The decentralization of the real world: an Unruly thesis | Hacker News Reader

The decentralization of the real world: an Unruly thesis

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18 pointssimonebrunozzi10 comments

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> Food will be produced on your rooftop.

> Energy will be produced right next to it.

> Objects will be printed on demand, as needed and in your garage (or close by).

> We will reduce our materials use.

> We will reuse everything we can.

> We will recycle everything else.

To me, this really has echoes of:

> In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.

Which is Tyler Durden's vision of the future from Fight Club.

And just like that vision, this only works if you reduce human population by 90% or more. If I live in a condo, I don't have a rooftop to grow food. Do I starve?

Edit: It's also funny that this is listed as a point.

> We won't rely on government incentives and massive corporations deciding what we should eat. Fiat food is over.

If you want to eat "locally" (food produced on your rooftop), prepare to limit your food choices a lot more than any government or corporation would/could. No more bananas, mangos, pineapples, chocolate, coffee, etc. if you live anywhere near the 49th parallel for example.

Division of labour creates wealth... that's not distributed.

BTW The origins of basic supermarket foods is amazing: e.g. potato, corn, avocado are from the Americas. What did Europeans used to eat - cabbage and turnips?

Also, the Earth can theoretically sustain a few more billions of humans if we become vegetarians (vegans?), but with our current population, we can't support everyone living like the average American. Americans also aren't impacted by the early degradation of the climate as much. There isn't incentive for Americans and other highly developed countries to greatly lower their own living standards, but it's either that or a culling.

There's literally millions of square miles of completely unused land across the world. There's absolutely no reason we couldn't theoretically support a higher standard of living for everyone that currently lives, from a technological perspective.

Land isn't just fungible. Arable land that can be used to grow crops, fresh drinking water, greenhouse gas emissions (human transportation, freight, farming, computing, utilities, etc.), and housing are all factors to consider (some not related to land). For housing, more vertical cities would be helpful, but the suburban sprawl needs to be contained. Maybe we can squeeze in some more capacity, but it's reckless to act like we can continue barrelling forward with a high standard of living for everyone. We're not going to go extinct any time soon, but those of us on HN are generally more privileged and shouldn't be gambling on millions of lives.

In the US we also have been converting conveniently flat, fertile land near cities into warehouses, light industrial, and parking lots as those are more valuable uses per sq ft. And over time the light industrial doesn't look so good when compared with the townhouses, so they get redeveloped and the infrastructure moves further away, or gets consolidated. The same type of thing happens in cities with old warehouses near ports but I have less exposure to that.

With enough fusion generator, water, lighting, robots, building materials, and seeds, you can grow all of that stuff pretty easily anywhere. Maybe you'd even be able to download and print the seeds.

"Decentralization of the real world" is a euphemism for the collapse of global diplomacy and modern Westphalian nations (territorialism, violent conflict), the disolution of their mature institutions (law, medicine, education, travel protections, etc) and the lifestyles they enable.

Now, we might be headed that way and the far side of the transition might be heavenly (for some), but it's probably wise to keep in mind that the historical "pendulum swings" between centralization and decentralization don't tend to go smoothly. Too much reliance on the euphemism makes it easy to forget.

On the plus side this article is absolutely the cringiest, crypto-bro take on the idea so completely unlikely to go anywhere except a collapsing seastead.

Please, please, please tell me how you can run a blockchain without centralized authority? Do you have a photolithography rig in your garage?

The future imagined in this trainwreck of a blogpost is brutish and ruled by might. You better give half of your "rooftop grown" produce to the big dude that comes around every week or else your head gets bashed in, either by him or by someone else he's protecting you from. Oh wait, no, you made big guns in your garage to shoot them when they come near! Right.

It's astonishing how far people can fit their heads up their own asses.

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