Best practices for economic collapse: Long Now talk
Mike sez, "In this lecture hosted yesterday by the Long Now Foundation, Dmitri Orlov describes the Russian economic collapse of the 1990s, and explains how he thinks an American decline/collapse would differ:"
Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. . . . Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.Social Collapse Best Practices (Thanks, Mike and all the other people who suggested this!)
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This is a fantastically good rant!
One of my favorite lines: "hobos are almost infinitely compressible".
I live in the desert and have been thinking that it would be a good idea to move somewhere like Kentucky or Washington State before long. It's a lot easier to not die of dehydration in Tacoma.
Word up, I was just reading Stewart Brand's email about this Long Now seminar earlier today. But I first heard of Orlov's Reinventing Collapse here on BoingBoing:
(Looks like it was first mentioned in this thread though.)I love the way he advocates the use of organized crime to overcome the problems of an economic collapse.
While Orlov is a damned readable and convincing writer, the man sometimes annoys me by being alarmist in the extreme and making too many "apples to oranges" comparisons.
Prediction: In ten years, these sorts of survivalist screeds re: the Great American Collapse will strike us as being at least as quaint as those written during every other decade of the last half century.
Sure, sure, most of the planet is in a tight spot economically. Happens. But let's get real for a moment: What was the worst thing to follow the last major global economic collapse? Armies of jobless people zig-zagging about the North American continent in rickety cars searching for jobs, babies getting the skitters from eating nothing but green peaches, starving old men drinking milk straight from the bosoms of saintly young mid-western girls, and global warfare?
#1 Our cars are way better than in those days.
#2 Canned peaches: not so bad, really. In fact, I happen to love 'em. Ate some with my oatmeal this morning.
#3 Breast milk? Yuck. Bitter -- but nutritious.
#4 Global warfare? Honestly, who's got the resources or infrastructure to support that for more than a few months?
The way I see it, rather than running all over the place wailing about imminent collapse, we should simply do what is needed to avert it. What I'm saying is, let's just skip the suffering and go straight to whatever the 21st Century's answer to the Beat Revolution, Cool Jazz and the Invention of Rock and Roll is. We're smart. We've got the technology. So why not make the leap? The solution to our troubles is really very simple. All we need to do is print a heap of money.
Worked for Germany.
Besides, I'm pretty sure Orlov is just having fun at our expense. How else can you explain brain-storms like:
"It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it's often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don't want to part with. If you can't afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood."
A very fun rant, I agree.
If the only thing standing between the US and a frozen, starving, bicycle-delivered, race-war apocalypse is a liquid-fuels crisis, I suspect we'll just burn and gasify/liquefy a crapload more coal. Or maybe build a couple of dozen nuclear powerplants and use that to convert the coal to fuel and fertilizer. Either way, it's even massively politically expedient.
It will be interesting to see which way we end up going. I guess it depends on whether or not we find some way to buy off the citizens of Nevada about Yucca Mountain.
If the article does turn out to be more correct than not, I suspect the next few years will be a bad time to be a mountain in Tennessee.
Most everyone prefers a good catastrophic destruction scenario, something really exceptional and spectacular, to the long, drawn out, boring and menial business of building reality.
Wow, Great Recession '08 is sounding a lot like Y2K '98.
I'm banking on there being a resiliency here.
Yucca Mountain shouldn't be a problem, the citizens of Nevada are going to be very thirsty soon.
I came here to post about almost infinitely compressible hobos and was pleasantly surprised to find that as comment #1!
So the style of the screed is weighed and found to be of surpassing excellence. How about the content? For me, I hope that he's wrong, but fear that he's almost spot-on. The Y2K paranoia never felt reasonable to me, because the root problem seemed so ridiculous. The root problem here (nobody having any money, leading to the collapse of the government and a wholesale transformation of US [and probably global] society) seems the opposite of ridiculous.
Yes, we've seen this sort of thing before, in the 1930's. I would argue that the 1930's US was much closer to the 1990's USSR in terms of the self-sufficiency of its citizens, making them much more able to weather the economic storm than we can. Again I hope I'm wrong on this.
I don't understand why people take this Orlov character seriously: we're paying him to bash Americans. If you read through his blog, all he does is connect a bunch of American stereotypes to a vague theory of economic collapse.
Orlov forgets that while self-sufficiency is not as good as it may be in Russia, our information infrastructure is much better. It seems that as long as the lights / power stay on, information can be had through Internet, TV, and radio. Moreover, Orlov (and many others making these sorts of delusional, paranoid arguments) drives his argument on a theory that people aren't malleable. Yes, if they economy somehow completely collapsed overnight and people stayed the same, things would be bad. Orlov assumes this, suggesting that Americans will just give up. People, however, have a habit of changing and adapting and surviving (it's one of the things we're good at). The idea that hungry Americans would "stand around waiting for somebody to come and feed them" is just unbelievably stupid, narrow-minded, and hateful. I hate to do this (because arguments of this form are often associated with crazy people), but if thinks so poorly of Americans, perhaps he should go live elsewhere.
Overall, I do worry that this sort of stuff is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy (like the economic crisis of the moment).
Previously:
* Underground economics in the USA
* Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
* Tales from the underground economy
* counter-economics
* black market
* economic secession
* financial cryptography
* currency competition
* free banking
Ludwig Erhard:
Wow, I don't even know what to say.
So I'll just make this comment,
Irony: I'm reading about the end of my country on a computer which is powered by the grid, which will collapse. Which was written by someone using a computer, which shouldn't be made because it's not a sustainable product and serves no real purpose to housing, food, or security.
I look forward to my Mad Max: Thunderdome hell on earth post apocalyptical, the air, water, and soil area all contaminated future. (If we had made it a little farther with nano tech/gene therapy I could have added mutants in there too.)
One more comment on 1930's vs. 2000's US self-sufficiency. I'm not saying that our grandparents were intrinsically more self-sufficient than we are. What I mean is that the systems they had to deal with were orders of magnitude simpler than ours, so they were able to deal with them more effectively. I mean everything from their government, their social systems, their banking systems, hell even their cars. Ignition failed on your Model A? You can probably fix it with simple stuff you already own. Try getting out your nail file and burnishing the points. Make sure the distributor cap isn't wet or loose. Ignition failed on your Civic? Good luck fixing the engine control computer/capacitive discharge ignition module/crankshaft angle sensor with that nail file.
Link's no good - Any chance of a mirror or direct link to talk on the TLNF site? Googly-goo isn't turning up anything for me.
Yawn, another C. Doctorow "US 11th hour imminent demise watch posting."
This may have been somewhat conceivable during the Bush years and last summer but now with the rest of world sinking also (albeit temporarily), it's not as entertaining.
Good thing your publishers pay you in Dollars instead of Pounds, right Cory? The City isn't doing too hot right now every time I check the FT.
Where's the jokes about the Krona, all eggs in one basket economy of Russia, creaking ponzi pension programs of Europe?
Alas, the inner workings of the global economic systems in 2009 are as transparent to even the most insightful of us as the vast diversity of global electronic infrastructure was in 1999.
We see examples, we define patterns, we construct models; some point to a clean break, some to abject disaster -- but of necessity we can only base these models on small subsets of the incalculable empirical sum of data.
We can only be as certain of what lies on the other side of this recession as we were of what lay the other side of Y2K.
If duct tape makes you feel safer, then duct tape you shall buy.
Infinitely compressible hobos -- Great band name.
It's interesting to read the comments here. There seems to be a general sense among many readers that the stuff Orlov described can't possibly happen in our lifetimes.
I've got news for you - he's right. It's a matter of when, not if. That oil we're burning up as fast as humanly possible isn't coming back. That mountain of dollar-denominated debt we're producing will turn around and bite us in the ass sooner or later, probably sooner.
One thing about hobos that's difficult to compress - their names. These sturdy names give them substance. Do you have a hobo name, noen? Does it have an N in it?
FYI, here is The Long Now founder Stuart Brand's summary of and comments on Orlov's talk:
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With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as "Goldilocks"---just the right size---when in fact is was "Tinkerbelle," and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach.
Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security.
Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies.
As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it.
The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda.
Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus of mentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient.
By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.
Stewart Brand
The text of Dmitry Orlov's SALT talk is posted at his blog here: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
The slides he used for a famous 2006 talk, "Closing the Collapse Gap," may be found here: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259
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The noen hobo has never been seen Eustace. Just a shadow in the darkness and you're not sure anything was there in the first place.
Ok, can we maybe do something besides compare only to Russia? What about Argentina for instance? They had a hard time, but are back on their feet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999-2002)
Food for thought anyway.
We can't compare ourselves to Russia any more than we can compare ourselves to the Wiemar Republic, Argentina, or the Former Yugoslavia (where I've been living for the last five years, now). It should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has even a slight understanding of how dynamic systems work why not: different situations in each case.
Also, since when does living somewhere until you are 12 years old give you anything more than the shallowest insight into how people get by? For Orlov to assert that he's some sort of expert on the Russian situation just because he lived there as a kid, (or even that he has an extensive understanding of the American Psyche because he has lived and traveled around the country a bit) is laughable on its face.
If someone, let's say, oh, Sarah Palin, asserted that she understood the People of Florida because she had lived in that State until she was 12 before moving to Alaska, would you then re-arrange your your goals for a 21st Century future in Seattle to fit her description of how Floridians survived the 1960's ?
ROFL!
This is right up there with the Stalin vs Martians game.
"Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal."
Anyway, maybe the U.S. will collapse this decade and maybe it won't. The same is true of large chunks of Europe - I'm not so sure about the rest of the world.
If it does, I think Orlov's onto some pretty good ideas (and a lot of these are in line with the kind of thinking I'm seeing out of Bruce Sterling and other "long term thinkers".)
Actually, this is completely in line with the stuff Sterling's been talking about lately. The witty sarcasm fits too.
Here's his summary of Orlov's talk:
"A. Garden all the time
B. Get used to being poor.
C. Put a cork in the bottle and try not to whine"
What you call a depression I call a vacation. I haven't a decent vacation (more than three days off in a row not including weekends) since 1998. I am thinking I need to take some paid vacation just in case my employer goes belly up. Since I work for the IT department I suppose I will be the one in charge of turning out the lights if that ever happens.