Looking Down From On High
First Task: Observation & Orientation
Let’s take stock of where we are in this moment, the Observation and Orientation in the OODA loop.
Post here will always have an Attention Conservation Notice, a practice that originated with Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design Movement. Those with a U.S. military background might call this a “So What Notice”.
Attention Conservation Notice: I’ve been worried about climate change and energy security for the last sixteen years. What we face is likely an existential threat for our species and we’re going to fight like cats in a sack over the resources that are left. Having our global communications network simply collapse might be for the best. Mother Nature has solutions for our population overshoot. She has not consulted us regarding methods or timing.
Climate:
We’re in a massive population overshoot driven by fossil nitrates, synthetic nitrates, fossil fuel, fossil water, antibiotics, and a bunch of other health related advances. The entire time our species has existed the Earth was breathing in roughly 100,000 year cycles, with CO2 varying from 180ppm at the lowest to 280mm at the highest. We began exploiting fossil fuels circa 1760 and CO2 today is around 420ppm.
If you’re itching to respond with some climate change denial tropes you might as well just click close and go somewhere else. Here we deal with objective reality and respect for scientific consensus is part of that. There’s no room for crackpot outliers and whataboutism.
California is facing years of a grinding drought AND a year of record flooding. A heat dome over the south central U.S. has brought an entire month of 100F+ temperatures. The smoke I used to dread here in NorCal is now a national problem, as the Canadian taiga has started to burn. All of the bad things predicted for 2100 started in 2022 by my reckoning – that’s the year every major river in Europe dwindled to a trickle. Mother Nature’s fury in 2023 has been front page news ever single day.
People who live in naturally hot places have the choice of walking away, or simply dying where they stand. When wet bulb temperatures get to around 30C those who were already fragile start dying. When the bulb reports 35C people resting in the shade with water can still have heat stroke. We’ve had surprisingly little trouble in terms of global food security despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wheat prices and stocks are a pretty good proxy for global food security, and things have been disconcerting for a while now.
If you’re struggling to visualize, take a look at conditions in Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Too many people, not enough water, not enough food, and then the government goes sideways HARD and finds it difficult to pull out of it. This will not just continue, it’s going to accelerate.
Geopolitics:
Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion has been compared to Germany vs. Poland, the Balkans at the start of the 20th century, and you hear it less, but for me it evokes the Ottoman dissolution. Russia is imploding another level below where it landed when the Soviet Union dissolved. China is standing back up after a long period of western dominance and we’re on the verge of competition turning to conflict. Xi grasps for Putin’s things in Africa, they’re making inroads in South America, and the outlines of the 21st century’s Great Game begin to emerge.
Turning to another face of this global Rubik’s Cube, what has been happening in Ukraine may be seen in a similar light to the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, Germany’s unexpected romp around the end of the Maginot line in 1940, or Japan’s late war attempts to stop U.S. ships via kamikaze attacks. New technology is out of brochure mode and into battle tested doctrine mode. Everything is light, fast, smart, and civilian gear is being repurposed for war in ways we’ve not seen since beating plowshares into swords was a thing.
Climate change is going to keep the global pot at a minimum of a rolling boil. No amount of free market fairy dust or Cold War nostalgia will overcome this new reality. If we don’t have rare earth metals and chip foundries out of an enemy’s reach, we’re done. And with the ubiquitous nature of the internet, there’s very little that can be described as out of reach.
Disinformation:
This complex, rapidly evolving real world puts everybody on edge. The ubiquitous nature of mobile phones and the popularity of antisocial network services such as Facebook and Twitter mean that anyone with the urge to manipulate can find a way. The written communication based services have been under threat from the image/short video platforms like Snapchat and TikTok for the last decade. We’ve permitted something as addictive as tobacco to employ methods developed for slot machines and we’ve created a clever trap in that the advocacy to change things must be done ON the platforms that need regulation …
You can see where that’s headed. I am afraid the only way to break the unhealthy grasp of those applications will involve waiting for things to devolve to the point where we no longer have 24x7 electricity or stable cellular service networks.
There’s been a wave of near panic regarding artificial intelligence, and attempts at closing that avenue of attack before it metastasizes, but stochastic parrots still get easily made by real humans at this point. The places where AI has benefited my practice are jogging my memory when I can describe what I want, but I’ve forgotten the particulars, or in producing Python code snippets that show me how to access unfamiliar services. Well funded efforts will be much smoother, but the smart humans are already compartmentalizing themselves and insisting on authenticity. You can see this in the Fediverse, in the invite cascade that’s populating Bluesky, and in the way that half of all science communicators have already departed from Twitter.
But … the masses will remain vulnerable.
Conclusions:
Climate change means climate refugees. The U.S. had its first experience with this in 2005 with the 250,000 or so people displaced by Katrina. I saw refugees where I was, in Omaha, and large cities in Texas had trouble digesting the influx of newcomers. When less than 1% of that state’s population were refugees there was friction intense enough to make the news. There are eight billion people on this planet. Three billion of them live in places where wet bulb temperatures will periodically make their homes roughly as hospitable as Death Valley. I’ll leave the calculus on what 37.5% of the global population having no choice but to migrate will do to overall stability.
Populist movements backing strong men are a thing now and they’re going to be around for the foreseeable future. When things get out of control a portion of the populace have a temperament such that they just want someone to make it STOP. This always involves hate speech, blaming and “othering” some identifiable group, so you’ll need to be familiar with what that actually means.
Thinking Through Hate by Wes Unruh is how I first learned about hate speech tropes.
Our disposable culture’s disposable phones are available for little to no money due to a conflict minerals supply chain that starts with kids in the Congo digging for coltan with garden tools. Marginal producers set the price for commodities, and if the electronics business were made to pay a living wage for raw materials we’d see device prices quadruple and user replaceable components would become the norm. And we all need to get with the fact that nothing is free – any social network you use is a behavioral observation effort at a bare minimum, and the ones that are taking investment money will inevitably go to manipulation as a service for their revenue model. Only the Fediverse seems resistant, and there’s so much activity in that area it’s hard to make out how things will evolve.
Effective climate change remediation would require a global consensus, and then a China-like ability to make and rapidly implement deeply unpopular but obviously necessary policies. Getting there would require events like the demise of the Republican party here and a similar fate for the oil driven monarchies of the Persian Gulf. In other words, a lot of people are going to say “over my dead body”, and they’re not just using that as a figure of speech.
Don’t look at me – I realized this was an existential threat in 2007 and I’ve been working against it to some degree ever since. You’ll need to decide what (if anything) you’re going to do about it …