A writer and software engineer in Central California, DeAnander is my friend and mentor. I am delighted to introduce readers to her omnivorous intellect and acerbic wit. Her prior obligations at other sites, her day job, and her preparations for several big life-changes have postponed De’s more public role at IA. She already contributes to IA via the insights and interrogatives she shares in correspondence with other contributors.
[NOTE: She spells funny, because she’s British, and she calls her mother “Mum.” It must be the years as a Unix geek that make her type in lowercase more than half the time.]
I recently went shopping for a bicycle. Eventually, I stayed within my budget and got a used Nishiki for $75. But when I went to the bike store to get the safety and comfort widgets for the bike, the proprietor showed me one of the high-speed, low-drag models of bicycle that weighed around two-and-a-half ounces and traveled at top speed of Mach I. Sticker price: $4,000.
Fortunately, we don’t have to shop and pay for our Bullshit Detectors… unless you count as payment the hard-won experience required to fully develop said BD. De’s BD is the high-speed, low-drag model for people who are very very serious about their bullshit detecting.
She has given me permission to re-post and link some of her remarks and debates from European Tribune, where she used to be on the editorial committee and still drops by from time to time; and for that readers can be grateful. It means that while we wait for De to get her house in order, we can have a sneak preview of The Essential DeAnander. (The archives of ‘Moon of Alabama’ are another good place to look for mini-essays and rants from De.)
[DeAnander grabs the mic (editorial privs) here and sez: thanks to Stan for his over-the-top flattery, though it always makes me want to blush and mumble. I’m never sure who’s mentoring whom. I owe him countless articles on topics touching the vexed confluence of our present predicament, i.e. energy, food, money, colonialism, patriarchy. My sorry-ass flakiness as an IA contrib means that it’s awfully decent of him to gather these off-the-cuff squibs and snips that I’ve been posting in odd moments at ET — where btw you will find some vigorous and not entirely unintelligent opposition to much of what’s said below — for publication at IA. I hope to contribute something more substantial to IA in the near-to-medium future. In the meantime, I can be found commenting and moderating at Feral Scholar, and occasionally doing some drive-by posting at ET and (more rarely) MoA. I’ll open a thread at FS for a free-for-all on any of the topics touched upon below…]
From “Is Civilization a Pyramid Scheme?”
to answer the question: yes
any model that depends on perpetual growth for success is a pyramid scheme… finance capitalism as we know it, or indeed any capitalist model that relies on the magic of compound interest, future discounting, and evergrowing markets to snowball (illusory) profits, is a Ponzi scheme. why this isn’t obvious to everyone is a great puzzle to me…
…but more to the point, finance capitalism seems more and more to me like the logical end state — or more pessimistically, just the latest release of the software — for the historical dynamic of “civilisation”. i.e. a new pseudorational ideology that justifies/perpetuates the regime of accumulation and the core/periphery dynamic needed to support a parasitical and idle elite, monumental construction, massive resource hoarding and concentration, grotesque displays of status and the other markers which we recognise as indicating “high” culture.
the ethic of perpetual growth predates capitalism; it’s built into the imperial model. empires must grow — acquiring fresh periphery to loot — or their overheated cores collapse, they can no longer offer the outrageous profit margins in loot and luxury which command the allegiance of their mercenary armies, or support the lifestyle to which their elites feel entitled. so capitalism often seems to me merely a fresh ideological paint job, replacing Divine Descent, Apotheosis, or their watered-down descendant Divine Right as the legitimating myth of the regime of elite accumulation and the core/periphery Ponzi scheme.
industrial technology ups the ante; by extending the supply lines and multiplying human effort by cheap energy, it sets the core/periphery game on Fast Forward so that the looting/pithing of the periphery now achieves in a few decades a degree of damage and mayhem that, using more primitive tools, would have taken centuries. but the essential regime of accumulation, hoarding, conspicuous consumption and exterminism doesn’t seem to have changed much.
no pyramids w/o slaves — including pyramid schemes. and no skyscrapers without energy slaves; no energy slaves (cheap fossil fuel) without immiseration and displacement and warfare.
the civitas or imperial city (in contrast to the market town which has a more symbiotic relationship with agrarian realities) is a microcore, draining its periphery. but now we have “progressed” to the global-imperial megalopolis that drains the entire world, its dragnets (literal and figurative) liquidating biotic systems and enslaving peasants worldwide.
the “civilised” — that is, those who are committed to the priorities and purposes of the imperial city and “high” culture — are at perpetual war with their periphery, whether it be the smallholders just outside the walls, or the unfortunate Iraqis whose oil is required to keep the lights on and the elevators running. I’d say without too much sense of rhetorical exaggeration that slavery is written into the structure of any building with stairs too long for an average resident to climb, as much as it was written into the design of Queen Cleopatra’s barge.
…or so I would argue based on the evidence currently available. Bookchin insists that the polis as a healthy and symbiotic human institution and lifeway is distinguishable from the civitas and is recoverable. I am only halfway through his argument and have not yet decided whether I find it convincing. maybe he will convince me that civilisation — a human life based in cities — can be achieved without theft, murder, slavery and warfare. he will have some uphill work to do so, but I’m still reading.
From “Why the free market fails in sustainable energy innovation”
I still suspect there is a Veblenesque aspect to housing design; very wealthy people in olden days had big houses with lots of windows in open parklands. It was a way of displaying wealth and power: it said I can afford glass (which was expensive back then when energy was closer to true-cost accounting), I own or command enough woodlot to heat this sprawling pile, I am powerful enough and the local elite is powerful enough to impose order so that I need not fear my neighbours, the peasants, or invaders, and I do not need to raise food because I command tribute from others, so my grounds are given over to unproductive lawns and decorative plantings (in the front anyway). and I command enough labour to keep my grounds immaculately manicured. the home farm and the kitchen garden were discreetly hidden, like the ha-has which discouraged trespassers without being an unsightly barricade. and that aesthetic — watered down, Taylorised, adulterated, plasticised — is the suburban ideal.
the elite define our aesthetics over long periods of time, as do antiquated standards. a passive solar home with its strategically situated windows looks “weird” to most people; in many suburbs the neighbours will complain if you grow veg anywhere visible from the street; we are still hooked on home designs whose very appeal is their nose-thumbing stupidity and inefficiency, and tend to look down on anything small, efficient, or productive because it looks “peasanty”. American high school kids learn to call the metro bus the “loser cruiser”. American hate-radio jocks “joke” that all cyclists are fags. and so on.
anecdote… I was attending the SPIE conference in Glasgow a few years back (they made me go, I had a poster). on the shuttle bus from airport to ghastly convention centre there was a predictable concentration of US science geeks. two were sitting directly in front of me, commenting on the city sights. “Wow,” said one, “look how small the cars are!”
“Yeah,” said his companion. “The UK, it’s like a third world country these days.”
In other words, having large wasteful cars is a sign of wealth and power; the more wasteful the more prestigious. Having small cars is a sign of second-class status, loss of prestige. Conspicuous consumption. This is going to be a hard cultural nut to crack, the anti-potlatch of deliberately wasting resources to nobody’s gain, just to show off rank and status. The anti-gift economy. The overwatered golf course and uncovered swimming pool in the desert states. The AC keeping the homes and cars in the Sun Belt so cold that people wear sweaters indoors (no kidding). The 5000 sf trophy home in the carburb.
now we are back to the smallness of iPods and how to make elegance and efficiency attractive — for those who are somehow colourblind or tone-deaf to their inherent, bewitching attractiveness 
Another section of the same thread:
actually the iPod is a bad example of efficiency because of its notorious failure rate, which wins it special mention in Slade’s book Made To Break.
In “Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America,” the Richmond, B.C.-based author explains in painful detail why cast-off cell phones — and countless other products and electronic devices, from pocket calculators to PCs — are quietly creating the largest toxic waste stream the world has ever known. The situation is bad, and in three years’ time, he notes, it’s about to get much worse.
To be clear, “Made to Break” is not a book about e-waste. (There are several of those out there, including Elizabeth Grossman’s excellent “High Tech Trash”.) Rather, it is a meticulous history of planned obsolescence — the practice of engineering or designing products in such a manner that they become either socially undesirable or non-functional after a given time period. Under the banner of “innovation.” Slade argues that this technical and psychological obsolescence — and the parallel phenomenon of disposability — have over the course of a century become so ingrained in western consumer culture that our very economy depends on it to survive. […]
Disposability was first created with paper clothing products, like paper shirt-fronts, collars and cuffs. You’d take off your shirt collar at the end of the day and stick it in the stove, and it was gone. It was only later that metal watches and Gillette razor blades started going into landfills. Once disposability was invented, then planned obsolescence could occur. We had invented mass production, and we had to feed the machine — we had to get people to buy new stuff — and obsolescence emerged as the answer. [emphasis by De] Waste was simply the after-phenomenon.
By 2009, the FCC [the U.S. Federal Communications Commission] will have mandated the complete change from analog to digital television. All the older TVs have cathode-ray tubes that contain maybe five to 10 pounds of lead. Television enjoys a 95 per cent market penetration in the United States, which would mean that, conservatively, there are about 300 million of them out there in living rooms and dens and basements. And they are about to be chucked. The sheer amount of toxic lead that is about to enter the waste stream is simply going to overwhelm it — there are not enough container ships to send these obsolete televisions off to Asia where they can be broken up safely. This is a massive biohazard that is about to enter America’s groundwater. And it is going to happen because electronic manufacturers lobbied the FCC to mandate digital TV. The problem for them was, there is not enough obsolescence in the television market; they are built to last five to seven years. That was too long.
Steve Jobs came out recently and pretty much admitted that the iPod should be thought of as a disposable product. It is a slick, sleek thing, and you would never consider that it comes from a fundamentally dirty industry. In fact, the amount of toxins that go into an iPod is enormous. There are more than 68 million of these things out there, and they are full of cadmium, beryllium and lead. And Apple has deliberately created them so they only last a year. The company has a voluntary take-back program, but how many people use it? They won’t say. I am hugely personally disappointed in Steve Jobs. He turned into Darth Vader. […]
I would like to point out that the highlighted passage vindicates or underscores Hornborg’s comments on the investment trap of core technomass, which I’ve applied in other threads to e.g. overcapitalised factory trawlers. some technology is so expensive, and so “efficient,” that it can only “pay for itself” if it runs at maximum duty cycle. the owner cannot “afford” to shut it down.
we have to feed the machine because if it stands idle we are losing money — failing to pay the interest on the massive loans needed to pay for the huge buy-in cost. the technology, and the financial model (compound interest finance capitalism plus mass production, automation and cheap fossil fuel) creates a finger-trap that the owner cannot get out of w/in the rules of the capitalism game. we have to shovel raw materials into the machine — converting harmless substances to harmful ones, potential energy to dissipated and irrecoverable energy, living things to dead ones — constantly and (thanks to the growth model necessary to support the compound interest fantasy) at an accelerating rate.
in other words, it doesn’t matter if we create nifty, small, light, low-energy technologies; if we continue to render them obsolete w/in 12 to 18 months in order to keep the machinery of production from idling, there will be no meaningful slowdown in our resource or energy consumption. traditionally the amount of energy needed to manufacture a consumer product was vastly exceeded by the energy it consumed in a long functional lifetime; but with modern disposable gizmos it may very well be that making them more energy efficient doesn’t make that much difference, since the bulk of energy dissipation and toxification happens during the manufacturing and disposal process — the product lifetime is so short that its own energy consumption is almost irrelevant.
so… it’s not sufficient to produce nifty/energy-parsimonious consumer technology, no matter how small and kewl; it also has to be fully remanufacturable or recyclable at lower energy cost than fab from raw, and it needs to last longer.
and that means revising the whole capitalist model; the notion of “having to” keep the assembly line running in order to protect the rentier’s investment — even if this means a spectacular waste of resources and drives perverse dogwaggery in the form of “demand creation” (with all the intrusion, privacy invasion, pollution of the memescape and other side effects of blitz advertising that groups such as Adbusters document so well) — is just plain absurd.
More from the same thread:
I would have to go retrace some reading pathways from a decade and more ago, but my memory suggests that the “burning” potlatch was only observed after Anglo conquest of the Pac NW and sustained attempts to wipe out the first nations’ languages, religions, and cultural patterns. the ethnographer whose book I was reading at the time was of the opinion that the “burning potlatch” was a debased or corrupted form, inspired by the despair of the tribes as their land was stolen, their children forcibly taken from them and “re-educated”, their sacred sites demolished or profaned, etc. s/he read it as similar to the self-immolation practised by some Asian peoples as the ultimate statement of shame, grief and rage after defeat by an overwhelming force.
the destruction or sealing-away of goods in an intact culture is iirc more strongly associated with organised hereditary kingship, like the grave-goods of the pharaohs. he who dies with the most toys tries to take them with him into death, selfishly ensuring that no one else will have any use or benefit from them.
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open thread at Feral Scholar for discussion
Posted by stan in Analysis