R.K.: Do you think that it is necessary to shut down all of these high tech aspects, manifestations of industrial corporate civilization in order to move forward?
K.F.: If they are tools of disconnection then yes. There are certain things that people do need to survive. Of course if you're not used to living outside civilization which the vast majority of people are not, you need food networks, you're going to need healthcare, you're going to need ways of getting clean water because we don't have those structures in place at a community level.
So shutting those down, it's not something that should be done ever lightly. I write at the beginning of the book, I do talk about risk and I talk about the idea that you have to consider how it's going to impact people. You shouldn't just go steaming in and say I'm going to shut down this power station, I mean we have this horror of nuclear power sitting there knowing that if the power goes off then the rods are going to start over heating because the cooling water can't continually be flowing through them.
That's an outcome of civilization. It's almost like civilized blackmail. It's industrialized black mail. It's saying if you dare to shut this down then we are going to have nuclear Armageddon and if you think about how sinister is that? That you have these potential, these forms of mass destruction sitting there, if you shut the power off, if you shut the water off, they're going to get you.
And that really frightens me but that also makes me incredibly angry that we can have things like that that exist, by which you're not going to suddenly say, I'm going to get rid of it because if you try to get rid of it, it'll hurt you. So we have to be very careful about how we do things.
R.K.: You know, the truth is, if what you envision happens, that industrial civilization collapses upon itself with the help of the underminers, it's very likely that there will be some disasters that occur in that process, isn't it?
K.F.: Yeah, it's an important caveat, but I will counter that with the fact that civilization is going to collapse anyway because, it's something that I address in Time's Up quite extensively, what's happening to the climate, what's happening to disease, what's happening with the shortages of energy.
Civilization for instance needs a constant supply of cheap energy. What you're seeing now with fracking, with tar-sands, with deep sea oil drilling, with all our other forms of what we call unconventional energy which will become perfectly conventional once the other forms run out, this is civilization desperately trying to keep itself running and once that energy goes, which it will, then civilization is going to collapse.
R.K.: Well let me throw this at you. What we have right now is industrial corporate civilization with corporate psychopaths manning the wheel of navigation.
K.F.: Yup
R.K.: And they are making choices that are good for the billionaires in the world, the heads of corporations, that are bad for 99.99% of the population. I've recently read E. F. Schumacher's book, Small is Beautiful: Economics for Humanity, and there is a big conversation going on among a small group of people about coming up with ways to make a small world that can work and I wondered if there's within your view of the future a way that a small connected collection of humanity could survive holding onto some of the technologies that connect us across the vast distances of the planet.
K.F.: I'd say a yes and a no to that. Yes we need to be looking smaller, yes we need to be banding into communities that are self sufficient, there's no way we can exist in using any form of mass anything, which is destructive. Therefore we have to start breaking things down into smaller chunks.
We need to be more self controlling. We need to understand that global government and even national government are only in it for the interests of the greater corporate world. But once you start getting local, we call it local government, local administration, then you get a lot more control back. So I can see the argument and that is an inevitable outcome of undermining these great industrial worlds.
The technology problem, it's something that's really difficult to, there is this idea that you can have small technologies, that you can have just a few radios, that you can have just a few light bulbs, etcetera, all those things, in order to achieve them in the first place required an enormous amount of industrial infrastructure.
You never had the light bulb until you had this huge infrastructure that somehow managed to create this magnificent thing that lit up the world. It did not happen in small communities. Neither did radios happen in small communities and once they've started breaking down you're not going to create them again. Technology requires a very large infrastructure. I wrote about it in an article called The Complexity Myth which essentially goes -
R.K.: I read that article. I really enjoyed it, it really got me thinking in some new ways.
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