Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[TFian]

One more before I head off

Sure, I just figured it might start getting too philosophical. My question is "aspect of nature do you find valuable?". To make myself clear, I can look at a human and see value in its ability to experience and interact with the world: more specifically, I find my own experiences to be of value, and so when I look at others having similar experiences I consider that to have value as well. I can see that there is a similarity in the experiences of many forms of animal life as well, and so I attribute similar value to them.

I also attribute value to certain parts of nature not intrinsically but because of my own experiences of it: the beauty of a forest, for instance.

So I'm wondering if you have some similar viewpoint, of if you simply value nature as a whole for a vague "because it's valuable" reason. The latter, to be honest, may be fair enough: eventually you simply have to stop asking why and admit that some things are fundamental. But in this case it's a viewpoint that I have a hard time accepting, because it seems so arbitrary.

It's all subjective values no doubt, and most people will disagree with me on it as well (no problem there, they're just my personal views). My personal views on humans individually is they hold no value really (With some exceptions). Like ants, if you kill one, the rest keep going (unless of course, you kill the Queen). So I look at species as a whole group, rather than individually. As a whole group, I think we've done pretty dismally. We're wrecking our environment, committing horrific violence to Mother Earth, and generally are dependent on a culture of violence. This makes me pretty misanthropic, and in general, I maintain a very low opinion of humanity, which is why I don't care much for it's welfare. Hopefully I explained it better there(?)

More later...

 

[TFian]

Now you're worried about the enslavement of rice?

I'm sorry, I don't follow? How could rice even be enslaved? I don't think I ever brought up rice.

You were talking about the freedom of the humans living in the wild. And I am pointing out that they are much less free than humans living in a modern first world country.

What does the lot of rice or pigs have to do with that? It's certainly true that that is another topic that you might find to be of meaning, and by all means discuss it, but it has nothing to do with whether wild humans are living in a more free state than non wild humans.

I think this is where the misunderstanding comes from. I wasn't talking about the domestication of animals, and rice(?), but of humans. This idea is outlined by philosopher and author John Zerzan http://greenanarchy.info/dom.php

Which idea of freedom? Even your idea of freedom had to wait for civilization to be thought of.

Not at all, it existed pre civilization, and died when it came around. Look at band societies, far more egalitarian and free than any civilization.

That's circular. Why do you only find the effects of civilization impeding freedom to be meaningful, but not, for instance, the actions of people of a neighboring band?
Both have the effect of impeding your freedom to roam, hunt, and gather.

I don't understand your argument. Are you saying pre civilized (wo)man wasn't free, because he/she could have been killed by rivals? What do you consider warfare then?

On a per capita basis? Much less.

Why was the 20th century considered the most bloody century in history then?

No, you'd be killed by your neighbors if you tried to cross their land.

Just as you do if you cross into an alien nation.

Actually, we would. Look at what native australians did to their environment with the use of nothing more high tech than fire.

Not nearly as to the scale as civilization does.

Because art is of value?

I disagree. http://www.primitivism.com/case-art.htm

If you don't have a problem with censorship, that's fine. I do.

Censorship is only relevant within a civilization.

And personally, I think ideas are of tremendous value.

Depends on what ideas.

That's fine: you don't want to improve the human condition. I do.

Myth of progress. http://tinyurl.com/32xbw54

Again, why do only the effects of civilization matter when it comes to things that impede your freedom?

I'm not sure I understand the question. How do you mean only my freedom?

Not to anywhere near the extent to which it happened in hunter-gatherer societies.

Keep in mind more people died in the 20th century by warfare, murder, etc., than any other period in human existence.

 

[TFian]

Finally, do you accept that the following is simply not true?

Exaggerated yes, but not completely untrue. IQ of an institutionalized retard is too far, but lower IQ no doubt, on average.

 

[Garrison0fMars]

Wow, there's so much wrong with OP's post I don't even know where to begin. As someone who has a passing familiarity with John Michael Greer, and many others active in the peak oil community, I hope my two cents will be constructive.

The "Grand Archdruid" as you like to call him isn't even correctly defining the "Internet", or rather, he's using the wrong word for his definition. He's conflating the concept of an "Internet" with the "World Wide Web". This is false right off the bat. The concept of the "Internet", and the World Wide Web as it exists today is in fact, not the same thing. The WWW, as you know it, is simply the most widely used gloablized version of what we consider an "Internet". If you look back into Internet history, you'll see globalized use of Usenet groups predating the emergence of the World Wide Web, which didn't even exist until 1990. (Usenet groups were used all the way back in the 70s). Arguably Ham Radio networks were our first "Internet". This distinction will be important later in my post.

So first off, is JMG's contention that the world wide web will simply become unable to be maintained after the peak in petroleum even true? I argue otherwise. If his argument is nothing that can't be powered solely by renewable energy will exist in a "post peak world", then the world wide web is most certainly here to stay. GreenStarNetwork is deploying the worlds first zero carbon Internet – where all routing and cloud/storage nodes are powered solely by local renewable energy sources. Greenstar now has 5 nodes in Canada, several in Europe and pending nodes in China and Japan. http://www.greenstarnetwork.com/node/6 Given that we can and already do power the nodes that make the WWW possible, why wouldn't we just do that? As he says about agriculture

Still, this doesn’t mean that we’re all going to starve to death; it means that the way we produce food nowadays is not long for the world, and will be replaced by other ways of producing food that don’t depend on mass infusions of nonrenewable resources

So why exactly wouldn't we do this with the World Wide Web?

But what if powering the nodes that make the WWW possible are unable to be powered in the future? Will that make the internet disappear? No, it would just mean the WWW would disappear. There are many different ways we can contruct and maintain an "internet" for widespread use, as evident by the usage of Usenet groups a decade before the emergence of the World Wide Web. Many different avenues exist. BBS, local last-mile meshworks, point-to-point modem connections. Such point-to-point connections are still possible using the regular old landline network, and new possibilities exist for doing the same thing with local wireless meshworks. Such local meshes, with data stored on hard drives even during down time, are potentially a lot more resilient. JMG completely missed the point that commenter Mash's argument that can be found in the comments of OP's link, the extent that the Internet is a loose network of lots of modular local systems, it’s quite likely that local meshwork systems may survive indefinitely as community “intranets” of sorts even if the WWW can't be maintained, and that something approximating what we consider "the Internet" will survive. The fact that he just brushed him off as being a member of his metaphorical strawman argument shows a rather apparent Luddite bias on his part, which seems to make him unable to see anything valuable in technology post steam engine. In fact Greer’s own example of the Roman courier relays — which survived in modular, local form in the cities — works against him in this regard. I quote:

In urban areas, where it made sense, the network was maintained or even expanded. Outside of those areas, much of the system was simply lost, the roads swallowed by forests, mudslides, wandering rivers, fields and weeds, the fortifications falling to ruin and scavenged for building materials, the bridges succumbing to earthquake and flood.

He also (correctly) states radio technology will survive whatever upheavel we may go through. Well, I hate to break it to him, but computer data can be transfered over a vast network through packet radio technology. Not only did we test this (successfully) in the 60s with the Aloha network, but people right now are working on a packet radio Internet network that will span North America. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/HInternet It wouldn't be as robust as the WWW, and it seems like it'll be confined to a continental level, but it'd still be a widespread usable Internet, maintained with the very low powered network of packet radio. Localized versions already exist of this as well (look at existing networks) You may also want to check out http://wndw.net/download.html, it's a very interesting e book all about how third world countries, who only use a sliver of our energy usage, are able to connect to the World Wide Web, and develop their own local Internet systems as well. Such things would inevitably happen in the US, if it as JMG says, becomes a "third world country". There's also the mesh networks utilized by the One Laptop Per Child laptops, which are powered by a hand-crank, and use a combination of mesh networks and sneakernets to operate their own Internet to communicate with one another.

If you're worried about how will we produce new computers in such a scenario, given how many computer components are developed everyday (millions), there'll be enough supplies probably for a millenia for a recycle and reuse production system for computers. Given that we can use electronics a lot longer than we actually use them (My old Nintendo 64 has a power supply that can last 90 years, plenty of home computers can be used for a lot longer than they are used as well), it wouldn't be hard to simply recycle old computers and remake long term durable computers out of them. If such a decline comes to the first world as JMG details, I'd suspect a lot of organizations like this would pop up in about every mid to heavily populated city in the west. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Geek They already have 12 locations and and growing. Given all the practical possibilities, it doesn't look like computers or "The Internet" are going anywhere anytime soon.

 

[Garrison0fMars]

TFian, you may want to check out these articles

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/03/limits-on-thermodynamic-potential-of.html

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/03/archdruids-and-net-energy.html

Stuart Stanford, who holds a Ph.D in physics (John Michael Greer holds no scientific degree) the author of the blogposts, and a regular contributed to the Oil Drum, details just how badly John Michael Greer doesn't understand physics, yet feels like he can talk about it as if he's some authority. But it's not surprising that he gets the fundamentals so wrong about science, after he said this... (extracted from his interview in the "Wiccan/Pagan Times")

Three hundred and fifty years ago we had something called the Scientific Revolution. It's too rarely realized that this was a revolution in the political sense. First in Britain, then in other countries in Europe and Europe's colonies, power passed from landed aristocrats and kings to business interests. What we call "modern science" was the ideology of the new ruling class: a worldview in which nothing exists except matter and energy, in which nature is nothing but raw material, religion is purely psychological, and magic is impossible. It's the perfect belief system for a world in which money is the prime source of political power.

The interesting thing is that nobody ever actually proved scientifically that magic doesn't work, that spirits and gods don't exist, or any of the other things paraded as definite fact by the publicists of modern science. You can test magic by experiment...but the experiments weren't done. The promoters of the Scientific Revolution simply insisted loudly and repeatedly that magic had to be impossible, and that was that. When Rupert Sheldrake did a few experiments on nonphysical causation a few years back and published the results, the editors of the very prestigious British science magazine _Nature_ called for his book to be burnt. Sheldrake committed what, in scientific terms, is the ultimate sin: he'd subjected the basic assumptions of science itself to experimental test, and showed that they don't hold water.

(Source http://www.twpt.com/johnmichaelgreer.htm)

Yes, the guy not only doesn't accept the scientific method, but also believes in magic. Since he openly doesn't accept the scientific method, it's rather suspect that he tries to use it to justify his particular "Green Wizard" worldview, don't you think? I'd actually read up on Stuart Stanford if I were you, he's one of the most rational, and scientifically literate people in the peak oil crowd.

 

[Hellbound]

Excellent posts, Garrison...said a lot of the things I was thinking, but better.

 

[TFian]

Garrison0fMars, your comments are very nearly the perfect example of the logic of abundance, the kind of thinking Grand Archdruid Ancient Order of Druids in America John Michael Greer criticized in this post. I don't think you've grasped yet that the future ahead of us is one in which there will be urgent, bare-survival needs clamoring for every watt of electricity, every scrap of salvage, and every hour of labor time. For a village to devote the electrical output of a waterwheel to a repeater could mean that the electricity won't be there to power a couple of refrigerators, so that children don't die of diarrhea from spoiled food, the way they used to do, every summer, in the pre-refrigeration US. The hours of labor needed to keep your computer system running is time that could be spent growing and harvesting more food, so the risk of going hungry before the next harvest will be a little less. That's the way life works when you don't have a fantastic abundance of cheap energy flooding through a society -- and it's a reality that most people these days seem unable to grasp.

Me personally though, I've suggested is that as costs rise and pressures for control escalate, it will gradually become an expensive luxury used mostly by government, big business, and the rich, while everyone else falls back on less sophisticated methods of interaction. It could straggle on for some time before resource shortages or sociopolitical collapse or any of a dozen other things finally pulls the plug.

About the packet radio internet. Why would anyone bother doing this? Is that sort of thing technically feasible? Sure. Does it offer enough in the way of benefits to be worth the considerable cost in resources, when every scrap of energy and material has six serious needs begging for it, and communication on the scale you're discussing can be done just as well by a cheaper and less resource-intensive approach that does without computers? Hardly. This is the point that I'm trying to make here: it doesn't matter if a technology is really nifty; if there's another way to meet its actual needs that's cheaper in terms of scarce resources, that cheaper way will be more viable.

 

[TFian]

Excellent posts, Garrison...said a lot of the things I was thinking, but better.

Excellent? They're baseless. Ever notice that in places where there is little wealth there is little internet? Remember, to make the internet work you need to maintain and power thousands of server farms, each of which use as much electricity as a midsized city, not to mention all the other costly and energy-intensive infrastructure that keeps the net running. If he/she wants to respond to the economic argument I've made, fine, but he/she needs to address the argument -- not just ignore it and insist that anything that's nifty and technically feasible is an option in a resource-constrained world

Industry is cumulative in nature, always supported by the excess energy of fossil fuels. Once that begins to break down, a large number of things will no longer be producible for want of just a few key parts or materials.

 

[Roboramma]

Excellent? They're baseless. Ever notice that in places where there is little wealth there is little internet?

I haven't. I spent about a year in Mysore, which isn't the poorest place in the world, but certainly never had a problem finding an internet cafe there. And that was almost ten years ago now. And it only cost 10 rupees/hour too.

The main reason that it is rarer in india than elsewhere seems to be the expense of developing the infrastructure, not the ongoing costs. Once that infrastructure is in place it really isn't that expensive.

Industry is cumulative in nature, always supported by the excess energy of fossil fuels. Once that begins to break down, a large number of things will no longer be producible for want of just a few key parts or materials.

I like you TFian, mainly because you seemed to be actually listening to the arguments that people have been making... but this sentence makes it seem as though you haven't even read the thread at all.

 

[excaza]

I like you TFian, mainly because you seemed to be actually listening to the arguments that people have been making...

You must be reading a different thread.

but this sentence makes it seem as though you haven't even read the thread at all.

ah, there ya go.

 

[TFian]

I haven't. I spent about a year in Mysore, which isn't the poorest place in the world, but certainly never had a problem finding an internet cafe there. And that was almost ten years ago now. And it only cost 10 rupees/hour too.

The main reason that it is rarer in India than elsewhere seems to be the expense of developing the infrastructure, not the ongoing costs. Once that infrastructure is in place it really isn't that expensive.

But the infrastructure needs easy cheap abundant energy to maintain.

I like you TFian, mainly because you seemed to be actually listening to the arguments that people have been making... but this sentence makes it seem as though you haven't even read the thread at all.

How so? What part of the thread haven't I read?

 

[TFian]

Yes, the guy not only doesn't accept the scientific method, but also believes in magic.

So? What does that have to do with the issue at hand? Also, do you find something wrong he said in the quote you mined?

 

[Hellbound]

Excellent? They're baseless. Ever notice that in places where there is little wealth there is little internet?

No, actually, I haven't. And I've been in several places where there's so little wealth that people would have to be turned away each morning from a job working 12 hours a day, doing heavy lifting, at a wage of $5 (for the entire day's work)...food not provided.

 

[drkitten]

For a village to devote the electrical output of a waterwheel to a repeater could mean that the electricity won't be there to power a couple of refrigerators, so that children don't die of diarrhea from spoiled food, the way they used to do, every summer, in the pre-refrigeration US.

[...]

About the packet radio internet. Why would anyone bother doing this? Is that sort of thing technically feasible? Sure. Does it offer enough in the way of benefits to be worth the considerable cost in resources, when every scrap of energy and material has six serious needs begging for it, and communication on the scale you're discussing can be done just as well by a cheaper and less resource-intensive approach that does without computers?

You've just answered your own question. If you've got a village somewhere that relies on " a couple of refrigerators," they damn well better know how to maintain and repair them. They damn well better know how and where to get spare parts for them.

The easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to get that knowledge is via internet.

There's a reason that every appliance manufacturer puts all the manuals for its products on the Web. It's much easier and cheaper to distribute PDFs than it is to spray ink on dead trees and pay someone to lug the damn thing halfway across the country -- or across the world.

 

[ZirconBlue]

I don't think you've grasped yet that the future ahead of us is one in which there will be urgent, bare-survival needs clamoring for every watt of electricity, every scrap of salvage, and every hour of labor time.

He hasn't "grasped" it, because you haven't demonstrated it. It goes against everything we know about Science and History, and you've provided no evidence to make us reconsider, other than to appeal to the authority of GrandArchDuke Ferdinand, or whatever his name is.

 

[maximara]

You've just answered your own question. If you've got a village somewhere that relies on " a couple of refrigerators," they damn well better know how to maintain and repair them. They damn well better know how and where to get spare parts for them.

The easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to get that knowledge is via internet.

There's a reason that every appliance manufacturer puts all the manuals for its products on the Web. It's much easier and cheaper to distribute PDFs than it is to spray ink on dead trees and pay someone to lug the damn thing halfway across the country -- or across the world.

Good point and you have to remember that the peak oil curve is just that--a curve. The problem is the world's economy depends on every increasing amounts of consumption just to keep going and people do not or will no understand how these two factors will interact.

When the cost of the oil required for everything gets too high the economy seizes up resulting in a recession. The recession reduces the demand and the cost of oil for a while. Now there are three ways this can go:

1) companies and-or governments use the breather to ramp up and get online as many renewable sources as possible

2) a wild series of recession-very short recovery followed by even deeper recession cycles,

3) no real recovery from the recession occurs and as we continue on the down side of the curve the cost of oil increases resulting in the recession getting worse possibly going into full scale depression.

In any case the consumer happy type of capitalism we know will be gone. Even if we go to option 1 renewables just can't keep up with the 3% geometric growth requirements of our current system.

It terms of over all energy use the internet is the cheapest method of moving information around and as things contract expect to see the most inefficient methods in terms of tonnage per unit of energy to go first.

Airplanes followed by long distance trucking will likely go first.
Long distance personal travel will be next.
Trains supported by shorter haul routes by truck will likely become the rule.

Long distance teaching and office work become common place eliminating the need for buildings, classes, and offices as we know them. Information itself will become even more a commodity then it is now as it is will be the only thing that can really grow in the post peak world.

 

[Garrison0fMars]

Garrison0fMars, your comments are very nearly the perfect example of the logic of abundance, the kind of thinking Grand Archdruid Ancient Order of Druids in America John Michael Greer criticized in this post.

Metaphorical strawman. Please don't do that, you're essentially jumbling me into an mindset I never even expressed.

I don't think you've grasped yet that the future ahead of us is one in which there will be urgent, bare-survival needs clamoring for every watt of electricity, every scrap of salvage, and every hour of labor time.

So I'm guessing you just ignored the articles I gave you from Stuart Stanford? I'd advise you to read them, they're quite informative.

For a village to devote the electrical output of a waterwheel to a repeater could mean that the electricity won't be there to power a couple of refrigerators, so that children don't die of diarrhea from spoiled food, the way they used to do, every summer, in the pre-refrigeration US.

Uhm...refrigerators take more electricity and power to run than say most home PCs, you know this right? But even if we don't have enough power to devote to home PC use, we could switch to laptops, which can be...wait for this, powered by an hand crank. A decent laptop can be run for an entire hour with only five minutes of cranking the handcrank.

The hours of labor needed to keep your computer system running is time that could be spent growing and harvesting more food, so the risk of going hungry before the next harvest will be a little less.

So what, we can't devote at least five minutes to pull a handcrank?

That's the way life works when you don't have a fantastic abundance of cheap energy flooding through a society -- and it's a reality that most people these days seem unable to grasp.

But you don't need "abundance of cheap energy" to power most laptops. Outside high powered gaming, you don't need much power at all to run a modern laptop, and all the benefits it brings.

Me personally though, I've suggested is that as costs rise and pressures for control escalate, it will gradually become an expensive luxury used mostly by government, big business, and the rich, while everyone else falls back on less sophisticated methods of interaction. It could straggle on for some time before resource shortages or sociopolitical collapse or any of a dozen other things finally pulls the plug.

Then frankly, you haven't considered all the possibilities. I can consider two that would happen in the interim between present day and your hypothetical collapse. People could A.) pool their money together, have one person buy internet access in their home, and share it via a mesh network (which can be created with a Pringles can), and/or B.) Their municipal governments can buy the ISP access, and create an municipal mesh wi fi network. I'd imagine both of those solutions would be adopted across North America, if it became "too expensive".

But really, that's moot, since it's pretty clear you didn't read my link to GreenStarNetwork, showcasing that we already power those "server farms" entirely with local renewable energy.

About the packet radio internet. Why would anyone bother doing this?

Fair question in it's own right. Why would anyone bother maintaining an Internet system of any kind? Well, drkitten pretty much has it right. But I'll go a bit more in depth. The transfer of large bits of information, over long distances, accessible to governments, institutions, communities and individuals, is frankly, something of immense benefit that it's more of a question of "why wouldn't we". I don't think you have really grasped the benefit that the "Internet" really brings. Let's say your particular "socio political collapse" happens. Let's say there's three communities. One's Community A, another is Community B, and the last is Community C.

Let's say Community A knows how to significantly increase crop yields, but is seriously lacking in the ability to create new educational infrastructure. Community B has an abundance of teachers who worked in the previous educational system before the collapse, but has no real technicians to help them maintain what's left of their irrigation system. Community C has an abundance of technicians, but lacks both farming science knowledge and educational structural knowledge. Now tell me, what's the more efficient way these communities can communicate this knowledge? Pony express mailing system, which would use more energy than an packet radio network transmitting digital data, or the packet radio Hinternet system? Simple example mind you, but I hope you get the idea...

Is that sort of thing technically feasible?

I already showed you it is. Did you read the link I gave you on the Hinternet? If we're going to continue and maintain radio links, why wouldn't we use those same radio links to transmit computer data? Of course this is all assuming the World Wide Web (remember, the World Wide Web and the "Internet" are not the same things, technically a local LAN network is an "Internet") will not be able to be powered in the future, and I think GreenStarNetwork proves this otherwise.

Sure. Does it offer enough in the way of benefits to be worth the considerable cost in resources, when every scrap of energy and material has six serious needs begging for it,

Then the ArchFruitcake doesn't believe Radio technology will survive in the future? He needs to stay consistent.

But really, given we can handcrank packet radio and laptops, I don't see either going away anytime soon.

and communication on the scale you're discussing can be done just as well by a cheaper and less resource-intensive approach that does without computers? Hardly.

What "Cheaper and less resource intensive approach" method without computers? Computers are in fact, the cheapest and least resource intensive ways of information travel. You do realize it costs MORE energy to use paper and pony express,....yes??

This is the point that I'm trying to make here: it doesn't matter if a technology is really nifty;

Luddite bias. Define "nifty", and how such "nifty" technology is without any objective use.

if there's another way to meet its actual needs that's cheaper in terms of scarce resources, that cheaper way will be more viable.

Then you accept we create an packet radio Internet with the receivers being handcranked powered laptops? Good!

 

[excaza]

I suggest you don't even bother. If you've noticed, this has already been explained to him multiple times over the course of the thread, and he's still making the same 'arguments.'

 

[Garrison0fMars]

Excellent posts, Garrison...said a lot of the things I was thinking, but better.

Thanks Though I'm sure someone with more experience in such matters could have put it better than I did.

 

[excaza]

Thanks Though I'm sure someone with more experience in such matters could have put it better than I did.

Others have. But it is nice to have yours as well.