LA is burning. The destruction is immense, but less than it could have been, This is a small blip on the radar of future catastrophe. Time will only intensify these events – wildfires, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods – as the climate adjusts. As the ice and permafrost melts and the load on the poles lightens, it is reasonable to expect that earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis will happen more frequently as the planetary crust adjusts.
Yet the environments isn’t our biggest threat, we are. The population explosion since 1900 — nearly 500% growth as of 2024 — opened the door for ideological domination by capitalism by creating functionally infinite workers making products for functionally infinite consumers. But there are only so many things that 8 billion people can use and we are well into the era where excess, not progress, is the defining ethos of our civilization, even though that excess is not evenly distributed across the 24,642,757 square miles of habitable land on the planet.
| YEAR | Global population | sq ft/person | acres/person | population density |
| 1776 | 706 million people | 972,089 | 22.3 acres | 29 people/sq mi |
| 1865 | 1.27 billion people | 540,945 | 12.4 acres | 52 people/sq mi |
| 1900 | 1.62 billion people | 424,074 | 9.7 acres | 66 people/sq mi |
| 1950 | 2.51 billion people | 273,705 | 6.3 acres | 102 people/sq mi |
| 2000 | 6.11 billion people | 112,439 | 2.6 acres | 248 people/sq mi |
| 2024 | 8.08 billion people | 82,025 | 2.0 acres | 328 people/sq mi |
| 2100 | 10.0 billion people | 68,700 | 1.6 acres | 406 people/sq mi |
Where once, merely 124 years ago, we lived in a world that was mostly uncrowded, we increasingly live in a world that is mostly crowded, in part because of population growth and in part because of land use decisions that concentrate people together in cities because that concentration is good for business. This means that we face more and more frequent competition of scarce resources while simultaneously being played against one another for the market gains of companies and politicians.
Cities are the built environment equivalent to Valentine’s Day cards — a manufactured artifact that tries to romanticize the ordinary or mundane or trivial for profit.
Dark forests are inevitable
“Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet, because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay quiet.” – Yancey Strickler
We live in a fragile world. We depend too much on the stability of a “Benevolent Superpower For Life” to create and maintain geopolitical, macroeconomic stability so that we can have a global trade and manufacturing system that makes E V E R Y T H I N G and when that falls apart, like it did during the COVID-19 Pandemic, we encounter stupid problems like how we can’t sell flour ground in the local mill from local grain because the bags to sell it in are manufactured eleven time zones away.
Scale is hard, is usually taken too far, and creates fragility:
- there is a thermocline that marks the boundary between small and comprehensible but perhaps inefficient and maximally efficiency at the cost of complexity and lack of transparency
- economies of scale break down when the on the other side of the thermocline and we begin to have to make ethical decisions about the state of our soul in order to make further gains in efficiency.
Food isn’t supposed to be monopolized:
- you want a degree of industrialization in your food supply, but you don’t want an industrialized food supply.
- it’s ok to want food that tastes good, is out of season, is easy and convenient, but not at any cost. We need to ask where the food came from, how it got here, and what it took to make it not for ideological reasons but because knowing the answers informs us about how much we should reward the company for putting that food in front of us.
We live in a dark forest because there are corporations that want to make us dependent upon them that go hunting in the darkness. They are not friendly. They are not benevolent. They exist to do this and nothing else.
The purpose of a corporation is to enrich and empower its owners and to preserve its ability to do so perpetually.
In the dark forest we are self-sufficient-er
The fine line between subscriber and kook is where we need to be as consumers. Not preppers, but at-home manufacturers. Not subscribers of services, but buyers of things.
With a little bit of knowledge, the right tools, and the necessary materials and we can be manufacturers of things we need – cleaning supplies, furnishings, food, clothing – because what we need isn’t scarce or novel or complicated.
Tribes build shared resources for distributed manufacturing:
- tool libraries
- seed banks
- community gardens
- supply depots
- FOSS software
- digital pattern markets
- automats
- fabrication stations
Cyberspace is a vision quest.