Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.
2. Countries that have ID cards - like the whole of Europe - still have the same irregular migration problem (you may have heard!!!) & in fact the UK has the lowest share of its economy estimated as irregular economy in Europe so if it fixes the issue WHY DIDNT IT FIX IT THERE?
3. this is not the moment for an incredibly expensive increase in state surveillance infrastructure to be run for profit by private tech firms just before Labour ushers in an (even more) authoritarian right wing government. FIX THE GODDAMN COST OF LIVING INSTEAD YOU FREAKS.
@zoejardiniere.bsky.social Fixing the cost of living involves acknowledging that the incumbent system (finance, fossil carbon, and field agriculture) can't persist and will be replaced. This is not materially impossible but is socially impossible; the incumbents can't volunteer for loss of relative status.
Thus the global authoritarian freakout; change (however urgently necessary) won't be allowed until they can guarantee their continued high relative status.
Which is impossible.
@graydon I know this is obvious to many people but I have just now had the insight that the first criteria for considering any societal change is whether it keeps currently powerful people in power. If the answer to that is “yes,” then the change might be permitted to proceed. If “no,” then the change cannot be allowed to happen — even if that change is needed to save hundreds of millions of lives. Hence: Climate change denialism. OTOH, LGBTQ rights did not, until recently, threaten incumbent power so sure why not let ’em have it.
Also: Presumably field agriculture must be replaced with something more efficient, like greenhouses? (Hopefuly not soylent green.)
@MitchW Well, that's the thing.
Greenhouses are open-loop and require a lot of field agriculturesque things to run; some place to plant the seedlings you started or soil inputs or bees or who knows. And they're all fossil-carbon plastic sheathing as structures nowadays. So, no, greenhouses aren't a reliable post-unstable-climate food supply.
That there isn't a known replacement for field agriculture is the thing under all this panic.
@graydon And presumably, field agriculture needs to be replaced because it is inefficient and burns fossil fuels? Even applying my science-fiction brain I cannot think of a replacement, unless it’s yeast tanks like in 1960s sf.
@MitchW @graydon Field agriculture needs to be replaced because it requires a stable climate and we're losing that. If you can't predict the overall climate a year ahead you can't plan which crops to plant. So you increasingly get random famines. And sooner or later our global supply chains won't be able to move stuff around in sufficient quantities to keep everyone fed. Then we all die.
@MitchW Don’t forget the chlorella tower with Chicken Little in the basement from THE SPACE MERCHANTS.
@cstross @MitchW What Charlie said.
Decarbonizing agriculture would be a job of work and involve many more people doing agricultural work than is presently the case in the North Atlantic economies, but it's one of those "no technical bar" things. Pretty straightforward in the absence of incumbent oligarchs.
Agriculture as a thing sits on six inches of dirt and predictable precipitation, and we're losing both, globally. This is an outside context problem.
@graydon @MitchW I'm not sure decarbonizing agriculture requires *that* much stoop labour: we definitely need to get fossil fuelled vehicles out of fields, but EVs are probably now up to the job. We need to replace petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, but stuff like using engineered McG cycle photosynthesis in crops instead of the C3 pathway may help. And so on.
We *aren't* going to survive if we try to go low-tech or no-tech, though.
@_Infinity As I recall, it was a fixture of 1960s dystopian science fiction. People on an overpopulated Earth ate yeast that was grown in tanks, often altered into inadequate simulacra of steak and other real foods.
@cstross I sometimes think about a Stephen Baxter novella, the premise of which is that civilization is a brief 10,000-year interregnum punctuating millions of years as a hunter-gatherer species. I have forgotten the title of the story, but the premise sticks with me. It’s one of those Olaf Stapledon-esque type stories where there is no main character, just the narrator describing the vast sweep of time and events.
Baxter did include a passing reference to a globe-spanning civilization based on biosciences that lasts hundreds of thousands of years. To which my brain responded, “Wait, what? I want to read more about THAT.”
@cstross Low tech is a disaster (weather satellites are high tech!) and anything that works is likely to involve a lot of industrial vat processes because actual crops are going to become iffy by any means.
High-yield-per-area (multi-cropping such as corn-beans-squash style synergistic planting, etc.) takes much more effort per area; that would itself drive labour requirements upward. Add in redundancy growing and ecologic remediation efforts and there's just more work involved.
@cstross That seems likely. Also, the theory seems like a house built on conjecture. Impossible to predict how human civilization dies when we only have one example and it hasn’t died.
@MitchW @cstross Soylent Green is an incredibly bad idea in epidemiological terms.
Ruminants are effectively bateriophages having evolved a mechanism to operate an internal vat of digestive bacteria. There isn't any obvious reason we can't become eusocial external technoruminants.
Well, aside from it being a non-trivial problem and it might-maybe having been a better idea to have started the development program already.
@graydon I’m going to need to look a lot of that up in the morning. I am the product of an American public education. @cstross@mastodon.social
@graydon @MitchW The fetish of individualism prevalent in the US, then in anglophone, and finally in all western cultures, will NOT accept eusociality as an option. They'll go even more death-cultist than our current-day fash. (Their view of eusociality will be a reflection of "Hellstrom's Hive" by Frank Herbert, dialed up to 11: "kill it with nuclear fire" springs to mind.)
@cstross @MitchW Which is something of a problem since we've been nigh-eusocial since whenever it was that fully modern humans came along.
(And hoo boy does eusociality help to make sense out of why people do such extremely not-in-their-interest things and insist they're just looking out for number one. They've mistaken a specific social group's membership requirements for laws of nature.)
@graydon @cstross I am intrigued by the idea of humans as eusocial organisms — like ants. Not the first time I’ve encountered the idea, but this phrasing puts it in a new light.
A few years ago, I saw an interview with an atheist who was an enthusiast for extreme sports. He said dying did not concern him, it just meant that his consciousness would end and he would return to the Earth. I was watching with someone who is a believer in spirituality and New Age beliefs — she said she believes the same thing.
We are part of a larger whole, and the whole continues when we cease. No man is an island.
Also: The Olduvia Theory seems like clever and intriguing science fiction, but basically baloney. Far too much speculation and back-of-the-envelope calculation.
I can imagine the human race being forced to rely on far fewer resources, and I can — terribly! — imagine a resulting mass death event leaving only 1% of today’s population. But I can’t imagine that we’d simply roll back 10,000 years of civilization.
@MitchW @cstross Olduvia Theory is what happens when you get a fash outlook trying to face facts.
Civilisation is a large group of people deciding every day that they're going to participate. The size of the group determines what you can have. (In part by determining the amount of knowledge; breadth matters far more than is generally acknowledged.) Sudden changes in the group size are problems; you get knowledge that can't be applied or a need for knowledge that isn't available.
@MitchW @cstross Those are both observed in the historical record (too much population too soon means you don't know how to design cities to minimise disease; that knowledge took thousands of years) but none of that is a general failure of the conditions for agriculture.
That's plausibly happened before; there are arguments for attempts at agriculture during the peak glacial 30 kyears BP, or arguments from plant DNA that selective breeding of crops is much older than 10 kyears.
@MitchW @cstross What hasn't happened is a global loss of agriculture in a post-industrial depauperate landscape with about double the industrial carrying capacity of humans in place. That set of conditions is not able to degrade gracefully.
It's important to get from coal, iron, and brass to solar, aluminium, and glass; we need industrial society because it's the only way we can all eat and the extent to which "let the useless starve" means total collapse is not recognised.
@MitchW Any time an approach is deeply concerned with ensuring stability of hierarchy, that's not a bad bet. Throw in being intensely anti-immigration and fixated on fossil carbon as an inescapable law of nature and it becomes extremely challenging to suggest how it might not be.
Remember that the Oil Empire as it exists post-1980 is predicated on a deliberate, conscious policy of genocide of double-digit percentages of all humans to maintain the status quo of American military dominance.