If you mean 'To more or less maintain the lifestyle we have now' look around you and see how many things in the immediate vicinity are made of, or contain, plastic.
Plastic isn't just useful and cheap, working it is much less labour intensive than natural alternatives.
There's no reason why we couldn't make PCs and car parts and mobile phone case sout of wood, but the assembly process would take a lot longer and be much more expensive.
There's also a minor problem with sustainability in a wood economy.
Seriously, I see no other way out in the medium term than synthetic hydrocarbons. They will be horrendously expensive, but at least we won't have to replace all our stuff at once and will be able to keep using our current (suddenly horrendously expensive to run) technological stock and replace it with other stuff as it wears out. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
But still so many of them come with unique chargers, unique batteries, unique covers, unique packaging, sometimes even unique cables etc etc. All this could be standardised - and would be, if it weren't so damn cheap. If it becomes expensive, there will be solutions.
A client of mine is making very, very good electric guitars out of a fibre liquid composite suitable for injection moulding (or, more exactly pressure moulding) The same process could make a whole range of products such as casings. And it can all be recycled (though, as with paper, there are only 5-7 cycles before the fibre deteriorates - at which time it can be burnt for energy)
As I was F2F arguing the other night with colleagues - if the music industry and the film industry disappear, it won't mean the end of movie-making nor music. Spiderman 3 will disappear, Bond movies will disappear, Hollywood hegemony will disappear. But movies and music will continue to be made. They will be very different, but they will still be enjoyable - maybe even better for us.
If we have an unsustainable lifestyle, then we have to change it.
I was very happy as a kid - before we got TV - sitting round the piano singing songs in the evening with the family. It was a happy time. I am not saying that we have to do that. We will find other ways to amuse ourselves and to feel happy.
Human beings take to innovation naturally. Let's just innovate useful lifestyles, instead of destructive lifestyles... You can't be me, I'm taken
Media hardware is often deliberately non-standardised so that manufacturers make more money. 1000mAh of generic Li-ion battery costs maybe £15 to sell and maybe a couple of quid to make. 1000mAh of proprietary Sony/Nikon/Whoever Li-ion battery is more likely to cost £50 - while costing the same to make.
Car makers make a huge proportion of their income from spares. The really quite crap boot shelf in my car costs three figures to replace, and can't cost more than a tenner to make.
And so on.
So there's no commercial incentive to standardise, except when that's enforced from the top down, either by big players with clout (e.g. the USB standard) or Big Government (e.g. power leads.)
Having more or less plastic around won't change that process. But it may put prices up across the board.
As for the media - it's an open point whether other kinds of music will be better or worse. As I've said before I know rather too many talented people who find the scene hopeless and are giving up and doing other things instead, and rather too many mediocre people who are hanging in there on a hobbyist basis while still hoping for microcelebrity success on MySpace.
This does not reassure me. The reason it doesn't reassure because the currency that defines the transaction isn't actually music - it's something different, and the music happens to be a convenient marketing device, rather than a thing in itself.
There's always been a lot of that in the industry, but I'm seeing more of a move towards it than a move away from it.
YMMV of course.
To me, this is a very fundamental disagreement, but in no way acrimonious ;-)
As you say . who knows whether music or anything else will be better or worse. No-one can say. The only thing one can say is that it will be different.
I was just reading a report today about Finnish cinemas. There were only 6 copies of 'The Queen' circulating: which means it gets to rural areas (at worst) 4- 6 months later, by which time the DVD is out. There is no chance in this monoculture for biodiversity.
Do we accept the monoculture with a very small niche for 'other' creativity, or do we reject the monoculture and accept the specialization of biodiversity and reinforce the idea of robustness?
IMO the lesson of Nature tells us that mongrelization leads to robustness and invigoration. And there is a timescale to that. Just as the product of cross fertiliztion may skip a generation, so the product of musical cross fertilization may take two generations - with a lot of creative people suffering in between. The 'failure' of the in-between generation does not condemn the process. Time will tell. You can't be me, I'm taken
It has happened many times before.
The end of our dependence on oil products doesn't have to be calamitious. We just have to argue about the value of happiness and what that means, rather than protecting 'jobs' that are no longer needed. Creativity will alway be needed - but of what kind? You can't be me, I'm taken
I'm not the one who thinks that just because a creative work can be reduced to a digital file it's as valuable - or not - as every other digital file of equivalent length.
As for monocultures - that's a different issue again. I'll be the first to agree that corporate media monoculture is a bad thing. But the IP people's solution is more likely to create an even worse monoculture than solve the problem.
You create diversity by supporting talent. If you don't support talent - which is something that neither the corporates nor the IP people seem keen on - you don't get diversity.
Effectively I don't see a distinction between Pirate Bay and Microsoft on this issue. Neither has any interest in supporting art, and there's absolutely no evidence that either has ever made any effort to do so - nor ever will.
The point is that hardly anyone cares about content any more for its own sake. What's fashionable at the moment is a rather superficial vogure for creating markets for their own sake.
eBay, MySpace, YouTube, mp3.com (as was), PirateBay, Demonoid, and all the rest are all more interested in the process of bartering attention than in the content that's being exchanged.
Some people might find this exciting. I think it's creepy, because it means the capitalists have won - everything is a market now, and the highest possible value is either trading stuff, or stealing it.
The situation is almost exactly analogous to peak oil. In the same way that the physical world is considered an externality, the process of creativity is considered external to these markets.
But like the real world, it's a limited resource. It's quite a bit more sustainable than oil is, but that doesn't mean that if it's not nurtured it's not going to diminish into rather less than it has been for the last few hundred years.
