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 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.

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.

---

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