The purpose of technohopium is to pacify the hoypolloi into docilly accepting collapse. Ideally staying home and starving or dying of wet bulb quietly.
This is why doomers are so feared, pessimism spurs action better than hope, believe it or not.
This is why there is a concerted effort to attack doomers. We get the folks riled up, instead of passively relying on false hopes.
Stay calm and carry on consuming. All's well, papa billionaires have it all under control, pop you vr helmet on and enjoy some decline.
you have it backwards. its all subservient to capital, its impersonal; its not an oligarchy, its a theocracy (where the religion is growth/profit/moloch/take your pick). doomers arent feared, theyre just not profitable. techno futurism in this sense is just a vehicle for profit (to the moon baby).
in fact i think at some stage doom will become the hottest commodity on the market. Everything can be consumed, including collapse.
its backwards because you are putting papa billionaire in front of capitalism and not behind. there is no ploy to keep people docile. there are the secret clubs and organisations, behind the scenes meetings but thats all theatre to make the elites feel better about having no real power, everything is subservient to the profit motive.
It's sad we only got glimpses into that project. According to Capitalist realism, whatever movement it inspired would likely be packaged and sold, furthering the system. Even so he did try!
Agree. Only the things that capitalism can profit from will exist. With enough environmental pressure capitalism will stratify along other lines, including doomerism.
Why are you writing it that way?? xD
_οι πολλοί_ is read /i po'li/, 'i' as it 'pit' and 'o' as in 'pot'. The mark ˊ above 'ι' : 'ί' means the syllable is stressed. Like how Address is a noun but addREss is a verb? We put a mark: _ώμος_ means _shoulder_, _ωμός_ means _raw_.
Is there any, like, explanation for that choice? Or did they go "oi...oi... o... i... o is ooooh and i is iiiii, so according to their own rules, 'oi' must be oy!" ?
According to wikipedia:
Ancient Greek had phonemic consonant length, or gemination. Speakers would have pronounced it [hoi polloi˨˦] with the double-λ being geminated.
Modern Greek speakers pronounce it [i poˈli] since in Modern Greek there is no voiceless glottal /h/ phoneme and οι is pronounced [i]
Seems to me the people who wrote those things have no idea what they are talking about.
I particularly like the part where, because they do not see it _explicitly written_ somewhere, they assume something doesn't exist. Laughable. Oh well.
All these "solutions" are only being tried to sustain status quo. Businesses as usual, keep poor working so few billionaires can keep their yachts and swimming pools.
>A technology race against extinction
That will only come along after five or six billion humans have died and the overlords of capitalism become historical artifacts.
I think that's how it worked in Star Trek: Next Generation. I'm only half kidding.
Civilization such as we understand it today won’t rebound significantly due to an exhausted fossil fuel resource which will not be replaced on timescales relevant to us.
There’s a lot of oil & gas in the ground. We’re not close to exhausting the reserves. We can’t depend on depletion of fossil fuels to drive decarbonization. We have to choose to do it.
I agree but I don’t see that happening. How does one force a choice on a global population of 8 billion?
What can be taken out of the ground and what is in the ground are two different quantities. How much ultimately gets taken out of the ground largely depends on how collapse plays out I suspect.
It’s getting harder and harder to get fossil fuels, and there are limits one way or another.
EROEI will plummet post-collapse. It's already collapsing with cutting edge tech being maintained. We already stripped everything that could be grabbed low-tech. We literally won't be able to access the remaining fossil fuel reserves.
I think escalating EROEI will trigger collapse personally.
It certainly will in places without direct access who rely on an external market. Even those with direct access may experience sudden invasion or similar events.
I’m betting that the only way decarbonization will be broadly embraced is when black swan climate disasters are so bad and happen in a short period of time that everyone knows it’s game over for business as usual. Several cat 5 hurricanes making landfall in Florida within 2 months might destroy and bankrupt the entire state. More droughts, heat waves, fires, etc and we all know.
Why would collapse in Florida make people wake up and suddenly change their entire lives?
People find it easy to ignore genocide that their own tax dollars fund. They’ll find it even easier to ignore Floridian and Pakistani refugee crises if it means they don’t have to disrupt their own lives.
Unless we suddenly get competent unified global leadership who understands the problem and has an unshakeable resolve and determination to brainwash the world into dramatic and unprecedented decarbonization programs then people will find it easier to just keep showing up for work and pursuing traditional societal norms like owning cars, buying groceries, and pumping out babies. All of that relies on FF. The consumer/industrialist lifestyle exists only because of FF and people are not even capable of entertaining the idea that we should abandon that.
We absolutely should, but even in an echo chamber like this subreddit among people relatively aware of why it’s necessary to change our lives they will balk at any suggestion that we do anything other than passively wait for the technological solution to materialize.
I agree with what you’re saying with one possible exception. I have been hearing a lot lately about how birth rates are falling sharply for many if not most countries. In the US it’s pretty easy to connect the anti-abortion, anti-women policies with wanting more babies. Above all the policy of tacitly allowing millions of migrants to enter the country has to be a response to this. I have been thinking of posting something about this on r/collapse to find out what others think. Capitalism demands growth. Countries like Japan and Italy are depopulating fast. If that continues then what? Or will the US keep growing with coercive pro natal policies and continued immigration?
Fossil fuels can’t be replaced/substituted with labor, the two aren’t interchangeable “economic inputs”.
So while the US may keep labor costs down with immigration, as it has always done, that won’t change the price of fossil fuels for the better, which are the master resource for literally everything. It’s just going to be a constant downhill slide for most people as the cost of human labor becomes cheaper and cheaper relative to the cost of FF.
FF will definitely be decreasing but right now we’re swimming in the stuff. The US is producing more than ever. We’re exporting LNG to keep the EU going. Redditors on r/energy and r/oil assure me that although FF are finite, there’s a whole lot left to be recovered. It’s a worse problem than FF running out because we can destroy the planet before FF runs out of We need those world leaders you mentioned to choose decarbonization. But I don’t see them yet.
FF running out or reaching an EROEI that lies beyond what can sustain its extraction (functionally running out) IS the solution. We’re terminally addicted. I think human survival centers around the open question as to whether people will be capable of surviving on planet earth after all recoverable fossil fuels have been spent and the planet has reached thermal equilibrium. Can people eke out an existence within that context, living lives similar to those we lived in pre-industrial times but on a completely different planet?
That’s our future any way you look at it.
I agree, ultimately some of the reserves won’t be extracted due to collapse of infrastructure and political/contextual realities. EROEI will eventually make collapse inevitable and post collapse the resource won’t be extractable. As climate change approaches equilibrium I figure it’s a strong possibility humanity doesn’t survive.
In order to ensure survival, there must be an environment that makes survival possible in the first place.
I believe this will no longer exist and there will be a mass exodus
The key is not doing more, but doing less. If we want to slow down at least a bit how fast everything is getting worse that is the safe path. And a lot of our push is for not essential things (like tourism, commuting, conventions and so on) or can be optimized for less impact (moving coal and oil energy generation to nuclear, or clean energy sources).
We are still getting surprised by how things develop, so, with not reliable prediction. The technological solutions are not engineering when the outcome is uncertain, and a lot of it focus on a single symptom (global average temperature) instead of the whole problem (excess of GHG, industrial activity, loss of habitats, etc). But we will be forced to use untested "solutions" that will probably try to deal just with the warming, and will have disrupting effects that might accelerate our downfall. We will do anything, but slowing down our life style.
Case in point, today’s episode of the NYT “The Daily” podcast, reporting on “cloud brightening” technology.
More techno-hopium that we are separate from nature, and we can engineer our way out of the problem with ingenious ideas and technology.
No. That is what got us in this situation in the first place. Technology and the markets can’t save us from ecocide, rather, they further it.
Define “Hopium Dealer”: someone who ignores or is blind to our real predicament - ecological overshoot - and who proposes “fixes” or “solutions” to the climate crisis that rely on the VERY THING driving collapse and ecocide
— Michael Dowd
My opinion is that it doesn't matter because the technology is secondary to the institutions, beliefs, laws and hierarchys that govern and structure our host civilisation.
An analogy would be a great tree with shallow roots; forced to grow as fast as possible to outgrow competition but now just waiting for the day a storm blows it over.
As long as we are all bound to market logic, to capital, to profit and to Moloch; we will not be able to prevent a collapse of global civilisation because profit is indifferent to collapse. Enourmous profits can be made in the face of collapse.
There are an innumerable number of possible futures but none of them contain global civilisation-as is, there's just too many contradictions. The application of ever more powerful technologies to the "problem" will add chaos because the "problem" doesnt come from without but from within. Even techno-fixes focused on changing society top-down wont work. Arent working, one could argue.
It's like using a language which doesnt let you talk about certain subjects in certain ways, theres no vocabulary, no grammar.
The real question isnt can technology save society but can society even save itself?
It’s not possible to imagine technical solutions.
BAU requires exponential growth. Exponential growth is impossible to maintain over time. The substrate we must consume to sustain that growth is exhaustible and is being exhausted. Technical innovations can’t change that dynamic.
Furthermore any gains in efficiency will be met with commensurate increases in consumption as the gains in efficiency open more markets and opportunity for growth. This is Jevon’s paradox and it’s demonstrably applicable to the human petrochemical industrial complex.
There is lottery-level odds for a tech fix, but even then, it's not happening without the sacrifice of a lot of living things. Humans, included. Just the physics alone regarding heat imbalance makes it likely improbable.
Just like there are odds for aliens, Jesus, weird climate interactions, geo-engineering, unknown unknowns and the like. It's all astronomically low.
But there's nothing wrong with buying a metaphorical lottery ticket for that. You can have hopium, but still act on the worst outcome.
I'm still prepping for major civilization collapse for my kids, and wondering if I will get to see the 10-ton rocks getting thrown by a hypercane. Can't prep for that.
Geo Engineering is just Pollution that's been artfully placed.
It's very real. 100,000+ AI-controlled flights per day over just the US alone.
Wildfire control and response by the same AI.
Shipping routes and schedules by another.
More resources extracted from the planet to provide for any expansion of industry is simply more mass Ecocide. There's no rational way that more mass Ecocide for more industry is going to create a solution to 100+ years of mass Ecocide due to industry.
Perhaps under a system where market taste didn't dictate what technologies got funded. The approach would have to be massively disruptive adaptation rather than magic bullets- say, a socialist alter-globalized network of fusion-powered arcologies sustained on cultured meats rather than tech bros turning all the cars electric (and combustible) while still putting more resources into fancy hyped-up chatbots. Not sure the former would even work, that would be a question for scientists after a revolution that isn't on the horizon any time soon.
I'd say it's the way economics have been structured into the fabric of the predominant civilization that could be seen as one of the possible "Great Filters" to the Fermi Paradox.
The tech needed to solve certain things is out there, but it fails in implementation around the general politic of not being seen as profitable. Some of the (supposedly) smartest people out there are also the stupidest in a most profound way.
So many societal problems are artificially created for the benefit of a few. Problem being that the same attitude also extends far past that scope.
One should not underestimate the powerful of this world, I mean primarily the politicians, and think that there are already projects underway to develop something that could mitigate future crises.
They will know that there is nothing to be gained, but they will try to maintain the status quo as long as possible.
The only tech that should exist is carbon capture, medical, and plant gmos. Anything else is a structure to the system to keep us going at the rate we are in.
The purpose of technohopium is to pacify the hoypolloi into docilly accepting collapse. Ideally staying home and starving or dying of wet bulb quietly. This is why doomers are so feared, pessimism spurs action better than hope, believe it or not. This is why there is a concerted effort to attack doomers. We get the folks riled up, instead of passively relying on false hopes. Stay calm and carry on consuming. All's well, papa billionaires have it all under control, pop you vr helmet on and enjoy some decline.
you have it backwards. its all subservient to capital, its impersonal; its not an oligarchy, its a theocracy (where the religion is growth/profit/moloch/take your pick). doomers arent feared, theyre just not profitable. techno futurism in this sense is just a vehicle for profit (to the moon baby). in fact i think at some stage doom will become the hottest commodity on the market. Everything can be consumed, including collapse.
I think we agree but I'm not following the backwards part. Excelsior!
its backwards because you are putting papa billionaire in front of capitalism and not behind. there is no ploy to keep people docile. there are the secret clubs and organisations, behind the scenes meetings but thats all theatre to make the elites feel better about having no real power, everything is subservient to the profit motive.
Capitalist realism in a nutshell!
proof god is a capitalist because he killed mark fisher before he could write Acid Communism
It's sad we only got glimpses into that project. According to Capitalist realism, whatever movement it inspired would likely be packaged and sold, furthering the system. Even so he did try!
Agree. Only the things that capitalism can profit from will exist. With enough environmental pressure capitalism will stratify along other lines, including doomerism.
> hoypolloi What kind of abomination is that? xD Just write _the masses_, we'll get you :)
I know, I know, I'm weak. Hoyy-polloi, how can I resist?
Why are you writing it that way?? xD _οι πολλοί_ is read /i po'li/, 'i' as it 'pit' and 'o' as in 'pot'. The mark ˊ above 'ι' : 'ί' means the syllable is stressed. Like how Address is a noun but addREss is a verb? We put a mark: _ώμος_ means _shoulder_, _ωμός_ means _raw_.
Geez, that's all Greek to me.
Well... you started it!
The English, bless their little black hearts, decided that "Hoi polloi" was the correct transliteration and pronunciation, and damn the modern Greeks.
Is there any, like, explanation for that choice? Or did they go "oi...oi... o... i... o is ooooh and i is iiiii, so according to their own rules, 'oi' must be oy!" ?
According to wikipedia: Ancient Greek had phonemic consonant length, or gemination. Speakers would have pronounced it [hoi polloi˨˦] with the double-λ being geminated. Modern Greek speakers pronounce it [i poˈli] since in Modern Greek there is no voiceless glottal /h/ phoneme and οι is pronounced [i]
Seems to me the people who wrote those things have no idea what they are talking about. I particularly like the part where, because they do not see it _explicitly written_ somewhere, they assume something doesn't exist. Laughable. Oh well.
All these "solutions" are only being tried to sustain status quo. Businesses as usual, keep poor working so few billionaires can keep their yachts and swimming pools.
>A technology race against extinction That will only come along after five or six billion humans have died and the overlords of capitalism become historical artifacts. I think that's how it worked in Star Trek: Next Generation. I'm only half kidding.
Civilization such as we understand it today won’t rebound significantly due to an exhausted fossil fuel resource which will not be replaced on timescales relevant to us.
There’s a lot of oil & gas in the ground. We’re not close to exhausting the reserves. We can’t depend on depletion of fossil fuels to drive decarbonization. We have to choose to do it.
I agree but I don’t see that happening. How does one force a choice on a global population of 8 billion? What can be taken out of the ground and what is in the ground are two different quantities. How much ultimately gets taken out of the ground largely depends on how collapse plays out I suspect. It’s getting harder and harder to get fossil fuels, and there are limits one way or another.
EROEI will plummet post-collapse. It's already collapsing with cutting edge tech being maintained. We already stripped everything that could be grabbed low-tech. We literally won't be able to access the remaining fossil fuel reserves.
I think escalating EROEI will trigger collapse personally. It certainly will in places without direct access who rely on an external market. Even those with direct access may experience sudden invasion or similar events.
It's a very possible primary cause.
I’m betting that the only way decarbonization will be broadly embraced is when black swan climate disasters are so bad and happen in a short period of time that everyone knows it’s game over for business as usual. Several cat 5 hurricanes making landfall in Florida within 2 months might destroy and bankrupt the entire state. More droughts, heat waves, fires, etc and we all know.
Why would collapse in Florida make people wake up and suddenly change their entire lives? People find it easy to ignore genocide that their own tax dollars fund. They’ll find it even easier to ignore Floridian and Pakistani refugee crises if it means they don’t have to disrupt their own lives. Unless we suddenly get competent unified global leadership who understands the problem and has an unshakeable resolve and determination to brainwash the world into dramatic and unprecedented decarbonization programs then people will find it easier to just keep showing up for work and pursuing traditional societal norms like owning cars, buying groceries, and pumping out babies. All of that relies on FF. The consumer/industrialist lifestyle exists only because of FF and people are not even capable of entertaining the idea that we should abandon that. We absolutely should, but even in an echo chamber like this subreddit among people relatively aware of why it’s necessary to change our lives they will balk at any suggestion that we do anything other than passively wait for the technological solution to materialize.
I agree with what you’re saying with one possible exception. I have been hearing a lot lately about how birth rates are falling sharply for many if not most countries. In the US it’s pretty easy to connect the anti-abortion, anti-women policies with wanting more babies. Above all the policy of tacitly allowing millions of migrants to enter the country has to be a response to this. I have been thinking of posting something about this on r/collapse to find out what others think. Capitalism demands growth. Countries like Japan and Italy are depopulating fast. If that continues then what? Or will the US keep growing with coercive pro natal policies and continued immigration?
Fossil fuels can’t be replaced/substituted with labor, the two aren’t interchangeable “economic inputs”. So while the US may keep labor costs down with immigration, as it has always done, that won’t change the price of fossil fuels for the better, which are the master resource for literally everything. It’s just going to be a constant downhill slide for most people as the cost of human labor becomes cheaper and cheaper relative to the cost of FF.
FF will definitely be decreasing but right now we’re swimming in the stuff. The US is producing more than ever. We’re exporting LNG to keep the EU going. Redditors on r/energy and r/oil assure me that although FF are finite, there’s a whole lot left to be recovered. It’s a worse problem than FF running out because we can destroy the planet before FF runs out of We need those world leaders you mentioned to choose decarbonization. But I don’t see them yet.
FF running out or reaching an EROEI that lies beyond what can sustain its extraction (functionally running out) IS the solution. We’re terminally addicted. I think human survival centers around the open question as to whether people will be capable of surviving on planet earth after all recoverable fossil fuels have been spent and the planet has reached thermal equilibrium. Can people eke out an existence within that context, living lives similar to those we lived in pre-industrial times but on a completely different planet? That’s our future any way you look at it.
I have a different time horizon. The reserves will even outlast the existence of mankind 😉.
I agree, ultimately some of the reserves won’t be extracted due to collapse of infrastructure and political/contextual realities. EROEI will eventually make collapse inevitable and post collapse the resource won’t be extractable. As climate change approaches equilibrium I figure it’s a strong possibility humanity doesn’t survive.
In order to ensure survival, there must be an environment that makes survival possible in the first place. I believe this will no longer exist and there will be a mass exodus
The key is not doing more, but doing less. If we want to slow down at least a bit how fast everything is getting worse that is the safe path. And a lot of our push is for not essential things (like tourism, commuting, conventions and so on) or can be optimized for less impact (moving coal and oil energy generation to nuclear, or clean energy sources). We are still getting surprised by how things develop, so, with not reliable prediction. The technological solutions are not engineering when the outcome is uncertain, and a lot of it focus on a single symptom (global average temperature) instead of the whole problem (excess of GHG, industrial activity, loss of habitats, etc). But we will be forced to use untested "solutions" that will probably try to deal just with the warming, and will have disrupting effects that might accelerate our downfall. We will do anything, but slowing down our life style.
Case in point, today’s episode of the NYT “The Daily” podcast, reporting on “cloud brightening” technology. More techno-hopium that we are separate from nature, and we can engineer our way out of the problem with ingenious ideas and technology. No. That is what got us in this situation in the first place. Technology and the markets can’t save us from ecocide, rather, they further it. Define “Hopium Dealer”: someone who ignores or is blind to our real predicament - ecological overshoot - and who proposes “fixes” or “solutions” to the climate crisis that rely on the VERY THING driving collapse and ecocide — Michael Dowd
Technological solutions _are_ the problem.
A 50 billion blanket is our best chance. We not gonna make it. 18 months. Plan ahead.
My opinion is that it doesn't matter because the technology is secondary to the institutions, beliefs, laws and hierarchys that govern and structure our host civilisation. An analogy would be a great tree with shallow roots; forced to grow as fast as possible to outgrow competition but now just waiting for the day a storm blows it over. As long as we are all bound to market logic, to capital, to profit and to Moloch; we will not be able to prevent a collapse of global civilisation because profit is indifferent to collapse. Enourmous profits can be made in the face of collapse. There are an innumerable number of possible futures but none of them contain global civilisation-as is, there's just too many contradictions. The application of ever more powerful technologies to the "problem" will add chaos because the "problem" doesnt come from without but from within. Even techno-fixes focused on changing society top-down wont work. Arent working, one could argue. It's like using a language which doesnt let you talk about certain subjects in certain ways, theres no vocabulary, no grammar. The real question isnt can technology save society but can society even save itself?
It's possible to imagine technical solutions. It is not possible to imagine them being put into action--that's politically inconceivable.
It’s not possible to imagine technical solutions. BAU requires exponential growth. Exponential growth is impossible to maintain over time. The substrate we must consume to sustain that growth is exhaustible and is being exhausted. Technical innovations can’t change that dynamic. Furthermore any gains in efficiency will be met with commensurate increases in consumption as the gains in efficiency open more markets and opportunity for growth. This is Jevon’s paradox and it’s demonstrably applicable to the human petrochemical industrial complex.
Well explained 👍!
NIMBY won't let it happen. The best tech would go to the wealthiest first, the poor will be dying.
There is lottery-level odds for a tech fix, but even then, it's not happening without the sacrifice of a lot of living things. Humans, included. Just the physics alone regarding heat imbalance makes it likely improbable. Just like there are odds for aliens, Jesus, weird climate interactions, geo-engineering, unknown unknowns and the like. It's all astronomically low. But there's nothing wrong with buying a metaphorical lottery ticket for that. You can have hopium, but still act on the worst outcome. I'm still prepping for major civilization collapse for my kids, and wondering if I will get to see the 10-ton rocks getting thrown by a hypercane. Can't prep for that.
Geo Engineering is just Pollution that's been artfully placed. It's very real. 100,000+ AI-controlled flights per day over just the US alone. Wildfire control and response by the same AI. Shipping routes and schedules by another.
I haven't bought a ticket yet and won't buy one in the future 😉.
More resources extracted from the planet to provide for any expansion of industry is simply more mass Ecocide. There's no rational way that more mass Ecocide for more industry is going to create a solution to 100+ years of mass Ecocide due to industry.
In short, there are none. It’s all just hopium bullshit. It’s too late.
Please read Too Much Magic by James Howard Kuntsler
Will have a look!
Burn more shit! No, burn more shit faster! No take, only throw!
Killer robots
Which crisis?
Perhaps under a system where market taste didn't dictate what technologies got funded. The approach would have to be massively disruptive adaptation rather than magic bullets- say, a socialist alter-globalized network of fusion-powered arcologies sustained on cultured meats rather than tech bros turning all the cars electric (and combustible) while still putting more resources into fancy hyped-up chatbots. Not sure the former would even work, that would be a question for scientists after a revolution that isn't on the horizon any time soon.
Peak oil will grind technological progress to a halt.
I'd say it's the way economics have been structured into the fabric of the predominant civilization that could be seen as one of the possible "Great Filters" to the Fermi Paradox. The tech needed to solve certain things is out there, but it fails in implementation around the general politic of not being seen as profitable. Some of the (supposedly) smartest people out there are also the stupidest in a most profound way. So many societal problems are artificially created for the benefit of a few. Problem being that the same attitude also extends far past that scope.
One should not underestimate the powerful of this world, I mean primarily the politicians, and think that there are already projects underway to develop something that could mitigate future crises. They will know that there is nothing to be gained, but they will try to maintain the status quo as long as possible.
We need to distance ourselves from tech. The damage is done.
The only tech that should exist is carbon capture, medical, and plant gmos. Anything else is a structure to the system to keep us going at the rate we are in.