An Immanent Collision of Probability Tidal Waves:
There are two gigantic economic forces at work in the world right now. Politics are a product of economics. So each of these economic forces is creating a lot of possibilities, depending on how people act upon them. These two probability waves are going to crash into each other. And we’re caught right in between them.
The first is globalization. Tom Friedman, the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, has a new book out now, called The World is Flat. Globalization has shifted to a new stage. The first stage of globalization—Globalization 1.0, as he calls it—was the European colonization of the world, in which countries were competing against other countries. Globalization 2.0 was the topic for The Lexus and the Olive Tree, in which businesses were competing against other businesses. Now, in just a few short years, we’ve moved on the Globalization 3.0, in which individuals are competing against individuals. He calls his new book The World is Flat because, in a way at least, the internet is democratizing the global economy.
Basically, if it’s possible for someone to do your job over the internet, there’s someone in India who’s willing to do it for 1/5 the price. Even things that seem so simple they shouldn’t need to be done over the internet are being done over the internet anyway. In his book, Mr. Friedman gives an example of some McDonald’s restaurants that had outsourced their drive-though ordering to a call center in another state. Seriously, when you drive up to the drive-through menu at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and the person says, “can I take your order please?” you’re talking through a phone line to someone in New Jersey or something. Then when you tell them your order, they e-mail it to the kitchen at the McDonald’s you’re at. Of course, this call center is handling the drive-through orders of a lot of other McDonald’s too. And since they specialize at what they’re doing and they’re set up for it specifically, and the person taking your order isn’t getting distracted by all the kitchen staff running around doing what they do, these remote drive-through operators have cut the mistakes that are made in people’s orders by like 2/3 or something. This is only being done at a few restaurants now, but it’s paying off well, so you can be sure it’s going to spread.
India is a third-world country with over 1 billion people in it now. And they all speak English. So if you find that the people who take your orders at McDonald’s drive throughs always speak with foreign accents now (or sometime in the near future) there’s a reason for it. It means that the part-time high school student who was getting paid minimum wage to take your order last month got his job shipped overseas.
So you just might say that we’re in the midst of a worldwide economic earthquake. But that doesn’t mean this is a disaster for American workers, it just means that it’s a new way of doing things. This is creating a lot of new opportunities too. If your job can be done over the internet, you don’t have to live in the same country as your employer either. You can also collaborate with people who live in other countries. That means you could set up your own business, bring in jobs from anywhere in the world, get Indians to handle all the menial labor involved, add your specialty to it to turn it into the product your customers came to you for, and everyone benefits. You get to run your own business cheaply, you only have to pay your workers $3 each an hour, that $3 an hour in their local economy is a fortune, and your customer gets what they wanted cheaply.
This is how I run my own publishing company. When you come to my website and order a book, I never see the copy of the book you get. Café Press handles all the menial labor involved in printing the books, packaging them, shipping them, and collecting your money. All I do is upload the text of the book to their website, along with the cover art, and you can order a copy of the book the very next instant. They’ll print you any number of books you want, and they’ll be in the mail within two days.
If I was to run my own publishing company the traditional way, I’d have to pay about $10,000 up front to print a whole bunch of books at the same time, and then every time someone ordered one, I’d have to collect the money myself and then go to the post office and mail the books myself. All that time I’d have to spend doing things anyone could do is time I wouldn’t be able to spend writing the next book.
If I was to try to get my books published the conventional way, that would take for f*cking ever, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be happy with the results. First I would have to find an editor, and pay them $5,000 or something, which I don’t have. It would probably take them a year or two to edit the book. And considering that I’m a genius, I’m helping to pioneer the most complicated and most controversial field of science ever, and I’m simultaneously using it to do something that’s never been done before within the realm of human experience, how much of that do think an editor could comprehend? To them, it would look like just a bunch of words someone wrote down about some ideas he had, which would make it look like every other book anyone had ever written. Then they’d tell me that my presentation style wasn’t good enough, and they’d tell me how I was supposed to fix it, as if I was supposed to understand what they were talking about, and then they’d talk to me like I was stupid because I don’t speak English-major snob dialect, and then they’d tell me that if I wanted them to show me how to fix everything I’d have to give them credit for helping me write the book, or if I wanted to learn about what they were talking about I should take an English course at my local college, which would take four more months and which I can’t afford, and then in the end, after waiting two and a half years and paying so many thousands of dollars, the result I would get would be some watered-down bullsh*t that they would tell me would make the book palatable to all the sophisto English-major a**holes out there who read books, because if I don’t make it palatable to them it won’t be marketable. Well the whole problem with that is that if I tried to make my work palatable to the people with the most money, the words that I would be able to say would no longer adequately convey all the ideas I was trying to get across. How do you make a book about how Capitalist pigs are f*cking up the entire world palatable to the Capitalist pigs who have all the money? The world is already full of books about abstract ideas about how we should be doing things differently that everyone says are nice to think about but never accomplish anything. I didn’t go to all the trouble of writing these books just so I could fall into that trap along with everyone else. I wrote these books for the sake of making those Capitalist pigs understand that their college degrees and their proper f*cking English don’t make them special and don’t give them the right to f*ck up the entire world, and if they don’t wrap their minds around that simple concept real quick and start leading environmentally sustainable lifestyles I’m going to lead a global Green-Anarcho-Socialist revolution, march through their cities, and teach them their places in the world once and for all. But how do you make a book like that palatable to the people who have the most money? So f*ck professional editing. Ultimately, a thousand people who understand what I’m talking about is worth a hell of a lot more than a million people who don’t.
But lets just suppose I got a professional editor anyway. The next step would be to get a literary agent. That would mean sending them a cover letter and a sample of my book, and then waiting six months. On the average, literary agents accept 2% of the proposals they get. And they don’t like for people to submit their work to multiple agents simultaneously. It would take me 3 more years to get up to a 12% chance of acceptance. And that’s assuming I could find 6 agents who could appreciate my work and who would know the right publishers to submit it to.
So now about 6 or 7 years have passed since I finished writing the book. Then it takes at least another year for a publisher to get a book into print. Since I relate so much of evolutionary science to current events, who the f*ck is going to want to publish a book about current events 8 years after they’ve happened?
This is why I’ve never gotten any books published before now. I’ve written two novels. But there’s not enough market for occult punk science fiction for anyone to want to publish them. So literary agents don’t want to waste their time on them. At best, they tell me to get a professional editor and resubmit my work. But even if I could afford a professional editor, by the time I got my manuscript back it would be garbage. Because if you dare to try to write a novel about punks using a punk narration style, all the middle class English major literary snob douchebags out there are gonna whine and whimper about my fuckin’ writin’ style hurtin’ their fuckin’ eyes. So if ya ain’t willin’ to pander to the emotional weakness of the middle class and fuckin’ spoon-feed your fuckin’ ideas to them in language that ain’t gonna fuckin’ hurt their fuckin’ feelings or challenge their fuckin’ perspectives on life, it doesn’t matter if you’re a lower class genius with somethin’ important to say. If ya ain’t willin’ to play their game, you’re nobody, and your whole life amounts to nothin’.
My point is, the only reason it’s physically possible for me to move atoms and energy around in the world in a way that results in my books getting published is because of the internet. The same internet Indian workers are going to use to take your order at McDonald’s.
Now, as an anti-Capitalist revolutionary, may I remind you that economics is the process by which people combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people. That says nothing about money moving from one place to another. That means that anything people do to provide for their needs is economically valuable. Meeting up with people from foreign countries and learning what life is like over there is economically valuable. Meeting up with people from foreign countries and learning why people there hate Americans so much is economically valuable. Meeting up with like-minded people who live in your area so you can get together in person and hang out is economically valuable. Whatever.
This is why I post my audio books on the internet for free. This way, potentially, I get to talk to everyone in the world. I don’t make any money that way, but it’s still economically valuable.
So now that our economy is starting to work differently than it did before, people are acting differently than they did before in order to get the things they need. That means our political system is changing along with it. If corporate executives set up multi-national corporations, who are they going to be most loyal to? To their home countries? Or to the workers they depend on to make their businesses function and the other business people they deal with to get their raw materials and parts, and then transport their products all around the world? The people these international business people depend on most for their livelihoods don’t all live in the same country. They’re a few people from each of many different countries.
This means that as long as Globalization 3.0 endures, no industrialized country is ever going to fight a war against another industrialized country. Because somebody somewhere depends on people in both countries to keep their businesses functioning. A lot more people depend on people in at least one of the countries to keep their businesses functioning. A lot of people in each country depend on foreigners keeping their business operations there. If that country gets into a big war, a lot of foreign business people are going to move their businesses out of that country just as fast as they can. That means that a war in your country is going to result in a lot of people being unemployed, and a lot less money coming into your country. So if getting into a war wasn’t a bad enough idea in the old days, now it’s even worse.
You know how the Indians and Pakistanis keep arguing over who owns Kashmir Province? And you know how both countries have nuclear weapons? And you know how India also has a billion English-speaking people who can do American jobs for 1/5 the price? Given the choice between making a lot of money or getting into a nuclear war, which do you think they’re going to pick?
But this brings me to that other economic probability tidal wave…
That’s the Laws of Thermodynamics. Globalization 3.0 depends on an industrialized economy to make it work, so we already know that the Laws of Thermodynamics are going to win in the end. These two gigantic probability waves are on a collision course because they’re each trying to move the world in opposite directions. Each of them creates a lot of opportunities, depending on what people decide to do now. But if we aren’t prepared for both of them, when they crash into each other, each is going to negate a lot of what the other was making possible. The Laws of Thermodynamics will win in the end, but the big question is: What’s going to happen between now and then? How is it going to affect you and me and everyone else?
Capitalists are collaborating across international borders, which is helping to break down the borders and bring us all together into a global community. That’s the Globalization 3.0 wave. But their industrialized economy depends on non-renewable energy, and the endless growth of their Capitalist economy depends on an infinite supply of energy. On their present course, their long-term success isn’t physically possible, and they are doing nothing to try to alter their course. So what’s going to happen?
As the energy supplies they depend on start to run out, following the global Hubbert’s peak of energy production, and energy is produced ever-less-efficiently, the Capitalists are still going to depend on ever-increasing supplies of energy to make their economy function. So where are they going to get that energy?
They are going to get their resources from the same places they’ve always gotten their resources: From wherever it’s easiest to get them. That means extracting them from the natural cycles of the environment and making environmental economies break down; using up supplies they’re already accessing (like oil fields) and thereby taking those resources from people who could’ve used them and can’t protest because they haven’t been born yet; offering what seem like free-trade agreements to people who are economically desperate by offering them short-term economic incentives (like money) in exchange for inflicting long-lasting environmental damage on their local economies; and ultimately, by taking resources by force from the people who are least able to defend themselves.
All of that means that as the Capitalists band together worldwide for the sake of their mutual business interests, while knowingly or unknowingly continuing to practice an environmentally suicidal economic system, they will be able to cooperate with each other ever more effectively at oppressing their workers.
Globalization 3.0 makes wars between industrialized nations obsolete. But the impending collision between Globalization 3.0 and the Laws of Thermodynamics makes a worldwide civil war inevitable instead, as the workers are forced to band together to protect themselves because their oppressors have already banded together. The workers are going to band together using the same internet the Capitalists are using. And then the inevitable worldwide showdown between Labor and Capital is on.
And this is exactly what the global anti-Capitalist revolution is already doing. The one thing they’re lacking is a unifying ideology to let them work together as an effective political force.
But you know, the cool thing about developing a functional understanding of the entire chemical reaction of the world is that it isn’t some measly ideology, because it isn’t made up of mere ideas. It is the compilation of all the observable evidence, which creates the single most effective system of cause and effect anyone has for predicting the results of people’s actions. And that’s what this book is about.
So the Capitalists and the workers both have access to the same information. But the Capitalists have made strong emotional connections to the idea that their competitive, financially driven, expansionist economy is the right one. It has seemed like the right one to this point because when all the sensory input they’ve gotten has combined with their universal human brain structure, it naturally creates new brain-molecule patterns that are most compatible with their original brain structure. Then the Capitalists reinforce their perceptions with religious and philosophical belief systems that supposedly prove they’re right, and some have been doing this for 10,000 years.
So now, for one reason or another, the Capitalists are rejecting the evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined beliefs about how the world works. If they are rejecting the evidence consciously, it means they’re trying to oppress the workers intentionally. If they’re rejecting the evidence subconsciously, it means they’re criminally insane—because they’re acting upon beliefs that contradict observable evidence and harming other people as a result.
Regardless of what the Capitalists believe or why they believe it, it doesn’t change the fact that the workers have scientific reality on their side.
Now here we are, caught between these two probability tidal waves on a collision course.
Surf’s up!