February 21 2019
I recently watched a 2018 presentation by Nate Hagens [0] at the
King Abdulla University of Science and Technology titled "Energy,
Money and Technology - From the Lens of the Superorganism" [1].  It
contained quite a lot of information and, though a bit rushed at
times, was quite good, well worth the hour and 20 minutes (includes
a Q&A at the end).

One thing that caught my eye was a slide [2] showing two oil
production curves highlighting the effect of debt (without debt it
looks fairly Gaussian, with debt the curve looks more like Ugo
Bardi's Seneca cliff [3]).  I'd not come across anything like that
on the usual Peak Oil sites so I contacted Hagens to see where he
got it.  A reply came a day later; seems it was just something he
drew up purely to illustrate the idea conceptually; no real data
behind it unfortunately.

Hagens did however point me towards a YouTube video series he
recently created from his 45 hour Reality 101 course he teaches at
University of Minnesota.  The condensed series is titled "Nexus
One" [4] which consists so far of two playlists, 'Brain & Behavior'
and 'Energy & Economy'.  I watched both and thought they were pretty
good. Brain & Behavior gives a nice summary of our brains as a
product of evolution, our baked in blind spots and bias, our
propensity towards group-think, and introduces the concept of
Ultrasociality, or what biologist E. O. Wilson calls Eusociality
[5]. Eusociality is a very high level of sociality, mostly seen in
hive building insect species such as bees, ants, and wasps; in fact,
humans seem to be the only non-insect eusocial species.  Anyone who
has spent much time looking out an airplane window has likely notice
the similarities between our built environments and those of hive
building insects.  Hagens and others have extended the notion,
suggesting that humanity has essentially, without conscious decision,
organized into globe-spanning superorganism.  Hello Matrix.

The second playlist, Energy & Economy, is less heady, focusing on
the critical role energy, specifically the fossil kind, plays in
our lives, it's historical ramp-up, it's absence from modern economic
theory, and how hard it's going to be to replace in the not-to-far-off
future.  I did notice an absence of some of the more troubling
aspects of this reality, how it has grown the world population and
makes possible the high degree of specialization, particularly in
the developed countries, neither of which are likely to be maintained
once a sustained energy shortfall is in motion.  Probably this has
to do with the target audience, college students, wanting to spare
them some of the existential anxiety that often comes with fully
absorbing the ramifications.  Hagens rejects both the green-utopia
and full collapse versions of the future, suggesting we'll likely
end up somewhere in between, making use of "rebuildables" -- what
most refer to as renewables, PV and Wind -- as well as the remaining
fossil fuels, and doing so by powering down to some lower energetic
ways of living.

Anyways, not a bad video series and it sounds like there will be a
third playlist added soon, more of a big picture take on the
situation.  The credits list David Hughes [6] and Art Berman [7]
which I think lends some heft to the overall credibility.

 - -

[0] https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/nate-hagens/
[1] https://youtu.be/2DpfsqjQbP0
[2] https://youtu.be/2DpfsqjQbP0?t=2065
[3] http://thesenecatrap.blogspot.com/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLL1uobWCltqNQlOrXBpLsA/playlists
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
[6] https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/david-hughes/
[7] https://www.artberman.com/