Anti-Progress, Breakdown, Reset

A reality doesn’t exist in the human experience until it has a name. If it doesn’t have a name, we don’t recognize it, and can’t discuss it. We may think we’ve already named everything under the sun but new things arise and need to be named to be fully experienced / grasped / understood.

I have a name for The Collapse of Quality: Anti-Progress, which is the subject of my new book The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century. Anti-Progress is the opposite of progress, the reversal of progress, yet it’s presented as “progress” to mask its true nature.

So we’re told the new appliance is “progress” because it now has WiFi, but the decay of quality and durability hidden behind the facade of “progress” is Anti-Progress in its most virulent form. We’re told ours is the finest and most prosperous system ever, yet 75% of the adult populace is now at risk of metabolic disorders–an unprecedented collapse of public health that can only be described as Anti-Progress.

Three-Quarters of U.S. Adults Are Now Overweight or Obese, with the inevitable result being over half the adult populace is diabetic or pre-diabetic, with catastrophic consequences for health and well-being:

Is the collapse of the birthrate a positive indicator of social-economic health? No, it’s an indicator of Anti-Progress. When young people can no longer afford to have children, it’s an indicator of collapse, not prosperity.

Are soaring disability rates a positive indicator of social-economic health? No.

Are health insurance costs quadrupling in one generation a positive indicator of social-economic health? No.

Anti-Progress generates breakdown. Consider this though experiment. Let’s say the landfills are all shut down, and we each have to store all our trash in our backyard or in multi-family buildings, piled in the parking lot, not for a day or two, but indefinitely. How long before the entire complex of civilization breaks down not from a natural disaster but from choking to death on overconsumption / “waste is growth”?

Breakdowns erode buffers and our ability to kludge a fix. Duct tape works for a while, but the next breakdown moots the duct-tape fix, and the entire machine grinds to a halt.

Anti-Progress generates breakdowns which cascade into collapse. This process is greased by optimization, which strips out redundancies, buffers, spare parts availability and in-depth repair capabilities as needless expenses that reduce profits. So when the breakdowns occur, they quickly snowball into collapse because the system was optimized to function as if nothing truly untoward could possibly happen.

The apparent robustness of “normalcy” fosters a detached-from-reality faith that the system is unbreakable, and we brush aside all the indicators of Anti-Progress and breakdown with magical thinking: AI will fix that. This faith and breezy confidence it will all work out without us having to do anything other than what we’re doing today is the dynamic driving collapse:

After breakdown comes the opportunity to reset the system. There’s never any need for a reset until the system breaks down completely, i.e. collapse. Only after the failure of the status quo optimization is complete will we accept the reality that things have to change in some fundamental fashion.

All the “solutions” have consequences which must be literally buried or pushed out of sight, lest the Anti-Progress become undeniable. Quick, fire up the diesel-fueled dozers and bury the non-recyclable wind turbine blades. Oh yeah, AI is gonna fix this, so no worries–silly us!

AI is gonna clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre the size of Texas, too. This isn’t the only floating mat of plastic garbage in the seas, of course; it’s just one of several.

The indicators of breakdown and collapse are all around us, but we don’t dare name them because then they’d become a problem we can’t bury. We could do something different, of course. We could recognize Anti-Progress and start discussing what kind of reset might be possible and what kind of reset might be sustainably serve human well-being rather than “growth for growth’s sake.”

Or we can keep burying all the evidence of Anti-Progress and shout, but look at the stock market–it’s going up! It’s hitting new highs! Everything’s great! Excuse me, but the banquet of consequences has been served. Best not to let it get cold.

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