Low-Tech Movement: Not Just Pedestrian Pride
Is technological progress a bell-shaped curve and are we approaching its decline? It seems that way sometimes when you think about our country’s embittered relationship with the automobile.
There is a silly horror movie called Bloodcar; I can’t quite recommend it, but conceptually it is interesting — gas prices are at an impossible cost so suburban cars become ruins. A crazed auto-mechanic stuffs a body under the hood and discovers human blood powers the machine. Then….
We won’t ever reach that point of desperation … not just in terms of cannibalistic survival mechanisms. Remember Julian Simon’s bet with Paul R. Ehrlich? Tradeoffs are made and substitutes emerge eventually over time… just never as quickly as we’d like. The nature of scarcity is little consolation when you’re standing by the pump today and watching the numbers flicker up to twice what you’d expect to cover groceries for the week.
The best solution for most of us city-dwellers seems to be abandoning the car entirely. And for everyone else it is moving to the city:
We can see even now communities where for reasons of land scarcity people have been forced to adopt a lifestyle that uses much less energy – places like Manhattan, London or Singapore. Manhattan, for example, has 67,000 people per square mile. Kensington and Chelsea in London have 37,000 people per square mile. Housing space per person is much smaller, people walk or take public transit to work and to shop, and energy usage is correspondingly much lower, despite the inhabitants being very rich.
So the future after peak oil will involve living in such dense urban settings where destinations are walkable or bikeable, just as in pre-industrial cities (the city of London in 1801 had 100,000 inhabitants in one square mile). Homes will be much smaller, but instead of caverns of off-white sheet rock, we will spend our money in making much more attractive interiors. Nights will be darker. We will not have retail outlets lit up like the glare of the midday sun in Death Valley.
The New Amsterdam Project, recently profiled in the CS Monitor, is a wonderful Boston group providing “human-powered delivery services,” bikes instead of trucks. Environmental concern plays the major role, but the social experience is also a big part of it.
There’s also the circular bureaucracy that strangles every urban car-owner — the parking tickets, the meter maids and speed cameras, the waking up to a brick in your back window — oil is rarely the only grounds for divorce. It’s an example of bureaucracy slowly eating itself, until the people give up on it entirely.
But what if this movement went beyond the automobile, and sparked a trend against everything battery powered? Low-tech Magazine, the website that “doubts on technology,” has a number of low-tech alternatives with modern uses, some really ingenious like consumer goods transported through underground pipelines.
Remember several years ago, how those who managed without a cellphone and laptop were jokingly refered to as neo-luddites? There was a starving-artist chic to it, but today anyone without either is just considered really poor. Now, frustration with technology’s demands is the cliche of modern life. Surely, I’m not alone in going weekends with my cellphone on mute in a box someplace, when I know I just don’t want to think about anyone other than myself.
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