Data centres, in contrast, are energy and component hogs, adding to the growing supply chain and electricity generation shortages across the western states – a particular problem in Europe following the loss of cheap Russian gas, but also in the UK where new wind and nuclear capacity is lagging well behind the loss of coal, gas, and nuclear, leaving us relying on imports for 10% (and growing) of our electricity consumption (and our less than half-wit government somehow imagines that the UK might become a world leader in datacentres).

Squeezed on both the supply and demand side, the system of global communications is entering a death spiral. As critical mass is lost and running costs continue to rise, the days of the “free” internet are numbered. Most likely, online platforms and services currently funded by advertising will gradually shift to paid subscriptions. Last year, for example, Facebook – the biggest of the social media platforms – floated the idea of a $17-per-month subscription in exchange for advertisement-free browsing. YouTube already offers this. And Elon Musk’s Twitter/X charges $8-per-month for its blue tick verification for individuals, and $2,000 to $10,000-per year for its gold checkmark for organisations.

This mixed model may work for a while. But those – the majority – users sticking with “free” accounts are already seeing their feeds filling up with clickbait and AI-generated slop, while the content which makes the platforms worthwhile is increasingly crowded out. This may cause some of the more affluent users to reluctantly fork out for a subscription (which is currently no more expensive than a good ad-blocker). But most users will simply leave the platform, thereby deepening the death spiral. And the obvious next step – because it happens in all death spirals – is that the clickbait/slop will grow even as subscription fees are increased, thereby driving even more users away.

No doubt bankruptcies will occur. And we will get to watch the accipitridaean practices of those corporations left standing. But this is no more than a slowing down of the inevitable descent, since once the few still-profitable assets have been stripped, the death spiral will gather pace once more… until, logically, the “squeezed middle” who are asked to pay for it all will no longer be able to do so, and the entire online environment will have shifted from a mass consumption to a luxury elitist business model – the very opposite of the techno-utopian vision being promoted by western corporations, think tanks and neoliberal governments (none of which would survive the loss of communication that an internet death spiral implies).

The aviation industry suffers similar delusions, such as imagining that biofuels will replace aviation fuel in the near future. Indeed, even if this were possible, it is not going to happen any time soon, as biofuels currently make up just 0.05% of aviation fuel. And even at this low concentration, there have already been casualties. The main reason why Boeing’s latest version of the 737 turned out to be a clunker is that the corporation didn’t (couldn’t afford to?) reconfigure the design to incorporate the required (bigger and heavier) lean-burn engines to accommodate new, less energy dense fuel. The result was an unstable aeroplane whose tendency to stall and nosedive the ground had to be corrected with AI (sic) which turned out not to be up to the task. The long list of more recent failures point to a corporation which is struggling to balance the cost of operating within accepted safety standards and maintaining sufficient returns to shareholders to prevent the corporation doing metaphorically what too many of its planes have been achieving literally.

The aviation death spiral is easier to understand because of its entirely discretionary nature. Unlike internet communications which are now the only way of accessing such essentials as banking and government services, air travel can be done without for all but a handful of elite travellers. And so, the aviation infrastructure – which saw a massive increase in airports (and the logistics which make them possible) in the decade or so before the 2008 crash – which depends upon mass use is particularly vulnerable as real incomes fall even as the cost of essentials continue to rise.

We were treated to an early taste of the unfolding aviation death spiral even before the 2008 crash, with the withdrawal of Concorde from service. Prior to 2003, supersonic commercial flight was a central part of the techno-utopian future… and then it wasn’t. In November 2003, the Concordes were scrapped – ostensibly because of a crash three years earlier, but in reality, because it was simply too expensive to operate as even business and celebrity travellers opted to accept slower flights on sub-sonic planes.

The next phase though, will involve the gathering end of mass flying, as former customers cease being able to afford holidays abroad, and budget airlines and regional airports are forced out of business. And again, the corporate vultures will gather to strip the corpses of any potentially profitable assets, giving aviation a brief hiatus before the death spiral gathers pace once more. And as with communications, the end point must surely be a return to the luxury-class flight of a much earlier age, where only those still able to pay eye-watering ticket prices will be travelling on a much smaller air transport system.

Although it is the most discretionary transport system, aviation is not the only one in the early stages of a death spiral. In the UK, the attempt at a north-south high speed rail link has proved a disastrous failure. And rail more broadly is expensive, overcrowded, and increasingly prone to cancellations. But the alternatives are no better. Britain’s roads are in the process of disintegrating, and it is clear that central and local government cannot afford to repair and maintain everything. One result is that vehicle insurance (which is mandated by law) has increased far more than inflation in recent years, as poor roads cause damage to tyres, wheels, and axles (might it be that one reason for the lowering of speed limits is an attempt to cut the cost of vehicle damage?). Whether we drive our own vehicles or attempt to use one of the remaining bus services, the fact is that road journeys are getting longer, more uncomfortable, and expensive.

Part of the current moral panic around “15-minute cities” may be due to a general contraction in travel resulting from its increasing cost, poorer quality, and less availability – people who grew up with the expectation of rapid national transit and global tourism, experience heightened anxiety at the prospect of being corralled in a single town or even a single district within a town. But the thing they fear is due more to a transport death spiral than to some globalist conspiracy. Indeed, the original 15-minute city idea – of having all of life’s essentials within 15-minutes travelling time will ultimately have to happen because, in an energy and resource constrained economy, what cannot be provided locally will not be provided at all.

Which, in its way, is just the latest version of every other economic crisis – not enough money coming in to afford the costs going out, but with no obvious means of increasing income or cutting costs any further. In an earlier period, optimists would draw the analogy with the rainforest – as the old and already decaying trees (ossified corporations) fall, the sunlight breaks through to the green shoots (innovative start-ups) below, which will become the new tall trees of the future. That appeared to make sense in an economy still rich in energy and material resources (and at a time when there were just two billion humans consuming planet Earth). In today’s energy and resource-depleted economy, with more than eight billion mouths to feed, there is not enough left of the planet for green shoots to grow into anything like tall trees. More likely, we are already in a catabolic state in which the only real (i.e., not debt-based) growth which is possible is through cannibalising the few still valuable assets of those corporations which go broke.

This is where all of the other optimistically-levied price and tax increases go to die. In an unravelling economy, one person’s tax increase must be another person’s price cut, and vice versa. The burgeoning precariat, along with the increasingly hard-pressed lower ranks of the professional-managerial class, simply cannot afford to pay for it all. We are already seeing this in that bastion of neoliberalism, the university system – which, rather like local government, has borrowed heavily since the 1990s in the insane expectation that student numbers (and income from them) would grow forever. Instead, they face a treble-whammy of declining overseas (full fee paying) student numbers, a much smaller “Gen-Z,” and fewer youngsters wanting to gamble indebtedness against the (increasingly less likely) prospect of finding a well-paying career. And so, universities are becoming yet another institution which will have to be bailed out.

This raises a fascinating question – which will only be answered when it happens – about how many institutions government can bail out before it can’t. That is, at what point do investors cease lending money to government (i.e., buying government bonds) and/or, at what point does money creation become so inflationary that the game isn’t worth it anymore? Because, with everything unravelling, government cannot hope to raise the taxes to continue servicing the debt, but nor can it avoid the inflation which would follow any large-scale attempt to keep everything going. It follows that something – probably a lot of somethings – is going to have to give… and that is as psychologically shocking as the material shocks which are already unfolding.

This, in turn, points to a government death spiral resulting from the growing death spirals unfolding across the economy. Not, of course, that this implies Marx’s utopian “withering away of the state,” or the libertarian fantasy of pure market freedom unfettered by government. Even the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy – one of the most basic and sustainable civilisations – had its governments. And there is no reason to believe that some form of government will persist throughout the collapse of advanced (fossil-fuelled) industrial civilisation. But as this essay series has explained, the reach and size of government is a product of the once linked systems of communication and transport, which in turn, are the product of the type and quantity of useful energy available at any time.

Since energy and resources are now decreasing, and the impact of this on communications and transport systems is becoming more apparent (and not just in the UK), government will have to shrink too. But while the ultimate end point is foreseeable, the route we follow has to be a matter of conjecture, since government is a key power node where vested interests crash headlong into physical realities. I will discuss this further in the final part of this essay.