The science fiction writer S.M. Stirling has written a series of books based on a similar theme. I found the premise and the first book pretty good. The latter went off in (to me) less interesting tangents. But, overall, one of Stirling's strengths as a writer is really extrapolating the downstream effects of an "event."
There's an entire sub-genre of science fiction along these lines now. Sterling and a few others really crank them out. Call it "Start from (Near-) Scratch Sci-fi". There's inevitably some smart character or two who immediately start thinking long-term and argue that the rest of the characters need to use what little tech they have as the seed-corn for starting over. The more ambitious books try to bootstrap the protagonists from leftover tech and rocks to space flight in a few years.
Many of the old Connections episodes can be found on YouTube. As it happens, i'd re-watched "The Trigger Effect" just a few months ago. I, too, enjoyed how he transitioned from the breakdown of modern society to Mesopotamia. His example of the NYC blackout is but a convenient scenario for delving into the question of how millions of people facing a modern technological breakdown could possibly get by. Of course, some will have the wherewithal to do so, in bits and pieces, but most individuals would not. Whether and how society would come though is a big unknown.
The premise of coming upon a conveniently abandoned farm sidesteps the niggling issue of avoiding being shot by its occupants -- be they the original owners or whichever outsider with a bigger gun got there first -- which is something i'd touched upon in a recent comment. But it also put me in mind of another film that you might find interesting.
"After the Big One: Nuclear War on the Prairies" (1983) is a National Film Board of Canada examination of the consequences of a nuclear strike on US bases close to the Canadian border. Spoiler: it doesn't look too good for the farmers, so don't count on riding it out simply because one isn't in a major city.
I remember watching this when it was first aired in the US. I was starting college. It had a big influence on me - still does in some ways.
The plausibility of such a collapse, of a permanent disruption, seemed tangible in the very late seventies and early eighties. The energy crisis of the early 70s was still in our minds. I think this was also when we started hearing a lot about electro-magnetic pulses from nuclear weapons that would fry our electronics. Fears of nuclear war were starting to peak. There had been plenty of post-apocalyptic views of the world in books, tv, and film in the 60s and 70s. I think it all made it easy to take the what-ifs in this episode more seriously.
I was working in lower Manhattan during the 2003 cascade effect blackout, which lasted roughly 18 hours. I feel obligated to reply-guy that the NYC of 1977 was clearly a snapshot of an evolving culture. The blackout I experienced was a lot of fun. All the streetlights were out, so anyone willing stood in the intersection and directed traffic a while. I did for 20 minutes or so. A stranger let me into his home to use the toilet. And there was really only one crisis, which the entire borough got together to collectively solve--the beer was getting warm. I saw no theft, no violence, and the only gouging visible was fifty dollar Maglites and twenty dollar D batteries.
I was a kid when we were visiting family in NYC in 1965 when the Big One hit the east coast. My recollections are much like yours in that I don't remember very much in the way of any major crisis happening, more along the lines of people who were able and mobile looking in on those that they cared about, and then keeping an eye on everything else to ensure that some drgree of order was maintained. My aunt was in her late 50s at that time and I recall a young man that lived next door coming over to politely ask if she was okay and was there anything that he could do? About the only thing that I can really remember of that occasion that seemed out of place was the way that people were talking about the UFO siting of that time and how it might have been linked to the black out: the talk was more than a little desturbing inasmuch as certain individuals were talking about arming themselves as they viewed the black out as a prelude to invasion,...
Like I said, 1977 was a snapshot. 1965 was before they shot Martin, Malcolm, and Bobby. People still had hope. 1977 was a nadir on the hope front, before raygun hijacked it with his phony populism. 2k3 was near enough to 9/11 that people were still warm toward each other. Things change. The only constant is change :)
The central question of our time is the relationship between the human ability to create technology of various kinds, and our ability to manage the technologies we create. It's typically assumed that if we're smart enough to create some technology, we're also smart enough to know how to successfully manage it. This is a sloppy wishful thinking assumption, because creating a technology and managing it are two very different skills.
Underneath the vast complexity of the modern world lies a simple foundation, a "more is better" knowledge philosophy. This is a 19th century philosophy that became outdated at 8:15am on August 6 1945 over Hiroshima Japan. But we mostly still don't grasp this, because the "more is better" knowledge philosophy is to us what the divinity of Jesus was in 12th century Europe, a largely unquestioned blind faith dogma taken to be an obvious given. We thought we walked away from faith during The Enlightenment, but really we just changed what we have faith in.
So long as an unlimited "more is better" knowledge philosophy is married to the reality of human limitations, we are setting the stage for a collapse of some kind. No one knows what the limitations of the human ability to manage power might be, but whatever those limits are, we are racing towards them as fast as we possibly can.
I've just experienced a real-life application of this, in a way. I work for the Highline school district in the state of Washington, and our computer network was in some way compromised last weekend. The result was that the district cancelled school for three straight days. It boggled my mind a bit that because our computers were now unreliable, we couldn't guarantee student safety somehow. We're finally going to be allowed back on campus tomorrow -- not using district computers or internet connections, taking attendance on paper, etc. I feel we could have been doing that all week, which makes me think there's more going on than we've been told. But if not -- if school got cancelled because the internet was compromised -- we seem very trapped by technology indeed.
Coincidentally, we had a power outage in town on Monday. So I've been thinking about Burke's points nonstop.
The work of James C. Scott and some others suggest that the kind of civilization-building that Burke describes has been frequently done in reverse, voluntarily -- that is, the kind of walking-away he describes as a disaster was done deliberately as a strategy of survival and resistance, in the event of war, famine, or an overbearing government. Times were simpler then, of course, with less technology to set down, and with places to go beyond the farms: mountains and forests that can, if managed carefully, support a significant population. It would be much harder to pull off now. But it would be interesting to see what Burke would make of Scott's evidence.
Another angle to consider is that technology is knowledge -- and some forms of technology allow you to store that knowledge pretty well. Here in my house we have a whole shelf of books on self-sufficiency, starting with the Foxfire series and going from there. We never read them. But in the event of an irreversible disaster like Burke suggests, they'd be there for us. Hard to move, vulnerable to water and fire, but otherwise quite shelf-stable, no matter what's happened to the electricity. Other technology can be carried in our heads, too -- germ theory, for instance. First aid training. Knowledge of certain edible plants...
I think there was an NBC series that touched on the same point in the 2000s, where a machine causes electricity not to work and hence puts people back to more medieval times although I still remember thinking as I watched it, that they all looked too clean. Revolution I think it was called. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)
I lived in NYC 1960-1991, nearby NJ until 2001. I too am weary of the _nostalgie de la boue des '70s_ . It might have more to do with the nightlife- and city-exploring of Boomers like me in their twenties in that decade than any broader collective experience.
If you want to dig deeper about this topic, I regularly post about many aspects of societal collapse on my blog. Specifically, I recently wrote a summary of book commissioned by the German government to explore what would happen in Germany after a long term blackout: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-blackouts
The science fiction writer S.M. Stirling has written a series of books based on a similar theme. I found the premise and the first book pretty good. The latter went off in (to me) less interesting tangents. But, overall, one of Stirling's strengths as a writer is really extrapolating the downstream effects of an "event."
There's an entire sub-genre of science fiction along these lines now. Sterling and a few others really crank them out. Call it "Start from (Near-) Scratch Sci-fi". There's inevitably some smart character or two who immediately start thinking long-term and argue that the rest of the characters need to use what little tech they have as the seed-corn for starting over. The more ambitious books try to bootstrap the protagonists from leftover tech and rocks to space flight in a few years.
Many of the old Connections episodes can be found on YouTube. As it happens, i'd re-watched "The Trigger Effect" just a few months ago. I, too, enjoyed how he transitioned from the breakdown of modern society to Mesopotamia. His example of the NYC blackout is but a convenient scenario for delving into the question of how millions of people facing a modern technological breakdown could possibly get by. Of course, some will have the wherewithal to do so, in bits and pieces, but most individuals would not. Whether and how society would come though is a big unknown.
The premise of coming upon a conveniently abandoned farm sidesteps the niggling issue of avoiding being shot by its occupants -- be they the original owners or whichever outsider with a bigger gun got there first -- which is something i'd touched upon in a recent comment. But it also put me in mind of another film that you might find interesting.
"After the Big One: Nuclear War on the Prairies" (1983) is a National Film Board of Canada examination of the consequences of a nuclear strike on US bases close to the Canadian border. Spoiler: it doesn't look too good for the farmers, so don't count on riding it out simply because one isn't in a major city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl4yW_X5xsk
Thanks for mentioning the new Connections series. That's a reboot that i can get behind. Ditto, Connected. I'll look those up.
I remember watching this when it was first aired in the US. I was starting college. It had a big influence on me - still does in some ways.
The plausibility of such a collapse, of a permanent disruption, seemed tangible in the very late seventies and early eighties. The energy crisis of the early 70s was still in our minds. I think this was also when we started hearing a lot about electro-magnetic pulses from nuclear weapons that would fry our electronics. Fears of nuclear war were starting to peak. There had been plenty of post-apocalyptic views of the world in books, tv, and film in the 60s and 70s. I think it all made it easy to take the what-ifs in this episode more seriously.
I was working in lower Manhattan during the 2003 cascade effect blackout, which lasted roughly 18 hours. I feel obligated to reply-guy that the NYC of 1977 was clearly a snapshot of an evolving culture. The blackout I experienced was a lot of fun. All the streetlights were out, so anyone willing stood in the intersection and directed traffic a while. I did for 20 minutes or so. A stranger let me into his home to use the toilet. And there was really only one crisis, which the entire borough got together to collectively solve--the beer was getting warm. I saw no theft, no violence, and the only gouging visible was fifty dollar Maglites and twenty dollar D batteries.
I was a kid when we were visiting family in NYC in 1965 when the Big One hit the east coast. My recollections are much like yours in that I don't remember very much in the way of any major crisis happening, more along the lines of people who were able and mobile looking in on those that they cared about, and then keeping an eye on everything else to ensure that some drgree of order was maintained. My aunt was in her late 50s at that time and I recall a young man that lived next door coming over to politely ask if she was okay and was there anything that he could do? About the only thing that I can really remember of that occasion that seemed out of place was the way that people were talking about the UFO siting of that time and how it might have been linked to the black out: the talk was more than a little desturbing inasmuch as certain individuals were talking about arming themselves as they viewed the black out as a prelude to invasion,...
Like I said, 1977 was a snapshot. 1965 was before they shot Martin, Malcolm, and Bobby. People still had hope. 1977 was a nadir on the hope front, before raygun hijacked it with his phony populism. 2k3 was near enough to 9/11 that people were still warm toward each other. Things change. The only constant is change :)
The central question of our time is the relationship between the human ability to create technology of various kinds, and our ability to manage the technologies we create. It's typically assumed that if we're smart enough to create some technology, we're also smart enough to know how to successfully manage it. This is a sloppy wishful thinking assumption, because creating a technology and managing it are two very different skills.
Underneath the vast complexity of the modern world lies a simple foundation, a "more is better" knowledge philosophy. This is a 19th century philosophy that became outdated at 8:15am on August 6 1945 over Hiroshima Japan. But we mostly still don't grasp this, because the "more is better" knowledge philosophy is to us what the divinity of Jesus was in 12th century Europe, a largely unquestioned blind faith dogma taken to be an obvious given. We thought we walked away from faith during The Enlightenment, but really we just changed what we have faith in.
So long as an unlimited "more is better" knowledge philosophy is married to the reality of human limitations, we are setting the stage for a collapse of some kind. No one knows what the limitations of the human ability to manage power might be, but whatever those limits are, we are racing towards them as fast as we possibly can.
I've just experienced a real-life application of this, in a way. I work for the Highline school district in the state of Washington, and our computer network was in some way compromised last weekend. The result was that the district cancelled school for three straight days. It boggled my mind a bit that because our computers were now unreliable, we couldn't guarantee student safety somehow. We're finally going to be allowed back on campus tomorrow -- not using district computers or internet connections, taking attendance on paper, etc. I feel we could have been doing that all week, which makes me think there's more going on than we've been told. But if not -- if school got cancelled because the internet was compromised -- we seem very trapped by technology indeed.
Coincidentally, we had a power outage in town on Monday. So I've been thinking about Burke's points nonstop.
The work of James C. Scott and some others suggest that the kind of civilization-building that Burke describes has been frequently done in reverse, voluntarily -- that is, the kind of walking-away he describes as a disaster was done deliberately as a strategy of survival and resistance, in the event of war, famine, or an overbearing government. Times were simpler then, of course, with less technology to set down, and with places to go beyond the farms: mountains and forests that can, if managed carefully, support a significant population. It would be much harder to pull off now. But it would be interesting to see what Burke would make of Scott's evidence.
Another angle to consider is that technology is knowledge -- and some forms of technology allow you to store that knowledge pretty well. Here in my house we have a whole shelf of books on self-sufficiency, starting with the Foxfire series and going from there. We never read them. But in the event of an irreversible disaster like Burke suggests, they'd be there for us. Hard to move, vulnerable to water and fire, but otherwise quite shelf-stable, no matter what's happened to the electricity. Other technology can be carried in our heads, too -- germ theory, for instance. First aid training. Knowledge of certain edible plants...
We shouldn't ever have to start over entirely.
I think there was an NBC series that touched on the same point in the 2000s, where a machine causes electricity not to work and hence puts people back to more medieval times although I still remember thinking as I watched it, that they all looked too clean. Revolution I think it was called. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series)
I lived in NYC 1960-1991, nearby NJ until 2001. I too am weary of the _nostalgie de la boue des '70s_ . It might have more to do with the nightlife- and city-exploring of Boomers like me in their twenties in that decade than any broader collective experience.
If you want to dig deeper about this topic, I regularly post about many aspects of societal collapse on my blog. Specifically, I recently wrote a summary of book commissioned by the German government to explore what would happen in Germany after a long term blackout: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-blackouts
https://emptaskforce.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Grid-Down-Death-of-a-Nation-9.22.23-Compressed.pdf
Great article on give the mind food for thought today Thank you