by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
I want to thank all the readers who reached out to me during the past several days as I took a leave of absence to do an extended fast to concentrate on my health and get my instructions from the Lord as to what I needed to focus on in 2025 under a second Trump presidency.
I plan to begin writing again this week, and am already preparing an article I hope to publish tomorrow on inauguration day, or shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, I am republishing an excellent article published this weekend from Charles Hugh Smith of Of Two Minds.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Mr. Smith lives in Hawaii and is in 70s, and is one of the most astute economists and financial analysts I have ever read. Unlike most others who write on the economy. Mr. Smith fully understands we have built an economic system on the bubble of technology, and that this bubble has no choice but to burst, at some point.
Is Digitization Catastrophic for Civilization? A common-sense, practical case can be made for “yes.”
by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
The answer draws upon a number of my list of The 20 Dynamics That Will Shape the Next Decade, especially #13, over-optimization.
The fundamental dynamics of any civilization are 1) the quantity / scale of resources available to support the civilization and 2) how are those resources invested / consumed.
As a generalization, the analog world lends itself to durability in a number of critical ways.
Prior to the Age of Hydrocarbons, the limits of available resources optimized a focus on durability, as there simply weren’t enough resources available to squander on projects that were ephemeral. (When resources were squandered on ephemeral projects, that hastened the collapse of the offending civilization.)
The book The Upside of Down begins with an account of the immensity of the resources that had to be assembled to construct the Coliseum in ancient Rome.
If all those resources had been used to build a structure that only lasted five years, the structure could not have been rebuilt in five years because the civilization had devoted most of its surplus resources to the initial construction.
Per #4 in my list, the current global civilization is based on “no limits”: since human ingenuity is limitless, so are resources and solutions.
Based on this belief of “no limits,” we assume there will always be enough resources for everything we conjure up, durable and ephemeral alike.
The possibility that using resources for things that must constantly be replaced could deplete the affordable resources at the scale necessary to constantly replace everything doesn’t register in a “no limits” world.
But this “no limits” world isn’t the real world, it’s a fantasy world constructed of modern mythologies. The real world is inherently limited in a number of ways.
Humans understood this in the pre-oil eras, and so the examples of Progress that were celebrated were durable public works. Yes, lavish public displays were common at the height of civilizations, but as resources were either depleted or became costly due to ephemeral consumption, then these lavish displays became less common or disappeared entirely.
The core problem with digitization is that it is optimized for short-term profits generated by replacement via planned obsolescence and accelerated product cycles, which demand a continuous flood of new novelties and updated models that obsolete previous versions to drive sales.
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