Most of the time, in writing these essays, I try to treat the decline of industrial society with the

seriousness that it deserves. Sometimes, though, the plain raw absurdity of our current situation
rises to a point that only raucous laughter can address. I ran into another of those points a few
days back, while reading an article on Yahoo News sent to me by a longtime reader and
commenter—tip of the hat to David By The Lake. The article is by Hasan Chowdhury, and its
title is “Humanity is on the brink of major scientific breakthroughs, but nobody seems to care.”
You can read it here.

Chowdhury’s article points out that recent news stories about the latest heavily promoted claims
of a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research, and the much-hyped announcement by two South
Korean researchers that a room-temperature superconductor had been discovered, didn’t get the
response the media expected.  By and large, people yawned. To Chowdhury, this is appalling,
and he argues that two factors are responsible.  The first is that people in the hard sciences need
to be better at publicity. The second is that too many people out there suffer from an irrational
fear of progress, and simply need to be convinced that the latest gosh-wow technologies will
surely benefit them sometime very soon.

As though they don’t get enough fawning

attention from government and media already.

Yeah, that was when I started laughing too.

Let’s start by talking about the two supposed breakthroughs Chowdhury talks about. The first is
the claim that yet another team of fusion researchers has achieved net energy gain—the point at
which the energy coming out of a fusion reaction is more than the energy put into it.  This was
first achieved in 2014, and a handful of other research teams have managed it in the years since
then. Is it a step in the direction of commercial fusion power?  Sure, in exactly the same sense
that bouncing high on a trampoline is a step in the direction of landing on the moon.

The net energy gain in question, to begin with, is only a gain if you compare the output of the
laser beams used to kindle the fusion reaction with the energy released by the reaction itself. It
takes far more energy to fire up those lasers than you get out the business end, and so far fusion
reactions have not even achieved the energy output they need to power their own lasers. And the
other energy inputs needed to build, run, and maintain an experimental fusion reactor? Those
aren’t included in the net energy figures either.
Nor, of course, does any of this affect the astonishingly dismal economics of fusion power.  The
reason that commercial fission, the other kind of nuclear power, is dead in the water these days is
not that it doesn’t work—it’s that it’s so expensive that nuclear reactors can’t pay for themselves
without gargantuan ongoing government subsidies. Fusion reactors are several orders of
magnitude more complex and expensive than fission reactors. This means that even if some
future fusion reactor can get positive net energy compared to all its energy inputs, it’s still an
expensive stunt, not a source of grid electricity that any country anywhere in the world can
afford. Of course Chowdhury doesn’t mention this; nobody pushing fusion hype ever breathes a
word about the economics of what promises to be, even if it works someday, the world’s most
hopelessly unaffordable power source.

The second breakthrough Chowdhury wants us to get excited about is the claim that a room
temperature superconductor has been invented. A superconductor, for those of my readers who
went to American public schools and therefore got no scientific education worth mentioning, is a
material that conducts electricity with effectively no resistance. Existing superconductors have to
be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero and subjected to various other complex
conditions, which limit their usefulness. (Superconductors are heavily used in experimental
fusion reactors, for example. Is the energy needed to cool them to working temperatures factored
into those net energy figures?  Surely you jest.)

“I wish she’d cut the political lectures and get

around to teaching us some science.”

So why hasn’t this announcement been met with gladsome cries?  Because for decades now the
media has been full of exciting new scientific breakthroughs that turned out to be bogus. We’re
constantly being told that this or that or the other wonderful technological revolution is about to
happen. It’s the follow-through that deserves attention here, because the vast majority of these
announcements are pure hype, meant to separate fools from their investment money in the time-
honored fashion. As it turns out, the room temperature superconductor seems to be another
example of this kind; repeated attempts by other labs to get the same results have failed, and so
it’s pretty clear that the research team that made that claim was either mistaken or lying.

This sort of thing is far more common than the cheerleaders of science like to admit. Retraction
Watch, the most widely respected organization tracking scientific fakery these days, estimates
that more than 100,000 papers should be retracted each year; the actual number in 2022 was less
than 5500. Of retracted papers, four-fifths on average are withdrawn due to scientific fraud. You
know those claims that scientists can be trusted to police themselves, and will drive fraudulent
researchers out of the business?  Think again.  Retraction Watch lists some researchers who have
had more than a hundred papers retracted, and are still happily employed in their laboratories
turning out junk science.

Until relatively recently this was treated as an internal problem within the scientific community.
The difficulty scientists face is that now it’s a public scandal. A very large number of people
outside the sciences are well aware that scientific opinions are for sale to the highest bidder, that
a great many scientific studies are fraudulent or simply wrong, and that in a great many cases,
scientists simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They know this, in turn, because their
noses have been rubbed in it over and over again by public policies promoted by scientists the
failed abjectly to live up to the hype.

Fusion was just twenty years in the future when

this photo was taken…

It’s ironic that Chowdhury should have chosen fusion power as one of his examples, because it’s
also one of the biggest offenders here. You can get a belly laugh quite reliably in many parts of
today’s America by saying in an earnest voice, “Fusion power is just twenty years in the future!” 
The reason, of course, is that experts have been saying these words in exactly that tone since the
1950s. Most people realize at this point that it’s never going to happen; most people figured out a
long time ago that the fusion researchers who say this are simply angling for another round of
government money to flush down their high-tech ratholes.

The fact that scientists, politicians, and the media still pretend that commercial fusion power is
possible is thus an important factor in the collapse of public confidence in expert opinion of all
kinds. The narrative that scientists, politicians, and the media are pushing—“fusion researchers
are closing in rapidly on a wonderful new power source for everyone”—has drifted much too far
away from the narrative that the facts are telling—“fusion researchers are spinning their wheels
uselessly, but they don’t want to admit it since their income depends on claiming otherwise”—
and more and more people are coming to believe the second narrative.

It’s far from the only offender along these lines. At least as much credit has to be given to the
scientific rhetoric around climate change. Before we go on, I want to point out that yes, the
global climate is changing; yes, there are serious problems caused by the current pace and
direction of climate change; and yes, greenhouse gases produced by human activity play a role in
the shift in climate we’re experiencing. Those three points are important, and in an upcoming
post I’ll be discussing them in considerably more detail, but they don’t begin to justify the shrill
claims that have been made by climate scientists in recent decades.

…and it will still be twenty years in the future in

2995 AD, when the ruins of Las Vegas will look like this.

The parade of failed doomsday predictions by climate scientists has become so embarrassing that
you can find entire chronologies online listing inaccurate claims made by experts, and comparing
them to what actually happened. Somehow, despite those claims claims splashed around by Al
Gore et al., the Arctic Ocean is not yet ice-free in summer—that was supposed to happen years
ago, according to the hype—and polar bear populations are rebounding as the bears do what
Darwin predicted and adapt to changing environments. Again, this does not mean that global
climate change isn’t happening. It means that the experts know a lot less about climate change
(not to mention polar bear ecology) than they think they do. What that means, in turn, is that a
growing number of people are responding to the latest dire pronouncements of climate activists
by rolling their eyes and walking away.

Hasan Chowdhury also has his equivalents in this field. I’m thinking here especially of a recent
article by Rebecca Solnit titled “We can’t afford to be climate doomers,” which you can
read here. She insists that it’s wrong for people to assume that nothing can be done about climate
change—why, if we all clap our hands in unison and believe, surely Tinkerbell can be saved! It’s
interesting to compare Solnit’s earnestness with the equally earnest claim by Greta Thunberg in
2018 that if we didn’t give up all fossil fuels within five years, humanity would be doomed to
certain extinction. If the scientists Thunberg cited were right, it’s already too late; if they were
wrong, why should we believe the rest of what they’re claiming?

Solnit is incensed that “the comfortable in the global north”—that is to say, the privileged classes
to which she herself belongs—are increasingly discouraged about climate change. She insists
that all we have to do is embrace the same remedies she and her fellow activists have been
pushing all along:  political action, allegedly green technologies, and the demonization of fossil
fuel companies. The difficulty, of course, is that those supposed remedies have not just failed to
achieve their goals, they’ve failed to have any effect on climate at all.
 You know as well as I do that they’re still
planning to fly to their next vacation in Bali. Using less carbon? That’s for other people.

After all, despite climate treaties, green technologies, activists throwing public temper tantrums
about climate, and the rest of it, fossil fuel use and the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere both
continue to climb steadily.   All those wind turbines and solar PV farms haven’t even slowed the
global increase in fossil fuel consumption, much less replaced any noticeable amount of fossil
fuels with green energy—in point of fact, world consumption of coal, the dirtiest fuel of all, hit
an all-time record last year, up 3.3% from the year before. The narrative Solnit is pushing
amounts to “climate protesters are heroes saving the earth from evil fossil fuel companies,” but
the narrative that the facts are telling is “climate protesters are a pampered subculture engaging
in meaningless virtue signaling while ignoring their own carbon-laced lifestyles.”  Once again,
it’s the latter narrative that’s become more convincing to people these days.

What exactly have the last three decades of climate protest accomplished, after all? That’s a
question you’re not supposed to ask. Of course, mutatis mutandis, that’s the question you’re not
supposed to ask about fusion—what have all those billions of dollars of investment in fusion
reactors accomplished so far?—or about a long, long list of supposed breakthroughs and dangers
the media is still  pretending to take seriously. No matter how many times the same hype has
been disproven by events, no matter how many supposed experts have tripped over their own
predictions and bloodied their noses on the hard pavement of reality, the rest of us are supposed
to place blind faith in whatever they happen to say this time around.

There, in turn, is where it’s possible to glimpse the chasm opening beneath the feet of today’s
corporate-managerial aristocracy.

Every society depends for social cohesion on the widespread acceptance of a shared narrative
about authority. In the European Middle Ages, the narrative held that kings were anointed by
God to do the work of leading God’s people, and that divine sanction cascaded down the feudal
hierarchy through dukes and barons and knights and peasants all the way to the swineherd
leading his pigs. Everyone knew that plenty of kings, and for that matter plenty of swineherds,
didn’t live up to the image the narrative assigned them.  As long as the narrative remained in
place, even the political radicals of the time thought in terms of getting each person to fill their
assigned roles, rather than tearing down the feudal structure itself.
 “Yes, he’s a complete dunderhead, but God has set him over us!”

The medieval narrative was durable precisely because it wasn’t vulnerable to objective disproof.
If the king was a brute or a nitwit, as of course he was tolerably often, that just showed that God
was irate and had sent the people a bad ruler as punishment for their sins. The early Protestant-
capitalist narrative that replaced it was equally immune to disproof.  God (or his faux-secular
equivalent, the almighty market) had assigned the rich their riches and the poor their poverty as a
sign that the former were pleasing in his sight and the latter were not, and the remarkably
arbitrary nature of divine favor was hardwired into Protestant ideology from the early days of the
Reformation onward.

But the Protestant-capitalist narrative gave way in the wake of the Great Depression to a new
narrative of expertise.  According to that new narrative, bureaucratic and corporate meritocracies
had received the secular equivalent of divine favor because they were the smart kids in the room.
Their university degrees and their successful ascent of organizational hierarchies proved that
they were better suited to run the world than anyone else, and they were expected to demonstrate
that in practice by pursuing policies that worked.

At first, that wasn’t much of a problem, because the kleptocratic investment class that ran the
country before the Depression had made such a mess of things that almost anything would have
been an improvement.  Later on it became more difficult, when real world problems—cough,
cough, Vietnam, the War on Poverty, etc.—turned out to be much more recalcitrant than anyone
in the managerial class thought. There was a trap hidden within their rhetoric, however, and it
turned out to be a trap from which they could not escape.

Central to the core narrative of the entire industrial world during the managerial era was the
insistence that sometime soon everything would change. The world we all knew would be
replaced by something else—by a shiny Utopian Tomorrowland, if we all gave the experts
everything they wanted, and by a smoking postapocalyptic wasteland if we didn’t. That was the
message that scientists, politicians, and the media rehashed endlessly:  tomorrow may be
wonderful or it may be terrible, but it will not be the same as today.

This future has pulled a no-show…

The fact of the matter is that both the promise and the threat turned out to be bogus.  As Peter
Thiel famously said, we were promised flying cars, and what we got instead was 140 characters
and an easy way to circulate cat pictures around the world. Chowdhury himself, in the article
cited above, quoted a venture capitalist complaining that no matter how wonderful and exciting
and cutting-edge the imaginary world of computer imagery looks, as soon as you return to
everyday life things change utterly:  “The minute you get into a car, the minute you plug
something into a wall, the minute you eat food, you’re still living in the 1950s.”

Except, of course, you’re not—not unless you’re a wealthy venture capitalist, or for that matter a
comfortable media flack, and in either case you can afford to ignore the explosive crapification
of modern life. In the 1950s an ordinary unskilled laborer could count on earning enough money
to stay fed, clothed, housed, and supplied with the other necessities of life.  In the 2020s even
skilled workers have to struggle to do these things. Compared to that unchanging reality, all
those promises of a shiny new future about to dawn any day now look like vicious jokes. Even
the thought of a sudden apocalyptic end to the system has begun to lose its appeal—and yes, it
has considerable appeal to those who have been assigned the short end of the stick by the current
system. The apocalypse has pulled so many no-shows at this point that the disaffected are no
longer counting on it to free them from the dead weight of an unbearable situation.

What we see around us is a society caught in the throes of futurus interruptus, denied both the
orgasmic release of the Tomorrowland future and the even juicier equivalent of its apocalyptic
twin, waiting in increasing frustration for a fulfillment that’s endlessly promised but never
arrives.  That’s the time bomb ticking away at the heart of the system. Chowdhury, Solnit, and
their many equivalents in today’s media are right to be terrified at the increasingly widespread
refusal to put any more faith in the same tripe that’s been shoveled forth by their equivalents
since the managerial aristocracy seized power not quite a century ago.  Once the central narrative
breaks down, after all, the end of the existing order of society is a foregone conclusion.
 …and so has this one. What will you do now?

That end need not involve vast amounts of bloodshed.  Wars of independence tend to be hard-
fought, but domestic revolutions very often involve only token violence. What happens instead—
in France in 1789, in Russia in 1991, and in many other cases—is that a system that has been
hollowed out by a string of cascading failures runs into one more crisis than it can tolerate, and
implodes under the weight of its own absurdities. We are much closer to such scenes in North
America and Western Europe right now than I think most people realize.  Every belly laugh
called forth by the drivel that Chowdhury and Solnit expect us to believe brings us closer still.