Kunstlerism of the Week: Famine?

Location: Farmer's Market

In his latest post, James Howard Kunstler, fresh from a meeting of New Urbanists in Atlanta, takes aim not merely at the doomed sprawl that is Atlanta but also what Peak Oil will mean for all of us:

Among other things, the most forward-looking leaders in the New Urbanist movement now recognize that we have to reorganize the landscape for local food production, because industrial agriculture will be one of the prime victims of our oil predicament. The successful places in the future will be places that have a meaningful relationship with growing food close to home. The crisis in agriculture is looming right now -- with world grain reserves at their lowest level ever recorded in modern times -- and when it really does hit, the harvestmen of famine and death will be in the front ranks of it.

Kunstler puts his apocalyptic spin on this story, but he's right about the effect if not the magnitude. It's time to support your local grower, or become one yourself, while we have enough margin in energy markets to learn how to do so.

Read the rest of "Out of Darkness" for more information. And, to reference a post I made last week, step out of Plato's Cave into the light.

Lindens Market Suburban Life With Fake Kid

Location: Torpid State of Smoldering Discontent

So this vision is the best that Linden Lab can do for us today? This is pretty far from what creative residents have built on Linden Lab's infrastructure. The Lab currently seems to be casting about, wildly, for customers. The campaigns flail back and forth, from the far slicker and interesting "put some steam in your punk" images that ran a couple of weeks back to...this.

It's The Sims. Uh, yeah.

As a wag at the Alphaville Herald put it, soon we freaks may have a stark choice: we can look elsewhere for the artists and creators or "be here and have a nice life that looks just like your real life. While in SL, you can watch (at 8fps) your avatar mow your virtual lawn and chat with the other seven people with active accounts."

While the Lab has segregated the new 'hoods into themed areas, they don't seem to have learned the trick for their advertising. If you want us all to continue to live in SL, Mark Kingdon, you had best learn some real-life demographic facts and pitch ads like this in venues likely to attract the right eyes, not the scoffers like me who equate "suburban" with "boring and resource-piggish and soon-to-collapse."

Linden Lab makes a big mistake if they think that the fake suburbanites can live on the same continent with the cool freaks and geeks. Linden Lab used to pitch to this crowd, not so long ago (in the Rosedale era).


Yes, these are my people.

Boring and cool folks don't mix too often in real life, either. Some very rich hipsters and society types mingle downtown with the pierced and inked around here, especially on gallery nights, but you just don't see the boring class of business clones who swam upstream to spawn in the the cul-de-sacs "venturing downtown," as they put it.

Thank God. I don't want to hear about their homes or their trips to the Outer Banks or their TV shows or their kids. And in SL, I consider child avatars really creepy, even if they are just playing "kid" to some fake mom and dad.

Am I too cruel? Perhaps a fake house in a fake utopia will be a way to relive the glory-days of suburban bliss when Peak Oil puts the lie to that living arrangement, forever.

Linden Lab, you've lost your soul. Get back to images like the following from your old days, so you look cool and not lame-o-max-o, ya'll.


My wife, giving me her opinion, dislikes the "man boobs" in the last image, but she agrees that either Projects Mayhem or Gangsta look better than Project Mow-the-Lawn.

I need to go play Pharaoh in Heritage Key now. At least those 'burbs are stylin'.

Kunstlerism of the Week: Mass Delusions

Location: Enjoying Spring!

Like Kunstler, however, I look over my shoulder from time to time. I've this feeling that our technotopian ideas for abundant alternative energy are as fallacious as Sarah Palin's fantasies of unlimited oil. As Kunstler puts it:

This far along in the tribulations of our time, most Americans still have not heard of peak oil, and the few who have regard it as some figment that Ralph Nader or Al Gore conjured up on an acid trip in a sweat lodge. The more sophisticated among the mentally unwashed are certain that the earth has a creamy nougat center of low-sulfer light crude oil, or they heard that the Bakken formation in Dakota holds more oil than Saudi Arabia, or that the whole US car and truck fleet will be electrified in a year or two, or that we can drill-baby-drill our way to permanent oil abundance, or just that the American can-do spirit will come up with something to keep Happy Motoring alive because we're the greatest!

Read the rest of "False Spring" here, but be wary of what it will do to your good mood.

A Peak Oiler's Riposte to the Singularity Timeline

Location: Ruins of Azalea Mall, Richmond VA

I'm combining this post with my usual "Kunstlerism of the Week." I've been thinking about Transhumanism lately, and debating the topic in a friendly way with some proponents of the idea. In fact, one of the graduates of Dr. Raymond Kurzweil's Singularity University belongs to the Second Life Education List (SLED), and we've been posting our prognostications back and forth.

James Howard Kunstler's post this week notes:

We could conceivably take ourselves toward futures to be proud of, but they are not likely to be the kind of futures we are so busy projecting in our techno-grandiose fantasies about machine "singularities."

As a neo-luddite and organic gardener, my objections to transcending the body should be obvious: I don't consider it an appropriate technology for reasons of social justice and concern for the environment. As an ecologist, I fear that Transhumans and AIs would have so little regard for the found (as compared to remade) natural world that they'd make today's eco-rapists look like green angels.

Of course, as a believer that cheap oil will soon reach a global maximum of production and then begin a terminal decline, the ideas of the Transhumanist movement seem moot to me. We may not have a reliable enough power grid or transportation system to make the advances they predict, let alone distribute them in a way meaningful to the majority of humanity. I draw upon the thinking of Richard Heinberg (Power Down and The Party's Over), Michael Klare (Resource Wars), and Kunstler (The Long Emergency) for my futurist slant. I draw upon "The Hirsch Report" written for the US Dept. of Energy and Matthew Simmon's Twilight in the Desert for the science behind my ideas.

What sort of time line might I set against Dr. Kurzweil's? This is my optimistic projection, as compared to those of some Peak-Oil writers.

2010-2015:

• Modest economic recovery in US and Europe. Chinese and Indian growth continue, as Mexico's Cantarell oil field--a massive source of US crude--continues its steep decline.
• Saudi oil begins to decline, covered up at first by their state oil monopoly. Other Gulf states announce (as have Kuwait and Yemen) that their oil reserves are in permanent decline. New finds in western Iraq offset much of this.
  
• US consumption remains near 20 million barrels per day. Canada asserting its oil wealth.
  

2015-2020:

• World oil production begins a slow decline, amid increasing demand from China, India, and oil-producing nations as their consumer economies ramp up.
  
• Advanced virtual-world / VR applications a toy or a tool for research among a tiny minority of computer users. Social virtual worlds like Farmville remain popular but never engage all five senses.

2015-2025:

• US infrastructure at the crisis point as fiscal constraints, no-tax zealotry, a car-based lifestyle, past entitlements, and insufficiency of alternative fuels conspire to produce consumer rage, dispossession, and steady economic decline.
  
• Suburban life increasingly expensive, and in-flow to cities begins on the one hand, new "back to the land" movement on the other.
• Full-on collapse in Gulf and possible wars involving Saudis and their neighbors.
  
• US oil consumption drops as oil producers hold on to their supplies for domestic use or trading with preferred partners. Bankrupt public unable to replace vehicles on a large scale and begin using public transit or their feet to travel.
• Ongoing collapse in consumer economies and declining tax base reduces R&D spending to focus on defense and energy. Loss of polar ice-cap results in bonanza to explore for Arctic oil. Canada benefits from global climate change and begins to assert military power in a frontier called "The Far North."
  

2025-2040:

• US federal and state governments belatedly, despite rage from right-wing political groups, begin to adopt some aspects of European urban planning, green energy, and car-free lifestyles.
  
• Most freight moved by rail; most perishable food locally grown. Homesteading to farm the nation's biggest growth industry, along with production of alternative energy sources.
• National electric grid wobbly and failing; local power off the grid replaces semi-monopolies of power companies, but energy remains scarce.
  
• High technologies, car ownership, and access to health care increasingly an object of class warfare. VR remains a popular curiosity.
  
• A bankrupt US government, increasingly bereft of naval power as Nimitz-class carriers are retired one by one, cannot contest Russian, Chinese, Canadian, Indian and European wrangling in the Arctic Ocean over oil. Real chance of global war over remaining oil fields.

2020-2060:

• Europe, India, Russia, China, and America cope with climate and fossil-fuel refugees as Middle East, Central Asian, and Mexican economies collapse.
  
• US Medicare and Social Security "safety nets" collapse. High technology not a primary concern of most individuals.
  
• Human population begins to decline from disease, war, and famine in much of the world.

2060-:

• Barring massive burning of coal, simpler lifestyles and localism lead Carbon Dioxide levels in earth's atmosphere to stabilize, but rapid climate change remains under way for at least a century.

So, Transhumanists, let's hope you are correct in your optimism about humanity's inventiveness.

Perhaps climate change and oil depletion will trigger the sort of innovation we saw during WWII or the Space Race, but I doubt it; the Transhumanist vision does not acknowledge Homo Sapiens' propensity for bloodshed, tribalism, and pure chaos that erupts when scarcity prevails. How do we avoid the worst of these changes? That would be lovely to know, but as Kunstler also notes, "We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place."

Elgin Park: A Virtual World in Photos

Location: New York Times Web Site

Photos Courtesy of Michael Paul Smith's Flickr site

We usually think of virtual worlds in terms of avatars and special software. I've run across a popular virtual world that requires neither: one needs only a Web browser and nostalgia.

The Times reports how Michael Paul Smith's images of an imagined town, Elgin Park, have attracted a large audience at the photo-sharing site. Smith arranges die-cast cars from the Danbury Mint in settings that evoke Postwar, pre-Vietnam America, a time whose sunset I dimly recall and that often appears in my dreams.

Why the popularity? Smith has a great sensibility for architecture and photography. He knows how to pose his vehicles. But my take is that many of Smith's followers share a desire with folks who become so involved in Second Life and other virtual worlds: a sense of control.

America in the mid 60s, for white men at least, was still a place in command of its destiny (mutual assured destruction being the megaton of an exception). Smith's images capture those urban settings; even the cast of light is perfect. By dwelling on the quotidian, he also captures life as those older than 40 recall it. It's the most distant era many of us could imagine wanting to return to: reasonably modern medicine, technology, and media. Personally, the image above takes me back to hours waiting for my dad while reading Jack Kirby's and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four and other Marvel comics in our family's Edsel, then Star Chief, then Bonneville. It was safe to be alone in the car as dad did business with other produce dealers in large brick warehouses that did their best to look "Space Age" like many other businesses of that era.


Then we stopped going to the moon, and we began driving Japanese vehicles. I'm not critiquing the second of those changes, but they are there as markers of the end of American techno-triumphalism. Jay Leno feels that way, in a piece that accompanies the story of Elgin Park. Leno notes that when Chrylser sent its turbine-powered car on a world tour in 1963, "In countries where people were still riding bicycles and donkeys, Americans were driving jets."

Just as Leno can build a new one-off jet car, in virtual worlds we can create content not--and importantly, no longer--possible in real life. We can return to a past that has been perfected or a future that could never be: future nostalgia, in fact. Is it that different from the image below?


It's notable that Smith's photos lack people--who made that past so darned complex and doomed it to change. The convulsions of the 60s lay just beyond the range of these pictures.

It's also notable that the images of main street show a perfection that now has been lost to the hideous uniformity of suburban sprawl. Outback Steakhouse and its coast-to-cost homogenized cousins put The Rainbow Bar under, and Hegner's Paints got undercut by Home Depot and other blights on the cloned strips of America. Gradually, we've moved American commercial districts to uglier and uglier places than they inhabited in the methodical, human-scaled world that Smith depicts in 1/24 scale.

Smith's world is gone, but we have pictures. And if we cannot ever be dragon-slayers, vampires, rock stars, or I.M. Peis, we can at least have our avatars fill those roles.

Reality Check: Kunstlerism of the Week

Location: Clusterfuck Nation Blog

Jim's at it again, in some dizzying verbal pyrotechnics about the Greek economic crisis that has piled up worries larger than the Gyros in my favorite sandwich shop:

Europe is a sad case, really poignant, because it became such a darn nice corner of the world after the convulsions of the mid 20th century. Who, for instance, can spend two weeks walking the lovely ancient streets of Bruges or Orvieto, or Lisbon and not fall to their knees in overwhelming despair on return to the slum of Kennedy Airport? Europe rebuilt itself so beautifully after the war while America became a utopia of overfed clowns riding in clown cars around the plasticized cartoon outskirts of our ruined cities. Europe had wonderful public transit while America let its railroads rot away. European men went about their business in grown-up clothing while Americans men dressed like five-year-olds and got flames tattooed on their necks as though contemplating a barbarian invasion of Akron, Ohio.

As a Europhile who has often called Americans some variation of "blind, fat white people, racing toward the edge of an abyss in their SUVs," I agree. Should add "while chatting on their cell phones and watching action flicks on the car entertainment system."

Jim's only overstatements are as follows: 1) I happen to live in a nice, slowly reviving city, only hampered by a clownish city government and 2) Jim needs to go back to look at younger European men's clothing. Fashion crime has arrived, in the "I wear sports attire but don't play" variety we see in America, too, and baggy "doofus drawers" that threaten to fall down as soon as the cops begin foot pursuit of a thug.

That the Euro-zone is not immune to the stupidity and greed that led big finance to wreck the world economy, remains a profound disappointment to me. Maybe there exists no paradise beyond the warmth of family and friends in close community, the very localism that Kunstler champions and that will be the likely result of life after oil begins its terminal decline.

And for a while (here's the virtual world reference) we'll build fake paradises of code and pixels. Good luck with all that and may your power stay on.

Read the rest of "Euroland, The Horror Movie" here.

Reality Check: Kunstlerism of the Week

Location: James Howard Kunstler's Blog

I'm fond of Jim's turns of phrase, and I read his blog, "Clusterfuck Nation," every Monday as soon as I can.

Since he writes too about invented worlds--the American delusion that oil is infinite and suburbia is sustainable--I find a clear connection to the forever-young, forever-awake world of Second Life. Reality is, of course, a little harsher than SL, as Kunstler reminds us this week:

Do you really think that more suburban sprawl makes this a better nation? When our soldiers bleed out in the sands of Central Asia, will their last thoughts be of the curb cut between the Best Buy and the Burger King?

Read Jim's "Jive Economy" (seems that the Lindens DO copy reality in this, too) for more insights by one of our most acidic, and overlooked, social critics.

Maybe I'm just grumpy because my local bus-line reduced service and my employer must provide shuttle service to co-workers who might otherwise lose their jobs, even as many of the students on campus are so affluent that they'd never be seen dead on a public bus.

Even among my well educated colleagues, too few of us leave our cars parked and commute by bike or foot. Too few shop from local merchants, not on suburban strips that will become unworkable and boarded-up shells, with cheap oil's demise.

When that occurs, or when China stops subsidizing US debt, "Too Big to Fail" may become "Too Broke to Not Fail." Then, perhaps, we'll see how invented "reality" has been in our Strange Land.