H/t to Vanderleun for this brief speculation on a post-imperial world.
I love the assumption that computing power will negate the need for physical security in depth, detail, and duration.
Gonna be a helluva lot of sad pandas when they learn the truth about Cyclops.
Don’t be a sad panda.
Got fighting and farming skills?
You’ll need ‘em both.
Computers will NEVER replace boots on the ground.
Or plows in the field.
AP
Oh, and I LOVE the pics.
The entry to the coming New Dark Ages began when Anthropogenic Global Warming was thrust upon academe as fact. That was a hoax endorsed by the great unwashed as truth when it was easy recognized as a fraud by even marginally well educated people.
“our destiny will call for us to recreate the wonderful things that men once called “the West” and “America.”
because we all recognize that it is past tense
Realistically, having fighting and farming skills is probably unnecessary. The immediate need would simply be for fighting, as you try to survive and get to a place of refuge. After that, you simply need to have *one* skill that is useful: farming, carpentry, metal working, gunsmithing, first aid, advanced medicine, etc. Basically, mob rules apply: if you are useful to them (whoever “they” are), you’ll live and be protected.
The ability to teach your skill to others would also help, but probably isn’t critical – information is pretty easy to come by these days.
Yeah, soft dark ages, love the sound o’ that. Too bad the reality will be starvation, disease without end, senseless murder and rape, pillaging, and survival of the most ruthless. Oh, and lots of loud noises, burning things, and dirty water to drink.
The computing issue is what makes me genuinely fear that the oncoming collapse could resemble the Catastrophe – the end of the Bronze Age – more than the end of the Western Empire. How long does computing equipment actually last? Ten years or so in my experience – twenty if it is good quality, carefully maintained, and not overly stressed. Even in a slow, generational collapse – under circumstances where the tech isn’t being maintained, replaced, used, improved on – circumstances where the primary focus for at least a generation or so is mere survival – how long is that information going to remain available? How many people are going to actually use it, or simply have the capabilities to use what they know instead of thinking “if only” and then making do? All the information gathered for the last 30 years at least is now electronic, not lying around in libraries waiting for future monks to pull it out and put it to use. Much of the information from the preceding 100 years – techniques for a multitude of seemingly everyday things – is getting migrated into electronic storage, and is less and less available in hardcopy. If it doesn’t get used, if the systems in which it resides don’t get maintained, it vaporizes. The vast majority of our civilizational knowledge could simply disappear over the course of a mere hundred years, leaving only myths about wizards.
Consider also that this civilization has gone around digging up and museumifying as much as it can turn up of prior civilizations. In a collapse, how much of that information will be lost, this time permanently? The Egyptian mobs burned l’Institut d’Egypte a little while back. The Iraqis looted their museums after the fall of Saddam. How often will such scenes replay themselves?
I try to get physical copies of any literature or tech information that I consider really important, just to do my part against this.
My girlfriend is curator at our county museum. Everything is being cataloged and put on disc. I can no longer go through the photo albums and look for specific photos of old historic sites or the old German POW camp. You can’t do research at your leisure, they have to pull it up for you, at their convenience.
Most of my friends and coworkers don’t own books. Too slow and boring for them, but they can spend all day playing with their cell phones, trying to show you postage stamp sized photos of their hunting pics. Or texting while we drive to work.
We are in for a world of hurt when we need hard copies of info, and there is none available. Or some new device takes over and very little info gets transferred to the ‘new and improved’ system. How much music did ‘we’ lose when 8 tracks disappeared, or cassettes? I’ve thrown away boxes of those things, and had to start over with discs.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will replace books! I have Nat’l Geographics going back to 1919, I almost threw them out this summer, for lack of space, but decided against it. There is still a wealth of info stored in those pages. Maybe one day when the power is out, I’ll be able to go back thru them all and enjoy some quiet reading time, next to my Aladdin lamp.
Kirk: What is all this?
Cogley: I figure we’ll be spending some time together, so I moved in.
Kirk: I hope I’m not crowding you.
Cogley: What’s the matter? Don’t you like books?
Kirk: Oh, I like them fine, but a computer takes less space.
Cogley: A computer, huh? I got one of these in my office. Contains all the precedents, a synthesis of all the great legal decisions written throughout time. I never use it.
Kirk: Why not?
Cogley: I’ve got my own system. Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn’t so important, I’d show you something–my library. Thousands of books.
Kirk: What would be the point?
Cogley: This is where the law is, not in that homogenized, pasteurized, synthesized… do you want to know the law, the ancient concepts in their own language, learn the intent of the men who wrote them, from Moses to the tribunal of Alpha III? Books.
Kirk: You have to be either an obsessive crackpot who’s escaped from his keeper or Samuel T. Cogley, attorney-at-law.
Cogley: Right on both counts.