How To Do It


 


Anybody Remember The Long Boom ?
Yes, Virginia, there was a time when I subscribed to Wired. Charter subscriber; was led there from the CoEvoluion Quarterly because of Kevin Kelly. I liked the idea of a magazine devoted to all the technophile cutting edge stuff from a comprehensive perspective. And while there was real journalism within and often interviews with really interesting people, I gradually (not quickly) got tired of their fawning interviews with executives, their assumption that "if it (or he or she) is online, it (or he or she) is hip"--and their flaccid techno-hip optimism. I let the subscription lapse--but (just to show how cool I am) I take their RSS feed.
I read The Long Boom when it was published back in 1997, and even then, it reminded me of the Monty Python sketch "How To Do It "--a show for kids whose instructions include 2. Get Everything Right and 3. Don't Make Any Mistakes. Even with me, Mr. Optimism, and even in those heady times of the Goldilocks economy ('just right') it sounded unbelievably fatuous. And now, well...there are any number of 'boom' jokes that are too easy to use.
But, after six years in the stinking desert, watching the Forces Of Reaction grunting and farting to move us back to the Age of McKinley--can we Do It? Can we fix things? What sort of future can we make, with what we've got? Can we do it, even if we don't get everything right?
Mr. Optimism thinks we can. Not quickly, and not painlessly, but I think we can.

Now be aware that, at the core, I'm a technophiile and that, I also don't believe that the corporate world has to be demolished in order to get anywhere--not completely or systematically, anyway. Both of these things take a long time to argue, and I promise to apologize, in the old sense, later. But be aware that by 'technology' i mean solar ovens and hand-cranked radios as well as hypersonic jets and moonbases. John W. Campbell marked my soul--but so did Stewart Brand.
Economically, I don't think there's a better way of putting it than the Big Dog: there's nothing wrong with America than what's right with America can't cure. We have a population that's intelligent, flexible, educated, and not risk-averse. We have gobs of resources. And we've got adaptation built into our culture.
There are a few things that need to be done--outside of hanging Rush Limbaugh from a sour apple tree (his truth is marching on!).
In general, we have to re-establish a country where middle class people find it relatively easy to live: where hard work, intelligence and willingness to take some risk--minus genius or a rich family--will make one able to afford food, clothing, housing, education and health care. Especially with respect to the last, we have moved radically way from that base. A nation where a birth can bankrupt a middle-class family is not set up for change or growth.
It's the breadboard model--or the software development environment. The easier it is to make connections, to add functionality, the more productive the process. The Interstate Highway System was a big breadboard improvement--and the Internet is another. But it is offset by the increase in the nightmarish difficulties of our health care. (Don't think that outsourcing isn't made more attractive by it, either.)
A prosperous middle class and a less fearful middle class is more open to change, for example, brought on by technology and the changes we've wrought on the environment.

Can we deal with the consequences of global warming? It'll get harder the longer we delay, so, not necessarily. But our use of energy can be changed by two processes: improved technologies and increased appropriateness.
By appropriateness I mean the principle of only moving what has to be moved, only shifting what has to be shifted. If only information needs to move, only move the information. If only ten pounds of groceries needs to move, don't use 6,000 pounds of steel to move it. If kids need to move, let them move themselves. Increased use of systematic intelligence can help enormously: for example, the idea of making food stores more intelligent: you go online, and the supermarket tells you its upcoming specials, together with its regular prices, and you indicate how much you want. You're notified of when they come in. Even without an obligation to buy, the amount of excess capacity a store would have to carry would be vastly reduced, and the profit margins go up even as energy use goes down.
Ultimately, an optimal transit system could evolve: a system of trams, small buses, and cabs. With enough intelligence built into the system, you put in a request, and the system can send a cab to take you door to door--or to a tram terminus (with no waiting!) and another cab for less money. Assuming universal access to the control system, the luxury of door-to-door could easily be funded (both financially and energy-wise) by the elimination of running regular bus lines and cruising cabs and a reduction in private cars.
In general, as the information economy matches supply and demand better, our economy becomes less wasteful--even without Americans giving up their deep-fried hamburgers.
Now these efficiencies don't get implemented without corporate dislocations. Large corporations (despite their 'thriving on chaos' bushwash) and the rich who own them are not agents of change--if a change impairs, let alone dismantles, a profit center, they will fight it and never mind fairly. It would be nice if everyone buckled down and changed their lives to be more efficient--but being a dirty commie hippie, I would rather see corporate structures crumble and be replaced than see families ruined, uprooted or torn apart by those same forces. Corporations die like candle flames, while people bleed.

We've got a lot to fix: We've got terrorists to catch, relationships to heal, wars to stop and a hell of a lot to apologize for. We've got a deficit to close, a middle class to patch up, and a bunch of corporate criminals to ride out of town on a maglev. We've got New Orleans to rebuild, windmills to erect, and giants to slay.

And what might we get at the end? In general, if we 2. Get Everything Right (or enough) we might achieve a society in which people can get what they actually want--and find that it's not that huge a thing, or as wasteful. Because people don't want cars, they want mobility; they don't want stuff, they want unimpeded access to stuff; they don't want wealth, they want freedom. And they want home. And Americans, when offered it, might find that what they really want is not much different from what a Mexican wants, or a Chinese wants--or an Arab. Each under his (or her) own olive tree.

I had a vision, driving through rural Illinois, of a twenty-second century world, if we make it. It's quite as sappy as any Long Boom, so beware.

:..of homes, spaced out over plains, through the forests, and in the mountains--with small plots of engineered plants to grow food as well as pharmaceuticals--connected with the rest of the world and with all of history by a powerful network that brings everybody next door to everybody else, and makes all the right people famous for as long as they want. Where you just have to ask, and beautiful Daimler touring car or Duesenberg will show up at the front gate, and you can take the family along the beautiful moss-covered roads to a picnic spot by the river a hundred miles away, or be picked up by a passing zeppelin to go to a port city, to take a giant ocean liner with forests of intelligent sails across the Atlantic or to Hawaii in one long party--

--and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

(--and all the autumn leaves fall into neat little piles.)

Next: how to play the flute.

Posted: Monday - March 19, 2007 at 08:17 PM        

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