A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

“History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.”

That was the opening Kelly had been waiting for. In the final pages of his Luddite book, Sale had predicted society would collapse “within not more than a few decades.” Kelly, who saw technology as an enriching force, believed the opposite—that society would flourish. Baiting his trap, Kelly asked just when Sale thought this might happen.

Sale was a bit taken aback—he’d never put a date on it. Finally, he blurted out 2020. It seemed like a good round number.

Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right.

Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.

“Would you be willing to bet on your view?” Kelly asked.

“Sure,” Sale said.

Then Kelly sprung his trap. He had come to Sale’s apartment with a $1,000 check drawn on his joint account with his wife. Now he handed it to his startled interview subject. “I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” he said.

Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. He agreed. Kelly suggested they both send their checks for safekeeping to William Patrick, the editor who had handled both Sale’s Luddite book and Kelly’s recent tome on robots and artificial life; Sale agreed.

“Oh, boy,” Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. “This is easy money.”

Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We’re about to find out how easy that money is. As the time to settle approached, both men agreed that Patrick, the holder of the checks, should determine the winner on December 31. Much more than a thousand bucks was at stake: The bet was a showdown between two fiercely opposed views on the nature of progress. In a time of climate crisis, a pandemic, and predatory capitalism, is optimism about humanity’s future still justified? Kelly and Sale each represent an extreme side of the divide. For the men involved, the bet’s outcome would be a personal validation—or repudiation—of their lifelong quests.

Sale’s provocative book, Rebels Against the Future, is just one title in a shelf-full of works urging a return to a preindustrial life. His fervor for the simple life took root early. John Kirkpatrick Sale grew up in a close-knit suburb of Ithaca, New York, one of three sons of William M. Sale Jr., who taught literature at Cornell. Sale père was a legend in the field; his students included Kurt Vonnegut and Harold Bloom. Kirkpatrick Sale felt that his tiny community was idyllic. When a plan was proposed to merge his local school into the Ithaca district, young Sale spoke out against it. “Something in my genes flatly resisted the idea of leaving a human-scale school for the vagaries of education down in the city of Ithaca,” he later wrote. (Ithaca at the time had all of 30,000 inhabitants.)

Kirkpatrick attended Cornell, the family institution. He studied history, but with an eye toward journalism. Even then he was a rebel. In the late 1950s, there was no war to protest against, but there was a policy called in loco parentis, which put school administrators in charge of moral probity. Sale, who was the former editor of the student newspaper, was enraged by a proposal to ban unchaperoned coeds from off-campus parties. He helped incite close to 1,500 people to demonstrate. In the hubbub, the dean of men got hit by an egg, and protesters hurled rocks and smoke bombs at the beleaguered university president. Sale was suspended, as was his roommate, novelist-to-be Richard Fariña.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3bbOdem