Six Easy Steps, Five Simple Stages
In April of 2010, a full decade ago now, I was in the audience at a theater (remember those?) here in San Francisco listening to David Eagleman. He’s a neuroscientist and his presentation was part of the Long Now Foundation which “fosters long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” The Long Now folks are an upbeat group that explore all sorts of topics with an emphasis on pragmatic solutions. I use them as a leavening agent. They help add a touch of color to my sepia tone worldview.
Eagleman’s spiel was titled Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization. He was smart and energetic and often quite funny. He offered an optimistic paint-by-numbers set of solutions to the troubles that have vexed societies for thousands of years. YouTube and podcast versions are available and worth a listen for those who are so inclined.
His choice of Six Easy Steps appeared in this order.
1. "Try not to cough on one another."
Funny how things worked out with this one. Doctors have been warning us for ages that sooner or later a novel communicable disease would emerge, because throughout history they always have. His recommendations will sound familiar to you. Push as much activity as possible onto the internet in order to minimize physical contact and reduce contagion.
2. "Don't lose things."
Over the millennia the same discoveries were made repeatedly in different places by different people in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. But that knowledge was lost as each bright light was extinguished before it could spread and be useful. His recommendation was to keep everyone connected and have all of humanity’s information available on the Web - which is exactly what’s been happening.
3. "Tell each other faster."
As trouble spots emerge - be it a tsunami, a viral outbreak, or an earthquake - be sure to communicate quickly and in a non hierarchical manner. He used the examples of Google being able to collate metadata to identify outbreaks faster than government agencies and cell phone transmissions dynamically rerouting information horizontally.
4. "Mitigate tyranny."
Eagleman’s point here boils down to sunlight being the best disinfectant. And once again the Internet and cell phones were meant to effectively communicate wrongdoing to keep power and corruption in check. He said crowdsourced information could be used to thwart vote tampering, censorship, and misinformation. (I’m giving him a C- on this one because he failed to imagine how these same mechanisms can evidently produce exactly the opposite effects from all sides.)
5. "Get more brains involved in solving problems.”
The more people around the planet have access to education the more likely and able they will be to help solve pressing problems. How might impoverished and marginalized populations in remote locations gain access to education you ask? All together now… The Internet.
6. "Try not to run out of energy."
Finally, he stressed that all civilizations have required a natural resource base to keep them functioning. Until fairly recently energy was limited to firewood, fodder, and grain. Lately it’s been things like coal and oil which allow the modern world to function. When the energy return on energy invested goes negative civilizations break down. Eagleman goes on to describe the many ways the internet and new technology can make us all more productive and resource efficient.
To his credit Eagleman concludes by poking holes in his own presentation. We’re exquisitely reliant on highly complex institutions to continue to function and hold all the interlocking components together. Most of this ephemeral infrastructure is based on ordinary humans agreeing to get along for the common good - or not.
And he confesses that our ever increasing reliance on the Internet makes us vulnerable if it should ever fail. The two largest threats to the Net are disruptions to the electricity supply and intentional attacks. His most prescient statement, in my opinion, was that the Internet will have to fail two or three times before we eventually get around to making it more robust. A 2x4 to the head is the best tutor in many instances.
So we must decentralize the electricity grid so each of the server farms, transmission lines, and home and business terminals have their own long lived back up systems. This is what engineers call multiple redundancy. And we must be aware that wars will soon be fought largely by disabling each others ability to use the Internet. That means there will be mornings when we all wake up and discover that some critical aspect of the Internet (banking, commerce, medicine…) is just gone. Expect this to happen more than once before we sort things out properly.
We have remnants of cuneiform tablets from the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia. These were the ancient equivalent of our modern Internet. The scribes who crafted these records were no different than contemporary coders. They kept track of transactions, maintained accounts, and sent messages across space and time. These bits of earth have survived for five thousand years and we can still read them today. It might appear to be a primitive system compared to smart phones, but it proved highly resilient and anyone can reproduce them today with a lump of wet clay and a stick.
When our own civilization is dug up, perhaps by accident, in the distant future will our descendants find enough physical stuff to read our records? The ephemeral nature of the Internet makes me think they won’t. How exactly would anyone even know what a floppy disk is? And how might a future archeologist construct a machine to read it? If an iPhone 12 were unearthed and dissected could it be revived without the existing support of the rest of the Web? It’s hard to get programs and devices from the early 1990s to fire up anymore. My guess is these things will all be lost in the fullness of time. Our toaster ovens may survive in some form, but not our digital information.
That brings me to the late Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. She’s best known for her work describing the five stages of grief associated with death and dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. My best friend in high school in the 1980s was very keen on Kubler-Ross and we read all her books together. This basic framework has helped me navigate the passing of various people in my life. I’ve also used this concept to prepare for my own inevitable future. We’re all heading to the same destination one way or another.
Civilizations appear to have the same stages as they confront challenges. When circumstances change old habits prove dysfunctional. The first reaction is denial that anything is wrong. When external reality asserts itself more aggressively anger appears. After things go from bad to worse we get bargaining in the hope that things can go back to normal if we tinker with this or that small detail. Then depression sets in when it becomes clear that the old normal is gone forever. And finally there’s acceptance. The world is different. It’s not possible to go back. It’s time to adjust to whatever the new thing is. There can be peace in that moment of pragmatic realization.
I suspect society is currently in the anger phase. Our underlying institutions are failing and people are pissed off about it. There’s plenty of finger pointing and a desire to blame others for the things that can no longer be maintained. Bargaining will come as we all become exhausted from the fights that will escalate. Eventually these conflicts will burn themselves out as failure compounds failure in the physical world and depression sets in. That prepares the way for acceptance. Civilizations come and go. They always have. I suspect they always will. But humans carry on.
Granola Shotgun posts from the last five years can be accessed via the Way Back Machine.
