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Harm/Benefit Analysis

March 8, 2016

Harm/Benefit Analysis

According to Kaczynski, we need to reject organization-dependent technologies that tie us into the technosphere, and cultivate organization-independent ones:

Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology does regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down.

Easier said than done! It implies eliminating just about everything that makes it possible for people to survive. It implies living without electricity—not even off-grid systems that use batteries, photovoltaic cells and small-scale wind generators. It means living without pumped water, because demand pumps, pipes and valves are all manufactured products. It means living without electronics of any kind, since the electronics industry is globally integrated. No internet; no vaccinations; no cosmetic dentistry; no eyeglasses; no antibiotics or painkillers… Nothing that’s mass-produced… It means living off the land using crude tools you can fashion yourself in a primitive smithy using salvaged metal. Very few people would ever settle for that!

Sorry, Ted, but we need a better metric on which to base our decisions than simply sorting technologies into organization-dependent and organization-independent, and depriving ourselves of all the organization-dependent ones. So how about we do this instead: define a reasonably complete list of positive and negative aspects of technology, and then select which technologies we do use in order to maximize the benefit while minimizing the harm?

Calculating the harm/benefit ratio

Unlike the primitivist, extremist approach outlined above, this is a perfectly copacetic, constructive initiative, but I believe that the end result will be exactly the same, although achieved more gradually. You see, the harm/benefit analysis maximizes technology’s benefit to us while minimizing technology’s harm to us—not the technosphere.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VIII

December 1, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VIII

This series of blog posts offers a preview to a book which is yet to be written. Since it is turning out to be a rather long series, it seems fair to recap, to give you an idea of where we have been and where we are going. We started with a discussion of how the contemporary living arrangement, in the US specifically, but also in various other so-called “developed nations,” has become entirely untenable, because it forces us to rely on a suite of technologies that is unsustainable and catastrophic for the environment. These technologies are forced upon us by a set of political technologies that rob us of our power and will to pick and choose what technologies we use. We have also reviewed another set of political technologies—ones that are used to destroy nations around the world should they prove unwilling to go along with the deranged master plan.

We haven’t yet discussed what political technologies can be used – and are used with an increasing degree of success – to bring this forced death march to a halt. But that’s coming. Instead we took a grand detour, to look at what the best-case scenario looks like if it is, in fact, brought to a halt, if the political technologies that are being used to destroy both society and the biosphere are swept away. And it turns out that the best-case scenario is still pretty bad, because of all the unwelcome developments that are already baked into the cake, such as:

  • Ocean levels rising by at least 30m, putting the coastal cities in which two-thirds of the population lives either partially or fully underwater.
  • Average temperatures rising by around 17°C, resulting in heat waves in which electric grids, and the air conditioners they power, fail, and major metropolitan areas are depopulated by heat stroke.
  • Disappearance of mountain glaciers which feed river systems on which major agricultural areas depend for irrigation, resulting in depopulation due to mass starvation in many countries.

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VII

November 24, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part VII

You have survived your first winter on the land. Congratulations! The worst part of the ordeal is quite possibly over. Gone are whatever addictions and expectations with which you arrived, be they internet access or coffee. Your new world consists of the few people around you, and a huge number of plants and animals. But it is a world that is indisputably yours—to make the best of, and to pass along to your children and grandchildren.

In the beginning some elements of nonnaturelike technology will persist. But as seasons wear on your newfound world will no longer include electricity or electronics, synthetic materials or fabrics, internal combustion engines (no more outboard engines, snowmobiles or chainsaws). Firearms, synthetic pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and much else will quietly fade from memory.

In place of gadgets there will be books: the riverboat that makes its rounds of shoreline settlements exactly once a year—in midsummer—carries a lending library, dropping off books one summer and picking them up the next. It also distributes a set of textbooks made available by the government: language and literature, mathematics, botany, biology, chemistry, physics, geography and geology. Some of the textbooks haven’t changed in many generations; after all, there has been very little new that would be useful to you. Others have needed an update or two; the geography textbook no longer lists countries such as Bangladesh, Kiribati or US states such as Louisiana and Florida, which won’t be around for much longer. Numerous failed states with morbid populations and undefended borders will be given scant mention.

In place of synthetic fabrics or cotton there will be cloth of flax and hemp (cotton goes away along with industrial chemistry, on which it depends for pesticides). Much use will be made of leather, wool and fur, the last of which already essential for your continued survival.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part V

November 10, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part V

Before we proceed any further in describing how political technologies can be used to bring about the sort of dramatic social change that might grant humanity a new lease on life on planet Earth, let’s describe what “naturelike technologies” might look like. By “naturelike” we mean something that is in balance with nature—its rhythms, both diurnal and annual, and its cycles: of water, carbon dioxide, organic nutrients—and human generations. By “technologies” we mean the know-how, passed from generation to generation, which one needs in order to survive—not any fancy gadgets or machinery, not the internet of things, nano-this or genetically-engineered-that.

Of course, there must also exist political technologies that can sustain and defend such an effort, especially against the predations of profit-driven psychopaths who have imperiled human survival through rapid resource depletion and out of control industrial development, but let’s put this question aside for now…

While I was growing up in the USSR, every summer, from age five to age nine or so, my family would take off in some direction, east or west, on trips that could, in some of their aspects, be described as trips back in time. We spent one summer in a village so out-of-the-way that the locals demanded to know how we knew that their village existed. We hadn’t known, neither did the authorities in the local regional center, and the locals seemed keen to keep it that way.

We simply tagged along with a geological survey team that was doing seismic testing, blasting its way along a hydrocarbon seam. Our method of transportation was a “Smotka”—a reel truck that bumped along rutted dirt roads running cable between sensors stuck in the ground that triggered small explosive charges, then recorded seismic data as jagged lines on spools of graph paper spewed out by a seismograph inside the truck.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part III

October 20, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part III

[Part I] [Part II]

Previously in this series of posts we outlined how inside the US special interests use political technologies to keep the population fooled. We also showed how these efforts will eventually fail, either through internal contradiction or because the parasites eventually end up killing the host. We will now turn our attention to political technologies used by the US against the rest of the world. This may seem like a digression from the task of addressing the question at hand—of how to bring about social change in order to avert climate catastrophe—but it is necessary.

The long list of political technologies used within the US to keep Americans fooled helped us show just how pervasive and destructive these technologies are. We are yet to see any ways to neutralize these technologies—because Americans have failed to do so. To find examples of successful ways to neutralize them, we have to look at what the US has been attempting to do to the rest of the world—and failing.

No matter how good America’s luck has been—isolated geographic location, plentiful natural resources, the gigantic windfall of its victory in World War II, the additional windfall of the Soviet collapse—the luck was bound to run out eventually. In fact, to a large extent it already has: as a purely practical matter, it simply isn’t possible to continue running roughshod over the entire planet if you run roughshod over your own population as well. The US has less than 5% of the world’s population, half of whom are obese, a third on drugs and a quarter mentally ill. It leads the world in deaths from gun violence, police murders and prison population. Half the children are born into poverty and a third into broken and nonexistent families. Over a quarter of the working age population is permanently out of work. By no stretch of the imagination is this a description of a group that can rule the world..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part II

October 14, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part II

[Part I]

Political technologies have three main goals:

1. Changing the rules of the game between participants in the political process.
2. Introducing into the mass consciousness new concepts, values, opinions and convictions.
3. Direct manipulation of human behavior through mass media and administrative methods.

Political technologies pursue these tactical goals in accordance with higher, strategic imperatives, and it is only the noble nature of these higher imperatives that can justify the use of such high-handed, nondemocratic means. Yes, the ends justify the means—once in a while. It is better to save humanity and the natural world through nondemocratic means than to let it go extinct while adhering to strictly democratic ones.

But often the imperatives are far less than noble. They can be separated into two kinds:

1. To improve everyone’s welfare by pursuing the common good of the entire society, as it is understood by its best-educated, most intelligent, most decent and responsible members. Political technologies of this kind result in a virtuous cycle, building on previous successes to increase social cohesion, solidarity and setting the stage for great achievements. (These are the good kind.)

2. To enrich, empower and protect special interests at the expense of the rest of society. These kinds of political technologies either fail through internal contradiction, or result in a vicious cycle, in which those who benefit from them strive for ever-higher levels of selfish behavior at the expense of the rest, setting the stage for poor social outcomes, economic stagnation, mass violence and eventual civil war and political disintegration. (These are the bad kind.)

Let’s take the United States as an example The United States currently has more than its fair share of the latter sort. Let’s briefly review a dozen of the most important ones.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part I

October 13, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part I

On September 28, while addressing the UN General Assembly, Putin proposed “implementing naturelike technologies, which will make it possible to restore the balance between the biosphere and the technosphere.” It is necessary to do so to combat catastrophic global climate change, because, according to Putin, CO2 emissions cuts, even if implemented successfully, would be a mere postponement rather than a solution.

I hadn’t heard the phrase “implementing naturelike technologies” before, so I Googled it and Yandexed it, and came up with nothing more than Putin’s speech at the UN. He coined the phrase. As with the other phrases he’s coined, such as “sovereign democracy” and “dictatorship of the law,” it is a game-changer. With him, these aren’t words thrown on the wind. In each of these cases, the phrase laid the foundation of a new philosophy of governance, complete with a new set of policies.

In the case of “sovereign democracy,” it meant methodically excluding all foreign influences on Russia’s political system, a process that culminated recently when Russia, in tandem with China, banned Western NGOs, which were previously making futile attempts to destabilize Russia and China politically. Other countries that find themselves having trouble with the Orange Revolution Syndicate can now follow their best practices.

In the case of “dictatorship of the law,” it meant either explicitly legalizing and absorbing into the system, or explicitly outlawing and destroying, every type of illegal or semi-legal social formation, first by focusing on the criminal gangs and protection rackets that proliferated in Russia during the wild 1990s, and now expanding into the international sphere, where Russia is now working to destroy the products of illegal Western activities, such as ISIS, along with other US-trained, US-armed, Saudi-funded terrorist groups. “Dictatorship of the law” means that no-one is above the law, not even the CIA or the Pentagon.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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