June 06, 2013

Is this the Reel Life ?

The net is dead, long live the net. Doesn't quite pack the punch of the king is dead, but for most people the changed form is more relevant. We get seduced into thinking that all knowledge can be at the tips of our fingers, then find that we have an association of uncoordinated facts that requires us to think about what we are being told. The net is so good at giving us what we expect these days, that we wonder how we managed to have a functional society before the computer was invented.

I share the addiction – it is like an alcoholic anonymous meeting. I stand up and say it has been four days since I have logged in and get a small round of applause and encouragement. That I never intended to be isolated off the net for this period only adds to the frustration level of being disconnected. I know that the space of time here is really null, I have spent months off-line in order to get other work done without distraction. It's just that I didn't plan to take the time off, this time.

The phone line has a female drone saying that the line is not currently in service. This may mean a CME strike took it out, or it could mean that nobody paid the bill. There is little information flow except not working. No amount of individual trouble shooting can fix the problem, as the phone is the means of connection to the outside world. Just practice for the party – I know that the net is as far away as a wireless connection … unless that CME was really the big one, which I doubt.

This does create a perfect allegory for something that we all need to pay attention to – the changes from expectation as the society whines its way onward. The things we take for granted may have a duration shorter than our current lifetime. The hot shower first thing in the morning, or the cup of Brazilian coffee, or bananas and cream, all take a behind the scenes production assembly to deliver the product to you at your door? As the resources available diminish, which parts of the established order are going to need replacement to get on with the next life – a localized world built by the people there to construct the world.

I get to chuckle sometimes when I hear my friend, the desk jockey, complain that all the adventure has been taken out of his modern world. Everything to be discovered has already been discovered, he moans. He doesn't realize that humans have lived a short life for many centuries prior to the 'advances' of the past two and an eighth – 2013 is already becoming a show-stopping experience. By missing the day to day rumble of the televised tumble, I get the 'news' third hand in the analysis sheets on a variety of website. Thus the psychoanalysis of Russian children came up before I knew of the marathon bombing and the cock'n'bull story that the lame-stream media presents has more holes than good Swiss cheese.

Let's say that we can scry into the past for peeks at the development of the future. We are confined to living in the immediate now, because here, reading this, is the only place that you are at this minute in this lifetime. It is a fixed point of reference that you can note for future use, or promptly forget by the end of the next sentence. The past is all behind us and the future has yet to be – but the things we know are the things we know, and they are based on the perception of reality that we have developed individually from the collective learning experience. Whether any of this is true or not depends on things we don't know for sure.

Our first look at tomorrow concerns the reality of the peak oil concept. The curves have been presented and the arguments charged by the information concerning the size of the earth, the finite rate of growth of natural production and the constant advance of backward areas that are catching up in the global economy. The game has been discussed in many other places in elaborate detail and we all have our opinions and our vehicles. The weigh we think has absolutely nothing to do with the lifestyle of putting gas in the rig and going to where-ever we need to go. 
 
Developing nations have seen Americans driving personal cars for the past 55 years – when televised America was presented through the shows like Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver and My Mother the Car. Since the Brady Bunch morphed into the Simpsons, personal family vehicles have conveyed an image of wealth and desirability for a privileged lifestyle that is another assumption underpinning the image that the world carries of Americans.

In nature, everything heads toward the average. A statistical anomaly produced early in a basis set may dominate the landscape, but eventually over time, all statistics tend to regulate around two or three standard deviations from the mean. The game has changed to a world where the BRIC has risen. The world war two advantage of having an intact infrastructure meant that America could set the bar for the modern age. Our university system attracted thinkers from all over the world and the images broadcast fit the system that was. Now, 70 years into the future, every country in the world has modern conveniences available to the elite populations.

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have changed the nature of how the world economic system is being played. They have each modernized based on a world view set in capitalist terms by the contracts of expansion into their sovereign territory. The extraction of resources from the third world to America was a wealth pipeline that increased our standards of living artificially, because we could afford to buy things at discount so that resources we distributed by 'trickle down'. 
 
That only worked while the advantages were here – and one look at today's whirled tells me that we have the illusion of being special when we are all quite ordinary. That we Americans allowed export of our factories and mining operations and businesses overseas to places where the costs of production were cheaper, was based on the idea that corporations were not people and that people behind them were responsible for individual actions. The current too big to fail bankster show shows that nobody is enforcing the games – in the end winner takes all – can we get to the next new deal?

The end game depends on your current perspective. You can visit many websites concerning what is coming from people that appeal to you from a like perspective. The doom and gloomers have their Alex Joneses, we have our James Kunstler – everybody has tales from the net, but to experience real life means getting away from reel life. The movie Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) was all about how it could have happened, but it was crazy – we all have our own weigh of looking at things and the common beliefs that we share are manufactured beliefs based on the sum of the things we know.

So concerning peak oil – it seems to me that instead of taking a serious approach to alternative energy, we sold out to big corporations to provide for us and the limit of those provisions has been exceeded. They will milk out every cent that we have, then go elsewhere where the economic conditions allow the populace access to the toys of the game, without the need to spread ones things across a vast disco-ordinated land. The people will need to circle the wagons and will head to the cities, but the food will always be grown on the land, as long as the land can be supported. The infra-structure is threatened by the consolidation of resources, but when the end-point is reached, the common logistics will have to be worked out for each unique situation.

If you have the means to keep gas in the vehicle, you will have access to get to places where you need to be to get things done. The ability to live outside the resource base will be restrictive – the distance that an item travels will be associated with the costs of getting things there. In an economy where oil has greases the skids for almost 100 years, nobody has ever seen anything really different from the perception of today's reality. The movie and television futures are fantastic recreations, but the history of past times has people working together on smaller scale and building community together against tough times.

We live isolated by our video screens. The movies have taken tales of the past, that some of us had read in books, and presented them on the big screen as models of how to do the things we do. The TV tells us how things work, but the mythos of reality is that we assume things are the same for everyone everywhere here and find it hard to grasp that some people do not have phones, or cars, or even homes. The logistics of point and click, of fast food, and of hot cars has seduced us into a debt encased slumber that is more like 24 Hours than Happy Days.

The shift of life is coming, because the reality of the goals are that what we have is not built on value. The way of evaluating worth is to change everything into monetary terms and the only thing that really makes money is money. That the banksters can create debt and use it as a weapon to foreclose on this culture is coming slowly – the large tsunami is coming in an entirely different form that we don't expect. Be aware and ready for anything – take care of keeping the one you operating at full efficiency, as your energy is diverted to doing the things you have to do to maintain this illusion just a little bit longer. 
 
When oil and gas are not available, except at the highest prices, then the ability to keep this infrastructure going stops cold. Modern history has been rewritten by the victors, who justify their spoils – ancient history is recreated in the form of religions, that each tell the same stories in different words and terms, but each tells the same story. Need a flood story? Hello, Noah. My guess is that beliefs will be convergent – that reality will form from the results, rather than from the plans.

Namaste'      doc       052213

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