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At 9:33 PM -1000 on 7/17/00, Reese wrote:
> >For an even better analysis of why some people make digeri doos and
> others
> >make F16's see, "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The fates of Human
> Societies", by
> >Jared Diamond.
> >
> >This book talks about how access to resources, for the most part,
> dictate
> >how human cultures evolve.
>
> How does it address net-importers of resources, vs. net-possessors of
> resources?
It says they build ships. That they have resources to build ships. :-).
Or they have horses. And swords. And they take what they need from people
who don't, or they get conquered themselves.
The canonical example is at the front of the book. It's about how in the
1850's the Maori, a polynesian people who inhabit a tiny bit of
continental land mass (read: lots of different kinds of rock and
biosphere) in the middle of the south pacific called New Zealand, heard,
from English traders, about a society of mostly pacifist, egalitarian
hunter-gatherer (the kind you get in resource poor areas, like the
Australian outback or the Kalihari) polynesians, from roughly the same
cohort (the were from New Zealand even) on a fairly barren island to New
Zealand's, um, east, I think.
Said hunter gatherers had an egalitarian society because everyone had to
do the roughly same thing to eat: gather birds eggs, rodents, whatever.
Their population densities were low, because resources were scarce, and
so there were no real specialists.
The Maoris, on the other hand, lived in a resource rich area, one
containing surface deposits of metals even, and probably would have
developed metalurgy given another thousand years or so. They had an
agricultural, almost feudal, society, with lots population and resulting
social stratification and specialization. Hawaii, by the way, went the
same way for the same reasons (it has something like 5 of the 7 of
earth's biomes, or whatever the number is), but on a smaller scale,
because it's not as big as New Zealand. Australia, once you get over the
coastal plateau, is mostly flat. It doesn't have a lot of surface-metal
deposits in the middle, like you get in Northern and middle Africa, or
Greece, Mesopotamia or Europe, or China.
Anyway, as part of the Maori's feudalism, of course, was the idea of
conquest and slavery. One day the Maoris jumped in their big war canoes,
sailed out to these islands in the middle of nowhere, and proceeded to
conquer and enslave the hunter/gatherers. Game over.
The title "Guns, Germs, and Steel" comes from the idea that agriculture,
in areas where agriculture works best, gives us high population
densities, yielding not only in specialization and, frankly, progress
(cavalry, ships, steel, and guns), but, also, those same population
densities yield periodic epidemics and the resulting immunity to same.
Germs, in other words. The fact that most of America was empty (an 80%
population loss? I can't remember) before white people even got there to
see it all, all because of European diseases like smallpox, or dumb stuff
like influenza or cholera, is an example of this.
Now Diamond is absolutely balanced about all this. The book is not some
kind of crackpot libertarian wet dream. Far from it. It's intellectual
and academic, dare I say, "liberal" as all get-out, and the book has won
the Pulitzer Prize.
But, nonetheless, the conclusions are clear, folks: reality, progress, in
other words, is not optional. People who don't do new stuff with more
resources cheaper end up, at the very least, working for people who do.
So, to attempt to haul this back to something like topicality, I think
that, in the long run, just like we've created suburbs, we'll probably
create what someone somewhere called "cyburbs", or something, where all
you need is connection to the net and, what, ballistic(?) :-) delivery of
manufactured goods. Or, more likely, automated, distributed manufacture
of goods somewhere very close to you. A geodesic society, in other words.
I think that cryptography, financial cryptography, and bearer financial
cryptography in particular will be the glue which holds this kind of
society together, because it allows for transactions, for financial and
information *property*, without laws. Or, for that matter, a geographic
force monopoly to uphold those laws.
And, of course, when it does happen, like it does with all real progress,
human population will go up, food, actual longevity, will be cheaper, and
people will be spread out to more places they couldn't live before,
including "inhospitable" places like the extreme polar biomes and
structures in space. I'm reminded of what a plains Indian said to his
people after seeing Manhattan in the early 19th century, sometime after
the Erie canal was built, and they had gridded the whole island for
development and people were tearing it up hand over fist to make a city.
He said something like "they're like locusts, and they'll keep coming,
and we'll not be able to stop them."
Finally, we have to remember that the root of the word "civilization" is
"city", and we're a long way off from complete, geodesic
decentralization, if we ever get that far. There's not enough bandwidth,
yet, that's for sure, and Moore's "Law", would have to iterate a whole
bunch between now and then. But I bet when it will happen is an almost
calculable prediction, though.
Cheers,
RAH
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--
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
