- Paradise postponed Archived Message
Posted by Keith-264
on March 2, 2023, 4:24 pm
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https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/03/01/paradise-postponed/ According to a certain interpretation of the long arc of human history as seen from the prism of the religion of progress, we are currently passing through the “third disruption.” According to this view, the first disruption – also referred to as the neolithic revolution – arrived with the emergence of agriculture. In relatively short order, this gave rise to the first civilisations. That is, urban systems which require the importation of resources from beyond their land base. Civilisations have risen and fallen over and over in the millennia since. But a new phase of human history arrived with the second disruption – also known as the industrial revolution. The primary achievement of this fossil-fuelled machine age – although seldom acknowledged these days – was to dramatically lower the number of agricultural workers needed to feed a growing population. Computerisation, it is argued, has paved the way for a third disruption – referred to on the right as the fourth industrial revolution, and on the left as fully automated luxury communism. Indeed, it is of more than a passing interest that the descriptions given by fascists and socialists are almost identical: “This Third Disruption has already started, with evidence of its arrival all around us. As with the Second Disruption its basis is a general-purpose technology: the modern transistor and integrated circuit, contemporary analogues to Watt’s steam engine over two centuries ago. While the Second Disruption was marked by a relative freedom from scarcity in motive power – coal and oil rather than muscle and wind moving wheels, pulleys, ships, people and goods – the defining feature of the Third Disruption is ever-greater abundance in information. For some this signals the completion of the Industrial Revolution, marking an era in which machines are increasingly able to perform cognitive as well as physical tasks. This new situation of post-scarcity underpins what will be referred to as ‘extreme supply’, something not only limited to information, but – as a consequence of digitisation – labour too. Here, continuous improvements in processor power, in combination with a range of other technologies, means machines will be capable of replicating ever more of what was, until now, uniquely human work.” … This is eerily similar to: “We have yet to grasp fully the speed and breadth of this new revolution. Consider the unlimited possibilities of having billions of people connected by mobile devices, giving rise to unprecedented processing power, storage capabilities and knowledge access. Or think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing, to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological worlds.” It is this belief in a new digital revolution which gave rise to the much-derided article by Danish politician, Ida Auken – originally titled “Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, I have no privacy, and life has never been better.” More popularly known as “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” It is a world of digital currencies and digital IDs, vaccine passports and 15-minute cities, electrification and driverless cars. All of it based around the “energy too cheap to meter” from wind turbines and solar panels, and all of it operated by autonomous artificial intelligence within the “singularity” of the “internet of things.” It is a mirage, of course… one only visible to so-called “virtuals” – people whose lives and careers are now so detached from the material world that, were there not so many of them, could otherwise be diagnosed as certifiably insane. The real world, meanwhile, looks more akin to the second global collapse – the first being the collapse of the integrated economies of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean empires sometime around 1186 BCE. The majority of ordinary people have seen their living standards decline over the past two decades – a process compounded and accelerated by two years of lockdowns followed by a year of self-destructive sanctions on key resources. Life-expectancy is falling – perhaps not entirely naturally – even as birth rates have collapsed. Only a handful of countries now have birth rates above the 2.1 required just to maintain their population. This creates the added bottleneck problem that for the next couple of decades there will be more elderly people than there are younger workers to care for them or to fund their retirement. Most obviously though – at least to those of us living in Europe just now – the rising cost of critical resources, and especially of energy, has thrown all of the received visions of the future into reverse. It should have been obvious enough that non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies could not provide the cheap energy their proponents claimed, simply because the more we have deployed them, the higher the cost of energy has risen. Moreover, once the cheap gas that we’ve been using to balance the intermittency was no longer available, the price of energy has become unaffordable to European businesses and households. Ironically, the European wind turbine industry was among the first industries to close in the face of unsustainable energy prices last year, so that any hope of reaching the net zero targets has already been lost – although the coming tsunami of industrial closures (once investors realise that cheap energy is not going to be returning) will likely divert attention from the collapse of the NRREHTs industry. Renewable electricity though, was just one pillar of the techno-utopian third disruption. Central to turning fantasy into dystopian reality was the increased communication speeds that were to be provided by the roll out of the 5G network. But as with NRREHTs, it turns out that 5G – which is far more energy-hungry than previous generations – is entirely dependent upon a continuous supply of cheap energy. As Andrew Orlowski and James Warrington at the Telegraph reported this week (they misspell “Western sanctions” “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine”): “In a further blow to the network operators’ ambitions, the surge in energy costs following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is also taking its toll. “5G’s power-thirsty new radio equipment eats up far more energy – around twice as much as 4G… With energy making up around 10pc of the network’s operating cost, there is a risk that higher bills could be passed on to the customer.” In the same vein, Michelle Donegan at Telco Titans reports similar concerns from 5G network provider Ericsson: “High energy costs and looming carbon emission reduction targets have made power consumption a bigger consideration in 5G deployment decisions and are causing some operators to tap the brakes on rollout plans, according to Ericsson. “After energy prices spiked over the last year, operators are wary that adding more 5G capacity will only increase their energy bills, especially when new services have not yet materialised that can boost revenue growth.” As with those in the NRREHTs industry (they would say that wouldn’t they?) the 5G corporations believe that some miracle will put in an appearance in a few years’ time to reverse their current misfortunes. It is difficult though, to see where this miracle might come from. After all, the communications sector faces an even worse death spiral than those opening up elsewhere in the economy. This is because a large part of communications – along with the technologies that might require 5G – are entirely discretionary. I might need access to a phone for emergencies. And I am currently pissed with the government and the banks for insisting I have a phone to verify online transactions. But most of the other things we do with phones, like sharing photos or watching YouTube videos, are entirely discretionary. Nor do I particularly need a refrigerator that is capable of doing shopping on my behalf, or a washing machine that I can operate from the other side of the planet. And don’t get me started on the complete waste of time and energy that is the proposed “metaverse.” Crucially, as is the case in all death spirals, the communications networks depend upon mass use in order to remain profitable. That is, it is only because enough of us use our phones to watch videos, record our exercise routines, and do our online banking, that the communications industry can keep prices affordable to a critical mass of consumers. But rising energy, food and resource costs is forcing a majority of the population of Europe to abandon discretionary spending of all kinds in favour of maintaining essentials. And so, while communications “can” – in a legal sense – pass on their rising costs, economically they cannot because they will drive consumption down and thus lose the critical mass required to remain profitable. The advocates of the third disruption will no doubt claim that this is merely about the correct allocation of money. Whether through a socialist redistribution of wealth or a fascist programable basic income, so long as we put enough money in the hands of ordinary people, they will continue to consume. This though, is also a mirage. Money has no intrinsic value but is merely a claim on future energy and resources. Indeed, the only thing which gives money its value is our shared belief that those resources will be there in future – which is why, by the way, governments and central bankers are so scared of inflation. But the situation we now find ourselves in is precisely that the energy and resources our currency is based upon are not there anymore – at least, not in the quantities and at the price we depend upon. For a decade between the Crash and the Covid, inflation was avoided because the new currency that was created remained tied up in financial assets (which are not included in official measures of inflation). The initial reason that prices spiked up at the end of the pandemic was that a relatively small proportion of the new currency being created was allowed to flow into the real economy – the initial pent-up demand driving prices up in the face of major shortages. But that brief monetary inflation has already gone. What is holding – and in some sectors still driving – high prices are precisely the high energy and resource costs which are rendering large swathes of the economy unprofitable. In the event that the socialists or the fascists got their way, the result would not be a new, techno-utopian age of prosperity, but inflationary misery on a scale not experienced since the Spanish brought all of that Central American gold and silver back to Europe. Insofar as there is going to be a third disruption, it is going to be the relatively rapid de-industrialisation of the global economy, as a whole raft of things we used to be able to do on the back of cheap and abundant fossil fuels will no longer be possible. Exactly how this plays out is anyone’s guess, but it is likely to be experienced as hardship as our lives become less material and far more local. But if the alternative is Herr Schwab’s version of a digitised fascism, I won’t regret it. |
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