20 ms·

A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

191 points by chobeat 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago
"Notably, the concept has yet to be claimed by a specific political party." That's not true. The GOP has adopted the both the Christian Dominionist apocalyptic rhetoric and the methods of Disaster Capitalism. They're doing things like using the pandemic-driven spike in crime to push all kinds of anti-democratic policies. Edit: the article specifically mentions that here: "Right-wing Accelerationists/Dark Enlightenment: the collapse of humanity will happen, but it is a necessary evolutionary step to free Capitalism from the need to support the human community."
- chobeat 5y ago
  that's not claiming the collapse for themselves: it's using it in conflict with other political and social forces
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > using it in conflict Yes they do claim it for that purpose. Look at the rhetoric around the preppers, the bitcoin scammers, the gold buyers, and all those zerohedge types: The collapse is coming, we are going to use it to take control.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Your partisan lens is showing here, rather blatantly, along with a heavily US-centric tilt. Do you think the spike in crime is driven by the pandemic? A GLOBAL pandemic? Do you think there is a spike in crime in other nations as well? Or do you think that maybe, just maybe, a radical political movement casting all law enforcement officers as bigoted predators may have more to do with it? I vote Democratic, have my whole life, so I can bash the GOP all day long, but acting as if the incredibly massive, and corporate sponsored "Defund the Police" movement hasn't had an impact on crime is simply irrational and not supported by data. The spike in crime in US cities has not been universal, and the data clearly shows the cities which cut police budgets and predictably lost officers were the worst hit.
  - margalabargala 5y ago
    What spike in crime? All data I've seen has shown marked, consistent decreases in crime. Could you link the data you refer to?
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      > What spike in crime? Well, see, that's the subtle part. Is there really a crisis-level crime wave (in the US)? There was a sharp decrease in crime in the initial months after lockdowns went into affect, but a spike in gun purchases. As such, homicides, which in the US are overwhelmingly committed with guns, are definitely up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rate-homcides-explained https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rat... But it's not anywhere near the historic rates of the '70s. You won't know that from reading the "violent crime collapse porn", which likes to point to absolute numbers (Most murders in 25 years!) while ignoring population and other factors. So my contention is that the collapse has been embraced by the reactionary Law and Order types to sow fear and uncertainty. This is partly has a pushback against the attempts to reform police and partly as a way to push for economic austerity as well as a return to racist criminal justice policies of the 80s.
      - majormajor 5y ago
        It's so hard to find good data on this in one place. On one hand there's a pandemic, on the other hand there's police protests, etc. Year by year numbers will be so lumpy that you could support tons of narratives, I bet. I couldn't find month-by-month numbers quickly for some of the cities in that article like Chicago or NYC, but Baltimore has some: https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020 https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020 Interestingly there, the biggest spike during 2020 happened in May 2020, so generally before the George Floyd killing and protests and "defund the police" movement.
        cratermoon 5y ago
        That's a pretty cherry you've picked.
j_m_b 5y ago
The language of this article is biased and portrays viewpoints using various leftist tropes such as use of "deniers", "right wing", "alt-right". The article is little more than summary of fictional portrayals of future society. Absolute drivel.
- slumpt_ 5y ago
  Right wing, alt-right, and “deniers” are all real constructs. The article is undoubtedly flawed but do at least get your ducks in a row.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    I agree with you on "Right Wing", and with "denier" in the sense of climate change, but alt-right has devolved into a meaningless label for anyone to the right of Mao. I was called "alt-right" by an AI ethics researcher because I asked her if she had looked at the actual data on police shootings/crime and argued with her response that the data released by the FBI UCR (victim reported crime data) was fabricated/fraudulent. I was also called a "denier" on a trip to Orange County, California last year because I wasn't wearing a mask while walking outside on a boardwalk, by a person who assumed I was an anti-masker. (I simply don't wear them outdoors)
    - chobeat 5y ago
      if people misuse of a specific term in a casual context made the term meaningless, we wouldn't be able to speak of politics, science or any other specific field. Alt-right has a very specific meaning in politics and political analysis, regardless of how it's used in a casual context
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        "Alt-right" isn't any sort of established term of art; it was first coined in a casual context less than a decade ago. I've seen some researchers use it as a kind of synonym for "white identity politics", but it seems to me that they're doing so specifically because of the casual usage, not because the term is particularly useful to them.
CalRobert 5y ago
If you find the collapse of human civilisation interesting, you might enjoy: It Could Happen Here - podcast by Robert Evans exploring a US decaying in to warring states and dissolving https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-30717896/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-307... Dark Mountain, a twice-yearly collection of short stories and poetry on themes of collapse and ecocide. https://dark-mountain.net/ https://dark-mountain.net/
- edrxty 5y ago
  It Could Happen Here was pretty haunting. Some of it was hand wavy but a lot felt borderline prophetic. I should caution people here though. Going down this rabbit hole is not at all good for your mental health and in parallel, much like a particular Big Short scene, glorifying any of the potential scenarios here is glorifying death and suffering on a level never seen before. We have a lot of problems to solve over the coming years but resisting this train of thought becoming mainstream in the algorithmic feeds that define our future is one of them. This can only have strictly negative consequences of the "self fulfilling prophecy" variety.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - CalRobert 5y ago
    It's horrifying, but then, the more time goes on the more IPCC forecasts trend towards what was previously labeled as histrionics and doomerism. Anyway, action is the antidote to despair and it's what has worked for me. We're far past the point where losing a few coastal cities is our biggest worry.
    - edrxty 5y ago
      This is a good point. My focus above was more the artificial disasters (ie. political unrest for the sake of political unrest) which to me feel like the most imminent given all the people sitting on their ai feeds and seething in message boards. It does bear mentioning that the real issues, most importantly climate change followed by economic inequality, are very real and absolutely will destroy just about everyone's way of life.
yann2 5y ago
Not even one reference to history. Why do that when mindless mental masturbation gets upvotes. Misguided people are surrounded by misguided people and they are all reinforcing their bullshit.
giantg2 5y ago
Not sure which buckets I fit into. Maybe a pessimist bucket that isn't listed. Maybe a matrix of longterm near linear decline with localized event driven rapid declines. Probably a degrowth variant since I do believe there's a minimum level of consumption tied to each person and that incremental cost has a ceiling when talking about sustainable population levels. Probably a combination of apocalyptic and cottage for aesthetics, but the possibilities are probably extremely variable based on many demographic and resource qualities of a given locality as well as what type of collapse. So, what was the purpose of these categories? Edit: why downvote?
- chobeat 5y ago
  It's a compass, it's a tool. You give it a purpose
  - giantg2 5y ago
    And what purpose have you given it? Do you have any theoretical uses?
    - chobeat 5y ago
      well I wrote it lol. But it helps me navigate the politics of it and try to build better communication and praxis in my own politics.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Are you familiar with / have you seen David Pollard's "New Political Map"? https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collapse-the-new-political-map/ https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collap...
alpineidyll3 5y ago
This is actually fun
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  For me it was quite a disturbing read.
ReadEvalPost 5y ago
Notably missing Doomer Optimists who accept the reality and inevitability of collapse, while viewing it as an opportunity for localist, agrarian communities to rise in the wake.
- some-guy 5y ago
  Is this not addressed by the "Right-wing Accelerationists/Dark Enlightenment" section?
  - ivraatiems 5y ago
    No, because that group tends to want a "libertarian" pseudofascist capitalist society, not an agrarian one.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  "Cottage-core: the fetishization of bucolic and isolated life is once again proposed by cottage-core as an escape from declining modernity. " From the article perspective they are in the pessimist section. As they are pessimist avoid improving the current state.
  - blix 5y ago
    But Cottage-core is in the aesthetic section, not the pessimist section. I also know quite a few people with this general perspective and I don't think any of them would use that label. (To reference another comment; this seems like a Very Online label) Ultimately this perspective doesn't neatly fit into any of the pidgeonholes the author has created. This is a problem with trying to categorize large numbers of humans into sequential, unrelated categories.
  - danjac 5y ago
    Reminds me of the term "cosy catastrophe" (coined by British SF author Brian Aldiss): https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosyCatastrophe https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosyCatastrophe
- 5y ago
ivraatiems 5y ago
This is a Very Online taxonomy; I don't think it incorporates the vast majority of normal, not particularly Online people who are aware of these problems but aren't spending most of their energy on them. The vast majority of people are fundamentally outside of this taxonomy because even if they are thinking about ideas related to "collapse", it's as a problem someone else is going to solve for them. The biggest challenge in climate change (for example) is that it's simply happening on too long a timescale for the average person to pay much attention to it. That will change in the coming decades, but by the time it does, it'll probably be too late to avoid the biggest harms.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  Do you have sources supporting your statements? They may sound common sense to you, but there is considerable ongoing scientific inquiry into people’s attitudes today, their sense of responsibility, and their sense of agency. Maybe you’re right, but I would go to the effort of reviewing the research and giving links before making assertions.
  - exolymph 5y ago
    This is a casual discussion website, comments often relate personal opinions.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      True, but is the distinction between fact and opinion plausibly important, even if the conversation is casual?
  - ivraatiems 5y ago
    Honestly, if the position of the original author is that this is representative of everybody, not just Internet People, I think it'd be on them to justify that view. They don't quite make that claim, though, and so I am not trying to formally refute it - I am just making what seems to be a logical note given the content as it stands.
- 5y ago
throw0101a 5y ago
For those that would like to know how to rebuild civilization, the book The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell is a handy reference on things to know and do. General bibliography: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ Deep dives on particular topics of agriculture, food and clothing, substances (charcoal, lime), materials (wood, cement, furnaces, glass), medicine, etc: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/ See also the more light-hearted How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North: * https://www.howtoinventeverything.com https://www.howtoinventeverything.com Which starts with inventing language (spoken and written), before moving to "non-sucky" numbers, the scientific method, and calorie surplus.
- codeulike 5y ago
  Also The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comfort https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
  - cyberbanjo 5y ago
    Only four of fifty or something machines are finished designed and build able today.
- pW9GLKxm9taFEhz 5y ago
  Also relevant is Long Now's "Manual for Civilization" https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/ https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization...
GoodJokes 5y ago
The idea of collapse is just fear porn for people that are online too much. Kinda sad to see it on a forum like this, a forum otherwise devoted to rationality and using words that meaning.
papito 5y ago
Oh, this is nice. While the mortals are talking about surviving a self-inflicted societal collapse, the trillionaires are busy building penis rockets, fighting taxes tooth and nail, and building doomsday bunkers. Ironically - in New Zealand, a place where society will most like be one of the last ones to fold. Good bye, and thanks for all the fish!
- gspr 5y ago
  How is it ironic to be building doomsday bunkers in the society most likely to be one of the last to fold? It seems like exactly the place to build one, if one were looking to.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - papito 5y ago
    It's ironic because these people have no problem shitting where they eat, moving on to a place that has not been defiled yet but their riches and absolute lack of moral compass. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val... Supplemental reading: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-steve-bannon-peter-thiel-214490/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump...
    - gspr 5y ago
      Sure. It's disgusting. But it's not ironic.
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  I feel pretty sure that if the rest of the world collapses, New Zealand will send their army and appropriate whatever resources these chuckleheads have hoarded. Anyways if the rest of the world goes sideways what value do stocks and bonds and American dollars have? The value of those kind of contractually enforced intangibles is socially constructed and would be the first thing to go. Land would be the thing with the most value, and again if New Zealanders are starving the government will probably just take the land by eminent domain in order to plant crops. The power of money only matters to the extent that the state backs it up.
throwaway34241 5y ago
I’ve found Ray Dalio to have some of the most interesting takes on this subject. [1] [2] [3] He’s the (retired) founder of the world’s largest hedge fund and he tries to examine these topics through economic and historical lenses, which seems like as good an approach as any. He also explains a lot of macroeconomic material in a way that isn’t very jargon heavy (which can sometimes be hard to find, at least for the schools of thought popular among people who do it professionally). [1] https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/ https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/ [2] https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/bw-populism-the-phenomenon.pdf https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/bw-populism-the-phe... [3] generally anything at his site economicprinciples.org, or his book on historical debt crises at https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/ https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/
Hokusai 5y ago
It's interesting but not insightful. Anyway, I would find more conducive to stop talking nonsense about collapses and focus on the many technologies that are being developed. We got a million times better at creating vaccines. AIDS vaccine is on the way. Clean technologies are growing exponentially and a future of clean-air cities is approaching fast. Working from home thru video conferences, I saw that in sci-fi when I was a kid, is a day to day reality. We should be building a better future instead of focusing on extremist views of the world. It was fun to read, it would make no sense to give it too much weight.
- seandoe 5y ago
  Yes, I'm with you. The focus and obsession with doom and collapse needs to end. It's like porn. We're biologically programmed to direct our attention to it. While the various media fuel this neverending stream of negativity, we have to realize that our primal selves yearn for it. Regardless of how likely any of these scenarios are, obsessing over them does not help our situation. How can we break this cycle of addiction? I guess the first step is recognition.
  - elihu 5y ago
    I agree that the idea of collapse is something we're inclined to fixate on whether it's about to happen or not. But on the other hand, democracies can fail, ecosystems can collapse, economies can fall apart, and so on. These are real risks that I think should be taken seriously. (Especially climate change.) The important thing though is not how much we're focused on the problems, but what we're doing about it. Individually we don't have much influence, but we can participate in elections, we can donate to worthy organizations, we can (to some small degree) minimize our climate impact, we can constructively influence discussions about these problems. Regarding the tendency of people in general to want to believe in the end of the world, I once had an idea for a new randomly-moving holiday called "arbitrary apocalypse day", where you roll 3 D-10s to pick a number of days until the next arbitrary apocalypse day, and roll another die to decide what's going to destroy civilization this time (nuclear war, nanobots, a big meteor, etc..). You treat that day like the end of the world. If everything goes on as normal, then you roll the dice again the next day and select the next arbitrary apocalypse day.
thriftwy 5y ago
How about Soft Landing expectation? Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, there will be a lot of issues in many countries, a lot of people will have to live with worse life quality (as they already do since 1970s in many places), but the life will generally go on as usual. Expect a rebound in 2nd half of XXI century. Collapse will not likely happen, but even if it did, there's the experience of collapse of USSR which offers a lot of insights. The chief of which, humans can take a lot of beating before they actually start to die.
at_a_remove 5y ago
I guess I fall into Accelerated/non-linear collapse pessimism, with a hint of eco-fascism as the only option out of the Road Warrior post-apocalptic aesthetic. Even as people cheerily mention that they expect the population to peak at ten billion, I think that's at least an order of magnitude beyond the carrying capacity. Plus, those ten billion people? Yeah, the U.S.A. has been exporting its lifestyle via movies for a long time -- those ten billion people are all going to want American lifestyles. They'll want steak, they'll want SUVs and fast fashion. They want their own McMansions, not just running water.
cryonics 5y ago
Very not-nuanced. This article doesn't seem to be based in any kind of factual reality. It relegates the idea that rapid climate collapse is inevitable to lobbyist groups, when anyone who's read any of IPCC's reports would agree with their own conclusions that the collapse is gradual and somewhat arbitrary in its checkpoints. It restricts the "future" to a Malthusian dichotomy where we either have perfection or some kind of post-apocaplyptic agrarian society.
skillpass 5y ago
Personally I feel like the Collapse movement is full of histrionics and hysteria, and for a while I was ignoring it. But the movement seems to have a psychological pull. Most of the people I talk to in the US who are tuned into the news cycle or culture war on both the right and the left have started to accept parts of the Collapse narrative (rampant crime leading to breakdown of social order, climate change induced disasters leading to mass displacement of populations, etc.). It worries me to see so many people accept Collapse as inevitable. I think such pessimistic attitudes will lead more people towards radicalization as they see revolutionary change as the only means to preventing collapse. There must be some part of the human psyche which is attracted to the idea of world ending disasters. Ideas of apocalypse are found in many religions throughout the world. Perhaps the Collapse movement is the new eschatology for a post-religion world.
- chobeat 5y ago
  For sure there are eschatological traits, it's discussed quite commonly in the literature on the topic. We are exiting the linear, flat time of our parents and entering again in a cyclical time and we need ruptures: Collapse is one, Singularity is another but there are more on the horizon (like escape to space and so on).
  - ben_w 5y ago
    While I listen when, e.g. Stross compared the Singularity to an Atheist take on Christian theology, I don’t think our parents lived in anything like a linear time: My dad was born in ‘39; the first fission bomb was ‘45; first transistor was demonstrated in ‘47; first fusion bomb ‘51; NTSC TV color standard was ‘53; first artificial satellite was ‘58; the laser and the pill in ‘60; measles vaccine in ‘63; the 60s was civil rights, anti-war, free love, gay rights and second-wave feminism in the west, decolonisation in Africa, the green revolution, and the majority of the space race; 8-track, compact cassette, PDP-8, BASIC were all ‘64; first ATM and first human-to-human heart transplant was ‘67; the Mother of All Demos was ‘68. Then the 70s happened and made the 60s seem languid — the mainframes became home computers, the women became national leaders, space became more relevant, DNA sequencing first invented and then used to fully sequence a virus, first test tube baby and first genetically modified human insulin from E. coli, X-ray tomography and MRIs invented, smallpox eliminated first from the Americas and then worldwide, public key encryption, cochlear implants successfully implanted, first demo of an audio CD, polio eliminated in the USA, … And the 80s surpassed the 70s like the 70s surpassed the 60s. So much has changed so fast; these days you can only even keep track of how much has changed because of the crowdsourced efforts of other people.
jnurmine 5y ago
An interesting article, it made me think. I doubt there is one global model or form of a collapse scenario which would happen everywhere. It's likely that some places, already hanging on the edge of chaos, would enter this state in a very short time whereas some would persist over a longer time, and some would perhaps even adapt to the changing circumstances.
Manuel_D 5y ago
I once encountered a reddit user vocally insisting in a regional subreddit that industrialized society would collapse in the next 10-20 years. I poked around his comment history and it was non-stop commenting in /r/collapse pondering the kind of collapse that would happen, theories as to what would trigger it, and plans for how they would somehow survive and turn it into a utopian society for themselves. Like 9 months of this kind of commenting. The kicker was a wall of text, a dozen paragraphs long, about how he'd emerge from his bunker and become the patriarch of the local group of survivors - ultimately leading to him having several wives, of course. While there are pressing challenges like climate change, aging populations, inequality, and more, I find that the substantial majority of people who devote large amounts of energy towards pondering and preparing for the collapse of civilization are using it as an escapist fantasy. I see lots of parallels with people preparing for Judgement Day: some unprecedented event is going to kill off the majority of the population leaving a chosen few to inherit the new world. These collapse predictions are often rooted in serious issues, but I find that this kind of escapism makes the average person more skeptical of serious activism.
- paraph1n 5y ago
  Not sure if you read the article, but both you and the redditor you are describing fit archetypes explicitly called out by the author.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    Which one? "Partial Deniers" I guess? I think that's the overwhelming majority of people, those that recognize that emerging problems exist but do not predict they will cause a global collapse of society. Although it's often difficult to judge, exactly, since collapse evangelists tend to be rather evasive and ambiguous about what exactly will trigger the collapse.
    - paraph1n 5y ago
      You fit partial denier, yes. The redditor you're describing would certainly fit into "post-collapsists" given that they are preparing for the collapse in order to minimize post-collapse consequences. I would say that most upper-middle-class+ educated westerners fit into the "partial denier" archetype, yes. It's in human nature to deny something bad is happening until its too late, and sometimes even then (see, eg. global warming, COVID-19, etc).
CorruptedArc 5y ago
This misses whole primary subsets of ideologies and doomers, glosses most Libertarian groups which are probably the most paranoid about such events. Seeming to focus too hard at the near non-existant extremes like EcoFash & EcoCommies and really never adjusts back towards a realistic middle which comes in any crisis.
vharuck 5y ago
I wish the article provided links or references for each major philosophy. I've avoided diving down this rabbit hole for a while because I'm already afraid I'm slipping at its edge. But it'd be nice to read books or essays explaining the positions.
wilburTheDog 5y ago
I think, no matter how hard you try, you can't produce something like this without it being biased toward your own opinions on the topic. And those of us with different opinions would phrase things differently. I suppose I would fit in his Pessimist/Defeatist category, though I wouldn't call it that. (And I guess deniers wouldn't call themselves deniers either.) I would probably refer to my own take on collapse as depressive realism rooted in observations of climate change. As one observation, take the latest IPCC report. U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres described the latest IPCC report as "a code red for humanity." "The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk," Guterres said. [1] The more you look the worse it gets. We aren't going to be able to reduce atmospheric CO2 without some sort of drastic uncomfortable change. The lockdowns during the pandemic reduced emissions by about 17% at one point. But despite that, CO2 in the atmosphere continued to increase. Whatever we do has to be more drastic than the pandemic lockdowns, and permanent, or it will keep getting worse. I just don't see people being willing to go along with that, especially those of us in comfortable Western societies. I don't know, is that pessimism, defeatism, or realism? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/09/ipcc-report-un-climate-report-delivers-starkest-warning-yet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/09/ipcc-report-un-climate-repor...
- FooHentai 5y ago
  All good points. Another clear lesson from the pandemic: Achieving optimum outcomes is severely bounded by practical political realities - Consider if every single country had hard locked down, everywhere, for 6+ weeks. Perhaps complete elimination could have been achieved. But politically, impossible. That equally applies to climate change as a similar tragedy of the commons played out on a longer timescale. So there are some learnings to be applied if you're looking, as I think many people now are, to identify how things might play out and then make your own life choices accordingly. Something I'm increasingly certain of is that the future will be boring. By which I mean trends are likely correct but will play out over longer timescales than expected. Visions of sudden collapse and apocalypse are mostly anxiety-fuelled inventions of the mind aimed at spurring action in the present day. Reality is more like economic stagnation, decreasing freedoms, and continual smaller crises that gradually bring us to the predicted future state. Nothing that can be ridden out in a bunker with a few years supply of oats.
narrator 5y ago
One should really read "Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joe A. Tainter. He's an archeologist who has a very timeless view of collapse based on diminishing marginal returns on societal complexity. A lot of the collapse theories that get a lot of ink are written from the conclusion backwards. As in here's my plan for the total restructuring of society and a long justification with cherrypicked examples for why everyone needs to get on board or we're going to be in Road Warrior territory next year. Collapse is a very subtle process that needs to be understood as a set of dynamic interacting forces not a dialectical materialism like process that proceeds inevitably from an invented mythology of historical forces.
- jdkee 5y ago
  Relevant as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-his...
NoGravitas 5y ago
The best we can hope for is something like Kim Stanley Robinson's new book "The Ministry For the Future". A hodgepodge of technocratic reforms against a background of anthropogenic natural disasters eventually produces a solarpunk degrowth world that's post-capitalist without an an abrupt anti-capitalist revolution. Capitalist powers-that-be go along with it because it's being led by the central banks, and at every step the most profitable option is to go along with it. I don't think we'll get that, though; I expect something more like William Gibson's "Jackpot" (from "The Peripheral" and "Agency"). There's no single collapse, just ongoing failures to solve coordination problems from hundreds of climate-change-spawned disasters, shortages, wars, pandemics, crises, and a century-long excess death toll around 6 billion. When the global kleptocrats pick up the pieces, it ultimately shakes out to cyberpunk ecofascism. The political question of the early 21st century is what can we salvage? And are we able to work together to do so? The tea leaves aren't looking good.
csbartus 5y ago
Just to put in context, Collapse is one of the three possible post-crisis trajectories, beside Recovery and Continuing Instability; and it must be triggered first by a Revolutionary Situation. Before worrying about a collapse, we should check if we are in a revolutionary situation. And perhaps we are not yet there. https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019.pdf https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019....
closeparen 5y ago
It seems surprising that so many collapse ideologies are focused on local production and self reliance. I would naively read environmental trends as tending to require more interdependence: we’re going to have significant population centers with no arable land and no fresh water. Maybe they’ll find ways to cooperate and trade for what they need. Maybe they’ll migrate en masse to better resourced areas. Maybe they’ll resort to war and plunder. But at any rate there is going to be an interaction.
monkeycantype 5y ago
I grew up on a farm, my dad was a remote developer when that meant tapes in the mail and a mainframe in the shed. When my naivety and I emerged from this insulated cocoon into the the mess of the world, I couldn’t believe that something as reckless and corrupted and chaotic as our civilization could possibly continue beyond a year or two. Because our genius exists at the individual level, we are horribly unsophisticated in our collective behaviour, and terrible at even comprehending our collective behaviour. I think /r/collapse may not be factually rigorous, but accurately represents sublime horror of individuals being shattered by staring into the incomprehensible abyss of of mass human activity
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Ha! That was a good writeup. While I am an optimistic person here is one scenario from the article that I think is possible: “”” Cyberpunk/Sci-fi: The social and ecological collapse is not accompanied by a reduction in material well-being or technological competence, but by a disproportionate growth of the gap between social classes. Often a collapse of the established order is not followed by a chaotic and violent conflict, but by corporations that replace the state and implement dystopian societies. Examples: Autonomous, The Peripheral, Elysium. “”” Humans are very adaptable and scenarios that sound awful to present day people, might be tolerable once they manifest.

191 points by chobeat 5y ago

"Notably, the concept has yet to be claimed by a specific political party." That's not true. The GOP has adopted the both the Christian Dominionist apocalyptic rhetoric and the methods of Disaster Capitalism. They're doing things like using the pandemic-driven spike in crime to push all kinds of anti-democratic policies. Edit: the article specifically mentions that here: "Right-wing Accelerationists/Dark Enlightenment: the collapse of humanity will happen, but it is a necessary evolutionary step to free Capitalism from the need to support the human community."

chobeat 5y ago
that's not claiming the collapse for themselves: it's using it in conflict with other political and social forces
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > using it in conflict Yes they do claim it for that purpose. Look at the rhetoric around the preppers, the bitcoin scammers, the gold buyers, and all those zerohedge types: The collapse is coming, we are going to use it to take control.
JPKab 5y ago
Your partisan lens is showing here, rather blatantly, along with a heavily US-centric tilt. Do you think the spike in crime is driven by the pandemic? A GLOBAL pandemic? Do you think there is a spike in crime in other nations as well? Or do you think that maybe, just maybe, a radical political movement casting all law enforcement officers as bigoted predators may have more to do with it? I vote Democratic, have my whole life, so I can bash the GOP all day long, but acting as if the incredibly massive, and corporate sponsored "Defund the Police" movement hasn't had an impact on crime is simply irrational and not supported by data. The spike in crime in US cities has not been universal, and the data clearly shows the cities which cut police budgets and predictably lost officers were the worst hit.
- margalabargala 5y ago
  What spike in crime? All data I've seen has shown marked, consistent decreases in crime. Could you link the data you refer to?
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > What spike in crime? Well, see, that's the subtle part. Is there really a crisis-level crime wave (in the US)? There was a sharp decrease in crime in the initial months after lockdowns went into affect, but a spike in gun purchases. As such, homicides, which in the US are overwhelmingly committed with guns, are definitely up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rate-homcides-explained https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rat... But it's not anywhere near the historic rates of the '70s. You won't know that from reading the "violent crime collapse porn", which likes to point to absolute numbers (Most murders in 25 years!) while ignoring population and other factors. So my contention is that the collapse has been embraced by the reactionary Law and Order types to sow fear and uncertainty. This is partly has a pushback against the attempts to reform police and partly as a way to push for economic austerity as well as a return to racist criminal justice policies of the 80s.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      It's so hard to find good data on this in one place. On one hand there's a pandemic, on the other hand there's police protests, etc. Year by year numbers will be so lumpy that you could support tons of narratives, I bet. I couldn't find month-by-month numbers quickly for some of the cities in that article like Chicago or NYC, but Baltimore has some: https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020 https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020 Interestingly there, the biggest spike during 2020 happened in May 2020, so generally before the George Floyd killing and protests and "defund the police" movement.
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        That's a pretty cherry you've picked.

j_m_b 5y ago

The language of this article is biased and portrays viewpoints using various leftist tropes such as use of "deniers", "right wing", "alt-right". The article is little more than summary of fictional portrayals of future society. Absolute drivel.

slumpt_ 5y ago
Right wing, alt-right, and “deniers” are all real constructs. The article is undoubtedly flawed but do at least get your ducks in a row.
- JPKab 5y ago
  I agree with you on "Right Wing", and with "denier" in the sense of climate change, but alt-right has devolved into a meaningless label for anyone to the right of Mao. I was called "alt-right" by an AI ethics researcher because I asked her if she had looked at the actual data on police shootings/crime and argued with her response that the data released by the FBI UCR (victim reported crime data) was fabricated/fraudulent. I was also called a "denier" on a trip to Orange County, California last year because I wasn't wearing a mask while walking outside on a boardwalk, by a person who assumed I was an anti-masker. (I simply don't wear them outdoors)
  - chobeat 5y ago
    if people misuse of a specific term in a casual context made the term meaningless, we wouldn't be able to speak of politics, science or any other specific field. Alt-right has a very specific meaning in politics and political analysis, regardless of how it's used in a casual context
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      "Alt-right" isn't any sort of established term of art; it was first coined in a casual context less than a decade ago. I've seen some researchers use it as a kind of synonym for "white identity politics", but it seems to me that they're doing so specifically because of the casual usage, not because the term is particularly useful to them.

CalRobert 5y ago

If you find the collapse of human civilisation interesting, you might enjoy: It Could Happen Here - podcast by Robert Evans exploring a US decaying in to warring states and dissolving https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-30717896/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-307... Dark Mountain, a twice-yearly collection of short stories and poetry on themes of collapse and ecocide. https://dark-mountain.net/ https://dark-mountain.net/

edrxty 5y ago
It Could Happen Here was pretty haunting. Some of it was hand wavy but a lot felt borderline prophetic. I should caution people here though. Going down this rabbit hole is not at all good for your mental health and in parallel, much like a particular Big Short scene, glorifying any of the potential scenarios here is glorifying death and suffering on a level never seen before. We have a lot of problems to solve over the coming years but resisting this train of thought becoming mainstream in the algorithmic feeds that define our future is one of them. This can only have strictly negative consequences of the "self fulfilling prophecy" variety.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- CalRobert 5y ago
  It's horrifying, but then, the more time goes on the more IPCC forecasts trend towards what was previously labeled as histrionics and doomerism. Anyway, action is the antidote to despair and it's what has worked for me. We're far past the point where losing a few coastal cities is our biggest worry.
  - edrxty 5y ago
    This is a good point. My focus above was more the artificial disasters (ie. political unrest for the sake of political unrest) which to me feel like the most imminent given all the people sitting on their ai feeds and seething in message boards. It does bear mentioning that the real issues, most importantly climate change followed by economic inequality, are very real and absolutely will destroy just about everyone's way of life.

yann2 5y ago

Not even one reference to history. Why do that when mindless mental masturbation gets upvotes. Misguided people are surrounded by misguided people and they are all reinforcing their bullshit.

giantg2 5y ago

Not sure which buckets I fit into. Maybe a pessimist bucket that isn't listed. Maybe a matrix of longterm near linear decline with localized event driven rapid declines. Probably a degrowth variant since I do believe there's a minimum level of consumption tied to each person and that incremental cost has a ceiling when talking about sustainable population levels. Probably a combination of apocalyptic and cottage for aesthetics, but the possibilities are probably extremely variable based on many demographic and resource qualities of a given locality as well as what type of collapse. So, what was the purpose of these categories? Edit: why downvote?

chobeat 5y ago
It's a compass, it's a tool. You give it a purpose
- giantg2 5y ago
  And what purpose have you given it? Do you have any theoretical uses?
  - chobeat 5y ago
    well I wrote it lol. But it helps me navigate the politics of it and try to build better communication and praxis in my own politics.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Are you familiar with / have you seen David Pollard's "New Political Map"? https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collapse-the-new-political-map/ https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collap...

alpineidyll3 5y ago

This is actually fun

AlexCoventry 5y ago
For me it was quite a disturbing read.

ReadEvalPost 5y ago

Notably missing Doomer Optimists who accept the reality and inevitability of collapse, while viewing it as an opportunity for localist, agrarian communities to rise in the wake.

some-guy 5y ago
Is this not addressed by the "Right-wing Accelerationists/Dark Enlightenment" section?
- ivraatiems 5y ago
  No, because that group tends to want a "libertarian" pseudofascist capitalist society, not an agrarian one.
Hokusai 5y ago
"Cottage-core: the fetishization of bucolic and isolated life is once again proposed by cottage-core as an escape from declining modernity. " From the article perspective they are in the pessimist section. As they are pessimist avoid improving the current state.
- blix 5y ago
  But Cottage-core is in the aesthetic section, not the pessimist section. I also know quite a few people with this general perspective and I don't think any of them would use that label. (To reference another comment; this seems like a Very Online label) Ultimately this perspective doesn't neatly fit into any of the pidgeonholes the author has created. This is a problem with trying to categorize large numbers of humans into sequential, unrelated categories.
- danjac 5y ago
  Reminds me of the term "cosy catastrophe" (coined by British SF author Brian Aldiss): https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosyCatastrophe https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosyCatastrophe
5y ago

ivraatiems 5y ago

This is a Very Online taxonomy; I don't think it incorporates the vast majority of normal, not particularly Online people who are aware of these problems but aren't spending most of their energy on them. The vast majority of people are fundamentally outside of this taxonomy because even if they are thinking about ideas related to "collapse", it's as a problem someone else is going to solve for them. The biggest challenge in climate change (for example) is that it's simply happening on too long a timescale for the average person to pay much attention to it. That will change in the coming decades, but by the time it does, it'll probably be too late to avoid the biggest harms.

orhmeh09 5y ago
Do you have sources supporting your statements? They may sound common sense to you, but there is considerable ongoing scientific inquiry into people’s attitudes today, their sense of responsibility, and their sense of agency. Maybe you’re right, but I would go to the effort of reviewing the research and giving links before making assertions.
- exolymph 5y ago
  This is a casual discussion website, comments often relate personal opinions.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    True, but is the distinction between fact and opinion plausibly important, even if the conversation is casual?
- ivraatiems 5y ago
  Honestly, if the position of the original author is that this is representative of everybody, not just Internet People, I think it'd be on them to justify that view. They don't quite make that claim, though, and so I am not trying to formally refute it - I am just making what seems to be a logical note given the content as it stands.
5y ago

throw0101a 5y ago

For those that would like to know how to rebuild civilization, the book The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell is a handy reference on things to know and do. General bibliography: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/ Deep dives on particular topics of agriculture, food and clothing, substances (charcoal, lime), materials (wood, cement, furnaces, glass), medicine, etc: * http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/ http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/ See also the more light-hearted How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North: * https://www.howtoinventeverything.com https://www.howtoinventeverything.com Which starts with inventing language (spoken and written), before moving to "non-sucky" numbers, the scientific method, and calorie surplus.

codeulike 5y ago
Also The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comfort https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
- cyberbanjo 5y ago
  Only four of fifty or something machines are finished designed and build able today.
pW9GLKxm9taFEhz 5y ago
Also relevant is Long Now's "Manual for Civilization" https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/ https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization...

GoodJokes 5y ago

The idea of collapse is just fear porn for people that are online too much. Kinda sad to see it on a forum like this, a forum otherwise devoted to rationality and using words that meaning.

papito 5y ago

Oh, this is nice. While the mortals are talking about surviving a self-inflicted societal collapse, the trillionaires are busy building penis rockets, fighting taxes tooth and nail, and building doomsday bunkers. Ironically - in New Zealand, a place where society will most like be one of the last ones to fold. Good bye, and thanks for all the fish!

gspr 5y ago
How is it ironic to be building doomsday bunkers in the society most likely to be one of the last to fold? It seems like exactly the place to build one, if one were looking to.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- papito 5y ago
  It's ironic because these people have no problem shitting where they eat, moving on to a place that has not been defiled yet but their riches and absolute lack of moral compass. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val... Supplemental reading: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-steve-bannon-peter-thiel-214490/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump...
  - gspr 5y ago
    Sure. It's disgusting. But it's not ironic.
fallingfrog 5y ago
I feel pretty sure that if the rest of the world collapses, New Zealand will send their army and appropriate whatever resources these chuckleheads have hoarded. Anyways if the rest of the world goes sideways what value do stocks and bonds and American dollars have? The value of those kind of contractually enforced intangibles is socially constructed and would be the first thing to go. Land would be the thing with the most value, and again if New Zealanders are starving the government will probably just take the land by eminent domain in order to plant crops. The power of money only matters to the extent that the state backs it up.

throwaway34241 5y ago

I’ve found Ray Dalio to have some of the most interesting takes on this subject. [1] [2] [3] He’s the (retired) founder of the world’s largest hedge fund and he tries to examine these topics through economic and historical lenses, which seems like as good an approach as any. He also explains a lot of macroeconomic material in a way that isn’t very jargon heavy (which can sometimes be hard to find, at least for the schools of thought popular among people who do it professionally). [1] https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/ https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/ [2] https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/bw-populism-the-phenomenon.pdf https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/bw-populism-the-phe... [3] generally anything at his site economicprinciples.org, or his book on historical debt crises at https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/ https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/

Hokusai 5y ago

It's interesting but not insightful. Anyway, I would find more conducive to stop talking nonsense about collapses and focus on the many technologies that are being developed. We got a million times better at creating vaccines. AIDS vaccine is on the way. Clean technologies are growing exponentially and a future of clean-air cities is approaching fast. Working from home thru video conferences, I saw that in sci-fi when I was a kid, is a day to day reality. We should be building a better future instead of focusing on extremist views of the world. It was fun to read, it would make no sense to give it too much weight.

seandoe 5y ago
Yes, I'm with you. The focus and obsession with doom and collapse needs to end. It's like porn. We're biologically programmed to direct our attention to it. While the various media fuel this neverending stream of negativity, we have to realize that our primal selves yearn for it. Regardless of how likely any of these scenarios are, obsessing over them does not help our situation. How can we break this cycle of addiction? I guess the first step is recognition.
- elihu 5y ago
  I agree that the idea of collapse is something we're inclined to fixate on whether it's about to happen or not. But on the other hand, democracies can fail, ecosystems can collapse, economies can fall apart, and so on. These are real risks that I think should be taken seriously. (Especially climate change.) The important thing though is not how much we're focused on the problems, but what we're doing about it. Individually we don't have much influence, but we can participate in elections, we can donate to worthy organizations, we can (to some small degree) minimize our climate impact, we can constructively influence discussions about these problems. Regarding the tendency of people in general to want to believe in the end of the world, I once had an idea for a new randomly-moving holiday called "arbitrary apocalypse day", where you roll 3 D-10s to pick a number of days until the next arbitrary apocalypse day, and roll another die to decide what's going to destroy civilization this time (nuclear war, nanobots, a big meteor, etc..). You treat that day like the end of the world. If everything goes on as normal, then you roll the dice again the next day and select the next arbitrary apocalypse day.

thriftwy 5y ago

How about Soft Landing expectation? Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, there will be a lot of issues in many countries, a lot of people will have to live with worse life quality (as they already do since 1970s in many places), but the life will generally go on as usual. Expect a rebound in 2nd half of XXI century. Collapse will not likely happen, but even if it did, there's the experience of collapse of USSR which offers a lot of insights. The chief of which, humans can take a lot of beating before they actually start to die.

at_a_remove 5y ago

I guess I fall into Accelerated/non-linear collapse pessimism, with a hint of eco-fascism as the only option out of the Road Warrior post-apocalptic aesthetic. Even as people cheerily mention that they expect the population to peak at ten billion, I think that's at least an order of magnitude beyond the carrying capacity. Plus, those ten billion people? Yeah, the U.S.A. has been exporting its lifestyle via movies for a long time -- those ten billion people are all going to want American lifestyles. They'll want steak, they'll want SUVs and fast fashion. They want their own McMansions, not just running water.

cryonics 5y ago

Very not-nuanced. This article doesn't seem to be based in any kind of factual reality. It relegates the idea that rapid climate collapse is inevitable to lobbyist groups, when anyone who's read any of IPCC's reports would agree with their own conclusions that the collapse is gradual and somewhat arbitrary in its checkpoints. It restricts the "future" to a Malthusian dichotomy where we either have perfection or some kind of post-apocaplyptic agrarian society.

skillpass 5y ago

Personally I feel like the Collapse movement is full of histrionics and hysteria, and for a while I was ignoring it. But the movement seems to have a psychological pull. Most of the people I talk to in the US who are tuned into the news cycle or culture war on both the right and the left have started to accept parts of the Collapse narrative (rampant crime leading to breakdown of social order, climate change induced disasters leading to mass displacement of populations, etc.). It worries me to see so many people accept Collapse as inevitable. I think such pessimistic attitudes will lead more people towards radicalization as they see revolutionary change as the only means to preventing collapse. There must be some part of the human psyche which is attracted to the idea of world ending disasters. Ideas of apocalypse are found in many religions throughout the world. Perhaps the Collapse movement is the new eschatology for a post-religion world.

chobeat 5y ago
For sure there are eschatological traits, it's discussed quite commonly in the literature on the topic. We are exiting the linear, flat time of our parents and entering again in a cyclical time and we need ruptures: Collapse is one, Singularity is another but there are more on the horizon (like escape to space and so on).
- ben_w 5y ago
  While I listen when, e.g. Stross compared the Singularity to an Atheist take on Christian theology, I don’t think our parents lived in anything like a linear time: My dad was born in ‘39; the first fission bomb was ‘45; first transistor was demonstrated in ‘47; first fusion bomb ‘51; NTSC TV color standard was ‘53; first artificial satellite was ‘58; the laser and the pill in ‘60; measles vaccine in ‘63; the 60s was civil rights, anti-war, free love, gay rights and second-wave feminism in the west, decolonisation in Africa, the green revolution, and the majority of the space race; 8-track, compact cassette, PDP-8, BASIC were all ‘64; first ATM and first human-to-human heart transplant was ‘67; the Mother of All Demos was ‘68. Then the 70s happened and made the 60s seem languid — the mainframes became home computers, the women became national leaders, space became more relevant, DNA sequencing first invented and then used to fully sequence a virus, first test tube baby and first genetically modified human insulin from E. coli, X-ray tomography and MRIs invented, smallpox eliminated first from the Americas and then worldwide, public key encryption, cochlear implants successfully implanted, first demo of an audio CD, polio eliminated in the USA, … And the 80s surpassed the 70s like the 70s surpassed the 60s. So much has changed so fast; these days you can only even keep track of how much has changed because of the crowdsourced efforts of other people.

jnurmine 5y ago

An interesting article, it made me think. I doubt there is one global model or form of a collapse scenario which would happen everywhere. It's likely that some places, already hanging on the edge of chaos, would enter this state in a very short time whereas some would persist over a longer time, and some would perhaps even adapt to the changing circumstances.

Manuel_D 5y ago

I once encountered a reddit user vocally insisting in a regional subreddit that industrialized society would collapse in the next 10-20 years. I poked around his comment history and it was non-stop commenting in /r/collapse pondering the kind of collapse that would happen, theories as to what would trigger it, and plans for how they would somehow survive and turn it into a utopian society for themselves. Like 9 months of this kind of commenting. The kicker was a wall of text, a dozen paragraphs long, about how he'd emerge from his bunker and become the patriarch of the local group of survivors - ultimately leading to him having several wives, of course. While there are pressing challenges like climate change, aging populations, inequality, and more, I find that the substantial majority of people who devote large amounts of energy towards pondering and preparing for the collapse of civilization are using it as an escapist fantasy. I see lots of parallels with people preparing for Judgement Day: some unprecedented event is going to kill off the majority of the population leaving a chosen few to inherit the new world. These collapse predictions are often rooted in serious issues, but I find that this kind of escapism makes the average person more skeptical of serious activism.

paraph1n 5y ago
Not sure if you read the article, but both you and the redditor you are describing fit archetypes explicitly called out by the author.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  Which one? "Partial Deniers" I guess? I think that's the overwhelming majority of people, those that recognize that emerging problems exist but do not predict they will cause a global collapse of society. Although it's often difficult to judge, exactly, since collapse evangelists tend to be rather evasive and ambiguous about what exactly will trigger the collapse.
  - paraph1n 5y ago
    You fit partial denier, yes. The redditor you're describing would certainly fit into "post-collapsists" given that they are preparing for the collapse in order to minimize post-collapse consequences. I would say that most upper-middle-class+ educated westerners fit into the "partial denier" archetype, yes. It's in human nature to deny something bad is happening until its too late, and sometimes even then (see, eg. global warming, COVID-19, etc).

CorruptedArc 5y ago

This misses whole primary subsets of ideologies and doomers, glosses most Libertarian groups which are probably the most paranoid about such events. Seeming to focus too hard at the near non-existant extremes like EcoFash & EcoCommies and really never adjusts back towards a realistic middle which comes in any crisis.

vharuck 5y ago

I wish the article provided links or references for each major philosophy. I've avoided diving down this rabbit hole for a while because I'm already afraid I'm slipping at its edge. But it'd be nice to read books or essays explaining the positions.

wilburTheDog 5y ago

I think, no matter how hard you try, you can't produce something like this without it being biased toward your own opinions on the topic. And those of us with different opinions would phrase things differently. I suppose I would fit in his Pessimist/Defeatist category, though I wouldn't call it that. (And I guess deniers wouldn't call themselves deniers either.) I would probably refer to my own take on collapse as depressive realism rooted in observations of climate change. As one observation, take the latest IPCC report. U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres described the latest IPCC report as "a code red for humanity." "The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk," Guterres said. [1] The more you look the worse it gets. We aren't going to be able to reduce atmospheric CO2 without some sort of drastic uncomfortable change. The lockdowns during the pandemic reduced emissions by about 17% at one point. But despite that, CO2 in the atmosphere continued to increase. Whatever we do has to be more drastic than the pandemic lockdowns, and permanent, or it will keep getting worse. I just don't see people being willing to go along with that, especially those of us in comfortable Western societies. I don't know, is that pessimism, defeatism, or realism? [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/09/ipcc-report-un-climate-report-delivers-starkest-warning-yet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/09/ipcc-report-un-climate-repor...

FooHentai 5y ago
All good points. Another clear lesson from the pandemic: Achieving optimum outcomes is severely bounded by practical political realities - Consider if every single country had hard locked down, everywhere, for 6+ weeks. Perhaps complete elimination could have been achieved. But politically, impossible. That equally applies to climate change as a similar tragedy of the commons played out on a longer timescale. So there are some learnings to be applied if you're looking, as I think many people now are, to identify how things might play out and then make your own life choices accordingly. Something I'm increasingly certain of is that the future will be boring. By which I mean trends are likely correct but will play out over longer timescales than expected. Visions of sudden collapse and apocalypse are mostly anxiety-fuelled inventions of the mind aimed at spurring action in the present day. Reality is more like economic stagnation, decreasing freedoms, and continual smaller crises that gradually bring us to the predicted future state. Nothing that can be ridden out in a bunker with a few years supply of oats.

narrator 5y ago

One should really read "Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joe A. Tainter. He's an archeologist who has a very timeless view of collapse based on diminishing marginal returns on societal complexity. A lot of the collapse theories that get a lot of ink are written from the conclusion backwards. As in here's my plan for the total restructuring of society and a long justification with cherrypicked examples for why everyone needs to get on board or we're going to be in Road Warrior territory next year. Collapse is a very subtle process that needs to be understood as a set of dynamic interacting forces not a dialectical materialism like process that proceeds inevitably from an invented mythology of historical forces.

jdkee 5y ago
Relevant as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-his...

NoGravitas 5y ago

The best we can hope for is something like Kim Stanley Robinson's new book "The Ministry For the Future". A hodgepodge of technocratic reforms against a background of anthropogenic natural disasters eventually produces a solarpunk degrowth world that's post-capitalist without an an abrupt anti-capitalist revolution. Capitalist powers-that-be go along with it because it's being led by the central banks, and at every step the most profitable option is to go along with it. I don't think we'll get that, though; I expect something more like William Gibson's "Jackpot" (from "The Peripheral" and "Agency"). There's no single collapse, just ongoing failures to solve coordination problems from hundreds of climate-change-spawned disasters, shortages, wars, pandemics, crises, and a century-long excess death toll around 6 billion. When the global kleptocrats pick up the pieces, it ultimately shakes out to cyberpunk ecofascism. The political question of the early 21st century is what can we salvage? And are we able to work together to do so? The tea leaves aren't looking good.

csbartus 5y ago

Just to put in context, Collapse is one of the three possible post-crisis trajectories, beside Recovery and Continuing Instability; and it must be triggered first by a Revolutionary Situation. Before worrying about a collapse, we should check if we are in a revolutionary situation. And perhaps we are not yet there. https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019.pdf https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019....

closeparen 5y ago

It seems surprising that so many collapse ideologies are focused on local production and self reliance. I would naively read environmental trends as tending to require more interdependence: we’re going to have significant population centers with no arable land and no fresh water. Maybe they’ll find ways to cooperate and trade for what they need. Maybe they’ll migrate en masse to better resourced areas. Maybe they’ll resort to war and plunder. But at any rate there is going to be an interaction.

monkeycantype 5y ago

I grew up on a farm, my dad was a remote developer when that meant tapes in the mail and a mainframe in the shed. When my naivety and I emerged from this insulated cocoon into the the mess of the world, I couldn’t believe that something as reckless and corrupted and chaotic as our civilization could possibly continue beyond a year or two. Because our genius exists at the individual level, we are horribly unsophisticated in our collective behaviour, and terrible at even comprehending our collective behaviour. I think /r/collapse may not be factually rigorous, but accurately represents sublime horror of individuals being shattered by staring into the incomprehensible abyss of of mass human activity

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Ha! That was a good writeup. While I am an optimistic person here is one scenario from the article that I think is possible: “”” Cyberpunk/Sci-fi: The social and ecological collapse is not accompanied by a reduction in material well-being or technological competence, but by a disproportionate growth of the gap between social classes. Often a collapse of the established order is not followed by a chaotic and violent conflict, but by corporations that replace the state and implement dystopian societies. Examples: Autonomous, The Peripheral, Elysium. “”” Humans are very adaptable and scenarios that sound awful to present day people, might be tolerable once they manifest.