[MD]

A post from energy bulletin that definitely deserves some space and attention on this forum.
linky

[EndOfSewers]

I fail to see his point. By his definition, anything more advanced than a sharp stick puts you in a "dependent power relationship" with someone. As long as you sharpened that stick yourself, by rubbing it on an unrefined stone. Wouldn't want to be dependent on the flint knapper . . .

[gg3]

Bingo! EndOfSewers (clever userID, yo) scores on that one.

Jeff Vail, the author of the linked article, makes the mistake of implying a black/white distinction. Reality is always more complex than that.

His example of the south-facing home obviously fails the test. Cement, steel (rebar), copper pipes, wiring, the toilet, the refrigerator.... A south-facing cave might be OK:-)

The useful concept here, however, is to question the degree to which we give up our autonomy in exchange for things. The hypothetical hunter-gatherer has the greatest freedom, working on average four hours a day for his/her subsistence, and having the rest of the time off to play games, have sex, engage in philosophy, and just hang around enjoying life, plus or minus bacterial disease risks and so on. The suburban commuter with dependent children is a slave, as surely as anyone dragged across the ocean in chains.

And yet, technological dependencies need not lead to hierarchies, nor need life's functionally-necessary hierarchies lead to abusive ones.

What causes all of that mischief is the confluence of greed and laziness. Greed alone is not the problem; the desire for excessive rewards causes little trouble as long as those who desire them are willing to work more and harder to achieve them. Laziness alone is not the problem; the desire for less work causes little trouble as long as those who desire to work less are willing to accept fewer rewards.

The trouble occurs when those who desire excessive rewards are unwilling to themselves do the hard work to achieve them. Thence come the substitutions of others' labors for one's own, first in the form of slaves and later in the form of machinery powered by increasingly portable fuels. And thus comes the treatment of individuals as means to other ends, and thus comes the need for all manner of rationalizations and costly power-structures whose marginal utility decreases at each turn.

We can of course choose to throw the lazy greedies off the edge of the cliff they so skillfully skirt, and so we should do. After all, seven billion humans are five billion too many for this planet to support, and creative culling will soon enough become a preoccupation of the present century.

We can after all have everything from the metal fork with which to eat, to the power-driven tools with which to build our nests, to the uranium-fueled miracles with which to keep our nests warm and our food cold and our dark nights illuminated. We can have them all the more with fewer of us, and especially with fewer of the subspecies of us that conflates its contradictory desires to the detriment of the rest of us.

[JRP3]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', '
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We can of course choose to throw the lazy greedies off the edge of the cliff they so skillfully skirt, and so we should do. After all, seven billion humans are five billion too many for this planet to support, and creative culling will soon enough become a preoccupation of the present century.