No Flying Cars or Paperless Society for You or Me. The future that we were all promised will never arrive. No Jetsons’ flying cars or paperless society or synthetic foods and materials that are superior to their natural counterparts. In fact, we have slammed into the brick wall of technology that is incapable of producing anything remotely like “free energy” machines or a synthetic alternative to atomic or coal, natural gas or oil. Other than personal computers and the internet, nothing from the predictions of the optimistic mid-1950s has come to pass. In America, our infrastructures such as roads are dangerously antiquated and in need of repairs. Our higher education system loads incredible and unjustifiable debt for most students, rendering moot any future earning power due to the mountain of bills that will have to be climbed before students can get their life on track. And forget about the Gulf Oil Spill. 98% of the plastic ever created in the world post World War Two is still with us… choking the oceans and food chain with “islands” said to be twice the size of the state of Texas or larger. [1] And it doesn’t take a engineer to realize that the oil that is necessary to fuel our cars, planes and trains will one day drop to levels that will not sustain our current fuel-based civilization in the future. It doesn’t matter if that day will come 10, 20 0r 50 years from now. We simply won’t be ready. We do not have the technology that needs to be in place now to prepare for that future time. [2]
All this correlates nicely with the today’s Wall Street Journal article by Holman W. Jenkins Jr on the venture capitalist Peter Thiel entiled, “Technology = Salvation.” Who is Peter Thiel? A cofounder of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook. As you can imagine, his business savvy has made him, as the late Kurt Vonnegut would say, “Fabulously well-to-do.” He plays poker against the financial heavies in which way the markets will rise or fall. What Thiel shares his interviewer is interesting. Jenkins remarks on how Thiel made his money through Paypal and Facebook in troubled economic times:
“Those two realms of investing—narrow technology and broad macro—are behind his singular diagnosis of our economic crisis. “All sorts of things are possible in a world where you have massive progress in technology and related gains in productivity,” he says. “In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.”
“This is where [today is] very different from the 1930s. In the ’30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That’s not going to work today.”
Thiel goes on to say why the “Keynesian stuff” won’t save our asses. Because we don’t have the technology.
“People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. . . . Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology—all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.”
Jenkins speculates that if Thiel is correct in his conclusion, then,
“[t]oday’s heightened political acrimony is but a foretaste of the “grim Malthusian” [4] politics ahead, with politicians increasingly trying to redistribute the fruits of a stagnant economy, loosing even more forces of stagnation.
In other words, what we laughingly call our capitalist “civilization” is irreversibly set on a course of terminal decline that technology, which has served us over the past 200 years, will be useless to prevent. An Equal Money solution will be the only alternative, but even it won’t be enough to stop the effects of peak oil and diminishing oil reserves. It may, however, keep the “Malthusian” genie in the bottle by giving everyone an equal shot as living a life without survival being the number one priority in everyone’s mind. Equality is the answer, not technology, which inclines a people towards convenience and gadgetry over self-realization and self-reliance, for instance.
We need a fresh set of eyes that have not been hypnotized by the money tree or its profits… errr, I mean Prophets! The Equal Life Foundation supports a currency that is based on the value of Life, not competition, or buying the right to survive. The Equal Money Platform is really only one thing: the only future and destiny of Mankind that we have LEFT.
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[1] Nobody really knows the size the plastic island in the Pacific. See Peter Ryan, Charles Moore et al., Monitoring the abundance of plastic debris in the marine environment. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 27 July 2009 vol. 364 no. 1526 1999-2012, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0207
[2] http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2005/04/peak_oil_confer.html The comments from a 2005 A Peak Oil Conference, Entering the Age of Oil Depletion, organized by Depletion Scotland and the Oil Depletion Analysis Center (ODAC), held in Edinburgh Scotland. Among the comments by participants: “Hirsch in his recent report to DOE was quoted by Aleklett as claiming that “World oil peaking represents a problem like none other. The political, economic, and social stakes are enormous. Prudent risk management demands urgent attention and early action. If you start a serious program today it will take 20 years before completion.”
[3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704696304575537882643165738.html
[4] Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834), English economist and clergyman. In his Essay on Population (1798) he argued that without the practice of “moral restraint” the population tends to increase at a greater rate than its means of subsistence, resulting in the population checks of war, famine, and epidemic.
