Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts

Before I read the book, I wrote this:

I like living in an industrial civilization. I like living indoors and not having to gather, harvest, or hunt my own food. I like having electronic devices and the Internet. I like the fact that air travel to almost anywhere in the world is at least moderately affordable. I like all these things, and I would like them to continue indefinitely into the future.

And that is why we need to minimize the effects of climate change on human civilization and make every effort to keep our planet’s ecosystems vibrant and healthy, and we must allow every human to have a meaningful stake in our civilization, and not have a permanent underclass of exploited workers anywhere in the world.

I really hope environmental calamity, together with social inequality and instability, doesn’t ruin everything I selfishly want!

Now, is this relevant to the book I just read?

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts

by Leigh Phillips, 2015

As it turns out, yes, Leigh Phillips’ book is relevant to what I wrote above. Through occasionally angry, often colorful prose, Phillips tears into environmental rhetoric and solutions that he calls “a series of romantic proposals from the green left that at best to very little to deal with the issue and at worst are counterproductive -- climate change is too grave a crisis to leave it to the greens” (p. 5).

Phillips is a left-wing socialist who likes living in an industrial civilization, does not want climate change to undo all of the progress humanity has made, and thus is deeply frustrated with the current state of lefty rhetoric when it comes to environmentalism and technology. He criticizes many (not all!) modern-day leftists for embracing an anti-technology and anti-growth ideology, which he sees as actively harmful to the pro-human-being values that left-wing politics ought to hold paramount.  

“Collapse porn” is how Phillips characterizes material catering to the idea that we’d be better off if industrial civilization just fell apart and we all went back to living on the land. Granted, people have been grumbling down this road ever since the first stirrings of industrialization, but Phillips is concerned that this way of thinking is becoming way too prevalent today, when in fact we need technology and economic development to avert (or deal with) the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

I’m personally unfamiliar with the books and ideology that he characterizes as “collapse porn”, so I was forced to take his evaluation largely on trust, but the rhetorical points he makes against this way of thinking are striking. Economic “degrowth”, he writes, cannot be differentiated from the economic austerity that leftists correctly despise -- they are the same thing. In response to Naomi Klein (a frequent target of his throughout the book), he says her “degrowth arguments stand opposed to the interests of working people, and are a barrier to labour’s advance” (p. 28). Comparing the proposals of various “collapse porn” fans, he asks if we need to scale ourselves back to the 1970s? The seventeenth century? The stone age? The answer “appears more to be based on aesthetic affinity rather than any evidence of resource equilibrium” (p. 21). And towards the end of the book, he reminds us that anti-modern rhetoric can also be a tool of right-wing authoritarian governments.

He also attacks what he sees as the left’s fetishization of the local and the small-scale. When it comes to food supply, localism is often more damaging to the environment, not less. For one thing, it results in less efficient use of land than more intensive agriculture; for another, the production of food has a much larger energy appetite than the transportation of it, so localism has limited benefits. His conclusion is that “localism is ultimately presenting the instant gratification and easy option of ethical consumerism as a solution rather than the hard, years-long slog of society-wide organization for structural change” (p. 128).

Phillips criticizes the common claim that we humans have overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity, as it’s not the vague group “humans” who are to blame -- by doing so, you ignore class differences. Phrases such as “per capita consumption” contain absolutely no useful information and obscure the differences between rich and poor. This rhetoric can inadvertently hide the true causes of environmental damage. For instance, he opines that it’s misleading to characterize the 2010 BP oil spill as the result of an exploding human population’s insatiable demand for oil; rather, it was the result of irresponsible decisions made in BP executive offices, and blame should be assigned accordingly.

Calling the left’s obsession with collapse “a politics of despair” (p. 131), he feels we are at risk of succumbing to the sense that building a better future just won’t work. (This echoes very similar sentiments in Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists.) If we celebrate the collapse of industrial civilization, it’s because we can’t imagine any realistic alternative. We’re still submitting to the dominant paradigm.

Phillips argues that some level of alteration of Earth’s environment is inevitable -- we simply cannot go back to some imagined state of nature without bringing widespread misery and death to literally billions of people. So we must develop technological solutions to minimize the effects of climate change and provide the people of Earth with the means to live meaningful lives.

He is unabashedly pro-technology, and slams left-wing activists who reflexively shun nuclear power and GMOs. He points out that it’s long been a common position on the left that “technologies used in the context of colonialism and exploitation in another political and economic context could be liberatory” (p. 156), and says the left must embrace scientific and technological innovation again.

I find it difficult to evaluate Phillips’ economic arguments, as I don’t have the requisite knowledge. He argues for a democratically planned economy, without going into the details of exactly what that would look like. I get the feeling that he’d say it’s on me to educate myself -- which is fair enough.

As for his environmental stance: “to put it bluntly, the goal can only be to maximize human flourishing”. Environmentalism shouldn’t be about saving the Earth (whatever that means), it should be about saving ourselves. If you were to dip into this book at random, you might come away with the mistaken impression that Phillips thinks we shouldn’t worry so much about the environment -- but this would be a terrible misunderstanding. His stance reminds me of the following cartoon:

From Humon Comics

Click on the comic to read the fine print.

It also reminded me of Charles C. Mann's recent book The Wizard and the Prophet -- well OK, I haven't read the book yet, but here's Mann's 12-minute TED talk, which is basically a trailer for the book.

To tell the truth, there are several areas, from economics to science, where I feel my lack of knowledge very keenly and I don't feel qualified to comment on Phillips' ideas. But I can definitely reiterate what I said in the beginning, that I like industrial civilization and I want it to continue. What I don't want, in the words of cartoon Gaia above, is for humans to fuck themselves over big-time.

Null States

Null States

by Malka Older, 2017

Book two of Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle. It’s the second half of the 21st century, and most people live in centenals: political units of 100,000 people each, who democratically elect their chosen government every 10 years from a panoply of choices.

The Centenal Cycle has gotten under my skin -- in a good way -- more than most fiction works I’ve been reading lately. Its world of centenals, and global governments that compete for the right to govern them, feels like something new, not just familiar extrapolations from current geopolitical trends. It’s like a very well-done thought experiment, but Older’s succeeded in populating the world with well-written characters that fully inhabit it.

(By the way, I have not yet opened book three, State Tectonics, and so every bit of this post is written in perfect ignorance of what happens in it.)

Two years after the events of Infomocracy, we begin in Darfur, where emissaries of the planetwide network known as Information have arrived to meet with a local governor, but find themselves witnessing an assassination instead. Our main protagonist is Roz, an Information agent who’d been a prominent secondary character in the first book. The investigation into the murder involves untangling the political situation in Darfur: who wanted the governor dead?

Meanwhile, two of the stars of Infomocracy are crisscrossing Eurasia. Mishima used to be a full-time Information employee, but now she’s doing freelance analysis work based out of Saigon. Ken was a Policy1st operative, but he’s left his old organization now that it’s the global Supermajority -- the most powerful government worldwide. Now they’re both hopping round the hemisphere, with only time for an occasional romantic rendezvous, dealing with the residual scandals of the old Supermajority government Heritage and the ramifications of an expanding war in central Asia.

Of course, everything is connected, and Mishima and Ken find themselves drawn into the expanding Darfur investigation. Something low-key that I like about this series is that our main protagonists are primarily analysts. There’s some old-fashioned violence, and a couple of action scenes, but Older is very clear that our heroes spend a huge amount of their time bent over screens, and they are all very competent at their jobs, and while we never get too deep into the number-crunching aspect of what they do, the narrative never loses sight of it either.

A few months ago I read and wrote about Infomocracy, and I am embarrassed to re-read that post now, as what I didn’t think worth mentioning then is exactly what becomes important in the subsequent book. “Imagine there’s no countries,” I said in my flippant way, but I shouldn’t have, as the world of The Centenal Cycle still has some traditional countries. Saudi Arabia’s one, as we learn in the first book. We see in the second book that Switzerland’s another. And there’s still a rump Chinese state, with its capital at Xi’an. And there are still nation-states in Central Asia -- Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have gotten into a shooting war that threatens to spiral out of control and drag surrounding centenals in.

These are the null states of the title. At least, that’s how Information sometimes refers to them, a bit snarkily. In my review of Infomocracy, I called Information “an independent entity that has apparently replaced the news media”. That’s not wrong, but it’s also much more than that.

The people of this world are so connected that we humans of the 2010s look ridiculous by comparison, with our clumsy, clunky “smartphones” and other “gadgets”. These people are plugged into the online world to such a degree that it borders on telepathy, as they wear miniaturized computers 24/7 that they can control with eyeball movements and they tap out messages with their fingers onto virtual keyboards. AI has become good enough to understand real-time speech with all the nuance, and honest-to-goodness universal translators that actually work well are now standard.

And they are constantly plugged into Information. Reading something -- anything -- in the “real” world? If you like, Information will helpfully annotate it with explainers, context, and fact-checking. Need video of something that happened in a public place? Fortunately, we’re all under constant Information surveillance. This is why the surviving old-timey states are nicknamed null states -- Information doesn’t have its usual level of sophisticated data on them.

This is likely to sound horribly dystopian to many of us, but we readers aren’t being pushed to see it as such. Older never insists that this world should be seen as a dystopia. All of the viewpoint characters are so accustomed to Information and this hyper-connectivity that they see it as the natural order of things, and so we readers will find ourselves doing so as well.

Within the narrative there are “outsider” characters who resist Information’s panopticon world, vindicating those readers who see it as nightmarish. For instance, there’s one very small government in this world that has ideological objections to Information surveillance, and one of its citizens is a minor character who gives her land’s point of view a voice. I can think of many ways the Centenal system is better than what we’ve got right now, and many arguments why Information as presented here is a positive thing. And yet, the downsides are real, not least the potential for malfeasance. Bad people can exploit this system in so many new and ingenious ways.

As I noted in my review of the first book, Older never delves into how we got from our world to the Centenal system, and I think it's wise of her to present this world to us readers as a fait accompli. If I were to speculate, I suspect some elites might be receptive to such a radical re-organization of political power as long as they’d continue to be the elites under the new system, but they’d have to be spooked into doing so under threat of chaos and violence and annihilation. Older does make a brief fleeting reference to large-scale wars that took place in the final years of the pre-Centenal system -- and so I wonder if there are bustling cities in our universe that our globe-trotting heroes in the Centenal Cycle never visit because they are now radioactive rubble.

I read Null States shortly before the local elections here in Taiwan, and so I naturally pondered what sort of government I’d be living under in this universe. I imagine there’d be some sort of patriotic Formosa government, but as I live in a politically very “blue” area of Taipei, they probably wouldn’t win my centenal. There’s a good chance my area would go for the global technocrats of Policy1st, but I could also see the center-right Heritage government doing very well here, at least before they sank under scandals at the end of Infomocracy. (The Heritage-built Tokyo-Taipei tunnel in that book implies they had a presence here.) Or the commercially-oriented Chinese-dominated government called 888 would also be a strong possibility. They wouldn’t be my first choice, but I would deal with it. On the other hand, if my centenal elected 1China, I would be very unhappy. Actually, I’m very curious how cross-strait relations have evolved in this universe.

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood, 2003

Grim end-of-civilization fiction.

Our protagonist Jimmy grows up in a world, a few decades hence, where the super-rich live and work in vast corporate-owned gated communities and everyone else lives in the world outside. Jimmy’s dad has a sweet corporate job working in the lucrative and rapidly developing field of genetically modified organisms, and Jimmy’s childhood friend Crake turns out to be a budding genius in this field.

But we know from the start that everything’s doomed. Chapters that describe Jimmy’s childhood alternate with chapters about Jimmy’s later life. Civilization has collapsed and nearly all humans are dead. Jimmy lives near a settlement of people called Crakers, genetically modified humanoids who live an Edenic existence, pure and innocent and ignorant of all trappings of civilization. They call Jimmy “Snowman”. Crakers are the creation of Jimmy/Snowman’s old buddy Crake.

Oryx and Crake describes how we get from point A (Jimmy and Crake’s childhood) to point B (planetwide apocalypse).

This is Margaret Atwood at her most science fictiony. I know Atwood pushes back against calling her books ‘science fiction’. Frankly, I see that as a cynical attempt to not get pigeonholed into what she sees as a literary ghetto, and since I’m not her literary agent I can call her book what it obviously is all I want.

In this sci-fi world (oooh, I’m calling it not just ‘science fiction’ but ‘sci-fi’), humans are reshaping the animal and plant kingdoms: “chicken” meat that grows on tree-like organisms; porcine creatures called “pigoons” with human-like physiology, perfect for growing transplantable organs. This tampering with nature, as we can surmise early on, eventually helps lead to the collapse of human civilization.

I’m sure some see this as a grim warning of the dangers of genetically modified organisms, while others see it hysterical anti-GMO alarmism. Personally, I don’t think the biotech of Oryx and Crake necessarily needs to be interpreted in either of these ways. Atwood is clearly fascinated by this technology, and she’s engaging in the time-honored science-fictional tradition of extrapolation. People who choose to read it as a big unsubtle moralistic message about GMOs are, of course, free to take it in whatever way they want; I choose to read it differently.

I haven’t mentioned the enigmatic Oryx (half the title!), because she’s weird and I’m still not sure how to think about her character. Keeping this spoiler-free, I can say that it’s hard for me to get into her head, and if Oryx and Crake were written by a generic male author rather than by the great Margaret Atwood, he’d be mocked over how he wrote the novel’s most prominent female character.

But my wife has advised me that Atwood is playing a long game here, and I should read the remainder of the MadAddam trilogy before rushing to judgement on Oryx. OK, that’s fair.

Oryx and Crake is a self-contained story, but it ends on something of a cliffhanger, and I’m genuinely interested in what happens next. We have the second book in the trilogy on our bookshelves -- I’m interested to see how The Year of the Flood expands on this universe.

Taiwan, China. Taiwan, Province of China.

This is Air Canada.

This is the website of the IELTS exam.

This is an official form on the website of my home state in the USA.

Imagine how you would feel if, every time you had to fill out an online form, you had to cross your fingers because you knew your country’s name might be twisted in a insulting way.

There are some people who will say “It’s technically correct”. Well, I am something of a persnickety pedant myself. And I wrote this post to express exactly what I think of claims that it’s “technically correct”.

It's fine to not be an expert in East Asian geopolitics. No one is an expert in everything. So here is a brief explanation of why we are so angry about this.

Q: Isn’t “Taiwan, China” technically correct?

A: You’re thinking of the “Republic of China”, the official name of Taiwan’s government. (Why is it the Republic of China? Long interesting story, well worth reading up on, but I won’t insert a history lecture here.) If Taiwan were designated “Taiwan (Republic of China)” or “Taiwan (ROC)”, there would be no anger and outrage. At worst, there would be some eye-rolling, as the Republic of China is a contentious issue here in Taiwan and I can assure you many Taiwanese people have strong opinions on this matter.

But none of the screenshots above say "Taiwan (Republic of China)".

Q: So why is “Taiwan, China” so offensive?

A: First, ask yourself this. When someone hears the word “China”, do they think of the Republic of China, de facto capital Taipei, population 23 million? Or do they think of the People’s Republic of China, capital Beijing, population 1.4 billion? Most people outside of East Asia aren’t even aware that there’s an entity called the “Republic of China” that’s separate from China. The Chinese government is well aware of this and uses it to its advantage.

I’m not going to mince words here. The government of the PRC would like nothing more than to take over Taiwan and incorporate it into their territory (and it’s easy to see why -- geopolitically it would be a wonderful strategic prize). This is not the ranting of a conspiracy monger -- China isn’t even trying to hide its intentions. Publicly at least, they won’t rule out the use of military force to conquer Taiwan. But as that would be extremely risky, they would much rather wear Taiwan down, demoralizing it so that its people see annexation as the inevitable choice.

Whether China takes Taiwan by force or by “peaceful” coercion, it doesn’t want the rest of the world to see it as a larger country taking over a smaller, less powerful country. That would look very bad. Instead, China wants the rest of the world to see Taiwan as a recalcitrant part of China that needs to be brought to heel. That’s why (among many things) it’s got people pushing to change “Taiwan” on those drop-down menus to things like “Taiwan, China” or “Taiwan, Province of China”. It’s all about changing the world’s perception of Taiwan so that if Invasion Day comes, the rest of the world doesn’t see a large aggressive country invading a smaller country.

And every airline that lists Taiwan as China and every educational institution that forces students to declare their country as “Taiwan, China” is complicit in this. With Beijing -- not politically neutral.

As I said above, imagine if you knew that every time you filled out an online form, there would be a moment of uncertainty before you learned if you would be forced to render the name of your country in a deliberately insulting way, And the hopelessness you would feel if you knew that it wasn’t an aberration, but rather fast becoming the norm.

Incidentally, in two of the three examples above that I provided screenshots for (all but Air Canada), Hong Kong, which is actually ruled by China, is just “Hong Kong”, not “Hong Kong, China”. I suppose there’s no need to insist on adding the word “China” if it’s actually part of China.

Q: What about “Taiwan, Province of China”?

Well, everything I wrote above applies to the weird variant “Taiwan, Province of China”. But for everyone who says “It’s technically correct if you assume ‘China’ means ‘the Republic of China’, I have something to show you.

The Republic of China does indeed include an administrative area called “Taiwan Province”. And here are its borders, courtesy of Google Maps:

“Taiwan Province” covers part of the main island of Taiwan, but not the parts under the administration of the largest cities: Taipei, New Taipei, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung. So someone living in Taipei or Taichung does not live in any “province,” no matter how generous and flexible the interpretation of “Taiwan, Province of China”.

Of course this is all somewhat beside the point; I’d be mad as hell if I lived in Hualien or Hsinchu and an online form forced me to say I lived in “Taiwan, Province of China”.

“Taiwan, Province of China” was never an attempt to be “technically correct”; rather, like “Taiwan, China” it’s just trying to denigrate Taiwan in the eyes of the world and make people think it’s already in some way under the thumb of Beijing.

Q: Hey, wait. You’re making out Taiwan to be a separate country, but didn’t I hear somewhere that the Taiwanese government sees itself as the rightful government of all of China?

A: You’re just not letting me get away without giving a history lecture, are you? Look, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the rulers of Taiwan were the same guys who ruled China before Mao took over in 1949, and they absolutely saw themselves as the rightful rulers of China and produced loads of official propaganda to that effect. They also headed a terribly unpleasant military dictatorship and Taiwan is much better off not being ruled by them any more. There are still a few “retake the Mainland!” guys around, but today few people under the age of 80 seriously think the Republic of China ought to retake its old territory.

The Taiwanese government’s claims on China are a relic of an earlier age. They still maintain them because the Chinese government has threatened war if Taiwan makes a break with its past -- that would, in China’s eyes, mean Taiwan was officially taking steps away from eventual unification. It’s possible that China is bluffing. But it’s awfully easy to say Taiwan should call China’s bluff when you’re not the one with missiles pointed at you.

Yes, a minority of Taiwanese genuinely want Taiwan to be a part of China. This is because human beings are capable of holding a variety of political positions, and Taiwan is a free country where people can be open about their political beliefs. It’s not the opinion of most Taiwanese.

Q: But aren’t Taiwanese people (culturally/ethnically/linguistically) Chinese anyway?

A: OK, there is a lot that can be said here, from the fact that this is an extremely reductionist and ridiculous way to decide if a country should legitimately exist or not, to the fact that not all Taiwanese have Chinese ancestors. But I’m just going to make an observation.

According to Wikipedia, nearly three quarters of the population of Singapore is of Chinese heritage. But no Singaporean is afraid that they’ll have to start telling foreigners that they’re from “Singapore, China”.

Singaporeans, and the millions of people in Thailand, Malaysia, etc. who also self-identify as Chinese, have a luxury that Taiwanese people lack. They can call themselves Chinese all they want and no one will think that de-legitimizes their actual native country. Beijing’s not putting out disinformation that Singapore is a wayward Chinese province. As far as I know, Beijing doesn’t have missiles pointed at Singapore to keep them from acting too independent.

Q: Who are you? You’re not even Taiwanese, are you?

A: I’ve lived in Taiwan since 2007. I try to play a role in the civic life of the country where I’ve had legal residency for the past eleven years, though I admit I’m not always as active as I know I should be.

Currently, in my day job, I work with Taiwanese students who want to study abroad in English-speaking countries. Therefore, I am angry that both IELTS and TOEFL, the two biggest international English proficiency exams, both have switched online designations to “Taiwan, China”.

Q: So why don’t we hear from Taiwanese people, rather than a Westerner like you?

A: Taiwanese people ARE speaking up. But let me point something out, just as an example.

In August, as I said before, the TOEFL exam changed Taiwan’s designation to “Taiwan, China”. The protest from Taiwan was impressive, with “an open letter that claimed to have the backing of more than 5,000 students”.

As of today, TOEFL hasn’t changed anything. Honestly, can you blame Taiwanese people if they are becoming fatigued at fighting the same battle, again and again, and nothing happens?

Incidentally, I sincerely hope no one reads this post as "Westerner explains to Taiwanese how they should feel about their own country". It is absolutely not my intention to tell Taiwanese how they should feel, and in fact I hope Westerners seek out Taiwanese voices on this issue. Rather, my intention is to counter to any Westerner who thinks "Taiwan, (Province of) China" is in any way "technically correct", and is anything other than an insult.

Note: This post began life as a rant directed specifically at IELTS when they changed Taiwan to “Taiwan, China”. People seemed to like it, so I reposted it after making it more general in focus, and adding a bit more on “Taiwan, Province of China”.

Voting

As Election day nears in the US (and another Election Day is coming up in three weeks here in Taiwan), I have some thoughts on voting.

Some people say you should go out on the street and protest rather than vote. Some people say you should organize rather than vote. Some people say you should riot rather than vote. But these are all false dichotomies -- they should read “and”, not “rather than”. Except perhaps for the rioting one. I’m not sure rioting is a productive idea, but who knows what the future will bring. I may change my mind on that.

So yes, I am saying “voting is good”. I am saying “as many people voting as possible is good”. I bet many of you have cynical things to say in response to that. Be aware I’ve probably heard it all before.

I think I've been swayed by the literature I’ve read this year. Yes, I did read Achen & Bartels’ Democracy for Realists earlier this year (scroll down if you follow the link), which argues that aggregate voters are really really bad at making coherent choices. But I also read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, which argues that it’s good for the country if the electorate is as large as possible, so the government is accountable to as many people as possible. The arguments the two books make do not actually contradict each other -- you can agree with both at once.

Just because you vote does not mean you shouldn’t participate meaningfully in your democracy in other ways as well -- I’m talking about getting out there and protesting, or donating money to organizations, or just becoming more aware of what’s going on (TV news is bad for this, by the way). I won’t shame people who don’t do any of this (we all have our own busy lives to lead) but I’m absolutely flabbergasted at those who love to denigrate people who show their dissatisfaction after an election -- they say things like “Your side lost, get over it”. As if they were talking about a sports game rather than something with real-world consequences. As if politics only happens when there's an election. There’s nothing wrong with cheering for your “team” when watching election returns (even if I did disapprove, it’s still probably human nature, ingrained into most of us), but it’s important to remember that democracy doesn’t end when the election is finished.

Civic engagement is what a democracy runs on, whereas voting is what we should all be doing anyway. The more I think about this, the more infuriated I get at voter suppression. The government should not throw up unnecessary barriers to make it more difficult for some people to vote. This simply should not be happening.

My parents both voted several days ago at their local town hall at a time of their convenience. I voted absentee, and when I had doubts whether my ballot had been accepted, I emailed my state government and I quickly heard back from a real person who wanted to help me make sure my vote would count. This should be the norm everywhere, but unfortunately it’s not.

To summarize, we should all be voting, AND we should also remember that there’s much more to civic engagement than voting. I don’t live in the USA, but the country where I do live seems to be on the front lines of democracy versus authoritarian tyranny. I can’t vote here, but I ought to make up for it with more civic engagement. My wife is good at that; I am less so. I should do better.

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