The Twilight of Mechanized Lumpenleisure

[4dsc]

Nothing like a cheery Kunstler in the morning to make my day!!

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_lumpenleisure.html

Where does this leave us as we enter the new period of history I have several times alluded to: the post-cheap-oil world, and eventually a world altogether without recoverable fossil fuels? You could say up a cul-de-sac in a rusted GMC Denali without a fill-up. Or you could say more to the point, in a society that will have to get its thrills and satisfactions in other ways, involving fewer prosthetic projections of our will-to-power. The will-to-power itself will probably be subdued by something more elemental: a will to stay warm, clean, and well-nourished in the era of post-oil-and-gas hardship and turbulence we are entering, which I have taken to calling the Long Emergency. In this new era, coming soon to a twenty-first century region near you, the formerly industrial nations will have a great deal of trouble keeping the lights on, getting around, and feeding their people. Vocational niches by the hundreds will vanish, while the need to make up for a failing industrial agriculture, with all its oil-and-gas inputs, will require a revived agricultural working class in substantial numbers.

[Warpy]

1. As someone whose enjoyment of a snowy day

was invariably shattered by the roar of idiots on snowmobiles in the cranberry bog at the end of the block, I will be deeply grateful in some ways for the demise of the power leisure industry.

I will resent the hell out of everything else it will bring.

[phantom power]

2. Heh. Props for coining the word "lumpenleisure" :-)

[depakid]

3. I've heard this passage echoed by other authors as diverse

as Jane Jacobs and Kevin Phillips. Having witnessed it (and having a long memory), I find it a very apt and accurate description:

At this point – let’s say, the ascension of Ronald Reagan, America’s first purely TV President – something curious happened. A new economy began to replace the old smokestack manufacturing economy. But the new one was not the one that was advertised in politics or the news media. It was not the information economy based on the spread of computers. Neither information nor computer-aided “efficiency” had any net social value when jobs and standards of living were being destroyed. Nor was this new economy the vaunted “service economy,” a perpetual-motion fantasy akin to the proverbial village whose denizens supported themselves by taking in each other’s laundry.

No, all that was mendacious balderdash. The real new economy was the final blowout of the cheap oil era: the hypertrophic build-out of suburban sprawl and the furnishing and final accessorizing of it. In other words, our living arrangement essentially became the remaining basis of our economy, in the absence of any other purposeful creation of value or wealth, such as manufacturing things. And because it was a racket devoted to a way of life with no future, it spawned enormous cynicism. Just as the immersive ugliness of the suburban highway strip was economic entropy made visible, so the cynicism of the public was entropy applied to human values, a force propelling things into disorder. When nothing was sacred, everything became profane.

The demoralization of the American public, and especially of the economic lower orders proceeded remorselessly from the 1980s on and became focused on two very pernicious ideas: first the belief that it was possible to get something for nothing, and second the belief that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. The first derived from the fact that Americans still appeared to generate wealth without really producing anything of value. This was achieved, by one means or another, through the accumulation of debt.

This debt was represented by the false collateral of suburban real estate – the infrastructure of a living arrangement with no future. Meanwhile, this debt, or credit (hallucinated surplus wealth), was cleverly converted into huge batches of tradable financial instruments and used to drive both bond and derivatives markets. Since finance is ultimately predicated on the expectation that the wealth of societies will ever increase, this economy was the greatest shuck and jive the world had ever seen....