Especially the part where the article says "All you can hope for is to keep hacking and extending its life in increasingly brittle ways, and hope to avoid a big random event that triggers collapse."

It's that "increasingly brittle" part combined with the inevitability of the "random event" part that spells eventual doom for this attempt to stack band-aids infinitely thick on the problem.

The kind of hacking I'm seeing in my crystal ball is learning how to turn nickles and quarters into metal arrowheads for small game hunting.

Should be edited to read "the way big old cities that have managed to survive seem to survive..."

That makes it a tautology, or at the very least, selection bias. You can't count the survival of surviving cities, while ignoring the non-survival of non-surviving cities as evidence that all cities survive. There are a lot of examples of big old cities that did not survive. Unless, of course, you only look at the last few hundred years, which is a very short-sighted view of history. Especially history as it might be applied to the deep future.

It's very uncomfortable to contemplate one's own individual mortality, and just as uncomfortable to contemplate the mortality of civilizations. But if history has taught us one thing it's that civilizations do NOT last forever. And if paleontology has taught us anything, it is that species do not last forever either. System become too complex to manage, and then they collapse. It's the natural order of things. It's just the way it goes. To think this generation is so smart it can avoid that natural cycle is like those folks who in 1929 told us the business cycle had been conquered and permanent prosperity had arrived.

In the final analysis it doesn't matter what I believe or what you believe. The inexorable laws of thermodynamics and the laws governing complex dynamical systems will grind on and on, oblivious to our opinions. The great machine will unwind, as all great machines do, and this civilization will end, as all great civilizations have in the past.

The way that old cities which have managed to survive, appears to be through, “hackstability.”

Therefore, “hackstability” appears be be (in these instances at least) a successful survival strategy.

For an example…

I don't see that it has any bearing on the historical fact that civilizations eventually overextend and fall, however. And ours will not be the first civilization with toilets and sewer systems to fall. The Indus Valley Civilizations, e.g., Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and the Romans and Egyptians had toilets and sewer systems and they fell. And I'll bet they also thought they were too clever to ever fail.

Is this a law which cannot be violated?

Or is it self-selecting?


The sun now sets on both the Spanish and English empires, yet London and Madrid seem not to be wastelands.

"Civilization" and "empire" are two different things. Civilization can survive the collapse of empires but empires cannot survive the collapse of civilization. Modern civilization is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels powering complex trade and communications networks. This makes our civilization much more brittle than any previous civilization. One unusually large solar storm, one suborbital EMP, one small asteroid, one super volcano, or any one of a number of other disasters whose effects might have been local or regional in centuries past can now have global consequences.

In times past civilizations were more robust because they were local and there was a lot of redundancy built in. Today civilization is fragile because it's too interconnected and the redundancy has been discarded in the name of efficiency. Something like Chernobyl or Fukushima close to New York, or Chicago could shut down world markets and start a chain reaction that resulted in the whole system coming unglued. It's a house of cards with a shaky foundation.

(tautology)

In an earthquake, a rigid structure may be more prone to collapse than a flexible structure.

http://nzwood.co.nz/industry-news/2010/02/09/wooden-multi-storey-buildings-show-great-promise-for-earthquake-zones/

"...a rigid structure may be more prone to collapse..."

Exactly. And our civilization, by virtue of it's complexity, has become too rigid and brittle. My point exactly.

But rather than try to prove it to you, I'm content to sit back and wait for it, although it may not happen in my lifetime. Still, in theory, my hypothesis can be confirmed, eventually, while yours cannot be confirmed, ever, because there's always the chance the civilization may collapse tomorrow.

And there is a fundamental difference between us. While you are content to sit and wait for society to collapse around you. I am not.

This just seems to be saying the we should just continue to stumble along as best we can.

It doesn't seem to be advocating any changes in how we do things.

At least that's my opinion. As an old time computer hack, I have sympathy for the liberal definition of the term. Common culture -- fuck you, Hollywood -- always terms hacking negatively, which anyone who has ever called themself a hacker knows is a fucked-up characterization. It is precisely like calling all Catholics sodomites. Neither characterization is correct.

The open source concept, which gave rise to a vast portion of the Intertube technologies, is valid across any number of disciplines. Of course, it has been used substantially by the sciences for decades, if not centuries, and is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the citizen scientist movement which is becoming a very potent force.

It is all about assembling a brain share where anybody who has interest and the education needed (formal or otherwise) to cut the mustard, one is welcome to participate.

It is about sharing info to make society, environment, life, liberty, etc. a community project. The cool thing is that we have the perfect infrastructure to do precisely that, the Intertubes.

I use only Linux on my computers which is a product of precisely this model of cooperation, as is the Internet itself. I don't even need virus scanners. (Email Spam filters, yes!)

I love the idea. I also like his definition: "An intelligent, but rough-handed and expedient behavior aimed at manipulating a complicated reality locally for immediate gain." I hacked a lot of small programs (especially in assembly language) back in the late 70s and early 80s.

Then I went to work for a telecom company that was coding its second really big PBX, and I discovered something about hacking. It can work really well in small, isolated, one-off systems, but in big, complex, interwoven systems it's the kiss of death. It introduces instabilities that can show up far from where the hack was done, and it makes the entire system less and less maintainable.

Here's one example of such a hack that is killing the world: automated, ultra-high-speed commodity trading, also known as algorithmic trading or robotrading. It's a classic hack in terms of the definition he uses, and its consequences are devastating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

Hacking is a natural human tendency, but in a big system like a global industrial civilization it can be a suboptimal approach to change management...

Yet, scripting languages are the foundation for much of the modern “web.”

Take, for example:

• JavaScript
• PHP