More State Of The World 2009  

I included a quote from Bruce Sterling's "State Of The World 2009" show on the Well recently but I probably should have used the one below, so here we go again.

Well, I have to doubt that we're all left-wing green yeoman peasantry
by next Christmas. But we won't be stricken cannibals gnawing each
other's thighbones, either.

As for local currencies -- what, hot-pink San Francisco rubles? Yeah,
maybe.

Cellphone banking is happening now among Third Worlders who never saw
a bank in their lives -- forgotten people who'd be spat upon by
conventional bankers. Their need for money is so dire that even
rapacious cellphone outfits look good to them.

There are two major kinds of poor in this world: people inherently
incapable of generating value for others, and people who are KEPT from
making any money by oppressive systems that don't serve their
interests. You don't have to be a Marxist to see that this second
problem is a major issue for everybody now.

The shattered banks are making honest, industrious, capable people go
broke. It's not that we created some over-complex loan vehicles, and
things would be great if we returned to the limpid honest of the Gold
Standard. That's idea is wingnut hokum. Money is always a social
invention. Money is never simple or natural. Money always has winners
and losers.

The problem with these booming cellphone banking systems -- thriving
in places like Kenya -- is that they are stealth operations. If the
local kakistocracy caught on that the Little People were actually
making money, they'd drive by in a Mercedes Benz to beat and shoot
them. Improving things by stealth has limits. Kenya isn't like Kenya
by accident.

The same goes for Americans trying to rebel against Wall Street.
There's no visible other space. There's no liberated territory. It's
like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so
fat and stupid.

I get it about the Phil Gramm argument that one should always put up a
brave front in big troubles. So Americans are a lame bunch of
crybabies... I guess the Americans ought to put up with the savage
loss of their comforts, privileges, prerogatives and civil rights, and
let the likes of Phil get on with the everyday plunder.

But dude, this is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is
gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are
hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a
laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully
earned the public's contempt. You can't "blame the media" for that.
Even the media's broke -- ESPECIALLY the media. You can't pull a
Reagan, triple the national debt and pretend that everything's jolly.

I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large
crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems
that have gone unconfronted for years. These problems are not
directly responsible for the money panic, but the blatant neglect there
has created an atmosphere of crisis.

The Iraq War was a harebrained adventure that wrecked the
international community. And to what end? The War on Terror is a
bust: stateless terror is the new status quo.

Huge demographic changes in the world have not been confronted. Why
are the victors of World War II still the so-called Security Council?
What real security are they providing most living people today?

The planet's population is aging. Contemporary Italy looks like a
Florida retirement city. And it's not just the rich white guys who
forgot to have kids -- Mexico is also rapidly aging, and China has
one-child families. We lack the financial capacity to allow retirement
funds to run the world. We can't have ninety-year-old rentiers who
are rich when young people can't go to college. That doesn't compute.

Then there's energy. I'm not a Peak Oil guy, but of course wild
turbulence in energy prices is gonna put people on edge. How can any
person of reasonable prudence invest, plan and build with that kind of
uncertainty?

Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's
entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our
civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff.
Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's
everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a
technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single
citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that.
Nor will it.

The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire
combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty
comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't
yet have the battalions.

Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any
economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living
planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no
place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for
that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a
new global religion.

None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair
because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank
recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.

Let me put it this way. People don't have to solve every problem in
the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems.
People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something
coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL
they're solving some of mankind's many problems. People can't stumble
around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like
Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.

When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't
mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in
ways that are unimaginable.