The science- fiction ‘Singularity’ concept suggests a period when (washing) machine capability or ‘progress’ reaches a point where machine intelligence and intentions become self- sustaining and supersede those of humans. This will happen because machine intelligence will amplify itself exponentially: smart machines will build smarter machines which will in turn build even smarter versions until the process takes on its own form. Writers who promote the idea put its taking place somewhere in the near future. We will become aware of its arrival when the future becomes non-linear and unpredictable … like now!

Ordinary humans can still outwit the refrigerator, nevertheless the self- creating singularity ‘event’ – along with peak oil – took place a long time ago! It all starts with the ‘American Way of Life’ and its dependence upon cheap petroleum:

• Peak oil as a concept is very easy to grasp. If you can understand a leaky bucket, you understand Peak Oil.

• Nobody ever asks, “What are we doing with the oil, or with the energy we produce”? The assumption is that simply increasing production will allow consumption to sort itself out. This is the marketing message that our culture promotes.

• Culture is fashion, ‘trends’, fads, appearances and descriptions and vice versa.

• Our culture is a creature of inexpensive energy but our energy consumption is a creature of fashion and nothing else.

• The Establishment is also a creation of culture, not the other way around. Our culture is self- generated and its imperatives supersede those of its putative masters. Welcome to the singularity, you are in it.

What is happening in the economy right now is the intersection between resource depletion and increased consumption. This is a cultural rather than an economic problem because our economies are also products of fashion. People don’t really look at things this way because they see how much power the world’s economies represent and compare this to the ‘triviality’ and pointlessness of fashion. By means of swapping present money for future returns economies engage labor and ‘rent’ time. Fashion appears incapable of doing so because it appears too ‘faddish’ and topical.

People don’t realize the economic actors are following cues that are the product of fashion. Economies behave certain ways because participants are stage- managed to behave within fashion dictates rather than within economic logic. Culture sez that the money- money swap has value. Nothing in nature or the ‘real world’ makes that suggestion.

 

The triumph of the fake over the real.

 

Creating energy demand is fashion’s primary function, the rest of the culture is fiction rationalizing that demand. Its instruments are the products it wheedles into existence along with the supposed benefits use of the goods is intended to provide. The bulk of culture exists to promote the benefits which in turn are theatrical roles to which participants adhere to closely. This is a positive feedback loop: adhering to the roles acknowledges the participant’s place in the culture while reinforcing culture’s supremacy at the same time.

The marketing culture is created by advertising managers and commercial artists. The highest form of art on 21st century Planet Earth is advertising, the highest form of that being the self- referential or self- advertising scam. As described by economist Hyman Minsky, the Ponzi schemes that make up much of the modern world’s economies are self- referential scams. They thrive and prosper simply because they exist.

At the same time the output or physical production which gives shape to our world and demands more and more energy use follows the same fashion dictates. Products have no real function other than to be. Humans have existed comfortably without cars,  iPads or lawn furniture for tens of thousands of years. The mechanisms grinding the world and its inhabitants are vacant, self- referential abstractions which have no meaning outside the context of fashion: ‘growth’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘progress’.

Our ‘New’ culture is intolerant of other forms and hegemonic. All of what passes for ‘modernity’ is contained within itself. This is true in the United States where the culture was invented. It is also true everywhere in the world there is a television. There is no other American product with the reach and grasp of the narcissistic American Way. It subsumes all other forms and tilts all values toward the industrial, the commercial and the materialistic.

Both the singularity that is our culture and the science- fiction version are self- referential scam- creations of  fashion. Most of what passes for ‘policy’, ‘education’, ‘economics’ or ‘management’ are cultural ‘goods’ and self- referential scams. So are ‘capitalism’, ‘religion’, ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’. These endeavors have been stripped of whatever potency or effect they might possess on their own. They have permutated into outgrowths of cultural expectations which are in turn the products of marketing.

Unlike previous cultures which ‘sold’ permanence and stability, the culture of modernity markets a narrative of perpetual progress and material development. Implicit in the narrative is that what has preceded the present has no value and is being superseded.  Modernity is destabilizing along with its institutions. What is useful and worthwhile on day one is disposable on day two. The goods produced by modernity reflect the marketing requirements the culture makes on itself. Since fashion is false what modernity markets is its own false-ness. As such the primary narrative is another self- referential scam.

For it to be otherwise would be undermining: it would imply something outside of fashion has value and put an end to the narrative. The scam consequently markets itself as ‘Ironic’, with irony set forth as a central virtue of modernity. The ‘modernity narrative’ paints itself as an imperfect work ‘in- progress’ whose defects will be cured when one more ‘advancement’ gives rise to another -then another, and another. This concept gives ‘growth’ moral supremacy.

Because growth is a moral imperative it is difficult to address by way of economics or politics which are both marketing tools of culture. It is fashion — not economics or the banking system with compound interest — that demands growth.

The form of employment that acquires the greatest cultural status is to manage the Ponzi schemes. Managers are employed strictly by how they conform to the expectations created by marketing. Conforming includes how managers look, dress, speak, where certified and whom they ‘know’; where they live and work and how they travel. Forms that require labor, skill, difficulty or do not present a marketing opportunity are penalized with diminished status. Because the scams are divorced from reality the scam managers are expected to be incompetent even as they are fashionable! There is no penalty for stupidity in America.

Competence is intolerable except where it allows for the proper internal functioning of the enterprise. The ostensible scam- masters are thievish buffoons but those who tend the boilers must know what they are about.

Actual or ‘real’ phenomena which take on some of culture’s forms are treated by culture as if they are scams irrespective of logic: “Buy the fiction, sell the fact.”

Because our institutions are acknowledged to be fraudulent and this is winked at it is not hard for marketing to promote what it wishes as frauds. This is how energy companies can falsely accuse climate science of being a scam and have a large part of the public accept it.

Marketing creates products by first creating the need or expectation for firms or companies to emerge which then create the goods. This is an unremarked aspect of modernity, the requirement for the large organization first, then the product. This process delineates the role products play within culture regardless of the products’ real usefulness. The cultural role of any good is what matters. Cultural necessity creates demand which sets the entire production cycle into motion. Production takes place within a form or set of expectations, created by marketing.

Marketing requires gigantism as a form of validation: it is also essential to support the marketing. No good – no matter how ‘innovative’ – can support itself but instead needs the massive organization or firm to validate it.

Following along, the marginal utility of a good or service is irrelevant. What matters is the marginal utility of the goods’ marketing relative to other goods’ marketing. Well ‘positioned’ useless goods gain traction in culture whereby economic worth follows. This may appear self- evident, but goods and services that cannot be effectively validated may as well not exist regardless of any other virtues.

This is why the resource depletion messages are not heard. Marketing by climate scientists and geologist must be more marginally ‘useful’ than that of energy companies, auto companies, construction contractors; finance, insurance and real estate companies along with the government agencies which putatively ‘regulate’ these industries. That is, the marketing of resource depletion must compete against these interests on the interests’ own terms in a context that created the interests in the first place!

 

Peak oil as a concept is very easy to grasp. If you can understand a leaky bucket, you understand Peak Oil. 

 

Fashion requires the creation of a ‘Peak Oil Company’ or corporation to bring the peak oil ‘good’ to market to answer the demands marketing makes for its existence. The military has become the ‘large business entity’ that does so. This is by default, because peak oil itself cannot create a company and there are no other entities willing to speak. Reports published by military groups worldwide serve as the marketing campaign. Without the military there is no validation for peak oil.

Even so, the military adheres to the role that culture assigns to it.  Fashion does not allow any change in doctrine which would reduce fuel consumption. Here is modernity in action: the monolithic entity has its own goods to sell which have been brought into existence by advertising and gigantic business interests: cyber- warfare, terrorism, WMDs, etc. All of these ‘threats’ require products and a range of scripted activities. As part of its product line, the military markets peak oil … while its activities amplify peak oil’s baleful effects at the same time. How ironic.

Meanwhile, fashion grants the military moral supremacy for its wasteful fuel guzzling and institutionalized child abuse. This is ‘progress’.

 

An Economic Strategy.

 

Peak oil and other snatching resource constraints pose a existential challenge for modernity. Modernity must either be altered or events will annihilate it. The promoters of modernity itself acknowledge this. At the same time, roles institutions play within modernity make it difficult to effect the changes necessary to do more than salvage modernity’s ruins.

The nature of the narrative as a self- reinforcing Ponzi scheme and the high status afforded to Ponzi managers makes finding individuals capable of effecting outcomes within the cultural hierarchy a daunting challenge. Managers who succeed because of how they look, dress and whom they know are not able to make real changes. At the same time, the ‘boiler tenders’ who know how to shut down the machines before they blow up lack the status to do so! The progress narrative has become a trap for the culture that invented it. The choice peak oil presents to modernity is to abandon the narrative before events render it obsolete, This is not the kind of dilemma fashion was intended to solve.

An obvious remedy is substitute conservation – and conservation ‘values’ – for consumption. Doing so would more than likely allow economic theory to follow along and rationalize conservation in ways that allow gains for its promoters, the same way gains follow those who currently promote consumption. Ponzi structures would be erected to provide a supply of lent ‘funds’ as money ‘wealth’ proxy for the conserved fuel and other resource capital.

The marketing and economic mechanisms that support fuel consumption are finance inventions not acts of God. The petroleum pricing structure that makes fuel an ‘economic loss- leader’ was contrived by John D. Rockefeller in the 19th century as a means to monopoly. He undersold his competition and by doing so supported the nascent automobile industry with very cheap fuels. There is certainly no reason why a successful economy cannot be devised that requires very expensive fuels, after all our current economy thrives on very expensive diamonds, very expensive gold and very expensive Picassos.

The decline of very expensive real estate worth is an outcome of the shift in fuel prices from ‘rock bottom’ to ‘slightly more expensive’. The outcome of this shift has been a ‘collateral worth’ crisis. What if real estate worth could be directly swapped for fuel value in the ‘hierarchy of goods’? The impediment to this swap is not economic – a decent economic argument can be made for almost free housing in place of almost free gasoline. The objections are cultural. Housing and ‘development’ are part of the progress narrative. The future of the human race holds the promise of Ivy- league educated refrigerators in every human ‘home’. Fashion – not economics – determines the hierarchy of goods: somewhat capable appliances, more capable cars and most capable houses … all of which cost a lot more than gas!

… Which of course is silly! Inputs are being repriced by the markets which will invert the hierarchy of goods. Why not make use of the collateral worth of natural resources which increases with resource scarcity? All that is needed to make this work is to peg a currency to the worth of land, water, trees, oil, uranium, wind, etc. and let the games begin. The markets would sort things out and make themselves relevant again at the same time.

 

A Strategy of Needs

 

Modern culture fences participants in with ‘product anxiety’; advertisers insist we are sub- human due to our lack of certain goods such as chess-playing clothes driers. If we already have one we must run out and buy another. We are beaten down by the insistent demand for more energy servants. The hierarchy of goods is broad: there are categories for all  rooms in fashion’s many mansions: ‘working class’,  ‘middle class’, ‘outlaw’, ‘Admiral’, ‘beggar’. ‘college student’. ‘nerd’ etc. This ‘dictatorship of wants’ runs at cross purposes to nature’s parsimonious ‘economy of needs’. These are simple: food and water, clothing, shelter along with delight – love, sex and a stimulating and beautiful environment. I submit the greatest shortage of the now is not fuel but interesting, remunerative forms of work.

Given good, healthy nutritious food and good wine, to live in a delightful place and wear beautiful clothes, to be surrounded by friends and family and to have creative lifelong tasks … what could be better?

This is a good question! How is life improved by slavery to products, the regimes their manufacturers dictate, the drear and drudgery that the rationalizing economic system imposes on our lives? Our auto- friendly car habitat is hostile and inhumane. The time- demands products make on us are absolute. Culture’s incentives are perverse; dissipation and waste are rewarded. Thrift and restraint are penalized.. How does the product cycle which renders ruin to people and nature on either end represent progress? No wonder modernity is awash in drugs, disease, mental illness and suicide! Gimme the dope or get me out of here! The product cycle ‘end zone’ for more means living in a wasteland!

Fashion claims these are temporary shortcomings solved with more and more ‘growth’. These are the same claims and promises that have been made by growth’s promoters since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This has been over 200 years! When are we going to wise up?

We can keep indoor plumbing, rail trams and telephones along with the gourmet food, good wine (beer) and nice clothes. We can spend our time making for ourselves and our children a built environment that delights us rather than makes us dumb machine operators and bookkeepers. We can create art as a lifetime endeavor that can be handed over to future generations. We can be farmers, artisans, artists, designers, builders, shipwrights, writers: we can pursue a thousand other things that are valuable and interesting. We can build Florence and Eguisheim in a hundred thousand places and live in them. We can leave the best to nature and begin to enjoy ourselves. We can build a real civilization rather than the grinding fake that  modernity foists on us. We can relegate the material progress fantasies to comic books where they belong.

Instead of smart washing machines and dumb people we can bring quality back into our lives. Skills and mastery abandoned for gambling gains can be rediscovered. Delight can be found in learning and dignity rediscovered within labor.

There have been many fabulous prior civilizations in every part of the world under every sort of circumstance All of them existed without our energy waste. It’s a simple matter is to pick some that we like and adopt them! All culture is fashion, ‘trends’, fads, appearances and descriptions. What is needed is the ‘(wo)manpower’ to effect the change.

 

A Force Majeure Strategy

 

John Michael Greer suggests a future ‘salvage society’ which mines the carcass of modernity, presumably for its useful detritus including creaky but semi- functioning institutions. This seems as grim and nasty as what we have now. Why not stand up and fight! What kind of future can we take for ourselves if we try harder? A salvage society represents a a failure of imagination.

If we are lucky and smart, our future is Tuscany rather than Congo or Chechnya. We cannot be passive. Enough competent people in the right places can make a difference. What is likely to come is a continuation of the age- old struggle between finance and and the ‘little people’. When this emerges from behind its veil of public apathy and ennui, fashion will flee:

In the 1930’s the developed world was torn between continuing community- level economic activities that had sustained the United States for 150 years – and the rest of the world for centuries – or embrace the ‘New’ Big Business commercial/industrial model that had emerged at the turn of the 20th century and from which was spawned the current form of modernity. By 1929, the excesses of capitalist monopolies had shattered the virtuous self- funding cycle that promised unlimited prosperity on one hand, but delivered it with the other to the monopolists’ themselves. The outome was a smoldering revolt of the public vs. the rentiers. This was the ‘real’ great depression; a revolution that has continued in fits and starts to this very day.

The community- level economic model that sustained human endeavors for prior years may or may not emerge. No matter, the unraveling itself will leave a blank slate. It is only (the corpse) of fashion and machine culture that insists that modernity is ‘All or Nothing’.

Oh well, another trendy lie!

It’s more, ‘Lead, follow or get out of the way!’ Ends are to recapture the political system and drive the charlatans from it and economics by whatever means come to hand. The process is ‘reality- based politics’ within established institutions and applied economics of thrift. Such along with truth, respect, justice, fairness and sacrifice have wide appeal if not viewed through the lens of fashion and its corrupt enablers. Beating the system is worth a try, particularly as fashion’s institutions corrode into uselessness.

You have nothing to lose but your (store) chains.