The Necrotization of Commerce

As part of my ongoing efforts to dissect the process of decline in our culture, I've started looking at western economies and examining the changes in that landscape to see what, if any, sense can be made of the future there. 

Currently, in the United States, service exports (not goods) have become a cornerstone of our export business.  This has been paired (over the course of many decades) by a dramatic shift in economic policies to favor classism and the wealthy elite (who generally aren't among many underserved ethnic groups). This piece explains this pheonomeon quite nicely, and gives a nebulous historic view on how and when this happened.  

I don't want to rehearse all the points on this from a historic point of view, because there are other resources that you can review that will do that much better than I can.  It has mostly to do with our exploitation of our planet's resources, though.   If you need a starting point, start with John Michael Greer's work here, and work from there.    And because western commerce is now so deeply tied with environmental and natural resource exploitation, another great place to start is with Catton's book here. Both provide a somewhat grim outlook for the future.  I want to use the current state of commerce to demonstrate the bottleneck in which we currently find ourselves, and continue to propose ways to get through it.  This is a blog about life and death, after all.    We can't have one without the other. 

Currently, the area where I live is fighting against a request by a major utility provider to a governing body to allow them to increase their pricing for the cost of electric delivery to certain areas.    The utility service is a publicly traded entity, which means that they must return dividends to their shareholders.  There's a lot of fancy footwork involved with this type of economic arrangement, but I'll simplify it greatly:  the company invites (requests) money from people (investors) to feed its coffers, and in return promises greater financial rewards (dividends) to those people (investors) who participate.  Obviously this is highly regulated, and there's a great deal more to the process, but basically this is how that arrangement works.    Addtionally, and simultaneously, the same utility provider also generates revenue by billing subscribers (folks like me) for service delivery.   It is important to note that this utility provider bills for service delivery in terms of what is known as kilowatt  hours (kH), or so many kilowatts per hour.   Kilowatts, of course, representing a certain fixed quantity of watts, and watts being a fixed measurable unit of electrical power.   These kilowatts are delivered to each home on what is called a grid, with individual homes/members being subscribers.  Currently, the provider is attempting to raise the price per kilowatt hour by nearly 16%.   

This is a yearly feature of the utility provider.    Yearly increases are generally granted, because of the cost of doing business.  And this provider's only means of producing (delivering) kilowatts is by exploitation of natural resources, in my region it is carbon in the form of coal, which is mined from the Earth.  Mining is a very expensive endeavor, and the US Energy Information Administration predicts that the prices of coal will continue to increase essentially forever. This website indicates (scroll down at the very bottom) that a certain measurement period goes through the year 2050, but that's only because it would be bad form to publish a statement that says "energy will become unaffordable for most people in the near future." 

Prices go up.    Disposable income to households goes down.  These two variables are directly entertwined, and as a result of this we see the delivery system of companies such as this utility provider begin to stiffen - massive amounts of money are needed, more and more every year, in fact, to be able to operate heavy equipment necessary to mine this coal (equipment which is fueled on petroluem products, I might add), to pay workers (whose labor is ever more specialized) and to return investment promises to shareholders.  Flexibility decreases over time, because these organizations are required to perform greater outputs, while harvesting a dwindling supply of resources, and they respond by placing greater demands on their constituents.   This is a process I am referring to as necrotization - its the beginning of organizational necrosis, wherein the agility and flexibility of the provider will continue to diminish as its costs increase and the specialization of labor increases.  

The necrotization of commerce is symbolic of our cultural decline.  

This process is very similar to what happens to a human body during the biomechanical process of dying under certain conditions - blood flow decreases to extremities first, in the body's attempt to save its core processes.  This might be seen in the formaton of necrotic tissue, dead skin, gangrene, etc.  Blood flow in the heart and to the brain are critical to maintain life system support; once these have been interrupted, the biomechanical systems attempt to reroute their support needs through other means, and temporarily forestall the process.   Organizations like this utility provider are doing this now - shifting greater burdens of costs to subscribers, for example.  But eventually, the corporeal systems that sustain biomechanical life give out and the human body is declared deceased.  

Biomechanical death is a process, not a fixed point.  So is commercial death.  But just as much as I believe that biomechanical death isn't an ending, I also believe this about the current necrotizing features of our globally westernized culture.   The necrotization we see now in our commerce will seem painful for a while. It will become economically stressful on many.  

What I hope, though, is that it teaches us - over time - to see that there is so much more here that we have missed, and that a magical way of lies just underneath the surface of all of this nonsense we have created, just waiting for us to find it.