The Dark Mountain Blog
The Barcode Moment, part 2
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
3rd May, 2012
You are currently interacting with a machine. On the other side of another machine, miles away from you, connected by wires and satellite signals in a way that, probably, neither of us understands or can control, is me, currently sitting on my bed in my dressing gown, typing these words into a laptop computer which, in a few short years, will seem primitive and old fashioned. As I write these words, and you read them, we are both playing our part in the rolling ecocide which is currently enfolding the Earth. The thought is a depressing one, but it is also a slightly unreal one. Most of us can’t see any ‘ecocide’ going on; we hear of it, ‘know’ of it, see it as an abstraction, real but unexperienced. And so we go on, enjoying what these machines bring us even as we worry, sometimes, about where they might be taking us or what is at the other end of the wires.
You have probably never met me, and I have no idea who you are. We think we are ‘interacting’ with each other, but we are not. I am interacting with a machine, and you are doing the same. You can read my words, and if you like you can respond to them with your own words, but – as Dougald pointed out here some time ago - this is far from being a genuine human interaction. We are not responding to each others’ body language, or smiles or frowns. There is no chit-chat, no animal relationship at work, no drawing on the ancient intuitions of our species which allow us to converse person-to-person, with all that this entails. There is just a monologue, cast in pixels. We may stimulate each others’ brains, as we sit hunched over these glowing machines, but the rest of us sits inert, gazing in on an abstraction.
How quickly did we get used to this? For most of my life, it has not been possible. I remember when I was at school, in the sixth form, and one of my upwardly-mobile mates got himself an early mobile phone, the size of a brick, and everyone laughed at him for being a wannabe yuppie. Twenty years on, many people seem unable to live without virtual mobile communications, which have changed our relationship with each other and our environments in short order. Downloading the web into your head via your Google Goggles might seem absurd or frightening now but soon, very soon, it will seem workaday.
Have a look at this fascinating report, from last week’s Observer, from the new ‘Singularity University’ in California, set up and bankrolled by the Silicon Valley dweebs I talked about in my last post. Absurd, some of it, and terrifying – especially the future of warfare, which is where much of this comes from. And look at what drives it – that old, Western terror of ego-death. Look, too, at that vision of the future stripped of anything but humanity: our raging ape-narcissim projected onto the world through our robotic and computerised alter egos.
And yet this – the self-driving cars, the search for immortality, the meteor-mining, the silly space fantasies, the silicon transcendence that all of it represents – this is where we’re going, and though we are going there frighteningly fast, we are doing so in stages, each of which we seem to absorb and welcome with no worries. Cars that drive themselves? Bring it on! Don’t ask questions – questions are for Luddites! Each stage causes a tremor but not a full earthquake. At the end of the process, if there ever is one, you are no longer human and Earth is no longer Earth. We – a species that has lived through abstractions sicne we first drew pictures on the walls of caves – will have reached the inevitable endpoint of this process of living internally rather than extrenally: we will have remade the world in our own image. But there may never be, for most of us, a barcode moment; there may never be a line-crossing, doubt-quashing step that makes everything clear. Instead, there will be a climb down an endless series of small but manageable steps into another world.
As the great Bruce Springsteen once put it, ‘you get used to anything / sooner or later it just becomes your life.’ This, I think, is what is walking us rapidly towards that Singularity. We are a hugely adaptable species and also, paradoxically, a conservative one. If you grow up in Bladerunner world, Bladerunner world seems to be Just The Way Things Are.
Luckily, I didn’t grow up in Bladerunner world. I grew up in Middlesex; or rather, that part of greater London which was once Middlesex. My Middlesex was an endless suburb. The local park and the drain under the tube line we played in, the always-closed cricket pavilion, the junior school with the asphalt playground and the blackberries in the hedges. The old toyshop on the bridge, the garages behind the council estate, the thin strips of back garden, the fake-beamed Ind Coope pub from which emanated the exciting and glamorous smell of stale bitter. This was the Middlesex of my childhood. These are my blue remembered hills.
But there was once another Middlesex, one that I am much too young to have seen. This place had been, before the arrival of the Romans, a great forest of oak, elm and beech, inhabited by elk, wolf and deer. Later, the home of the Middle-Saxons became the second-smallest county in England, a retreat for merchants from the noise and grime of London. It developed into an agricultural ‘home county’ with a distinct character – small, hidden, human-scale – which made its loss the harder to take for those who knew it. These days, Middlesex barely exists. It has all been swallowed up by London, and even those who live there don’t use the county’s name anymore. There is only a memory where a place used to be.
I discovered John Betjeman, the chronicler of the death of Middlesex, in my early twenties. I discovered old-fashioned poems about places I knew – Harrow, Greenford, Rayner’s Lane, Ruislip – in guises that meant nothing to me. It was like seeing a picture of your mother at 18, young and free and with no idea you will ever be born. Here was a county of whispering pines, enormous hayfields, elm trees, meadowlands, low, laburnum leaned-on railings. The evocation of its loss was strong and clean and managed to raise a nostalgia in me for something I had never been part of.
For it wasn’t the world I knew. I knew pavements and park railings and cul-de-sacs and council estates and concrete street lamps and white dog shit and the remains of old air raid sirens. Compared to its past richness, my Middlesex was a drab monoculture. It was, in Betjeman’s words, ‘silent under soot and stone’. But I liked it, because it was where I came from.
And I wonder now whether we could Middlesex the whole world. I wonder if we could replace the rainforests with plantations, fish out the seas until only a couple of commercial species are left, carpet the moors in turbines and dam all the rivers and build endless suburbs over what remains of the haymeadows which are now used to grow maize for silage. I wonder if we could busy ourselves with our microchips and machines, turning the world into a planetary farm to support our digital appetites and sinking deeper into our machine narcissism as we do. I wonder if we could deplete the diversity and richness of this wild world by eighty or ninety percent – and within a few generations see it all forgotten, even by those who noticed its going. I wonder if, raised in this culture, with all the new toys to play with, wearing our Google Goggles, sitting in our self-driving cars, we would even notice, or care?
Our current plunge into ecological overshoot could lead to global economic collapse. Our pushing up against ecological limits could lead to the unplanned scaling-back of the human machine. It could push Gaia into what James Lovelock calls ‘ a fever’, in which all bets are off, the planet’s ecosystems shift wildly into new states and it’s game over for human hubris, if not for humanity itself. That’s the fear – or the hope, depending on your point of view.
But what if the fear is wrong? What if we somehow manage to get ourselves out of this fix? What if the Silicon Valley cornutopians are right, and technology or ingenuity or blind luck save us? Or what if Earth reacts differently: what if it can, after all, tolerate the elimination of 80% of terrestrial life? What if a planet of rats, cockroaches, pigeons, GM crops, synthetic livestock and post-human immortals is possible after all?
In other words, what if all our talk of ‘collapse’ is a narrative designed to quell a worse fear: that things might not collapse, but continue like this? That the Earth’s final wild frontiers may be tamed and diluted, ravaged and destroyed, and that we would not care much because we were too busy following the logic of our narrative to its endpoint, becoming our machines – our little creations, made in our own image, sent out to rule the world with our culture’s poison in their silicon veins.
In the next and final post in this series I’m going to try and address this stuff at a far more local, human level. If this rush towards the virtual can’t be escaped from – if nothing will rescue us but collapse – what might be the best way to live through it, on a practical, day-to-day level? All thoughts on that question are very welcome.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 3 May, 12
Comments: 15 comments - Read them and respond
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Paul,
Hmm, not sure about this post. It seems to miss the point that human activity (per capita) is creating, year on year, a larger and larger footprint(be that farmed land to supply our food or the extraction of potable water for both human consumption and industry as just two examples).
The technologists would have you believe that this technology you talk about makes our lives so much more efficient….but it is doesn’t. The mbodied energy required to provide all of the services, that we as humans, require each year is increasing exponentially not even at a steady (still unsustainable) rate. Now that’s bad enough with a stable global population. But this too is increasing. And that’s not the worst of it. The hugely increasing rate of urbanisation increases this ‘load’ still further. Then add to that the increasing wealth of this urbanising population in say India, China and Brazil. That’s another ‘load’ on the planet.
If we were seeing technologies being developed which together were reducing the net energy used per capita or the ecological footprint reduce per capita, year on year, then I may agree with your fear that humanity somehow morphs into the slightly worrying fellow you had your debate with.
Yor essay also addresses the issues solely from a UK perspective. Arguably we (in Britain) have been able to ‘benefit’ from the effects of the huge ‘wealth pump’ which has taken(stolen / misappropriated) resources from the rest of the world to our shores. We in the West have led the trashing of the planet by arguably stealing from the East. The madness of our modern economic system means that we assume that the East will be able to grow and ‘develop’ as we in the West have done. But how? They have no West to steal resources from. They may, for a while, take them from Africa. But what happens when the Africans want to do as the Chinese and Indians have done ?
I think it is dangerously wrong to assume that humanity will be able to ‘engineer’ the future you fear. It won’t and it can’t for all of the reasons I have set out above……..but importantly becuase we collectively are not becoming more effiecient in the use of the resources that the planet can provide….even with all of this ‘amazing’ technology.
I’ve said this before but what we are talking about here – this technological indulgence culture – is because we have ‘energy slaves’ and those energy slaves are available to us only because of the one-off endowment of cheap, easily available fossil fuels. Any belief that we can somehow operate, as we do currently, without this extra net energy is at best hubris and at worst insanity.
And these resources have probably already peaked………. A car only stops accelerating when the very last drop of fuel leaves the petrol tank ! And that, I believe is what we are doing.
Andy
I agree Andy, mostly, with what you say. It’s certainly my default position. I find it very unlikely that the cornutopians will end up being right. But it’s worth thinking about what would happen if they were.
I also think it’s worth talking about inequality and uncertainty. One point that Ran Prieur (http://ranprieur.com/ – see 7 April post) makes well is that the coming collapse – which looks like it has already begun – is likely to be uneven. In some parts of the world, there may be enough abundant energy left to push the machine project on, whereas other parts of the globe will be smaller-scale and more human as we currently understand it. Increasingly, I find this quite convincing. It seems likely that collapse is happening and that, of course, we can’t sustain this system globally into the future. But what if some people can sustain some parts of it? What if they will do anything to keep this alive because, to them, it represents hope and progress?
You write “But what if some people can sustain some parts of it? What if they will do anything to keep this alive because, to them, it represents hope and progress?”
I believe many will be (and already are) trying to do exactly that, whatever the cost to other lifeforms, including ‘humanity’.
The following quote came to mind:
“If your experience if that your food comes from the grocery store and that your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because you life depends on it; if your experience is that your water comes from a stream and your food comes from a land base, you will defend to the death that stream and that land base because your life depends on it.”
-Derrick Jensen (from the 2007 movie What A Way To Go – http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/)
Another one, this time from Richard Heinberg, also from What A Way To Go:
“Every one of us is living in this little comfortable bubble that’s completely disconnected from the real world of animals and plants and soil and water, and the natural forces that produces everything that’s of any meaning whatsoever on this planet.”
The questions you pose in this article are difficult ones, and sometimes I wonder if there even are answers to them… Thank you for addressing these issues, eloquently as always!
Hi Paul,
You mention James Lovelock who I suspect has succumbed to dementia as he has now denied his previous prediction of climate chaos. He’s 92 now so what can you expect.
For clear evidence of global warming look no further than Texas in the good ol’ USA. In the desert the ecosystems, arguably the toughest on the planet, are dying due to the severity of the 2011 drought. The weather anomalies are now beginning to occur with greater and greater frequency. Non-linear climate feed-backs are here now…not in some far-off future.
I read a statistic a couple of years ago stating that in 1850 the total weight of humans and their cattle was less than 2% of the total weight of terrestrial vertebrae animals. The number now is greater than 98%.
Any notion that we can continue in that direction without consequence is mad. I would guess that we’ve already exceeded safe operating limits shortly after you were born. Prognosis: Death by a thousand cuts.
Once again, and like rade and Andy also commented on the last post, I think the way through is in the simple and radical action of standing with the light, however you see it, however you can…. Holding what you can, taking the care you can, mending what you can, treasuring what you can…by seeing the beauty and the ugliness, feeling the joy and the despair and by being present. At least bear witness and maybe one day in some unknowable future, your stories of the land that once was will also lodge in someone’s heart and make it sing a little, and remember….
Paul,
Yes, agree entirely. I think we are already in a collapse. It’s very hard to know you are on a slope unless you look either down the slope or up it. I think we’ll look back in ten or twenty years time and be able to see clearly where the collapse started. John Michael Greer also writes very sensibly about what form this collpase might take and also about the ‘unevenness’ you mention. His book ‘The Ecotechnic Future’ is well worth a read. I think his views on what the future might ‘actually’ look like, in the context of his vision of a ‘salvage econmony’ are well worth reading. I think within those thoughts are some pretty clear ideas of how we will in the future have to live and, more importantly, how we will be able to address the issue of what quality of life we might expect. Now seems like an awfully good time to start a lot of experimenting around this !
Andy
In the context of quality of life in a collapsing society, I’d recomend the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris.Certainly they suffered from being the right people at the wrong time; their philosophy being entirely at odds with the huge momentum of the Industrial Revolution. However, for what we are considering at DM, I think their time may have come.
Rosie,
I don’t think Ruskin or Morris could have put it any better.
Andy
Reality knows what she’s doing.
Its the unreal self that hopes and fears.
Living through collapse is a question of self mastery.
“You are currently interacting with a machine…”
Actually, no I’m not. I’m interacting with your words. And I don’t really see how this is different from interacting with those same words if they were set in type in a book (and, really, on my screen they don’t look that different from how they might in a book) or even if we were corresponding by letter.
So what is it about the underpinning technology we use to communicate that gives us this kind of angst? I don’t recall anyone in the eighteenth or nineteenth century agonising over “you are currently interacting with ink and paper…” There was no “no chit-chat, no animal relationship at work, no drawing on the ancient intuitions of our species which allow us to converse person-to-person, with all that this entails”. And yet, despite this, readers have always been able to make empathetic connections with authors – even across cultures, languages, and eras.
To push this a bit further, when my grandfather left his native Aberdeen in the 1880 to go to India at only 16, my grandmother – his future wife – wrote a letter to him each and every day. They were parted for years at a time, and post took six weeks on a steamship to be exchanged between them. You could say that this was “just a monologue”, scrawled by pen and ink – after all, the two hardly knew each other. But it was also a profoundly human thing – and speaks volumes about what is best in our species.
It’s easy to be dismissive of the internet, as if it were just some gimmick dreamed up in a jaded marketeer’s mind – to jibe at facebook, and the shallowness of the relationship it fosters. But those relationships are only as shallow or as deep as the people who make them – for every person who boasts hundreds of ‘friends’ they have never met, there are many others who are quietly reconnecting with old friends and old flames, patching up old enmities, or connecting with kindred spirits and others who they might never have otherwise met. In the end, the story of ‘internet mediated communications’ will be seen as a human story, rather than a technology one – and will be shaped by its successes, rather than its failures.
I don’t agree, James. I think this analysis misses the point.
Do you think that there is a qualitative difference between the writing and receiving of a paper letter and the wearing of glasses which stream information into your head? Do you think that they have different impacts on how you see the world and interact with it, and what skills you use and which wither? This is about choosing who we are and what limits we set. On which, more tomorrow.
Paul, you are right I believe. What if the collapse doesn’t happen? The taming of the world – all of it – is probably the more likely (and depressing) outcome given, as you say, our extraordinary ability to adapt to any environment. A species that has simultaneously adapted to life on ice, in deserts or 20,000 feet up mountains will surely have no problems coping in a global Middlesex.
For the same reason I’m less sure our machines will end up dominating us – but maybe I just lack the imagination to believe that possible.
Thanks Paul, interesting posts. The goggles were shocking for a minute or so, but then…from the point of view of my childhood (b. ’65), they seem to be – as you say – only another step or so down the road we have been travelling ever since then.
I like Rosie’s answer a lot. I’m grateful for the Transitioners and all such practical, communal initiatives…we can at least try to think and act creatively in the face of change, even if it feels like flapping our arms as we fall from the cliff.
What seems to come home more and more for me is – obviously, I suppose – that what matters now, will matter then. Jensen puts the question (in Dreams) as ‘What are the stories that might cure us of the infectious psychosis of civilisation?’. I think we have those stories already – we build edifices around them until they’re buried in belonging and believing, but they have always said, in whatever way you choose to frame it, that physical survival is not the core issue in the question ‘How will humanity survive’?.
If we do manage to survive, locally, together, how will we stay human when things fall apart? Surely one part of the answer is ‘To the extent we make it our business to help each other’.
As now.
Having stories that will “cure us of this infectious psychosis” is one of the things that has attracted me to the Dark Mountain Project. Despite all the technical aspects of modern society, it is the story it has woven about us as humans that is where the true struggle lies. The myth of progress is a very subtle on, which infects us to a greater extent than many are willing to acknowledge. I have often felt that many who are pushing for a paleolithic primitivism as a response to our current state believe in human progress in their heart of hearts, and in a way wish to throw us back as far as possible to give the environment time to heal before humanity inevitably marches forward again. Furthermore, much of the talk of rejecting modern industrialism still uses the forms of progress: “an evolution of consciousness” and “the next stage of humanity” have been used by people advocating a turning away from technology nearly as often as it is used by the technophiles (the only difference being the ultimate end in mind).
As much as I have come to identify with much of what motivates the Dark Mountain project, the basic premise, roughly paraphrased, that we need NEW stories to reflect this age of collapse, because the OLD story of progress no longer works, gives me some unease. I would submit that we would be best served by turning first to the truly OLD stories, and trying to find ways to mend the fabric that the modern, reductionist, industrial mind has torn. A reweaving of the torn tapestry that ties us to our ancestors. But again we have managed to convince ourselves, even when we try to reject the evils of modernity, that we are somehow more advanced, enlightened, and evolved than those that lived in millennia past.
On whether folks in the 18th and 19th century were agonizing over text and the loss of chit-chat, animal relationships, ancient intuitions, and person-to-person conversation: Yes, as it turns out, some of them were.
I was, to be honest, somewhat surprised when I came upon a bit of history that showed that folks were indeed agonizing at that time over texts.
Specifically, some of the parents in England (or elsewhere in Europe) were opposed to the novel because they felt it was a bad idea that such strong emotions could be roused in a person from a lifeless lifeless collection of flattened pulp and ink blots. They felt that human emotion was special and should only be elicited and developed through face-to-face story-telling.