[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The End of the Information Age

[Bill Totten]

The Archdruid Report (May 13 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society



One of the repeated lessons I've learned over the three years since The
Archdruid Report began appearing is the extent to which many people
nowadays have trouble grasping some of the most fundamental facts about
the crisis of our times. I had yet another reminder of that a few days
back, when the comments on last week's post started coming in.

A point made in passing in that post was that railroads, while they are
much more efficient than automobile or air transport, still require
relatively large amounts of concentrated energy, and so may become
uneconomical for many uses at a certain point well down the curve of
fossil fuel depletion. One of my readers took rather heated exception to
this comment. Only America's backwards railroads, he pointed out
indignantly, relied on fossil fuel; since European and Japanese railways
used electricity, they would be unaffected by fossil fuel depletion and
could keep rolling along into the far future.

This kind of logic is common enough these days that it's probably
necessary to point out the flaws in it. Electricity isn't an energy
source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so.
The electricity that powers the European and Japanese rail systems is
mostly generated by plants that burn coal, with significant help from
nuclear reactors and a rather smaller assist from hydroelectric plants.
Of these, only the hydroelectric plants are a renewable energy source;
the others are poised just as firmly on the downslope of depletion as
the diesel oil that runs American locomotives.

Coal is turning out to be much less abundant than the cozy estimates of
a few decades ago made it sound, and of course there's the far from
minor impact of coal burning on an already unstable global climate.
Fissionable uranium is well down its own depletion curve, and it's worth
noting that the enthusiastic claims sometimes made for breeder reactors,
the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel, and other alternatives to
conventional fission plants are very rarely to be heard from people who
have professional training in the fields concerned. Thus my reader was
quite simply wrong; the European and Japanese rail systems that so
excited his admiration are just as dependent on nonrenewable fuels as
the American system, and are also just as vulnerable to the economic
implications of supply and demand as energy supplies dwindle.

Now of course there are other reasons why railroads may be kept in
service, at least for certain uses, long after they become economic
liabilities. Many of the world's larger nations - the United States and
Russia among them - grew to their present size only after rail transport
made it possible to exert political and economic power on a continental
scale, and future governments may well keep long-distance rail links
going as a matter of national survival. That likelihood, though, does
nothing to counter the point central to last week's post: that in a
world with much less energy, older and more energy-efficient transport
methods such as canal boats may turn out to be much more economically
viable than their more recent and more extravagant replacements, and
those cities and regions well positioned to take advantage of waterborne
transport may therefore thrive in the 21st century as they did in the 19th.

The same logic can be applied usefully to many other aspects of the
future taking shape ahead of us right now. Probably the best example is
the looming impact of a future of energy constraints on the ways that
modern industrial cultures store, process, and distribute information.

It's hard to think of a subject that has been loaded with anything like
as much hype. Our time, the media never tires of repeating, is the
Information Age, an epoch in which economic sectors dealing with mere
material goods and services have been relegated to Third World
sweatshops, while the economic cutting edge deals entirely in the
manufacture, sales, and service of information in various forms. As
usual - can you think of a short-term trend that hasn't been identified
as a wave of the future destined to rise up an asymptotic curve to
infinity, or at least absurdity? I can't - the standard assumption is
that the future will be just like the present, but even more so, with
more elaborate technologies providing more baroque information products
and services as far as the eye (or, rather, the webcam) can see.

This is hardly a new vision of the future. In his 1909 novella "The
Machine Stops", which should be required reading for anyone who buys
into the Information Age hullabaloo, E M Forster provided a remarkably
exact dissection of contemporary cyberculture's idea of its destiny most
of a century in advance. It's a great story on its own terms, but it
also puts a finger on the central weakness of an information-centered
society: information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if
the physical substrate goes, so does the information.

In Forster's story, that substrate was the Machine - an interconnected
technostructure that spanned the globe and provided the necessities and
luxuries of life to uncounted millions of people who spent their lives
in hivelike cells, staring into screens and tapping on keyboards like so
many of today's computer geeks. Adept at manipulating abstract ideas,
the inhabitants of the Machine lost touch with the fact that their
universe of information only existed because the physical structure of
the Machine kept it there, and their attitude toward the Machine
gradually evolved into a religious reverence devoid of any reference to
the practical realities of the Machine's workings. The skills needed to
apply physical tools to pipes and wires dropped out of use, and the
consequences - minor malfunctions snowballing into major ones, and
finally into total systems failure - followed from there.

Now of course fiction is fiction, and the events that cause the Machine
to stop are unlikely to be repeated in the real world. The central
concept, though, demands attention, because our Machine - the internet -
depends just as much on a physical substrate as the one in Forster's
novella. In our case, that substrate is the global network of
communications links and server farms, and the even vaster economic and
technical infrastructure that keeps them funded, powered, and supplied
with the trained personnel and spare parts that keep them running.

Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to
maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a
home computer is modest enough that it's easy to forget, for example,
that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo's family of web services
online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on
Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server
farms that keep today's online economy going, and the hundreds of other
energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start
to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the
screen where you're reading them.

It's not an accident that the internet came into existence during the
last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980
and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human
history. Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to
bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be
constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that
made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come
to an end, and the economics of the internet take on a very different
shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again.

Like the railroads of the future mentioned earlier in this post, the
internet is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Once the cost of
maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be
generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of
information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more
marginal uses. Governments will have very good reasons to maintain some
form of internet as long as they can, even when it becomes an economic
sink - it's worth remembering that the internet we now have evolved out
of a US government network meant to provide communication capacity in
the event of nuclear war - but this does not mean that everyone in the
industrial world will have the same access they do today.

Instead, as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs
increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access
costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to
be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor
neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether. There may well still
be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much
more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the
free-for-all that exists today. Newspapers, radio, and television all
moved from a growth phase of wild diversity and limited regulation to a
mature phase of vast monopolies with tightly controlled content; even in
the absence of energy limits, the internet would be likely to follow the
same trajectory, and the rising costs imposed by the end of cheap energy
bid fair to shift that process into overdrive.

The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the
future, because - like other new technologies - it is in the process of
displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more
sustainable basis. The collapse of the newspaper industry is one widely
discussed example of this process at work, but another - the death
spiral of American public libraries - is likely to have a much wider
impact in the decades and centuries to come. Among the most troubling
consequences of the current economic crisis are wholesale cuts in state
and local government funding for libraries. The Florida legislature was
with some difficulty convinced a few weeks ago not to cut every penny of
state support for library systems - roughly a quarter of all the money
that keeps libraries open in Florida - and county and city libraries
from coast to coast are cutting hours, laying off staff, and closing
branches.

Some of the proponents of these budget cuts have been caught in public
insisting that with the rise of the internet, nobody actually needs
public libraries any more. (The fact that many of these people call
themselves conservatives proves, if any additional proof is needed, just
how empty of content today's political labels have become; what exactly
do they think they're conserving?) Now of course public libraries
provide many services the internet doesn't, and it also provides them to
all those people who can't afford internet access. The point I'd like to
make here, though, is that the public library will still be a viable
information technology in a postpetroleum society. When Ben Franklin
founded America's first public library, it may be worth noting, he did
it without benefit of fossil fuels.

If public libraries can be kept open during the waves of economic crisis
that punctuate the decline of civilizations, then, everyone will likely
be the better for it. I am sorry to say that this is probably not the
most likely way things will fall out. The current wave of library
downsizing is probably a harbinger of things to come; pressed between
too many demands and too little funding to go around, library systems -
like public health departments, for example, and a great many other
institutions that make community life viable - are far too likely to
draw the short straw. Exactly this sort of short-term thinking has
driven the loss of vast amounts of information and cultural heritage in
the collapse of past civilizations.

As we move into the penumbra of the deindustrial age, then, it's crucial
to start thinking about the options open to us - individually and
collectively - with an eye toward their long-term viability and to the
hard reality of a world of ecological limits. When today's data centers
are crumbling ruins long since stripped of valuable salvage, and all the
data once stored there has evaporated into whatever realm magnetic
patterns go to when they die, the thinking that led politicians to gut
viable library systems on the assumption that the internet will take up
the slack will look remarkably stupid. Still, the habits of thought
instilled by the age of cheap abundant energy are hard to shake off, and
from within them, such mistakes are hard to avoid.


_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/end-of-information-age.html


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