Evil Nerd Theory Part 2: A Brief History of Energy Capture and Free Belief
So how did we get here? What went wrong? What could go right? Let's try to find out.
This is Part 2 in an ongoing series. Part 1 is here.
I.
The story goes like this: 350 million years ago, Earth’s biosphere is captured by plants who independently figured out how to turn themselves into trees. The churn of evolution—undirected change offering itself up to the world for acceptance, rejection, or revision (like an academic paper going in for peer review) turned out something weird: wood. The combination of lignin in the interior material of a stalk (forming hard structure), and suberin in the exterior (making thick bark), allowed plants to grow tall and straight and broad trunks: new applied knowledge in the world. Once up high, these novel strong materials could support large lifted leaves, pulling away from hungry ground-based herbivores and shading out any smaller plants below, eliminating local predation, and killing off any competition for water and soil nutrients.
This was a potent combination, and it set off several feedback loops. Lignin and suberin are primarily made of carbon, sucked in from the atmosphere and fixed. We think plants are made from dirt, but they’re not. Plants make themselves from air. As trees proliferated and dominated, they pulled more and more carbon into their production, cooling the planet’s atmosphere, expanding its ice caps, and lowering its sea levels. This drawdown of the oceans produced more lowland swamps and forest for these new tall plants to lift above and dominate.
They breathed in carbon dioxide, cracked it open with solar power, and exhaled oxygen, these trees. The air became supercharged with O2, peaking at around 150% of today’s atmospheric concentration. In the Animal Kingdom, giant insects ruled the Earth, newly empowered by this energy rich air. There were scorpions the size of housecats, dragonflies as big as seagulls, and segmented, multi-legged, roach-like critters called Anthropleura grew as long as a kayak.
Meanwhile, the appearance of these new carbon based compounds, like lignin and suberin, had happened so quickly on the geologic timescale (just a few million years!) that the micro-organisms and fungi accustomed to breaking down dead plant matter could hardly keep up. If they didn’t burn in super-oxygenated wildfires, the millions and billions of trees stayed where they fell, failing to decay, piling up and petrifying. Most of them became peat and coal in the swamps. The black stones the trees turned into, forged from the atmosphere, give this Period its geological name: Carboniferous.
II.
It was a heist, and afterwards the treasure was lost. The carbon the dead trees drew down was effectively exited from the world for millions of years, bound up, sequestered and laid dormant under the ground by further churn, forgotten. This material was stolen like dragon’s gold and covered by blankets of settlement and leaf-fall. And then suddenly it was let loose again. The thing you need to know about carbon is this, it burns. It was severed from oxygen once, using energy from the Sun, and when it connects to oxygen again it releases energy, and that energy had been hidden away for a very, very long time.
The thing you need to understand about energy is this, it is addictive. Humans had already been mining coal for hundreds of years before the late 18th century, but when fire from coal was re-applied back onto its own potential fuel capacity, used to power pumps and engines for the mines and mills, making more coal more accessible, bringing it back into the world, the people who invented these machines and these mines tasted the beginning of a hard exponential takeoff in energy use. They wanted more. The hot vapors out the engines of the Industrial Revolution were ghosts from the steam swamps of the Carboniferous Period, carrying heat from the early Sun. Those spirits were restless after their long sleep. Things hidden since the foundation of the world. While the energy made itself useful to the unsuspecting humans who breathlessly dug the coal up and burned it, H2O and CO2 did their silent unchecked work, capturing more and more Thermal Units (British and Otherwise) from the now more mature ultimate solar source itself. Little by little, part by part per million, these gases heated up the planet again.
The fossil trees had got themselves deterritorialized. They were off the map, when they landed back on the scene again (the holo-scene, the anthropo-scene), they set something else loose too, besides fire and steam and carbon dioxide: Free Belief. Sure, sure, “renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation” and all of that, blah blah blah. Yes, the Enlightenment, yes, yes, for sure. Really all of that was just the long tail. The vertical head on the graph-y snake raised up and to the right once coal figured out how to get itself burned and put to work. The ideologies and path dependencies were already there, laying around, waiting to become more useful and more mobilized and more dominant once this vast reserve of energy, these ancient sleeping trees, fat with carbon on their sunny success, were woke once more.
The power mode in Europe and European North America that dominated previously was a hegemony of hierarchy, in the form of feudalism, monarchism, and Catholicism. These structures were literally run by the living: people and animals and plants were the vital biological sources of energy that drove these regimes, and they were in turn organized from the top on down. The Catholic church’s power, though, was already reeling under blows dealt by new pluralities and new economics enabled by rationalization and navigation, sure, sure. But concepts like Geometry, Joint Stock Companies, and Natural Rights can only obtain as modes and ideologies if they are coupled to an energy source. Here was another upending, driven by the risen carbon dead. Power was unleashed, but so was belief, jumping off of the old dominant maps and tearing them apart like electricity from an overloaded transformer. The belief that was freed from its millennia long capture by church and feudal state and vitalist biopower found its ground again in new organizational structures.
III.
Free Belief is almost as dangerous as free electricity. Researcher Max Anton Brewer describes the release of Free Belief as what happens when: “The institutions of control dissolve and the energy, the massive amount of communal coordination it takes to maintain them, is released.” It’s another deterritorialization, and free belief tends to get captured and activated by whatever else is laying around at the time of its release. Memes, cults, new political and social structures, new ideologies, new ways of doing things. If you want these to be successful in the world, you could do worse than seed them in some time and place when a lot of belief is about to get free.
Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, that Free Belief and free energy reterritorialized and activated some fertile ground: this relationship produced Modernism. Just as plants figured out how to make themselves omnipresent by using carbon to turn themselves into universal trees, so ideas learned to reproduce by using carbon to transform into ubiquitous commodity objects. The primary mode—in matter, culture, and politics—that this new energy source enabled was one of industrial scale production. Free Belief is captured by a technocapital singularity as enlightenment idealism and mass reproduction take off.
But the thing you need to know about trees is this, they’re more different from one another than they are alike. “Tree” is not a description of a stable horticultural category, but instead a marker for a set of consistent characteristics. Trees have a strong internal structure of wood (lignin) and a hard external structure of bark (suberin), they grow tall and spread out leaves wide to make shade and capture the sunlight (and the carbon). Treeness, like Modernism, is such a productive strategy that all kinds of plants adopted it. So too with cultures becoming Modern. Ideological reproduction gives Modernism a strong interior structure and an equally effective exterior protective membrane, and it’s powered by an energy source that was (for a time, more on that in a bit) abundant and reliable.
Gutenberg can print the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or any other text, and Edison can shine electric light on them all. Looking on the Bright Side (and we’ll go to the Dark Side in a bit, don’t worry) we could say that Liberalism did to Modernism what the Forest did for the Trees, creating an all encompassing space for difference and repetition to co-exist. It’s now a metacategory. This is, at best, convergent evolution and pluralistic universalism. As one Evil Nerd thinker, Scott Alexander, puts it:
“Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the ‘kill people for being Protestant’ thing.”
(Scott goes on to say that anti-racism is now undermining Liberalism, and he hints, but doesn’t have the courage to say, that we should get rid of it. Whatever. They have solid diagnoses, but weak prescriptions, remember?)
IV.
Modernism is like a tree, right? But it’s not all sunny. Build yourself out of Free Belief and cheap energy, down from the sky, floating in the air, digging in the ground - crowding out, starving, or outright murdering competing ideologies - and playing host to all kinds of new and strange minor critters … go ahead, the party won’t last forever. As Aunt Le Guin says, “The Word for World is Forest.” But the thing you need to know about worlds is that they end. All of this extraction, suppression, eugenics, totalization, and colonialism, (for whatever the leaf, these are among the roots) it works for a while, it even improves material conditions for the beings it supports, but the unclaimed carbon and brainspace is limited, and when one runs out, the other is let loose again too.
The story goes like this, around 1972-73, people who were paying attention to things noticed that the carbon was maybe going to be gone soon. The coal from the Carboniferous period, and its cousins, oil and natural gas, were of course never resources that anyone seriously thought could be replenished as fast as they were used. But a long time is a long time. It turned out that we didn’t even have that. In energy charts: demand curves, supply curves, cost curves, and discovery curves, were all mismatching in inauspicious ways a lot sooner than most had hoped. Energy prices were not going to go down forever, and other lines, like those graphing wages, quality of life, resource access, food production global health, and other measures of material human reality, were not going to head perpetually up and to the right. The hard take-off was canceled.
Modernism failed along with its energy supply. It happened 50 years ago. We’ve been Wile E. Coyote-ing it ever since. Some of us kept our eyes on the horizon, and others looked down early. No flying cars, no cities on the Moon, the oceans, and Antarctica, and definitely no jetpacks. What’s burning in those things, anyway? None of that was going to be possible in a carbon based economy. And besides, haven’t you noticed we’re wrecking the atmosphere? Haven’t you noticed the pollution? The racism (hello Scott)? The control society ideology that seems inherent to technological Modernist solutionism? The exploitation? The police state? The wealth inequality? New awareness of scarcity undermined the old ideology, and its seams became threadbare. The old new church of Modernism had replaced the old church of … church. And it held on to Free Belief only as long as its promise to keep making everyone’s lives better was fulfilled. Now that the promise is broken, the Belief is Free again.
V.
So what happened next? Well, we’re still there. Next is now. Welcome to the future, where we will spend the rest of our lives. We are kind of exiled from the forest, and the savannahs are dangerous places to wander in. There are lots of things laying around in the tall grass, things that seemed dead and entombed under the treelike gothic vault of the Modernist cathedral. And that Free Belief is in the air, ready to re-animate them. Old ideas and old hierarchies—eternal lies—are some of the first things that people want to reach for and activate once their status as believers in the broken promises of High Modernism had been undermined and freed. The world can be new, we were told, and new is good. New was good, but new is literally running out of energy, and if new fails, people want to try old again.
The opposite of Modern-ism is Past-ism. Traditionalism; all of that Evil Nerd stuff about patriarchical family values, respect for authority and the state, old time religion, self reliance … Heck why not kings and knights and Roman statues of emperors and shit? A lot of people might want to be a happy peasant in a postcard if the world made some fucking sense for once, right? And a lot more people think they might even get a shot at being the Duke in the castle in the background, especially if they’re smart and underappreciated in the Modern world.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Modernism at least had an energy source, it all worked out for a few hundred years, but the trees would laugh at that track record. Evil Nerd ideology has captured a lot of Free Belief, but it does not yet have an energy source, though I suspect it will be autonomous, independent, and solar. Let’s not let the Evil Nerds RETURN to sun-worship, okay? Two things are in play: structure, and power, which are organized by a third thing: Free Belief gone to ground. It’s all still up in the air, let’s capture it first. Carbon is structure, Oxygen is power. We’ve got Hydrogen, we’ve got Nitrogen. Knives, sharp sticks. We just need to put these elements in the right relationship with one another. Maybe we need a CHONN Aesthetics (the other N stands for Nuclear), or a NeoCarboniferous Period Manifesto. This is not that, yet.
Modernism—the story goes—was, at best, a monism of pluralisms, an enabling metacategory, and at worst a new hegemonizing control system for turning difference into sameness. Who can tell? Well, we can tell. We, or at least our grandparents and great grandparents, had a whole damn war about this. The attempt to retcon Modernism into a single totalizing cultural origin point via fascist pseudohistory failed. So let a thousand Modernisms blossom. The real forest has never been tried (except by the trees).
Warm times make carbon compounds, carbon compounds make strong structures, strong structures make cool times, cool times make free oxygen, free oxygen makes giant bugs … I am not sure where I’m going with this, but yeah, real history is more complicated than memes. Free Belief is like free oxygen, it can power a huge dragonfly, with intricate wings catching and refracting the sunlight into a rainbow thrown to the shadows, or it can set off a wildfire the size of a small continent.
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This has been Part 2 of Evil Nerd Theory. Thanks for reading. Here’s a reminder that you can find Part 1 here.