If James Kunstler and Tom Robbins had a love-child, it would be this guy

[dixiegrrrrl]

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-death-of-internet-pre-mortem.html

Interesting ideas, much focus on what comes next, delicious writing, as he ponders futures.
In the link above...the future of the internet.

Radio and television, like most of the other familiar technologies that define life in a modern industrial society, were born and grew to maturity in an expanding economy. The internet, by contrast, was born during the last great blowoff of the petroleum age—the last decades of the twentieth century, during which the world’s industrial nations took the oil reserves that might have cushioned the transition to sustainability, and blew them instead on one last orgy of over-the-top conspicuous consumption—and it’s coming to maturity in the early years of an age of economic contraction and ecological blowback.

The rising prices, falling service quality, and relentless monetization of a maturing industry, together with the increasing burden of online crime and the inevitable rebound away from internet culture, will thus be hitting the internet in a time when the global economy no longer has the slack it once did, and the immense costs of running the internet in anything like its present form will have to be drawn from a pool of real wealth that has many other demands on it. What’s more, quite a few of those other demands will be far more urgent than the need to provide consumers with a convenient way to send pictures of kittens to their friends. That stark reality will add to the pressure to monetize internet services, and provide incentives to those who choose to send their kitten pictures by other means.

It’s crucial to remember here, as noted above, that the internet is simply a cheaper and more convenient way of doing things that people were doing long before the first website went live, and a big part of the reason why it’s cheaper and more convenient right now is that internet users are being subsidized by the investors and venture capitalists who are funding the internet industry. That’s not the only subsidy on which the internet depends, though. Along with the rest of industrial society, it’s also subsidized by half a billion years of concentrated solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. As those deplete, the vast inputs of energy, labor, raw materials, industrial products, and other forms of wealth that sustain the internet will become increasingly expensive to provide, and ways of distributing kitten pictures that don’t require the same inputs will prosper in the resulting competition.

[bananas]

1. Peak oil nonsense. nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. You are saying that how the internet will probably evolve to serve the 1%..is "peak oil nonsense"?

Despite the fact we just went thru an attempt to create a two tier internet for the sake of profit?

An intelligent comment might have been to point to an idea in the article, ON topic, and show your reasons for refuting it.

Fortunately, most readers here at DU have learned to ignore crude attempts to shut down a discussion.

[bananas]

3. I'm saying his premise is based on peak oil nonsense.

Kunstler thought y2k would collapse civilization, your subject line comparing Greer to Kunstler is appropriate.
I'm not trying to shut down discussion, I've discussed this plenty right here on DU for the past decade.
Example from 2010: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x251383

[magical thyme]

9. comparing Greer to Kunstler is totally inappropriate

Peak oil is not nonsense; it's simply not possible to accurately predict exactly how it will play out, nor does Greer try to.

Greer considers at a combination of peak resources (not just oil), climate change, economic collapse, and the overall sustainability of our current "civilization." And if you tell him that one event (Y2K in your example) or another will collapse civilization, he'll laugh in your face. He's looking at civilization crumbling over decades and hundreds of years.

Your example for 2010 tells me nothing except that 2 individuals were unable to make accurate predictions; not surprising considering the number of variables in what they are trying to predict, from economic to physical wars over resources.

[KoKo]

5. You need to read the whole article to understand his futuristic view...

I realize adding in Peak Oil distracts from what he says....but the whole article where he starts off with some of the pitfalls "subsidized technology" and then compares the internet is worth a futuristic examination. Going off on the "Peak Oil" to discount the rest of the article is very harsh. He makes some good very good points.

We are going to have to pay for our Internet...eventually. It's Free Now because it's still new...but, we see many more features going under "Pay Walls" and millions don't even have proper access to the Bandwidth to even view the "Free You Tubes" from Google. But, eventually those will be "Pay for View."

[KoKo]

4. A Bit More that makes so much sense from the "futuristic view" of the Article:

It’s crucial to remember here, as noted above, that the internet is simply a cheaper and more convenient way of doing things that people were doing long before the first website went live, and a big part of the reason why it’s cheaper and more convenient right now is that internet users are being subsidized by the investors and venture capitalists who are funding the internet industry. That’s not the only subsidy on which the internet depends, though. Along with the rest of industrial society, it’s also subsidized by half a billion years of concentrated solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. As those deplete, the vast inputs of energy, labor, raw materials, industrial products, and other forms of wealth that sustain the internet will become increasingly expensive to provide, and ways of distributing kitten pictures that don’t require the same inputs will prosper in the resulting competition.

There are also crucial issues of scale. Most pre-internet communications and information technologies scale down extremely well. A community of relatively modest size can have its own public library, its own small press, its own newspaper, and its own radio station running local programming, and could conceivably keep all of these functioning and useful even if the rest of humanity suddenly vanished from the map. Internet technology doesn’t have that advantage. It’s orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than a radio transmitter, not to mention the 14th-century technology of printing presses and card catalogs; what’s more, on the scale of a small community, the benefits of using internet technology instead of simpler equivalents wouldn’t come close to justifying the vast additional cost.


Now of course the world of the future isn’t going to consist of a single community surrounded by desolate wasteland. That’s one of the reasons why the demise of the internet won’t happen all at once. Telecommunications companies serving some of the more impoverished parts of rural America are already letting their networks in those areas degrade, since income from customers doesn’t cover the costs of maintenance. To my mind, that’s a harbinger of the internet’s future—a future of uneven decline punctuated by local and regional breakdowns, some of which will be fixed for a while.

That said, it’s quite possible that there will still be an internet of some sort fifty years from now. It will connect government agencies, military units, defense contractors, and the handful of universities that survive the approaching implosion of the academic industry here in the US, and it may provide email and a few other services to the very rich, but it will otherwise have a lot more in common with the original DARPAnet than with the 24/7 virtual cosmos imagined by today’s more gullible netheads.

[starroute]

6. Frankly, I don't believe it

I think it's twentieth century technologies that will become unaffordable -- like that whole business of cutting down forests to print newspapers and magazines, running large capital-intensive pieces of machinery to produce them, then burning oil to truck them around the country.

Either he thinks we're going back to the Middle Ages -- with a few gadgets for the rich on the side -- or he's completely off base. But the future I see is one in which we save the energy we're currently wasting on moving massive metal containers full of people or goods from here to there and put our resources into moving electrons around.

That would be cheaper, more efficient, and wouldn't require every small town to have its own printing presses, its own newsboys to hawk papers on the corners, and its own traveling merchants to bring goods from far distant places to the local markets.

[magical thyme]

8. if you read more than a single article of JMG

then you will see that he thinks that we'll end up with early 20th century technology technology.

And when I say eventually, I mean his timeline is over hundreds of years overall, in fits and starts, with "step-downs" happening in local areas.

And yes, due to a combination of overall resource depletion and the lack of money to invest, only the wealthiest will be able to afford high tech gadgets.

Also, he looks at more than just "peak oil." It's a combination of factors: overall resource depletion, climate change, ecological damage, and the collapse of global economy and financial systems.

Our current way of life is simply not sustainable. Factory agriculture totally dependent on oil not only to run the machines, but to build them and to make artificial fertilizer, is not sustainable and every techological solution to today's problem makes things worse down the road. The loss of topsoil combined with climate change and desertification of the west and midwest will turn much of the US into a dustbowl.

We use oil for more than just energy. A lot more. Using alternative energy will stretch the oil supply to last longer, but that is all it will do.

There also is a point where it costs more energy to extract it than you gain from what you extract. Consider the vast amounts of energy that are used to extract oil from Canada's tar sands.

[magical thyme]

7. I wouldn't compare JMG to Kunstler in any way, shape or form.

Kunstler is on a permanent curmudgeon rant about anything and everything that does not live up to his expectations of perfection. Not that he is wrong about collapsing civilization, but he seems to think it's just going to drop over any second versus crumbling in patches here, there and everywhere over decades.

And his survival "kitchen" garden left me Real gardens, the kind you feed off of, do not leave more space for lawn to be mowed than actual veggies. His is clearly an amateurs garden designed to be shown off to the wealthy neighbors, quite suitable for holding tea parties in.

His writing, as with his gardening, is far and away style over substance.