I’ve been thinking about honey a lot lately.
People in ye olden days had a notable lack of cavities, largely because getting their hands on sugar was not easy. You got some natural sugars in fruits, of course, but if you wanted that pure-sugar Pixie Stix hit, you needed to find some honey.
For our Palaeolithic ancestors, this could prove challenging:
Yeah.
So that was the situation through hundreds of thousands of years – honey good, bees stabby bastards. Sometimes the honey made you crazy, IDK. Cunning was required. Eventually we went so far as to trick bees to live in boxes we built, approached them wearing medieval hazmat suits, and blasted them with narcotizing smoke, all so we could get that sweet, delicious fructose and glucose. Not much later, we’d enslave literally millions of people, move them halfway around the world, and work them to death generation after generation to grow sugar cane, so people in yet a third corner of the world would have something tasty to put in their tea.
Yes. Humans are willing to be stung to death (or make some other poor bugger risk it) or to commit multiple genocides, to get sugar. Because 1) we kind of suck, and 2) sugar is great, and we really, really want it.
Now we have all the fructose and glucose we can stand. It feels wrong to look back at the history of sugar consumption, and consider everything from the domestication of bees to the African slave trade, and label all of that as “friction,” but, in a technological sense, it was. Making sugar was hard, and required a lot of murderous labour. Now making sugar is very, very easy, and cheap. In cities around the world, you can buy sugar suspended in water 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
This is not great if you’re worried about diabetes rates or childhood tooth decay. It’s better than genocide, by, like, a whole heck of a lot! But it’s not what we were expecting, either.
This is the recent history of humanity – everything was expensive and hard to get, and we were willing to do terrible things to one another to get the stuff we wanted, like gold, sugar, and pictures of naked people. Then we invented SCIENCE!, and suddenly a lot of things that had been really expensive and really hard to get got easier, and cheaper, and they kept getting easier and cheaper year after year.
This process has always, always had unforeseen side effects.
• Energy used to be delivered by humans, animals, and maybe windmills. Then we discovered coal, and later oil. This liberated humans from lives of agrarian drudgery, at the cost of cooking the planet.
• To see a dramatic or comedic entertainment, you used to have to hie yourself off to an open-air theatre so someone could declaim in iambic pentameter at you. Now you can literally choose among thousands of options while sitting on the couch, or on the toilet, or anywhere in between the couch and the toilet, and this has created an explosion of art, and also definitely not had any bad effects on our health or our willingness to socialize and form community bonds with others!
• Killing people used to be a bespoke process, involving sharp rocks, hafted bronze spearheads, and skalds to talk up the time you spilled some thrall’s guts in the snow so you could swipe his family’s winter grain supply. Then we invented gunpowder, and belt-fed machine guns, and atomic weapons, and now we all live in the shadow of imminent worldwide destruction, all the time, every day, every hour, every minute!
• Information was expensive. From the scriptorium of the monks we leaped to print (which arguably caused genocidal religious wars in Europe for centuries) and then to the internet, which was going to bring us all together because anyone could talk to anyone, anywhere, without barriers! Because nothing says utopia like a flood of information, any kind of information, literally anything from Proust to The Turner Diaries to flamewars about Buffy the Vampire Slayer to your neighbour trying to narc on some teenagers in hoodies he thinks are casing his house!
This brings me to Twitter.*
Twitter is frictionless. Twitter is the internet, but faster and leaner, without any of that pesky nuance. You can follow hundreds, thousands of accounts, many of which will be re-tweeting countless other accounts. It is jokes, memes, breaking news headlines, hot takes, hotter takes about the hot takes, conspiracy theories, trolling, scams, cultural posturing, and bullshit. It is information delivered through a firehose, aimed directly at your face.
Twitter/social media/the internet in general are the proof of that old quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”** The Soviets knew the power of quantity – that was how they beat the Nazis.
The Germans have better tanks, guns, training, aircraft? Fine, say the Soviets. We have MORE. Keep making T-34s, keep building more rocket launchers and ground-attack aircraft and cheap boots, keep drafting more half-starved peasants off the collective farms and flinging them at the front line, until the front line is in Berlin and Hitler has a bad case of self-induced lead poisoning. Boom! Quantity, assholes!
I am attempting to slash my use of Twitter right now, for my own mental health. Twitter’s frequent small hits of dopamine are not worth the overall feelings of anxiety, irritation, and general enervation that any 20+ minute period of scrolling through the feed generates in me.
There’s a widely shared idea that social media sites are bad for society, which usually results in half-assed attempts to “fix” them and make things nicer. Maybe deplatform a couple of racists, tweak the algorithm.***
To hell with reform. I think that Twitter, on the whole, is bad. I think it would be genuinely better for the world if Twitter had never existed, and that goes double for Facebook. You know the arguments for this, from the macro social impacts to the micro impacts on your own life. We stick around because we’re like alcoholics who know we have a problem, but the people at the bar are our friends! We like them! They tell good jokes and they laugh at ours! Of course, later we feel sick, and we likely embarrassed ourselves somehow, and we could have spent that time with family, or reading, or going for a walk or a bike ride…****
I have no idea what the answer, society-wide, is for social media. I think it’s bad and we’d be better off without it; I think there’s major legal and social hurdles to banning it outright, or to any kind of meaningful fix. The good stuff, like finding new friends and cool links and fast news, only exists because of the overall volume, which has toxic aspects. I don’t know that they’re separable, at least as part of a Silicon Valley for-profit business model.
So.
This is our world, which has gone through multiple shocks caused by the crisis of abundance. Things that were formerly expensive – information, energy, weapons, food, clothing – become suddenly, drastically cheaper. This unleashes changes that are usually good and sometimes bad and often very, very far from what you would have predicted, but the changes rapidly become so embedded in our lives and economies that rolling them back is unthinkable.
At least we aren’t on the cusp of a material technology revolution set to rival the 30-year-long information technology revolution, right?
Oh, shit.
I mean, we have to decarbonize. Sooner is better. And the only way to do it, apparently, is to rapidly roll out a better, cheaper, greener source of energy. So, yay, clean energy costs dropping like a cartoon coyote who just ran off a cliff!
On the other hand, this is going to have consequences. Noah Smith’s newsletter has some ideas about this, ranging from cheaper manufacturing to more abundant home appliances to Bitcoin (ugh) mining. Just about everything we make relies on energy, but bulk chemical processes, metal refining and mining, construction, and paper making are among the top power users. So imagine slashing big chunks out of the prices of all of those things, just to start with.
That’s phase one. Phase two is the cheaper power makes things possible which weren’t economically feasible at all before.
That gets into the weeeeeeird stuff, frankly.
If power gets half as cheap, or 25% as cheap, or 10% as cheap as it is now, and all the things it’s used as an input for get commensurately cheaper too, what becomes possible? Does vertical farming suddenly get cheaper than growing plants in dirt? How about transport – do high speed trains, maybe even the hyperloop suddenly become easier to build in North America? What about those old weird 1970s science fiction dreams, like hollowing out whole mountains to build arcologies, or laser-assisted space launch?
Or you get small-nation nuclear weapons proliferation (hey, refining and chemistry just got cheaper!) and high-powered truck-mounted laser weapons, or maybe just 3D-printed .50 calibre machine guns and home-brew plastique kits.
Remember, like Stalin didn’t say: quantity has a quality all its own. The guys building their own machine guns in the garages of 2040 will probably have all met and riled each other up on social media.
Next week: What is science fiction but futurism gussied up with characters and sold for… well, frankly, a lot less money. So next week, not the sort of futurism you get from a reputable dealer in fresh tomorrows, more the sort of grubby futurism you buy from a guy in a panel van in the parking lot of a bar. Vulgar futurism*****, if you will.
Okay, that one got a little dark at the end. Here’s some pictures from a recent walk I took by the Fraser River. Soothing!
Self Promotion Corner!
Oh hey, I’ve got something to plug! My story The Acheulean Gift is coming out in the March/April edition of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. You can indirectly support me by subscribing, tell your friends, etc.
What’s it about, no one asked?
It’s about a summer camp. For kids who were the victims of a wee minor grey market genetic modification, which may have resurrected a few instincts from our Homo erectus ancestors. So they have to figure that out, along with adolescent crushes and the creepy threats against the campers that have started up recently…
*I started thinking about this looooooong before Trump was permabanned last week. I have nothing to say about that that hasn’t been said about a billion times already.
** Stalin did not say this. But you can probably find someone on Twitter who has attributed it to him in the last couple of minutes.
***Attempting to Google recent changes to the Facebook algorithm led to dozens of hits on sites promising to help you outsmart the algorithm. Sigh…
****I definitely checked Twitter during the writing of this piece. More than once.
*****Dammit, ‘Vulgar Futurism’ would have been a great name for this Substack! This is likely to be a continuing feature, ‘Cool Names Matthew Was Too Dumb To Think Up At The Time.’