{"id":7891,"date":"2015-05-07T06:05:53","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T11:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7891"},"modified":"2015-05-07T06:05:53","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T11:05:53","slug":"the-whisper-of-the-shutoff-valve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7891","title":{"rendered":"The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/05\/the-whisper-of-shutoff-valve.html\">The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Last week\u2019s post on the impending decline and fall of the internet fielded a great many responses. That was no surprise, to be sure; nor was I startled in the least to find that many of them rejected the thesis of the post with some heat. Contemporary pop culture\u2019s strident insistence that technological progress is a clock that never runs backwards made such counterclaims inevitable.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it\u2019s always educational to watch the arguments fielded to prop up the increasingly shaky edifice of the modern mythology of progress, and the last week was no exception. A response I found particularly interesting from that standpoint appeared on one of the many online venues where\u00a0<em>Archdruid Report<\/em>\u00a0posts appear. One of the commenters insisted that my post should be rejected out of hand as mere doom and gloom; after all, he pointed out, it was ridiculous for me to suggest that fifty years from now, a majority of the population of the United States might be without reliable electricity or running water.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve made the same prediction here and elsewhere a good many times. Each time, most of my readers or listeners seem to have taken it as a piece of sheer rhetorical hyperbole. The electrical grid and the assorted systems that send potable water flowing out of faucets are so basic to the rituals of everyday life in today\u2019s America that their continued presence is taken for granted.\u00a0\u00a0At most, it\u2019s conceivable that individuals might choose not to connect to them; there\u2019s a certain amount of talk about off-grid living here and there in the alternative media, for example.\u00a0\u00a0That people who want these things might not have access to them, though, is pretty much unthinkable.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve Last week\u2019s post on the impending decline and fall of the internet fielded a great many responses. That was no surprise, to be sure; nor was I startled in the least to find that many of them rejected the thesis of the post with some heat. Contemporary pop culture\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[236,2149,5222,341,3799,1826,1574,786],"class_list":["post-7891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-economic-collapse","tag-economic-decline","tag-electrical-grid","tag-future","tag-off-grid","tag-past","tag-power-grid","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7892,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7891\/revisions\/7892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}