Lemmings don’t really rush toward a cliff and throw themselves off when food becomes scarce.
People do that.
We’re doing it right now.
It’s something in human nature.
When a big species is threatened with extinction, hunters rush to kill the last few remaining. Guys in pick-ups go around “rolling coal,” deliberately creating thick black smoke to blind other drivers.
When things become unsustainable, people rush to prove the truth of it.
Proof is All Around Us
Michael Spence at AI Supremacy wrote recently how the data center boom is unsustainable. Their electricity demand will double by 2030. $500 billion will be spent on new builds next year, and big tech companies are now hiding the debt. World models placed in front of LLMs only increase costs, and won’t produce the needed revenue hit either.
Our economy is being driven over a cliff.
Jobs are already scarce. Inflation is rising, debts are increasing. Tax policy is made on a whim, and no one wants to trade with us. People are hurting, so the numbers are disappearing. Health care is being made unaffordable. Grocery prices keep rising, with no one around to harvest the produce.
We know the environment is going to hell.
We are still fighting a war in Europe. China continues to burn coal. America is rejecting cheap solar and wind energy for more expensive oil and gas. African and South American rain forests are disappearing, as are our glaciers and polar ice caps. The trend won’t reverse just because the ice and forests are gone. It will accelerate until the world’s fever kills us like the virus we have become.
Our political path is also unsustainable.
Money is worthless if it’s all in the hands of a few dozen people. Especially if they’re busy abandoning money built on economic output for fake doubloons that ignore that cost. They’re switching ships and figuring they’ll sink the one with debt in it, then ride off into space. They think their private armies can kill the rest of us on their way out.
What Can We Do?
We could start by describing reality accurately. Instead, political opposition stands on the deck of the Titanic, waiting for the orchestra to finish, hoping to inherit its instruments.
My only hope lies in young people. In Africa, where they are in the majority, they’re already revolting. Investors are pulling back from India because they know how young Indians are. We’re not seeing anything in the West only because our young people are such a small percentage of the population.
We know how angry they are. I’m angry, too. But we old-timers are afraid to tell the truth, afraid of the chaos that comes when systems fail.
Our political opposition is feckless. Democrats are useless. Republicans are complicit. Everyone is serving the same master. Welcome to the Larry Ellison Administration. It’s the show Succession brought to life. Old men are ranting, and their incompetent heirs are waiting for them to kick off. Everyone else is hoping to steal the heirs’ money.
Why doesn’t anyone demand the radical change needed to meet the challenges before us? It’s because a call to rationality becomes a call to revolution, and revolutions are, by their nature, no places for old men.
Mad as Hell
I keep hoping the places most supportive of the current insanity might wake up. Every red state has its share of blue state values, just as every blue state has people with red state values. But I also know that red and blue are just habits of the same mind. This isn’t just true in America, but everywhere.
The most wide-awake opposition to our present path, is coming from those committed to racing faster toward the cliff.
No one listened to Jane Goodall, and no one is listening to Greta Thunberg. No one is listening to me because if you were, you would be mad as hell and wouldn’t take it anymore.
Millions born at the birth of our wealthy civilization are alive to see its end
