How Dystopia Happens

Suddenly, then all at once

I wrote a series of apocalyptic novels where I destroyed the major cities of the United States and launced an EMP to take down the grid, rendering the country into a reenactment of the 1880s.

Source - Lela Markham/Lauri Sliney

In doing so, I’ve given a lot of thought about how so much of our modern world depends on electricity and petrochemicals. Yeah, various people worry about the dangers of AI, Bitcoin, surveillance, and the corrosive effects of social media, but few ever talk about the jankiness of our electric grid that all these modern marvels — like them or not — depend upon. All it takes is a raven running into a transformer in Anchorage to plunge the entire Railbelt of Alaska into darkness. That’s a product of centralization. Because of the distance and the extreme weather affecting us, most communities have their own onsite electrical generation plants, but until very recently, the electrical cooperative in Fairbanks really wanted to become wholly dependent upon renewables (in a latitude with only 2 1/2 hours of sunlight in December and no real wind throughout the year) and use Anchorage electric as a backup. Since Anchorage has since admitted it’s running out of easily-accessible natural gas, Golden Valley Electric Association has rethought that dependence.

Notice - when ratepayers pointed this out a year ago, we were told we didn’t know what we were talking about. “Experts” have since told the GVEA board that we do indeed know what we’re talking about. The ratepayers have no value, but “experts”….

Modern Times

It’s even worse in the Lower 48. If one squirrel munches the wrong wire coming out a transformer, he can plunge the entire Atlantic seaboard into darkness as substations in multiple states blow relays, switchgear, and transformers. Since many of those components are decades old and now manufactured on another continent, it might take weeks or even months to get the lights on. Forget about not being able to access Facebook or call your daughter two states over. Your heat (or air conditioning) probably won’t work. Your electric can opener will become a paperweight. Nobody will be able to reach their bank account or Bitcoin wallet. This is the risk of digital currency. It’s not real. It resides as a line of computer code in the digital cloud. Without electricity, it doesn’t exist. And if you can’t access your bank account, it might be a little difficult to buy food, which (on the bright side) will eliminate the need to figure out how to open it without a can opener.

The more complicated our systems have become, the more vulnerable to failure they are.

Finance

I’m at a point in my novel series where my people have survived the winter (though at least 100 million others didn’t) and are now thinking about rebuilding society, which means I have to give a lot of thought to the financial system — another gigantic apparatus grown incredibly unreliable through greater and greater complexity. Money has become a mere hallucination of the markets that trade in currencies. Consider “derivatives” which amount to little more than bets that an interest rate will change either up or down. We trust in these things to have value, but they only have value if we say they do.

Modern Monetary Theory (otherwise known as M(agic) M(oney) T(ree)) proposes a multitude of fiscal figments can go on forever and derivatives can be ever more abstracted from what they purport to represent. MMT is popular economic dogma, but its theory remains unsubstantiated. Since the formula relies on the unlimited “printing” of money by central bank proxies for governments, you might bet that something will go wrong with such a system. This is why the government keeps trying to tell us to ignore inflation. They don’t want us asking uncomfortable questions, like “Is something about to break in the system we’ve built for regulating and distributing capital?” They’d rather we fixate on defining “capital”, but let’s just use the traditional definition - real wealth, hard things like arable land, ore veins, installed machinery, railroad tracks, airports, etc. Figment—wishes, bets, or hallucinations—are not capital.

Money is a janky concept these days. Take the bond market for example.

What? You don’t want to hold that fiscal timebomb in your hands? I don’t blame you.

The bond market is based on the idea that borrowed money will be reliably paid back. Yes, the adverb is the key word here. In order for this system to work, money must remain “money”. People must regard it as possessing value. But that’s the problem because money is visably losing value as we approach $35-trillion in national debt. People are beginning to realize the US population can’t plausibly pay off its debt — heck, we can’t even keep up with the interest payments. The more money we “print” under MMT, the more monetary value degrades. The interest rate on the borrowed money has to go up to compensate for that loss of value, and all of a sudden you’re borrowing money to pay the interest on the money you owe, the gross volume of which is only increasing because you have to keep printing money to keep up with inflation because inflation is a direct result of printing excess money.

Smart investors are warning us the bond market is liable to blow, and take the MMT-driven system with it. The Big Theory is about to be proven disasterously wrong. The price of everything will vaporize in a mushroom cloud of malinvestment and when the dust settles — which might take a long time — everything will be priced…uh, differently. A lot of things that currently have a value will then be valued at zero.

Dystopia and Then the Good News

There’s a lot of groups in this world who would like to be in power and control the reins of our prosperous economy for their own benefits, often at the expense of ordinary people. The good news is the system these groups depend on seems unwell. So when it collapses, the system will take those groups with it and, also good news, many ordinary people will still have the necessary skills to survive the long adjustment period that follows. A lot of authoritarian nonsense will be unable to find its footing for decades, hopefully centuries.

In my book series, groups like politicians and the military-industrial complex are still fighting it out, but I think in the real world, without the people’s resources to exploit, the elites who survive the collapse will have a hard time taking back the power they crave.

And that’s a very good thing.

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Lela Markham is an Alaska-based novelist and commentator who, in writing an apocalyptic series, has discovered just how vulunerable our society is to failure.