It interests me to reflect that the way things are temporarily is the way people define normality, and think things will always be, so that if you are living in a big city like New York where so much remaining wealth is concentrated, and you are dazzled by the whirr and flash of things, including all the pretty young people drilling into their iPhones, you might expect a longer arc to the moment at hand.

     Out here in the provinces it’s a different story. The exhaustion is palpable. I dropped into the mall at mid-day on Sunday to take the pulse on the ballyhooed post-Thanksgiving ritual shopping frenzy and the place was like a ghost town. The sparse stream of supposed “consumers” had the dazed, beaten-down look of people pushed beyond the edge of some dark threshold, like displaced persons in a low-grade war zone.

     Their behavior seemed ceremonial, though, mere acting-out as opposed to acting. They were not carrying bags with purchases. I saw almost nobody actually shopping, that is, fingering the merchandise, in either the two department stores I passed through or the smaller shops lining the corridors. There were strikingly few clerks in either the big or little retail operations and you got the feeling that these stores were now expected to run on automatic pilot, with a skeleton crew of employees because the margins just aren’t there anymore. They are going through the motions of being in business, and when Christmas is over some will not be there anymore. America has had enough, notwithstanding the latest YouTube videos showing crazed mobs fighting over worthless plastic crap at the “Black Friday” WalMart openings elsewhere around the country.

     The physical condition of our so-called towns (many of them just “facilities” smeared carelessly over the landscape) is something else. We are not taking care of our property in part because we don’t have the money, but also because so much of it is obviously not worth caring about, was not designed and built to be cared for – and anyway, there is the lure of the narcotic flat-screen television within to distract anyone with a fugitive thought of opposing the pervasive entropy of these times. The disgrace of this nation – I mean it quite literally – is now total, from our bodies to everything around us. We are entropy made visible.

     Variations on this exhaustion are playing out in other parts of the “advanced” world, Europe and Japan, where all the money-related parts of the modernity machine have gravel in their gears and are grinding into self-destruction. China will get to the same event horizon soon, too, despite the fact that so much of their stuff is brand-new – after all, what use is a set of new super-highways if Brent crude prices remain above $110?

     What if we just accept the reality that the industrial spree was a self-limiting adventure and now we have to move on? What do we give up? What do we actually do with our time and effort?

     There’s a clear trend to give up on the gigantic nation-state, at least in its current corporatist configuration, most recently in Spain with separatists winning this week’s election in the northern province of Catalonia. Perhaps greater Spain will now join the defunct entities of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR. There are rumblings of “secession” here in North America now, where a certain moron-inflected cohort favors a replay of the Civil War, largely for sentimental reasons instilled by TV. What Dixieland doesn’t seem to grok is the unraveling of its own Sunbelt miracle economy which was, in effect, a suburban development bubble, and which will land them back in a ditch with a sack of turnips like Jeeter Lester’s family in Tobacco Road.

     Here are some trends we would benefit from getting comfortable with:

     Globalism is withering and will end with a whimper (sorry, Tom Friedman). The economy of North America will become much more internally focused in the decades ahead. If you are young, think about getting into the boat business on the continent’s magnificent inland waterway system. There will be no more trucking to move stuff around, and at the rate we’re going the railroads will never be fixed.

    National chain retail will be dying as its economies-of-scale vanish. WalMart and everything like it will be gone. No more Black Friday toy riots. Sorry. If you are young, think about getting into some kind of local business that will play a role in your rebuilt local economic network. There will be plenty of work for you, but not so much new cheap plastic crap to hassle with. Lots of opportunities for the business-minded!

     Farming comes back to the center of economic life. Hard to believe, I’m sure, if you live in an iPhone fantasy-land of apps and tweets. Forget all that stupid shit. The electric grid will certainly fail, or at least fail to be reliable enough to matter, in the next couple decades, and the real value in human existence will be using the land to produce a living. Lots of opportunities for young people who like to work outside. Also, some chance of political revolution to expedite changes in land tenure.

     Farewell to the auto age and hello again to real communities. Hard to believe, I’m sure, as you read this in traffic on your iPad, but your commuting days are numbered. Indeed the whole car thing comes to a rather stunningly abrupt halt – though we are certainly doing everything possible now to prop it up. The old Herb Stein formulation will apply here: people do what they can until they can’t, and then they don’t. The implications in this for how we inhabit the landscape going forward are rather huge. Find a nice small town on a waterway surrounded by farmland and get ready to have a life.

     In the meantime, as these circumstances roil in the background, you can be sure that the people running things will campaign strenuously to keep the current set of rackets running. The results will be sad and possibly terrifying. Be brave and seek opportunity in these epochal changes. Modernity has nearly put us out of business. Leave the exhausted enterprise behind and be human for while. Enjoy the time-out from techno-progress that is at hand. It will be something to be grateful for.

13 Comments on "Kunstler: Modernity Bites"

Ken Nohe on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 9:29 pm 



Like many people I enjoy Kunstler weekly posts because they are so well written. He pounces against suburbia and the soon to be ghosts of our past prosperity, denouncing the illusion it always was with such a beautiful prose that it becomes hard to grieve for the soon-to-be empty shells of closed down gas stations and retails chains.

He may well be right for what I know but I sincerely wonder how nice life will be in the new “local communities” close to the “continent’s magnificent inland waterways” with the New York urban corpse rotting 100 miles away. History shows that when civilizations crumble, waterways bring more barbarians with axes than peaceful traders with goods. Isolated and well defended monasteries might be better places to weather the storm!

Arthur on Wed, 28th Nov 2012 9:41 pm 



“Globalism is withering and will end with a whimper (sorry, Tom Friedman).”

Hard to admit for Tribe members as it puts an end to millenia old Talmudic dreams of global domination, but Kunstler is the rare exception. Excellent story, as usual. Except of course for his estimation of the survival chances of modern low energy footprint communication devices, like the one he is using to spread this message. He writes them off too easily. They will be around long after the car has gone as one of the few leftovers of modernity.

Beery on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 12:19 am 



“History shows that when civilizations crumble, waterways bring more barbarians with axes than peaceful traders with goods.”

Actually, history shows quite the opposite. It’s nice to think that Vikings were just nutty maniacs bent on rape and pillage (makes history lessons more fun), but that’s mostly based on to one raid that got plenty of press because the Christian church used it as (very effective) propaganda. People (even people who worship Thor) usually prefer safe profit to risky pillage.

BillT on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 12:49 am 



Arthur, do you really think that the internet is going to survive? I don’t. I expect it to be one of the first things to go in the crash. All of the energy used to power up and maintain those thousands of towers, satellites, and hardware manned by many thousands of educated people around the world. Hardware manufactured with rare earths gathered from many locations in many countries. No, I expect it to go back to the military and then to totally disappear. You won’t need it then anyway. You won’t be able to afford the luxury even if it is available.

Ken Nohe on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 1:44 am 



Beery, you are joking, I am sure! The reputation of the Vikings is based on much more than an isolated raid “that got plenty of press”! They ravaged the coast of Western Europe for over a century. Came up the Seine to Paris, menacing the capital and were given Normandy to stay quiet, Went all the way to Sicily, leaving “warm feeling” along the way… as well as burnt cities.

But I was not just referring to the Vikings. The Russ, another Nordic tribe were not wimps either and traveled all the waterways they could. The Vandals made a name for themselves which has survived eons. And that is just for the fall of Rome. Elsewhere, the “Wajin” (Japanese) visited sporadically the coast of China whenever the Empire was weak and as they didn’t have cameras yet, they had to take back everything they saw as souvenirs.

You are right though that usually people prefer to trade than to wage wars, but this doesn’t hold in troubled periods when people are under pressure for survival. And the kind of transformation that Kunstler predicts would most certainly be the cause of much trouble and pressure. You do not feed a city with garden patches on balconies!

MrEnergyCzar on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 3:50 am 



Read his World Made by Hand, very descriptive post peak oil novel….

MrEnergyCzar

Arthur on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 10:47 am 



BillT, we had this exchange now at least three times, but you never respond to my argument… the internet had an enormous impact on the lives of hundreds of millions on this planet and even in the third world billions had at least the internet experience, although not through the luxury of a connection of their own. Again:

http://tinyurl.com/c8utcyy

The energy costs of the internet are now between 1.1 and 1.9% of the total planetary energy consumption, and this is not just current from the wall socket but also the energy cost of producing and replacing ALL the necessary hardware. That is currently ca. 250 GW. But even this low number is goingto decrease since all these relatively high desktop and laptop computers are going to be replaced by tablets, which consume 2-10 Watt. But even this energy consumption can be slashed. ARM is producing a new generation microprocessors that consume merely 0.1 watt. Apple is considering replacing Intel with ARM. The Amazon kindle has a screen that exactly needs ZERO energy when displaying a static screen, it only needs a tiny amount of energy to go to the next page. You can read for a month non stop on a single charge. This kind of IT has only one lower end energy consumption boundary, namely zero. The te technology is too valuable, too useful to let go.

And please, forget about this idee fixe that the internet requires satellites, it does not. All you need is cables and they are already in the ground for the next 100 years. My mother still uses the some bakellite phone provided by the PTT 60 years ago. The PTT is long gone, but not the phone.lol it is true that the replacement rate of the tablets is going to decrease, so what. My parents had their first black and white tv for twenty years before they changed to colour. Will not be different for tablets.

The future is large windturbines next to every village, solar panels on every roof, the remaining carbon fuel is used to maintain that energy infrastructure, cars and planes are largely gone… and everybody is connected, communicating, informed, educated and entertained through the internet.

BillT on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 11:12 am 



Dream on Arthur…You are in more denial than SOS aka econ101. The internet is probably the most complex system in the world today and complex systems are usually the first to go in any downturn.

250 GW is not a small number after oil. And, it is not the energy that will prevent the inter net from existing, it is the hardware that will go first. Do you really compare the built-to-last TVs of old to the planned obsolescence of today’s junk? lol. You I-pad will be useless withing 5 years if you cannot buy an new one. Ditto any of the mass produced junk sold for profit today.

Besides the fact that it all depends on the world’s financial system to exist in the first place, or to continue. Cables are not permanent and will not survive the wars coming. Nor will private citizen’s use of the net. Wait and see.

BTW: I don’t put my trust in videos, so I rarely watch them and never watch TV. All paid-for propaganda from one source or another.

BillT on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 11:15 am 



BTW: Berkley is definitely one source I would never read or believe. Who pays their salaries? Apple? Microsoft? Google? ^_^ Always look at who signs the check to see the spin.

Arthur on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 12:29 pm 



“Dream on Arthur…You are in more denial than SOS aka econ101. The internet is probably the most complex system in the world today and complex systems are usually the first to go in any downturn.”

The complexity is in the software, but that has been written and is stable. The internet is plug and play. Besides there are vast armies of smart unemployed, even in the third world, to keep it going. Complexity is not an issue, energy and resources are. When large industrial complexes like car factories will come crashing down, there will be lot’s of competent people yearning for a new technological task. They can eat their heart out in IT.

“250 GW is not a small number after oil.”

Do not look at absolute numbers, look at percentages. It is ca. 1.5% of the total planetary energy budget now, it will be 0.15% soon with ever more downward potential.

“Do you really compare the built-to-last TVs of old to the planned obsolescence of today’s junk?”

Tablets are not junk, they are very compact devices with zero moving parts, apart from the power button. Screens go on for ever, like microchips. Usually it is a harddisk crash that terminates the life of a PC and tablets do not have harddisks. The battery probably needs to be replaced after 1000 charges (3 years). But I see no reason why a tablet could not continue to function for 1-2 decades, in case you are very poor.

“Cables are not permanent and will not survive the wars coming.”

That’s a joke. Not even the US army contemplated switching off the mobile grid in Iraq, so insurgents could continue to use it for IEDs. Are you really expecting armies to dig up cables? There is not going to be a war in Europe or middle America, so nobody is going to touch these cables there.

“Berkley is definitely one source I would never read or believe. ”

That’s paranoia. I worked at a university… you sit in a room for 1-2 years, you write your piece, have it peer reviewed by a prof and another higher up and that’s it. Energy consumption of computer devices is a topic that is not politically charged like 9/11 or the holocaust. You can say what you want provided you can substantiate it. I believe Berkely in this.

Arthur on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 2:07 pm 



BTW, I recently checked that my iPod of 2002 still works… not that I ever use it. No reason why it should not work in 10 years time. Again, no moving parts.

Yesterday it was announced on the news that for the first time since WW2 the Amsterdam car show will not take place. Yet everybody wants an iPad, iPhone5, Amazon kindle fire, the latest Samsung smart phone, etc.

Sign of the times. Oil out, data/photons in. Milliwatts instead of Megawatts. If it has moving parts, it is out, solid state is in (microchips, flash memory, solar cells). We are not falling back to previous times, we are moving into something new. Technology is good as long as it has a low energy footprint. Once people bought “long-playing records”… these plastic discs required to put your 90 kg body into a 1400 kg car, to drive to the record shop to buy an LP that had been delivered to the shop by a truck, produced in a foreign land. Today you can order essentially the same product while sitting on the toilet waiting for things to come. Out of thin air, so to speak, thanks to wifi. Zero material cost, merely a few ‘combed bits’ on your gadget and mutated bits on your bank account. That’s progress in a resource depleted world.

Ham on Thu, 29th Nov 2012 3:45 pm 



‘Screens go on for ever, like microchips’
Without Gallium it is doubtful that screens will be continuing forever. Granted there will be lots of unemployed, the caveat is that they will have to work on land, otherwise we will starve. In Africa they cannibalise computer parts that end up in a toxic waste land.

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0806/ref.shtml

christian phillip on Mon, 3rd Dec 2012 10:44 pm 



hahahaa…yoyo’s get ready for cannibalism and swallow your pain…humanity does not deserve anything else after so many extinctions…this was my final conclusion, about this pest on this planet, and i wish that Kunstler may find it out sooner or later….there is nothing worthy to save…and nothing will…well, of course i hope not in my lifetime,as i am nopt suicidal…enjoy…