You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.

“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club

I had to stop working in the granite industry:  it was counter productive.

Grug want break rock.  Grug grab other rock, smash rock.  Rock eventually breaks.  Grug happy.

Another example:  Grug want break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine.  Grug create coal mine.  Grug find tree.  Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer.  Grug smash rock.  Grug happy, much faster.

Yet another example:  Grug want to break rock.  Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur.  Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite.  Grug break rock real fast.  Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.

I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot.  The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient.  It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time.  And it’s really cool.

What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well?  A-flat miner.

The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method.  And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet.  Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine.  Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.

The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once.  It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.

Decades?

Krugman?  More like Grugman.

Yes.  Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas.  What was the backhoe guy digging for?

I have no idea.  Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck.  And they were always digging.  I think they might be part mole.  Maybe they were digging for this:

Meme as-found.

The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly:  couldn’t buy gas.  At all.  Even with cash.  Credit card usage?  Nope.  And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.

Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber.  But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet.  In Alaska.  In 2005.

The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely.  Information used to be hard to move.  Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places.  It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear.  Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.

When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.

Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China.  Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.

But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain.  But books burn.  The ephemeral website?  It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon.  Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.

What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today.  I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.

To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice.  Why would they?  Their methods, their lives are the most direct.  They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.

I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus.  It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.

The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike.  The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it.  Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon.  He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.

“I’d go home.”

Why?  There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done.  He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz.  Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.

Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.

These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct.  How fragile?  Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.

I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.

I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.

We’ll leave that to your mom.  I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.

(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

51 thoughts on “You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.”

  1. Worthy of note, while we all still have internet and access to printers, at least in theory, is some of the knowledge that would allow better odds in the likely event that things stop working for whatever reason. http://www.survivorlibrary.com exists for this purpose. Get a cheap duplexing printer, innumerable reams of paper, and get to work making your future chances as good as they can possibly be.

    1. Ironic that when I used your link to the Survival Library they were DOWN due to Server Issues and the Librarian is working TODAY to get it back online.

      Not laughing, just a reminder of Tempus Fugit (time flies).

      Not looking forward to that flight club quote becoming real life ™ when 3rd world invaders and social incompetence is mandatory finishes off our wildly interconnected world.

      “And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club”

      Michael

    2. Sooner is better than later. Worst case? It sits around gathering dust. Which also might be the best case?

  2. Asimov’s Foundation series of books did a really good job of capturing the fundamental descent into the dark ages that you mention. I didn’t watch the movies as I heard they were mostly woke/nonsensical, but the books really left a mark on my psyche. The whole notion that you can see the dark ages coming but can’t really do anything about it was unsettling. Unfortunately, I think we all now realize that it is something we are living through in real time (particularly when one can no longer take even the simplest of tasks for granted anymore).

    Much like Hari Seldon, I have started preparing myself and battening down the proverbial hatches as best I can to weather out what is likely to be a generational or greater storm.

    1. Another great series is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDominium

      I reread it a few years ago and it’s chilling how similar it is to today even though it was mostly written in the 70s. The authors rewrote the fall of the Roman Empire from the perspective of a future high tech earth.

    2. The first step to avoiding collapse is to take it seriously. We are not. We are treating it like it’s magic and we can pretend food and energy into existence. But more on that for tomorrow.

  4. We should all be glad that the government villa under DIA is EMP protected.

    1. Normies will never rise up without leaders. We already have far more people radicalized than studies indicate are needed for a successful sportiness. What we lack are elites to get us organized. We need to become those elites at a local and state level.

  6. Over at Sev’s place yesterday (https://foundingquestions.wordpress.com/2024/03/05/tuesday-miscellania-3/), much of discussion, including by me, in the Comments had to do with “Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies” (of which I’ve read to be a better writer).

    Sev’s comment was, “The kind of “collapse” he’s describing is political collapse, and that’s usually far less apocalyptic. It’s more like “a return to localism after a period of artificially high centralization.” It’s not Mad Max; it’s a return to what’s sustainable, given the resources and technological development of a local(-ish) area. And far from being all bad, in many ways it could be good. If one were given the choice of living out one’s life in Late Roman Britain, for example, vs. Britain c.500 AD, you’d probably pick the latter. It’s a lot less violent, for one thing, and even though you’d have much less access to Mediterranean luxuries, is that so bad? There’s a lot less Late Imperial decadence that way. The 600s are going to suck, but you’re not going to live to see them…”

    My response was: https://foundingquestions.wordpress.com/2024/03/05/tuesday-miscellania-3/#comment-62740

    PS Hope that’s not too many links.

    1. Thanks for the link, Clayton.

      I might quibble a bit on the statement that the Late Roman Empire in Britain was worse than the AD 500’s. Even after the Groans of the Britons in A.D. 410, which is useful placeholder for the end of significant Roman oversight, things still chugged along more or less as the previous 40 years – through the A.D. 450’s or 460’s, that traditional dates of the Saxon/Angle/Jute invasions. Things became much more difficult – especially if you were Romano-British – from around A.D. 514 on. Things did eventually stabilize more or less, but I doubt the then-existing Romano-British saw it as much as an improvement, having been forced to the fringes.

    2. An excellent discussion there, though of course I might be biased 😉

      Too many people miss the fact that Mad Max collapse has never happened in recorded history. Unrecorded history, perhaps. But that still leaves a ~5,000 year unbroken streak. We’re either going to get more of the same, but worse. Or it splits up, then gets worse. Unless our side gets its shit together such that we control one of those breakaway groups.

      2. Bronze age collapse, circa 1,150 BC. Complete with land and sea raiders (the origin of the Philistines, by the way). The only empire to not collapse and disappear was the Egyptians. Something like two-thirds of the known world’s population was wiped out over a couple decades.

      3. You may be right, but nukes , bioweapons, and EMP technology have the ability to put us into a Mad Max scenario pretty quickly.

    3. I’m only disappointed you didn’t link your books!!!!

      The bigger difference is the population collapse due to very high levels of leverage. It may happen. We certainly won’t be hitting the high end of population projections in any event – complexity and energy. Companies generally have the nicest hq buildings about the time they collapse.

    4. Where I live, remote in a ‘third-world’ country, most of the people will be ok without modern services. More difficult life but ok.

      Fruit trees everywhere, rich dark soil, free-range chickens, hosses n moocows, fishies in the seas. No more PEZ deliveries yes but I’m weaning off it anyways.

      Moreover, in the face of GloboHomo, this nation and others have retained its extended-family, traditional family structure. Girls that like to be teased, feminism not yet ascendant. Decent number of Christians scattered about. Were I a young man in New Amerika I’d relocate here or maybe El Salvador, where leadership is realistic, masculine, and sensible.

      Nah the peeps will do fine here, lack of meds and water will take some work tho. They’ll just go back to how folks did things a couple generations ago. Those that will suffer greatly are in the big cities of the first-world nations.

    1. No, thank you! My goal is to be the funniest writer on the Internet talking about serious things, so that’s a win!

  8. I lived through the Stoned Age. You whippersnappers didn’t really miss anything … well, except epic performances by Alvin Lee and “The Rotatin’ Rocker”. (And you can find those online, if Grug hasn’t knocked it down.)

    1. The 80s and 90s were amazing times to be young. Talking with kids today, they’re not happy like we were. And we were happy.

  9. looming competency crisis

    Looming? It’s still just ‘looming’? Seems to me that we’re already 400 lines deep into the weave. Try to get a cheeseburger without pickles at any of 40,000 burger stands in Moron America and get back to me on how well that goes. You’ll have better luck learning to love pickles.

    Now add in 8 million new arrivals, times DEI Uber Alles, and raise that to the KareNth power while subtracting out White guys. There’s no ‘looming’ about it. We’re in the soup. Cold, dark, sewage-tainted soup.

    Grab your pronouns, boys and zxyrls, for there’s an ill wind blowin’.

    1. I once ordered a sausage McMuffin without the muffin at McD’s. They gave me . . . only the muffin. I have given up on special orders.

  10. In a prolonged internet shortage the country would collapse in a matter of hours. I wonder if anyone has ever considered that, like some of our enemies….

    1. nah, the internet might be down, but my friend said he could just go out and get a signal with his phone, so all is good…..

    2. The good news is that the Internet was built to be “nuclear war” resistant. The bad news is that I’m thinking it’s not idiot plus sabotage resistant.

  11. John – Brilliant, as always (or “Ugh”, as Grokwig von Mises would say). Information has indeed become a cheap commodity – but (as you have also pointed out with energy) it is only cheap in that a whole infrastructure exists to make it so.

    I remember back to the heady days of “pre-broken” rock, when the entire sum of knowledge we had access to was the county library, the school library, and occasional book fairs. Our knowledge was completely limited to what was available for us there (or the very occasional “inter-library loan”).

    In 8th grade my parents invested in a set of Encyclopedia Britannica (man, I wish they had not gotten rid of that). The sum of knowledge, put into 25 or so handy 1,000 page volumes.

    Which is why I continue to insist on physical media. Yes, it is bulk and a pain to move and is prone to fire, wearing out, and the occasional dog or cat attack – but it cannot be deleted or permanently “on loan”.

      2. Yes, but a pre-1990’s encyclopedia is full of content that was actually true

  12. Copies of the EB from 1965 or 66 are available at estate sales. It’s the right era for the folks moving to the next place… and coincidentally one of the finest examples of its kind. Took me years to replace the one my siblings sold far too cheaply at a garage sale. In South Texas they run about $50-150 depending on how lucky you are.

    It’s new enough the science is “close enough”, but it hasn’t been infected by the 70’s multiculti BS or environmentalism.

    They strove mightily to be comprehensive and fair. Those are NOT traits associated with wikipedia. I no longer trust anything that can be revised instantly and anonymously, and undetectably.

    Add the Harvard Classics or the 5 Foot Shelf of Books, some collected works of more modern authors (Poe, Wells, Grimm, Twain, Doyle, an annotated Shakespeare, the 4 volume “How things work”, and some math and science, and you are well on your way to your personal apocalypse library. Gray’s Anatomy, some art history, a nice atlas, the PDR, the Norton Anthology, some history, medical and english dictionaries, and you are further along. Couple books on nursing, the “when there’s no xxxx” books, some field manuals on sanitation, Boy Scout handbook from the 40s or 50s, some farm manuals from the 40s and 50s, and you’re farther along than 90% of humanity.

    Add the rest of the stuff I’ve got, and you start to feel a bit foolish and paranoid, but you figure your kids can deal with the estate if everything stays together.

    Having a “rebuild society” library is one of the separation points, or “level up” points to prepping. I figure it’s cheap insurance and I love books anyway, so I’m willing to buy them when they are cheap and find space for them. I recognize it’s more than most people will do.

    Like buckets of rice, it makes me feel better.

    nick

    1. Nick, I have Ma Wilder’s Books of Wonder as well as the 1970s Encyclopedia of Science as well as a 1959 EB. Love it all.

  13. “Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places.”

    Many people forget about the Theory of Relativity though, and also that light can travel at different speeds through different mediums. This must be why when I withdraw money from the bank my account updates instantly, but when I deposit cash it can take days.

    1. Hahahaha! I will note that I got the speed of light in glass more or less correct for the meme. That’s the kind of quality that you guys expect, and I’d hear about it if I was wrong. (which I always appreciate)

  14. “I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.”

    Point Of Order:
    The two tunes you were trying for are “Staying Alive”, and
    “Another One Bites The Dust”, not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.
    The correct two choices have the same beat, which coincides with the correct rate of chest compressions for adult CPR.
    And shows that the universe has an ironic sense of humor.

    Important Addendum: It’s poor form to hum or sing either one out loud while you’re actually performing CPR. Doing so inside your head is acceptable.

    Your CPR card is thus obviously expired.
    Go re-cert.

    1. So, I looked, and For Whom The Bell Tolls is only off by 5bpm from Staying Alive. But I think it would be better for the patient, especially if I do the drum solo right.

      Mine is actually up to date, though I did lose points on the practical because I noted the CPR dummy had fewer arms than the drummer for Def Leppard.

  15. True story. The wife and I took a CPR course and the instructor suggested singing “Staying Alive” to get the rhythm of 120 beats a minute that was optimal.
    When it was time to demonstrate what we learned on the dummy, My Dear wife spoke up on her turn and said that she had found a Better song and proceeded to sing it while pounding out the CPR…
    It was “Another one bites the dust”
    Everyone after her chose that song as well. I think the Instructor disapproved.

    1. Opps, just saw the reply from Aesop, day late and dollar short,
      Though I must disagree with the admonition about singing it out loud,
      If I was still able to hear during CPR I would much prefer a jaunty tune than listening to people grunt and mumble.
      On the double plus good side it will give me a pleasant ice breaker to tell Saint Peter.

      2. Humming either one is very poor form, because there may be immediate relatives of the deceased you’re working on nearby, within earshot, and trust me when I note they won’t think it’s nearly as funny as you do.
        😉

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