Previous posts have tried to do justice to the idea of collapse.
Luke Kemp, of Cambridge University, has just published a voluminous (almost 700 pages) book on the subject Goliath’s Curse – the history and future of societal collapse (2025) which I find rather disappointing since, despite its subtitle, it doesn’t try to summarise the previous work in the field. I’ve extracted the following text from his Epilogue
OUR FRAGILE FUTURE
We live in a uniquely dangerous time. Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads. Since the invention of the atom bomb the world has come frighteningly close to nuclear war at least a dozen times.
The climate change we face is an order of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years ago. Viruses can now spread at the speed of a jet plane, and computer viruses at the speed of an internet connection.
The better-known and more deeply studied threats of nuclear war and climate change are joined by new, more hypothetical technological terrors.
In 2023, hundreds of AI scientists and other luminaries (strangely including the CEOs of the main companies building these new AI systems, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind) released a statement warning against the risk of human extinction from AI. They fear that an uncontrolled, ultra-intelligent machine whose interests are not aligned with those of humanity (or at least most of us) will either destroy or enslave us. Other scholars, including biological scientists, have warned of advances in bioengineering that could create doomsday diseases – far more contagious and deadly than anything that has ever existed. And those are just the present threats. Who knows what new hazards rapid technological change could conjure in the coming decades. The confluence of these different threats has led some to call our current predicament the ‘metacrisis’, ‘the precipice’, or a ‘global polycrisis’.
Decreasing nuclear stockpiles, slashing carbon emissions, and making our societies more democratic are all completely feasible, and doing so in the long term will mean escaping these traps and digging up the root causes of existential risk. We’ll need to do what few societies have successfully done: kill Goliath.
Collapse may seem inescapable. This is an illusion. Most of the challenges we face are entirely solvable. If our world falls apart in the cold of a nuclear winter or the unending blaze of climate change, it won’t be because there was nothing we could have done. There are many ways to reduce the risk of global collapse, to defeat Goliath, and even actions that individuals can take.
We need to introduce open democracy, with deliberative juries and assemblies creating national policies for governments and providing oversight of corporations. If decision-makers are randomly selected from society, we will no longer be selecting for those who crave status and power or who rank higher in the dark triad. The constant cycling through new citizens to make decisions will also help ensure no one is in authority long enough (or holds enough power) to be corrupted.
There are many other options, such as banning the revolving door between regulators and industry. Corporations such as Exxon or the East India Company have been just as destructive as empires, and firms today are less accountable and less democratic than most states. Corporations could similarly be democratized by reforming them into large-scale worker cooperatives governed by workers alongside deliberative juries, and with an overriding legal goal of providing social and environmental benefits, not short-term returns to investors.
Levelling political power won’t be enough. Even a deep democracy that uses citizens’ assemblies and juries, as well as digital technology to carry out regular direct votes, will eventually be undermined if some people have billions of dollars with which to rig any system we come up with. One could argue that we have democracy and massive inequality in the world today, and that the two are not in tension. It’s a mistaken idea. What we ordinarily call democracy – systems in which a subset of people (who are aggressively propagandized by political marketers and billionaire-owned media empires) vote every four to five years for a tiny number of (usually rich) representatives who are funded and lobbied by corporations (for whom they frequently work afterwards), who then enact policies which usually better represent elite interests than popular opinion – is better described as an oligarchy with democratic furnishings.
It is far more inclusive than most governments throughout history, but that is a low bar compared to what is possible. Even this threadbare democracy is being frayed by increasing wealth inequality. It is no coincidence that (with a slight time lag) democracy started backsliding after inequality began rising across the world in the 1970s. Inequality in one form of power or another will eventually spill into others: the rich buy elections, overly powerful generals launch coups, and autocrats amass fortunes.
Wealth becoming more unequal may be close to an iron law throughout history, but reversing it is surprisingly easy. The simplest way is through taxation. The US had an income tax of above 90 per cent on the highest earners from 1944 through to 1963 (the highest rate in the US is now 37 per cent). It didn’t lead to an economic bust. It actually helped to usher in an economic golden age for the US. A highly progressive taxation system should be combined with an even higher tax on wealth such as land and stocks.
Other measures include placing a cap on wealth, $10 million for example (a level that is well beyond what any individual needs), or capping the income of the highest earners within companies at five times that of the lowest-paid worker.
Democratic Control of Information and the Military; One of the best ways to distribute the control of information is to break up existing monopolies, specifically in big tech and the media. This could mean creating new legislation as well as rigorously implementing existing anti-trust tools, such as the Sherman Act and Clayton Act in the US, which have already been used to block big mergers.
Rebalancing power will inevitably require increased protest and activism in the coming decades. Yet governments have made a concerted recent effort to curtail the right to protest, such as through the UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022, or the 323 different bills that have been introduced in the US since 2017 that restrict the right to protest, and even encourage violence against peaceful protesters. Finding ways to roll these back and unshackle concerned citizens will be critical to levelling power and holding the Agents of Doom to account.
This is not a complete blueprint for solving our problems. Trying to foist a vision of utopia on the world has never ended well. Instead, we should democratize the world, level power, reduce Goliath fuel, reduce existential risk, and see what world blossoms from this new civilization.
Other recommedations include
Don’t Be a Dick; First, I propose a simple pledge to not be a dick. This is a pledge to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk. Don’t work for an Agent of Doom, whether it is an AGI lab, a fossil-fuel company, or an arms manufacturer. No institution should be financing our global descent, and no one should support one which does.
Be a Democrat; Second, practise democracy. Democracy is not just a form of government; it is a culture and a way of life. One that all of us need to recapture. Be a democrat: don’t just vote every few years, but join a union, join an activist group (while there is no group fighting against all the sources of catastrophic risk, there hopefully will be one soon), advocate for workplace democracy, and discuss political matters in a productive way – whether it be nuclear weapons or mass surveillance or climate collapse – with friends and family members.
Vote Against the Apocalypse; Third is voting. You are first and foremost a citizen, not a consumer. While democracy is more than voting, voting is a fundamental part of democratic practice in the modern world. If you know about climate change, a nuclear winter, and the other real risks to the survival of our species but base your vote on who promises to cut your taxes, then you are culpable for our current path towards self-destruction. It is a travesty that no election to date has been decided by the candidates’ positions on nuclear weapons and climate change. There is no reason to contribute to that trend in the future.
Don’t Be Dominated; Fourth is to re-cultivate the counter-dominance intuitions that guided us through the Palaeolithic. Oppose domination in all your relationships, whether they be personal, family, or workplace. Whenever you come across a hierarchy, whether it is based on wealth, gender, or age, ask whether it is legitimate and whether it justifies domination. If it doesn’t, then try to overturn it.
See also Collapse, you say? Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020 Collapse You Say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020 Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020 Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021 Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021 Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021 Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021 Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021 Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021 Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022 Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022 Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022 Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment