Every Story is a Degrowth Story!

Get back in the ship! The whole planet is on degrowth stories! Go, go go!

For February, the Contraptions Book club is reading Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz, to be discussed the week of February 24. The chat thread is open for early comments.

Three big, unmanaged forces of destruction and creation are irrupting into the human world across the planet today. The story of the permaweird over the next decade is going to be the story of these three entangled forces.

1. Internet-native nomad invasions (née: ethnonational reactionism)

2. AIs, particularly LLMs

3. Climate change

Fortunately for our sanity, the three forces are operating on different time-scales and in different parts of the world with different intensities. Like the villain’s henchmen coming at the hero one after the other rather than all at once, there is a certain helpful ordering here. Which is not to say the three forces are entirely serialized and decoupled. There will be significant episodes where 2/3 or even 3/3 of these forces will act together. Or appear in weirdly scrambled orders in particular scenes.

The nomad invasions — by political tribes around the world riding free-ranging internet denizens — are cued up to go first. Career politicians, operators, and their allies from business, the media, and the arts, are the equivalent of Mongols. The masses of internet supporters powering their campaign are the horses (though a surprisingly number of the horses imagine themselves to be riders). These invasions will peak over the next four years. The situation resembles the state of the world around the time of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, except there is no Genghis-like single progenitor. Trump is perhaps like Batu Khan, founder of the Golden Horde. Putin is perhaps like Hulegu Khan, founder of the Ilkhanate of Iran. Xi Jinpeng is perhaps like Kublai Khan, though I don’t think the Chinese state likes acknowledging the legacy of the Mongols or the “barbarian” strand of its imperial DNA. There are a great many other minor Khans around the world, such as Milei in Argentina and Meloni in Italy.

Most likely the world of these modern-day Chinggisids will continue through the next decade, but like that world, it will eventually collapse due to their inability to build new institutions designed to last. The story of the world so far has been the story of nomad invaders prevailing in the short term, but sedentary civilizations prevailing over the long term. Nothing about these latest invasions, from the internet steppes, suggests this will change.

AI is queued up to truly arrive next, as the next generation of powerful hardware lands, costs fall, and the action really heats up. The metaphor I’ve been developing for this is that of a succession of sharply demarcated geological strata of collective hive-mind intelligences and memory settling. Each stratum comprises a generation of foundation models, and the short-lived linguistic era it drives. In each stratum, humans co-evolve with the models of that vintage, creating a staircase of radical transhuman evolution. The basic assumption of this metaphor is that language itself is a humanity-scale uncompressed networked intelligence. Now LLMs just compress, archive and backup this latent intelligence periodically, with those archival intelligences being plugged back in to living language, helping drive the next epoch of co-evolution. The “intelligence” in AI isn’t in the computers or models. It’s in the self-reproducing training data. AIs and brains alike are merely data’s way of making more data.

I will develop these two analogies in detail in future posts, but for now I just wanted to share these trailers.

And finally, climate change will bring up the rear in this triad of forces. As yet, I have no good metaphor or mental model for it, but it will be a bigger force than either the internet nomad invasions or AI. The rising and increasingly volatile cost of coffee and cocoa in the coming year will be a small taste of what’s to come.

I predict that the whole drama will last about 10-15 years, so let’s pick a nice round unlucky number and say 13 years, which takes our horizon out to 2038. All three forces will be at work through the entire 13 years, but will peak at different times, at different loci, and have very different magnitude profiles across time and space. And the drama won’t end up with resolutions but with our collective arrival on a particular sort of threshold I’ll characterize in a minute.

People are trying to tell themselves a variety of different stories about the next 13 years based on how they’re making sense of them.

There’s only problem. If you look closely, every currently popular big-future story is a degrowth story, driven by some flavor of panicked, uncomprehending Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (EEAAO) FUD.

To escape the paranoid EEAAO style of storytelling the future, and tell better stories, we have to start with a revisionist telling of the OG story about a series of three monsters, each bigger and badder than the last, Beowulf.