That said, there are things I call “granularities” – irreducibles that cannot be broken down further. An example of an irreducible would the minimum caloric intake to healthily sustain a human. This value is a dependent variable on the particulars of a human, but these can be averaged into a fairly narrow range between roughly 1000 and 3000 calories – 50 isn’t nearly enough and 1,000,000 is far too much.

Now, granularities can be absolute, such as Planck’s limits, or they can be “false vacuums”, where a change in context, form, or practice collapses the granularity and it shrinks to a smaller value, and what once seemed as a fixed bottom value may serve as a new ceiling value.

So, we have a variety of continua and a number of granularities – and these operate over time in a variety of different and continuously evolving contexts or flows. For humans, these flows are regulated and delimited by language and communication -  a product of our brain as its reductively composes models and ideas of sense data and its own operations in order to reproduce more brains.

At this point you are probably wondering where the hell I am going with this and what on this little green planet of clocks (thanks for the fish!) does any of this have to do with economics. Be patient.

The United States of America, an Empire of extra-ordinary power, has been experiencing economic difficulties, difficulties I predicted prior to the crash of September 2008, where, on the energyResources forum on 8 APR 08, I wrote:

If the non-borrowed reserves are reflecting borrowing money from the
TAF , when can they possible get back in the black on the h3 table?

They have no reserves, and they’re borrowing Billions, they need to get
some profits rolling in order to get their Reserves back above zero.
But, if they’re borrowing money to keep afloat, and they’re sinking
because their source of income (debts and debtors) have gone sour and
can’t / won’t pay, then what exactly is the strategy to solvency?

The only thing I can think of is for the TAF to actually become a debt
liquidation instrument, and literally dump billions into the system by
buying all the bad debt and then “burning the certificates”.

And that is EXACTLY what the US government did, they basically developed the TARP from the TAF model and did it to an extent above and beyond the call of duty to the point where the executives of the very corporations that sank the economy were able to walk away with huge cash bonuses.

While billions were supposed to be moved into the toxic accounts where they were to be effectively “burned” and removed from the economy and piled onto the national debt – in a stroke basically externalising the debt out of the banking sector and distributing it to the public – what happened is the debt still sits there, toxic as ever, and the trillions pumped into the system are now sitting there in bank reserves. As of July 18th 2010, the h3 report stated that the total nonborrowed reserves of all financial institutions in the USA stood at $1,027,487,000,000. Yes. Just over 1 trillion dollars. Now compare this to the h3 report in October 2008 when it was NEGATIVE $333,707,000,000.

It sits because of the record high unemployment rate
(the highest sustained since the Great Depression of the 1930s)
depressed housing prices
(that continue to descend in many places)
the enormous debt burden already carried by the average citizen
(also in record territory)
and the preference of people to deleverage themselves out of debt in a precarious job market.
(which is only common sense)

It sits in the banks because the model of stimulus has been to lower interest rates to permit greater lending. When people are up to their eyeballs in debt, they are unlikely to take on more debt, especially when unemployment is high and the sensible thing to do is to get out of debt.

Therefore, the way to give this trillion dollars velocity is to not give it to the banks, but to give people jobs so they will spend it. But this doesn’t jive from the position of the owners of the banks, as it runs counter to their business algorithm (lend > get paid > lend more).

One axial critique would be the obvious: this is simply brutal class warfare, where the ruling elite turns into a kleptocracy and loots the Treasury at the expense of the working classes. Given the evidence, this analysis is true enough as far as it goes, but there is farther to go, as there are other axia to grind here, and the above axial critique (certainly a kind of Marxian approach as one extrema of a Marxism vs. Capitalism axis) doesn’t really go far enough.

So, this is what I think is going on:

The USA is a giant empire flailing about trying to maintain its hegemony through military dominance, much like what Rome did in order to maintain energy flows at a positive rate of acquisition. Rome failed as its ability to acquire resources ran up against the laws of diminishing returns and had to encompass ever larger areas. As a given area requires (x) military presence, and area squares as it doubles, Rome was not able to properly police its borders, and within its realm, the energetic and mineral resources began to stretch thin and fail, given their methods of acquisition.

It’s a good thing they never really figured out coal or petroleum – otherwise we would have had an ecocidal apocalypse 1800 years ago…

So, faced with an inability to expand itself eastward due to the brutal weather in Russia and impoverished locals in the NE and the enormous Parthian empire to the SE, and hemmed in by the Sahara to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Rome had nowhere to go. It began to dilute (inflate) its currency. At the Empire’s peak in 117ce it was only 110 years from financial collapse.

The USA is in much the same position. It can’t conquer more energy, because:

a. it’s broke
b. global oil extraction is at or very near peak

Because the USA is broke, it can’t really buy its way out of trouble and because of the peaking of its critical resource, it doesn’t have the wherewithal to produce itself out of trouble.

The monetarists might argue – nonsense – just go into debt.

And what exactly is debt? Debt is a claim on future labour.

Even for the capitalist. The Capitalist borrows money and builds a factory. The money borrowed is paid back by the labour of the factory workers who create the wealth.

Even for the ordinary citizen. I want a car. I take out a loan. I work and pay back the loan. In essence, the loan is a claim on a portion of my labour.

Debt is a claim on future labour.

Labour is work plus resources. The resources are reducing. Combined with the fact that energy is the ability to perform work, and that energy production is basically flat, even though population continues to grow, the ability for the USA to do the work to produce the labour at a rate that can pay back the debt at interest is looking increasingly poor over time.

Therefore, the USA gov’t has a limited set of options:

1. dilute the currency through a significant but controlled inflation, making the debt “payable” with worth-less money.
2.expand employment through government work systems – employed people spend money, and there is PLENTY of crap that needs to be done (alternative energy systems, electrify the railway system, radically expand the electric railway system, bulldoze dead cities, massively insulate private homes and businesses, etc.)
3. radically restructure the financial engine of the country AND the gov’t.
4. Paper over the holes and hope something good happens.
5. Conquest.
6. Some combination of  all of the above.

Very shortly the next debt tsunami is going to hit: commercial real estate notes who bought into the funky mortgage instruments is going to come due, and the Republicans, just as they did in 1936, are bleating about the debt. The disaster in the gulf is going to screw North American oil production for a good while. Right now there is a lot of oil simply being stored because the crappy economy has created demand destruction and reduced pressure on production. However, the summer sees increased demand for fuel. That will reduce the slack, and increase the demand, and when winter hits – the price will rise.

However, the price will not get stratospheric, or if it does, not for long. There’s a great article explaing why Here. In short, because oil is so strategic, the USA will sooner cajole / arm twist / invade the Middle East or Iran than let it hit $500 a barrel. The only problem with that is the USA is broke and can’t afford military adventures, and everything in the Middle East is so precarious thanks to the foolishness of the neocons and the Bush Junta, that any such action there would have catastrophic results – and it’s hardly the legacy the Obama administration would want to leave. Moreover, military action won’t increase the flow rate, or the total number of gigajoules of energy. At that point, like Rome, the USA will face the law of diminishing returns, and will have to do one of several things:

1. (My preferred solution) Renounce its Empire and focus on transitioning to a postcarbon future in a more mature, responsible, and adult manner.
2. (a very possible and likely solution) Hold onto its Empire resulting in a variety of easily predictable ranges of behaviour – all leading to a final collapse-
a. (a less likely, but very undesireable possibility) break into smaller states, many of them fascist, all of them a kind of neofeudalist economics.
b. (a much more likely and rather nasty outcome) hold the nation together but with a severe curtailment of traditional negative “freedoms” and immiseration of an expanded and poorer working class.
c. (and the old standby…) increase military adventures resulting in political and economic bankruptcy, leading to b.

Which do you think is likely? Which is preferred?

What do I see?

The Obama administration chickening out, again, and repeating the mistake of Roosevelt in 1936 and rolling on federal debt reduction. This will result in another recession on top of the one the USA is already in and culminate in what I call a spastic economy – as resources deplete, basics (food, energy) will increase in price – spurring inflation – but those things that are more subject to financialisation (mortgages) or economies of scale (consumer items) will drop in price – spurring deflation. This creates a spastic and sputtering economy, where by Xmas, we could see $4 for a loaf of bread and $3.50 a gallon of gas, but a former $400k McMansion auctioning for $100k…

Spastic.

And every day, another 80 million barrels of oil are extracted and blown into the atmosphere.

Now, what does this have to do with granularities? It’s the granularities that create the asymmetries. The asymmetries create localised scarcities, and these scarcities are what propel capitalism, as one can only realise profits on scarcity – ubiquity is non-economic.

A granularity can be seen in Grain – only so much is grown in a year, and this was a bad year. Per capita grain production has been falling for years, and with global warming parching traditional grainaries like Russia, this has had a bad effect on prices for grain when such a staple is exposed to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Another granularity is how much debt a human being can carry. The actual amount of debt is not important – that value is arbitrarily large – it could be in the trillions per capita in 2010 dollars – the question is how a person can meet the monthly payment. The grain is that payment. Again, this is adjustable, but not infinitely so. This is the kind of game the USA gov’t has been playing since the disastrous Reagan Administration.

A quick peak at The US Debt Clock reveals that the US gov’t is in debt approximately (as of 10.24, 12 AUG 2010) $13,314,341,000,000. For those less familiar wit such large numbers, that is 13 trillion, 314 billion, 341 million dollars. So, lets do a little math, and pretend that the USA will (in the next few minutes) miraculously stop adding to the debt, forever, and will begin paying it down at the rate of 1 million dollars a day. Note: the US gov’t has rarely been able to stop increasing its debt load, and has never been able to actually pay down its debt for any sustained period of time. That aside, let’s figure out how long it will take the US gov’t to pay off its debt in 2010 dollars.

First we take the total debt (which I have rounded off to the nearest billion) of 13.314 trillion dollars, and we divide that by 1 million, because that’s how much we are going to pay per day. We get the result of 13,314,000. That is how many days it will take to pay off the debt. Now, a year consists of quite nearly 365.25 days (the .25 to account for leap year), so let’s divide that in, and we get 36,451.74 years. Now, we do lose a leap day every 100 years, so we will subtract 364 from that number (almost a year right there!) and we come to the number 36,086.74.

So, if we were able to stop the increase in debt this afternoon, and immediately began paying it off at the rate of $1 million a day, it would take 36,086.74 years. From today, that would be May 9th, in the year 38096. So, if personal debt could also be rolled into the future like that, then there would be no real debt problem. There would be a massive currency problem, but debt would cease to be a significant issue. Similar strategies are already on line in places like Japan with their 100 year mortgages. So, if one applies this concept, only stretches out the payment from 100 years to 36,086 years, at zero percent interest, the payment on a million dollar home would go from $833 a month to $2.30 a month. The debt for this would be passed down from generation to generation, but each generation could then do the same – just kick it down the road indefinitely with stupendously long term loan terms.

Who would get hurt in such a bizarre system?

The ruling class who own the banks. They would get nailed because they would see their gross receipts crash by many orders of magnitude.

Who would benefit from such a nonsensical dream?

Pretty much everyone else.

What is the blind spot even in this?

Non-economic granularities. Geologically determined structures, like resources and energy. No amount of debt will put more oil in the ground or make the sun shine brighter or increase the grain harvest or restore extinct species. We cannot repeal the second law of thermodynamics or buy our way around it.

Again, there is no solution: just mitigation.

The recent move by the Federal Reserve to buy treasury notes is a desperate and foolhardy attempt by the banking system to continue pulling money out of the working class. What they fail to understand is that you can’t get money from the working class if the working class isn’t working. If they want to reignite the consumer engine, they need to give people disposable income and a sense of job security. When people have a steady energy inflow they will naturally engage in behaviour to expend the excess. They will get fat, drive huge trucks, put men on Mars, entertain themselves into imbecility, declare war for the fun of it, build cities in the desert, vacation in the Antarctic or the Moon, etc. all depending on how much excess they have and how secure they feel about it.

People can feel secure as can be, but if they have almost no excess, you still get stagnation. People can have gobs of excess, but if they feel insecure, they’re still dodging bullets and not taking much advantage of the excess. With the peaking of resource extraction, the per capita excess can only reduce. The only solutions are to reduce need (conservation down to granularity), reduce per capita (which is a very sticky subject, worthy of its own post) or some conbination of both.

So, in conclusion I would suggest that the best route would be what I called for almost a year and a half ago. Either that or give everyone the same deal the government has and given them 36,000 years to pay off any and all debts.

updated 12 AUG 2010

This afternoon, I saw Avatar, directed by James Cameron. I saw it at a gigantic multiplex in Greenwood Indiana, in 3D in an IMAX format. I had an excellent seat – sixth row centre. The 3D glasses were large and comfortable.

My point is not to describe my experience of the film, although it is an important part of Avatar, and will play into some of my discussion of the film. I am not a film reviewer, nor am I much of a film theorist, but I feel this film requires my attention and focus for a variety of reasons that will come clear.

First off, people will ask “So what did you think of Avatar?” and “Did you like it?” These two things are not necessarily linked, and what Avatar is and does is very complex, and points directly at a number of critical issues in contemporary civilisation. What struck me on viewing the film, in terms of images, what I saw was a large number of references to films I very much like – and these references were seductive and interesting.

In the Home Tree, I saw the Camphor Tree in My Neighbour Totoro. This is where Mei discovers the nest of King Totoro. Totoro is a wood spirit and lives in the Camphor Tree – the Na’vi live in the Home Tree. The Tree is an ancient symbol of biblical proportions and esoteric meaning.

The general reference to Dances With Wolves is also obvious – a soldier who leaves European ways behind and goes to live with Native Americans. However, I see that actually as relatively uninteresting due to its obviousness, although that theme is something I will come back to.

The planet has floating mountains, which remind me of album covers for the Yes group by Roger Dean – covers like Close to the Edge

Close to the Edge: floating worlds...

and other images by Roger Dean from that period, such as flying dragons – looks a lot like a Banshee, no?:

Jungles floating in the air:

Alien landscapes:

Floating pastoral worlds:

And floating trees and rocks:

I could go on, but now, look at this preliminary concept art from Avatar:

and this still from the film:

and it is pretty clear that Dean’s playful organic fantasy artwork must have had some influence, which is fine by me. Dean is no Da Vinci, but his artwork reminds me of happy times in my adolescence, spent listening to music by Yes with my friends and arguing over the lyrics with precision I can best describe as Jesuitical. It was what teenage fans of ProgRock would often do in the mid 70s… When I was young, the floating jungles and weird landscapes of Dean were a fantasy space I would sometimes imagine myself inhabiting, especially the floating world of Close To The Edge. Seeing this realised in Avatar struck a comforting cord in me.

Another fond memory Avatar brought back with the Floating Mountains was that of Castles in the Sky, by Miyazaki. I have always enjoyed Miyazaki’s work – beautiful, lyrical, gentle and unalterably peculiar.

In these ways, the imaging was something I was immediately comfortable with and inclined to have “good feelings” about; they formed a seductive landscape.

The design of the extended starship in Avatar reminded me of the ships in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running.

Silent Running is a story that occurs before Avatar – In Silent Running, the “wild” world has been sent offworld into ships for its own protection. Of course, as soon as it became economically burdensome, the wild world bottled up in these ships is disposed of like so much useless baggage. Avatar talks about how the world the humans come from isn’t green – how it is dead and grey. That would be the world after Silent Running, and like Silent Running, whose name reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, both films are warnings about the predations of industrial civilisation. Silent Running shows the imprisonment of the wild world, and its execution at the hands of capital. Avatar shows the pillaging of nature to feed the industrial war machine, as symbolised by the RDA corp. and the military goons it has brought along. In this way, I think Avatar is much more direct and accurate – Silent Running is a despairing work with a poignant ending of doom: a small robot must take care of the last remaining forest. In Avatar, direct action on the part of the Pandorans changes things and even defeats the industrial war machine (IWM).

In Avatar, the industrial war machine is only defeated when two things occur: the Na’Vi collectively band together and take up violent resistance to the IWM, and when knowledge of the Other is communicated and integrated into the world data system of the living Pandora planet. This idea of Pandora as a living planet reminded me of the film Solaris, first by Tarkovsky and then by Soderburg as produced by Cameron – only without the tedious psychology of the films or the book. Communication is a critical point in this film, and it is also important in my view of this film as an object in society.

This brings me to the essential contradiction of Avatar. The film is an extremely expensive, complicated, ultra-high technology story whose very existence is predicated on the industrial extraction and processing of resources that are, for all practical purposes, irreplaceable.  The story it tells is how a society based on such principles is, by even a cursory analysis, inherently evil and self-destructive. Evil, in that it practices direct violence upon those who stand between the IWM and the resources it requires. Self-destructive, as discussed earlier: the planet Earth in the year setting of the film (2154)  is a grey and dying place. Also, the system is logically self-destructive: such systems require continuous exponential growth; growth that is simply impossible on a finite planet in a materially finite universe.

So, here we are faced with a film, a commodity, that points directly at the industrial system that spawned it. It says that collective action can stop the unrelenting madness of the IWM, even as it is a product of the very same system. Just as the Na’Vi will never leave the Home Tree voluntarily, the IWM will no surrender peacefully. The IWM must simply be destroyed, which brings us to some rather interesting conclusions. The film takes place on Pandora. The story of Pandora is well known, so I will simply note that the result of Pandora’s foolishness was that while she unleashed all manner of madness upon the world, we still retain Hope.

Derrick Jensen’s essay in the book The Future of Nature (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis. 2007.), titled “Beyond Hope”, he directly attacks the notion of hope in our present circumstances:

Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held  among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in mis fortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power ssurely as a belief in some distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more thana secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.

… hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

His is one particular angle on hope, one vision of Pandora. He accurately critiques the common notion of hope, one I frequently hear from students when they say “give me some hope.” Counter to both my students and Jensen, I prefer the idea of hope as articulated by James Howard Kunstler:

“and a lot of time, college kids say ‘can’t you give me some hope?’ Can’t you give me some hope. Well, here’s the deal. I’m not a hope dispenser, OK? You have to generate the hope. It’s got to come from you. And the way you generate it is by proving to yourself that you’re competent people, that you can deal successfully with the circumstances and the changes that reality is sending to you. That you’re successfully negotiating your living arrangement and your reality. And that you’re paying attention to the tasks that need to be done in your society. And you’re not just relying on wishful thinking and waiting to win the lottery, or sitting around thinking you’re going to get something for nothing, or wishing upon a star. People who are generating hope are the people who understand the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen.”

I agree with Kunstler more than Jansen, in that Kunstler is re-defining hope for the age we are in, and giving us a process for creating hope. And it is that sense of hope that is demonstrated in Avatar. The Na’Vi band together and DO SOMETHING. Their cause is hopeless – they cannot successfully fight the blitzkrieg of the IWM, and their casualties are huge. The Na’Vi are only saved when the “Cavalry Arrives” in an inversion of the Cowboys and Indians.

Here, the indigenous Na’Vi (the “Indians”) are fighting the Cowboys. Normally, in the Western Genre, the Cowboys are faced by a brutal and implacable enemy in the Indians, and are saved at the last minute by the U.S. Military  – the Cavalry comes to save the day. In Avatar, the cavalry is the biosphere itself coming to the aid of the Indians, and the Cowboys, the IWM, are the implacable and brutal enemy. This inversion is underlined in the casting of Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. She is a human – a member of the invasion force. An Alien. But she is an Alien who cares about those she has invaded, unlike Weaver’s foe in the film, Alien (dir. Ridley Scott. 1979.), which was an implacable and brutal enemy. In both films she is employed by an interstellar corporation. In both films she is an invader of an alien world. In Alien, we are asked to sympathise with her and her invading team sent there to mine ore. In Avatar, we are asked to sympathise with her as she attempts to help the Na’Vi, while despising her “team”, the RDA corporation who sent them to Pandora to mine ore.

The success of the Na’Vi is predicated on the arrival of the Cavalry – the giant and ferocious animals that are commanded to come to the aid of the Na’Vi by Eywa, the Mother Goddess of the Na’Vi. Eywa was informed of the peril of the situation by Jake Sully in his Avatar form. Dr Augustine’s character had died and her memories absorbed into a kind of spiritual database in the The Tree of Souls. Examining Augustine’s mind and her memories of the devastated Earth and the brutality of the IWM, allowed Eywa to understand how desperate the situation was. The war was won through information that allowed for the  amassing of forces significant enough to repel the invasion.

So what message does this film have for us, today?

1. The destruction of the IWM can only be accomplished through direct action.
2. Key to this is the acquisition of substantial forces, which is accomplished through communication.
3. Hope (Pandora’s gift) is possible, however, it requires an enormous amount of work.

From Kunstler, we understand that it is precisely this work that creates the hope most needed in these desperate times, as civilisation faces the greatest transition and crisis it has ever faced in 10,000 years of indoor living, and humanity faces its greatest challenge to its very survival in 70,000 years.

This leads to the Necessary Contradiction of Avatar, and it is an instance of the Necessary Contradiction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as Avatar is simply an instance of ICT.

Per a Fox spokesman in an article by David Patten, Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million and an estimated $150 million for marketing, for a total of $387 million. To illustrate the size of that sum, For FY 2009, the budget for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was only $155 million. To fund this film, directly out of pocket, every man woman and child in the USA would have to pay $1.27. Obviously, this endeavor is something that American society deems to be of some importance, as it is willing to invest such significant sums in its development. Its development is that of a media commodity, one with significant and rapid profitability potential.

Media commodities exist in a commodity culture – the devices and systems that the media commodity is made on and distributed through are also commodities. These commodities are only possible through industrial production means and methods,and the resources that go into these systems are subject to thermodynamic losses and material dispersion. These systems, as commodities, exist in a system predicated on continuous growth. Any continuous growth operates by exponential mathematics and can be called exponential growth. Exponential growth, as it requires continuous exponential resource acquisition, is simply unsustainable on a finite planet.

In Avatar, the Earth of 2154 was unable to acquire a critical resource, comically named “unobtainium“. It is the exploitation of unobtainium – valued at $20 million a kilo – that has brought RDA corporation to Pandora, and put RDA and the IWM it is part of in opposition to the interests of the Na’Vi.

Science Fiction is often not about any actual future – it is usually a commentary on the present, and Avatar is no exception. As much as it is a classic tale of imperialism, restating the theme of “Dances with Wolves”, given the contemporary crises of peak oil, the impending peak of phosphorus and other critical materials, and the continuing growth of the human population creating a perilous condition of overshoot, films that engage the issues of peak oil, the disaster that is suburbia, the unsustainability of civilisation, or, if the film asks, “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Then we need to look at them differently, as all entertainment (ICT) systems are intimately connected to some of the most rapacious and destructive resource acquisition systems on earth, as well as being directly a creature and critical path creator of contemporary globalist economic systems. It is important to connect entertainment and ICT. Since the digitalisation of culture all such devices require electronic components and computational facilities, and these components and facilities are made from materials all over the globe, and the co-ordination of the production of these materials, their processing, and final manufacture into ICT commodities require the movement of digital data via ICT, we can only see ICT as both creature / creation of the global industrial war machine and its critical path creator, as without ICT, the co-ordination and manufacture of these globalised ICT systems would simply be impossible. As these systems are identical in both nature and function (a computer is a computer is a computer) we can only see our contemporary entertainment networks as creations of the IWM. The linkages between the I and the WM are well detailed by other theorists (viz. Virilio, Hardt, Negri, DeLanda, Jensen, Zerzan, and many others) and I don’t think it necessary to detail that here.

From this, ICT – as a critical path component of the IWM – brings this weight to any content it provides. So, a film, such as Avatar, that is critical of this relation, is then subjected to charges of hypocrisy. I do not agree with such charges. In fact, I stand opposed to such charges, and have put them into what I mentioned earlier: the Necessary Contradiction of ICT. It is not that  ICT embodies this contradiction (which it does, but not my point) as much as that it is necessary that we maintain ICT, even as ICT is such a destructive system to the earth and is part and parcel of the IWM. So, even as we decry the ongoing ecocide, we use ICT to decry the ecocide at the same time ICT is central to the ongoing ecocide.

Now, this is nothing new – above are links to media critical of the IWM, and you are presently reading some.

This leads to other ideas I have about the future of ICT and its relationship to society, but that is beyond this particular writing. All societies communicate with the systems they have at hand. Our system is predicated on the IWM, therefore, our communications are complicit to the actions of the IWM, even if they are inimical to the interests of the IWM. Avatar brings an anti-industrial message in the most advanced industrial method possible: large scale 3D digital cinema. Avatar is a product of the IWM, even as it satirises the IWM. This contestation leads to complex results: Avatar could be seen as Hollywood greenwashing, or the first blockbuster film celebrating the end of Industrial Civilisation, or, and this is very likely true: it is both.

Stuart Hall discussed these negotiated relationships people have with media, but this was largely around issues of content. Now we are faced with a radicalised McLuhanism, where the medium IS the message, and the medium is part and parcel, creature and creator, of the problem itself. Organised Networks rely on the technology developed by the IWM for their existence. At the Internet as Playground And Factory Conference in November 09, Christian Fuchs talked about a communist ICT infastructure. While an admirable goal, I don’t think it is either possible (politically or materially) or likely (due to the exigencies of resource extraction). This is a longer discussion that looks into an inherent weakness in Leftist theory and praxis, but the important point is to get the conversations started.

Avatar, a piece of blockbuster entertainment that brandishes a theme of anti-industrialism, and prescribes violent and bloody opposition to the IWM is, at root, entertainment. A fun story. However, given the crises we face, and the gathering storms of catastrophe on the horizon, its ecological message needs to be amplified and brought into public awareness. We, as a society, must make plans for a very different sort of existence in the next few decades, and use this huge transition as an opportunity to create a better, more humane and caring society. The easy road is one we have seen before in Rome, Central America, and Easter Island, and that road is a very sad and lonely Road. Avatar is deeply flawed in many respects (the reliance on Joseph Campbell formulae, the music was awful, the acting was wooden, and the story was predictable) but it stands in opposition to many other great Science Fiction Films. In 1984, the people are victims. In Blade Runner, the people are victims, even or especially when they’re artificial people. In 2001, Bowman is basically on a big ride – he has little agency. In Alien, we empathise with a crew who went someplace they had no business being. In Slient Running agency proves futile, and the biosphere is left in the hands of a small robot. In the Andromeda Strain, people are just disease vectors and victims. In Stalker, the Room in the Zone is all powerful, and personal agency is used against the agent. In Avatar, the people,as symbolised by the Na’Vi, rise up and smash the invading Industrial War Machine.

That they only succeed through the intercession of a “goddess” brings it to an interesting point, as the “goddess” is actually a material fact – it’s an organic data base held by the biosphere itself. It is the biosphere, the moon of Pandora istelf tht destroys the IWM on Pandora, and it is the biosphere on earth that wil smash the IWM on Earth, as we hit the wall of Peak Everything, and civilisation transitions to its next phase. Luckily we have had the luxury of the Golden Age of petroleum,  and we have seen glimpses of fairness and justice, and we need to preserve these ideas through the transition and build a better society on the other side. It may well prove to be a neolithic society, but the lives lived in it need not be nasty, brutish, and short.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

Then they disappear.

Then the nightmare of the North American suburban disaster unwinds and we get to go on to the next downshifting of civilisation from this decidedly UNcivilised disaster to something perhaps more civil. Perhaps.

I don’t know if I should be happy or not. I am happy to see worthless suburbs disappear. Every time I spend anytime in those environments I get really depressed and angry. Still, I am sad to see all that sunk cost go to waste – this more than half century of investment into an ill-conceived lifestyle. It’s just frustrating and sad to know it was all a big mistake. Oh well. It’s the first step in a long road down the back side of Hubbert’s Curve.

HW

Today’s class was intense. Speck was rather provocative with some of his language and things got a little heated. Last night there was a reading by Nicholas(?) Baker that was very good. From his latest novel about a poet. I don’t remember who is on tonight.

Off I go!

Finished songs for the Tate presentation, emailed them to Carlos.

Gotta trot.

I’m reading a book I can’t talk about.

:-/

This morning and afternoon for the next three days I am in a class with Hendrik Speck, a professor who lives in Berlin and teaches in Denmark. He’s soft spoken and very much on top of this thing. Because the students are all from different technical skillsets, he’s been going over basic stuff like the history of the internet. I know a lot about this, so while I don’t find this very challenging, I am able to provide some useful comments, given my history…

Tonight, I attend a lecture by Wolfgang Schirmacher on Research Techniques, etc. I imagine/hope this is where he lays out the formats and formulae of our work here.

Have met some of the other students. A bright bunch, for sure.

This town, Saas Fee, is pretty amazing – we’re only about 500 – 1000 feet below the tree line, about 6000 ft / 2000 meters above sea level. The peaks around us are snowy chunks of rock, about twice as high. It’s pretty impressive – everywhere you look is some stunning view of some huge mountain. The altitude is such that I was a bit winded just climbingthe hill to class this morning. I will return to Toronto with Lungs Of Steel.

The food has ranged from very good to excellent. Of course, it is all Swiss, so it is big on dairy, which is useless to me, but there is enough variety that I’m NOT starving…

Oh – gotta roll. More later.

Edit: 8 PM: Second class was interesting – discussed a variety of efforts how people organise using new media and other media for resistance and political purposes. Outlined the next few classes and discussed the program.

Now to a class on Research Methods which goes to 10.30PM.

1. Nationalise the banks, forthwith. They will no longer be “for profit” institutions. Since they don’t need fancy investment instrument designs, they don’t need hotdog CEOs etc. Therefore: they keep their jobs with a top salary of $300k p.a. They can’t make a living on that? Fine. Leave. In this model, they’re little more than managers anyway. We don’t need geniuses running banks, we just need people who are honest, ethical, and competent.

2. By nationalising the banks the USgov repudiates the bank debt. Life continues on, the Chinese still own huge amounts of American Paper, and they will get paid. Over Time. Like everyone else. Because this is money eating debt, it has no velocity in the economy and will not result in inflation. Allowing for low interest rates to boot.

3. And the money? Next step: disband the Federal Reserve. The USgov will be responsible for its money supply. My, just like an adult would do.

4. Nationalise USA Health Care. Face facts: This whole nonsense about “your health care decisions should be between you and your doctor” is total freaking bullcrap. You know who makes your health care decisions? The insurance company. I would absorb the health care industry directly (on the one end) and I would get really pretty damn stiff with Americans on the other end. But a lot of that will fall out naturally.

5. Gas will be USD$5 gallon. If gas is cheaper than that due to over production or demand destruction, then the remainder goes directly into alternative energy systems. No ifs and or buts. If it is over $5, then it rises to what ever price that is.

6. Car makers will do chap 11, and restructure under strict supervision. The focus will be: the development of hybrid trucking to last 10 years to be replaced by electric vehicles and electric trains. The largest private vehicle will be the equivalent of a minivan. Gas will be rationed, viz WW2. The auto industry will focus on making superlightweight electric vehicles. Electric Bicycles (viz Stokemonkey or Crystalite systems) will be subsidised and encouraged, as well as enclosed electric tadpole trikes.

7. The USA will abandon Empire. The Pentagon will cut its budget by 50% a year until it is the size of the Chinese rate of spending. American Troops will be brought home, decomissioned, and retrained for the powerdown.

#7 is actually #1, but the banks need attention.

8. Crash Infrastructure improvements geared around livable homes and communities worth caring about. LOTS of insulation. Lots of geothermal. Lots of all that joy. Not so much in the massive giant office box development.

The above should result in a vastly improved economy.

Jeavons is correct if prices are stable or supply meets demand, on demand. When that ceases to happen, conservation is the only path to economic growth: if demand falls below production consistently year over year, then conservation will result in “economic growth”. Such a curve is not sustainble due to granularities in energy requirements – i.e., you can only drive down the energy curve so far before people die of starvation. These inelasticities can be seen as “granularities”: things that don’t divide.

But we are FAR from there (yet) and once we get a new energy / economic regime into common practice, then substitution can come to the fore and the machines can run, albeit fewer of them, and on a tiny fraction of the energy they once used – it will never get to granularity.

What I described above can happen and work. I would expect countries with more centralised govts (China, Russia, etc.) would do the above by decree. Nations filled with citizens may also find the political will to co-operate and bring the system down to reality. (Denmark, EU, etc.) but nations composed of TAXPAYERS, are screwed, as they have replaced their social contract with an economic one: they buy gov’t services as consumers. And consumers want one thing: SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. Hence, countries with taxpayer mentalities will fail.

That’s my opinion and I’m stickin’ to it… for now…

The Times of London is reporting that Royal Dutch Shell oil company (Shell) is abandoning its alternative energy plans. This is not a good thing, IMHO, as they intend to focus on oil, gas and biofuels. Well – oil is at or just past peak, gas is not far behind and biofuels are not an optimal method of keeping things going. This refocusing really only means one thing as far as I can see – they have changed their vision of the likelihood of their scenarios.

Last year, a letter came out of Shell, (From: Jeroen van der Veer, Chief Executive, To: All Shell employees, 22 January 2008, Subject: Shell Energy Scenarios)

that said, and I quote:

The first, a scenario we call Scramble, resembles a race through a mountainous desert. Like an off-road rally, it promises excitement and fierce competition. However, the unintended consequence of “more haste” will often be “less speed” and many will crash along the way.

The alternative scenario, called Blueprints, has some false starts and develops like a cautious ride on a road that is still under construction. Whether we arrive safely at our destination depends on the discipline of the drivers and the ingenuity of all those involved in the construction effort. Technical innovation provides for excitement.

It goes on to discuss their preference for the Blueprints Scenario. And by investing in alternative energy systems, they were investing in the Blueprints Scenario. by abandoning their efforts in alternative energy, the obvious conclusion is they no longer believe the Blueprints Scenario is the likely one, and that the Scramble Scenario is the more likely, and they are positioning themselves for the grinding disaster of such a Scramble. This is NOT good, IMHO.

A Scramble scenario means drastically asymmetric production and distribution of resources – haves and have nots – and Shell is interested in being a “Have”. However, it is clear that as resources tighten and become increasingly difficult to obtain, the trend toward nationalisation of said resources will be necessary by the governments of the nations located on top of these resources, especially if the nation is small. This will only work to the disadvantage of “oil companies” as they are already minority stakeholders in the world oil market with only (IIRC) 17% ownership of energy resources. A Scramble Scenario will pit nation against nation for what lies beneath them, (per Klare) and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in the botched war in Iraq obviously does not serve as a desirable model.

In conclusion, Shell (a company with a long history of brutality) abandoning alternative energy development is a canary in a coal mine moment. These people spend a lot of money developing scenarios and models, and when they decide to shift billions of dollars of research, they don’t do it on a whim. Simply, they are expecting a deeply suboptimal future and are positioning themselves to profit from it. Nice.

It follows, with a few modifications:

Henry Warwick says:
March 15, 2009 at 10:47 pm

I would like to point out that capitalism has always operated at the expense of the commons. It is why the biosphere is as utterly screwed as it is.

From my research and perspective, contemporary capitalism is no more or less direct in its rapacious greed to ruin the world – to chew rocks and spit nails, computers, automobiles, plastic corn forks, and those stupid little cups you get to hold ketchup. God I hate those things.

Early capitalism took the most immediate and local “Commons”, and the result were the Enclosure Acts forcing land into the hands of the rich and the peasants into cities to work at factories. The Enclosures effectively removed the Commons from existence.

In North America in 1492 Europeans found 24,709,000 km^2 of “Commons”. Instead of peasants feeding and watering their livestock on it, they found several civilisations of Natives who had been using the land for tens of thousands of years. Like the peasants of the UK, they were quickly forced off their land to make way for European farmers, soon followed by Industrial machinery and shopping malls and the “beautiful new Trail Of Tears golf course”. Sometimes I wonder how much of the Enclosure Acts and their techniques were results of the North American colonial experiment.

So, Enclosures and Invasions provided land based capitalism the raw materials. Then, the metals and fossil fuels provided by the theft of the land, in turn provided the energy and resources to create much more complex social and technical organisations like the interweb thingie.

Frankly, I do not see the pollution in, say, China, as Chinese pollution, or, the exploitation of workers in China or Malaysia as Chinese or Malaysian exploitation. I see it as Western and American. This is my reasoning:

I own a factory here in Canada. We make Canadian Widgets for Canadians. Wages in Canada are not cheap and business taxes are tough here, so I relocate the factory to some banana republic, like, Oooh, Alabama where unions are weak. And set up factory there. And so the money flows from Canadian pockets to me and I send off a pile of it to Alabama to keep the Widgets flowing. Then I talk with a Chinese gentleman who tells me I can make Canadian Widgets in China for 1/10 the price, and he’ll help me set it up. Next thing you know, a bunch of Alabamians are unemployed and I have a factory going in China, stinkin’ the place up with pollution making my Canadian Widgets.

So, is it Chinese pollution? If I hadn’t been able to move the factories out of Canada, the pollution never would have left Canada, so I would argue, no, it is Canadian pollution that has been exported to China. In this way, the entire planet is rendered a “Commons” that is then cut up and divided for the sake of capital and profit. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) doesn’t make it “more direct” than before. If you were a peasant in the Lake District in 1710, and some sheriff came by saying “Sorry lad – but you’ll have to give up the farm and move to Liverpool, and if you don’t it’s off to jail with you, and you haven’t but nowt to say about it, so go along quiet like.” that’s pretty direct, IMHO, and there isn’t much more direct than that.

The creation of Immaterial Production was only possible with the energetic and materials production that is presently available. This is prima facie correct. The real problem is the irreversible transition to lower energy states and degraded materials conditions that will avail in the not so distant future. Can such a civilisation exist?

Some argue, no: we are going to go blindly off a cliff like the Reindeer on St. Matthew Island, where when they were introduced in 1944, their numbers increased increased from 29 animals to 6,000 by 1963 but then underwent a die-off the following winter to less than 50 animals from a collapse of the food supply and within a few decades had completely died out.

Most of these theorists (Hardin, Duncan, Bartlett) figure it won’t be a one year collapse, but perhaps a one or two generation (20 – 40 year) collapse beginning with the collapse of oil exports sometime in the 2010s/2020s.

The destruction of the “Commons” for the vanity of the ruling class is also seen as a driving factory in the collapse of Easter Island. The Commons in that case was the forest. They cut down all the trees and within a few generations their population collapsed into constant warfare and cannibalism.

Others, such as myself, see a die off as well, but not over a period of 40 years – more likely 100 – 200 years, depending on how stupid people are.

From my perspective, the supposed qualitative differences between production from land capital and Immaterial Production from digital infrastructure are not of real significance, nor is one more immediate and direct than the other. You still have the freedom to starve.

Freedom, by Art Bears:

After this I saw multitudes
Forced from the land,
Cleared for the wool.
Dispossessed, refugees,
Who were told
To be free -
Free to starve,
Or to Slave;
free to choose
A or B, as we offered.
To labour or die!

I saw cities explode with
This freedom, and
Covered my eyes!

I would submit that present capitalism is faced with several big problems:

1. An imminent and permanent decline in total energy production. Work requires energy. No energy, no work. no work, no profit, no profit – bye bye capitalism… The top of the elite has been well aware of this problem for a number of years, but really starting with Laherrere and Campbell’s article in March 1998 Scientific American on the imminent loss of cheap petroleum resources. Note, Matthew Simmons, a leading figure in Energy depletion analysis, was a key energy advisor to the Cheney Administration.

2. The collapse of many basic materials. Many elements in groups 10, 11, and 12 of the periodic table are especially stressed. GeoDestinies by Walter Youngquist provides more than enough info on this. My understanding is he is going to republish it with updated info soon. It’s not for happy making.

3. The inversion of Jevon’s paradox, where rather than conservation only resulting in increased use of resources and economic growth, economic growth will only be predicated on the conservation of resources at a rate greater than the loss of energy from the system. I think I have a PhD waiting for me in there somewhere…unless….

4. Even though ICT exists at the highest energy and resource level, it will be maintained long beyond its sustainability inflection point as its effects in providing data and information and pacifying billions with entertainment is worth the loss of resources, as it helps inform and temper society as civilisation skitters into what is shaping up to be a trainwreck of a transition to a sustainable society. hmmmm… that sounds more interesting….

You wrote: But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder.

and I agree with you that their hopes are unfounded. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was only possible when the objective conditions existed such that the reproduction of labour in a (nascent) capitalist system was possible. HOW people worked and survived and how this work was financed (both in terms of dollars and resources) had to come prior to any actual “capitalist” formations. The Romans had factories to make bread. HUGE factories that ran off water wheels. We don’t talk about Rome as some ancient capitalist state. And even if a Roman said “hey – we have factories and we are creating a new class of people enslaved to our machines and we use huge sums of money to finance this factory – let’s call ourselves capitalists!!!” They’d say he was crazy and feed him to the lions.

Same with “communism”. you’re not going to get communism out of computer networks. Networks can be used for progressive ideas, gestures, and programs, (viz Rossiter and Organized Networks) but these machines are made by giant corporations and only exist from the insane destruction of our ecosystem. When we can figure out how to make computers out of sand and sea water (two things I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of) and assembled by people who do so voluntarily for the joy of building them – no – I don’t see this as any kind of a stage for communism. Quite the contrary….