So, I am wandering around naked… Ok, it just feels that way. I am on my way to see the first grand-daughter and have had to leave civilized parts and move into barbarian realms to do this. Which means I have taken my knife – which is as much part of dressing as putting on trousers – out of my pocket and left it carefully on the bedside table. I don’t think I ever go through a normal day without using it 4-5 times, and sometimes many more. Any place where they worry more about the danger of people cutting each other than having the tool for everything from baling twine to levering open a rusty hinge… plainly isn’t very safe and civilized. There seems to be some confusion about this in barbarian parts. (The ancient Greeks kindly defined barbarians as anyone who wasn’t ancient Greek – I’d take that to mean ‘like us’.)
I see the Queensland state government now offering subsidies to those who wish to install anti-theft devices to their cars — a naked admission in my “Greek” point of view, that the barbarians can’t catch or discourage car thieves, or punish them if they do catch them (IMO mostly of an age/ethnicity where this is difficult or unpalatable by the current administration, so is trying to make sure only the poor get targeted).
These seem to the Science Fiction writer not ‘progress’ but steady steps towards a dystopia. Ok, so I am biased. I’ve always believed crowded environments lead to authoritarianism (because rules – and enforcers of the same with the power it gives them — are justified to make such places ‘work’) and thus dense conurbations are the first step to authoritarian rule and thus very popular with authoritarians (they won’t live in the ‘walkable city’ or ‘eat bugs’ any more than they walk to climate-conventions, other than down the ramp of their private jet, trust me). Australia – of all places – is now suddenly having a media -rash of ‘we need to build up not out’ and ‘shared communal spaces are more important than a back-yard.’ (all perfectly spontaneous, I am sure).
The ‘Last stand on Zanzibar’ or ‘Soylent Green (Make room, make room)’ kind of dystopian novel seems to have gone out of fashion. Possibly because a large part of the Trad publishing industry lives in Calhoun’s behavioral sink, anyway, and, like our ancient Greeks regarded those not like them as ‘barbarians’, or possibly because the demographics of the future show declining populations — and LESS need for dense conurbations. So, painting this as a problem: (as Zelazny once put it, like a scientist studying an incurable disfiguring disease who then caught that disease saying “But on ME it looks good”) well, it’s the last thing those content in the behavioral sink want portrayed as undesirable. I think there will always be those so habituated to the behavioral sink as to shudder from the idea of not being close to lots of people. Well, sure. But the evidence is in. Without rural and peri-urban birth rates feeding migrants in (as was the case for London for example, for hundreds of years) these are dying sinks.
My own prediction is that dense urbanization is going to undergo a transformation to ‘desirable’ for conservation/climate change reasons. The truth of course is that the planet is like your liver. It can stand low levels of widely diffused poison with moderately little ill-effect – it just gets to be a problem when there are high levels of toxin, even in localized areas. Then you get necrosis which spreads out from those… but diffused ‘poison’ is much harder to subject to authoritarian control, methinks.
There were good reasons for dense conurbations, historically. Some still exist, but really other than to support arts like say an opera – where you need a dense population because it is only supported by 1 in 1000 people so to get a paying equation you need a large population close at hand, I think the need a declining one.
So: what is that dystopia of the future really likely to be like? A wasteland? A city crowded to the gills surrounded by ‘conserved’ wilderness?
I don’t know. But for a dystopia to be authoritarian, it needs to be possible to control the people. And that tend to mean having them where they can see them, and where there are plenty of other people to rat them out – although aerial/satellite surveillance and AI do offer new horrors.
But myself, based on historical trends, I think we may well find that so much of the self-righteous paeans of ‘history’s arrow is moving the way we believe it should’ may pan out to be regarded with horror in a few decades, if not sooner.
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “The trammels of civilization”
Concentrating the population also means you can argue that activities should be banned because they necessarily disturb the neighbors — IF you are living cheek by jowl.
I imagine the dystopia would be abrupt but relatively short lived. Something goes “SNAP!” for some reason, and the people who grow/process/deliver the food and fuel and fiber say, “No.” The central government declares that the super-cities muse be provided for, then discovers that 1) it’s hard to hunt shadows that 2) have the support of a large part of the population and that 3) know how to make the pursuer miserable [and his family as well]. Things will get vicious in the cities, and rough in the exurban areas. Places that are hard to survive in will get harder to survive in for a while.
Then the rebuilding starts, and it won’t be fun, but it will be smaller, more diffuse, and wider. I thing the key will be the small nuclear plants and a dispersed power grid. If that gets cranked up, then a lot of the “sticks” of the central governments will turn into pool-noodles. (After all, swaths of the populations are already getting used to the idea that evasion of government is a sport, a la Italy and taxes.)
The trouble is, that is hard to write well as a novel.
We need to banish all these ignorant country folk and just build more factories to make all the food we city folk need to survive. Who needs farms anyway?
People, people everywhere, and all the docs were shrinks.
People, people everywhere, and all computers finks.
c4c
“So: what is that dystopia of the future really likely to be like? A wasteland? A city crowded to the gills surrounded by ‘conserved’ wilderness?”
They pretty much have that now in China. Impoverished countryside, packed cities. A quick Google Earth shows every crappy little town has a tofu development next to it, rows of apartment towers.
Given the truism that more centralization means less efficiency, I suspect we’ll see the next phase in China pretty soon. There’s only so much friction a system can tolerate before it finally grinds to a halt.
I remember reading a book with photos of rural China a few years ago. Okay, one about Chinese cryptids written by Chinese researchers. But I was shocked at the pictures of rural Chinese villages. Some of them had what looked like protective wooden palisades. And most looked like they came from the 19th century. We’re talking ‘mining patch in Appalachia, but less prosperous’. I thought the revolution was supposed to improve life for the country people as well as the city workers, at least a little?
“the revolution was supposed to improve life for the country people”
Yeah, that was the sales job. In reality the cities are full because people work to death -and- starve in the countryside. In the city you only work to death.
I saw a very interesting article the other day, to the effect that factory jobs are going begging in Asia these days. Young people are not lining up to work in factories the way they used to 20 years ago. Factory owners are forced to provide amenities to attract workers. If that’s true (a big if) then there’s some interesting things going on out there. The article billed it as “the end of cheap stuff”, I guess we’ll see.
One of the (hilarious!) problems for socialism in modern life is that technology empowers the INDIVIDUAL against the group. In the old days you had to fit in or the townfolk would not help you raise your barn or whatever job you needed done that required 20 guys to do it.
These days you rent a crane. Or make one, like I did. Take one nerd, add technology, instant solution. In my case, a cheap welder and some square tubing. Shazam, now I can do it alone. Go me. ~:D
Which means that Socialists, who DO NOT understand that a “group” has no real existence and is only a collection of individuals, can’t cope with modern life. We do not conform to their models.
And all you need to do is look at China, Vietnam, etc. to see it. Those systems are breaking down as the individuals in them gain back their power to say “GET OFF MY LAWN!”
Just to be clear I’m under no delusions about any Workers’ Paradise that ever existed; I’ve read Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum. They made it obvious how poorly the rural workers were regarded by the Communist intellectuals. I just thought they’d have advanced from the 19th or maybe the 18th century in the countryside. Chinese cities certainly look modern enough in the pictures I’ve seen.
Thing is, they did advance; a lot of China was stuck in the 15th or 16th centuries in the early 20th.
Well, we shall see if Africa can become the last Cheap Labor place.
Expect automation to increase, vastly. More quickly if Africa can’t fill the gap.
I’ll take my little redneck town out in the middle of nowhere for $1000… Just sayin…