The pivot

For anyone new to Charlie Stross' fiction, here are a few links for your perusal:

Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological singularity, is made freely available by the author

In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes / Empire Games.

The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is available to read here [2].

Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be read here [3].

The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series gets pretty dark...

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... [2] https://reactormag.com/down-on-the-farm/ [3] https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

He wrote Accelerando, a book about everything happening faster, the mythical singularity would happen, after which everything will become increasingly better, increasingly faster. Now what we have is a pivot, after which everything will become increasingly worse, increasingly faster.

At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the direction may keep going for better

A very impressive number of prejudices strung along an attempt at a narrative around energy transition. Brings back the memories of usenet, where schizo posts were, unlike twitter, fairly long and glued together with something much like this.

However, the transition actually driving the change in the world currently, absent from OP, is the demographic transition and migration. It started in France in the 18th century and is now hitting much of the world with no end in sight and virtually no unaffected populations. Dwarfs covid, PVs, or oil, which was largely solved anyway by fracking.

In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and bigger upheavals.

Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over.

The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing.

So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.

>>> an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments,

Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?

> the geopolitics of the post-oil age

Goddard called the West Germans "the generation of blue jeans and coca cola," wearing tricolor and driving manual transmission cars.

The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.

Ok - that was a doozy. Well done mr Stross. I’m going to have to chew on that for a while, but if there is one takeaway, it’s we need what might be called “radical” solutions - which frankly are just “sensible - as long as your salary is not tied up in the status quo”

Potable Water and Stable Coastlines have entered the chat

Stross is at the cutoff of being a baby boomer. He thinks like one, and it is abundantly clear from his Malthusian preoccupations and overall cynical anti-establishment views regarding a system that he has personally benefited tremendously from.

Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such as via colonialism, war, etc.

The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new about it.

If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the anachronistic concern over peak oil.

He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...

His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting birthrates.

If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for working and middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common sense manners of speaking and thinking.

There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.

>What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so.

What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.