I'd pay good money for a series of crime novels based in ETopia. I don't know why.

And yes, if we're honest I think we have to admit that a lot of this knowledge loss was in fact driven by an overenthusiastic embrace of machine technology (plus colonial racism and arrogance, plus the Enclosing logic of industrial capitalism); so if our posterity someday come to blame their hunger or reduced circs on "science and technology" there will be a wee grain of truth in the accusation (which I think is why it irks us technorati so much to contemplate).  If we consider what scientists and industrial technologists are party to and responsible for, from Auschwitz to Agent Orange to GMOs to the whole fossil fuel party that may -- let us hope not, but it may -- have doomed our civilisation plus most of the other species we share the planet with... then that disillusioned and angry posterity may just have a point, no matter how fond I am of my laptop... which btw required something like 20x its weight in fossil fuel to construct... sigh...

I'm not so much worried about the high-tech information and knowledge that is perhaps about to be lost -- most of it is frivolous wrt to basic human survival -- you can't eat your iPod.  but I'm deeply worried about the more fundamental, essential information and knowledge that has already been -- often deliberately -- wiped out to make way for "newer better more profitable" monocrops (literal and figurative) and fossil fuel dependency.  The old joke about cashiers who are unable to do basic subtraction w/o an electronic cash register is not so funny;  metaphorically speaking it describes large sectors of our society.  I heard a funny story from a Kiwi about military "cooperation" exercises with US troops, in which the US detachment got lost because their GPS failed and they did not know how to read a paper map.  Maybe this was a slight exaggeration, but it sounded pretty circumstantial.

In essence what technocratic culture does is to Enclose competence and knowledge in the hands of an elite caste of designers, planners, and engineers, while removing and "obsoleting" more and more skill and knowledge from the work and lives of the masses of their fellow citizens.  It's the ultimate in "convenience" -- no need to think or to know anything!  To what extent this inculcated cluelessness and uselessness is a contributory cause of depression, anomie, bad social behaviours etc I have no idea;  but it does scare me that the majority of people I know are utterly dependent on technology they neither understand nor are able to repair, on food/water systems completely opaque, unaccountable and out of their control, and "magical" supplies of energy which they cannot replicate.

In a sense, technocratic culture makes the majority of the population into cargocultists, having neither competency nor sense of provenance wrt the objects and processes of daily life.  (The theory was, at least the ostensible theory was, that this would "free the masses from drudgery" and enable us to develop our minds, pursue the arts and higher education, enjoy leisure and so on.  In practise it means that people watch an average of 4 hours of stupidity-inducing corporate TV per diem, much of it dedicated to persuading us to buy even more didactic, dependency-inducing machines.)  This essential helplessness and dependency -- on such a fragile system directed by such irresponsible and often malignant powers (such as the neoliberal mafia today, but the industrial boss class has never been folks I'd care to share a bus bench with), scares the heck outta me, and not in some Rugged Individualist way...  it scares me for all of us.  I don't think any of us can escape the consequences.  The ratchet effect has got hold of us, and how are we to get out?

As a counterbalance to the classic C for L I offer McKibben's The Age of Missing Information, a book-length musing on the kinds of information that are being lost every day as we continue on our present course...  we are already in a dystopian regime of ignorance and information loss.

What scares the bejeezus out of me is the prospect of a crash that wipes out the machine-tech iron lung on which a majority of the world pop now depends utterly, without sufficient time to recover/relearn the information that was scornfully tossed aside as we embraced our dependency.  We have become kinda like a rich man's children who have never had to learn real skills or get a real job;  we're fine so long as the trust fund is sound, but if our family lawyer bungles it and loses the lot on a bad investment, we're totally unprepared for the real world.  It's a Bubble Economy in more than one sense... there's a boy-in-the-bubble aspect to it as well.

And having said all that, gloomily, I will admit that the enduring popularity of Make Magazine, of internet Kewl Hack sites, the hacker subculture, culture jammers, technology repurposing, not to mention the legions of hobbyists who feel the deep human need to exercise manual skill, dexterity, ingenuity -- all suggest that the instinct for workmanship [Veblen], the thirst for autarky and creativity, and the tinkering gene are not extinct in us -- it's just that most of us are no longer given any useful outlet for them. The ingenuity and solidarity of local communities responding to the Katrina disaster was as inspiring as the official governmental response was appalling.  It may be that on the far side of Hubbert's Peak we get a glimpse of what is best in us, not just what we fear.  Maybe technocrats will even learn to scale their ingenuity down to the point where it empowers the people at large rather than aggrandising the investor and manager class and rendering everyone else dependent and mystified :-)

I can envision a soft landing without the loss of all our high tech expertise, and with the recovery of at least some (many losses are already irreversible) of the wealth of knowledge that we've been throwing away.  But it is only one of a wide range of possibilities, most of which seem more likely and less palatable.

... I wish I had enjoyed the 70's more while they lasted... lately I seriously doubt that I will live to see any better days, more likely worse and worse ones.  at least back then one had a sense of hope, there was still enough time to take corrective action.  but that hope failed.  now, all bets are off and each new survey of our biotic status suggests that the damage is worse and progressing faster than previously estimated;  some mornings I can't bear to look at the climate or bio science news.  

gotta go fall over...  civilisation may be tottering on its undermined foundations, but we still need to sleep...  if this post is less than lucid, chalk it up to a long day sorting and packing books.  if all goes well, the creek don't rise and the world don't end before then, I leave the US at the end of December.  [expect my posting to be very sparse from now on].

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

a monastic order... dedicated to preserving knowledge by hiding books, smuggling them to safety (booklegging), memorizing, and copying them.

That sounds very much like Ray Bradbury's superb novel "Fahrenheit 451".

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

This Simplification will be a consequence of the widespread adoption - because they WORK - of collaborative business models, and of disintermediated "peer to peer" enterprise models where participants have an interest in the outcome.

My interest lies in the "legal protocols" that bind us together in our economic relationships. The current "one way" protocols - "contrats de mandat" - are detailed and prescriptive because they deal with conflicted - intermediated - economic relationships.

It is these conflicted and complex protocols which have been holding us back. We have been unable to see any alternatives.

The consensual protocols ("contrats de societe") I observe emerging, and am working to develop, are in my experience an order of magnitude simpler. This explains why the majority of lawyers ("programmers" really - "Law is Code") see such collaborative law as a threat to what is to all intents and purposes a combination of monopoly and religion.

Likewise the legions of other professionals paid by the hour, rather than the outcome, whose business is based - like other religions before them - upon complexity, arcane language, and opacity.

An illustration of the advantages of simplicity in law is its status in a naturally collaborative and consensual society like Japan. To go to law in Japan is to lose face.As someone said, there are as many Sumo wrestlers in the US as there are lawyers in Japan. You say in a 3 page agreement in Japan what your US attorney says in 300.

The point I am getting to is that simple consensual "legal" protocols will IMHO be the next iteration of the Internet - the "Semantic Web" so much talked about.

We will see the end of double entry book-keeping; the end of "profit" and "loss" - because there is no "profit" within a partnership, merely value created, exchanged and shared; the end of hierarchy; the "Abolition of Labour" and the "Abolition of Property" Marx wrote about in his early days, only to get cold feet subsequently in the face of machines.

We will examine the ancient knowledge - what is still out there - establish why it works, and update it simply, and sustainably.

We will simplify, because it will be in our self interest to do so when collaborative solutions give rise to a better outcome in which we share.

And in doing so, I believe, we will find that "Ethical is Optimal" and will achieve the spiritual peace of mind our current "civilisation" denies us.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

What is seen, should one care to look, is a halt to widespread product introduction and sales but an increase in scientific and technological investigation.  At the time, in the US, oil supplies were expanding and the energy from oil was cheap.  Thus the investigations used cheap energy as a given, therefore necessary, basis of the goods produced from those investigations.  With cheap energy slowly being eliminated as a given ongoing and future scientific and technological investigations will not assume cheap energy, the goods brought to market from those investigations will not be based on that assumption thus those goods will be more sustainable - however defined.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

The story was, however, a love story.

A story about the love of innocence, however strange, in the midst of failure and death.
Miller celebrates the wondrous mysteries of the world, even as it ends.
To all who comment here, ---if you haven't read it, gift yourself, and read the book.
 

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

At the same time it's worth considering that we've already built many of these kinds of ETopias through sites like this. I'm just a lurker here (I post as "eugene" at Daily Kos but have lurked here off and on since the place opened) but have been part of other dKos-spinoffs that were, I would argue, attempts to create this kind of self-sustaining, knowledge-preserving communities.

Moving that into the real world presents many difficulties, especially here in the neoliberal 21st century. But it's a project worth investigating.

As to Canticle, the book is fascinating on a number of levels, not the least of which was the effort of the very Catholic William Miller to reconcile his faith to the modern world. The insight of Canticle is that modern civilization rests on some rather Medieval foundations, and that when modern civilization faces terminal crisis (nuclear war, Peak Oil, climate change), it will return to those foundations through Medieval practices and ideas but also Medieval institutions.

What I find so interesting about your ETopia concept, or the others I've kicked around with my own circles, is the attempt to preserve modernity not in its use of the land, its dependence on extractive capitalism, but instead in its intellectual resources, its cultural produce. It's an effort to either find ways to make our current civilization sustainable by evolving new technologies to allow us to survive in small communes (and here I think of both the European usage of "commune" as well as the American '60s usage); or to return to a pre-19th century lifestyle that forsakes most of the modern technology but refuses to return to the ideas of a more Medieval era.

My fiancee is a librarian, an archivist by specialty. The question of information preservation in the digital age is one they grapple with regularly. They haven't yet come up with answers, but it may be worth investigating their discussions.

And the world will live as one

I'll go think about that on the beach.

you are the media you consume.

The last one was especially harsh ... a severe Depression is much easier to live through for a much larger portion of the population when 80% or more of the population can get 80% or more of what they need to live comfortably within their local community.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

On more apocalyptically pessimistic days, I think un-managed shortages will lead to a boil-down of current states, with them that of most large-scale economy, and seven billion people scrambling to survive will  in turn cause an ecological collapse, which in turn leads to famines and wars destroying even isolated pockets of civilisation.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Probability of the end of the Earth by human fault 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 %

Probability for the end of biology on the earth by human fault 0.00000000000000000001 %

Probability of human disappearance of the Earth ata ny point in the future: 100%

Probability of human disappearance in the next 500 years: 0.0000001%

Probability of ending the present capitalism structure in the next 500 years: 100%

Probability of ending any form of captialism in the next 500 years due to enviromental and human constrains: 50%

Probability of smooth or sharp adaptation of capitalism to environemntal constrains: 50%

Probability of strong depression as a way to adapt and change the "capitalism definition" : 30-50 %

Probability  of sudden die-off of one-fifth of the human population in the next 500 years: 0.1 %

Probability of population number decline in the next 500 years: 75 %

Probability of ending the knowledge structure together with the capitalism structure: 5 %

Probability of losing agricultural and industrial basic knowledge of our civilization together with capitalism: 0.0001% ... or 0.000000000000000000001%

And the oen everyone is thinking really about.. the combine probability of having either a sharp depression to restructure capitalism or sudden strong enviromental constrains due to global warming or water-biospehre cycles..... I will put my numbers (ideology) at 60 %.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

And, well, we are making sci-fi reality with things like wireless internet and other 'futuristic' advances.

But, I fear that the doom-literature like Canticle for Leibowitz are becoming ever more possible. This is sci-fi that I don't want anyone to go through.

And, as for being able to accept die-off/such, as a parent this is a nightmare scenario.  It is possible, but it is one that I am fighting to maintain as 'scenario' rather than reality.

In any event, thank you for the reminder. Somewhere in my attic are multiple books meriting re-reads.

Blogging regularly at Get Energy Smart. NOW!!!

My worry is that we are facing the future something like Wylie E Coyote and at some point we will have  run over the edge of the cliff and be standing in midair without the tools to work back up from a lower level.

that's at the limits of technofear though.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

The Rosetta Project is an initiative of the Long Now Foundation which is building an online archive of human languages, as well as designing a physical back-up through its aesthetically very pleasing Rosetta Disks.

The project, in my assessment, is multifunctional in that it deals with a current problem but also with possible future issues, and it has a level of redundancy, in terms of the format.

The Svarbard Global Seed Vault will be a crop biodiversity vault built deep within a mountain on Spitsbergen. The project, paid for by the Norwegian goverment, will provide a backup in case local disasters strike a regional genebank (as the BBC reports, this occured in the Philippines) as well as being a backup in the case of a more global disaster.

There's also talk of a Moon Ark, but I think that is rather silly.

(Seed Vault and Moon Ark thru WorldChanging)

As DeAnander tells, much knowledge is lost in "improving" times as well. One speculative example is Lucio Russo's hypothesis that Helleniac greeks already had a deep understanding of science methodology, but it get lost amid Roman "efficiency".

Booming times are in fact ordained predecessors of busts. Collapses happen under special conditions, and any unusual flourishing very likely has roots in removed brakes against the special conditions. Say, the stock market has higher risk of collapse precisely when it is growing beyond expectations.

In economic jargon, the Western (or capitalist) civilisation is highly leveraged one - it is performing better than any social arrangement most of the time, but there is a "systematic" risk of meeting growth boundaries. Here we can see a conflict of empirical induction and Popper's falsification logic: people tend (or are persuaded) to follow behaviors that appear to be most successful currently, even if those behaviors cannot possibly give the same success to everyone. Eventually, one has to take risks to be most successful. But statistically, the same risks are rewarding to a predictable portion of participators. Or worse yet, the flourishing conditions for "everyone" are destroying themselves under growth. And once conditions unnoticeably change, a "rare event" arises, unpredictable from the empirical time series of merry growth. Then your usual compulsion can hurt and bankrupt you.  

Of course, the "rare events" can be deduced from basic knowledge of the world. But purely logical deduction is dull and inferior to empirical induction in practical importance most of the time. Even if you suspect bad turns, you are pressed not to fall behind in "performance". Staying with the herd looks safe enough.

Most of the institutional investors who thought that risk was mispriced were nevertheless reluctant to invest on that view because of the cost of carrying that trade. Since virtually all such institutional investors are agents and not principals, they could not afford to take a position that involved a series of short term losses. They would appear to be better investment managers by focusing on the short term gains that could be achieved by going with the herd to enhance yield by assuming increased credit risk.