Energy and Information

                As we watch the House Republicans systematically dismantle what we used to call our democratic institutions, I think it’s time to start thinking about the deep structural changes that have to occur before we can rebuild a more robust and radical democracy.  There are lots of things that will have to change and be rearranged, but the two I think are most basic to building a new society are energy and information.  As building blocks of our daily lives, these two systems not only control the way our lives play out, they control the way we think about the options that are available to us.  Changes in these two systems will change almost everything else we do.

                The change in energy has been coming for a while now.  Climate change and greenhouse gasses are part of our daily lexicon.  I don’t think, however, that we’ve been as radical as we need to be about this shift in energy or what that shift will mean to other aspects of our lives.  When people talk about a proposal such as the Green New Deal, the tendency is to say it’s too extreme or too radical.  That might have been true twenty years ago, but it’s not true today.  We had a chance to be moderate and gradual, but we passed it up for a chance to build a few more coal powered power plants and a few thousand more gas guzzling SUVs.  The environmental part of the equation is widely debated, but it’s the structural changes that come with a shift to renewable energy that might have the most profound impact on how we structure our lives.

                Our energy is centralized and monetarized, meaning that the power of energy is controlled by a few companies and those companies are more interested in profit than the environment or flexibility.  When renewables make up a majority of our energy (and there’s a transition phase where they won’t and will need to supplemented by things like nuclear energy) the way we think about energy will change.  Instead of large conglomerates controlling supply and running pipelines and wires everywhere, a new energy system can spawn a whole new independence.  There are already people who ‘live off the grid,’ but in this system there would be no ‘grid’ to be part of.  The dominate and coercive effect on our economy that energy companies have will be eliminated.  We can share energy and be more responsible for the choices we make about it.  If we produce our own energy, I think we will become more of how it impacts our lives, and maybe we can stop burning California to the ground.  Being self-dependent will also give communities more control over development and land use.

                I think most people would be confused by the idea of an information infrastructure, but we have one.  There is a monopoly of a few gargantuan companies, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), Apple and Microsoft, that control the information industry.  The proof that they’re monopolies is in the way they buy up every promising new alternative to their dominance.  We are at their mercy as much as the people in California are at the mercy of rolling blackouts.  Just as our experience with energy has conditioned us to act in certain ways, so, too, has the information business.  The control that they exert over what we know and how we know it is a direct threat to democracy, which depends on good information and a highly manipulated algorithm of ‘likes,’ to function.  We’ve been running a 25 year experiment about unfettered information in a capitalistic system, and the results are pretty clear.  Either we change the information infrastructure or we lose our grip on sanity and reality.

                Both energy and information challenge us to behave differently.  How much energy should we use?  Are all the things we use energy to do and make really worth it?  Are we really better off with no regulation of information?  Are we really smarter and more well informed because of it?  There aren’t any easy answers to any of this, but it’s time to start the conversation.  Among the reasons our democracy failed was the corruption of the economy and politics by petrodollars and the contamination of the ‘public sphere’ by information companies.  It’s too late to stop what they have done, but if we want a different future we have to change the way they impact our world.