Civilization is a hack: should we plan to "throw one away"?
Civilization, to be honest, is a hack. It’s a rough draft, a crude prototype of the way things should and must be. We’ve progressed and grown at a fast and exponentially increasing pace, but only by ignoring critical questions of sustainability and scale.
An old adage about writing software says "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyway." It’s essential to create prototypes to gain a better understanding of the right requirements and design. It’s just as essential to throw away the prototype and replace it with something more durable, and to plan to do so. Push a prototype too far, and you have a system that collapses catastrophically at scale. The longer you cling to the throwaway code, the harder it becomes to get rid of it.
Our problem today is that we live under the delusion that our system is designed to last. Modern governments and economies haven’t been around for long, and they have no track record of surviving global challenges like resource depletion or climate change. It’s a matter of blind faith or stubborn hope that we’ll avoid collapse.
Changing course is hard to even imagine, much less do. It’s close to a sacrilege in the modern religion of progress to slow growth or sacrifice consumption on behalf of future generations. Technologically, socially, and economically, there are so many things we don’t know about how to build systems that will last.
Oil and global warming are just particular symptoms of a systemic, hard-wired flaws in the way we think about the world and plan for the future. At an almost genetic level, we are built to act as if resources are infinite. Perhaps only the trauma of collapse and recovery can reshape people’s core values and assumptions around sustainability. In that event, "planning to throw one away" means works working to minimize suffering and maximize the knowledge retained during any crisis.
Some might say it’s overly pessimistic to think that collapse is inevitable and even necessary. Can we engineer a smooth transition between the current prototype and the next iteration in civilization’s design? There are certainly things we can do. We can’t redefine human nature. We can’t do "big design up front". But we can at least redefine our metrics of success and reward based on the strengths and weaknesses we recognize in our current societal prototype. Our market incentives and metrics are screwed up, for example; it’s no surprise that short term thinking dominates and that greater depletion is defined as greater success.
I hate to end on a bummer, but If I’m honest with myself, it’s hard to imagine this "soft landing" scenario working out in the medium to long term. Our leaders are too timid and too corrupt. People are too unwilling to sacrifice or redefine success, and too preoccupied fighting with each other. I’m unfortunately more inclined towards the "plan to throw one away" point of view. I think things will hold up OK for my lifetime, but I worry a lot for my kids based on our current trajectory.
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Every organism is a hack.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/03/any_organism_th.php
Civilizations are creatures. Libraries are the nucleus.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/03/civilizations_a.php
From an engineering perspective, let’s implement self-replication on a civilization level. Think von Neumann probe. Think of it as a super-compressed seed, including at possibly thousands of genomes, menomes, brains, circuits, schematics, copies of the Internet Archive, billions of lines of software (or the ability to write what’s needed), etc. This way, we can do some nifty evolutionary engineering to let variation and mutation take place to see what works out in the end.
- Bryan
By kanzure on 01.21.08 1:34 pm
Interesting premise, but I think there’s a fatal flaw in your reasoning. Civilization wasn’t “designed”. It evolved — more or less in a bottom up fashion. It’s the results of innumerable decisions and influences aggregated over millenia of time. And there are many varieties of “civilization”, not just one. Good luck designing a new one from scratch — that’s the favorite activity of Utopian dreamers.
By Will Thompson on 01.21.08 2:27 pm
Thanks for those comments Will.
It wasn’t my intent to suggest that civilization was or could be designed.
Also, of course, there are many civilizations, but at a broad level we seem to be converging on a pretty unsustainable level of consumption.
There are two things that we can design for with respect to civilization.
1. if we think that things are going down the tubes, we can work on preserving as much knowledge as possible.
2. we clearly need to maintain market mechanisms. However, some of the rules around those markets might be tweaked to subtly influence the directions that the markets take, making them more or less short sighted for ecample.
By philbo on 01.21.08 8:12 pm
Hopefully we won’t have to resort to (1)!
For (2), I think realization is sinking in all around that we need to think longer term. There will eventually be market mechanisms in place (a carbon tax, high oil prices due to oil shortages) that will encourage thrifty behaviors. The question is, will it be too late to avoid catastrophic ecological changes? The jury is out, but I think our only hope at this point is that worst case scenarios can be avoided.
By Will Thompson on 01.21.08 9:43 pm
Way too cynical, big brother. I’m not convinced that you’ve pegged an irreversible trend, nor correctly targeted the true source of many problems.
I see the moral and leadership failure that is George Bush III has taken its toll on your mental well-being. But it is a mistake to think that such incompetents will be allowed to lead forever, or that Americans of greater or lesser character will allow more of the same.
There are a few things that give me cause for hope:
a) We all have to live in this world, and people are living longer. A sanitized version of an old adage: people don’t pee in their own nest. Dystopias do not feed the needs of rational self-interest; long-lived people have incentive to clean stuff up.
b) Some formerly “intractable” problems are notable success stories. Look at air quality in Southern CA and big cities versus 20, 30, 40 years ago. Look at water quality across the nation.
c) There is an ethic arising among successful people of the moral imperative of eventually donating their success to serve greater good. Look at Bill Gates and his billions. For myself, I know that I’m NOT going to pass most of our wealth to our children: it will be donated to the Nature Conservancy or some similar trust; the money will be unsquanderable.
Past generations had their challenges and eventually addressed them: famine and feast on the Nile, the mess of the Industrial Revolution. Some things get better with time: education, clean drinking water, food supplies. The problems seem bigger and more “global” now, but once upon a time major crises, while geographically smaller, threatened whole civilizations. We got through it. There are inherent incentives for systems to correct.
You don’t mention what I consider to be the only truly intractable problem: nobody wants to give up the chance to further populate the world with more little dears. It strikes me as a bit odd that the same folks trotting boilerplate lectures on being a virtuous consumer have no problem unleashing their own resource-consuming, carbon-emitting progeny on the world, which of course necessitates the house in the “safe” neighborhood, the minivan to haul them to and fro, etc.. These charming little folks are root particles in a chain reaction, and more breeds more.
If we were really serious about overconsumption and taking self-actuated steps to insure the soft landing, we’d cull the herd in our own backyards. Barring that sacrifice, folks are on thin ice if they pass judgment overmuch about others’ lifestyle choices. The emphasis then needs to be on encouraging a new (and entirely voluntary) ethic for what “should” be done with wealth at a personal level, and applying our collective genius to effect technical solutions to some very serious problems we face.
MSFT SQL Server, VS.NET 2008, the Pantheon, the Internet, and America’s democratic experiment (minus the near-apocalypse of the last eight years) all give me great hope for the future. Once in a while, humans manage to do pretty great things.
-KF
By Ken Fine (nee Bogle) on 01.24.08 9:05 pm
[…] Civilization is a hack: should we plan to “throw one away”? +1 […]
By Around the web | alexking.org on 01.27.08 11:36 pm
[…] The notion that we need “reindustrialize” the planet matches my sense that the first industrial revolution was a hack that has no chance of continuing to scale or endure. Our next president must rearchitect markets so that “the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do, so that it becomes the probable thing to happen.” […]
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