John Michael Greer writes essays on politics, culture, technology, and the decline of industrial society, with a focus on long-term trends.
Commenters praise Greer's essays as thought-provoking, citing his coinage 'lenocracy' and the Tolkien piece, and recommend the site for broadening one's view of the world.
From The Terror of Deep Time[0] in Ecosophia:
Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.
Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car. People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.
Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have…
>IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive.
Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of those things. Well, unless we develop "antigravity" or something...
Add the possibility of huge damage caused from a failing/failing/crashing flying car, not just to the road and other cars there (like with a car) but to any building, group of people, etc. If it was a car-replacement (and thus getting on it was laxer than flying a plane, with flight plans, airport checks, special licenses), it would also be perfect for suicide terrorism too!
Here's a funny but insightful post I've found, hammering on the topic:
Listen to most discussions of flying cars on the privileged end of the geekoisie and you can count on hearing a very familiar sort of rhetoric endlessly rehashed. Flying cars first appeared in science fiction—everyone agrees with that—and now that we have really advanced technology, we ought to be able to make flying cars. QED! The thing that’s left out of most of these bursts of gizmocentric cheerleading is that we’ve had flying cars for more than a century now, we know exactly how well they work, and—ahem—that’s the reason nobody drives flying…
Canada, like most other global north countries (regions), cannot maintain its economy - at least in the expected way, that is of ever-increasing GDP as has been the trend for the last 75+ years - based upon birth rate alone. We are below the replacement rate. Demographics, another aspect of the so-called poly crisis whereby we see and interact with the world through the lens of the left-brain hemisphere, isolated and reductionist, rather than a necessary and more holistic "big picture" global view.
For an interesting and relatively plain language view:
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
J.M. Greer recently wrote a post that elegantly makes the same argument. It's the best essay I've read this year, and I think about it quite a lot, actually. He's right about Tolkien, too.
> https://www.ecosophia.net/the-three-stigmata-of-j-r-r-tolkien/
> . . . It’s occurred to me more than once recently that one of the most distinctive things about the Western cultures of the last century or so is the way it’s become so obsessed with wholly imaginary worlds, as different as possible from the one we actually inhabit. That’s a very odd habit, when you stop and think about it.
FWIW, John Michael Greer recently outlined[1] some alternative philosophies in political economy (including cooperatism, distributism and social credit), aiming to spur increased imagination. He cites numerous alternative resources, enough to suggest a study list or initial-study guide.
[1] https://www.ecosophia.net/reimagining-political-economy/
John Michael Greer has a great term for this.
Lenocracy. The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp.
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-lenocracy/
Like most of Greers writing, it makes you think and also wonder what is in the water at his house.