[p2p-research] James Howard Kunstler

[Kevin Carson]

On 6/23/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> This resliance theory was very hot in the graduate schools in the early
> 2000s.  I find it interesting but I doubt strongly it is right.  Things
> actually do fall apart to borrow from Achebe.
>
> The evidence for that seems to be that things don't organize when they are
> bad--as in most of Africa, or Burma, etc.--some of which I too have seen
> firsthand.  In short, with all the freeware in the world, undereducated folk
> don't spontaneously start functioning bureacracies which are notorious
> difficult to achieve--witness the Middle Ages.

That's probably true.  But there's a whole long series of steps
between here and Mad Max, and there are all kinds of dynamic/reactive
mechanisms that make it unlikely we'll get from here to there.  During
all those intermediate steps, I would expect market signals from the
rising cost of fuel to create powerful incentives for telecommuting
and teleconferencing in the place of physical meatspace presence
wherever it was feasible, and I would likewise expect powerful
incentives for substituting the movement of digital designs for the
movement of physical products wherever decentralized
micromanufacturing was feasible.  It is these incentives in the
intermediate range that make me doubt the Internet's physical
infrastructure will be allowed to fail, or that we'll ever get to the
Mad Max stage.  I have no doubt certain centralized infrastructures
will collapse, but the infrastructure of the Internet is more akin to
the Roman villas -- i.e., the kernel of the successor society -- than
it is to the part that's doomed.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html