Philosophical Research:Apocalypse Manual

What would you do if everything you thought you could count on fell away? That question might sound like the back-cover summary of a Young Adult dystopia book, but it's quite applicable to many real-life situations. Services, platforms, and businesses close all the time, leaving nothing behind. Community projects die suddenly when all their members run out of free time. People lose their jobs and their income yet have to keep existing. People lose their partners. People lose their housing. People lose their movements. People lose their entire country economies and country demoinstitutions. People realize that the things they believed in and the things they hoped for were never true. Everything dies, and with time everything changes.

Or maybe you've got it pretty good, and your greatest problem is merely that you have to maintain a project that requires a group's worth of effort as one person.

Whatever the situation is that leaves you without anyone to count on, what you always must remember is that most crises a person can go through are crises on the basis of how much one is left without the ability to do as an individual, and whether or not an individual can expect other people to return and fulfill said missing tasks. The more resilient a particular thing is to the disappearance of other people and particularly the disappearance of anyone with special expertise in anything, the more robust something is period.

On "The Web"

Many people over the past decade have lamented the slow death of "The Web": a scattered and spontaneous collection of interesting small-scale "web pages" and niche "sites". This always seems to people like some kind of profound statement on the surface, in which everyone has clearly lost sight of what is important to them and misplaced the long-term forest for the short-term trees. However, this particular narrative about "The Web" fails to ask a lot of obvious questions. If any particular spontaneous "site" drops away, it is generally because the living individual behind it became materially unreliable at maintaining it. Some people do not have the time and energy to run servers. Some people do not have the money to pay for servers. Some people do not have the money for a host, and try to put up a server, and suddenly find that they can't maintain it and it has to go down. Some people have so little audience it turns out not to be worth the energy to put up a server. In any of these cases, who exactly would be expected to put back up and restore something that might only be important to and worth the energy of the person that originally put it up? At the end of the day every individualized "web site" is a person, and people are notoriously unreliable. People go away and do something else. People die. And other people have no real control over the time at which that happens.

The reason any particular scattered and spontaneous collection of "web sites" has dropped away is simply that such spontaneous constellations are not mathematically configured to survive. Large corporate entities have increasingly filled up the space because they have a more favorable configuration, given their ability to regulate the needs and expenses of great numbers of people at once. Even so, the ability of large corporate entities to successfully endure as specific entities is almost as fragile as the scattered tiny "web sites" that preceded them.

On printed books

In principle, printed books should be excellent at following Apocalypse Manual, and one of the most reliable repositories of information. A printed book requires no power beyond sufficient light to read it. A printed book can be preserved for decades without any electricity aside from any possible concerns about temperature changes. But in practice books are not all they're cracked up to be. Books take up physical space, which can be at a premium in a crisis situation. Homeless people have nowhere to put books, or very few places. Many people find their local libraries do not have space for the books they want to read, and they have to ship in books from some other city just to check them out from the library, or to buy them at the bookstore. Books have a critical problem that they are dreadfully inefficient — there are always more books than there is space to keep books, and there are always more books than there is time to sort through all the excess information contained in the great ocean of books spread across multiple cities and multiple countries to find the much smaller body of crucial information any particular individual or group of people is actually looking for.

Here is the problem with books: it takes weeks, months, or years to solidly disprove an incorrect statement by finding the correct books, but it takes less than a day for somebody to spread misinformation to hundreds of thousands of people. Books cost money, but misinformation costs nothing. Books take time and effort to print and then to ship across an entire country area, but misinformation takes no physical effort to transport. If we want people to be properly informed, all the proper information needs to be instantly available at no charge yesterday.

the surest repository of knowledge is one that is tiny and absolutely vast in how much information it can transport. it could well be the case that a cheap, replaceable digital device with indefinite access to battery power is superior to a collection of books.

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core theme: everything should be maintainable by one person at a time, because when something fails, it's very likely there will be no more than one inexperienced individual to fix it