Comment by krick
5 years ago
I thought this is pretty fun project and the idea is just cool right away, but then I went on reading and was surprised by the fact it seems the author is serious. I would be really curious to hear his opinion on why the supply chains should collapse before 2030. Obviously, there wouldn't be a shortage of people in the comments who can start speculating on why it might happen, and, of course, I myself also can provide a couple of feasible scenarios, but nobody of us were serious enough to actually start this project, so his opinion on the matter is somehow quite more interesting to me than it would normally be.
If you had told me last year that we would have a pandemic, lockdown, massive economic recession and job loss and now riots and protests etc and all at the same time I probably wouldn't have believed it. I'm starting to think the world is a lot more fragile than we all thought.
Not “we all” thought — plenty of people have been saying this would happen for years. Specifically, epidemiologists and black people. Maybe we should listen more!
> I would be really curious to hear his opinion on why the supply chains should collapse before 2030
Think about seat belts. Do you ask the driver:
> "I'm really curious to hear why you think you'll crash the car?"
when s/he puts on the seat belt? S/he'd likely say "No I don't think that at all".
And not impossible that the Collapse OS author might have a similar reply. Still, the project can be well spent time, like, a seat belt in case of the unexpected.
Think about: 1) Likelihood-of-Global-Supply-Chain-Collapse x How-Bad. And 2) How-much-does-Collapse-OS-mitigate-the-bad-things. And compare that, with 3) time spent building C.OS.
He said in the Why? article linked above somewhere that he really does believe, even if he has no evidence, that we'll be experience a collapse sometime around 2030. That's not really comprehensible to me, even though your description of a possible rationale, which makes more sense.
Oh, thanks for explaining. Here's the Why article: https://collapseos.org/why.html (didn't see it before).
In it, he writes: "... two important stages of collapse ... the second one is when, in a particular community, the last modern computer dies ... decades between the two ... Collapse OS won't be actually useful before you and I are both long dead"
making me wonder if one scenario he has in mind, is the different biggest countries in the world stopping trading with each other, so it won't be possible to get more rare earth metals (needed for today's computers, right). And then, maybe downhill from there, the thereafter following 50 or 100 years? — But not _necessarily_ a nuclear winter or something that dramatic & sudden.
And ... He also writes:
> What made me turn to the "yup, we're fucked" camp was "Comment tout peut s'effondrer" [a book]
I think you'd find the answers in that book then? Seems the book got translated: "How Everything Can Collapse" [in our lifetime] by Pablo Servigne.
I mean, I can rationally say I'll probably be in an accident by 2030 with no evidence either.
he gives a book name "Comment tout peut s'effondrer" by Pablo Servigne, Éditions du Seuil, 2015
https://collapseos.org/why.html
There's apparently an English translation released very recently: "How everything can collapse: A manual for our times."
I haven't read either version, but piecing together the thesis from reviews, it seems to be a somewhat more evolved form of Malthusian catastrophe and Peak Oil(/Energy), with a dash of climate change alarmism [1] and Piketty-style concern over inequality. And technology won't save us because... well, I haven't found anyone who can elucidate that concern. It seems to me that the commenter who wrote "this book seems to be only for those who were convinced beforehand" has it right.
[1] I don't like using "alarmism" here because it suggests that I don't think it's a problem (I do), but I can't think of a better succinct description of "if we don't fix this literally tomorrow, we're totally screwed."
> technology won’t save us because...
I hope I’m not uncharitably interpreting your comment, but are you saying that technology will be some sort of panacea?
8 replies →