Have you ever heard of the Club of Rome? World3? Well this group commissioned a report which became “The Limits to Growth”, a book about the unsustainability of our world’s growth-at-all costs model. Suffice it to say the BAU model is currently holding (Business as usual) and even updates this decade have reinforced the trajected projection of doom with a stall in growth between 2030 and 2040. The stall is followed by a cascading, precipitous fall.
Our success as a civillization is inextricably the same as our success in agriculture. A couple years ago, when I saw large agricultural drones used it inspired hope in me, I wanted to use my drone license to do something cool like that, maybe be an entrepreneur. Now as I see the technology actually appear in my life, a trailer loaded with drones, generators and fertilizer or pesticides passing me as I walk through my town I feel apprehension. When I’m watching Ryan Hall forecast during a local storm outbreak and he shares a video of a local storm being shot by a pilot who was monitoring a spray, drone in the frame, all I see is doom.
Our agricultural success is deeply tied to our bleeding-edge technology. RTK GPS is the backbone of farming now. If our orbit isn’t closely managed estimates project we’ll reach unfixable Kessler syndrome in about 2.8 days. I can imagine a solar storm putting us there in less time.
I’ve been telling people that it bothers me that we all have these extremely specialized careers, none of us with the skills to replace each other if it was necesarry, and still not recognizing the importance of socialization. I want people to make an active effort to make friends and keep our social lives going. I feel like nobody puts in the effort I do, and I’m just barely trying. I only recently started, but just picking 1 friend or family member to message each day has me realizing how many people won’t message back. I guess they’re too busy scrolling.
But what really bothers me is that this interdependence and specialization is a result of productivity driven by technology, the same technology that drives us apart with polarizing, echo-chambering “feed algorithms”. We need better negative framing for these things. We should be calling them “attention traps” or “antagonization bait generators” because that’s how they function and more representative of how they exist.
Technology for technology’s sake. We’re at the end of it now, with the very last people at the far reaches of the earth having access to the internet through smartphones. LLMs, “AI” was the last great hope and it’s not panning out. I only heard about “loops” a couple weeks ago and my feed is already filling up with people telling me that I’ve misunderstood the concept and it’s actually this or that or the other. I haven’t bothered trying to keep up. I know from experience that these tools can be useful, but when they’re applied beyond their usefulness they destroy not only productivity, but they take the fun out of jobs and they increase misery. They destroy the will for people to live. And it feels like the rhetoric is only getting more and more polarized every day, even from proponents turned sudden skeptics with the prospect of IPOs and subsidized subscriptions ending.
So I’m getting back into ham radio. Point to point communication is very important, we’re far too reliant on centralized systems outside of our control.
I’m volunteering with the local fire department and search and rescue teams. I’ll be in touch with people who are robustly capable of handlign crises and I’ll be learning how to handle those crises as part of those teams.
I’m going back to school for medicine. I’m in the middle of online Anatomy & Physiology 1, enrolled in A&P 2 and EMT courses starting in August. I’ll be a highly valuable resource to my community when our systems begin to collapse, hopefully someone worth feeding.
And Hannah started a garden. We’re learning how to grow our own food. Obviously an important skill if crops are going to fail with tractors unable to be fixed when every John Deere is out of business in 2050 or so.
I wish I didn’t see the end of history coming for us. I wish this hadn’t happened to me or anyone I know.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”