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A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

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Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#101

Post by [deleted] »

paraph1n wrote: post #75
Manuel_D wrote: post #69

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 month…

Not sure if you read the article, but both you and the redditor you are describing fit archetypes explicitly called out by the author.

[deleted]

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#102

Post by majormajor »

cratermoon wrote: post #80
majormajor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be my guest, if you can find month-by-month shooting and/or homicide numbers for NYC/Chicago/LA/other cities that have seen big 2019->2021 homicide spikes. I spent a few minutes trying, but this one the only one I could find nicely broken down. The coarse yearly numbers tell us these crimes have increased, they don't let us see how they play out with regard to the different things that changed in 2020.

looking at just 2019-2021 is cherry picking. Look back to the 70s and 80s if you really want to see that our current "crime wave" is nothing more than a made-up crisis for pushing a law-and-order agenda.

Looking at a potential inflection point where a trend reversed, to try to understand it (blip? new trend? change caused by change in underlying conditions?) is not cherry-picking. It's being responsible.

"It was worse in the 70s" is "the climate is always changing"-level deflection.

"It was worse in the 70s" is not a compelling argument for a political platform - having nothing meaningful to say in response to new events is exactly what would help "tough on crime" un-nuanced crackdown politicians elected.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#103

Post by derbOac »

Manuel_D wrote: post #74
skillpass wrote: post #66

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…

I think the allure is escapism: life is boring and unfulfilling for many people, so they are attracted to the notion that some spectacular event is going to suddenly upend their lives and make life more interesting. One of the other patterns I see is justification of apathy. People rationalize lack of desire to work or apply themselves with the justification that the world is going to end relatively soon, so why both…

I agree it's probably escapism, maybe due to life being unfulfilling, but I'm not sure boredom is driving it. I suspect a lot of people of different political inclinations are deeply dissatisfied, and feel helpless. So they turn to collapse theories of different sorts.

I really wish there was a good way of tracking actual sentiment about collapse, and indicators of societal upheaval, to better understand how things really are, or what people really feel in general. There's many such things but they're all imperfect and point in different directions for different groups. Maybe this says something about the complexity of society -- if we could predict collapse, we'd probably be able to avoid it -- but it seems like it deserves more attention. I feel like it's a topic of increasing salience, but I'm not sure I have much to base that on other than people say it is. It is a pandemic, so there's that, but there's been similar things in my lifetime that didn't lead to quite so much collapse narrative.

Maybe things were so good or stable-seeming before that returning to some kind of historical norm with regard to instability factors is bringing things back to a baseline with collapse narrative? End-of-world beliefs are a classic thing; maybe they just disappeared (relatively speaking) for awhile.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#104

Post by evil-olive »

CalRobert wrote: post #10

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-307... Dark Mountain, a twice-yearly collection of short stories and poetry on themes of collapse and ecocide. https://dark-mountain.net/

It Could Happen Here recently restarted as a daily podcast, after its limited run a few years ago. it's been fascinating listening.

Evans has been careful to avoid Doomerism and focus on some of the potential for hope and resiliency, such as in local mutual aid networks.

he's also been using "the crumbles" rather than "collapse", which is a terminology shift I like a lot. "collapse" seems to suggest a singular event, whereas what we are more likely to see (and are currently already experiencing, I think) is a more gradual crumbling of societal institutions.

to paraphrase William Gibson - the collapse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#105

Post by narrator »

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.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#106

Post by ben_w »

chobeat wrote: post #70
skillpass wrote: post #66

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…

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).

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.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#107

Post by NoGravitas »

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.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#108

Post by sk2020 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #91
Manuel_D wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only real instance of a widespread collapse of civilization was the Late Bronze Age collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse This entailed most urban centers in the Eastern mediterranean (besides Egypt and Mesopotamia) being violently destroyed, and writing completely disappearing in large regions. And all this happening over the course of maybe 50-100 years. Arguments can be made…

What about the sudden abandonment of cities in Mesoamerica at different periods?

Detroit? It’s still here; just a bit dusty.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#109

Post by NationalPark »

kbelder wrote: post #82
NationalPark wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the science understands that we need to cut emissions on a wide scale, and that air travel by a few hundred politicians is a meaninglessly small fraction of the actual problem. This is essentially a bad faith attack on the few people in congress trying to do something about climate change. Where is your ire for the dozens of Republican congressmen who don't believe climate change is…

How about your and mine air travel? Meaninglessly small fraction of the actual problem?

Indeed, commercial aviation is only something like 3% of overall carbon dioxide emissions globally. If you want to make a personal difference you would be an order of magnitude more effective if you stop commuting in a non-electric car or gave up consuming meat when dining in restaurants. Expecting individual action to fix this (or worse, blaming individual actions for it) isn't going to work though. Individual consumption is not the majority source of emissions, and it's a bit of a classic prisoners dilemma problem anyway, and we know how much Americans trust each other these days.

Re: A Compass for the Politics of Collapse

#110

Post by ivraatiems »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #38
ivraatiems wrote: post #23

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 chall…

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.

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.
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