Dear Eceni

Dear Eceni

Dear Eceni

I was listening to your podcast this morning, about how to build the future; and I had to stop listening, and start to write.

Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises.

All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

I will take the Ring to Mordor, although I do not know the way.

We should not fear that we do not know the way.

We don't, and can't, know how to get from here to there. We can't, because we don't know where 'there' is, and, indeed, as you point out, 'there' is not a fixed point, but is itself a point on a journey: a journey that we will not live to complete, a journey which must be steered onwards by those who come after us. The dead should not seek to constrain the living: we should not try to control what our children do with our legacy. But we should give them the values and the tools which will enable them to make good choices; and we must make the first step in the right direction, having first assembled the resources that we — and they — will need.

That is the task that is given to us. It is a manageable task.

Promises, promises

You frequently talk about money; much of today's podcast was about things to do with money. And, indeed, money is at the root of this. But I think you have very wrong ideas about money, ideas that will not help you or us. So let me start by talking about money.

Money is, essentially, a claim on the future. Having money, we believe, will allow us to exchange that money, in the future, for some as yet unchosen good or service.

One of the tricks that the makers of money have played in the past, and which we are all aware of, and yet which we are poor at perceiving in our own time, is that they have, again and again, debased money. De-based. Removed the basis for.

The Bank of England

kept gold in its vaults to pay off the value of the banknotes that it issued. It printed on those banknotes a solemn promise:

I promise to pay the bearer, on demand, the sum of one pound

But it printed more notes than it held gold to cover: those notes became essentially fraudulent, junk bonds, promises without basis. Promises which could not be met. In September 1931, the bank was forced to admit this, and to 'suspend' the gold standard. To declare publicly that it could no longer redeem its own notes. That is was bankrupt, in the full technical meaning of that term.

And we all know that; and yet, the issuers of money continue to issue more, without basis. And so much more has now been issued — against the collateral of, for example, fossil fuel reserves which the world cannot afford to pump and burn, or, for another example, against the promise of a future artificially intelligent entity which even its proponents have not idea how to build, except for some hand-waving about it somehow appearing as an emergent property of ever bigger and greedier statistical text generation engines — that all the useful goods that can ever be made using all the energy and materials that the planet can ever afford to yield up will not redeem it.

All money is now junk bonds. All money is now stranded assets. All money is now empty promises. All money is now snake oil.

But it is worse than that: as I have argued before

Money is fossilised unkindness, idolised meanness, the very stuff of misery in both senses of that word... Money grows in society by the process of eroding generosity.

Money is, then, a necrotising parasite on social relationships, systematically sucking out transactions of kindness and generosity from the economy and replacing them with a winner-takes-all, zero sum game of competitive meanness.

In your own language, money is the giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.

I believe that we shall have to, if we are to build a world that we would be proud to leave to the generations that will come after us, abandon money. To move from a market economy to a gift economy. To move from competitive transactions of meanness to open-hearted transactions of generosity.

Fortunately, I believe we shall have no choice.

Seven ways economy go bang

Nate Hagens, whom I know you also listen to, spoke this week of seven ways growth ends. My own conclusion from listening to that talk was that, whichever of those outcomes occurs, one thing is certain: the financial markets will collapse utterly. No government can bail out a debt overshoot on this scale; no one will believe they have anything to back the promises they would need to make, because, quite frankly, that much value cannot exist on this planet — at least while it still has living sentient beings on it.

So that crash is going to happen.

When it happens, there will be no money to pay for ships to transport oil, or food, or mineral ores, from distant places. There will be no money to pay the crews who work on those ships. There will be no money to buy the food for the crews who work on those ships. Those ships won't move.

Which means there will be no diesel for the tractors which till the fields and scatter the good seed on the ground; there will be no diesel for the combine harvesters which gather in the crop; there will be no diesel for the trucks which take the crop to the mills and thus to the bakeries; there will be no gas to bake the bread. And, in the slightly longer term, there will be no rubber to replace the tyres on the electric cars of the smug.

Large, complex societies cannot survive that crash — at least not as large, complex societies.

The durables

Somethings won't automatically fail. The electricity grid needs people to manage it and people to maintain it. Those people exist, and have the skills. If their local communities can support them, they can continue to run the grid. Everyone benefits from the grid staying up, so unless there's a complete breakdown of social order, people will probably support electricity workers. So provided the grid stays up through the immediate chaos, it will probably stay up. But if it doesn't, bringing it back up might well be very problematic.

I don't really understand the engineering and economic arguments about whether a single very large grid is better than many smaller grids, beyond the points that with a very large grid, electrical generators can support users who are geographically far away; and that a grid with many generators is resilient to the failure of some of them

A lot of our renewable generation capacity is largely automatic; it still needs maintenance, but not frequently; it there's a hiatus of a few months after the crash in which not much maintenance gets done, most of it will not fail. Hydro power stations mostly do need people to operate them, but they're mostly in remote rural areas which generally have good social cohesion and a high ratio of resources to population, so the power station staff, too, can probably be supported by their local communities.

But overall, there's a good chance that quite a lot of things which are wholly electrically powered will not automatically fail. There's a fair chance telecommunications networks will stay up, at least in most places, provided the people who know how to manage and maintain them can continue to be fed.

In the medium term, supplies of spare parts will run short. Making and stocking and distributing hundreds of thousands of different standardised replaceable parts for thousands of different types of machine is something that a large complex societies are astonishingly good at, which small fragmented communities may not manage nearly so well.

It's probable that we will, over time, be able to create a distributed child of the Internet, on which we will be able to share the specifications of parts, in order that those parts can be fabricated locally; in locations where people still have the tools, and the skills, and the materials, to fabricate parts. I wouldn't expect that to appear quickly.

Powering large data centres, maintaining high speed world spanning networks, are things which will be exceedingly hard to do immediately post crash. An awful lot of things which we are accustomed to having on our modern Internet will become impossible to reach, and it's quite likely that a lot of it will be lost permanently.

A local backup of Wikipedia would become an exceedingly valuable resource!

Be more pyrophile

Pyrophiles are plants which depend on fire for the germination of their seed. We must learn to be pyrophiles.

Large complex societies cannot survive the coming crash, but small, socially cohesive societies, affectively bonded, with strong resource bases, very much can. That isn't to say that all such societies will: in a major crisis there will be a lot of turbulence, and we have seen from history that ruthless individuals can use crises as an opportunity to gain very considerable power through terror and repression. We must conceive our nascent small societies as lifeboats, offering a chance of survival, rather than as certain promises.

But if they are to survive, they must be

1. Socially cohesive;
2. Affectively bonded;
3. Well resourced.

We can — and I believe we must — start building those lifeboats now.

The lifeboats must not be all built to the same design, because if there is a flaw in that design all will fail. Rather, they should be heterogenous. My preferred model is of the anarchist commune, but I have little enough chance of persuading even my own village of the merits of that, and we must all be flexible and prepared to compromise and cooperate with our neighbours to build something that works for our community.

Come together

But, every lifeboat must be socially cohesive, because every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand. Factionalism and favouritism are both holes in the hull through which the dark will pour in.

[TODO]

Make love, not war

Every lifeboat must be affectively bonded. Not everyone can be friends with everyone, of course. But everyone in each lifeboat must be loved by other people within that lifeboat who in turn are loved by others, so that there is a mesh of affection and loyalty that binds everyone and will not let anyone be thrown over the side to lighten the load. 'Love one another' has to be one of the first of our slogans.

[TODO]

Dig for victory

Every lifeboat has to be able to grow sufficient, varied, nutritious food to feed its people, in good seasons and in bad; and to store that food between the time of harvest and the time of hunger. It must have sufficient sources of clean drinking water. It must have a sufficiency of tools — tools which can work with the energy resources that lifeboat can itself generate, and be maintained and repaired with skills and materials that that lifeboat has or can produce. It must have a sufficiency of housing for shelter and of clothing for warmth, and the sources of materials to build more shelter and make more clothing as they are needed.

Lots of communities in Scotland — or England or Wales or Lithuania or Palestine or wherever else you live — do or could have such resources. Few have all of them in a form which can easily be managed locally, can quickly be reconfigured locally to meet local needs. Almost all of them have resources in a form which are designed to service distant markets mediated by money. And when the crash comes, those distant markets won't exist.

So one of the things we each must do in our own localities is to audit our local economies, see what resources we have, and start thinking about how to build those resources we lack. For those resources we have, we must start talking to those who manage them locally about how they could be reconfigured for local use in an emergency. Yes, initially, some of those people will laugh at us. Some will refuse to cooperate. But start the conversation, and, if possible, keep it open.

Wherever you are, you are going to need timber: a surprising amount of it. Today we build houses of concrete, brick, stone and steel; vehicles and machines mostly of metals and plastics. All of those materials are very energy-expensive, and, post crash, most communities will be energy poor. Timber will be your main material for building (and repairing) homes, vehicles, and other structures, almost everywhere. Yes, in very arid areas you can use unfired mud bricks, and cob and straw bale can be used where they can be protected from rain penetration, but you are going to want a sustainable supply of timber. If you don't have woodlands locally, plant some.

Many of the monocultures of modern agriculture produce food which is very nutritious, but which does not, by itself, constitute a balanced diet. If your area grows only wheat, or only potatoes, or only (if you're lucky) only fruit, you should be seeking to persuade land managers to diversify their production.

Many of our clothes, these days, are made of synthetic fibre, mostly produced from fossil hydrocarbon; which we will not have post-crash. Even those that aren't are mainly cotton, which won't grow in cool climates. Scotland used to grow a fibre crop, flax, from which linen was spun, and stinging nettles, too, can be processed to produce a high quality clothing fibre; but the processing is labour intensive. Sheep produce wool, although the sheep currently farmed in Britain do not produce very good wool, and I'm not sure that farming sheep for fibre is good use of land.

Clothes wear out, and modern mass produced clothes are mostly not designed for durability and hard wear. Your lifeboat will need a lot of fibre. You need to be thinking, now, about how your locality will produce it. To produce it, you will need not only the raw fibre, but the knowledge of how to process it, to spin it, to weave it, to tailor and sew it.

We are all — everyone of us — going to get very good at

The King is dead, long live the King

If you're reading this essay, you almost certainly don't think modern, western neoliberal capitalism is an ideal way to run a society, much less a planet. When it has — as it inevitably must — destroyed itself, and assuming there are enough of us left to build a new society, it is probably not the form of society we would want to rebuild. But should we seek to build a single overarching social structure at all?

Lifeboats must initially be autonomous. To implement a single point of control is to implement a single point of failure, and, as an possible mode of such failure, a single point for malign forces to seek to capture. So central control — 'the nation state' — even it it were possible, would not be desirable. Co-operation on a local scale is inevitable and desirable; co-ordination on a wider scale is likely to emerge organically over time. But I see the inability of 'the centre' to impose, for example, a 'nationalised health system', on all lifeboats as a strength, not a weakness.

Lifeboats are likely to copy successful features from their neighbours. But the people of an individual lifeboat know best what the needs of their community are.