Venkatesh Rao

So we'll default to the pop-science/tech idea of what's the best Plan B, which will be most people choosing to create survivable lower-density/lower-scale communities that mitigate local impact of effectively abandoned global climate action efforts.

This is going to be ridiculously ineffective. A bunch of people in miserable little communes larping their favorite post-apocalyptic scenarios. But it should be entertaining to watch if you happen to pick one of the minority of good ones to spectate from.

If this seems like a doom-and-gloom thread, it isn't really. There's plenty of room for positive dynamics to be spun up in this 3 act saga. My narrow point is that these motivating "broken system" problems aren't solvable and won't be solved.

But any positive dynamics are going to take longer than 10 years to have an impact. Collapse is faster than wealth-creation processes. Which is why you get busts while they race each other. Amara's Law of returns (overestimate short term/underestimate long term)

In purely technological revolutions, the interim tends to be between 1-3 decades. But when you're also simultaneously reinventing political and economic institutions, it could take much, much longer. Hence the dark-age scenario, which is more serious than people want to believe.

Think of it as this. Whatever "this" is, it's the result of software eating the world. The only question is what are we rhyming with here? 1910s (3rd industrial revolution, mostly tech) 1800s (1st industrial revolution, tech+economic) 1650s:(westphalia... tech+econ+political)

The entire stack of modernity is shearing. The pace-layering is hard to call. But the length of the "dark age" can be anything from 10 to 100 years depending on the details of the shearing dynamics. The bigger the stack refactoring you think is going on, the longer the dark age.

Optimism versus pessimism is a very tedious kind of debate since history has always been multiharmonic cyclic overlaid on secular trends that can be interpreted as either progress or decline.