Welcome back.
Today we will be talking about Collapse Informatics.
I want to start off by talking about the differences between sustainability and collapse.
Now, a lot of the things we have been talking about in this class have focused on sustainability,
but the way we think about collapse comes from the question what if efforts towards
sustainability don’t work out?
What happens if we as a civilization don’t manage to come up with a sustainable solution
to the problems facing us?
There has been a lot of resource that has been done on the collapse of human civilizations.
For example, the Mayans are a civilization that is well known to have collapsed, and
the Roman Empire collapsed.
Easter Island was another famous example, and there have been lots of other examples
of human civilizations that have collapsed across human history.
There are lots of different proximate causes.
The proximate cause is the cause that is sort of the nearest one, what immediately triggered
it.
So, economic collapse sometimes leads to it, some sort of pandemic disease, warfare with
the neighbors, and there are lots of other possible reasons why sort of the immediate
cause of a collapse.
But, there has been a lot of research on what the ultimate cause was, and Joseph Tainter
is one of the predominant scholars in this area.
He suggests that the ultimate cause of collapse is that there is diminishing returns on investment
in social complexity so that effectively what happens is that a civilization outstrips the
energy that it has at its disposal.
When there is a lot of energy available the way you solve a problem is that you add complexity.
For example, if you have a government and you have a problem with people coming over
your boarders too much, you invent the Department of Homeland Security and make an entirely
new thing to try to address that, and that addition to your society requires more energy
to keep going and at some point you hit your head on the limits of available energy.
What happens then is what Tainter coins a collapse.
He calls this a rapid simplification of society.
Another scholar who thinks a lot about collapse is Jared Diamond.
His point is that the ultimate cause of collapse is a failure to think longterm.
So, effectively the decision makers are isolated from the impact of their actions, that when
the people who were in charge of Rome, or Easter Island, or the Mayans, when they were
doing their planning they weren’t taking into account what the longterm impact of the
decisions they were making were.
So, here’s one of my favorite cartoons about this problem of short verses longterm impact.
It is a guy who is speaking presumably to shareholders of a company and he says, "And
so, while the end-of -the-world scenario will be life with unimaginable horrors, we believe
that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit."
So, I think this a classic example of short-term thinking.
So, in this course one of the things we consider is the possibility of future collapse over
the coming decades or a few centuries.
We don’t know for sure that collapse is coming.
There may be some new energy source that enables us to address some of the environmental and
civilizational problems that we are currently confronted with, but then again there may
not be some new source of that energy.
So, as an insurance policy we think it is prudent to consider now how best to respond
to these kinds of problems in order to hopefully avoid a collapse, or at least to prepare for
one should it be forthcoming.
We see that there has been a variety of different scenarios.
One would be an overnight apocalypse, that there is some sort of tipping point that we
will reach where everything suddenly goes bad.
Even though this is what makes a good Hollywood movie where Nicolas Cage is running away from
some living threat, it’s not necessarily though what most scholars think is what is
likely to happen.
Another way that things could go down is a slow decent.
So, over decades or centuries have effectually an N-dip recession.
A recession is when the global economy goes into a slump, and sometimes people talk about
a double dip recession which is just as you are coming out of your recession you then
go into another recession, and if you were to continue to go down that might be called
an N-dip.
So, it is sort of a bumpy road down.
Another possibility is that there is no decent but with business as usual which is sometimes
predicated to BAU.
We see this as an unlikely possibility.
Ultimately though, collapse is probably not apocalypse despite what most media would have
you think.
Ultimately collapse, it is less mediagenic than apocalypse.
It makes less of a better movie, less of a better story.
Instead of it being vast danger and explosions, it is more like bad healthcare and rotting
teeth that will be the harbingers of these kinds of collapse issues.
In terms of the timing of collapse, Jared Diamond suggests that "at current rates most
or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems will become acute within the lifetime
of young adults now alive."
So, that means 50 or 60 years.
Ultimately though, there is a boarder, the boarder between pre- and post-collapse.
Even though we can sort of discuss it as being a crisp differentiation, it is a fuzzy distinction
depending on your chosen collapse scenario.
Currently there are some people who suggest that we are already in the beginnings of collapse,
that some of the recessions that we saw in the late 2000s are the first stages of a broader
scale collapse.
The effects of collapse would be lower social complexity.
So, rather than having global civilization, it would be main unit of social cohesion would
be significantly smaller.
We would also see crumpling intermittent infrastructure.
So, things like the information communication technologies would become less reliable, and
power, we would have rolling blackouts and brownouts.
Transportation, we would have roads with potholes and other maintenance activities wouldn’t
happen.
Food would become less available, and fresh food from all around the world would become
lees available.
We might have challenges with the legal system where legal would become more a local phenomenon
than a national or global phenomenon.
The growing likelihood of these outcomes is why we think it is an important area of research,
to study the civilizational changes that would accompany a failure to achieve sustainability.
Particularly, we think there are some possibilities that IT can help us respond to these different
collapse scenarios.
For example, how can a system be designed that can provide services that are booth effective
now, and also in various different post-peak scenarios?
What are the characteristics of these systems?
What would they be like, and under what kinds of conditions would they be useful?
So, we have been pioneering a new area called Collapse Informatics which we are terming
the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in
a future of scarcity.
Now, on one hand from our position in the industrial world here in the U.S., it may
seem like collapse is quite a ways away, but there is a group of systems modelers that
has suggested that "The view that global crises will occur in the future reflects a parochial,
developed-world perspective.
For two-thirds of the world’s population, crises of scarce resources, inadequate housing,
deplorable conditions of health, and starvation are already at hand."
So, this suggests that there is potentially a narrow point of view that people in the
developed world have.
We would like to start thinking about some of these problems through a collapse lens,
and this could hopefully offer some new directions for the computing field that can help us avoid
some of the challenges of societal contraction before they actually start to happen.
We want to put in place systems that will be useful in the event that post-peak transformations
start occurring.
Hopefully thinking about things in the light of collapse will offer a different narrative
and that can hopefully allow us to define progress in a different way.
So, one way to potentially organize some of the different systems that one might build
around the idea of collapse would be to look at a two axis layout where one is pre-collapse
versus post-collapse, and the other is design time versus use time.
So, in the bottom lefthand quadrant where it is designed before collapse, and it is
for use before collapse, we see most current design.
This is where all of the systems that we currently use, icons are a good example of this, where
it is being designed in a time of abundance for use in a time of abundance, where there
is an expectation that you will get the next new thing anytime now.
The way a lot of people think about collapse in Hollywood is often sort of a post and post,
this would be the top righthand corner, where after the world has collapsed, after some
collapse has come to pass, there will be a period of improvisation where we are finding
things and cobbling them together.
However, what we are interested in, and what collapse informatics is looking at, is this
idea of designing it in the pre-collapse period for use in a post-collapse period.
So, this is a proactive approach to it, and the neat thing about this is that if these
technologies work they can also help to avoid collapse because they are ultimately sort
of economical, they are thrifty in terms of resource use.
In the final quadrant which would be design in a post-collapse world for use in something
that perhaps in a pre-collapse world would bring restoration.
This is trying to re-bootstrap civilization after collapse has occurred.
One concern that often comes up when you think about these topics is what if collapse never
comes?
What then?
Why use all of these resources if collapse does not actually work out and it is a reasonable
concern, but it is something that we wonder about that if we take these actions that may
be part of what prevents collapse from coming so we may never be able to know whether or
not collapse would be on its way.
Ultimately the kinds of things that we will be doing to prepare for collapse, even if
collapse never comes, will hopefully allow us to live more sustainably with a higher
quality of life and lower resource usage.
So, even if collapse never comes hopefully it is making the world a better place anyway.
Thank you very much.
I hope you have a good day, and we will talk to you soon.