Fossil Fuels and Capitalism, A Retrospective
Taking Less, Giving More — Part I
This is the first entry in a multi-part manifesto by the newest author to take on the Pablo Parabola name.
Taking Less, Giving More
Combating Climate Change Through Contributism
Part I
Fossil Fuels and Capitalism, A Retrospective
In the wake of a devastating hurricane season, it is imperative to explore the choices that have led humanity to this pivotal moment, and from this foundation peer beyond the veil to the possible futures before us.
The technological marvels that have fueled the global spread of capitalism in the last century can be traced to a single source. Oil. [1]
Petrochemicals have unleashed an exponential quality increase in every aspect of human life. Whatever humanity wanted, oil delivered an answer. Plastics could outlast any naturally occurring polymer by many centuries, meaning less time spent repairing and replacing worn components. Instead of harvesting bat guano from far off atolls, modern chemistry could synthesize fertilizer from fossil fuel feedstock. Electricity became commonplace and abundant, as new materials begat new techniques for wire insulation, data transmission, and remote control.
As humanity’s ability to transmute oil grew, so did our overall supply of money. Unlike gold, the benefit of abstract currencies was that as productivity increased, more money could be made available to other members of the community, whether that community was a small farming town in eastern Oklahoma or all 9 billion people on planet Earth. This is the underlying premise of fractional reserve banking, a fundamentally contributist concept in itself. A windfall of good fortune experienced by a singular individual goes into a bank and is then redistributed to other clients in the form of loans, while the bank might hold only a few cents per dollar in reserve. This takes one dollar and makes it ten, enabling enterprising individuals to roll the dice on innovation.
At the core of this entire scheme is the premise that currencies are a representation of value. That value can take many forms, but no matter what the direct value is to the consumer, this value is a representation of time. Producing more wheat in a given harvest means less time spent plowing fields or pulling weeds. Therefore spending top dollar for time saving tools or extra strength pesticides are worth the investment. A thought provoking film is a distilled and polished narrative journey told through a medium of sight and sound, stirring within the viewer ideas and emotions that they may have needed years of introspection to achieve personally. The very basis of entertainment is that it fills our time with meaning, adding texture and richness to our lives.
Fossil fuels, themselves formed over millions of years, were extracted and refined by humanity to save billions of hours of labor. This increase in productivity per unit time is the fundamental basis of capitalist expansion that has come to shape modern life. Unbeknownst to the wider public, this thermodynamic trickery of converting oil and gas into abundant energy literally mortgaged the future of humanity for the benefit of the present. The many centuries of extra productivity we have unlocked in these past few decades have manifested themselves as a debt to the environment, to our ecosystems, to our future generations.
Capitalism was a useful framework for directing and allocating this added time. It forced humanity to think non-intuitively, driven to utilize cheap and abundant energy to maximize production. Our massively interconnected lives have led to seemingly paradoxical efficiencies. For example, when buying pear compote in the USA, who could have imagined that the most capital efficient solution would be to grow the pears in Argentina, ship them across the Pacific to be packed in Thailand, and then cross that giant blue expanse again to await consumption. [2]
Driven by a singular focus on maximizing profits, capitalism has subsumed itself like an overheating snake. Instead of leveraging capital to improve the quality of life, capital has leveraged the lives of the many to serve the wants of the few.
Machine learning is the latest incarnation of this trend, promising to further reduce human involvement in the production of knowledge work, drawing upon an overwhelming display of resources to train and develop these tools, upending copyright protections and environmental commitments. [3, 4, 5, 6, 7] Yet even if large language models are able to deliver on their lofty claims, will our society be better as a result? Will our interpersonal relationships be strengthened? Will our communities be drawn closer, and the rhythm of our weeks more lively and bright?
The umbra of capitalistic taking doesn’t consider the externalities of the environment or society. This singular focus on increasing shareholder value has shaped the rise of Big Tech from brash, irreverent newcomers, to subservient participants in a global surveillance apparatus, powering new forms of international espionage and propaganda, while also raising an anxious generation [8] beset with challenges our current cultural attitudes are unable to address. I don’t believe this is a grand conspiracy to usher in a brave new world, but rather the consequence of a simple formula. More engagement with the platform enables better and more targeted advertising.
Advertising is the leading edge of the modern capitalist money machine, with Meta and Google dominating the market by becoming wildly efficient at extracting individual user data.
Contributism in the 21st century needs to be about reversing this societal norm. The discovery of oil led to such dazzling gains in productivity that we began to believe that productivity was an end in itself. By chasing productivity for its own sake, we have distracted ourselves from our humanity. We toil endlessly in pursuit of more energy to burn, despite knowing that it does not fulfill us, and even imperils our future selves. Instead of racing to see who can hoard the most capital, can we turn the tide, and ask: how can we enable the most number of people to be fulfilled, and in their fulfillment, contribute?
Read next: Part 2: The Human Condition is Contributist