Social Collapse Best Practices Revisited

The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Although 17 years have passed since the financial collapse of 2008, all that's happened since then is quite adequately captured by the expression "kicking the can down the road." But the road has to end somewhere, and when a fifth of all federal spending goes to pay interest on the federal debt, when the US has just lost its proxy war against Russia and is in the process of losing its trade war against China, some people might start to think that the end of that road is finally in sight. And perhaps this makes it a good time to revisit this talk.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It’s certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion isn’t a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that’s gone wrong. I know it’s a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn’t you instead want to go and eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for that after my talk.
I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious, professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May, or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno – some of my favorite people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the sights, and then I’ll fly back to Boston and go back to my day job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then everyone has a book, or so it would seem.
but that is how nature is with survival of the fittest