KMO compares worldviews with Brent Bednarik. KMO is an ex-Doomer who freely admits that he may have swung too far in the other direction, though he certainly does not identify with the techno-utopianism so derided by the Peak Oil faithful. Brent sees the perennially failed predictions of collapse as a sign that the world is more complicated and less predictable than the prophets of doom present it to be.

Feedback from a Friend of the C-Realm:

Hi KMO,I just finished listening to your recent free episode with Brent Bednarik.  I found this episode, like many of the ones you have put out over the years, to be thought-provoking even if my worldview doesn't quite map with yours (or Brent's for that matter) quite as much as maybe it did in the past.  I had a few thoughts and perspectives on some things you discussed in that episode that I'd like to share.

First, when you referenced Joseph Tainter's work and cited JMG as a kind of counterbalance or different argument I think you may have actually missed Tainter's core thesis, because to be honest it's not very different from JMG's idea of "catabolic collapse," but just looks at the process from a higher viewpoint.  Catabolic collapse is a ground-level view based on the idea that people will start to cannibalize the infrastructure of a declining society to fix the things that can be fixed and cobble together what they need to get through daily life.  Tainter's idea is that civilizations use increasing complexity to solve problems (and this typically involves more complex infrastructure) over time when they are experiencing infusions of energy and capital early on in their development.  However, as time goes on the cost of maintaining the complex infrastructure and social arrangements goes up while the infusions of energy and capital (commonly plunder taken through conquest) starts to decline, thus reducing the rate of return until it turns flat and then even negative.  This process also eats up spare capacity of the civilizations to deal with external shocks such as bad harvests because all that spare capacity is devoted toward maintaining growth rather than kept for when needed (the Anasazi network of sharing food between settlements being the prime example he cites).  Tainter never argued that this would result in a "flash crash" of civilizations -- like Greer he sees collapse as a process that plays out over centuries for most societies affected by it.This brings me to my second point, which is in regards to the idea of "doomers" vs. "technophiles" (for the purposes of simplification).  Like you, I sometimes feel as if I wasted some opportunities to greatly increase my own financial standing because I adopted "doomer" views around peak oil and the likes.  But while I've moderated my views on many of these subjects, unlike you I've also never really left them entirely.  Do you remember the series that JMG did on his old blog about the world after the dissolution of the United States, chronicling an emissary traveling from the nation that comprised the Northeast and New England to that made up of the former Great Lakes states?  Because I think, personally, that the Atlantic Republic as portrayed in that series gives a pretty good glimpse into a likely trajectory in the US.  That society was one that was starkly divided along class lines, with a small elite that was still able to take advantage of all the most recent technological advances and new gadgets while a massive and impoverished underclass went about their days barely able to make ends meet.  I see the trajectory of technology in the US playing out along similar lines, at least vis-a-vis economic activity (especially combined with a state seemingly devoted to its new mission as propping up high finance b...