Is Tuesday becoming Microfiction Day? It might be. This is another of my nearly-award-winning pieces. This time for Icon Magazine’s Stories for the End of the Decade contest. The win went to Mimi Zeiger of Loudpaper. You can read it here.

Mine goes a little something like this:

“It’s cultural hedging,” said my guide, as we picked our way through the parking lot, “Think about survivalists in Y2K. If everything had ended, they’d have been equipped to thrive. It didn’t, so they lost out.”

“It still seems like a bad decision,” I said, pausing to aim my photo rig, “The collapse of America is hardly imminent.”

The viewfinder showed nameless meat hung to cure along a guardrail, framed by skyscraper shadows and spotlight by the setting sun. I was fiddling with the focus when someone racked a shotgun.

“This ain’t America,” said the bandit, “This is Detroit.”

In an article called simply Bracing for the World the National Post has assembled tips for the soon to be beleaguered residents of downtown Toronto, as we prepare for the G20 summit.

Suggestions include having 72-168 hours worth of food supplies, putting nicely painted plywood over windows, not wearing ties (really), avoiding hospital visits, and being wary of hacktivists. All told, these scenarios would work as a nice backdrop for a Strange Days-esque thriller.

I’m fascinated with this because it reads like a guide for preparing to withstand a hurricane’s landfall. The G20 becomes an Act of God, the anticipated disruptions caused not by any particular group’s actions but by the weird convergence of political and economic turbulence and pressure zones. Through the eyes of the article, the motivations of the actors are abstracted out. I keep thinking of traffic engineers who find it more effective to conceive of masses of commuters as a fluid.

There will be a conference, there will be protests, be sure to dress casually and don’t count on regular train service. Pack an umbrella and mind the tear gas in the afternoon.

A recurring puzzle of evolution is the persistence of certain entities or behaviours that – at first glance – seem to harm the reproductive fitness of individuals. From the naive standpoint, an individual worker ant makes a mockery of evolution. They’re sterile; a reproductive dead-end.

One way of conceptualizing the answer is the unit of selection. It’s the idea that natural selection happens at a variety of levels: genes, cells, individuals, groups. When you look at ants, you don’t just look at individuals, you also look at colonies. At the colony level, there is an enormous benefit to specialization. Having thousands of sterile disposable workers lets you do all kinds of things that individually self-interested organisms mightn’t.

photo credit: sharkbait

A similar explanation has been offered for why homosexuality keeps occurring in nature. Naively, you might wonder why it hasn’t been bred out of existence; individuals who are born homosexual are unlikely to have kids. It’s possible that having a certain percentage of your family be childless has a benefit to the group. If the group persists, then the genes will be carried on.

How big do the units of selection get? Family? Tribe? Society? Nation? Civilization?

Consider Stephen Hawking. He’s one of the smartest people around. The beneficial consequences of his discoveries still haven’t been worked out. In any other period of history, he’d be long dead or incapable of communicating his ideas. In a significant portion of our world, he’d be dead. The unit of selection is something like: Stephen Hawking + technoculture capable of building a speech synthesizer and keeping him alive + technoculture capable of benefiting from his insights.

No one knows how to make a pencil, economists like to point out. We rely on a massive network of local expertise and an infrastructure of transportation to pull all the parts together. James Burke’s Connections makes the same point over and over again. The first episode especially so, beginning with a blackout in NYC and proceeding to a fantasy about the collapse of civilization and what you’d need, in order to survive.

The collapse fantasy comes up all over the place. A fear or hope that it’s all spinning plates, liable to come crashing down at any moment. So we bullshit about what we’d do if the zombies come, or we carefully put together our 72 hour survival kits, or we spend weekends in the woods learning “essential” skills.

Gun rights, gardening, anything to help in the great unknown.

From The Texas Survivalist

No one knows how to make a gun, either.

Survivalists fascinate me. They are in effect small groups of people attempting to redraw the borders of selection units. If the broader technoculture is the one by which most of us thrive or perish, serious survivalism is a bet on both the fragility of the larger system and one’s ability to continue past its end. In contrast, someone like me – perpetually connected, mildly asthmatic – won’t even make it to the wall when the revolution comes. The survivalists, meanwhile, expect to be happily ensconced in their compound, building a new authentic life while the rest of us go mad or starve.

The unit of selection is shorthand for a lot of ideas, and the edges of a unit are rarely precise. There is fluidity to definition. Civilization may collapse, but into rival tribes. A tribe might fall apart, while a family goes on. Two tribes might come together while a single loner escapes into the night.

For humans, disconnecting isn’t easy, indeed it may be impossible. In his manifesto, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) considers the problem.

118 Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

Ted Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future

You might feel that society is going the wrong way, Kaczynski argues, but you get very little say in the direction. If a decision affects a million people, you get (on average) a millionth share. And if the decision affects 6.7 billion?

Jamais Cascio has spent a great deal of time looking at the problem of global warming and the possibility of using geo-engineering as a tool to combat the worst of its effects. He’s also considered the fallout from those kinds of actions. There’s the obvious stuff like unintended consequences or uneven effects (say saving the Midwest breadbasket means drought in Cuba). And then there’s conflict over who gets to decide where, what kind, and how much geo-engineering happens.

In this scenario, the leadership of a powerful state might come to believe that:

• The effects of decarbonization would be slow and diffuse, but
• Said powerful state was well-suited to engage in adaptation projects, while
• The rival(s) of said powerful state were more vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic global warming, so that
• The rival(s) would be weakened relative to said powerful state if the effects of global warming persisted and said powerful state adapted.

In short, a powerful state believing itself better-able to adapt to or withstand the effects of global warming might see a persistent advantage to its rivals being hurt by global warming, and slow its decarbonization accordingly.

If all of that sounds ludicrous to you, you’ve probably forgotten about (or never lived through) the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.

Jamais Cascio A Cold War Over Warming

7 angels with trumpets aside, the Cold War is probably the first time that a truly global unit of selection existed. 40 years is a long time to spend on the hair trigger edge of global annihilation, (we may still be). Though global integration is far from comprehensive, it’s hard to deny that there are more and more causal links all over the world and that they are getting stronger. The usual suspects can parade out at this point: global warming, the Internet, the stock market crash, food security, nuclear warfare, global pandemic, Coca Cola.

What to do? With only one unit of selection, the question of humanity’s survival becomes all or nothing. If you rely on overseas shipping for your food, then even jitters in the market can cause havoc. When the Mayan civilization collapsed, it had no effect at all on events in Europe or Asia. Now, we risk drowning entire islands because of bad decisions made decades ago.

Kaczynski thinks we should tear things down sooner rather than later.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

Ted Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future

Hawking thinks we should establish extra-terrestrial colonies as soon as possible.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Hawking: Space exploration a necessity by Sylvia Hui, Associated Press

Both solutions are aspects of the same approach. When the unit grows in size and power such that a self-perpetrated disaster could wipe out the entire territory, we must either shrink the size, or grow the territory. Either way, the scope of consequences must be limited. Otherwise? They had a name for that in the Cold War: “Mutually Assured Destruction.”

At this point, any number of post-humanists might pop up and point out that extinction might not be the end.

1.

There is a possibly apocryphal story about a conversation on the subject of the solar system between Wittgenstein and a student. Wittgenstein asks the student why early people thought that the sun went around the earth. The student says that it’s because it looks that way. Wittgenstein asks, “And how would it look if the earth went around the sun?”

2.

In 1997, a real-estate bubble driven by financial speculation in the Asian Tiger economies reached its peak and burst. The resulting crash sparked international panic, threatening to bring down the world economy. In Thailand, construction halted on dozens of massive projects. 13 years later, those buildings are still standing.

Ban Phe is a fishing village about 2 hours outside of Bangkok. Look it up in travel guides and they will confidently tell you that the only reason you’ll be there is to catch a ferry to Ko Samet, a popular vacation island. There are at least 7 massive resorts within a 15-minute scooter drive. Nearly all are unfinished and abandoned. They tower incongruously over the countryside. The total capacity would have been in the tens-of-thousands.

3.

The Skyscraper Index posits that record-breaking construction projects are indicators of an irrationally exuberant economy and harbingers of doom.

4.

Up close, the Thai resorts are being slowly reclaimed by the jungle.

These are not slap-dash projects. They were well funded and carefully designed. They would have been nice places. Rooftop patios overlook what would have been ornate pools.

5.

*We’ve long had a term of art for old buildings that are ruined: they’re called “ruins.”

*However, we lack a term of art for “ruins” that are actually buildings never completed. Sometimes they’re completed buildings that are never sold, and therefore they start falling over before they were ever inhabited. This would be the American real-estate bust version of the phenomenon.

*Another version is the abandoned, incomplete high-rise. Commonly a steel and cement framework is erected (because that’s pretty easy), and then there’s some legal or economic brouhaha and the builders just down tools and walk off. In Brazil a skeleton framework of this kind is called a “squelette.”

Bruce Sterling Ruins of the Present

6.

The post-apocalypse is a comforting fantasy. It implies that things will only ever get that bad due to catastrophe. We say Detroit looks like a post-apocalyptic city because we are really bad at conceptualizing decline. Detroit got that way gradually.

“How would it look if it had just slowly fallen apart?”

7.

What would it have been like to live through the fall of Rome? You’d have been very old. The decline of the Roman Empire took 320 years. That’s 12 generations of people. Did each generation say that things used to be better in the old days? They were right, I suppose.

8.

When then end came to Thailand’s boom, somewhere an architecture firm – perhaps specializing in premium exotic locations – quietly removed all reference to certain projects from their portfolio.

9.

In Towards Hackable Architecture, Ethan Zuckerman considers the problem that architects face when they are asked by people with more money than sense to envision insane projects, in this case, building a hotel that is “Dubai meets Disney in Dakar”.

Many of the teams fought the question, arguing that the goal was to persuade the developer that the only way to compete in a global market was combining luxury with responsibility. But my favorite response came from an architect who referenced the ideas of creative reuse in my talk and said, “Build the hotel. Assume it’s going to fail and be left to fall apart. How do you build a building so that it can be hacked after the fact?”

Ethan Zuckerman Towards Hackable Architecture

10.

In my mind, there are two images of the Coliseum. The first is of the contemporary ruin. The second is of gladiators, lions, and Christians. But the last gladiatorial fights happened in 435 and the modern ruin wasn’t fully excavated until the 1930s.

That’s 1,500 years of neglect and adaptive re-use that aren’t part of the cultural picture of the building. Here are some things that happened: A church was built into the side; it was fortified and possibly used as a castle; a religious order lived in the northern third from the 1350s to the 1800s (what was happening in the other two thirds?); they considered turning it into a wool factory; they used it briefly for bullfights.

11.

*Occasionally squatters move into “squelettes” and bring in some breeze-block, corrugated tin and plastic hoses, transforming squelettes into high-rise favelas. This doesn’t work very well because it’s tough to manage the utilities, especially the water.

Bruce Sterling Ruins of the Present

12.

There are many more ruins than there have been cataclysms.

There is an arms race in progress between humans and bacteria. It started in earnest just before World War 1 with Salvarsan and really got going during World War 2 with the wide-spread use of Penicillin. In response to human aggression, resistant strains of bacteria evolved. Superbugs.

photo credit: US Army Africa

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is the current star child. Harmless when carried on the skin, it gets into the body through wounds and then it kills. It accounts for 19,000 deaths per year in the U.S. (compare to about 17,000 from AIDS). It’s doing much better than its less resistant brethren. MRSA accounted for 2% of of staph infections in the U.S. in 1974. In 2004, it was 63%. MRSA thrives in hospitals.

With that in mind, take a look at this story from the Associated Press. Look at the infection rates. Japan: 80%, Israel: 44%, Greece: 38%, Norway: less than 1%.

In 1980, when MRSA started to appear among the fjords, Norway responded aggressively… by cutting antibiotic use, and by stepping up the tracking and quarantine of the strains they found. The stunning result is encapsulated in that number. Even more stunning: old drugs are still useful in Norway.

Haug unlocks the dispensary, a small room lined with boxes of pills, bottles of syrups and tubes of ointment. What’s here? Medicines considered obsolete in many developed countries. What’s not? Some of the newest, most expensive antibiotics, which aren’t even registered for use in Norway, “because if we have them here, doctors will use them,” he says.

He points to an antibiotic. “If I treated someone with an infection in Spain with this penicillin I would probably be thrown in jail,” he says, “and rightly so because it’s useless there.”

From: Solution to killer superbug found in Norway by Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason

When the rest of us went to war trying to wipe out infections entirely, the Norwegians forged an uneasy truce. They intentionally deny themselves access to the latest infection-fighting technology. They suffer through colds and other minor illnesses, essentially letting the bacteria run rampant (Tylenol is used to control the symptoms rather than the disease and infected individuals are sent home and paid to stay there). In life-threatening situations, the big guns come out and antibiotics keep the staph at bay. It works because there is no evolved resistance. The staph gets to live day to day, so we get to live in the emergency room.

Norway’s biggest problem is that the rest of the world didn’t follow suit. Most Norwegian cases of MRSA are people who travelled to foreign soil, got infected, and came home. The resulting picture is of this island of sanity, doomed to be overwhelmed by everyone else’s poor decisions about antibiotics. Which brings me to the next twist the article: Norway’s success can be replicated.

Around the world, various medical providers have also successfully adapted Norway’s program with encouraging results. A medical center in Billings, Mont., cut MRSA infections by 89 percent by increasing screening, isolating patients and making all staff – not just doctors – responsible for increasing hygiene.

From: Solution to killer superbug found in Norway by Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason

I’d assumed that increasingly resistant strains of bacteria was a one-way trip, a monster that once we’d created we could not contain. But bacteria strains are competing amongst themselves all the time. The cost of being antibiotic-resistant might mean giving up advantages in other areas to non-resistant strains. Stop grinding the population under your medicinal heel, and the more benign strains take care of MRSA for you. Imagine! You can turn back the clock and calm staph infections to a dull roar.

Years ago, I saw an evolutionary microbiologist speak to the same idea around the AIDS virus. He’d done work tracing strains in sex-tourist-heavy Thailand and more chaste Japan and found that in Thailand, HIV was more virulent. It killed people faster. It could afford to, because the transmission rates were so high. In Japan, the incubation period was longer. It had to be – there were less opportunities to transmit. When Japanese sex tourists returned from Thailand infected with the high virulence HIV, those strains evolved toward longer incubation periods.

He ended the talk by suggesting that programs to reduce transmission rates could have a multiplicative effect. Not only would there be less AIDS but what HIV there was would be more benign. If, as you read this, you are thinking about William Gibson’s J.D. Shapely, you are not alone.

Every arms escalation is a race to the bottom. Each side has to invest more and more resources to end up at an equilibrium. The result is an exhausting and increasingly high stakes game of chicken.

The parallels between the military-industrial arms race and the bacterial arms race are as suggestive as they are obvious. Imagine a medicinal START 1 limiting the power and use of antibiotics. “If we have them here, doctors will use them.” Imagine a global treaty that steps us away from high alert and in turn domesticates our adversaries. Imagine a global detente with staph infections. They think their demands are being met, so they kill off their extremists. Secretly, we still have nukes.

It is worth emphasizing that there is a real trade-off at play. Norwegians are getting sick more often and are suffering through these minor illnesses for longer than the rest of us. It’s a national investment on their part in catastrophe insurance. Norway allows slack in the system by distributing the quality of life cost to individuals and spreading the income loss across the collective. Small inefficiencies are accepted and absorbed. In return, Norway gets evolutionarily complacent, easily controlled, staph.

In America, if you get sick and stay home, you generally lose your pay. So you go in and make other people sick, or you take antibiotics and then go in. In return, America gets efficient, survivalist, killer staph. We get to work more and companies don’t have to pay people who aren’t contributing day today. But when things go wrong for us, they go really wrong.

I can’t help but think about the financial crisis and the problem of over-optimization that I wrote about in 2008. The banks that were most successful in the lead-up to the crash fell hard, while the ones that were merely profit generating (instead of profit maximizing) survived without a bailout. When things were going right, the most profitable banks optimized slack out of the system. When things went wrong, they went really wrong.

From a cybernetic perspective, this is a story of feedback and control. Domesticating and controlling a belligerent element by drawing it into a system.

Consider the parallels to asymmetric warfare. This is a variation of the hearts and minds strategy. It’s the hope that we’ll be greeted as liberators. It’s paying the enemy to switch sides. It’s drones watching targets for days, waiting for minimal collateral casualties before firing.

This summer the new U. S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, further restricted air strikes and ordered troops to withdraw from a fight in which they were being fired on from civilian areas — better to let enemy fighters slip away than risk alienating a village, or the whole country. This push to cut civilian casualties has only increased the military’s reliance on UAVs.

From: We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned by Brian Mockenhaupt

What if the widely derided security theatre at airports is a form of terrorist domestication? If you can hijack a plane with box-cutters maybe you don’t bother learning to do much else. Maybe your superiors send disposable idiots instead of highly trained assassins. Maybe the highly trained commandos get stuck in the mountains or sent to Mumbai.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply the same lines of analogy to the War on Drugs.