Consciousness of Sheep
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Sometime in the early 1990s, A UK police researcher finally took seriously something that was so commonplace that it had previously been ignored. This was the widespread “excuse” that drivers were making when stopped for speeding… “I didn’t realise I was going so fast.” In law, not so much an excuse as an admission of driving without due care and attention. For most people involved in policing, from the Home Secretary down to the lowliest constable, the excuse was met with Mandy Rice-Davies’ infamous courtroom retort, “they would say that, wouldn’t they.”
To that one researcher though, the growth in the use of that excuse pointed to something real. Why were more and more motorists not realising that they were breaking the speed limit? The answer(s) pointed to a small revolution in UK driving. Improved road surfacing techniques (in an era when the UK could still afford them) made major roads much smoother and much quieter. At the same time, new car suspension systems, such as those in the Ford Mondeo which came out in 1992, along with better streamlining had made cars themselves quieter and smoother. The result, for a generation of drivers who had grown up with Morris Minors, Triumph Heralds, Ford Anglias, and Hilman Imps, was a sudden loss of the sensory clues which used to indicate an increase in speed… speeding drivers were telling police officers that they didn’t know they were speeding because they really didn’t know they were speeding.
I relate this story to illustrate that just because something sounds implausible, there may still be something real behind it. Which is why I want to examine a crop of improbable junk sci-fi stories being repeated on the YouTube platform just now. These revolve around the claim that the world came to an end sometime in the early 2000s, but we somehow failed to notice. The reasons given for this are borderline insane – the world was destroyed by a comet in 1999, and we are just living through the “world flashing before our eyes” moment that is believed to occur at the moment of death; or, perhaps, the Mayans were right, the world came to an end in 2012 as a result of the particle collision which revealed the Higgs-Boson “God particle;” or, maybe the AI which has been running the Matrix all of this time began glitching.
Whatever. I want to suggest that, just like that 1990s police researcher, it is the evidence offered for these whacky tales which tells us that there is something real behind them. That evidence falls within a broad complaint commonly expressed by right-leaning political commentators, that “nothing ever happens.” Politically, the same uniparty which took over in the early-1980s, is still governing us. Economically, the same grindingly slow process of decline which began back then is still lowering our standard of living. Despite the vast energy devoted to protest movements around everything from reversing climate change to saving the local library, the system continues unphased. But it is within the mainstream culture that we find the greatest evidence for a world that came to an end in the early-2000s. Consider the many hundreds of remakes of movies from earlier eras, which suggest that we lost the ability to create new stories. Consider the fashions of previous decades, which allow us to easily distinguish the ‘50s from the ‘60s and the ‘70s from the ‘80s. But the Britpop 1990s are the final moment when we can do this. Since then, each decade has merged seamlessly with the next, with no discernible difference. Then consider (the collapse of) music, with each hit record of the current century using the same four chords and sounding more or less the same.
But it isn’t just the culture. The amount of scientific research continues to mushroom, but the amount of truly disruptive research has collapsed. The result being that almost nobody is seeking solutions to the multitudes of crises beginning to wash over us even as the grant-making bodies spend billions repeating research that has already been done.
Big Tech seems to have spent the past quarter century engaging in a process of enshitification – turning perfectly good and useful applications into ever more useless and annoying ones in the sole purpose of “growth.” Facebook, for example, used to be a place where you could catch up with what your friends and relatives were up to, while joining up with people who shared your interests. Today, in pursuit of growing “attention,” it has turned into a cesspool of slop and clickbait advertising interspersed with just enough content from your friends to keep you coming back for more.
The crisis of economics, politics and governance would seem to underlie this ossification. Economists, trained in the primitive observations of the enlightenment era, offer models so detached from reality that they make casting runes look scientific. Politics, drawing on these erroneous models, has become formulaic, as the neoliberal professional gobshites who populate parliaments these days spout words that barely anyone expects to ever be put into action. Meanwhile governance, as practiced by entrenched managerialists follows a kind of reverse Midas approach in which everything they touch turns to shit.
Okay, the world almost certainly didn’t end in 1999 or 2012 – although a growing number might wish it had done – but this observation of the way everything seems to have stagnated since then does seem to have some grounding in reality. In the UK, the inability to change anything (save for the worse) has led to growing support for some form of military coup to usher in the kind of “strongman” leadership that might just break the impasse, while in the USA, many seem to fear (or hope) that Donald Trump is precisely that type of strongman.
This development requires that we dig deeper still and examine the widely-held view that civilisations – like people – go through a cycle of birth, development, maturity, decline, and death… with very few enjoying a rebirth. This, of course, is a very different view to the religion of progress that has dominated throughout the modern era, in which, and despite periodic setbacks, our civilisational progress is ever onward and upward. Nevertheless, we can count on one hand the number of civilisations which have enjoyed a rebirth after their decline. Byzantian Rome provides one example. The various Chinese empires another. Less dramatically, the recovery of the British Empire following the loss of America, and the Soviet bloc that arose from the ashes of the Russian Empire might also count. But for the most part, even the greatest civilisations seem destined to collapse into ruin eventually.
The Greek historian Polybius was one of the first to document the cycle of civilisational birth and death via a process he termed “anacyclosis.” Nor was this a purely academic exercise. Born in 198BC, Polybius had witnessed first hand the triumph of a powerful Roman Republic over the city states of ancient Greece… Polybius himself taken to Rome as a hostage (although enjoying considerable freedom to observe the mechanics of the Roman system and even to accompany armies on their campaigns). This allowed Polybius to claim that the Romans had discovered the secret sauce which prevented their decline and fall (although if he had lived a few decades longer he would have witnessed the corruption and conflict which caused the Romans to morph from a republic to an empire).
Polybius’s cycle comes in seven stages. First, is a kind of distressed primitive anarchy in which nobody is in charge. But sooner or later, in stage two, a warlord emerges to impose order, ushering in a monarchy. Monarchy – particularly where it is heredity – gradually descends into stage three, tyranny, until such times as even the elites become fed up, and usher in stage four – aristocracy. Aristocrats though, tend to become self-interested over time, leading to stage five – oligarchy. Eventually, oligarchy is overthrown by a popular uprising which ushers in stage six – democracy. But democracy is susceptible to corruption and grift, with representatives making false promises while imposing increased taxes at every opportunity. Until ultimately – stage seven – the civilisation descends into chaos and a dark age ensues.
The Roman Republic appeared to have overcome this cycle by balancing the three positives – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a way which prevented any one of the three negatives – tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy – from breaking out. And it is worth noting that both the British and the American empires in the modern era adopted similar checks and balances – Britain having an actual king (monarchy) a house of Lords (aristocracy) and a house of commons (democracy). America a pseudo, presidential king (monarchy) a judiciary (aristocracy) and a congress (democracy). But note also that over time both systems have been pushed remorselessly in the direction of democracy even as democracy has become ever more venal.
Missing from Polybius’s thinking is an explanation of why the Roman Republic should have risen to greatness in the first place. My regular readers will likely guess my own explanation… energy. Broadly, civilisations and empires rise and fall according to the surplus energy available to them and to their technical ability to exploit it. In pre-industrial – renewable energy – civilisations, this was intimately tied up with climate change. And corresponding to the apex of Rome was the early-Roman warm period which resulted in a benign climate across the northern Mediterranean. This spurred improved agricultural yields and tree growth – the two main energy sources of the pre-industrial world. It may well be that the Roman Republic’s system of government aided its optimisation of these energy sources, building a strong economy at home and allowing conquest abroad.
Conquest allowed the plunder of other peoples’ economies, giving a huge boost to the Roman economy. But – as always happens with empires – conquest comes at a cost in the longer term. The empire has to maintain a military to prevent the conquered state seeking revenge and/or the empire must devote resources to administering the newly acquired territories. Furthermore, the distribution of the plunder was unequal, with favoured families enjoying far more of the new wealth than those further down the pecking order. Less obviously, the creation of new provinces created de facto alternative states which might rise up to overthrow the imperial rulers. This happened on several occasions in Britain, where the need to quell local unrest resulted in the Roman garrison being large enough for it to be used as an army to march on Rome.
As with Europe in the Middle Ages, Rome burned its trees to the point where energy declined to dangerous levels. At the same time, relatively slow infantry was replaced with faster but more energy intense (fodder) cavalry. While, in an attempt to weaken provincial rebelliousness, provinces were broken into smaller – but in total far more expensive – administrative districts. Nor was there anywhere else to plunder. To the east, the Persians were too strong to risk the adventure, while to the north neither the Scots nor the Germans had anything worth plundering. All of this was reflected in the debasement of the currency. The silver denarius, once considered so safe that it has been found across the Eurasian trade routes as far away as Japan, was gradually reduced to base metal with the lightest of silver washes (a comparable process, of course, to the devaluation of the pound sterling across the nineteenth century and the dollar in the decades after 1945).
To ordinary people living through the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the process may also have appeared like an end of the world. Earlier periods of growth and technological improvement would have been an ever-dimmer memory, while a grindingly slow process of unrelenting collapse continued. And nothing anybody did would have seemed to have changed anything, even as Rome itself succumbed to corruption and debauchery… brought to an end only by the arrival of barbarian hordes from the east.
Many thinkers since Polybius have set out similar models for the cycles that civilisations go through. At the moment, there is considerable mainstream interest in Peter Tuirchin’s attempt to develop a mathematical model of our own “end times.” Around the end of the last century, Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond were warning of the likelihood of collapse. In an earlier age, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee had set out cyclical models of the rise and fall of empires. And even at the dawn of the religion of progress in the eighteenth century, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Malthus were warning that the apparent upward arc of modernity was merely the first stage in industrial civilisation’s progression toward an inevitable collapse.
The material reason why civilisations collapse is the process known as “overshoot.” The earliest city states, for example, grew bigger and more complex than their land base could sustain. Nor was this solely about population growth and increasing specialisation. Accompanying these was a degradation of the land base. For example, irrigation (which initially boosted growth) resulted in salination, while forest clearance (which provided new agricultural land) resulted in a dangerous loss of the topsoil required to feed the population. Because, in the earliest civilisations, food and energy were the same thing, it is less easy to separate the way the two operate in a modern society. Indeed, even as industrialisation proceeded in Britain and its European neighbours in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the majority of the population worked the land, providing food for people and the working animals that continued to provide a large part of the energy consumed.
The switch from water and wind power to coal in the eighteenth century though, marked a point of departure from every previous civilisation. The fossilised store of millions of years of sunlight locked up in coal allowed the early industrialists to develop a level of growth and complexity beyond anything earlier civilisations might have dreamed of. The process confounded Thomas Malthus… who tends to be dismissed as a crank these days precisely because we didn’t (and have yet to) outgrow our food supply. There’s a reason for that though.
Although the energy densities of charcoal and coal are broadly the same (28 to 35 MJ per Kg) at the dawn of the industrial revolution, coal was vastly more abundant. So that, whereas in the pre-industrial economy charcoal (which devastated Britain’s forests) was mostly used for smelting. The switch to coal (whose primary energy competitor was water power) in contrast paved the way for additional steam technologies, particularly in transport, where the ability to move foods from further afield allowed the industrial towns and cities to grow. By the end of the nineteenth century, the proportion of British people working the land had shrunk to just a quarter. And this, of course, would shrink even more dramatically after 1945 as the UK economy made the switch from coal to oil.
The 10MJ per Kg increase in energy density of oil over coal may not seem much, but it is the difference between the civilisation of nineteenth century London and the civilisation of twentieth century New York. Although, just as coal had advantages over charcoal and water power, oil had many advantages over coal… not least that it could be refined into gaseous and liquid fuels lighter and more easily stored than solid coal. In any case, to someone living at the time Malthus was writing, the technological leaps enabled by the switch to fossil fuels would seem like magic… particularly globalised industrial agriculture’s ability to feed more than eight billion people.
The process is a little more complex, however. While the increase in energy density unlocks the potential for progress (i.e., rising complexity) innovation and technology are required to realise that potential. This is what we refer to (often without understanding it) as productivity – the art of getting more output for energy and material input. And you might have noticed that among the long list of things which seem to have come to a standstill since 1999, productivity is one of the more worrisome.
I have explained elsewhere that, despite the religion of permanent progress, the process of productivity follows an “S” curve. Once we have learned to harness a new energy source – usually in a primitive manner – a series of cheap and simple technological improvements and economies of scale can be used to produce high returns. But soon enough, we hit the limits set out in the Second Law of Thermodynamics – that all energy conversions generate waste heat and that this sets a limit to the amount of useful work (exergy) that we can achieve. So that each additional productivity improvement comes at a higher cost while generating little additional output. And eventually, we reach the point at which the cost of further investment is too great and the return too little.
Although related to the problem of “peak oil” which became a concern for a while in the 1990s, this energy-productivity problem is more to do with the quality of an energy source rather than its quantity. For example, while American fracking pushed peak oil – the point at which the world would be at maximum oil production with only decline to follow – out of the news cycle for another two decades, the energy cost of that new oil has been rising even as the return it provides to the economy is falling. Crucially, despite the rise in the absolute volume of oil produced, the key middle distillates have been in decline for nearly a decade. Meanwhile a large part of the new oil is only useful for making plastic (which likely explains why the world is awash with the stuff).
During the boom years of the nineteenth century, the energy cost of coal had been falling, allowing more use, more growth and more complexity. In Britain, the energy cost of coal began rising from the 1880s, leading to economic problems, imperial weakness, military vulnerability and, ultimately, to war and the collapse of empire. Similarly, in the USA after 1945, with the energy cost of oil falling, the American economy seemed as unstoppable as its global military power. But, as happened to Britain in the coal age, from the 1970s the energy cost of oil began to increase. Most obviously, the result was the series of oil shocks as oil producers in North Africa and the Middle East sought a higher price for their (higher cost) oil. Less obviously, the ensuing inflation wrecked the post-war Bretton Woods currency system and led to unemployment and stagnation across the western economies.
This wasn’t (yet) overshoot. There was still plenty of energy and resources to be had. And the “creative” use of banking and finance, together with the offshoring of production, paved the way for one last debt-based boom across the western economies. And it was, I contend, the morphing of finance from a small service to the wider economy into the global behemoth that emerged by the turn of the century, which caused the end of the world.
Consider an observation Frank Zappa made about the difference between the early rock music industry and the music industry today:
“During the ’60s music executives were a stuffy bunch. They were an old guard of starched collars and ties, looking up from their Financial Times only to have an eye on the profit margin. Or as Zappa describes them ‘cigar-chomping old guys.’ But one benefit of these old guys was that they ‘looked at the product and came and said, I don’t know! Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’ It allowed countless seminal albums of the decade to be signed off and the music scene of the era exploded because of it.
This may be the easiest place to begin to find the “something” which brought an end to the world in the early-2000s.
“Zappa declares that ‘we were better off with those guys, than we are with the supposedly hip, young executives,’ making the calls on what gets made and what gets put out to the public.”
What Zappa was observing was evidence of the decay of democracy into its evil twin… technocracy. Where democracy was amateurish and innovative, technocracy is professional and formulaic. As the tentacles of finance infiltrated every industrial sphere that depended upon access to credit, it insisted on the employment of credentialled specialists concerned only with the bottom line. Need an advance to record your songs? Better make sure they use the correct chords in the right order and at the proper tempo. Need a grant for your science project? Better make sure you have the right scientists from the correct universities, pursuing the kind of research that gets published in the best journals. Looking for campaign funding for the next election? Better make sure you’ve employed the right political advisors from the best private schools and with the correct university qualifications to promote the same centrist policies that win elections.
You get the idea… when finance pays for something, it requires up front guarantees before a single penny changes hands. Innovation, it turns out, is for losers. In this way, finance corrupts everything it touches. At the start of the transition from democracy to technocracy, the technocrats could claim to be acting for the public good. The advanced and complex economy that had developed out of World War Two required a new professional and managerial class to operate it. Moreover, the lack of specialists gave rise to an education system which, for the first and only time, allowed the children of the working class to advance into the affluent middle. But gradually, the winners from that earlier era pulled the ladder up behind them. So that, when the technocrats said they were working for the public good what they actually meant was for the good of people like us. And so, a gulf opened up between the experience of the mass of the population and the lifestyles of the technocrats. Finance, of course, widened this gulf dramatically. In exchange for doing finance’s bidding, the technocracy enjoyed lavish lifestyles even as the living standards of the masses went backward.
So long as the technocracy could deliver broad rising living standards, the masses bought in. but with the net energy available to the economy in decline, and with mineral resources of all kinds reaching peak production around the turn of the century, the promise of technocracy no longer matched its lived experience. Not least because Big Finance, which had been enjoying returns of four or more percent, were suddenly struggling to make any return at all. And so, the stifling quarter of a century (so far) of enshittification began. Everything had to be sacrificed on the altar of financial returns, with innovation and creativity across the board being the first to be sacrificed.
The world may not have physically ended in 1999, but the innovation, creativity and joy that makes life worth living has been remorselessly ground down in pursuit of mammon. Like cancer, our metastasising banking and finance “industry” has been killing its host for four decades now. But it is only since the turn of the century – and especially since 2008 – that its effects have become obvious. Even so, few – and especially the technocracy – understand the intimate connection between declining surplus energy and debased currency which is driving the decline. Everything may seem the same, but our civilisation is fast approaching the point at which its turn to collapse arrives. After which, bad as it has become, you may come to remember the early twenty-first century as a golden age.
As you made it to the end…
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