Left Flank

John Michael Greer pronounces the Internet dead before he advocates what he calls «the ecotechnic societies of a sustainable future».

There are also few dimensions of modern industrial society more
vulnerable to breakdown in the age of scarcity now beginning. The
internet, the crown jewel of modern communications, depends on a huge
and energy-intensive infrastructure that may well prove unsustainable
in the future. A single server farm can use as much electricity as a
small city, and the technology that makes the internet possible in the
first place requires plenty of energy, exotic raw materials, and a very
high level of technology – none of which can necessarily be guaranteed
in the decades to come. On a broader level, most of today's
telecommunications, including the internet, support themselves through
advertising sales, and the economic model that makes this work will
have a hard time surviving the collapse of the consumer economy.

At the same time, electronic communications media need not be as
dependent on today's industrial systems as they are. It's quite
possible to build a vacuum tube – the backbone of radio communications
in the days before transistors – from commonly available materials
using hand tools; Peter Friedrichs' excellent book Instruments of Amplification,
which details how to do this, has become popular reading on the more
outré end of the do-it-yourself crowd. Fifty years ago, widely
available books for the teen market such as Alfred P. Morgan's The Boy's First (and so on up through Sixth) Book of Radio and Electronics
taught aspiring young electricians how to build remarkably
sophisticated gear out of oatmeal boxes, spare parts and salvaged
scrap. The possibility of viable electronics in a post-peak oil era
deserves exploration.

What would a viable long-distance communications network in the age
of peak oil look like? To begin with, it would use the airwaves rather
than land lines, to minimize infrastructure, and its energy needs would
be modest enough to be met by local renewable sources. It would take
the form of a decentralized network of self-supporting and
self-managing stations sharing common standards and operating
procedures. It would use a diverse mix of communications modalities, so
that operators could climb down the technological ladder as needed,
from computerized data transfer all the way to equipment that could be
built locally with hand tools. It would have its own subculture, of
course, in which technical knowledge and practical expertise would be
rewarded, encouraged, and fostered in newcomers. Finally, it would take
a particular interest in energency communications, so that operators
could respond to disruptions and disasters with effective workarounds
at times when having even the most basic communications net in place
could save many lives.

The interesting thing, of course, is that a network that fills
exactly these specifications already exists, in the form of amateur
radio. During a long and complex history, the original loose network of
radio experimenters who pioneered the airwaves in the first three
decades of the 20th century morphed into a worldwide community of radio
hobbyists, who are assigned their own segments of the radio spectrum.
Licensed and occasionally encouraged by governments, «ham radio» – the
origins of the nickname are a subject of some debate – flies almost
completely under the radar of the wider culture these days, surfacing
only when someone in the media notices that in the wake of some natural
disaster, a group of local radio amateurs stepped up and kept emergency
communications going when all other channels shut down.