Steve Fuller on Upwing vs Downwing Ecology

Description

Steve Fuller:

""UpWingers (or “Blacks”), above all, anticipate futures of greater energy consumption. They tend towards technological solutionism, their view of the future is in the accelerationism/singularitarian spectrum. Politically, UpWingers tend to follow the American Right’s libertarian view of freedom, and the Left’s view of transcendent humanity. Human potential is unlimited and chaos can be tamed. UpWingers might wave away DownWing concerns as being surmountable. Black is the sky.

DownWingers (or “Greens”), broadly, anticipate futures of reduced energy consumption (through efficiency or destruction, if you’d like). They tend towards localization/resilience thought, their view of the future can range from declinist to hack stability (and even accelerationist in some respects). Politically, DownWingers tend to follow the Left’s view of communitarianism and the Right’s sense of natural order. Human nature is limited and chaos should be avoided. DownWingers might accuse UpWingers as hand-waving away complex problems with the dismissive answer, “We’ll think of something.” Green is the Earth."

(http://www.fogbanking.com/upwing-downwing/)

Discussion

1. Fogbanking:

"First, the essay that outlines the Carson/Greer argument is useful for naming some other members in both corners, introducing me to the anarchic philosophy of economic mutualism and other proponents of catabolic collapse. Skipping ahead to the ephemeralization argument:

According to Carson, the problem with the theory of catabolic collapse is that it ignores what he calls “one of the most central distinguishing characteristics of our technology: ephemerality.” The classic example from Buckminster Fuller, he writes, is the replacing of “a transoceanic cable system embodying God only knows how many thousand tons of metal with a few dozen communications satellites weighing a few tons each.”

“It’s quite true that the mass-production industrial civilization that peaked in the 20th century is falling into ruin, failing to invest in upkeep at sustainable levels, and generally eating its seed corn — just as happened with Rome. The difference is, the Interstate Highway System, the civil aviation infrastructure, and the old electrical grid aren’t something to mourn. They’re something that would decay anyway, because they’re increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of production technology and economic organization the emerging successor society will be based on.”

Thanks to technological advancement in recent years, Carson argues, distributed infrastructure — including distributed renewable energy and distributed manufacturing enabled by peer-to-peer open source design— is making that same collapsing infrastructure obsolete.

“Metaphorically speaking, we live in the early days of an emerging economy in which peasant villages — with a Star Trek molecular replicator in each cottage — lives in the shadows of the decaying aqueducts.”

[…]

Greer takes issue with the idea that the ephemeral technologies Carson mentions are really less resource intensive, arguing that we only think they are because of mistaken accounting. Satellites are not possible without a space program, and space programs require so much infrastructure that it’s ludicrous to suggest that they require fewer resources than transoceanic cables. As for the Internet, “Descend from the airy realms of cyber-abstractions into the grubby underworld of hardware, and it’s an archipelago of huge server farms, each of which uses as much electricity as a small city …”

This is actually a fascinating facet of Greer’s thinking. He argues often for the hidden energy and infrastructure costs to modern living. He asks questions like: how much money and oil-based products does it cost to get more oil (we can’t seem to get at oil anymore with our bare hands and simple tools…)? How many oil-based products does it cost to install and maintain solar infrastructure? How much energy does it cost to get more energy?

The answers he comes up with are something less than uplifting. I’m not qualified to say whether this view is justified.

Where Carson sees a world of increasing efficiency, Greer sees increasing hidden costs. Where Carson sees certain improvement Greer sees unmanaged complexity. Where Carson sees sustainability, frankly, Greer doesn’t.

The Carsons of the world see Humans as being capable of transcending and manipulating nature. The Greers of the world see Humans as natural creatures with limits- social limits, cognitive limits, physical limits… "

(http://www.fogbanking.com/upwing-downwing/)

Michel Bauwens on the Mid-Wingers Scenario

George Anadiotis (citing Michel Bauwens):

"Even though Bauwens mentions the internet and the world wide web as an example of democratization of access to knowledge, at the same he acknowledges its co-option as a cautionary tale. Plus, access to does not necessarily mean productive use of.

That’s all fine and well, but what on Earth are Brahmin workers and what does P2P or open source AI have to do with it? Bauwens refers to a spiritual worldview according to which the timeline of the world unfolds in repeating cycles.

The first stage of a full cycle is dominated by the spiritual class (the Brahmins), followed by a second one in which the warrior class takes over, a third one where the merchant class rises to power, concluding with a fourth one where the working class rules. Bauwens elaborates on the evolution of this worldview and argues that we are entering another transition.

What the world needs, he writes, is not just a transition to a new cycle, but a synthesis to a self-aware, spiritually driven human group. Neither Brahmins, nor workers, (and not warriors or merchants either) but Brahmin-workers. I encourage you to read the essay, as it’s full of references that will expand your thinking.

The thesis is that for humanity to transcend its eternal cycles of ascent and descent and live in harmony with nature, we need to manage the complexity of our usage of natural resources, and our relationship with all other inter-dependent beings. There are two scenarios of how to do that, but Bauwens is suggesting a third one.

The first scenario is that of the Down-wingers, which want to bring down material and energy usage to levels compatible with its sustainable capacity. The second is the scenario of the Up-wingers, who want to augment the availability of matter and energy, believing technology will eventually make it compatible with natural limits, even if we have to go beyond earth to achieve it.

Bauwens’ third scenario, which i’d call the Mid-wingers, is one in which smart mutualization keeps us as ‘modern’ and ‘complex’ as possible. For this, he argues, we need human-friendly AI, available autonomously to the productive communities, the commoners, which are the new agents of human history. The Brahmin workers.

“This transition is different: we have nowhere to go, we have exhausted the planet. The conclusion is therefore stark: we can’t just continue the cycle of extraction, collapse, dark age, regeneration, and starting over. We have to ‘transcend’ the cycle of extraction and arrive at a steady state relation with the natural world, to which we integrally belong”, Bauwens writes, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Whether crypto communities along with open source AI are the agents of evolution that will take us there, I don’t really know. But it’s a scenario that offers some hope in an otherwise bleak-looking world, and one i’d like to see unfold and help bring about."

(https://linkeddataorchestration.substack.com/p/are-we-entering-the-era-of-peer-to?)

The struggle between the Cybernetic vs the Ecological Vision of Life

Nathan Gardels:

"For Dan Zimmer, the “up” constituency consists of the libertarian boomers of Silicon Valley and their deregulatory allies who want to barge ahead toward the singularity of a transhumanist future with no holds barred, even dreaming of “extending the light of consciousness to the stars.” The “down” constituency is composed of environmentalist doomers and regulators who harbor an instinctive hostility toward technology as a hubristic attempt to substitute for the natural wisdom of restraint and self-limitation.

“The enemy of this rising technological faction is less the traditional left or right than environmentalists and the regulations that they have been crafting to restrain technology since the 1970s,” writes Zimmer. “This tension between technologists and environmentalists cuts across traditional political boundaries, splitting the MAGA movement into “tech” and “green” factions and increasingly dividing the left into its own techno-solutionist and ecological camps. While the traditional left and right focus on human welfare, contemporary politics is being reshaped by people who claim to champion the cause of nothing less than Life itself.”

What Zimmer means by “Life with a capital L” is “the sum total of all living things reconceived as a single process.” But there is a deep dissonance between technological and ecological camps over what Life itself is.

Zimmer traces the common root of these contending visions to the rise of cybernetics in the 1970s, which came to understand that all living things are “complex information processing systems.”

(https://www.noemamag.com/the-clash-between-technology-ecology/)