In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next ~10-20 years, I pass on the following clips from a recent installment of my email subscription to Venkatesh Rao's "breaking Smart" news letter:
...world affairs are effectively on autopilot now, running on what in the control engineering world are called bang-bang laws. Bang-bang laws drive a control mechanism from one extreme to another discontinuously, like steering a car with only hard right/hard left limit steers, and regulating speed only with hard braking and floored accelerators. Or electing two opposed sets of wingnuts to govern in loose alternation...Bang-bang laws can often have nice properties like time-optimality, and making good use of limited control authority that “saturates.” And they’re simple and robust, like your thermostat, a bang-bang controller that’s in Chapter 1 of most control engineering textbooks.
...I don’t think the state of the world today is one that can be governed by the bang-bang control laws being applied to it by opposed tribes of wingnuts everywhere. It’s not the right sort of problem for the strategy. Nevertheless, it’s the strategy we’ve adopted, because it happens to be the only option available right now. Instead of an Overton window within which politics as an art and science of the possible operates, we have two narrow slits representing the bang-bang limit positions, separated by a stretch of impossible positions. This situation has been contrived by people who don’t like to think very much or at all. So we have control laws that don’t actually work in the current planetary condition...weird out-of-control behaviors unfold if you apply an ill-conceived bang-bang strategy to a system unsuited to it...you brace for weird fallouts. Just as if you’re a passenger in a car being driven in a bang-bang way, you brace for a crash...You prepare for a world that will go out of control when the bang-bang strategy fails. It’s a question of when, not if.
The world is becoming ungovernable even as visions and attempts to govern it are getting ever more outlandishly delusional and ineffective.
The only conclusion we can reach is that we’re in for a period of increasingly ungoverned anarchy. Sure, some sort of theater of governance will continue everywhere. There will be bang-Left and bang-Right theaters piously strutting about on their respective stages pretending to govern, to captive audiences desperate to believe they are being governed, confined within ever-shrinking and increasingly exclusionary islands of stable prosperity, secured with growing amounts of low-grade localized boundary-integrity-maintaining violence. Lots of individual lives will get destroyed in the process. There will also be marquee showcase things built just so there are things to point at as examples of governance doing something, even if not well. The facade will last longer than we expect, even if you’re expecting it.
But all around, the ooze will grow. The ungovernability will grow.
But the ooze is not inevitably good or bad. What will make it good or bad is the quality of the attention and care we bring to thinking and feeling our way into it. It only feels shitty-shitty right now because we are attending to it in bang-bang ways, blinded by too-simple ideas and a fear of words.
How do you ignore and sidestep the bang-bang governance theaters, and feel and think your way into the ooze, to begin co-evolving with it? That’s the question. Fortunately, it’s mostly not a question for you or me, but for the next generation.
