John Michael Greer: The economics of decline

I opened last week

Most of those who objected to this sketch of the future, in turn, relied on a very curious logic. The internet will remain viable and widely accessible, they claimed, because the economic advantages of keeping it are so great. Those few who addressed the issue of costs at all simply insisted that technological progress would allow the internet to use less power than it does at present, and left it at that. The same arguments, interestingly enough, were deployed in earlier discussions about railroad technology: most critics simply insisted that railroads were efficient and economically advantageous, while a few suggested that they could be run more efficiently than they are now.

All this is true, but it misses the central issue I’ve tried to raise in the last few posts