Scalable Society

The Onion has some great headlines: US Economy Failing because US built on Ancient Indian Burial Ground is a corker.  (The video itself is less brilliant than the title.)  Australia too, is built on bones of former occupants.  I have sometimes thought that a land really takes on a new people as they plant their bodies in it. In general though, lands are won and held in less romantic ways.

As society advances its store of techniques and tools (technology), the individual members gain powers.  At any time I wish, I can strap myself into 400 1250kg of steel and throw myself across the land at speeds that no human two hundred years ago had ever reached and survived.  (This, I think, is a pattern likely to be repeated: 'personal' powers spread widely and quickly.  Common powers (big power stations, hospitals, education systems) are slow and difficult, dependent on a lot of common understanding and compromises.)  The growth of ease of being  is not uniform.  I have the ability to trade my intellect (yes, absurdly, this same one writing this hotch-potch for you now) for money, actual money, that can pay for that car.  But I don't have the power of car: I can't get a car without recourse to a large industrial system.  That system needs a lot of people with skills I don't have.  It uses a lot of non-sustainable energy. It probably uses a lot of people without skills I don't have, as raw labour power.

Because of this technological economic base, and because of the social values that make 'personal' technology common, more people are a threat to our way of life.  It is not a sustainable way of life - it is not a scalable way of life.  More people are not going to be able to instantiate and extend our way of life.

If we had a sustainable technological economy in which the powers of production could be bestowed on people freely, there would be less need for anxiety about the strangers.

(This is a little like the mid-tech solutions in Anathem.  There is something to think about here, but I have a couple of threads and they're in some confusion.  At least one of the threads is probably better expressed in Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, an appeal for a human-scale socio-technical base - economics as if people mattered. You can read a little about him here.)