Petroleum Culture

Our critique of tech is missing something...

This past year brought oil and fertilizer embargoes, leaps in AI capabilities, and the continued grinding expansion of “big tech”, all of which have fueled a renaissance in techno-skeptic thought. In response to this Tooky’s very own in-house Luddite, David Herod, has asked to share his own synthesis of the musings of Nate Hagens, Todd Lewis, and Dave Green. Well go ahead David, share what you have with the class…

Enjoy!

Petroleum Culture

“Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival.”

- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly”

Flying Blind

You step off of your plane at dusk in a procession of tired people, plastic luggage wheels clacking over the metallic joints of a long docking arm. Autumn cold seeps in through the gaps, flavored with exhaust fumes from various chemical distillates you're unable to identify but have associated with flying since you were a child. 

Once in the terminal you shuffle past HD screens blasting blue-white light at no one in particular, down droning escalators, and past walls of glass beyond which lies a night sea of asphalt dotted by tracks of guidance lights. Exhausted, you sit down at the luggage pickup area and wait for the round conveyor belt to come to life. A shuffling crowd grows as you turn on your cell phone, a thrill in your chest as it reconnects to the network and dings with several missed messages. You scroll your phone for a moment, eying a few videos an algorithm selected based on a database of your viewing habits (this information is redundantly stored on three continents). Finally the metal plates of the conveyor lurch to life and luggage begins thundering down a ramp. No doubt a labyrinth of conveyors are grinding on endlessly somewhere beneath your feet.

You grab your bag, still cold and smelling of ozone. Once outside you call an Uber and in under five minutes a sedan pulls up in front of you. The interior is flooded with an overpowering cinnamon musk from an evaporating gel-cap swinging from the mirror and you chat idly with the driver about the flight and what it's like for him to be an Uber driver — things you both know well but it's a pleasant diversion as the car flies by a blur of dark pine trees and the occasional flare of an orange streetlight. The driver is an American like you, even the same ethnicity, but his accent is different. It's a nice talk, even as surface level as it is to avoid any charged subjects. You will never see him again.

Dropped off at your apartment building, you wave to Mr. Iqbal who's smoking a cigarette on the concrete stairs. You're not sure if Iqbal is his first or last name, but it’s the only title he gave you in the barest of English when you moved in two years ago. He gives you a warm smile in return however, and a part of you wishes you could ask what he and his family have planned for Thanksgiving until you remember they probably don’t celebrate it.

Going up the stairs you pass that blonde girl. She’s with her boyfriend and you almost say hello until you notice they're avoiding eye contact again. They pass in silence. She's always been a curiosity to you both for her attractiveness and her odd hours. There is another older man who also visits her regularly. You've theorized she is either a 'sugar baby', having an affair, or maybe just polyamorous.

You click your front door shut behind yourself before flicking on a light. You live alone like almost everyone else in the building. A historical rarity, but it was just a matter of course for you. There is about one child for every dozen adults in the building, but that seems normal too. Children live in other places.

You wince at a row of crusted dishes in the rack you forgot to run before you left — so you kick the machine shut and set it rumbling. You wrestle a personal pizza out of the freezer and drop the ice cold disk into the buzzing microwave for four minutes.

While it cooks you unzip your luggage and remove your laptop. You scroll Twitter, YouTube, or some social app until the timer beeps. 

Later as you lie in bed, you swallow against a bloat that's been building in your upper chest like a trapped burp since you landed. Even with the humming of the heater and the warm blow of air that laps at your face, it’s just too quiet. It feels like somehow, even wrapped in your 500 thread count Target bedsheets, that you are not home yet.

Energy Blindness

What I hope the above ‘hour in the life’ story demonstrates is that much of the background noise of our lives — dopamine addiction, multiculturalism, incels, outrage culture, strange new sexual norms — which may appear unrelated and at times oppositional to one another, are in fact connected by a single limiting factor. 

A growing consensus attributes these growing problems with the advent of the new technologies that enable them, after all, how could porn addiction, mass immigration, Amazonification of the economy, and corporate girl-bosses be sustained in a world without internet, cargo ships, and mass airline travel?

This critique of technology is valuable, but I invite you to consider a thought experiment: perhaps technology is not an independent phenomenon at all but instead merely an outgrowth of the available energy which nourishes it.

Every power outage is an uncomfortable reminder of this fact, as the humming of the dishwasher, clothes washer, and computer fall into unfamiliar silence and leave you tripping through a dark house full of silent dead metal things until you can dig a candle from a dusty drawer. Or consider your cell phone: would it change your lifestyle if you had a dozen cell phones at your disposal, or somehow obtained one five years more advanced? Or is the more significant factor that the service grid that supports them continues inhaling the vast quantities of energy it requires each moment of the day? Each app your phone may access also represents an additional technological system floated in perpetuity on a distant coal-powered server. 

This energy requirement for basic functioning is the rule for most of what we refer to as technology. The quantity and quality of machinery (whether cell phone or helicopter) very quickly reach diminishing returns and are often only modifiers on performance, secondary concerns in comparison with energy which is necessary to rev any engine to life with the turn of a key.

This distinction between technology and energy is crucial because our energy diet for the last century has been unique from all of human history, with over 80% of our energy coming in the form of fossilized carbons (i.e., oil, gas, coal) which have increasingly served as the muscles of our economy since the arrival of the steam engine. Our ability to extract, distill, and utilize every bit of this energy efficiently has only improved with time, as has the complexity and power of the tools that harness it. But we must never forget that these tools are only as powerful as their last meal — or in the immortal words of Steve Keen:

“Capital Without Energy is a Sculpture”

‘You’ in ‘Flying Blind’ was surrounded at every step of their journey by energy expended in the form of fuel for the flight itself, gas burned for heating, ubiquitous TVs and screens, petroleum and diesel powered vehicles, server farm hosted applications, an automated kitchen that does the work of at least two people while ‘you’ was socializing on their laptop. And that only describes energy in raw expenditure, we should not ignore the physical presence of oil that surrounds the modern person: plastic luggage wheels, clothing (your polyester shirt and underwear), hair gel, even the asphalt cement the airplane and car drove on is composed in large part of a dark heavy mixture of hydrocarbons called bitumen that is extracted as a byproduct of crude oil distillation. 

We wear oil, we are propelled forward by oil over roads of oil, we speak over vast distances on the fumes of spent coal, and we dream in a hydrocarbon powered hyperreality projected by bright screens and thrumming speakers — and we generally think very little of what enables it. This phenomenon is what Nate Hagens refers to as ‘energy blindness’, the industrial revolution era secular mythology which he argues we moderns take as received wisdom from birth — the oily water we swim in. He reframes this civilization-wide replacement of biomass (wood and animal byproducts) and muscle (human and draft animal) with fossilized carbons as follows:

“The main inputs to our economies were now free, we merely had to pay for their extraction. Not the cost of their creation, their true worth, nor their pollution… instead of appreciating this giant — one-time — windfall, we developed stories that our newfound wealth and progress had emerged purely from human ingenuity.”

-Nate Hagens

I'm reminded of this quote whenever foreign policy wonks begin speaking of the “strategic value” of countries like Russia (usually in opposition to hawks like John McCain who famously called the energy giant a 'gas station masquerading as a country'). What they are primarily referring to, as I am, is the delta between the market value and practical value of energy. Put another way, the cost to acquire (at the present moment) in contrast to the cost of lacking it.

Petroleum Culture

Kaczynski mocked conservatives for believing they could conserve traditional lifestyles while simultaneously adopting new technologies, and through this Petroleum Culture lens it is equally ridiculous to expect any conservation of traditional culture when traditional energy sources have been replaced.

Hyper-abundant energy allows the development and decades long refinement of a culture whose norms can only exist at the expense of vast quantities of fossil fuels, a Petroleum Culture. Three prominent cultural trends that appear to be constant in all cultures undergoing the massive energy boom of a fossil fuel era appear to be a devaluation of human relationships, social power centralization, and the unchecked growth of energy inefficient customs.

Devalued Human Relationships

The change in human labor valuation is simple: the introduction of large quantities of machine labor replaces human labor as a gallon of gasoline in a machine can do the equivalent of a month's worth of tedious human labor. But as a second order effect the value of human relationships, which guarantee access to mutual labor through familial and tribal ties, also becomes economically devalued.

For example, consider in purely economic terms how much easier it is to be a single mother with automated laundry and dishwashers. Cheap energy also allows for overproduction of commodities far beyond the needs of any reasonable consumer-base, making new customer niches a precious thing in the eyes of the elite. We ran out of new continents to sell to, but new ‘interior frontiers’ of illness, obsessive collection, and fetishes remain to be fostered and then catered to.

Social Power Centralization

There exists an interesting contradiction to the fossil fuel energy diet. Fossilized energy is concentrated rather than diffuse the way wind and sunlight are, meaning that proximity to their burning grants more direct access to the energy produced (often abstracted by human society as jobs and salaries). Further, the technological systems propped up by this energy surplus encourages centralization due to network effects while simultaneously encouraging social isolation (social media sites and ‘big box’ retailers being classic examples of this).

Those that control the technological systems, distribution systems, and power supply are therefore immensely powerful — powerful over us in ways an ancient king ruling over subsistence farmers could never dream of, for the king and his castle could vanish without a trace and the farmers would have the means to persist relatively unaffected as they continued to survive off primarily solar energy. In contrast, a suburb of Walmart employees and insurance salesmen cut off from the rest of society would face far more grim prospects — effectively being reduced to refugees. The "living in pod"  meme is so visceral to most modern people because it is more than just an exaggerated hypothetical, it is the logical end point for a society sustained on fossilized energy.

Inefficient Social Customs

Looking back it is easy to see the growth of the energy inefficient lifestyles in a way that was not as clear at the time. These changes were gradual at first, probing. After all, humans are social creatures and just like a cattle mob watching a few bolder strays push at loose boards on the neighbor’s fence, with each generation in this abundant energy environment we tested a little further against the possibility frontier. In this decades-long secular bull market of human wealth you really could have your cake and eat it too — people are free to gamble, overleverage, and live comfortably on credit far longer than the bears expected.

In this sense the traditionalists are made to look like fools for a seeming eternity on the timescale of a single human life as old models of human behavior which thrived in the game theoretics of an energy scarce environment can be freely discarded with few immediate consequences so long as that next line of energy credit comes in time in the form of cheap food, bureaucratic mega-state welfare programs, mass importation and indoctrination of foreign labor, and medication to support (or numb) unhealthy lifestyles.

Energy as Variable

Entire books can be written (and have been) on each of these trends, but I would like to keep this overview succinct and return to the emphasis on our own mental models. The following conclusions flow from this energy awareness that should be incorporated into our own thinking going forward:

1. Output from technology is almost entirely a result of available energy. Our societal failure to acknowledge this is an energy blindness which exaggerates the potential of human ingenuity and makes us vulnerable to fantastical thinking.

2. Our energy diet is crucially linked to how our culture will evolve. Energy incentivizes certain social orders, levels of social cohesion, and viability of cultural customs towards evolutionary fitness.

3. Our current energy model (80% non-renewable) is unsustainable. I can think of no other way to describe burning through millions of gallons of fossilized energy annually which took hundreds of millions of years to create.

So imagine (and expect) a future where technology remains, advances even, but with far less available energy. People will endure, but I suspect the majority of technological systems will go the way of most very large creatures with massive appetites during an extinction event.

But the energy drawdown will be gradual, the experience of generations. Biomass and muscle will slowly regain some of their old value, but we also won't be forgetting the secrets of wind, hydropower, nuclear energy any time soon. But such energy won't be as plentiful, nor quite as portable, stable, and flexible in its applications as liquid carbons.

I present this to you as the faintest outline of a more plausible future — not a cathartic Mad Max apocalypse where you get to play "The Lord Humungus”, not a techno-utopian pipe-dream of colonizing a barren red planet when humanity already seems unable to sustain this perfectly habitable one, and not a nightmare world of billions of humans crowded into pods and catered to by robots. But a quieter future, perhaps even a happier one. But whatever comes next will be something truly new.