Chris Hedges 08.25.18

Podcast: https://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-chris-hedges-082418/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8gUP3VDSQQw

(Sound of a storm)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Chris Hedges. He is a New York Times Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent who for two decades covered conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He returned to the United States to become a powerful social critic and critic of capitalism, and is the author of a dozen books, including War is a Force that Gives us Meaning; Death of the Liberal Class; and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. He is a columnist for Truthdig and the host of the Emmy-nominated show On Contact on RT America.

So first, thank you, as always, for all of your great work, and second, thank you for being on the program. 

CH: Sure.

DJ: So what does life look like at the end of empire?

CH: Well, that is a very interesting question, because it is exactly the question I asked two years ago when I set out to write my new book, America: The Farewell Tour, which will be out in August. What life looks like in a decayed society is expressed through various pathologies that we see all around us. Suicide, opioid addictions and of course overdoses. The false idea that we can build an economy and rescue ourselves from debt peonage through gambling. And the industry has become quite adept at feeding the addiction of gambling. In fact, I found, in the book, that gamblers, as an addicted group, have the highest rates of suicide. Hate crimes, sexual sadism, which you have spoken out against, and which very few people on the left have had the courage to emulate, or critique. Morbid obesity. These are all examples of a society in deep distress. And those problems are not solved by more rehabilitation clinics, or more Gamblers Anonymous meetings. They are solved by restoring the moral health of the society. Which of course are the things, those pathologies and the decay, that are getting worse under the Trump administration and the kleptocrats that he has put into power.

So the end of empire looks – and the end of all empire is really defined by both moral decadence  and physical decay and despair, and is expressed through aberrant behavior. I mean, we see almost every other day in this country a mass shooting, this nihilistic violence. I was looking at Émile Durkheim’s brilliant work at the end of the 19th century on suicide, where he made that argument, that suicide is the product, he called it “anomie,” of people who became disconnected from their communities, lost control of their lives, and fell into deep despondency or despair. Just look around us. The physical decay, the moral decay, and the way it’s expressed is embraced by this very sick and frightening culture, which is manifested in a figure like Trump. I always say Trump is not the disease. Trump is the symptom. 

DJ: Okay, I’m going to read a quote, which you knew I was going to get to at some point. I’m going to read a quote by Edward Gibbon, and then, after that, the question I’m going to ask you is why does this happen at the end of empire? Why are there these commonalities of, sort of, macrosociology becoming micropsychology? Or something? Here’s the quote. This is Gibbon writing in the 1780’s about the end of the Roman empire. 

“The five marks of the decaying Roman culture: Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth. Obsessions with sex and perversions of sex. Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original. Widening disparity between very rich and very poor. Increased demand to live off the state.”

And I just find that so remarkably, I want to say “prescient” but it wasn’t prescient because he was writing history. And so how does this happen, that there are these commonalities through the end of empire? Why is this? 

CH: Because you build, and this was true in the decline of the Roman Empire – you build an elite and a bureaucracy that will serve that elite, that is diverted from the common good towards the empowerment and enrichment of a tiny cabal. In the case of ancient Rome it was the ruling families who, like the Bushes and the Clintons, would just trade positions. You had, after the rise of Augustus, traditional – I don’t know that Rome ever achieved the democracy of ancient Athens, but you had a senate that became a kind of parody of what it had been. The form of the senate remained, but it was stripped of any real democratic power.

Essentially what happens is that any time a cabal, whether it’s oligarchic or corporate or fascist or communist, seizes power, you create a system of paralysis, which is of course what we’ve created. Because all institutions that once made incremental or piecemeal reform possible, i.e. gave a voice to the grievances and protected, to a certain extent – I don’t want to be too utopian about America, but to a certain extent protected the civil liberties of the populace. Everything is now directed toward this tiny cabal and their particular desires and lusts. And everybody else is ignored. They don’t count anymore. 

And so once you reach that point, then these totalitarian systems, while they are different in terms of some of the details, function essentially in the same manner. And because there is a kind of disemboweling of the state, all of these systems look for scapegoats to blame for the kind of precipitous decline. Totalitarian systems, autocratic systems also do spectacle and entertainment very well. Cicero writes about how in ancient Rome, as the democracy decayed and the oligarchic class seized complete control, it staged more and more elaborate spectacles in the arena, so that people’s emotional and intellectual life were invested in the absurd, in the trivial and the banal, in the salacious. We forget that there was a huge sexual component to the kind of entertainment industry at the end of ancient Rome. There are marked characteristics, and I would call them pathologies, that express themselves in a dying culture. And of course one of them is what anthropologists call the “crisis cult.” Crisis cults are where you retreat into magical thinking when you can’t cope with the onslaught of reality. So we saw, for instance, at the end of the genocidal campaigns in the late 19th century, in 1890, 1889, the rise of the Ghost Dance, where if you put on a particular shirt you could stop the bullets. You threw the Ghost Dance and the white Americans, Euro-Americans would disappear, all the dead warriors would rise up from the ground, the herds of buffalo would come back. But that takes place in all decayed societies. I think that that’s how we have to look at the Christian right, as a crisis cult. The Rapture. The end times. 

So we’re very far advanced. And what we’re really waiting for, which isn’t going to be that long in coming, is another economic collapse. And this time around, the oligarchs don’t have a plan B. They already have reduced rates to zero. There were actually moments in Europe when they were below zero. They were paying people to borrow money. Banks were paying businesses to borrow money. And what have they done? We’ve subsidized the financial industry, Wall Street, Citibank, etc., to the tune of trillions of dollars. That money has to be paid back, even though it’s lent at virtually 0% interest, and instead of investing in the country, as China by the way did after the 2008 crisis, and building New Deal-type infrastructure projects, all they’ve done is what Marx called “fictitious capital,” use money to make money, primarily through debt peonage. So they borrow money at 0% interest and then shove these student loans down the throats of college students, if you’re late on your credit card it’s 28% interest, all sorts of hidden fees in medical bills, even if you have insurance. But that’s not a sustainable system. The housing bubble is now back, the stock market is highly inflated. What did the oligarchs do with these huge tax cuts? Well, they didn’t invest in workers, they didn’t raise wages, they didn’t hire more workers. They bought back their stock. So the value of the stock increases artificially and then the managers or the CEO’s of these companies, because their compensation is tied to the value of stock, get huge bonuses. But it’s completely cannibalistic, and one of the things given mention in that quote, which is true, is that you – and also, by the way, Karl Marx wrote about this, although Marx was steeped in the classics, so he knew Gibbon – was that then these entities begin to consume the government, consume the bureaucracy, consume the system that actually makes, in this case, capitalist democracy possible. So, for instance, we’re watching the destruction of public, the privatization of public education into these charter schools, these vocational schools. We’re watching private companies; Booz Allen Hamilton, 99% of its budget comes from the government. The rise of mercenary forces. They are extracting – and of course they want to privatize Social Security. They are extracting the very marrow from the structures of power that sustains the system itself. 

So all of this is kind of swirling around us and is really waiting for a crisis to trigger what I think will be a very frightening period in American history.

DJ: There’s another question I want to ask, but before I get there, can you talk for a moment about the relationship between end of empire and death squads? It seems as economic systems collapse – I believe you used the word “scapegoat” earlier. I think about the relationship between the economic collapse of the twenties and the rise of fascism, the rise of the KKK in the United States in the teens and twenties. And then you’ve written about this in an entirely different context with Chaco Canyon and death squads there at the end of empire. Can you talk about either state or non-state violence – let’s call it reactionary violence at the end of empire?

CH: Right. What sustains empire is a fictitious ideology. In the case of the United States it’s a respect for democracy – and I’m saying this is fictitious, but it’s a respect for democracy, for human rights, for the ability of everybody to get a fair chance. And when that ideology collapses and is exposed as a lie, and of course the ruling economic ideology is neoliberalism, which no longer has any credibility across the political spectrum. That’s how Trump got elected, that’s why Bernie Sanders was able to run such a powerful insurgency within the Democratic Party, although the Democratic Party made sure he didn’t get the nomination. I mean, they rigged the primary, sewing up the nomination. 

So when that ruling ideology no longer has any credibility, then the elites only have violence left in order to maintain control. So they’re punishing the population more and more, to maintain the opulence of their lifestyles. I mean, you have CEO salaries that are 5000 times what their workers are making. The Walmart family I think makes $11,000 an hour for doing nothing but being part of the Walmart family. So you need coercion and force because the ideology, the ruling ideology is no longer effective. All we have to do is look at marginal communities in this country, primarily populated by people of color, to see exactly the forms of social control that are going to become even more widespread. So you deindustrialize cities and you redline them to leave behind primarily people of color, African-Americans in particular, and then you need a form of social control because there’s no work unless they go into the illegal economy. And so you create this massive prison system. We imprison 25% of the world’s prison population though we are only 5% of the world’s population. Half of the people in our prison complexes didn’t even commit a violent crime. All of this, by the way, was put into place largely by the Clinton administration and by Joe Biden, who is going to run for president in 2020.

And then you create, I would call them death squads. Militarized police forces that kill in these communities indiscriminately, with utter impunity. You take away people’s due process, and virtually nobody in these marginal communities has the right to a jury trial. They’re forced to plea out. 94% or something within our system never had a jury trial. They essentially have their rights as citizens removed. And Hannah Arendt wrote about this in The Origins of Totalitarianism when she’s talking about the stateless within Europe. Under the rise of fascism, she herself was stateless after being held for three weeks by the Gestapo and was expelled to France. So you’re stripped of your citizenship, the French don’t give you citizenship, and she said once you live in a society where rights become privileges, you create both legal and in effect physical mechanisms to strip a segment of that, demonize a segment of that society (in our case, people of color, primarily African-Americans) of their rights. But in a time of distress, or unrest, or social or financial collapse, everyone can be stripped of their rights with the flick of a switch, because you already have both the legal and the physical mechanisms in place. And I would include ICE, of course, as part of that.

So that is why societies, at the end, become so brutal. And it was fascinating when I was visiting Chaco Canyon and reading the work of the anthropologists who studied the late culture of the Chaco Empire, perhaps the biggest indigenous empire in North America, that it again replicated the way societies in terminal decline always seem to play out.

DJ: So part of what I’m hearing you say is that there is a sense in which rights, for those who at least  are somewhat on the inside of the gated community, but not at the very center, are in a sense luxuries, from the perspective of the system. Luxuries that the system can afford so long as it is still able to steal enough from the colonies, really. And then when that becomes endangered, we, those at the center, get down to business and sort of drop off all these rights that we can no longer afford. Is that kind of what this is talking about?

CH: Well, yes, in the sense that as long as, let’s call it the middle class, is not restive. As long as most of the society is passive in the face of this kleptocracy, which always characterizes late empire, then you don’t need brutal forms of coercion to keep them under control. But if you have, say, economic collapse, which we’re headed towards, and of course the most dire aspect of financial collapse will be the decision on the part of the rest of the world to no longer make the dollar the reserve currency – and we know what that looks like. All you have to do is look at Britain in the 1950’s when the pound sterling was dropped as the world’s reserve currency – then the value of the dollar plunges. Exports become exponentially more expensive and you can’t maintain empire. U.S. treasury bonds become worthless, people won’t want to buy them.

So at that point, then, the ruling oligarchs, corporate oligarchs in this case, will need these harsher forms of control in order to continue to prey upon the population to extract obscene profit and to keep people in line. You never want to build a society where a segment of your society, as we have done, in essence is stripped of their rights. That’s not a particularly sophisticated concept. Because ruling elites as rapacious as ours will never stop there, and history has borne that out over and over and over.

DJ: And one of the reasons that collapse of empire leads to increased racism, xenophobia, etc., it seems to me, is that, you know, I can get along fine with people of all colors and religions and everything else, but if I just lost my job, and I have been trained not to see capitalism as the problem, or the ruling elites as the problem, instead, I can come to perceive this as “I lost my job because of those damned people from Mexico.” Or because of African-Americans, or because of – I can come up with all sorts of, there can be – when I’m trained, again, to identify with the system itself, pledged my allegiance to the system, then I can look for scapegoats anywhere else to – when I have very real – you know, the farm crisis has been very real. The independent farmers have been driven out of business and driven off their land. And we can talk about the takeover of small farms by Big Ag, and that’s true, but – here’s the point. I interviewed a long time ago Joel Dyer, who wrote a book called “Harvest of Rage,” about how a lot of these farmers were ending up far right. And he said part of the problem was that, in this case, they’re very desperate, because the land that’s been in their family for four generations is being foreclosed on, and he said at that point that the left was doing a really terrible job of reaching out to them, and the right, the far right, the racist right, was doing a wonderful job of reaching out to them. And he said basically if you’re sitting there ready to kill yourself, your family’s gone, your land’s gone, and somebody knocks on your door; if they’re Mormons reaching out to you, you’re going to become a Mormon. And if they’re far right, you’re going to become far right. And if they were far left, if the lefties would have done a job of reaching out, they might have gone left. And I think there’s some truth to that.

I’m throwing a whole mishmash at you. Take anything you want and run with it. 

CH: So what happened with the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, as Stuart Hall has written, is that there was a conscious effort on the part of corporate power to dismantle the New Deal. And so they had to shift the whole perception of government. And that’s where you get Reagan’s thing, you know, government’s not part of the solution, government’s part of the problem. And to replace that idea of government as one that fosters community and makes sure everyone has a chance, and protects the vulnerable, etc., the ruling elites built this ideology of “Your national identity is under attack from these forces.” From these foreign forces. Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans. And if you look at the commercial media, they never talk about capitalism. That’s a word you’re never going to hear, even on MSNBC. And so any imperialist, any capitalist critics – you know this as well as anyone – have already been pushed to the margins of society. And what we’re seeing, because these people no longer have a counterargument to the ruling ideology, is that they are creating mechanisms to shut even our voices down, because they can’t answer these criticisms. Not in a rational way.

So you see the rise of this anonymous group prop or not, propaganda or not, where they take left wing websites, including the ones that I write for, that republish my stuff, and accuse them of being in the service of Russia – of a foreign power. And then they get Google and Facebook and Twitter to impose algorithms, which they have done, to essentially divert traffic away from left wing sites like TruthDig, where I have a column every Monday. And we have seen impressions. Impressions are: if you were to type “imperialism” into Google and I had written a recent article on imperialism, it would appear. Now you will be diverted to the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, but you won’t be directed to TruthDig, or any other left wing site. 

And so, impressions on TruthDig have gone down in the last year, and that is traffic referred to TruthDig has gone down from over 700,000 to below 200,000. The World Socialist Website has seen its traffic drop by 80-something percent. Alternet by 63%. And then coupled with this is the revoking of Net Neutrality that allows them to create tiers within the system to slow down access to these sites. This is why I have a show on RT America, because I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t even go on public broadcasting, unsurprisingly given the fact that the Koch brothers fund the news hour and are huge contributors to public broadcasting, along with all sorts of other corporate entities.

So you are creating a society, by intent, and this is again going back to the destruction of public education, where people don’t even have to ask the questions because they’re not even given enough information to ask the questions. And then they’re easily manipulated – we saw Trump do this – to blame the outsider for the social and political and financial and cultural decay. And the worse it gets, the more the state, the despotic state, sanctions violence against the outsider as a kind of safety valve to direct that anger away from the cabal that has seized power. That’s just classic despotic rule and that’s something that we are rapidly approaching.

DJ: So one thing that terrifies me is that we have what seems to me a very bad confluence here. You have, at the end of empire – Chaco Canyon is really interesting, that you had the death squads there and you had the other problems there, you had these same – and the same with the Roman Empire, because we can talk about the end of empire, and we can also talk about the iron cages that Max Weber talked about, and we can talk about technology just hemming us in. We can talk about television as the world’s best propagandistic tool of the time, and now the Internet, the same way. And with the control of flow of information, combine that with – I’ve done interviews about, and have read about, and have thought about lot; the decline of long-form thinking that has been taking place over the last, especially the last 40 years. If you get these dreadful symptoms at the end of empire anyway, and then, when I interviewed Robert Jay Lifton decades ago, I asked him if technology exacerbates psychic numbing, that he talks about in his work, and he laughed and said “Technology exacerbates everything.” 

And it seems to me that this is a confluence that makes the end of this empire much more fraught than – and we haven’t even talked about ecological collapse yet. But leaving that aside, this still makes this end of empire, it seems to me, far more dangerous than many previous empires.

CH: Well, because the systems of indoctrination are so much more sophisticated, along with the systems of surveillance and control. So you’re right. We’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, the Stasi state in East Germany was child’s play compared to what the United States has set up.

You’ve called them; it’s a term you use that I steal from you all the time; you call these things “electronic hallucinations.” They are designed to destroy thought. That’s why you gotta stay off them. I’m not on any social media. I don’t own a television. And yet you can’t escape it. Even I know who Stormy Daniels is, and Roseanne’s meltdown. But you don’t want them both seizing control of your time and also conditioning you for these constant adrenaline hits that destroy your capacity to sit down and actually think.

As you know, I wrote a book called “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” that talked about the danger of severing ourselves from a print-based culture and embracing spectacle and illusion. What’s happening now to the commercial news media is that it is a full partner in the reality show presidency. They largely created Trump. I mean, NBC created the fictional personality of Trump on The Apprentice, which he then used to sell to the American public. It’s all burlesque all the time. I find it just terrifying. I was at the gym the other day and saw CNN, and it was a long segment on something new from Stormy Daniels, and then a round table discussion about Roseanne Barr’s show. This isn’t news. I come out of news. I’m an old newspaper guy. 

So I think when you look at the decay of society, everything becomes salacious, everything becomes gossip, and that was certainly true at the end of the Roman Empire, at the end of the Habsburg Empire, any empire. Look at the end of the Ottoman Empire. In a way it becomes an effective mechanism, again, to divert attention away from the collapse, and you mentioned environmental collapse. The polar ice caps are melting at a rate that even the most pessimistic climate scientists a few years ago would never have predicted, large trees are dying, communities in the north are sinking because the permafrost is melting. And what are we doing?  We are doing what all societies do at the end, which is engaging in emotional and psychological retreat into the embrace of depravity. And we haven’t even mentioned pornography. We’re a completely pornified society. 

Because of you, actually, the fourth chapter in my book, which is called “Sadism,” is set at kink dot com, which I’d never heard of until you told me about it. And I went out there and sat through “classes” of torture, literally how to torture people. And as Wilhelm Reich writes in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and I’ll just read you that sentence: he says “Fascism countenances that religiosity which stems from sexual perversion, and it transforms the masochistic character of the old patriarchal religion of suffering into a sadistic religion; in short, it transposes religion from the otherworldliness of the philosophy of suffering to the this-worldliness of sadistic murder.” And we have to, and you have been very outspoken about this, one of the few; we have to also recognize that accompanying all of these pathologies is the loss of the capacity for intimacy, the objectification of women as essentially tools to be abused physically. I mean, I interviewed women on these kink sets, and boy, this pain is not simulated. These women are beaten. They are black and blue. When they finish they take painkillers. Everyone I’ve interviewed who’s left it is dealing with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. And these films are, there’s just no other word for it. They’re just sick. They’re just sickening. And that is a huge element within the culture. We are a completely pornified culture, which is why the stills that were released from Abu Ghraib look like stills from porn. That’s not accidental.

DJ: Yeah. It’s completely mainstreamed and horrifying. And, again, predictable. We have Edward Gibbon saying this in the 1780’s. 

We have – this is not quite time to wind down yet. We still have about 13-14 minutes. But I’m going to ask you what would normally be a wind-down question.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve interviewed some people who’ve been working on these issues for a long time, working on environmental issues especially, back all the way from the 60’s and the 70’s. And three of the people I talked to recently have all said that the momentum is just so fierce, so strong, that they feel like their work has been like throwing a tiny pebble against the incoming tide or something. 

I’m not countenancing quitting. I’m in this until my last breath. But that doesn’t alter the fact that when I read sort of macrosociological accounts, when I read your wonderful book that’s coming out in August, the fact that these are macrosociological larger social trends… Decades ago, when I read Overshoot by William Catton, one of the things he talked about in there is he said that if you have a certain number of people acting in a certain way, you can almost call that a fate because it is so hard to change an entire culture.

So what do we do, given that we care, you and I, and others; care about decency, care about justice, care about sanity? What do we do in the face of this momentum that is not only technological and modern, but also is a common pattern from the collapse of empire? A predictable result of the collapse of empire. 

CH: Well, we have to create in essence walled communities where we nurture and protect those values that the wider society is attempting to destroy. As much as possible, we have to create parallel institutions to sustain ourselves and empower ourselves. And all of that will be done locally. Because when collapse comes, the elites will retreat into their gated compounds, where they will have access to services and health care and goods and security that the rest of us won’t. They’re not going to be out there taking care of us. We’ll have to take care of ourselves. That’s why food, local food markets, sustainable agriculture, sustainable energy; all of this becomes, in moments of distress, becomes political acts. Local currencies. The more that we can dis-unplug ourselves, disconnect ourselves from the corporate monolith, the safer and the better we’ll be. 

So that really means attempting to take power locally. We can’t be naive. If you go back a couple years ago in Denton, Texas, the community rose up against the fracking industry and what did the state legislature do? It essentially overrode. The fracking sites around the city were making people sick and poisoning the drinking water, and the state legislature essentially outlawed the efforts by the local community to control their own environment. We also have seen this with fracking in Pennsylvania. These will be the forces we have to contend with. But we are going to have to begin to rebuild community and rebuild local power structures to pit power against power.

Will we succeed? I just don’t think it’s helpful to be Pollyanna-ish or naive. For me, what resistance is about, and ultimately what hope is about, is facing the bleakness of what’s out there rather than lying to ourselves about it. And it’s difficult, especially given what’s happening to the climate, but we have to remain rooted in reality. I would say that if you don’t resist, you can’t use the word “hope.” We have a kind of moral imperative to fight, without being overly dramatic, for systems of life, especially those of us who are older. And I have kids, and what kind of a world are they going to inherit? I at least want them to look back and say that their father tried. That he wasn’t complicit and he wasn’t passive. 

DJ: One of the many things I love about your work is that you unabashedly – that you’re not afraid of using the word “moral” or talking about moral imperatives. And I think this is a huge problem on the left specifically, that it seems like for the most part the left has ceded morality to the right. Ceded any claim of morality, I should say, to the right, and so there are – I mean, there are lefty screeds about, against all forms of morality. I find that both tactically absurd and also, to use the same word, morally repugnant. So I appreciate that very much about your work. 

CH: Well thank you. I mean, I think that this is – you know, Freud called these forces of death – well, actually they were called that later by post-Freudians, but it’s thanatos. That there are two forces in life. Eros: that force to nurture, preserve, protect. Forces of love, forces of reverence. But it’s always pitted against forces of death. As Freud wrote, these forces are in eternal conflict, both within the individual and within society. And the forces of thanatos are ascendant around us. And it’s imperative upon us to embrace those forces of life and fight for them. 

You know Kant has a great quote where he says that if justice perishes on earth, life has lost its meaning. As you know, I come out of divinity school. But I think that resistance, fighting on behalf of the oppressed, standing up against the lies of the corporate state, these give meaning to life. And I would even go beyond that. As Tolstoy said at one point; the only true happiness is living for others. And you see that with parents with children, and I have four of them. You know, it can be a headache, and sometimes that happiness is very bittersweet. But it is real happiness as opposed to the emotional and hedonistic highs that are defined as happiness by the consumer culture, with of course money being the primary route, they will tell you, to happiness. 

I went, at the age of ten, to an elite boarding school, as a scholarship student, one of 16, and lived around the über rich, and I can tell you they are immensely unhappy human beings, who, no matter how rich they are, never have enough. And you can see it in the lust by these billionaires, from Bezos to the Koch brothers to everyone else who has insane amounts of money and just want more and more and more. And of course it distorts their own relationships. Most of the relationships they have are built around a kind of mendacity and obsequiousness. So I think that on every level it’s incumbent on us to stand up against these forces and I think that standing up and resisting against these forces, even if we lose. It allows us at least to be complete and whole human beings. 

DJ: Yeah. I think a lot about a line by R.D. Laing: how do you plug a void plugging a void? And I think when you talk about the misery of the rich, they’re attempting to plug an existential hole with money. And that’s one reason for the insatiability. It’s one reason for the insatiability of pornography, because it’s not meeting the need that it’s purporting to meet. 

CH: It meets the need temporarily and then it becomes blasé. It’s why porn gets more and more and more violent, because you need to keep pushing it further and further in order to get that momentary high. Yeah, it’s the same with money. The same with the acquisition of goods and services. But it’s ultimately not only futile but self-destructive. 

DJ: A person I think about fairly often is Henning von Tresckow. He was one of the German resisters in World War II on the eastern front, and on D-Day, or after D-Day, a lot of the resisters said “Why are we even trying? We’re risking our lives for nothing because the war is essentially over.” And he responded that first off, there were people dying every day, civilians dying every day the war lasted, so the sooner they got the war over, and if this included stopping Hitler, doing their coup, then they should do it. And the other thing he talked about was he said “I want to show to history that there were at least some decent people in Germany. I don’t want history to say that every German went along with that.” And I always find that incredibly inspiring, that as this culture is wreaking havoc on so much – you know, it’s the story, in some ways, and it’s a dreadful story in other ways, but it’s the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. How many good people are there here? And I want the frogs to know, and I want the humans who come after to know, that there were some of us who were still decent people at the end. 

CH: Well, and go to Germany today. Who do they hold up? They hold up the White Rose. They hold up Niemöller. They hold up von Stauffenberg. They hold up these figures who actually did resist, to give themselves another narrative, to create moral signposts for the society that comes after them. So I don’t think resistance is ever futile. Justice or injustice is going to outlive us all. It’s a perpetual fight. You know, what Max Weber is saying in his essay Politics as a Vocation, it never ends. We must always be vigilant. But it is that kind of ironic point of light that guides future generations and inspires future generations to do the right thing. And if everyone is silent, those lights aren’t there.

DJ: Well I think that’s a good note to end on. And I always appreciate not only your analysis itself, but the eloquence that you – that you manifest this process that we’re talking about, of the importance of long-form thinking, by making clear the importance of people doing the work of reading other writers, metabolizing their thoughts, and then making them your own. That’s something people need to do with your work, is we read your work, we metabolize it, and then we – you know, one writer once said to me that all of those writers who are working in the right direction were all standing through time holding hands. You are reaching back to the people before, and reaching forward to the ones who came after. And I just want you to know that your work’s appreciated. 

CH: Well thank you, Derrick. Thank you very much. 

DJ: And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Chris Hedges. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

Charles Hall 01.19.14

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-charles-hall-011914/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fMgvXbxXPko

Hi, this is Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Charles Hall. He is a systems ecologist with strong interests in biophysical economics, and the relation of energy to society. Central to his work is an understanding that the survival of all living creatures is limited by the concept of energy return on investment (EROEI): that any living being or living society can survive only so long as they are capable of getting more net energy from any activity than they expend during the performance of that activity. He is the author or co-author of, among others, Energy and the Wealth of Nations.

So I was wondering if we could start, if you could talk about EROEI, and start on a physical level, on the level of plants and animals, and then move to the social level. 

CH: Okay. I’ll start by saying that I’m – first, I’m an ecologist by training, a systems ecologist. I was trained by an incredible guy named Howard Odum and his ideas have shaped my whole life. When I was working with him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960’s he was just beginning to transition from thinking strictly about the ecology of, let’s call it nature, although I think man is part of nature, but for the purposes of this interview we’re going to talk about humans and nature. 

He was focused mostly on the natural environment but was just beginning a transition with his book Environment, Power and Society, into attempting to apply the concepts to human civilization as well. I at that time strictly wanted to be an ecologist, and I came up with the concept of EROI – and incidentally, you used “EROEI” and that’s perfectly fine, but the way I use it is “energy return on investment” because although we principally look at energy return on energy invested, we sometimes analyze energy return on money invested, or energy return on environment invested, and other such things. 

So what I did for my Ph.D. work, in several small streams in North Carolina, mostly the beautiful New Hope Creek, was to look at the patterns of fish migration in the stream and attempt to figure out how much it cost for them to get from point A to B and how much they would gain in their whole life history cycle by either they or their progeny being in areas of higher available energy at the critical times of the year. And at the time I was also thinking about salmon migrations and spent some time working on salmon migration in the Pacific Ocean as well. 

So I figured out from my thesis work that the fish that were migrating in New Hope Creek, and there were 20-odd species that appeared to be doing it, were getting back at least four or five calories for every calorie they invested in the migration process itself. So it seemed to be of evolutionary advantage, and I went on, and although I didn’t always do the calculations, you know, you can think about bird seasonal migrations where they invest a whole lot of energy into the process of moving from the Caribbean or South America or Central America in moving up to the temperate or Arctic regions to breed, where there is, for that time of the year, tremendous surplus energy, in part because organisms that might be their competitors can’t overwinter there. It’s too cold. 

So this was the original origin – as an ecologist and thinking about the process of animal migration, being totally fascinated by everything from various antelopes in the Serengeti in Africa and other organisms there. But mostly fish. I was very focused on fish. 

DJ: Just to clarify: So if you have a salmon who runs up the Columbia and up the Snake for 800 miles or something, what that is suggesting is that their progeny, or the community, the salmon run itself – because obviously that particular salmon who runs up is going to die.

CH: Right.

DJ: But via their progeny, will then gain enough energy by the food sources and other sources at the spawning grounds, and as it comes down the Columbia, to make the trip worthwhile for the salmon run. Is that what you’re saying?

CH: Let me modify that a little bit. Basically yes, but the specifics are a little bit different, because I would – you can tell that the migration is worthwhile, and I got this idea originally by actually going up to Babine Lake in northern British Columbia and looking at the salmon runs there. The sockeye salmon that went to the ocean came back and they were ten pounds or so, pretty big fish. But some of their brothers and sisters had not made the migration to the Pacific Ocean. And those were about 12 inches long, half a pound at most, were much much smaller even though they were the same age. And so it was clear that the salmon that made the migration were selected to be larger, and the larger salmon females had many more eggs, and the survival of these fish and their contribution to the next generation’s gene pool was much larger. So apparently, just by looking in a pool of salmon waiting to spawn, and looking at the great big sockeye salmon in there, all brilliant red and green, and the little kokanee that had not made the same migration, even though they were presumably brothers and sisters of the other salmon, you could see that there was a tremendous advantage from migration in generating more offspring. 

Now in this case, the migration is out in the Pacific Ocean. In other words, the migration is downstream –

DJ: Right…

CH: Some 800 miles or something to the Pacific Ocean and then they turn and go up along the coast, following the plankton blooms up to Alaska. So they’re off the Aleutians by August. 

DJ: I was looking at it backwards. I was looking at it that the migration is upstream but the truth is that the migration that happens for salmon – I’ve worked on salmon issues for 20 years …

CH: Oh really?

DJ: Yeah. I’ve been working on them – I lived in Spokane, Washington, and I’ve worked on issues of taking dams out on the Columbia –

CH: Oh yeah?

DJ: Yeah. So I’ve been working on that a long time, but the whole time – this is great – the whole time, I’ve been perceiving the migration as upstream and then like living in the ocean and then coming up just to spawn and die. But the truth is that they were living – the migration – I understand what you’re saying. This is a complete shift in my perception of how salmon live. 

CH: (laughing)

DJ: That they were actually – I live right next to a salmon stream in Crescent City, California. And the fish actually migrate out to the ocean. They don’t migrate up to spawn. This is great. Thank you. 

CH: Well great! I’m glad that I can talk to you as a biologist and we can share some thoughts about that. According to the physiologist William Hoar, whom I was reading when I was back in graduate school, you can tell that the salmon almost certainly evolved originally in fresh water. Essentially they’re a rainbow trout.

DJ: Right.

CH: Because they have a kidney that’s most appropriate for a freshwater fish. And during the periods of glacial advance and retreat, there presumably was a large evolutionary advantage for those organisms that could migrate and go to new streams. But they have very stringent requirements for spawning. I was always interested that when they lost the upper Adams River sockeye, for example, when they lost that particular genetic strain of fish, and then they took the dam out that had caused the loss of the fish, they had tried to take lower Adams River sockeye salmon and reinstall them into the upper Adams River, and they never took, because they never had the right genes. And you can go on Vancouver Island and you can go to Little Qualicum River, and you can go to, I think it’s called Black Creek, just north of it. And they’re completely different environments, and the salmon that live – in this case, silver salmon, that live in these two environments are completely different creatures. In Little Qualicum, they have to do well in cold, oligotrophic waters, and the Black Creek salmon have to do well in warm, very nutrient-rich  and plant and animal-rich environments, and yet they both do fine in their particular environments, and they are very specially adapted to their environments. And so when they put in the big hatchery at Qualicum River and a lot of these salmon drifted into small creeks, there was a great deal of concern about diluting the beautifully fine-tuned genetic stocks of the individual creek salmon. 

DJ: Right.

CH: (laughing) We could talk about salmon all this time. But let’s get on.

DJ: You mentioned the EROI, and this reminds me of something that I just read not very long ago, and it makes sense, but it still was what I thought very interesting. I was reading some work on plants, and plants can – we can argue about the word “predict,” I like the word “predict” but if you don’t like it then we can just ignore that.

CH: I’m okay with it. I sometimes predict. 

DJ: Plants predict is the point. I was reading that plants can tell – plants in the understory grow branches by how the overstory is going to look by the time the branch gets out to where it will be able to be fully functional at receiving energy through photosynthesis. 

CH: Sure.

DJ: I thought that was really interesting because we normally, well, a lot of – the point is that plants are working on the EROI as well. 

CH: Absolutely. I live out on – I’m living on the Shore/Flathead Lake in Montana and I’m looking out to a pine forest and I can see, on one side of a pine tree, branches that go all the way down to the bottom, and on the other side, where it’s growing next to another pine tree, the branches are not there in the lower part of the pine tree. And if you go there you can find the dead branches or the little holes where the branches once were, but the tree – now I don’t know whether the tree makes a decision or whether the branch just deals with that but it’s expensive to have a branch, and a tree will maintain that branch only if it has a positive energy return on investment, the investment being investing in the leaves and the needles of branches and all the incredible chemistry and biochemistry and stuff that the branch does. 

But if the branch is not carrying its weight, and a branch, like an animal, at night and during the daytime too uses energy. It takes energy to maintain its structure, to maintain itself. This is called “maintenance metabolism.” If a branch can’t pay for its maintenance metabolism because it doesn’t get enough light then it’s goodbye branch. 

Now whether they can anticipate or not, I’m not – I don’t know about that. That’s a new one for me. But I wouldn’t be surprised. 

DJ: If you want I can send you the source later. But anyway, how does this apply then to a society, this concept?

CH: I’d just like to make one point, that if anybody wants to Google my name, Charles Hall, and then Tyee, all of this stuff was written up particularly well by that magazine in British Columbia. 

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/06/03/FishUseEnergyTeaches/

DJ: Okay, great.

CH: Okay, so how did I get involved with applying this to oil and uranium and other sorts of things? Well, as I said, my advisor Howard Odum had got me thinking that way, and I had this really good undergraduate student at the time I was a professor at Cornell University. I had a really promising undergraduate named Cutler Cleveland, who’s now made quite a name for himself in the energy world. He came to me and said that he wanted to do a project with me, and we talked about various things, and so we decided we – he told me he thought he was really more interested in energy than simply environment, or ecology, and at that time I was an ecology professor. And so I said “Well, let’s re-look at the Hubbert curve.” And that led to us doing a paper that’s called Petroleum drilling and production in the United States: yield per effort and net energy analysis. 

Click to access petroleum_drilling.pdf

And what we did – we went back and looked at the Hubbert data –

DJ: People might not know what that means.

CH: Oh, the Hubbert data means how many barrels of oil you gain in the United States from drilling a foot in looking for it. This guy Marion King Hubbert was the originator of all of this kind of work. I’m old enough to have known him reasonably well at one time. He famously predicted in 1955 that the United States would have a peak in oil production in 1970, and everybody shunned him and called him bad names and said he was a terrible scientist and so forth, but in fact, the United States did in 1970, we have never produced as much oil even now, with a little uptick recently, we have never produced or extracted as much oil as we did in 1970. 

So we took the Hubbert idea of yield per effort and how many barrels you get per foot drilled and updated his data, and we found a very strange pattern, that it declined, as Hubbert had observed. We were getting less oil for each foot we drilled looking for it, but then it went up, and then it went back down, over a period of about ten years. And this was very confusing to us. And then I remember Cutler plotting the data and I’d just come back from giving my fisheries lecture in ecology, and Cutler said “Look, this data, it just doesn’t make any sense, but it’s very clear.” And I looked at it, and I scratched my head, I didn’t know what – and then all of a sudden, I thought about my lecture. At the time, Cutler was a great big muscular fellow, a great athlete, and I got so excited I pounded on his shoulder with such force that I left black and blue marks, I was so excited. And I said “Look at this, look at this Cutler! It’s just like for fisheries! The harder you fish, that is, the more feet you drill for oil, the less you get per foot. Your yield per effort is lower at greater effort.”

You know, this is, in economics, though economists don’t talk about it much, decreasing marginal return. David Ricardo wrote about this 200 years ago. Basically what it means is those people who say “Drill, drill, drill,” the data doesn’t support what they say, at least so far, because the more you drill, the less efficiently you drill and the lower your return per effort. And that’s what we found. So we started analyzing things, instead of the feet you use for drilling, the energy you use for drilling, and ultimately applied this energy return on investment concept to getting oil out of the ground. 

DJ: So they were … basically measuring it by feet as opposed to measuring it by energy invested is sort of like measuring what miles you get per amount of time you drive vs. the amount of distance you drive. My point is they were kind of measuring the wrong input. 

CH: Well, it wasn’t wrong, exactly, but I think it’s more meaningful – all kinds of things are more meaningful when you start looking at the energy investment.

Well, I see what you mean. Like, for the salmon you might talk about how many miles did the salmon swim, but of greater interest, I think, biologically, is how much energy did it use for the salmon to swim from point A to point B? 

DJ: Right. Because if they’re going straight uphill the whole time, that takes a lot more energy than if it’s fairly flat. 

CH: Yes, of course. 

DJ: So what are the implications of what you’re saying, of the last bit you’re saying, what are the implications of that for the oil economy? 

CH: Well, if you plot the growth of the world economy it’s almost exactly the same curve as the growth of our use of fossil fuels. I remember hearing the mayor of Denver once say that the Sioux Indians who used to live there were completely dependent upon the bison for everything they ate, everything they lived in, everything they wore, their tools, their weapons and so forth were all based on the bison. And they celebrated it, and did dances and had special feasts and so forth in terms of the bison. And he said today Denver is completely dependent upon oil, and not only do we not celebrate it, but people don’t even pay any attention to it. They think it’s technology.

I mean, it drives me nuts. People talk all the time about all this wondrous technology but almost all of that technology is dependent directly or indirectly upon having cheap energy. And how long will we have cheap energy? Well, if you plot from the end of the Great Depression to today, you’ll find that the growth of the US economy has declined essentially every decade from five percent to three percent to two percent to one percent to less than one percent today. That’s the growth of the US economy and in fact of most OECD, or western, economies, it’s the same thing. We’ve basically stopped growing. Europe has basically stopped growing. Japan has basically stopped growing. The US: we can argue about it, but it certainly doesn’t grow like it used to. And probably not in real terms, or inflation-corrected terms, as much as one percent a year. 

And that’s the same curve as you get from plotting the global production of oil. We used to grow, I think we grew, could grow, very much because we had a lot of energy. Economic production is a work process and any work process requires energy. Oil is the best form of energy in all kinds of ways, and it’s becoming less abundant and I think it’s happening right now. You look around and our great universities are broke, often. Most of our states are either broke or have cut back the services they offer enormously. Many pension plans are broke. Everybody’s broke except the one percent, I guess.

So what’s happening is we have, I think, the impact of a restriction in the amount of oil and other energy – it’s a little bit more complex talking about coal and gas, but I would say the same declining EROI on these means that there’s less and less net energy available to run our economic processes, and we’re seeing that occur in the world now and it’s likely to become increasingly important. 

DJ: But I read something in Forbes, I think it was in Forbes, might have been in some other sort of over the top pro-capitalist magazine, that was saying that the peak oil myth – and I disagree with this, I’m just throwing it out as a softball – 

CH: Can I use “bullshit” on your radio show?

DJ: (laughing) I don’t know if you can or not. 

CH: That’s bullshit.

DJ: Okay, go ahead. Tell me why Forbes was wrong, or whomever it was.

CH: Well first of all, I’m not going to say I know everything and those guys know nothing. Every scientist, we’re trained to be cautious and so forth. But I can tell you right now that if you took all of the oil en bloc, and you took it out of the ground, all the oil that we can get out of the ground, that we’re capable of extracting, it would run the US for about a year. And we’re likely not to get it out that fast. What the new oil technologies are doing is to some degree compensating for the decline in conventional oil. And it’s doing a good job. Now whether it’s going to be enough to turn the US again into a net oil exporter; I look at the data and I say just no way in hell. It’s not gonna happen. And we can be excited about what’s going on in the Bakken but I’ve been analyzing this with one of my graduate students and when we look at it carefully, we find that almost all of the oil comes out of sweet spots. “Sweet spots” means areas where the oil is especially thick in the substrate. But most of the Bakken and most of the Eagle Ford is not a sweet spot. So what we find is that we’re moving – we know a little bit more about this with gas than with oil – we’re moving from the original areas that we started developing only 10 or 12 years ago, such as the Haynesville in Louisiana and Arkansas and the Barnett in Texas. Those areas have already peaked. We’ve taken the best – we’ve taken the gas and in some cases oil out of the very best spots. Geologists aren’t fools. They don’t drill at random. They drill where there is the greatest concentration of oil and if you look at the maps of where these wells are, there’s a map spaced about as far as lateral extensions. In other words, the map is completely saturated with wells in the sweet spots and there are very very few wells in the non-sweet spots. We have to move out of the sweet spots, which we’re going to have to do soon, and then it’s a whole different story because you’re going to be exploiting lower quality resources. 

So in all of this, what we’re looking at, what we’re doing is getting the oil out of the sweet spots and it’s marvelous technology. I’m not going to say that it isn’t. I think most of the environmental impact is above ground because it takes something like usually 1000 giant trucks worth of stuff to do a frack job, and enormous amounts of horsepower and energy to pressurize the fields, and then the fields run for really only basically a couple of years. They decline sharply in just one to two years and then you’re left with a trickle. So you have to keep drilling. It’s called the Red Queen hypothesis. In Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland the Red Queen had to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. So if we want to maintain, or we want to increase the shale oil production, we have to drill more and more each year and we’re already drilling like crazy. 

DJ: A couple of things. One of them is that my first degree was in physics, from the Colorado School of Mines, and I took some mineral economics when I was there. Of course you know the School of Mines is an entire energy school. And I remember that one of the first things they taught us in the mineral economics class was the difference between regular economics and mineral economics, and basically mineral economics is based on: you have a finite resource and what you do is you take the easy stuff first. That’s mineral economics in a nutshell. 

CH: Mineral economics 101. Yup. 

DJ: And so far as EROI, one of the things I think about with this is the Beverly Hillbillies. At first, some of the first oil wells were just, they were almost seeps where, like in the Beverly Hillbillies movie they shoot a gun and oil pops up. There was very little energy invested. I’m just saying that in terms of people who might not be so familiar with the concept. You don’t have to invest very much energy to get it out. And nowadays you have to frack, you gotta do tar sands, you gotta expend all this energy. 

CH: All the Gulf of Mexico. There are somewhere between five and six thousand of these platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. And there isn’t any steel any closer to the Gulf of Mexico than I guess Birmingham, Alabama or Duluth, Minnesota. How did all that steel get into the platforms? That was an enormously energy-intensive process. 

DJ: You mentioned the universities running out of money, and of course pensions running out of money is very much in the news right now. Can you be more explicit about what you think the implications are for declining EROI? And there’s a quote you have that I just want to mention, which is if real day-to-day economics is about stuff; food on the table, a roof over our heads, this we buy; why on earth is economics taught and undertaken today as a social science rather than a biophysical science? And so: what is the relationship between declining EROI and that question?

CH: Gee, that’s a beautiful quote. Did I say that? 

DJ: Well, it’s on your website with quote marks around it. 

CH: (laughing) That’s pretty good. Well, sure. I can’t believe what they teach people in economics. It’s fairy tales. You take any honest, good economist and you talk to him, and he’ll say “You gotta have all these assumptions to make the neoclassical model work.” This assumption and that assumption and we gotta be selfish or self-regarding, and then you do behavioral experiments on people and they’re not. They tend to be vindictive or altruistic because we’re social animals. It’s very complicated and the assumptions you have to make, especially relating to resources in conventional economics is just out to lunch. And so we’ve attempted to construct a new economics that we call biophysical economics. I and my colleague Kent Klitgaard, who’s very much a fully-fledged economist, who believes essentially everything I did, and we wrote a book together that’s available from Springer, called Energy and the Wealth of Nations, which is a pun on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and I would like to see that used in every high school and every college that teaches economics. Stop teaching fairy tales to our young people. What does that mean? It means that as the energy return on investment for our most important fuels declines, then it means almost inevitably that our ability to generate wealth in society also declines. As I stated, I think we’re seeing just the beginnings of it, the first ripples on the shore for the coming storm of what’s going to happen as we have less and less cheap oil available. I think we will have not only less and less cheap oil, but less oil altogether, something called “peak oil.” 

I just got a paper accepted that looks at that in great detail and all I can say is that if there’s anybody listening to this who doesn’t believe in the Hubbert Curve, send me an email at chall@esf.edu and I’ll change you in your tracks. With an analysis of some 46 oil-producing countries, almost all of them are showing peak and decline. Production that increased, reached a peak, and declined. And that’s where we are, and that’s essentially where we have to go for the world. And the question is: can our alternative forms of energy take up the slack? And I see no way. Of course we can do many things with solar and wind and so forth, but, especially if you include what we have to do to compensate for the fact that the wind blows only 30% of the time and the sun shines only half the time, if you’re lucky, then the energy return on investment on these things is much lower than we’ve been used to. And it requires high energy return on investment fuels for us to grow. 

Now I don’t think this has to be a terrible thing at all. I had a fantastic boyhood in coastal Massachusetts when we were running on about 15-20% of the energy we use now. It depends on how we adapt to that. But if we try to fight it, if we try to say “this isn’t real,” then apparently, and all the data I have indicates that this is real, then we’re just going to screw things up worse. 

Don’t forget: Mother Nature bats last. 

DJ: So can we throw some numbers out for some of this? Like what might have been the EROI on an oil well, average or whatever, 50 years ago or 100 years ago? What is it now? What is the EROI on, say, solar photovoltaics? Can you give ballpark numbers for any of those, just so we can get a feel for how things have changed?

CH: Sure. I’ve written several reviews recently. A lot of these are approximate. We do the best we can. We’re dependent on the United States government, the Bureau of Census maintaining good data. There’s a lot of evidence that they are not maintaining the data as well as they used to, etc. etc., but still all of the information is consistent and that is shown in the review papers. So the first data point we have is in 1919. That’s the first year that the United States got this kind of data. And at that time the energy return on investment for finding energy – this is going out and finding a new barrel of oil – was over 1000 to 1. 

DJ: You burn one barrel of oil to get 1000 back. 

CH: You don’t get it back above the ground, but you find 1000.

DJ: Okay.

CH: Back in those days. And this is published in a paper by Guilford, Hall, O’Conner and Cleveland that was in the Journal of Sustainability.

(Guilford, M., C.A.S., Hall, P. O’Conner, and C.J., Cleveland. 2011. A new long term assessment of EROI for U.S. oil and gas: Sustainability: Special Issue on EROI. Pages 1866-1887.)

 It’s open access, like we try to do with all of our papers. You can go to my website. All your readers have to do is search for “Charles Hall Energy” and they’ll get more crap than they can possibly deal with. 

http://www.esf.edu/EFB/hall/

So what we found is they got 1000 to 1 finding oil, and it had declined by 2000-something to 5 to 1. To find oil. Now, the more important one is to get oil, and that was actually somewhere around 15 to 1 back in 1919 and we actually got better up until about 1970. Depending on whose analysis you look at, we got somewhere between 25 and 30 to 1 to get oil out of the ground, which means you only have to use 3% of the energy you get, to get that energy. But now it’s declined back down to about, well, it looks like it’s not as much as 10 to 1 anymore. But let’s say in the last year it’s around 10 to 1. All countries that we’ve examined show that same basic kind of hump-shaped pattern. Initially the EROI is a bit lower and then it reaches some peak, almost like a Hubbert peak, and then declines over time. And if the decline rates continue, then we’re screwed because it’ll take a barrel of oil to find a barrel of oil within a couple of decades. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a linear decline or an exponential decline, or maybe something else. And I have to say that the oil from a sweet spot looks to be not too bad. Our guess at the moment is somewhere around 12 to 1. This is shale oil in North Dakota from a sweet spot. But if you get off the sweet spot then it goes way down very fast. 

DJ: 12 to 1 you just said is good, when 40 years ago that would have been terrible. 

CH: 12 to 1 is not as good as it used to be, but, y’know, it’s decent. You can run a society on it. You don’t need just 1.1 to 1 to run a society. We’ve done a lot of analysis of that. Just to drive a truck on a road takes 3 to 1, including all the infrastructure of the truck and roads and bridges. And then if you start including the infrastructure of supporting the driver and his family and health care and education and all of that, we figure that you need somewhere around 12 or 15 to 1 to have anything like the civilization we have come to expect. 

DJ: So it sounds like one of the things you’re asking for with the biophysical economics is for economics to take reality into account. 

CH: Well, yeah. They’re out to lunch. But they wrote the rules. They can write the rules and they print the money and they dump all the money from the fed system into the banks and you know, they didn’t bail out the homeowners, they bailed out the banks. And so the astonishing thing is that we don’t have inflation. At some point it’ll probably catch up to us. You know, it’s like these old pictures in Germany when people would go to the store with wheelbarrows full of German marks to buy a loaf of bread. We’re almost doing that electronically, because people want to have dollars – when the world is unstable, people want to own dollars because it’s the most stable currency. This and some other aspects are propping up the value of the dollar, and we’re not having inflation. We may even be having deflation. It’s quite amazing. It could flip-flop any day, I suppose. 

You listen to people like Nicole Foss and she’ll scare the crap out of you in relation to how unstable our financial system is. And it may be, I’m not an over-the-cliff kind of guy but it might be that we’re in much greater danger of some kind of large societal problem from the financial angle of things than from the energy angle of things, which is bad enough to begin with. A couple of my people whose analysis I respect a lot, Nicole Foss and Gail Tverberg and they both are really concerned – even though they’re both concerned about energy, they’re even more concerned about the instability of our financial situation. 

DJ: One of the things that seems really central to your, not biological, but economic work, is that energy and finances are pretty inextricably linked.

CH: Of course. The dollar has no meaning without energy to back it. Gold doesn’t back it, because when the Spaniards came back in the 1500’s from the New World to the Old, they doubled the amount of gold in Europe and halved its value. It’s like printing more money. What gave money value back then was solar light that was intercepted by the fields and the forests and the people who harvested the trees and grew the crops, and the artisans and the housewives who did all this work. Work is what causes wealth and money is a means we’ve been conditioned to use to keep track of it, but really what a dollar is, is a lien on energy. So if you have a dollar in your pocket, that means society is willing to use about seven megajoules somewhere to get whatever you’ve got for that dollar. So if you buy a bagel for a dollar, then somebody has used about seven megajoules of energy, on average, in this case, to take natural gas and make fertilizer in Louisiana and ship it up to Nebraska by the Mississippi River and use a tractor to spread it on the field, and then drive a harvester to harvest it and then grind up the wheat into making – oh, I’m sorry, you gotta plant the seeds, plant the wheat and then harvest it and grind it up and put it on the train and send it to, I guess you’re in California, and use some more electricity to mix the batter. Have you ever seen them make bagels? And then boil the water – all of that’s using energy. And then you pay them a dollar and you get your nice bagel. But if you had no money in society you could still trade whatever you do for bagels. You could go back to some kind of awkward trade system. Money facilitates it but what money really is, is a lien on energy. And that’s what our Energy and the Wealth of Nations book is and that’s why we want to use it for teaching. It’s not that complex. You can teach high school kids this. They get it. And of course once the kids see this, they go into their conventional economics class and say “What is this crap you’re teaching me? What is this?” Why should economics be only a social science? Where’s the biophysical reality behind what actually has to happen for an economy to exist and for goods and services to be produced and distributed? 

DJ: So I would like to thank Charles Hall for being on the program, and I would also like to thank all the listeners for listening. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. 

Jordan Brown 12.31.17

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-jordan-brown-123117/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=4s&v=8v3fur5U_Go

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen, and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Jordan Brown. He is an activist, artist, musician, and award-winning independent film-maker whose work broadly looks at the social, political, and environmental implications of digital technologies. He is particularly interested in cultivating a critical view of today’s culture of screens, and has recently completed a feature-length documentary on the subject called “Stare Into The Lights My Pretties.”

So first off, thank you for your fabulous work, and second, thank you for being on the program.

JB: Well thanks, Derrick: Thank you for your work as well, it’s really great, and thanks for having me on, it’s a pleasure.

DJ: So tell me, and tell the audience, about the new film, “Stare Into the Lights My Pretties.”

JB: Okay. Recently I completed my first feature-length documentary. It’s a film that takes a critical view of today’s sort of culture of screens. We’re just completely immersed in this, this society and culture that is completely dependent on digital technologies. And it’s a polemical film, so it’s something that I want to use as a sort of catalyst to open up some bigger questions about this culture’s reliance on technology, but also how the technology influences people, society and the environment, sort of this tiered interplay, I suppose.

DJ: Before we go any further, what do you mean by “culture of screens?” Does that include television, then? What are you saying?

JB: Well, yeah. There’s a voice in the film, Susan Greenfield. She’s a renowned neuroscientist from the U.K. She defines this brilliantly in the film, in that what she means by screen culture, and I guess, what I’ve taken to expand in the film is that screen culture is defined as – it’s not so much the devices themselves – well, it is that – but it’s moreso the amount of time we spend with screens, and how screens are sort of everywhere. So, yeah; she includes things like the amount of time people spend in front of a laptop, or with their mobile phones, and with emerging technologies like Google Glass, things like this. She talks about screen culture as being this sort of pervasive phenomenon that has big implications on the brain, and she talks about that from a neuroscience perspective.

DJ: You’ve said on the person, society and the environment. So what are some of the personal implications for devoting – or let’s back up even before that. So when we talk about screen time, do we have any numbers? Do you know how much time people spend on screens today vs. how much time they did, let’s go with the background of 200 years ago, they spent zero. 80 years ago they spent some, but not as much, and then – do you know? Like, how much time do people spend on screens?

JB: Well I know today – and some of these figures are fairly old – I think from 2010, it is, from memory? That it’s something in the vicinity of ten hours a day. And that’s sort of the average amount of time that an adult would spend in front of a screen. Perhaps that figure would be much larger for younger people these days, but I think it’s somewhere around that area. There are varying numbers, but I think a more conservative one would be anywhere from six to ten, twelve hours a day in front of a screen.

DJ: Which is the majority of our waking hours.

JB: Yeah, it’s probably one of the things we spend most of our time doing, interacting with some kind of digital technology in one way or another.

DJ: So what are some of the neurophysical and other psychological effects of this? Because that has to have some effects.

JB: Okay. I guess one place we could start with this would be just the way that it physically changes the brain. Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist in the film, talks about this on a scientific basis. There’s this notion in neuroscience called “neuroplasticity,” which is the phenomenon of how your brain physically changes. The connections in your brain are physically influenced by your experience, the way you perceive and understand the world.

DJ: A classic example of this, by the way, is that they’ve done brain scans of London taxi drivers. And London’s supposed to be one of the hardest cities in the world to get around. And London taxi drivers then, learning all those streets affects their brain physically.

JB: Yeah, that’s a really great example. And I guess it’s analogous to doing a physical exercise. So if you’re using, say if you’re using your arms, your muscles develop, and if you’re not using your muscles, they atrophy and you lose that capability. The same thing in the brain; if you’re rehearsing a certain set of skills or having a certain sort of reaction or experience, then that develops and sustains the neuroconnections in your brain, and that strengthens those connections, which makes it easier for your brain, for those pathways in the brain to interact with each other.

So yeah, if we’re spending the majority of our time sitting in front of a screen, we get really good at using a screen, but we also change our brains more into this sort of notion of becoming a computer itself. We become really used to being bombarded by lots of information. A lot of the online environment is designed, I would say, and has obvious elements of distraction. We can talk about stuff like advertising that’s constantly bombarding you when you’re online, or just even the notion of when you’re trying to do something online, say you’re writing someone back, you’re writing an email or something, or you’re looking up something on Google to satisfy one of your random curiosities that you may have at any point in the day. Most likely you’re interrupted. You’re interrupted with a ping of something. Maybe your phone goes off, maybe you get an email or you get a Facebook message or something like this.

So distraction is a big part of the online environment, so I guess one of the things, from a neuroscience perspective, is that if you’re practicing being distracted, then that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to not only become used to being distracted, but it will become a much stronger part of your experience. And I guess that it exacerbates and encourages that kind of thinking, that kind of scatterbrained thinking where you go jumping from one thing to the next all the time. You’re not going deep with anything, which means that you’re not practicing and using the ability to think about things linearly or really going deep on anything, because you’re constantly being distracted and jumping around. I imagine that has concerning personal implications, but also we can take it on from there. If we have large groups of people who have short attention spans and are used to being distracted, then surely that has concerning social implications as well.

DJ: I interviewed someone else about how long-form thinking is becoming rarer, and then the relationship between an incapacity to do long-form thinking and an incapacity to solve some of the most difficult personal and social questions facing us today.

JB: I think that’s something really classic. Long-form thinking is probably the first thing we see being lost to the screens. I was thinking about this the other day, even in terms of news reporting, how insane this – I mean, we can talk about how the collapse of journalism and the crisis of mainstream media. That’s a whole other conversation. But I think even just the notion that – yeah, news is being reported in short snippets these days. We have this sort of news culture that – institutions want to break the story in real time, and so instead of this analysis, we just have this rolling constant sort of flood of tweets, or little snippets of information without much context, or without much analysis. We just get bombarded by this tsunami of information that doesn’t really connect to anything. We don’t have time to critically analyze anything, we don’t get this opportunity, or give ourselves the opportunity to go deep with any information, because we’re just being bombarded. We’re really losing this ability to be doing long-form thinking and going deep on an idea, and sitting with it. Being contemplative, I think.

DJ: I watched your film, and I sent you a note about this, that I was only going to watch like the first five or ten minutes and I ended up watching the whole thing in one sitting and just thought it was absolutely fabulous.

JB: Well, thank you.

DJ: And one of the people in there mentioned the effects of screens on our memories. That we’re seeing already a decrease in the capacity to remember. Because why should you remember when you can just type it into Google?

JB: I think Pat Sparrow is her name, sorry if I have that wrong. “Sparrow” is definitely her last name. She did a study that was talking about how – the people she was looking at, you give them information that they’re not expected to remember later, then they don’t remember that information as well. And she talks about this phenomenon where people, instead of remembering the information itself, they recall the place to find it, which is essentially Google these days. She was talking about the way people would think about Google first, or would think about their computer first, when they’re trying to recall information, where they’re seeking to find an answer to something. This sort of plugs into the larger question of what are we doing as a culture, when that’s the first thing we think of? We think about the place to find it, when we’re confronted with a question or something we don’t know.

DJ: And there is also the question of giving up tremendous power to that single source of information, when instead of relying on either your own memory – basically we have outsourced memory to Google.

JB: Yeah, I think this is really where the film began for me. The germ of the film’s idea was, I had this idea back in 2009, that I was going to, because I could see it emerging then, already, and perhaps it was a new journey for me, but I had this idea that maybe I would make a film using Google as a case study to sort of talk about the way that one company is having such a tremendous influence over many aspects of our lives. And of course at that stage Google had, I think, just started scanning a bunch of out-of-print books, and making this large digital repository of books that was just for themselves. And so one of the concerns I have, and had back then, is what does it mean when one company privatizes the world’s information and uses it sort of in a monopolistic fashion?

And of course, you know, I went off to interview and did things like this and started developing a film, but really got bowled over by the fact that it’s not just one company. And it’s not just one technology either. One of the other voices in the film, Katina Michael, which was one of the first interviews that I had, broke out into this larger discussion of this culture’s complete fascination with things like artificial intelligence and robotics. So I think I realized pretty early on that it’s not just, it’s not just one company, it’s not just Google, and it’s not just one technology, it’s not just the Internet, it’s not just computers. It’s this sort of larger question of the implications of digital technology in general. That’s where the film really started, I suppose, was from the question of what does that mean, on a personal and societal level, if one company has such extensive influence over the information streams that we’re all tethered to?

DJ: Speaking of one company, suddenly I remembered the Lord of the Rings line about “one Ring to rule them all,” so speaking of one company influencing people on a pretty profound scale, you have – one of the parts of the film that I thought was really, really important – the whole thing is important, but one part that just blew me away was the bit about Facebook. There was a line – I’m going to throw the line out, and then if you can fill in behind and in front of this line? The line was about how – something along the lines of “we think that Facebook is helping little Johnny to make friends, but what Facebook is really about is predicting your future, is knowing you so well that they can predict your future wants and get you to pay for them.”

So can you fill in around that? That line was just so brilliant.

JB: The line was, that was by Douglas Rushkoff. He was talking about the myth. He was talking about how there’s not really this deep understanding about what the tools we are using are for. So we sort of have this myth that is espoused by a bunch of companies, all the online companies do this. They have these slogans and these big philanthropic ideas and aims. Google presents itself as being this champion of openness, but what they really exist for is to develop really detailed profiles about you, so they can sell you ads. That’s their whole business.

And Facebook is the same. Facebook isn’t so much a place to make friends. I mean, that’s sort of where it came from, but one of the primary purposes of itself as a business is to commodify your social relationships. And so what Douglas Rushkoff was talking about there is that today we don’t even know what the tools we’re using are for. You ask a regular young user of Facebook “what do you think Facebook is for?” and the answer will be “to help me make friends.” But you go to the boardroom of Facebook and what are they talking about there? Are they talking about “How can we make little Johnny make more friends? How can we foster deeper, more meaningful human relationships?” No, they’re not talking about that at all. They’re talking about “How are we going to monetize Johnny’s social graph?” And “How are we going to use that data, mine it and look for patterns to sell Johnny’s future to himself before he knows his own self?”

I think that idea is talking about something quite large, which I think is concerning about lots of these digital tools. They’re manipulative and are so by design. It’s even a little bit sinister in a way, in that there’s this pretense that the tools are designed for this purpose, and maybe they are in some cases, but I think there’s a strong ancillary purpose, which is to make money and sell advertising, which also opens up this great door for surveillance and manipulation and social control, these ideas, which are explored in the film.

DJ: Let’s be explicit about this. How does Google, or Facebook, monetize our desires or monetize our interests – how exactly do they make money?

JB: Google does this in a bunch of ways. One of the primary ways is every time you search for something on Google, or every time you visit a webpage, and there are many webpages out there online that use Google services, such that if you visit a website that has a Google ad on it, that’s talking to Google servers, and that information that Google brings in to develop a profile. They’re just amassing vast amounts of data about what they’re guessing are people. And I guess they just wait and keep collecting information to the point where they can guess with pretty good probability that they’re really talking to you, talking to the person on the other end of this screen. So one of the ways they make money is by using that information to sell you products, to show you targeted advertising. Advertising is essentially Google’s primary business model.

The same is true for Facebook. Facebook is all about bringing you in to this digital space where everyone else is. Everyone’s having their conversations there and people are doing their socializing, I mean, they call it the social network, after all. Which has this sort of effect. As more people join Facebook, it becomes more valuable to join, because everyone else is there. They call it the “network effect.” It’s the same thing that happened with the telephone. The telephone wasn’t really useful until everyone had a telephone, which made the appeal of getting a telephone stronger. And there is social influence on that too, I guess “peer pressure” is not the right phrase, but there are social pressures that come from an example like that. But yeah, Facebook operates in the same way in that they’re really gathering all of these really detailed information streams, that they’re doing this vast data gathering for the purposes of advertising. And then not only that, with a company like Facebook, they’re also selling the data bits that they have as far as I know, or there are other companies out there that buy information from companies like Facebook, to amass detailed demographic profiles. I think they call it “psychoanalytics” these days.

So there are a bunch of companies out there that are in the business of, I guess essentially they spy on people. The guy who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, recently spoke about this publicly a few years ago, saying that the Internet is now the world’s largest surveillance network, which is basically run on targeted advertising, for the purposes of advertising. So there are a whole bunch of companies out there on the web that exist to profile people, to really learn what they’re doing, learn about their interests, learn about where they are in physical space, because we’re all essentially walking around with mobile phones in our pockets that are essentially tracking devices that just happen to make phone calls. So we have all these companies out there that are in the business of vacuuming up all these digital data trails and then using them for a bunch of purposes. One of them that’s really pervasive is giving people advertising to sell them stuff in a really targeted and granulated way that’s really specific to them, that can capture your own unique personal characteristics. You see what I’m trying to get at?

DJ: Yeah. You know, the whole time I was watching your film, and again in this conversation, I kept thinking about how I started my book Welcome To the Machine, and the way I started it was that when I was a kid, I was a Christian. I’m talking six or eight, in that area. We were told “God knows your thoughts, and God knows everything about you.” And that’s okay, because God loves you. It’s okay. But the Devil can’t read your thoughts, but the Devil can watch you all the time. And even when I was six, seven and eight, I realized that if you can watch someone’s every action, you can effectively know their thoughts. It became very clear to me that even in this construct, effectively, and of course I couldn’t use this language, I was seven years old. But I understood the concept that if you can surveil someone every moment and know if they move from here to here, and know the expressions on their face from selfies, whatever, if you can know a person’s external actions, and you get enough data – that’s the real point, if you can collect enough data on a person, you can begin to effectively predict that person’s thinking.

And a small example that’s true for my dog, is that when I used to leave the house – I mean, I still leave the house, but when I had this one dog, every time I left the house he would get up and walk with me if we went for a walk, but if I went to the car he would not even get up from the porch, he would just sit there. And it took me a couple of years to figure out it was because if I was holding car keys in my hand, he knew I was getting in the car and would not bother to get up. And my point is, if you see somebody with car keys in their hand, you can predict they’re going to get in a car. And that’s just a really trivial thing. If somebody is always looking up some specific thing, if somebody is constantly looking up critics of screen culture, one can begin to surmise that that person is thinking negative thoughts about screen culture.

This whole thing is just a long-winded way of saying that total surveillance means that you can effectively predict someone’s actions. That’s the whole point.

JB: Yeah. And I would say that’s something that has been purposely designed in some of these technologies. The whole purpose is to encourage disclosure. In one of the things we see a lot, that happens in – I mean, in a lot of online platforms, but particularly Facebook, is that they want to encourage you to disclose. The whole purpose of the technology is to play to certain psychological characteristics so that you are disclosing all the time. And even in other ways, in some ways that you’re not doing directly. I’ve heard of instances where, say, you take a picture on a device such as an iPhone that has a whole bunch of other data embedded into it that you may not even realize. You’re just taking a photo of something somewhere. But the GPS coordinates are embedded into the photo and once you upload that information onto the Internet that information can be extracted and possibly added to your profile.

It’s sort of been baked in to the way these technologies are designed and deployed in the world, that they’re pushing for as much disclosure from us as possible, to come to this point where, yeah, I would argue, as you mention in your book Welcome to the Machine that this is a panopticon, the way that the technology functions is similar, or analogous to what a panopticon is.

DJ: And people may not know what that is. So can you tell us?

JB: Yeah, sure. Well, I think you’ve mentioned before, probably in a much better way, maybe I could paraphrase you. I think the panopticon was developed by Jeremy Bentham, is that correct?

DJ: That is correct.

JB: So his design – it’s basically a prison design. So you design a prison in a circle, and you have the guard tower in the center and all the prison cells around the outside, that face the center. And the tower in the center is where the watch, where the people that run the prison are, the people who are looking at all of the cells. I don’t know what they’re called, what do you call them, the people that run the prison?

DJ: Guards.

JB: Yeah, the guards. So the guards are in the center tower and the prisoners are all around the outside. The guard tower is really bright, the lights come from there so the guard tower can see into all of the cells of the prison in the circle. So there’s no way to hide. There’s no interstices of the prison to sort of hide in. But the other effect of this is that if you’re a prisoner you can’t see the guard. You can’t see in the center because it’s bright. You don’t even know where the center is. But the other part of this is you also don’t know when you’re being watched. You can be watched at any given time and you don’t know when that is. So there’s this sort of chilling effect on your behavior that is central to social control, central to controlling people’s behavior. If you don’t know when you’re going to be observed, you’re going to change your behavior. Because you could be observed at any time. So it’s sort of this neat way to have control over people.

DJ: Earlier you mentioned how phones had to get to a sort of critical mass before they were, I think you called it the “networking effect.” That reminded me of how I’ve read some accounts of when telephones were introduced, there were a lot of people who thought they were incredibly intrusive. Carl Jung, for example, did not like them and felt that they interrupted your capacity to have contemplative time. And it just makes me think about how so often technologies are – at first there is a, there can be a discussion of the harmful effects of them. But then that discussion is swept away and they are presented to us as a, at first as a form of convenience or a form of utility, and then somewhere along the line they become an absolute necessity, until, by now, I’m one of the few people I know who does not carry a cell phone with me everywhere I go. I mean, I hate getting phone calls already, so when, it’s like the notion of actually carrying a phone with me when I’m walking through the forest or running errands or doing something else is just horrifying. But I’m a dinosaur and I recognize that. I was just thinking about this process. I mean, I love the line you said a little while ago about how we’re basically carrying around surveillance devices that happen to be useful as phones. Tracking devices. And so can you talk a little bit about – and I keep thinking also, I’m sorry to go on, but I keep thinking also about one of the Doobie Brothers albums, which was called “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.” And I’m thinking about how what was once scary is now accepted. You know, GMO’s were the same way. There was this big discussion; “GMO’s are going to be really scary,” and then at some point it went from “Well, we need to think about it” to “Oh. Here they are, they’re in your food, and by the way, you don’t even get to know if they’re in your food.”

So I don’t know what I’m getting at. Can you pull any question out of this little rant that I just did?

JB: Yeah, there are a few things there. There are a few ways to go. One of the things I’d like to say first is I haven’t had a phone for seven years. I gave up a mobile phone a long time ago, because I went without it for a period of time and I really liked it. And that was seven years ago and I think things have changed a lot since then. And even then, I’ve noticed the way that that has changed a bunch of my social interactions. The way you meet a new person for the first time, or someone wants to get in contact with you. “What’s your mobile number?” Or “How can I find you on Facebook?” I think there’s this weird thing that happens when you’re telling people “I’m not on Facebook” or “I don’t have a phone” or something. It’s like “Who is this person? Why aren’t they part of this grand digital world?” It raises this weird air with people.

So there’s that, that’s the first thing. I think there really is this sort of, and this is something I try and explore just a little in the film, but I think it’s a fairly big topic in and of itself, and could probably – and I hope the film is a catalyst to open up these kinds of discussions. You’ve mentioned that this happens with a bunch of technologies, not just digital technologies, but especially with digital technologies, I think. There’s this effect called “creeping normalcy,” which is the way that slow incremental changes, and perhaps with digital technology it’s not even that slow. The pace of technology is so rapid. But what creeping normalcy is, is this notion that if you – if things change at a slow enough pace, then things become normalized and pass by unnoticed. So yeah. I mean, the examples that you mentioned are quite good. Something comes along that would be seen as objectionable at the time, “This is outrageous!” But it slowly becomes normalized and people sort of forget it, or let go of it. And especially something like technology where if you have even just a question that’s not even critical about technology, you get labeled as a Luddite or you’re backwards or you’re an old fuddy-duddy or something like that. This really systemic cultural objection to even questioning technology.

And there’s this great line by Jerry Mander in the film, sort of saying there’s considerable resistance to the very idea of challenging technology, and even just asking questions. “What are we doing? Is what we’re doing with technology a good thing?” Then I would ask on a social level, how technology influences what society means and how society functions and the implications on society. All of that. What are the negative effects of that? There’s this strong opposition to even asking the question, which I think is problematic. We need to break through that. We need to seriously consider what is happening.

I just saw something in the news today. A former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, recently came out saying that he feels tremendous guilt about how he contributed – his job at Facebook at the time was with trying to encourage user growth and get more people on the platform in 2007. And I think in November this year he’s come out saying “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works. There’s no civil discourse, no cooperation. We have misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

I think possibly this is a good time for this film to be coming out. We even have former executives in technologies themselves being like “Ah shit, what have we created?”

I think I read something not long ago, too, by someone who was working on the iPad? Or the iPhone, something like that? Saying that he has sleepless nights thinking about how he might have children himself, being really confronted by the fact that lots of young people are completely addicted to their phones and there are a whole bunch of negative effects there having to do with addiction. There are stories in, say, South Korea, where people are dying in Internet cafes because they’re playing online games for hours and hours on end without drinking water or going to the toilet and they’re just dying. Actually there was one famous case in South Korea in which, it has a sad irony to it. There was one young couple, who had a daughter in real life, a couple who were completely addicted to playing this online game. And in the online game, the purpose was to skill up and play this game with this little avatar of a girl. And they were so addicted to this game that their real-life daughter died of malnutrition. They would sneak out at night and leave the baby at home and play this game for days on end, and in the real world their own daughter died from malnutrition and complete neglect. They were just completely addicted to this online game.

DJ: We have about seven or eight minutes left. You hit one subject that I really wanted to hit, and I wonder if you can, but leave enough time to do another question? The question has to do with you said “dopamine-driven” and you mentioned the word “addicted.” That was another part of the film I thought was absolutely brilliant, was where you talked about the addictiveness of screen culture. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how you get a little hit of dopamine every time you see that somebody liked your comment?

JB: That’s essentially it. It’s the same thing – there’s a segment in there about how there’s been a lot of research done on what drives gambling, what makes gambling so enticing. And there’s a behavioralist towards the end of the film who talks about this. It’s from a different era, I suppose. He wrote a book in the 60’s, sort of talking about ways that you can encourage and exacerbate different forms of behavior modification. And one of the analogies that I tried to make there was that the design of the technologies is similar to playing a slot machine, or something like that. Because a slot machine is built on how you don’t know when you’re going to get these exciting and enticing rewards. So you go playing the slot machine, constantly looking to get that little hit. It’s analogous to the online experience where you check your phone or; one of the first things a lot of us do when we wake up is we check our phone. What do you get? Sometimes you get an exciting new TED talk, or you get an email from the girl you’re trying to date or something like this. And other times you get nothing. You just get junk, or spam. So it’s a similar kind of phenomenon in the brain, in which you don’t know when you’re going to get that exciting and enticing reward, and that’s what drives the addiction, that’s what drives the – they call it stickiness drivers, the notion of “How can we make our product so enticing that people keep coming back?”

This is something that the technologists, they employ teams of psychologists to tweak very specific things about not only their programs, but the experience of the programs, to make them completely enticing and to keep people coming back. This idea in advertising goes way back to the early days of advertising where it’s which colors do people respond to the most? And which media vehicle do we execute certain advertising messages in, to get people to do certain things? But I think the difference now is that with digital technology these insights are so much more valuable to psychologists and advertisers and the people who are working on marketing messages. They know the ways we will react best. They know how to push our buttons because we’ve disclosed so much about ourselves. Possibly in some ways they can know us better than we know ourselves. There are huge implications there, it’s deeply problematic.

DJ: One of the things I love about your work – okay, my next question’s going to be: So what do we do about this? One of the things I love about your work, and you did, after all, turn my essay “Forget Shorter Showers” into another great film. I know that your sole solution to this is not going to be “Well, turn it off and step outside.” Because that might work for you or me, but that doesn’t actually solve the social problem. So having said all this – sorry to paint you into a corner here – but having said all this, what do you want people to do with the information? So somebody watches your film, and again, the name is “Stare Into the Lights My Pretties.” Somebody watches your film, what do you want them to do with the analysis and information they gain from this?

JB: I guess the first thing would be to – I mean, there are a bunch of things. One of the things that I would hope would come out of watching the film would be to question our own – to look at ourselves, first. How am I being influenced by technology and what does that mean? And then, what is my understanding of these technologies? How am I being manipulated, what’s happening? And then I guess the next part of it is; well, if I think that’s a bad thing – we do need to turn off the computers, we need to sort of walk away from this. But we also need to, I think, really have some solid reflection about many of the larger questions that stem out of this.

I would like people to ask the question of who benefits from this the most? Because I think it’s clearly not us. The corporations that are completely controlling our online experience have a really strong grip on our lives. I think that’s problematic. And I hope that one of the questions that people have after watching this film, and perhaps if they agree with that, is how do we tackle these huge corporate interests that have extensive influence over our lives? And one of the things that I’d hope would come out of that is basically, yeah. A strong critique of capitalism in that we need to – it’s not just about turning off the technologies and walking away. It’s about completely rethinking the social system that gives rise to these technologies and perpetuates them, and changing that, and really putting a spanner in the works. So we’re talking about completely rethinking the social and economic systems that exist in the world. Completely walking away from capitalism, I suppose, and imagining some other world. And I hope that’s possible.

DJ: Well, it has to be possible. And the thing we haven’t really talked about is the environmental implications of digital technologies.

JB: Well yeah, that’s very important.

DJ: And if we can’t figure out a way to solve all this then there’s not going to be a planet.

JB: That’s one of the big things, I think. Fundamentally these technologies aren’t – I think it was John Michael Greer wrote a book called The Ecotechnic Future. I may not have this right, but I have a memory about how he was talking about the amount of energy that is required to run the Internet. And I guess we could look at this in other ways too, like the energy that goes into developing computers or the rare earth minerals that are required to make computers exist. That’s completely not sustainable. But just looking at the Internet, the amount of energy that is required to make the Internet happen is quite astounding. I think I was reading something before about how at current rates of consumption, by 2020 the web-hosting industry will surpass the airline industry in global environmental pollution. So that’s quite astounding to think about. The global airline industry, the total output of their pollution will be smaller than what is output by the Internet by 2020 at current rates of consumption. And that ignores growth, so is probably something that will happen quite sooner in that there’s this complete explosion with digital technologies, with the growth, it’s insane.

The environmental impacts of technology I think are another thing that isn’t considered or spoken about as often as it should be. The environmental impacts are horrifying. We can talk about things like what’s going on in the Congo, the mining of the rare earth minerals that go into our gaming consoles and smart phones and tablets, all of these technologies. There’s a complete horror that’s happening in that part of the world. Human rights abuses and the civil war, warlords and pogroms, all the horrible things that are happening there, that are basically driven by companies like Sony and Nokia and Apple and so on. The environmental implications of digital technology span out in a bunch of ways. It’s a huge conversation in and of itself. The end point is that this is not something that can continue indefinitely. There is an end point to this. We need to choose if we’re going to have a soft crash and withdrawal from the screens in a way that can wake us up to real life again, or if we’re going to just stay embedded in these computers, completely distracted, withdrawn from the real world, and have a harsh, brutal reawakening to reality, while the real world burns.

DJ: Well, I highly recommend that anybody who listens to this – how can people watch your film? That’s the last question.

JB: They can go to my website or look for it on youtube.

https://stareintothelightsmypretties.jore.cc

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3872s&v=Q5qJjNM2Kx0

Or the Internet Archives are probably another more interesting place to find this. Support that organization, they seem to be doing good work. It’s out there. You can find it. I hope people enjoy it.

DJ: I recommend everybody watch it. And I would like to thank you very much for being on the program. I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Jordan Brown. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.