Back to the 2050s

This being the first week of the New Year, all the notable writers on any topic at all are posting predictions for this year. The more prudent ones are saying what they’ve been saying all along – expect 2016 to be a continuation of 2015, but with a few more bumps and steeper gradient. For those who are hoping now is the time for some miraculous piece of technology or sudden revolutionary awakening of human consciousness to save the impending doom of our civilisation, this year is once again going to disappoint. I can’t add much of value to the predictions already made by Greer or Kunstler, so I think I’ll probe further into the future.

This slightly-further future is going to be very different to the one that has constantly been predicted by tech-fetishizing cheerleaders. Let’s take the year 2050, when I will be 55 years old. I expect that world to be very different from the one we find familiar. The ravages of war, depletion and climate change is going to result in a world, if parts of it are functioning at all, more resembling that of my grandfather’s time and earlier – perhaps like the year 1950, a century earlier. I'm going to (very roughly) outline how the forces of engineering and economics will shape the trajectory of the future ahead of us in terms of some features central to the lifestyles of people inhabiting developed societies right now.

Personal Computers and the internet: Expect these to disappear from the home, from your backpacks and pockets. To produce these devices, we need a strongly globalised economy with ample inputs of fossil fuels to extract, process, and manufacture raw materials into the highly precise pieces of circuitry required for digital computing. This massive embodied energy cost will be economically inefficient for functions that can be fulfilled with printing presses and radios. On top of that, the continuing pursuance of planned obsolescence production by most of the major tech companies means that plenty of valuable material is simply being wasted instead of being reused. As our current culture is obsessed with constantly producing and consuming ever more high-powered and resource consuming devices, regression to more sensible, low powered earlier computers will also no longer possible as our entire computer systems infrastructure is constantly ‘upgrading’ to better produce the sort of needlessly overpowered devices we use today.

By 2050 vast cost of manufacturing personal computers will make them inaccessible to average households once again. Emails will once again be a luxury, probably costing several times regular ‘snail’ mail. Computers will only be affordable to rich companies, government departments and academic institutions who will use them for what they were originally meant for – processing large amounts of data and complex calculations, instead of watching cat videos. As explained by John Michael Greer, the internet will morph into something more resembling the older DARPA-net, used only for essential tasks.

Cars: People living in many western societies can’t fathom life without their personal oil burning machine – I mean, car. Our cities are all structured around this gargantuan form of wastage and pollution. The advent of the car was a sign of a huge surplus of energy that our society had in the 20^th century, and similarly future shortages of such energy will do the opposite. When filling up your car is going to cost a quarter of your weekly income, and you have to juggle rent and soaring utility costs, you’re likely to ditch that gas-guzzler and live closer instead. No matter how much people try and cover up, facts are that personal transport is simply infeasible in a society where people have to pay the full costs of energy usage.

Take the graphic below, for example. Apart from just noticing the congestion issues, notice that each vehicle expends most of its energy in making itself move, and that moving passengers is a much smaller marginal energy input. Obviously a mode of transport that can move the most people is going to be more efficient in variable cost (per person), than one that spends a majority of its fuel in just making the frame and associated parts move (the extremity of that being a car with one person in it).

Secondly, think about systems costs. Cars and buses both require several lanes of gravel and tar, which is really energy and cost intensive. Compared to that, one set of rails with loose gravel, and cobblestone roads (that can be made with human labour) is going to be far easier to build and maintain. Any sensible administration will make the cost-effective choice, that is, ditch conventional roads once the huge subsidies governments have set up for them are ditched.

Along with this, I also expect that the time of sprawling suburbia with associated highways and malls is going to end as well. More competent administrations will invest in better urban planning and public transport, such as light rail. Long commutes are going to be unaffordable and thus undesirable (thankfully). Already built large suburban areas are going to turn into desolate ruins, be stripped down to make way for agriculture if possible, or turn into smaller towns and hamlets.

Phones: More and more of our communication infrastructure is tied to the internet, so the demise of the internet will bring about the phasing out of mobile phones associated nick-knacks like video calling. Rolling out wires for a telephone line operated by humans with switchboards is considerable, but a lot less than building mobile towers every few kilometres and keeping satellites in the sky just so you can find the nearest restaurant. It’s far easier to just use your local telephone to keep your loved ones notified when increased mobile costs mean that texting or calling on the cellular network costs as much relatively as it did in 1990.

Expensive cellular network costs will increase the demand for substitutes such as regular mail, or maybe a cost based email system. Even amongst those who could potentially afford the luxuries of mobiles, such as the elite, I expect that the most functionality the average phone will have will be calling and messaging. Mobile data networks are likely to disappear altogether, especially when the internet of the near future won't be even near as large as it is today. You’ll have to look up city directories and magazines to find a nearby restaurant, or rely on word of mouth again. And perhaps learning to read a map will be of value as well.

Flying: I myself have been very guilty of this particular form of waste, having travelled across the world in the past few months. Of course, not only are jet aircraft very fuel consuming, the also require huge amounts of embodied energy to produce and maintain. In terms of domestic transport, a country that wants to remain connected will have to resort to a lower capital and higher labour input level form of mass transport, such as railway or boats. There might be a narrow window of opportunity where airships can be a competitive substitute to both rail and flight, however due to our cultural obsession with needle-shaped heaver than air devices, I highly doubt that airships will gather sufficient investment to be developed before things get worse. I could (and hope to be) wrong – several militaries have been working on airships as heavy-load transport, and will perhaps have some sway over civilian transport policymakers.

Entertainment: When things regress, it’s often not in the same way backwards as it was forwards. The shifting of mass-entertainment from TV to the internet affected a profound cultural shift where people are now used to being instantly gratified with whatever form of entertainment they want. 

Gone is the patience of pencilling down a show you want to see at 7:30pm on a certain channel. Furthermore, most inhabitants of currently ‘developed’ societies are going to be overburdened with work to just feed themselves and therefore are unlikely to find TV worthwhile in terms of time or money. I find the return of TV as a mass medium unlikely in such circumstances. Perhaps old-fashioned movies combined with news reels will be the most viable form of visual entertainment and become popular as they were during World War II and after, as it’s far cheaper to pay a few dollars to walk into a short news and TV show than to buy a TV set and subscription.

Books are still relatively popular and will have better demand as handheld devices become less common. Although this also means that personal music will also disappear, the demand gap will be picked up by a renaissance of radio media, which has been surviving somehow through all these years of increasing on-demand digital entertainment. Radio is a much cheaper alternative as all it requires is a few microphones, maybe a recording player or two and a transmitter, rather than huge servers and factories needed to keep tablets and iPods going. The same can be said of newspapers; the printing press has been around since the 13^th century and isn’t going to be upstaged by internet news in terms of energy and cost input - ever.

Usually predictions of the future done by my fellow millennials are an assortment of their preferred techno-fantasies. However, most millennials are also completely oblivious of the unfolding crises that are going to wipe out industrial civilisation a few lifetime from theirs. Most see their current difficulties as a temporary set of circumstances that will improve once all boomers die and more ‘efficient’ or ‘equal’ policies are enacted as part of their utopian revolution. The fact that economic decline is going to be a permanent feature of their lives which they can adapt to or flounder in hasn’t struck home. Of course, the school of hard knocks is expected to make many students over the next few years. Being more realistic about the future ahead, can help preparation.

The Distracted Generation

2014 was touted as the year of economic recovery, aggressively drilled into our heads by the self-deceptive shrieks of a few politicians, businessmen and tech-yuppies. Yet for most people in my generation, the Millennials, it was another slide into the economic and social volatility that further shatters their confidence in the state, society and their future.

In Oceania this has manifested itself as abject apathy and a feeling of powerlessness. Despite the comparatively soft impact the GFC had on this part of the world, it’s an open secret that the jobs are drying out and apart from a few select fields, things are going to get harder over the next few years. Unlike the rest of the industrialised world though, our countries have held onto the basics of social welfare state, so the perception amongst youth in this part of the world has been that the causes of their problems are mainly political. The governments of NZ and Australia definitely have very little youth mandate and are facing fierce backlash for every policy they float to their baby boomer voters.

The reality of the ecological crisis to come, and the necessary changes in lifestyle that will have to occur is not even closely a part of national consciousness here. It’s a curse of relative long term prosperity and low population – people here don’t consider themselves in terms of carrying capacity of the land they live in. Therefore, the dark cloud of dejection in the air is seen as a result of creeping worldwide instability, and malicious political climate. Behind the current apathy lies an earnest optimism that given the right decisions, all of the problems about to plague youth in the future – employment, climate change, war, equality – will fade away to a return of the sort of suburban comfort that their parents have enjoyed.

Depending on the political orientation of who you ask, the opinion of decisions that have to be taken vary. Your upper-middle class neo-lib kid will rave about efficiency and technology, how the next big thing will transform our lives into a singularity-served utopia. The labour (left or right, doesn’t matter) university student thinks that the 1980s were the worst thing to ever happen (understandable) and Keynesian style reforms with plenty of emphasis on income equality will mean that there’s enough big slices of economic pie for everyone. The university eco-group volunteers believe that besides the token vege gardens, all that’s required to solve climate change is solar panels lined on every surface and wind turbines on all the hills. Rad-fems will claim that gender equality is the pressing issue, while puerile Marxists are still waiting about for their revolution.

All of these various beliefs have three common characteristics: 1) that the expectations of entitled lifestyle requires no change, 2) the impoverishment of youth is purely a political problem that can be solved with policy, and most importantly 3) that endless economic growth can continue once again. Even though the solutions suggested by various youth interest groups may have their own merits, none of them hold actual relevance to the root of many societal problems today. At least over here, the fact that worldwide resource depletion and constraints are something we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives hasn't even been considered as a topic for discussion.

Contrary to what older generations think, Millennials aren’t as techno-narcissistic as they seem. We aren’t the ‘Me Me Me generation’ (oh and what hypocrisy of those that accuse us), we are the distracted generation. Millennials distract themselves with various toys for the simple reason that reality is a bit too hard to deal with at the moment. Apathy is much easier, especially with the stranglehold that state institution dependence has on every aspect of young people’s lives.

For all the energy and enthusiasm Millennials demonstrate through protests and active organising, almost all of it is directed towards narrow interest group or self-interest goals. Too much is geared towards pressuring some abstract authority to initiate change, rather than taking the onus to create frameworks and relationships required to create grassroots change. True, there is plenty of cultural and policy change that is desperately required for youth today, but behind this lies a looming civilizational crisis that is being ignored.

I went to a large youth climate change summit two years ago where almost all of the focus was on pressuring state and international institutions to enact vague policy. Some of the organisers even insisted that changing personal lifestyle would only have a marginal impact and that government held the main responsibility of responding to climate change! The glimmer of middle-class western entitlements is defendable at all costs, regardless of how ridiculous and unfulfilling that goal may seem. For the same reason plenty of apparently altruistic action from energetic individuals at universities (in the form of organisational participation) is just another means of CV building for their aspiring management careers.

If the baby boomer generation sold out after the heyday of their youth, it seems that Millennials have sold out already. When reality comes knocking, (which will within the next decade in this isolated part of the world), Millennials will need to accept that permanent economic growth in the developed world is gone forever, and their expectations of suburban western lives along with it. Once the edifice of debt-financed welfare and educational inefficiency crumbles, their lives will be a race to the bottom with vicious fighting over the remaining management middle-class jobs. Hopefully we can use those skills we developed so well in deluded careerism to produce something resembling an alternate framework of value.

(Comments and feedback welcome!)