Mourning Mankind
I fear we've crossed the point of no return.
Among my close associates I tend to be a bit like Gandalf. If you recall the scene where he faces the balrog, he says “I am the servant of the secret fire”. The book isn’t clear, but he probably meant Narya - one of the three elven rings, which had long been entrusted to him. This ring’s power was to inspire resistance to darkness in the world.
I’m usually the one saying “Why can’t we do that?”, or suggesting a way around some obstacle. I periodically encourage those of you who read this Substack to recognize the signs of burnout and to rest. That, too, is about maintaining good spirts.
Since the first of the year I’ve handed out a number of NOPEs, some DON’Ts, and I’ve been ghosted by wily operators who’ve been there since before the beginning. I’m almost sixty now, and a person I’ve known since my twenties sent me this.
Several things changed during Q4 2024 and I feel like I owe you guys an explanation for my new stance.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Maudlin old man admits defeat. If you’re a think piece masochist, come on in …
Fact Finding:
My entire career has been one foot in light and the other in shadow. Like a golden jackal, orbiting a pride of hungry lions on a buffalo kill, I’ve darted in and come away with tasty tidbits. This was never a profitable pursuit, and after the most recent 5th of November, it’s well nigh suicidal.
The policy concern that set me in motion coalesced in 2007. I had just lost my health, my business, and while I did’t know it at the time, my children were gone from my life as well. These are not the first catastrophic losses I ever faced; those who survive such things are … we can size up potential negative outcomes quicker than those with charmed lives, and we’ll keep marching when others will drop. The CO2 level at the time was 384 PPM.
Last winter I read Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World Is Just the Beginning. He is a systems thinker and the paragraph that stopped me cold was on page 275, right at the end of the section on energy.
If you scroll back through Geocyber you’ll find Peter, Tony from China Update, Anders Puck Nielsen, Ed Nash, Ward Carroll, and a mix of news outlets. When American outlets appear it’s usually for their illustrative value, rather than any analysis. There are a few things where I think Zeihan misses domestic U.S. nuance, and others where he misreads the situation on specific technologies, but overall he’s got things right.
Zeihan’s last line is about what humans will do, and Mother Nature is the same. The permafrost is melting, the taiga is burning, the clathrates on the Siberian shelf are bubbling. Even if a slate wiper virus puts our kind through another thousand breeding pairs bottleneck like it did around 70,000 BCE, what we have set in motion can not be undone.
As I write this the CO2 level is 424 PPM.
The Future:
Making changes has been both fruitless and wildly unprofitable. Thanks to a combination of MediCal and stubbornness on my part, I more or less got my brain back in the fall of 2023, after a sixteen year hiatus in being able to focus properly. People here in BARTopia with my skills make four to eight times as much as I did last year. I am going to follow their lead.
The fallout of the demise of American democracy is going to be similar to that of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The thing I recall the most was the effect on my industry - deprived of day jobs, the KGB became obligate entrepreneurs, and that happened just as the web began. I’ve always treated the internet like a corrosive, poisonous gas under pressure, and that is becoming more true with each passing day.
The tone here began changing in Q4. Things that would have previously been in Tool Time are now front and center. We’ve got tiny ARM computers that would fit in your pocket, we’ve got defensive frameworks meant to protect small groups, and a flow of articles about the rising hazard of using anything you did not hand build for yourself.
I think many of you reading here are as I once was; you’ve got a policy issue which compels you into action. New arrivals are more likely to be sizing up defensive measures needed for a rapidly decaying security environment.
Conclusion:
The hockey stick graph of CO2 levels has a murky, poorly understood companion graph that nobody wants to discuss. Carbon dioxide cuts into our cognitive capabilities. This is already an issue in large office buildings and it’ll nibble a little bit more with each passing year. If any of you reading this live to see 2100, you’ll be maybe 20% less intelligence, even if you avoid age related cognitive decline.
While I don’t feel it to be the case, I know I’ve reached the age where I can say “That’s been tried before”, and many of you will immediately set about proving me wrong. Maybe Humanity’s Hope: Helion will turn out to be the way of the future. If all we need for boundless energy is a fractional distillation plant that can handle hydrogen, there are plenty of things one could do with the 4999/5000ths of the stuff that is not deuterium.
Perhaps one of you can see a path through all this which I can not …
And on that note, off I go, with the understanding that this is not just a stale meme, it’s also likely my future job description.
