Navigating The Collapse Map – Transhuman On The Dark Mountain

Heard of the political compass? Well, one enviro person compiled something similar for those who seriously entertain the possibility that industrial civilization will collapse. (H/t Mark Sleboda for pointing me to it.)

Needless to say, the “deniers” are almost as absurd as the “rapturists.” All the business as usual scenarios lead to collapse by mid-century.

“Deep green activism” of the Derrick Jensen variety is not only negative but profoundly futile. Not to mention rather clownish (“Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam”).

Neither “elites” nor “communities” can have anything to do with “salvation”, which in this context is bringing humanity back within global limits. That is because people are short-sighted and myopic, and the elites – be they democratic or authoritarian – have to cater to their tastes to remain in power.

As regards communities in the context of transition/”resilience”, an elementary consideration of human psychology and the history of state formation will show that to be a BS prospect. It just won’t work. Either you have to settle in remote places at the end of nowhere, or you will have to deal with the local warlords, “zombies” (climate refugees), and the harsh realities of a technologically regressed environment itself. In this climate, the most viable and “resilient” political units will be highly militarized, patriarchal, and probably led by strongmen (“He who doesn’t feed his army, will feed another” – Napoleon).

So by the process of exclusion we are only left with (D) Technoutopians, (J) Dark Mountaineers, and (K) Neo-Survivalists.

Neo-survivalism just makes sense at any level be it individual, familial, or local; it’s always a good idea to hedge against catastrophic outcomes. Even if we magically solve the AGW and general sustainability crisis there will still be the prospect of economic depressions, or Yellowstone erupting, or air force base commanders obsessed with precious bodily fluids going a “little crazy” in the head… In short, there is no point even arguing against it.

Transhuman on the dark mountain – Romanticism.

While it might sound contradictory, I am also both a Dark Mountaineer* (cool name!) – a Technoutopian.

In the sense while that I am convinced “business as usual” will lead to collapse, there is a significant chance that civilization will develop real technological solutions to the sustainability crisis, such as effective geoengineering, ubiquitous self-assembling nanotechnology, or the technological singularity.

There is nothing far fetched or historically unprecedented about this. Historically, some societies solved their Malthusian crises and continued steamrolling ahead (e.g. mid-period Song China, early medieval England when its wood ran out and it seized on the idea of using coal instead, or the biggest example of them all – the Industrial Revolution in Europe). In fact, the new science of cliodynamics suggest that when a society encounters ecological stress, it tends to redouble investments into finding ways of further increasing the carrying capacity (this can be called the “Boserupian Effect“). Of course for every success story there were multiple failures: The Roman Empire, all the Chinese dynasties prior to the current Communist one, the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, etc.

The 21st century is as I’ve remarked a few times basically dominated by a “race of the exponentials” between technology and ecological/civilizational collapse.

And if technology fails, then one must face the spreading desert, the Olduvai Gorge, the Dark Mountain… Here is what its founder wrote:

For fifteen years I have been an environmental campaigner and writer. For two of these years I was deputy editor of the Ecologist. I campaigned against climate change, deforestation, overfishing, landscape destruction, extinction and all the rest. I wrote about how the global economic system was trashing the global ecosystem. I did all the things that environmentalists do. But after a while, I stopped believing it.

There were two reasons for this. The first was that none of the campaigns were succeeding, except on a very local level. More broadly, everything was getting worse. The second was that environmentalists, it seemed to me, were not being honest with themselves. It was increasingly obvious that climate change could not be stopped, that modern life was not consistent with the needs of the global ecosystem, that economic growth was part of the problem, and that the future was not going to be bright, green, comfy and ‘sustainable’ for ten billion people but was more likely to offer decline, depletion, chaos and hardship for all of us. Yet we all kept pretending that if we just carried on campaigning as usual, the impossible would happen. I didn’t buy it, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one.

That’s pretty much the exact realization I reached a year ago. The scenario in which the tossed coin lands on the other side to the technological silver bullet.

But whatever happens there’s no point in worrying about it or emotionally overinvesting oneself into it. That is why the Dark Mountain is so appealing. After all does the beer yeast worry that the booze generated by itself and its fellows will eventually doom them all? Of course not. And you are presumably far more intelligent than a beer yeast.