- Where fantasy crashes into reality Archived Message
Posted by Keith-264
on June 29, 2023, 4:35 pm
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https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/06/27/where-fantasy-crashes-into-reality/ The Wreck of the Titan – no, not that one – was an 1898 book by Morgan Andrew Roberson in which a passenger liner, the Titan, struck an iceberg some 400 miles off Newfoundland and sank with all hands. In an eerie coincidence, fourteen years later an ocean liner called the Titanic struck an iceberg some 400 miles east of Newfoundland and sank, taking some 1,500 of its 2,208 passengers and crew to the bottom of the Atlantic. And so, Roberson’s book entered the panoply of strange tales, mysteries and conspiracy theories surrounding the ill-fated vessel. Was Roberson’s book a premonition? Almost certainly not… at least in the occult sense of the term. More likely, Roberson was just one of the few of his generation to be bright enough not to fall for the media hype of the time, and observant enough to understand that the “arms race” between a handful of transatlantic passenger shipping corporations was bound to end in tragedy sooner or later. Importantly though, ocean liners were a tried and tested technology. What did for the people on the Titanic was the age-old combination of cost-cutting and human error. Cost-cutting, especially, in the use of low-quality rivets which sheared on contact with the iceberg. And most fatal among the long list of human errors was that the crew had not been drilled to avoid the reflex instinct to steer away from any obstacle – if the ship had struck the iceberg head-on it would have survived. Fast-forward 111 years, and we have a new Titan. A home-brewed carbon fibre coffin just waiting for some uber-rich would be corpses to stump up the quarter of a million-dollar asking price for a one-way trip to the wreck of the Titanic. This was a level of lunacy above and beyond anything seen during the ocean liner frenzy at the end of the nineteenth century. Lunacy which without doubt stems from a deranged faith in technology which is a by-product of what used to be called information and communications technology (ITC) but is currently being hyped as AI. In any sane world, someone would have taken Stockton Rush to one side and told him to stick to making model aeroplanes. Except that someone – one of the few people employed by Rush who actually knew about submersibles – did try to do that and was fired for “mansplaining” or “whitesplaining” or some such. Because today, technologies don’t have to conform to the laws of physics or even have the slightest chance of actually working… all that is required is that we believe in them. And when – like Zuckerberg’s fast sinking metaverse – the technology doesn’t work, well: It’s just a prototype It will improve It is inevitable. There’s a fair chance that Rush said something along these lines every time water started dripping in through that rickety observation hatch or whenever that cheap game controller stopped working. And the media loved him for it. Because ever since Jeff Bezos started selling books online while Steve Jobs was paying slave labour in China to cram miniaturised ex-military technology into smartphones, we have fallen for the idea that supposedly visionary individuals can break through the wall of doubters to make the impossible come true. Never mind that it is impossible to take blood without a needle, the media loved Elizabeth Holmes. And the billionaires and ex-politicians fawned over her. Never mind that plenty of engineers have explained the stupidity of using solar panels to surface a road, the media fell in love with the Brusaws. Elon Musk’s hyperloop may be an engineering non-starter, but the media continues to tell us that it is just around the corner. Same goes for Musk’s battery electric haulage truck which, because of the battery weight-to-power problem, will never replace diesel trucks for big loads and/or long hauls. If, like Stockton Rush, these were just eccentric characters desperate to earn a Darwin Award, we might benefit in some small way from them. Except that far too many of them have reached positions of power and influence at the apex of the western stakeholder capitalist version of corporatism which bases its entire plan for the future upon a series of internet-based technologies which – like Rush’s self-identifying submersible – have absolutely zero chance of working in practice. Consider Ida Auken’s now infamous article: “First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes…” Set aside the impossibility of flying cars as anything more than an expensive novelty and the infantile idea that the infrastructure required to digitise everything could ever be free, and consider the Underpants Gnomes plan which is required to get us from where we are to those driverless cars. For the moment, most cars are privately owned and – as Auken and her colleagues are quick to point out – spend most of their time parked. We use cars as taxis for a public transport version of the same thing. And the big ITC revolution was the development of platforms like Uber and Lyft which allow someone with a smartphone to hail a cab at a moment’s notice. It is this “digitisation” of the taxi business, no doubt, that Auken imagines will lead us to the nirvana of self-driving cars. And, of course, many in the establishment media promote this view too. Except that this ignores two obvious truths about the Uber/Lyft platforms. The first concerns the nature of the internet itself, since it hasn’t really changed much from the days when it mostly involved geeks sharing pornographic images… not in the sense that it is all about porn, but more that what those geeks were doing is essentially what we all still do – connecting people who desire something with people who can supply it. Go right back to Amazon setting up its online bookshop to supply a far broader range of books than even the biggest bookshop of the day could have offered. Or the early Google understanding that what people needed was a means of connecting to the things they wanted… a search engine, if you will. Even Facebook connecting people to like-minded people was bound to emerge in some form or another. And that’s the point, in essence, the internet was – and is – a global-scale dating agency. What about the second truth? That is the one which Uber rose to prominence on the back of… cheap labour. The internet has always involved a race to the bottom, in which we seek out the best bargains while the corporations go about finding the cheapest means – which usually involves sweatshops in Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa – of meeting our requirements. The beauty of the Uber business model was that it was a taxi firm which didn’t own any cars. And its real customers weren’t the passengers but rather the desperate gig workers in a growing precariat who – once owning and maintaining their own cars was taken into account – earned far less than the minimum wage. Somehow, in the Auken/WEF transition to the brave new automated communist future, internet platforms whose success comes precisely from not owning the things they supply – think Airbnb – have to turn full-circle an invest in what are still (far) over-the-horizon technologies. But why would they? Currently a top of the range Tesla costs around £60,000. Add perhaps another £20,000 for the self-driving technology – assuming they can ever get it to the point that it doesn’t indiscriminately slaughter cyclists and pedestrians – and then multiply that by the 260,700 cars currently operating for private hire in the UK, and that’s a £20bn bill just to purchase the self-driving cars. On top of that is the cost for insurance, tax and maintenance. Why would anyone in their right mind even contemplate such an outlay when you can simply pay a gig-driver next to nothing to drive people around in their own car? This is the fundamental point about internet-based businesses… they’re cheap to set up, and so require relatively little investment when compared to making things happen in the real world. This is the flaw at the heart of the technocratic green new deal/internet/AI project. It fails to consider the steps – and cost – involved in getting us from where we are to where we are intended to be. In the real world, it takes more than a decade to bring a gigawatt of electricity capacity – whether windfarm or nuclear plant – online, whereas politicians seem to believe that terawatts can be conjured up within a single electoral cycle. Worse still – particularly here in the UK – more generating capacity is being taken offline as it reaches the end of its lifespan than is being added, so that we are increasingly dependent upon imported energy from a Europe which has a growing energy crisis of its own. It is for this reason that, in the end, Herr Schwab’s promised internet-connected refrigerators, Auken’s self-driving flying cars, BlackRock’s digital social credit scoring, and the central bankers’ programable digital currencies are all going the same way as Stockton Rush’s imploding submersible. Because the virtual world turns out to be a place where impossible dreams appear to work even as the energy-starved infrastructure which allows it to exist crumbles to dust. |
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