Collapsitarians
March 24th, 02009 by Kevin Kelly
There’s a new mood: collapse.
Former President Reagan defined a recession as when your friend lost his job, and a depression as when you lost your job. Collapse is when no one has a job; in fact there are no longer any such things as jobs to be had.
Google Trends showing number of news references to “collapse” (red) and “depression” (blue).
Doom and collapse are in the air. We could think of the Long Doom as the opposite of the Long Boom. The stock market has been falling steadily for a year and not even the usual optimists are claiming it has bottomed out. Like a vicious circle bad news breeds more bad news, and so at the moment the prospect for the near future is for more of the same bad news.
How low could it go?
Article continued at The Technium…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under Futures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on March 27th, 2009 at 4:57 am
[...] in developed countries. Evidence of this mood shift from Google Trends was highlighted on the LongNow blog a couple of days ago – worth a [...]
Posted on March 30th, 2009 at 10:17 am
* Nicholas Davis commented on John L. Petersen’s “A Vision for 2012″ –in response to Kevin Kelly’s “Collapsitarians” article, urging that we consider some measured apprehension about –all the train wrecks which seem to be looming ahead, punctuated, of course, by the Mayan Calendar’s closing curtain in 2012.
That all be as it may. If the “end times” are upon us, then we’ll just have to take comfort in having planted a few time capsules –to enhance the prospects of our Earthly salvation. However: should 2012 and all those horse riders of the apocalypse mostly ride on by, we’ll then have been very remiss –in having missed a marketing opportunity for Long Now.
* “Y2K” brought forth a sufficient increase in the number of people interested in placing time capsules to support a boom in the industry which manufactures such containers. Aside from the ongoing interest in placing a 50 or 100 year capsule into a local corner stone, I think the growing
“Collapsitarian” awareness, along with the rapid approach of the ballyhooed year of 2012, is going to make what happened to the “time capsuling” industry in Y2K seem rather tame.
Long Now will have a considerable asset in the eyes of this growing community of time capsulers, once they’re made aware of how difficult it is to find and appropriately mark a suitable location, and to balance optimizing the chance of future recovery without exposing the capsule to a greater risk of vandalism in the meanwhile.
Why not tap into the financial and personal support of this interest group by drilling banks of “pigeon holes” into the soft interior walls of Long Now’s mountain cave system –to receive and cement in donors’ capsules? Prices might range from $100 (and/or be a one-time benefit of a standard membership) to $1000 or more, depending on such factors as having a hole for just your own capsule, capsule size, Long Now provided markers (a survey station type magnetic anomaly rod?), and documentation (registration with the Time Capsule Society at Oglethorpe, say).