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Posted on September 2, 2025 | 52 Comments
With the publication of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age fast approaching but not yet arrived, I’m at that awkward stage in an author’s journey with a book where it’s too late to change anything in it, but it’s not yet left the nest and made its own way in the world. Already, I’m visited too often by an internal monologue along the lines of “should have included that, shouldn’t have said that, should have said that better”. Something I like about writing books rather than, say, blog posts is their fixed and tangible material presence in the world. The downside is, well, the fixity, rather than the more dialogic nature of online discussion. At its best – which it often is on this blog – online dialogue can be great. Whereas at its worst, retreating to a book and its ineradicable one-way word flow offers a certain balm to the soul.
Ah well, I’m happy overall with what I’ve written in Finding Lights. But in this awkward moment of pause, I still sometimes find myself switching gears in conversations with people when they stray into potentially controversial areas in case it prompts a flaring of that internal monologue. One such area that’s blindsided me a couple of times has been along the lines of “Ah, so you’re writing about the shape of the future – I expect you must have said a lot about artificial intelligence? It’s going to change the world!”
The truth, dear reader, is that I’ve said almost nothing about artificial intelligence in the book. And so the internal monologue flares again: “Aiee, AI! Should have included that…”
An advance review copy of the book sits on the desk beside me as I write these words. I touch it and feel its calming fixity. What’s done is done, and you can’t write about everything in the few short pages of a book…
Actually, I’m fairly relaxed about my AI omission. I see AI as but another over-hyped manifestation of our over-energised and over-connected world, which will likely fall as that world falls. Will it change the world in the meantime? Possibly, but not, I think, in especially interesting or positive ways. If it changes the world, it will change it in the way that the spread of 200 horsepower tractors in a world of 20 horsepower ones changes it. An acceleration, an amplification of a doomed trend. For sure, it will be used for some good purposes. It will be used for many more bad ones. Technology is never neutral. It’s always folded into existing social structures. And the argument of my book is that those structures will soon change radically, if unpredictably.
I spoke with a friend recently who works in a large public sector organisation. She told me that AI is increasingly dominating the deliberative and decision-making processes of her organisation in ways she thinks are uncreative and deadening. Artificial intelligence is not, in fact, ‘intelligent’. It’s just stylishly regurgitative.
I’ve seen AI versions of things I’ve written and debates I’ve had. They’re kind of like the low B essay of a moderately diligent but unengaged university student, who’s read a couple of the sources from the reading list and written a competent bit of hackery along the lines of “A says this and B says that. The strength of A is this, the weakness is that. The strength of B is this, the weakness is that. I think they’ve both got a point, but I think A is best because my professor prefers them”.
As I was discussing with my friend this deadening AI-ification of her workplace, it suddenly struck me that public intellectual culture is increasingly AI-ified in a similar way. Let me not name names, but there are certain authors and certain publishers that churn out books about weighty contemporary matters – food systems, migration and so on – along these lines. A says this and B says that. Here’s my novel and creative synthesis of the same old crap, along with five hundred references that hopefully nobody’s going to follow up too closely. Typically, the novel solution involves salvation by high-energy (but purportedly ‘renewable’) new technology which is being mercilessly flogged by state-corporate interests as the only realistic way to save the world or save the poor.
I’m not suggesting that these books have actually been written by AI. I don’t doubt they had an ‘original’ human creator. Most human originality is regurgitative anyway. But you do need a creative spark somewhere. The AI-ification of our intellectual culture speaks to its loss of creativity and vitality. We keep going over the same old arguments, looking for ‘creative’ solutions in them to growing problems that can’t be solved because they’re inherent to the premise of the arguments. There’s something deadening about this cookie-cutter futurology in contemporary public culture: “things look bleak, but actually I’m optimistic about the future because of (drumroll) tech-X”. For my part, I’m not optimistic about the future, but I stay hopeful because hope is a human trait. Maybe it’s programmed in – evolutionarily, that is, and not through coding. The difference is that you feel it.
The B student’s essay shows they have a basic ability to read, understand, summarize and repackage. It fits them to managerial work in public or private corporations where these skills are useful. This would be fine if business-as-usual was a good long-term bet for our public-private corporatized civilisation, but it’s not fine now.
Matters aren’t helped much if we turn out more A students – hence I’m not overly excited by the prospect of improved and more creative AI. A students end up being brilliant thinkers in universities whose output is quietly ignored by the rest of society – universities have become anything but universal – or, more likely, brilliant generators of income for our doomed corporatized civilisation.
Forgive me if the above sounds cynical. I don’t mean to suggest that there are no possible positions or acts of grace in the modern world. But I do think we need to do better, and this involves making some fundamental changes to the stories we tell, which AI and our AI-ified public culture are unable to do.
I’m not an especially creative or brilliant thinker myself, but I hope my book might help a few people see more ways of stepping out of these familiar stories and into the darker unknown. This is a place where the solution to global problems becomes easier because we stop trying to solve them. Instead, we address ourselves, without particularly knowing what we’re doing, to more tangible matters that are closer to hand.
In other words, I think we need some radically different stories that we can inhabit from the inside because we really feel them, rather than AI-ified surveys of the field that return some ‘realistic’ version of the status quo ante delivered by high-energy technologies.
My book won’t find favour with everyone, of that I can be sure. My fondest hope for it is that at least no one will think it was written by AI, or a human version of it.
And now, as previously trailed, I’m going to be mostly offline for two or three weeks. But rest assured I will be back here with more genuinely human-produced content soon.
Gaia Foundation We Feed the UK
David Graeber Pirate Enlightenment
(By the way, I just came across this interesting obituary of Graeber, who in my opinon truly was a creative and brilliant thinker. I daresay many people would come out a lot worse if an ex-partner wrote their obituary).
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I do hold a tiny glimmer of hope regarding AI, though not in the “AI will be the One Weird Trick that saves us!” vein at all… it is, after all, just autocarrot on steroids, capable not of understanding questions but rather of replying to queries with what a plausible answer might sound like. So there are at least two huge problems with it: one that people think there is understanding there where there isn’t, and another the old adage of garbage in, garbage out.
Rather, I hope that the bubble of rampant mis-application of AI (and it looks more and more like a bubble all the time) might remind some investors of the value of human endeavour and human labour. A slim hope, perhaps, and still not One Weird Trick etc, but I’ll take my faint glimmers where I can get them.
AI is just the latest shiny object in the news.
People are already noticing that AI is using so much electricity that their electric bills are going up and that it uses a ton of cooling water without providing any day to day benefit.
Everyone can do their part to reduce consumption by turning off the AI summary in your search engine.
The latest shiny object, indeed. AI is being blamed for “the reallocation of investor capital” away from the formerly shiny “future food sector”.
“AI a threat… Recent [drops in] investment levels in alternative proteins reflect a market-wide slowdown in food and climate tech funding, driven in part by the reallocation of investor capital toward artificial intelligence”.
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/alternative-protein-investent-decline-q2-2025-funding/
As I have often enough argued over the past decade and a half, so far as public consequence is concerned, it doesn’t matter quite so much what a technology can actually do as what people believe it can do? “AI” is the supreme case of this: whatever it actually is or does, its advocates genuinely believe it will drive the cost of human labor to zero in the near term, across most domains of endeavor. They are planning based on this assumption, and are sufficiently well-resourced to act on those plans.
And so that belief, and the plans based on it, will condition our economic, political and social reality for the remainder of the period we find ourselves in, regardless of what the technology actually turns out to be capable of. The particularly salient feature of this belief is that the obsolescence of human labor will generate large numbers of essentially surplus human bodies, in fact entire populations: an unnecessariat.
And the main policy considerations of the AI advocates therefore concern what to do with “excess” populations. You’ve heard of the accelerationist left’s response: “fully automated luxury communism” (which has never been anything more concrete than a clever turn of phrase, and is massively problematic for many reasons anyway), and until the glorious day that is achieved some kind of UBI.
I shouldn’t need to explain what the AI-right’s strategy for the management of populations considered excess looks like.
*This* is the discourse beneath the discourse, the esoteric meaning folded up within the exoteric talk of data centers, energy and cooling needs and so on. And this is why it’s worth addressing, and countering, in any account of the near-term human future.
I do have some sympathy for the fully automated luxury communism approach, with some caveats about the joys of actually doing meaningful activity which sometimes will be labour, and around how difficult it is with our current technology to automate simple things like making clothing (every seam in every garment you have ever worn was handled by a human being at some point) or picking fruit (there are people working hard on robotic solutions here but I think almost all fruit is also handled by actual humans). Still, the ideal of nobody being compelled to labour for subsistence — of having the same freedom to play, learn, and socialise as, say, the richest 1% do now — is an attractive goal.
The bigger problem is that “fully automated luxury” does not in and of itself automatically lead to “communism” and frankly we’re a very long way from even social democracy at this stage. Fully automated luxury capitalism will always be for the rich and only for the rich, and the freedoms now enjoyed by the 1% are not granted by technology but rather built on the exploitation of the poor and th destruction of the earth.
I don’t know what fully automated luxury distributism might look like, but I would probably read that fantasy novel.
Full automatic …….
Will ai change a flat tyre, fix your car unclog your drains or fix your ac/ heating ? dig out a stuck tractor ?
Now I give you 90% of the worlds politicos could be replaced by a comadore 64 , paper pushing jobs will be the ones to suffer ,civil servants maybe , universities as no one will need to know anything but basic reading but I remember the paperless office that was a bust .
Hence my caveats around how difficult full automation would actually be!
That said, if my grandfather had been told, when he was a child during WW1, that his grandchildren would keep in touch by tapping a tiny handheld computer screen they carry around in their pockets, he would have been astounded. I don’t believe we will have the spare energy just lying around in the future to develop technologies at the rate or of the kinder did in the 20th century, but I also don’t think humans are going to stop trying to solve problems with technology just because the fossil energy goes away. And I don’t think the fully automated luxury communism crowd are claiming that the technology for full automation already exists; that’s clearly not the case even in our most basic needs (food and clothing being the examples I already gave). But I don’t think that technology without systemic social reorganisation can lead to the equality and liberty imagined, and too much focus on the technology can easily cloud people’s thinking on this.
@Kathryn.
I get/agree with your points.
I just think that how far a technology/idea can “go” has always been limited by the available energy at the time.
Flight has always been imagined but no coal fuel/fire planes were ever invented. It took the discovery of oil to make the ideas a reality.
As the availablity of cheap/abundant fossil fuels declines, then the technology we create will become less complex/sophisticated. Not that we won’t still be very creative/innovative with what is possible.
PS I think we are in agreement on the horrors of what the right will do about excess population, whether or not the cost of labour goes to zero. (I think it won’t go to zero when we stop burning fossil fuels…)
As Kathryn says ” garbage in garbage out ” especially when you find out that the second largest source it uses for information is Wikipedia .
Chris , what you are worrying about what you left out is the basis for another book !
I think AI’s Achilles Heel, like the rest of modernity, will be a lack of energy.
Well indeed. The difficulty is how much damage those who are heavily invested in it do in the meantime… but I still think it’s largely a bubble.
The absence of AI sounds like a welcome relief honestly. Also LLMs aren’t AI, and most of the things people seem to ask about doing with it could already be done with algorithms and software already. I think it’s just an intensification of high tech systems to increase surveillance, avoid responsibility on the part of decision makers, and an attempt to de-skill/outsource knowledge work in a similar process to the way craft work was deskilled/outsourced with industrialization. I don’t know how well it works out for any of that. But nothing new there really, except personally where it seems like it’s going to be harder to use my office job to buffer my farming.
Projections for the growth of AI could be throttled by geopolitical realities, as some countries (such as the US, UK, Germany, and Finland) aren’t even making enough electricity to cover their own current levels of consumption, and imports of electricity are needed from neighbouring countries (2024 data). The same goes for the exorbitant electricity requirements of bacterial protein (hello Solar Foods in Finland) and cryptocurrency mining.
The latest energy stats for the UK show that even though the renewable generation of electricity reached a new record high there in 2024, the increase over the 2023 amount was only 7 TWh, which is less than the UK’s 9.5 TWh increase in net imports of electricity during the same year.
In other words, during 2024 the UK’s net imports of electricity increased by more TWh than the UK’s renewable generation of electricity increased, despite the record-breaking year for renewable generation in the UK (mainly due to an increase in biomass burning).
“Renewable generation rose by 5.1 per cent to reach a new record high of 143.7 TWh, driven by record high generation from wind and thermal renewables (bioenergy).”
“… while net imports rose by 40 per cent from 2023 to reach 33.4 TWh.”
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a28656478525675739051/DUKES_2025_Chapter_5.pdf
Interesting range of comments as ever – thanks. It’s a relief to see other people describing it as a bubble. Has anyone read Bender & Hanna’s ‘The AI Con’?
I agree with AG about the discourse behind the discourse in relation to managing ‘surplus’ populations. And that is something I do talk about in the book, separately from AI.
I basically agree with the points being made about the ‘AI-right’, although I see this more in terms of a colonialism initially imposed by European countries on the wider world that’s now coming back to haunt us. However, I’m not persuaded that the left-right framing is the best political optic for it. The colonial project has had both left and right elements (manifested now by the likes of Starmer) while localism/communitarianism has been best advanced by ‘conservative’ thinkers who are streets away from the AI or alt-right.
I’m less sympathetic than even Kathryn’s modest sympathies for FALC – another colonialist project. Sure, it’s good for people not to exist at the door of hunger and want … something that modernist liberatory dreams of the left and right have often in fact served up to them … but you don’t need far-fetched notions like FALC to generate that. The playing, learning and socialising of the 1% looks to me mostly quite destructive and dysfunctional, and it doesn’t even seem to make most of them happy.
I don’t think there can be a fully automated luxury distributism, because full automation and luxury require monopoly, and that’s what distributism is geared to negating. Tolerably automated quotidian or artisanal distributism is about as close as I can get. I think it’s enough.
Re Diogenes’ points about de-employment, yes first they came for the manufacturing jobs and then they came for the office jobs, now leaving only the service jobs (builder, mechanic, plumber etc). The ‘petty bourgeoisie’ as the new ‘revolutionary’ class (I have an article about this coming out soon) … like Robert de Niro in Brazil.
The question is how many ‘surplus’ populations will escape the machinations of the disaster capitalist state and be able to build their own local livelihood politics. That’s a major focus of my new book … though I give no numerical answers.
Perhaps the playing, learning and socialising of the 1% is so destructive because despite the apparent freedom their wealth affords them, they are really bound to the service of Mammon. And that’s just….boring.
I think most of the people I’ve seen seriously playing with FALC ideas are anarcho-socialist leaning communists, rather than bureaucrats, and that probably changes my impressions of their aims. But I would absolutely be up for tolerably automated quotidian-artisanal distributism! How we get there from here seems almost as difficult as FALC.
I am up late preserving fruit again, and thinking about how I might manage the allotment in busy years in future; I won’t be removing any fruit trees but there might be more flint corn and fewer tomatoes.
I am glad you didn’t include an AI chapter in the book!
In my take the main role of AI is actually to cope with digitalization, which has resulted in an explosion of “information” which has to be processed. i.e AI is just another layer of complexity to solve problems generated by previous development. Of course some of this will be “useful”.
Like for many other new technologies, it might be the case that the applications that really “hit” will not at all be the industrial applications, but “social” applications.
That is kind of a scary thought, seeing how social media has played out.
AI looks to me as the last gasp of industrial civilization of the west , any dam thing to keep the grown ball rolling , billions thrown at servers with no electricity to drive them but its investment hense growth , another way of milking the tapped out consumer .
I would not be surprised to see cities or areas losing power / rolling blackouts to keep the servers powered up unless you live somewhere close to a munitions factory then power is garranteed , even when no one has power to ask it questions .
Michael Crichton wrote a novel titled Prey (London:Harper Collins 2002) that deals with the confluence of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Of course things go very wrong and the hero and his compatriots have to save the day by blowing up the lab complex with the evil nanorobots and their human accomplices inside. I loved it!
Crichton writes well and I have read several of his books. This one was 524 pages and I finished it in less than 24 hours. What stands out for me is that he does his research and presents it well. In this book, Crichton’s theme is distributed intelligence. This is how birds move as a coordinated mass without a central intelligence. The intelligence exists at the network level – i.e. distributed. It is made up of organisms without the higher levels of complexity we see in primates and ourselves. Yet it works. It is based on a few simple rules that any mobile organism can follow like, “Stay close to your neighbor but don’t bump into them.” What this network does is allow infinite variation while minimizing error.
Distributed intelligence is significantly different from large language models (LLM) that have become the basis of the corporate use of AI. LLMs are based on the past and extrapolate into the future in a limited, restricted way. Of course they are going to use huge amounts of energy and provide more and more wrong answers! Think of the difference between a database and a spreadsheet. The database tells you what happened. The spreadsheet tells you what could happen. I use spreadsheets for database purposes too, as do many people, but if you are not generating reports it is not a problem. In the same comparative manner, distributed intelligence can come up with creative answers simply because they allow for randomness, something LLMs do not do.
Here is another point that I touched on in my latest book.
[Begin quote]
Distributed intelligence can also shed new light on the social revolutions of the 1960s and counterculture history, previously mentioned in the chapter on demographics. A few simple rules allowed an infinite range of behaviors beyond the few behaviors that are prohibited. It also brought any random variation into sharp focus. This could be a scientific counterpoint to Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the noosphere.
De Chardin proposed the noosphere as the sphere of thought encircling the earth that has emerged through evolution as a consequence of the growth in complexity/consciousness. In this formulation, a new idea is released into a hypothetical layer around the earth that is outside of time and space. When I think of something new, it is projected into the noosphere and available for anyone else to pick up on. The key to picking up on new things is how well prepared you are.
Of course, that is a simplistic view of de Chardin’s rather elaborate system of philosophy linked with natural phenomena, but the point is that a distributed net of organisms acting by a few simple rules can appear to be controlled by an intelligence that is beyond ordinary measurement.
[End quote]
The point here is that the focus on LLMs in AI is a Big ‘Nuthin. (The name of a wonderful song by The Roches from 1989, by the way.) If the mucky-mucks financing this nonsense weren’t so focused on centralization and profit, they might be onto something important.
I should probably add a little bit on how mimicry works in distributed intelligence (as well as in humans!). If a random action works (is successful) in a distributed intelligence network, the action “can” be repeated (but not always). In Crichton’s novel, the nanobots “bumped into” some adaptations that made them more successful in living outside the lab and actually taking over some human hosts. The mass of nanobots then adopted these successful actions through mimicry. Sorta like adopting the techniques of the best hunter in your tribe. And of course, culture takes this to a higher level, which is why mimicry is a necessary part of human culture, but a subset of the behaviors making up culture.
Distributed intelligence- yeah, a few simple rules that can lead to complex, emergent behaviors. Unfortunately, the simple rule is to maximize entropy through the maximum power principle.
This reminds me of the super organism concept used by Nate Hagens to describe the out of control global frenzy of short sighted economic pillage we are part of.
No one is driving the bus! So it goes.
Where to pre order in uk?
Chelsea Green says US only and Barnes &N link sends me to a US site…
And yes AI, not much use really! Can probably turn out ok GCSE essays but give it anything useful to do and unless you already have a high level of knowledge to coreect it, it makes daft and potentially damaging mistakes. I had the paid chatgpt model use our extensive soil Anaysis data to make a table of organic inputs for our market garden. It confused ha with acre and suggested I apply lime at 2.4x the correct rate, consisistently suggested non organic inputs dispute the prompts telling it to cross reference all recommendations to comply with organic standards.
Anything potentially useful it might do is riddled with mistakes.
You can find pre-order info if you scroll up to the Recent Comments list (almost to the top of this page). Steve L has provided links to the US and UK book sellers.
How about local and domestic scaled automated (peddle power!) Luxury distributism? I feel the need to pull luxury from the wreckage of centralisation as it is a word we use to describe the tactile and embodied values of a life of community sufficiency on the land. There is a debate as to whether there is a better word.
Also, to UK folks, Your Party has opened membership. Chris, I know you have been warned off this by a reader here but this feels like a time to get involved – very interested to read your thoughts but also of friends and colleagues in the UK agroecological space.
Also, this front Gem Bendle;https://jembendell.com/2025/09/15/centering-citizen-ownership-britain-is-not-for-sale-and-palestine-is-not-for-stealing/
@Joel.
Luxury.
A word that has different meanings to different people.
How does one define luxury?
Its shorthand for many things.
Can something be considered a luxury if it is available to everyone? Is luxury only really experienced by elites?
If something is available to everyone, all of the time, is it still a luxury?
Once something is taken for granted, does it stop being a luxury?
I’m not sure the pursuite of luxury should be the desired goal of civilization. Full automated or not.
Without sounding too pessimistic………..
I was/am a “Corbynista” but Your Party will not be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power. It may give voice to discontent but it won’t be able to facilitate meaningful change.
The full force of the Establishment will be brought to bear. Infiltrated and undermined from within as well as from external forces.
@Joel
Interesting article.
Banning the sale of UK property or land to non UK citizens sounds like a good idea.
But………….
The problem we have in the UK is that we need to import key resources to keep society functioning.
Oil being the most important of all. Without oil/energy, the country grinds to a halt.
As we no longer have an export industry, we have to sell off the “family silver” to raise the revenue to pay for the oil.
The “family silver” being property, land and utility companies.
We are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Yes, restricting foreign ownership of property would help people with more affordable housing but the flip side is that the economy would collapse due to an inability to import resources. 🙁
If France (where we live) were to ban the sale of land to foreigners, the next step is to seize the land already sold to foreigners. With compensation of course, but not likely at a return on investment of the money paid to upgrade the property. This would depress property prices and hurt the French citizens wanting to sell. We would have to go somewhere else. Then France would lose the US dollars we bring into the country every month. Keep in mind that ex-pats bring in more money on a yearly basis than short-term tourists. Right now the volume of tourists is the real difference. This demographic logic applies to the UK if a similar scheme were implemented.
Then there is the immigration aspect. In developed countries, the illegal immigrants do the hard manual work and pay more in taxes than the social benefits they receive. The rightwingers are just lying to you. The US and UK really do need illegal immigration just to keep the status quo. Oops.
Bendell and many other social activists are stuck in statist mindsets. So are most of the regular commenters on this blog. Forget laws and institutions. The power dynamic has already changed. The demographics are moving from class to rank at an accelerating rate.
@Walter Haugen.
Yes.
Foreign land/property ownership is a complex subject
There is a difference between someone buying up a farm, starting a smallholding and being part of a community compared to the likes of BlackRock buying up property as a revenue stream (wealth extraction)
A countries size also has an impact. France is so much bigger than the UK for example.
There are always winners and losers.
The French urbanite selling Grandma’s inherited, run down farm in the arse end of nowhere to a foreign national, is a winner.
A local Cornish couple trying to afford a house in the local community and start a family are priced out by second home market and Airbnb. They are losers.
I believe New Zealand put a ban on property sales to foreigners to tame the house price inflation. I’m not sure how that has played out?
Immigration is indeed one of those other thorny issues.
Capitalism relies on an ever expanding population.
With the birth rate well below replacement in the developed world (and pretty much everywhere else), immigration is vital to keep the population expanding.
If immigration were to stop, the population would contract and bring about the collapse of the economy.
Perhaps not the outcome that the likes of Nigel Farage intended!
But………then again……..is an ever expanding population desirable? Or even possible? At some point it has to reach a limit.
A bit of insight into what the future may look like as the “State” fails……
I watched TraumaZone. An Adam Curtis documentary (on BBC iPlayer)about the collapse of the USSR.
Very slooooooow in places but interesting non the less.
Dmitri Orlov wrote The Five Stages of Collapse in 2013. The idea of “stages” is both static and statist. It is a function (position) rather than the first derivative (motion), second derivative (acceleration) or even third derivative (acceleration of acceleration) of the function. I favor the variable speed of collapse, which puts me in the realm of the second and third derivatives. One can start with Orlov’s thesis but it would be wise to quickly shift your paradigms into a more nuanced analysis.
The analogy here is a hypersonic missile. Force = mass x velocity. A hypersonic missile gets more “bang for your buck” because the increase in velocity (up to 10x the speed of sound) gives you the impact of a nuclear missile without the radiation and at a fraction of the cost for production and delivery. If you don’t shift your paradigms quickly AND be able to adapt quickly, you will be left behind.
@Walter Haugen.
My comment on TraumaZone being slooooooow was a reference to the pace of the narrative. 🙂
Lots of footage that wasn’t really saying/adding much.
Not a reference to the speed of the collapse! That was pretty quick.
A further note on states and the statist mindset (centralized control of economic and social affairs – key word is control).
I have long considered that the Moors in Spain were the epitome of state-level society. We are now in Ronda, Andalusia, after spending some time in Malaga and Cordoba. I have now concluded that to be the case. Key factors are: 1) regional governance, 2) tolerance for other religions, 3) emphasis on cleanliness in body, mind and spirit, and 4) acceptance of limits in relation to the physical environment. After 1485, when the Reconquista was complete, Iberia went downhill fast and caught up to the rest of Europe in its downward spiral.
The point here is to look at the Moorish model as the global climate heats up. Some states will hang on longer than others and if YOU are in one of them, you might gain an edge by looking to Moorish adaptability.
I think I get what your saying Walter, is there a revision over these set of comments, from ‘the statist doesn’t exist anymore – to moorish states work the best’?
It’s interesting that you haven’t picked up the collective or commons ownership that underpins Bendell ‘s proposition, and that underpins the French model of governance that you so enjoy. As a embedded member of your community there, a few signatories will vouch for you I’m sure!
The interesting part of Bendell’s speech is that the number of nations that are opening land to global corporate markets is in the minority in the world. Perhaps there is a difference in generation here, in that the idea of ownership – that something has been ‘worked and paid for’ has shifted for the younger people, as they are ‘paying for’ the boom economy that has set the previous generation up.
I think we agree that a shift from nation statist/regulatory to regional/relational is a good/inevitable process. I think Bendell’s proposition of the weight of ‘close by citizens’ supports that.
Obviously, some states will continue for some time after the UK and US collapse, just as other nearby states continued after the collapse of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. The variable speed of collapse is not just fiber optic cable vs radio waves vs long haul trucks on the way to dropoff vs seasonal crop cycles. It is also how long some states can continue in a general collapse. Thus the hypercomplexity vs complexity argument.
The point of studying successful past states is to pick up “hints for managing collapse.”
As for collective land ownership; we tried that in 1971. It was a disaster. There are plenty of people with the same experience. The people who want collective land ownership either: 1) don’t have land or 2) are not willing to put in the sweat and blood I already put in or 3) are not willing to provide for me and mine in our declining years. Bottom line. You cannot have my land until you make a better case than some airy-fairy, quasi-socialist nonsense that has not been field-tested.
Jem Bendell is an academic who was late to the party. BUT he is smart enough to jump onto a train going in the right direction.
OK, Walter, good to see your cards on the table. I’ll refer you to the work of Elinor Ostrom, Nobel prize winning economist for Commons practice, probably the oldest and still functioning successful governance of shared resources.
Joel (and other interested commenters) –
Here is an example of the statist mindset. All over France, Italy and Spain, guardians of churches are adamant that men remove their hats and caps when entering a church. This is not a problem. However, we visited the Menga and Viera dolmens in Antequera today. These were not only necropoleis, but also used in rituals at various times of the year. I took my cap off when I entered, the same as I did in El Mezquita in Cordoba. But the two other men who entered the Viera dolmen at the same time as me did not even think of it. The state-level churches require a show of respect and modern institutions reinforce it at every turn. The old ones who were more successful humans than we are get only a fraction of respect from the statist mindset.
This is not a difference in the hard wiring of the brain. Nor is it a cultural difference. It is a difference in mindset, or paradigms if you prefer. It signals a flexibility that is conducive to paradigm shifts and adaptation.
I enjoy a megalithic site Walter, I’m hearing you were feeling a lack of respect from these statists. I agree, that is regrettable. I’m a lithophile in general, I’ve carved stone most of my life, and visit quarries throughout Europe.
I also feel your concern about finding care as we get older, it’s the basis of our thinking, Care Home Farm, and recently Tyson Yunkaporta hilariously pointed out (on Planet Critical), that you will need a million dollars for a care home place – just to be treated like a dog!
Hi John, as you say – Your Party is a strange long shot which is already tripping over its own shoe laces. My opinion is that it can raise money for regional and local assemblies, thereby creating the space for direct democratic practice, what I call commons practice, which is currently suppressed.
Luxury, for me is like the luxurious feeling of late autumn sun on your face – so yes, an embodied experiential joy that is open to everyone.
I think the regulation of land ownership is happening as we speak but it is tilted towards capital and corporations, and like the water the fish swim in, is hyper normalised. Most interesting is the collective ownership, the re-establishment of responsibilities of stewardship, the recognition of shared resource that comes with the regulation of foreign capital in land.
@Joel.
Yes. I get your point. Perhaps I am a bit too pessimistic.
Getting people used to and engaging in local assemblies is in itself a positive act.
Your Party may not get into “power” but then again, the nation state, it’s present forms and structures is on borrowed time anyway.
On a slight tangent
Are you aware of these guys Chris?
https://www.twoacrefarm.co.uk/
John Adam’s, I was wondering if you knew other farmers trying to produce food using hand tools. I know Samuel Lewis in France and Shane Simonsen in Australia ( Zero Input Agriculture ) both try to farm without fossil fuels. I have a farm in Southern Calif. where I maintain vegetables with a grub hoe and small battery electrics. Three acres without any gas or diesel for five years. I sell some vegetables but mostly I am chasing self sufficiency. BruceSteelesubstack for some detail.
Hi Bruce.
I haven’t done much research.
I found out about Two Acre Farm as I live 5 minutes away and saw their van parked up in the village.
I’ve read Samuel/Gareth Lewis’s book. 21st Century Hoe Farming.
(Found it really interesting. The stuff about hoe farming being the pre Roman norm. Then draft animals being introduced by the Romans to increase production. Which lead to the increase in field sizes)
Their project is a multi generational project. (Trees for roof trusses etc) Which brings to mind issues of inheritance through the generations. Not something the book looks at.
Other than that, not much else.
I’ll check out your sub stack.
@Chris
Without jumping the gun but……….do you cover inheritance in your new book?
I’ve been thinking about how land is passed down through the generations in a SFF.
If land will be the means for people to sustain themselves in a SFF. Having access to land is vital. If a couple have 3 kids, who gets the family farm and what happens to the other two?
The EU spent a great deal of time and money sorting out that problem as each child got a piece of land , that ended up as farmers ended up with postage stamp size pieces of land allover several parishes / counties . It proved completely unsustainable as farmers had to move miles between their holdings . Land was abandoned as it was too small a plot to do anything with .
@Diogenese10
Yes. You can’t keep dividing up the pie in a system that is based around private land ownership.
Communal ownership and allocation is such an alien concept to all is “westerners” brought up in the private ownership model.
There’s not much about inheritance in the new book – I discuss it a bit in A Small Farm Future and in past posts on this blog. Finding Lights focuses more on collapse situations where people are seeking land, a somewhat different dynamic.
Land succession indeed can be quite problematic, although there are a lot of interesting models for how societies have dealt with it. Land sale of course is one.
The problem is worse in situations of population growth, especially if there are no new agricultural frontiers to open up. In a situation of zero population growth, the couple with three children will be balanced by a couple with no children, which makes things easier.
Dividing land up isn’t always a problem. There’s also other work to do than farming, even in fundamentally agrarian societies.
The present global reality is massive agrarian overproduction and the impending global reality is probably minimal, zero or negative population growth. So the arithmetic of sharing land doesn’t strike me as a huge problem. The politics of it does, though.
@Chris
I guess if a steep population decline is the future, then inheritance isn’t going to be a problem for a few generations.
But if we are going to transition to a SFF with the present population size, then inheritance gets tricky.
This time, some of us going off to “the new world” won’t be an option.
Made me thinking of the Russian peasant communes that parcelled out land on age rather than purely family lineage, so a young couple/family group coming through get more, as a retiring couple get less.
John – re private ownership, this can mean many things, and it isn’t simply a western concept. Most small farm societies historically worldwide have organised land effectively via private ownership (see for example Robert Netting’s writings, or even David Graeber’s). There’s an extremist version of private property rights that *is* more typical of the west (though again not exclusively so), in which property rights are exclusive, abusive, accumulable and convertible, essentially arising from Roman law concepts. This is something I do discuss in the new book.
In relation to inheritance and division of property, the basic arithmetic is the amount of land divided by the number of mouths to feed, and this is the same however property rights are allocated – privately, collectively or whatever. Collective ownership involves many more problems than small-scale private ownership, and it’s quite rare historically essentially for this reason (Walter’s comment gives a flavour for one problem). There are many advantages to keeping land divided into small plots tended by owner-occupiers in terms of giving people the opportunity to self-generate a healthy livelihood. Family division into small plots is sometimes problematic, but less so than its opposite, which is the situation we face today. Most agrarian societies figure out ways to keep land moving through many hands, although they’re always vulnerable to engrossment by the powerful.
As I see it, the main problem we face now is how to move swiftly from a situation of over-engrossed farmland (e.g. farms counted in the hundreds or thousands of acres) to a situation of smallholdings in owner-occupier hands – this is a theme of the new book. You’re right that the fine details of managing land inheritance still raise problems. But these are nice problems to deal with compared to present problems of over-financialised land concentration and over-production of commodity row crops.
Regarding AI- I view it as the latest mindless search for the best return on capital; classic behavior of the super organism. It will inevitably be dragged down by its ridiculous energy needs a ECOE slowly increases, but there is a good chance it will cause more harm than good before that occurs.
A pump and dump scheme of grand scale, with at this time unknown collateral damage.
I especially loved your description of the typical output of LLMs as competent hackery. Seen it many times, and it’s pretty easy to spot.
Here in western Wisconsin, there is a very large new transmission line (765 kVA, biggest yet in WI) being proposed that will send power from west of us to those east of us. No details yet, but there is lots of wind out in Iowa and Minnesota, and many very large data centers soon to be breaking ground east of us. None of this is expressed in the minimal press releases, but we are not stupid. We certainly don’t need the added power, but will of course bear the cost through MISO and co-op cost sharing agreements.
So it goes.