The article makes it clear it was entirely Kelly’s shitty idea, and that Sale was at best, a reluctant participant.
Oh… someone held a gun to his head, did they?
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I’d say Kevin Kelly won just on the timeframe specified. We aren’t close to the kind of disasters Kirk Sale talks about in his books. Not the degree to which he was indicating.
But give it another twenty years, and I think we’d see a different answer here.
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Yeah, I mean, they’re basically giving the win to Kelly because the stock market is high (and thus, “didn’t get close” in that one category)? As if that means anything other than it hasn’t yet caught up with the economic situation “on the ground,” as it were. Hey, just ignore the incredibly dire economic situation many Americans now find themselves in…
If questions of whether the internet would be a “liberating force for freedom” had been part of this bet, Sale would have won quite easily, just being able to point to Facebook alone totally demolishing any utopian, mid-90s ideas about what the internet would be.
That wasn’t actually the bet, though - Kelly bet that it wouldn’t be anything like what Sale was proposing. Which it absolutely is, compared to when they made the bet. That includes the environment. Yes, a year later leaded gasoline was banned, but compared to the unaddressed environmental apocalypse of climate change, that’s barely noteworthy. And given Trump having overturned a number of environmental rules and regulations, a number of improvements will have turned out to be temporary.
The predictions of the book may have turned out to be completely wrong (not knowing what they all are), but we’re certainly closer to economic and environmental collapse, and armed conflict (that has economic roots, even if the people likely to pick up guns don’t recognize that) than we were 25 years ago.
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Well, but that’s the whole point of this story, that “collapse” always seems 20 years away
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And in 16 days those rules all come back and a few new ones do too. I don’t think we’re even close to the poor class picking up violence against and overthrowing the moneyed class, and I don’t think we’re close to the collapse of the dollar. The dollar today is stronger than the dollar when this bet was made. For every fear of the world dumping the petrodollar, we’ve only solidified it. The dollar isn’t worthless, there hasn’t been anything close to 1930’s depression even in the depths of covid’s shutdown, the poor hasn’t only not rebelled against the rich but the exact opposite, the fight is pretty much already over.
I’ll grant the third one about massive environmental disasters, but that still leaves Sale getting one out of three.
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This seems like it was an idiotic bet for Sale to accept regardless of the odds. If he lost he’d be on the hook for a thousand bucks, but if he won then catastrophic devaluation of currency would mean his winnings would be worthless anyway. It was literally a no-win scenario for him.
A smarter doomsayer would have bet a thousand bucks against something that would have inherent value in the event that he won, like a truckload of canned goods or some nice anti-zombie machetes.
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Yeah… right up until it’s happening fucking right NOW.
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Eh, not so much (even discounting changes that were permanent, e.g. opening up public land to mining and oil drilling, or the changes being made to the EPA itself, that would limit its future ability to regulate entirely):
Keep that in mind over the next month. We’re on the precipice of Trumpers waging armed conflict with, well, everyone else. And although racism fuels Trumpism, this new fascism is very much connected to 40 years of increasing economic precarity and the loss of a middle class. The rich preemptively won the class war by convincing the poor that the problem was not the current economic situation, but immigrants and minorities. We’ve had a staggering increase in income inequality (and decline in quality of life for the non-wealthy) since the bet was made. That’s having a substantial impact on US politics.
As for the economy, the bet was that it wouldn’t be anything like the depression, which things very much are like. We’ve had unemployment at depression levels, mass hunger and homelessness that have only been forestalled by temporary bans on evictions, all without any real federal response. That’s all going to come crashing down soon, as I don’t see the federal government doing what’s necessary to prevent it getting worse. Even in they do, the current situation is pretty dire. The strength of the dollar and stock market are perversely unconnected to most people’s economic reality right now; that they’re strong doesn’t mean anything.
The problem with the bet is that it took Sale’s extreme (unrealistic and even naive) predictions of “total” collapse, complete unlivability, etc. and tried to stake out some nebulously defined middle point that things wouldn’t get as bad as. But the thing is, everything has gotten significantly worse in those categories since the bet was made, and we’re very much at the precipice of disaster for most of them.
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That’s…not how bets work.
Maybe they should have been more clear on the terms but we are pretty far from societal or economic collapse, as of Jan 1, 2021. Now, 45 is still in nominal control for a couple of more weeks, so who knows? Sale is a Neo-confederate as well, not just a Neo-luddite so he’s not exactly committed to any future I want to live in. I seem to recall he and Kelly crossing swords before, to where Sale demonstrated his understanding of how to destroy a computer by taking a hammer to the CRT. A better visual, but ineffective.
He did. It’s in the blog post.
edit: actually Kelly offered double or nothing but Sale didn’t take him up on it
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Those factors seem like really weird choices as proxies for ‘societal collapse’.
Something like the fall of the dollar would definitely mean that a society(quite likely its friends as well) is having a really, really, bad day; but it’s pretty normal for ‘society’ to be in full operation even if certain areas of the world are dismal squalor zones. That’s the status quo, if anything.
Similarly, while a proletarian revolution would probably knock a fair bit of the NASDAQ, we’ve seen violent economic upheavals that haven’t notably decreased the amount of ‘society’ except in the most Fukuyama-colored sense of the term.
Environmental catastrophe, similarly, seems very likely to make people more miserable; but is much less obviously stacked against ‘society’ (indeed, by virtue of hurting relatively marginal populations and close-to-the-earth hunter gatherer types first and fastest environmental degradation might actually tilt the balance, at a population level, even further toward people who are only alive because of a relatively high tech, high coordination, high complexity, society; even if they are living sickly, miserable, lives on cultured algae synthfoods and toiling in the toxin smelters for the privilege).
I would have expected people interested in the question of societal collapse to be more interested in things like percentage of the population engaged in subsistence agriculture, length and complexity of economically viable trade routes, availability of energy other than muscle power, that sort of thing.
Those three factors sound more like a “will what remains of the western middle class survive; and if so will they envy the dead?” metric than a ‘society’ metric.
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So, of the three points, he got 50% of point one, 100% of point two (didn’t stipulate successful rebellion - Occupy Wall Street anyone?), and 100% of point three (inland hurricanes? Half-a-million acres of temperate rainforest burnt to a crisp In one summer?). How exactly is that a loss?
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I dunno, when the guy himself literally says “I was wrong”, it’s kinda difficult to argue that he… won?
Still plenty of challenges ahead for civilization but I highly doubt Kevin Kelly, or any sane person, would debate that! 2016+ has certainly taught me how much I was taking for granted, and how good things don’t just magically happen, you have to actively fight for them. 
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That depends who you ask. My life has been one of increasing costs and stagnating wages, and of opportunities that my parents generation took advantage of being taken away from mine. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle classes are in denial.
Why do you think I said I didn’t want him to have won? I have always been very clear about how I believe that I will be among the first to die in a survivalist’s fantasy.
I prefer the possibilities that Murray Bookchin talked about, which are very different.
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Isn’t betting $1000 when this is one of your winning conditions:
Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, …
a bit … ludicrous? Never bet in favor of the end of the world, because how would you ever collect?
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Oh, the Great Divergence is real. No argument there. But those running this simulation are careful not to let things get too far. We haven’t started burning police cars and precincts in every city. I have spent my whole working life in the lie that hard work gets rewarded, but if that were true farm workers would be rolling up in a brand new Escalade, having left last year’s by the side of the road…
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so who won? I’m not sure I’d want to be the judge of that.
This makes Kirkpatrick Sale sound bad.
He wrote The book on the SDS, “SDS”. He knew some very interesting people in his early days. I think it’s safe to think he thinks small is beautiful.
On the other hand, around 1995, he smashed a tv set or computer. And I knew someone who thought it was great. Except that was the left up to a certain time, antitechnology. It was easier to smash than to learn, and then control it technology.
