On Sun, Feb 01, 2009 at 10:47:12AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > A slightly more cooked version: > > http://seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php > > 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic
O'RLY. > >From the fevered mind of Bruce Sterling and his alter-ego, Bruno > Argento, a consideration of things ahead. > > by Bruce Sterling • Posted January 29, 2009 06:19 PM > > "Once people lose faith in the institution of insurance — because > insurance can't be made to pay in climate-crisis conditions — we'll find > ourselves living in a Planet of Slums." > > The True 21st Century Begins > > I'm always impressed by people's behavior during massive panics. They > rarely believe or admit that they are panicked. Instead they assure one > another that at last the wool has been lifted from their eyes. They are > seeing the clear daylight of rationality after years of delusion. > > But a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It's an A pyramid scheme works very well. Until it doesn't. Claiming that a pyramid scheme is great because it worked for a while strikes me as... not very smart. > institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us. People > no longer know what they value. They don't know what to believe. And > unfortunately, it's part of the human condition to believe and invest in > things that are demonstrably not true. So here's an opportunity go approach normality again. Isn't it great? > As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, > irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected > institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as > derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these > institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, > underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to > contribute. So why not panic over them, too? A lot of handwaving, without mentioning a list. Of course a number of things people consider normal aren't, so what? This doesn't mean everything we do is crap. > Let's consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular > dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social > compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary > to fact. Of course we know whom to blame for this. > 1. The climate. People still behave as if it's okay. Every scientist in > the world who isn't the late Michael Crichton knows that it's not. The > climate is in terrible shape; something's gone wrong with the sky. The > bone-chilling implications haven't soaked into the populace, even though > Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was > soft-peddling the problem. > > It's become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate > crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just > and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard > to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence > from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike > mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that's objectively > terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely. O'RLY. > 2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that > properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn't be reproduced. A bit ridiculous mentioning IP here in the same breath with energy, demographics, climate, education. > Declaring that "information wants to be free" is an ideological stance. > A real-world situation where information can't be anything but free, > where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply > scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do > under such conditions. > > > Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when > conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to > copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. > If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, > this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this > kind of "property" becomes absurd. > > To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we've > somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the > supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet's most > advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The > ultimate global consequences of this situation's abject failure would > rank with the collapse of Communism. > > 3. National currencies. What do these odd numismatic relics have to do > with today's roiling global economy? There is no national currency > remotely strong enough to resist persecution by speculators. They're all > potential bubbles — panics in the making. How about mentioning that interest is unphysical, and can't work? How about just picking up the basics of Islamic banking, and enforce them across the financial institutions? Or will the foxes in charge for the henhouse never vote for it? How about designing objective measurement processes for economies, and tamper-proof currencies? Just ask the foxes. > If cash becomes king, what happens when market forces smash the cash? > Was that inky paper really, truly supposed to be worth more than real > estate, or unreal intellectual property, or shares in productive > companies? Why should anyone honestly believe that local treasury > departments are somehow more credible than global bankers? What on earth > were people thinking? Flee for the hills! Captain Obvious strikes again. Oh, noes! > 4. Insurance and building codes. Every year, insurance rates soar from > mounting "natural" catastrophes, obscuring the fact that the planet's > coasts are increasingly uninsurable. > > Insurance underlies the building and construction trades. If those rates > skyrocket, that system must keel over. Once people lose faith in the > institution of insurance — because insurance can't be made to pay in > climate-crisis conditions — we'll find ourselves living in a Planet of > Slums. > > Most people in this world have no insurance and ignore building codes. > They live in "informal architecture," i.e., slum structures. Barrios. > Favelas. Squats. Overcrowded districts of this world that look like a > post-Katrina situation all the time. When people are thrown out of their > too-expensive, too-coded homes, this is where they will go. > > Unless they're American, in which case they'll live in their cars. > > But how can dispossessed Americans pay for their car insurance when they > have no fixed address? Besides, car companies are coming apart with the > sudden savage ease of Enron's collapse. Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping > up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo's ghost at the > banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of > contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day. > > 5. The elderly. There's nothing so entirely predictable as demographic > change. Obviously we're facing enormous booming hordes of elderly. Yet > no one is confronting that issue. People remain in denial. They're > hoping a miracle will turn up, like, for instance, the sudden > disinterest of a demographic majority who always vote. > > Even elders who have long-garnered private nest eggs quite likely no > longer have them in 2009. There is no sound way to live off the hoarded > efforts of earlier labor. Inflation looms, ready to destroy fixed > incomes. The elderly, supposedly the calm, serene, seasoned elements in > our society, have every right to panic. They will not go gentle into > that good night. O'RLY. > > 6. The Westphalian system. Why are so many great military powers losing > a war in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't even a nation-state, yet it's > defeating all comers. Why do we even pretend to have nations these days? > Hollow states, failed states, non-states... The European post-state! > > No flag, no currency... People no longer have to believe in these > effigies. Why do they persist? The benefits of believing in nations are > slim. The planetary slum-dwellers of failed states may find the > rollicking life of a Somali pirate far more attractive than the hard Why mentioning a non-entity? Just because everybody else does? > work of state-building. The nation-state is torn from both above and > below. The global guerrilla and the Davos globe-hopper are cousins. > > 7. Science. To be a creationist president is not a problem. A suicide > cult is the most effective political actor in the world today. Clearly > the millions of people embracing fundamentalism like to make up their > own facts. > > Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political > and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of > faith — it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking > empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe > that anything is real. > > If science is discredited, why should mere politics have any > intellectual rigor? Just cobble together a crazy-quilt mix-and-match > ideology, like Venezuelan Bolivarism or Russia's peculiar mix of spies, > oil, and Orthodoxy. Go from the gut — all tactics, no strategy — making > up the state of the world as you go along! Stampede wildly from one > panic crisis to the next. Believe whatever is whispered. Hide and > conceal whatever you can. Spy on the phone calls, emails, and web > browsing of those who might actually know something. > > If that leads you to a miserable end-state, huddling with the children > in a fall-out shelter clutching silver bullion, then you can > congratulate yourself as the vanguard of civilization. > > So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing > any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a > good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a > miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, > corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly > blows one's brains out for no sane reason. > > We can do better than this. If that the best you could do, Bruce, you could do indeed do a lot better. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
