BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Alex1Powell

I've been wanting to do a thread on this and you gave me an excuse. Buckle in, boys!

 You guys know I'm part of Collapse Gang and 2020 has certainly been a year of the kind of vindication I really didn't want to see this early.
I've been expecting something along the lines of the "Descending staircase" of the Tainter Model and 2020 seems like one of those periods where the step down is happening.
Eventually, things will hit a point where they'll stabilise and a sort of normalcy will return.

Only there'll be a bunch of stuff that just can't be done any more and we all just have to get used to that.

We're already seeing ham-handed attempts to set public expectations.
The "Great Reset" isn't so much a conspiracy theory as a pisspoor exercise in expectations management to get people to accept "Yeah we lost the capability to do these things you grew up with and we're NEVER getting it back, at least not this side of a new dark age"
It's a way to try and frame decline and pretend it isn't REALLY decline.

Expect to see a lot of overcompensation born of insecurity as elites start outright threatening anyone who notices and remarks upon the extremely obvious signs of decline.
We're already seeing that with this "Build back better" bullshit.

Everyone involved knows that's nonsense. We won't even be able to build back to where we were before, let alone better.

But they'll threaten you if you say that, because insecurity.
And that's going to be a big theme all around in the next decade or two.

Elites being insecure in their power, due to being incompetent and malicious and ordinary people being insecure in the basic necessities of life, because they are ruled by the worst people in existence.
All I can say is that to whatever extent you can, trying to build your life in anticipation of this insecurity, will put you ahead of the game.

Of course, by doing this you will also be signalling your lack of confidence in the elites ability to look after you.
And that's really the Scylla and Charybdis you're going to have to navigate between - building enough resilience into your life to cope with when vital systems fail, without signalling your lack of trust in the system so hard that you invite reprisals.
An important thing to understand about societal collapse is how socially driven a lot of it is. Complex societies are built on trust and when that trust goes away, the ability to do certain things also goes away even though everything materially necessary to do them remains.
We're going to see a lot of that. We've spent some time in the "looting phase" of institutions being pillaged while those pillaging them insist that it's business as normal and threatening us when we notice that we clearly have things to worry about.
Frankly, we have more to worry about from the people in charge of responses to crises than we often do from the crisis itself. Because they are unfit for their position, trusted by very few people and painfully aware of both of those things.
At the same time, these guys like to front a lot. They're going to pretend they've got some amazing high tech security state they're gonna roll out to keep everyone in line.

For the most part, that's bullshit. The tech is decaying as rapidly as anything else.
A lot of their systems of compliance are built on trying to manufacture consent rather than any ability to consistently and robustly punish people who decide "You know what? Fuck it".
So as time goes on, if you feel like it's more trouble than it's worth to comply with the latest order from some ideological nutjob who isn't fit to run a convenience store, let alone a government department, just don't bother.
If you can pretend to comply, or comply maliciously, even better. Make these assholes work for it. They deserve only your contempt and never your loyalty or compliance.
This is all going towards a new dark age, one way or another. So the urge to rage against the dying of the light is one you must learn to control and suppress. The light will go out and there's nothing you can do about it. Leave the raging to the elites, they'll do plenty.

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Two things can be true at once:
1. There is an issue with hostility some academics have faced on some issues
2. Another academic who himself uses threats of legal action to bully colleagues into silence is not a good faith champion of the free speech cause


I have kept quiet about Matthew's recent outpourings on here but as my estwhile co-author has now seen fit to portray me as an enabler of oppression I think I have a right to reply. So I will.

I consider Matthew to be a colleague and a friend, and we had a longstanding agreement not to engage in disputes on twitter. I disagree with much in the article @UOzkirimli wrote on his research in @openDemocracy but I strongly support his right to express such critical views

I therefore find it outrageous that Matthew saw fit to bully @openDemocracy with legal threats, seeking it seems to stifle criticism of his own work. Such behaviour is simply wrong, and completely inconsistent with an academic commitment to free speech.

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