What is “Globalization”?
And how does “Globalization” drive “Civilization”?
The 20th century dawned with the “promise” of world peace and prosperity growing from brilliant new technologies, burgeoning egalitarian states, and the prospect of global political-economic cooperation – it collapsed into chaos, genocide, holocausts, environmental destruction, with 70 million souls lost in the great wars and perhaps another 50 million in the 1918 flu pandemic. Yet the century’s second half, in spite of nuclear and Cold War threats, brought “rising tides” of wealth over poverty, foodstuff abundance, even more amazing technologies, and, in its final decades, it witnessed Eurasia’s re-opening and renewed prospects of “global convergence.” Yet, alas, we find ourselves in a new century wondering if Civilization hasn’t gotten dicey and dangerous, again. We observe new military conflicts, economic disruptions, energy supply panic, pandemics, one million souls a week flooding into urban centers, and many others trapped in modern slavery and human trafficking. We find ourselves disillusioned, living a 21st century angst, on a darker side of this “globalization.” What’s going on?
Minimal Observation:
WILD GLOBALIZATION wonders if Civilization’s lifeworld (“context”) is more like a “BLACK BOX” of [highly energetic, variable, overlapping, unstable, emergent, bundled, hidden, immeasurable] “FORCES/ENERGIES” [Ecology, Sex-Culture, Tech, Economy, Governance] – we may estimate or guess what goes into the box, and we can observe, try to measure and respond to what comes out, but what happens inside that gives rise to spontaneously evolving and now hyper-globalizing orders evades complete understanding or rational governance. It’s…WILD!.
Maximal Questions
Do these “wild” forces-energies actually DRIVE and PRODUCE Civilization, and if so, how? Our lifeworld grows increasingly “globalized,” powerful, unpredictable, supply-“chained,” emergent. Can the Enlightenment sciences’ amazing, even magical successes (Apollo, Hubble-Webb, the Internet of Things, now the “Cloud”) trick us to believe we can “…control…commmand…” Civilization? It’s as if these hyper-globalizing energies are unfolding so quickly and powerfully, and often outside our awareness or control (e.g., flows of errant mortgage capital building up to the 2008-09 financial crisis, growing energy demand and dependencies, citizens increasingly dependent on governments overrun with debt and “unfunded” liabilities) that civil order is now more vulnerable, indeed hyper-fragile, and so routinely and more frequently disrupted. History’s flow accelerates ahead of our practical and ethical responses.
So-called “developed” nation civilians live in angst and uncertainty, fragility, many using psychotropic drugs for “traumas,” growing more dependent on mismanaged, debt-ridden, often corrupt governances. AND, in the rear-view mirror, every week over one million “developing” nation souls move into cities, spontaneously creating an entirely new and radical set of human realities – micro-kiosk street merchants living freely in shanty neighborhoods, creating their own hyper-local governments while largely avoiding formal tax and governance. Over half of the world’s workers live in this informal “stealth” economy.
ALL of Civilization’s 10,000 year “history,” from the 1st agricultural revolution to the iPhone, has tracked under the blessing of what the paleo-climatologists call a “climate optimum” – those 10-15,000-year warming pauses between 100,000-year ice ages that have been the Earth’s main act for perhaps millions of years. And ALL of Civilization’s story has evaded the full-blown global catastrophic winters which we know are triggered by the Earth’s mega-volcanoes – America’s Yellowstone, a 120 square-mile hole in the Earth’s crust, has gone off every 600,000 years or so for the entire reach of our genus homo’s 2.5 million history – the last eruptions were @160,000 and @600,000 years ago. We’re due.
Wild Globalization will read to some as an attempt at a “big history” view of the phenomenon of globalization. However, while we track “big” themes, events, or what we call “forces,” we leave formal history to scholars. Indeed, we challenge traditional historians on a number of fronts. We wonder how civilization’s run can be confined to the last, say, 10,000 years when most of the preconditions to rising “civilized” complexity (e.g., excess production, technology, language) are traceable over the full run of homo sapien’s 250,000 year footprint. We wonder if the so-called “primitive” soul of “pre-history” might not rather be better understood, and revered, as “primal” – all these folks did survive unimaginable ecological challenges, including glaciations, global volcanic winters, and without the Internet or cellphones…imagine? We wonder why, as noted above, we don’t better appreciate the paleoclimatologists’ prescient observation (see above) that “formal” history’s 10,000 run has occurred during the convenient pause of a climate optimum and that so-called “developed” folks wouldn’t do well, or even survive, in an event so geologically recent as the “Little Ice Age,” let alone the Laurentide?
We especially challenge current governances’ (of all ideologies) hell-bent advances into the corruptions of public debt, and we try to understand that advance from a fundamental cause-effect rather than the simplified, again, “ideological” angle? Wild Globalization, rather, tries to get “under” or “behind” the energies, orders, and motivations of current history’s flows. It builds its perspective from the miracles and achievements of humankind, yet equally and always simultaneously from its horrors and often casual atrocities. So to some Wild Globalization’s voice will sound more like the provocateur than the scholar, more a siren for critical thinking than ideology, dwelling more in questions and wonderment than formal account. So on the one hand, its “big” theme respects the innate “cosmological” nature of human curiosity and cleverness (Science), yet we will insist that our clever (and still very short-lived, and fragile!) prominence in the quite recent evolution of species, and so our very survival, resides in the synchronous, the Janus-faced, instinct for altruism, for care and, indeed, for love of the miracles of Earthly life, itself (Ethos).
Can global peoples somehow take a break in the action, step back and re-appraise our brief trek out of the eco-wilderness, to re-orient ourselves in this barely fathomable, spectacular corner of an emerging “Webb-eyed” Universe? From the surging streets of our teeming cities, could this be a moment to begin new conversations, to confess our physical vulnerabilities and ethical frailties, to entertain and answer the wildness of data and ideas over the grand delusions of lazy ideologies? Can we turn our incessantly creative-destructive and emerging “hyper-tech” nature, which evolution has birthed through us, back on itself to gain new “comparative advantages?” How can we, even again, re-emerge from this wilderness? How can we, in the 21st century, regain practical advantage for our own, and the Earth’s, precarious endurance?
What do we mean by “Wild?” In this conversation, “wild” signifies “spontaneous, ever emerging, natural and hyper-natural, orders.” Wild Globalization explores how our common trek out of the deep savannahs, to finally occupy and dominate the entire globe, has been a constantly emergent march of what Geoffrey West calls “finite time singularities” [Reference: West, SCALE- the Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, New York: Penguin Books, 2017, p. 31-32) – that is, evolution which can be observed to grow, to “scale,” to points of exponentially unsustainable resource demand, reaching a “crisis” and near collapse, only to then undergo a paradigm shift, which resets and inititates the next growth cycle.
Wild orders emerging from nature, from the fire and ice and darkness (Wild Ecology), from our own demographic and cultural expressions (Wild Sex/Demographics and Culture), most remarkably from nature’s own gifts to us (bipedalism, big brains, intelligence, language) which spawned our hyper-natural abilities to cleverly innovate, invent, and direct if not control evolution itself (Wild Technology), orders having emerged from our attempts to arrange of resource management-production-excess reserves-trading-entrepreneurial markets (Wild Economy), and then finally, as human culture bounced and continues to be bounced between “small” and “big” community arrangements, from our often brutal and horrific attempts to form social contracts that might guide these extraordinary powers and let us live together with ourselves and our earth home, we observe the emergence of governance orders (Wild Governance).
“Wild” situates our conversation in “emergent” nature. “Wild” is long-toothed. It pays attention not just to the most recent few hundred years since the Enlightenment or Scientific-Industrial Revolutions, but to what we may know or surmise from the full stretch of the deep ecological and human record. Wild claims to speak from a “pan-historical” and “pan-cultural” perspective. Consequently, wild also invites a pan-ideological heuristic to the table because it claims that the eco-demo-tech-econ-gov energies leverage every human ideological response. And wild invites the swanky and sassy iPhone-toting soul to pay due homage to our earliest human ancestors who, over just the last 10,000 generations or so, carved their way, and ours, into history with sticks and stones and fire and the magic of innovation. Wild suggests that the full expanse of the human trek is “cumulative,” that in fact we have gathered and saved to memory their achievements, that we, like Newton, are able to see and act as we do because we “stand on their shoulders.” Wild may allow us to say in the 21st century that we, like them, are all trekking on the same continguous “primal” path of what it means to be, anbd to becoming, human.
Wild stories…
1989 Exxon Valdez Incident and “Credit Default Swaps”
The 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding that spilled 11 million U.S. gallons of North Slope crude oil into the pristine Prince William Sound, Alaska, was a significant trigger for the 2007-2009 “Great Financial Crisis”? Here’s the “wild” story: (1) Exxon had to secure a $5 billion “reserve” (borrowed from J.P. Morgan, “JPM”) for litigation and clean-up; (2) JPM then had to hold $400 million in cash for their liability, cash that could not be deployed to other business activities; (3) JPM wasn’t happy with this $4oo million drag, so they figured out how to get an outside lender, the European Bank for Reconstruction (“EBRD”), to “carry” or “swap out” (like an insurance premium) the $400M, and Voilà (!), JPM’s financial alchemy had created the “Credit Default Swap (“CDS”); (4) The CDS gave birth to a massive new set of global finance tools (“derivatives”) that, by the 2007-09 Financial Crisis, held $61 TRILLION (“T”, mind you!) in various types of derivative “insurance” and “hedge” contracts, which then grew to roughly the equivalent of the entire formal global economy. CDS and other derivatives got wildly ahead of global economic engineers – today, after reform and regulation by the financial community, outstanding derivatives total under $10T. As crazy as it sounds, though, these instruments, when applied prudently, actually add stability to the global financial system.
[Source: Scott Nations, A History of the United States in Five Crashes, 2017, 183-187; and https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1806b.htm ].
1906 San Francisco Earthquake & the Market Panic of 1907
“The bad news began at 5:12 AM on Wednesday, April 18, 1906…the northernmost 296 miles of the San Andreas Fault… ruptured…[registering] 8.3 magnitude…The eastern side of the fault had moved 24 feet. In San Francisco, the earthquake was bad but the fires that resulted from broken gas lines were worse…the quake had also broken water mains. After firefighters pumped the sewers dry in an attempt to stop the flames, they sent word to the Presidio…requesting an army artillery battalion. With no water to fight the fires, the soldiers used dynamite to collapse buildings into heaps of rubble that they hoped would serve as firebreaks. More often, the explosions started new fires. Though almost none of San Francisco was insured against earthquake, the vast majority of it was insured against fire. So citizens with houses that had been heavily damaged by the quake, but spared the fires, set their own homes ablaze. More than 27,500 buildings covering 500 square blocks, one-half of the largest city west of the Rocky Mountains and the financial center of the American West, was gone…the city’s fire insurance had been written by British companies because the city had a great many London-based banks poised there to finance grain shipments from the west coast to Britain…the quake hit the British hard. …London-based insurers began loading gold on ships and watched those ships sail west…$30 million [$1 trillion adjusted for inflation] was sent in April…$35 million [$1.1 trillion today] sent in September alone….equal to 14% of Britain’s total stockpile. …Operating under the gold standard, this sudden outflow of reserves was such a massive shock to the British financial system that the governors of the Bank of England did the only thing they knew to do: they raised the interest rates on gold deposits…Ominously for the American stock market, interest rates increased worldwide as those few who had ready cash started charging higher rates for it…the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 [was] the catalyst for what became known as the Panic of 1907.”
Source: Scott Nations, A History of the United States in Five Crashes, 2000, 17-18
“Java Around the Clock”
“A group of computer programmers at Tsinghua University in Beijing is writing software using Java technology. They work for IBM. At the end of each day, they send their work over the Internet to an IBM facility in Seattle. There, programmers build on it and use the Internet to zap it 5,222 miles to the Institute of Computer Science in Belarus and the Software House Group in Latvia. From there, the work is sent east to India’s Tata Group, which passes the software back to Tsinghua by morning, back to Seattle and so on in a great global relay that never ceases until the project is done. ‘We call it ‘Java Around the Clock,’ says John Patrick, V.P for Internet Technology for IBM. ‘It’s like we’ve created a forty-eight-hour day through the Internet.’ ”
Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 1999, 111.
Wild “Flash” Crashes
“The stock exchanges have converted from “open outcry” where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Trades were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild – in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the “flash crash”); in August 2012, …the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million.”
Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Antifragile – Things that Gain from Disorder, 2012, 285-287.
The Romans, Water-Power, and Slavery
“The Romans have long been celebrated as engineers but not as inventors…they were entirely familiar with water power but preferred to use slave labor to grind their flour or pump out their mine shafts. “The supply of captured slaves was apparently inexhaustible. Slavery was a more convenient way than machinery of dealing with heavy power problems. The wealthy Roman invested his capital in slaves, not machines.”
Stark, Rodney, How the West Won – the Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, 2014, p. 53-54.
“Datacenters” – 21st Century “Cathedrals of Commerce”
“…one of the world’s biggest datacenters is located near Reno, Nevada. It has twice the square footage of the Burj Khalifa (world’s tallest skyscraper). The Burj houses @100,000 bio-processors (humans)…the datacenter houses @200,000 silicon processers…a datacenter rents for five times as much per square foot as a skyscraper…there are only a handful of Burj-scale skyscrapers in existence or planned…there are already @500 mega-datacenters globally…with more than one hundred more expected in the immediate future. Each datacenter inhales 100 times more electricity than a skyscraper…buried within each of the thousands of these “digital cathedrals” there are thousands of refrigerator-sized racks of silicon machines called “servers” – the physical core of the Internet. Each rack burns more electricity annually than 50 Teslas…the Cloud Internet…now uses twice as much electricity as does the entire country of Japan. …Credit Microsoft’s 2020 “energy manifesto” which observed that “advances in human prosperity…are inextricably tied to the use of energy.”
Mills, Mark P., The Cloud Revolution, 2021, 51-54.
Wild Natural Gas – a 21st Century Finite Time Singularity
“In 2003, a group of government officials, engineers, experts, and executives from the natural gas industry convened at the Denver airport Marriott…the United States faced a permanent shortage of domestic natural gas. …The U.S. would have to do something new in its history: increasingly depend on large imports from the Caribbean, West Africa, the Middle East, or Asia.
…Larry Nichols, owner of Devon Energy, missed the Denver meeting because he was focused on Devon’s drilling program. “As we drilled each well and we saw the continuing production in the wells, we realized a little more each day that this was indeed a game changer.” By the end of the drilling program, they had the proof. Devon’s engineers had successfully yoked together the two technologies – slick water fracturing and horizontal drilling – to liberate natural gas imprisoned in shale.
It was as though a starting gun had gone off. News of the breakthrough set off a frenetic race among other companies to get their piece of that dense rock before anyone else. While the corporate “majors” were putting their money into the Gulf of Mexico’s deep waters and into multibillion-dollar “megaprojects” aground the world, the onshore was left to the small, independents – companies focused on exploration and production, more entrepreneurial, faster-moving…The independents carried the race to other shales in Louisiana, Arkansas, in Oklahoma, and then the mighty Marcellus, a thick bedrock a mile or more underground that stretches beneath western New York down into Pennsylvania and Ohio and on into West Virginia….[and] into Canada. The Marcellus shale would turn out to be the second-largest gas province in the world – and possibly the largest.
…By 2011, the U.S. Potential Gas Committee projected recoverable gas resources 70% higher than it had a decade earlier. …By 2019, their estimate for recoverable natural gas reserves was triple that in 2002. …The most decisive change was in the electric power sector. King coal had long been the dominant source for electric power. As late as 2007, coal generated half of U.S. electricity. By 2019, it was down to 24%, and natural gas had risen to 38%. That was the main reason why U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions dropped down to levels of the early 1990s, despite a doubling of the U.S. economy. Any thought of expensive LNG imports had been banished. The challenge was no longer how to eke out scarce new supplies, but rather how to find markets for the growing abundance of inexpensive natural gas.” ( Daniel, Yergin, The New Map – Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, New York: Pengui Press, 2020, p. 8-13).