Crumple Zone
Crumple me? Crumple you!
In my recent travels I’ve spent a lot of time maintaining and using a car, so I have had cars on the brain. I’ve been busy cleaning the car, organizing its interior with my stuff, obsessing and fussing over its fluid levels and the internal behavior of its transmission as a warning drive light blinks on and off occasionally.
They’re kind of comical objects, these cars. There are fluids that come out of them, which when you handle them - such as with an oil change - an automotive professional might look at you and go: “Oh shit, don’t spill that! Let me properly dispose of that for you.” You certainly wouldn’t want to drink these fluids, or put them on your garden plot.
And then you pour this flammable liquid made up of the remains of ancient organisms into the gas tank, and you turn a key, setting the liquid on fire and then it explodes over and over again within the engine, belching carbon, turning rapidly a set of wheels, that have these rubber tires that grip the road, spraying fine particles of that rubber everywhere and into the air, making you go very fast.
As I've mentioned previously, it is our path of development, typified by a constant acceleration of rapid movement, which has opened up these vast distances that we now live across and regularly traverse, renewing the necessity for a car, or some other form of rapid transit.
In the course of our short history on the road, we have discovered that upon setting into rapid motion these chunks of metal, sometimes we get results in which they collide with things, and we get an ensuing rapid deceleration. They collide with each other, or they collide with stationary objects, or they careen out of control and flip, or they do a combination of these things, which tends to be hard on the occupants inside.
What our engineers have learned is that if you design parts of the car body to crumple in a “crumple zone”1 you can transfer a lot of that violent force away from the rigid center of the car itself, away from the vehicle’s occupants. This saves lives.
If you take the crumple zone as a metaphor, and the rapid deceleration and collision that it implies, we can use the images that metaphor brings up to enrich our introductory discussion of rapid motion and acceleration.
You see, I’m going to have to contradict2 something I said in the concluding part of my introductory series, or at least qualify it. I concluded that piece with an impression: that things didn’t seem to be slowing down, and that we’d have to work to slow ourselves down in a world that defaults to acceleration and rapid motion. Well, kind of.
As you can tell just by looking around, it ain’t all acceleration and rapid motion all the time. Individual cars can crash and rapidly stop moving. The rapid circulation that makes up an economic system can unwind in cascading crises and grind to a halt, slashing the refresh rate of goods and peoples. Imperial hegemons can go into terminal decline, losing their agility and dynamism, breaking their grip on whole world orders. The machinery of whole world orders can grind to a halt, often resulting in great wars.
In observance of the socioeconomic landscape of the United States, you look out and see this weird blurry confusion of undisciplined activity: of rapid chaotic change and breakneck fragmenting innovation, and the rapid slowing down and disintegration of our most basic institutions and infrastructure.
Global economic growth is getting wobbly and chaotic. Birthrates are declining in developed countries. As I said in an offhand comment previously: resource depletion, pollution, growing ecological instability and chaos, the increasing climate extremes and weather events, all of these phenomena chew into the generalized acceleration characterized as economic growth, placing a drag on it. A slow motion crash.
But a crash often implies something that was moving too fast in relation to its surroundings. As our ruling elite would have it, they would continue to mash the accelerator, driving this thing into the ground as the dashboard lights up with warnings each and every way, encasing themselves in an ever more rigid and compact bunker, with crumple zones spread out in every direction beyond them to absorb what impacts may come.
Oh dear, it seems that we are the crumple zone. Our “leaders” have deigned to continue merrily on at present speeds, slapping AI data centers here and there, which buzz with the electricity of a city block, skyrocketing utility rates and all, slurping up freshwater, as our superfluous lives are sloughed off of the contracting and concentrating mega corps, and then we can get beaned at increasing frequency and intensity with droughts, fires, storms, and what have you, and by golly we’ll just have to lie down and take it, lest we want a can of pepper spray emptied into our vehicle intake say, or worse.
This is not just our leaders either. The people with “power” in world affairs should definitely be held responsible for their decisions and actions, but there are plenty of people in the world who would also jam the accelerator and stick it to everyone else, and then in opposition to that, there are plenty of people in the world who would - and do - take responsibility for their day to day lives and for the people and the earth around them and attempt to do the good they can in their daily lives. It is the latter we are concerned with here, and will attempt to amplify in this project.
But this does complicate our task.3 We’re not talking about the simple opposition of slowing down in the face of acceleration. We have an uncontrolled deceleration picking up all around us, in our environment and in our relations in the course of our daily lives, as a consequence of uncontrolled and undisciplined acceleration in the form of perpetual economic growth and imperial conquest. Slowing down given these conditions takes on a whole new meaning entirely.4
Here is a good primer on the crumple zone, and an interesting discussion of other aspects as well.
You’re going to find some apparent contradictions here from time to time. I can’t be completely straightforward all the time. Sometimes you need a zig here and a zag there to make the full point. It keeps things interesting.
Yeah, sorry about that. I’m going to try to keep things simple around here, but when you try to keep things simple, you run into other problems. A basic binary such as “slow” opposed to “fast,” or for that matter “accelerate” versus “decelerate” can’t possibly encapsulate the strange, baffling, and infinitely complex reality we find ourselves in. So you start with a simple binary and then you start adding exceptions and subtleties to better fit that binary to the reality on the ground, and what was simple and straightforward becomes more complicated and convoluted despite your best efforts. One way through this is to start simple, move into an increasing complexity of explanation, and then pare that complexity down into something simpler again which better reflects the compound meaning you’ve arrived at. One of the meanings of “elegance.”
As John Michael Greer put it, “Collapse now and avoid the rush.”