The complexity of modern civilization is somewhat of a double-edged sword. It has brought great advances in human health and well-being, yet a full understanding of the sum-total of our knowledge of how the world works is now far beyond any single person. Consequently, getting people to agree on how to tackle complex problems becomes this much harder. In How The World Really Works, energy expert and policy analyst Vaclav Smil provides the big picture of the material and energetic basis undergirding human civilization, and what this means for attempts at addressing climate change. Rich in eye-opening facts and not a little bit opinionated, this is a much-needed reality check that purposefully avoids extreme views of both the techno-optimist and catastrophist kind.

How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, written by Vaclav Smil, published by Viking (a Penguin Books imprint) in January 2022 (hardback, 448 pages)

Czech-Canadian scientist Smil is nowadays a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a prolific polymath, having written some forty books. Some of these have found their way onto my shelves and I previously reviewed his book Growth, which was more a conceptual work that looked at growth in its many guises. Here I finally had the chance to observe him actually apply his considerable knowledge. So, how does the world work according to Smil?

Smil is at his strongest when he focuses his mind on the problem of climate change. Without the title indicating so, it has become the leitmotif underlying this book. Why? Because understanding why dealing with climate change is so challenging requires you to understand a host of other things. The reality is that “we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years” (p. 5). The first three chapters focus on helping the reader better understand this. First is energy. Though we have made substantial progress thanks to solar and wind power, energy is so much more than electricity generation. Take transport. I have previously reviewed the downsides of electric cars, but as Smil points out, the under-appreciated concept of power density means that our prime movers (i.e. trucks, ships, and planes) are far harder to power in any other way. Second is food. Heavy machinery, agrochemicals, and especially fertilizer are all possible thanks to fossil fuels. Smil lays out the many challenges with returning to all-organic farming without denying that many improvements can and should be made to both food production and our diet. Third are what Smil calls the four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia (used as artificial fertilizer), plastic, steel, and cement. The first two require fossil fuels as feedstock, while all are energy-intensive to produce. All very mundane substances, but produced in staggering quantities (hundreds of millions to billions of tons annually) to construct the world around us. We have no realistic alternatives ready to produce these substances at those scales. Though politicians love to score points with ambitious decarbonization pledges, “the gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast” (p. 6).

“Everyone can name clear examples of living and non-living things. However, as so often in biology, there is no sharp demarcation between the two.”

It is exactly when Smil takes his mind off the challenge of climate change that the book starts to meander a bit. Though I consider his chapters on the long history of globalization and our understanding and misunderstanding of risks enlightening, they feel somewhat out of place. These chapters form an interlude before Smil seemingly collects his thoughts again to discuss the long history of our understanding of climate change and the problems with future outlooks and quantitative forecasts.

The final two chapters are also where Smil is more opinionated. He is clear from the start: “I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist; I am a scientist trying to explain how the world really works” (p. 6). He neither tries to downplay nor demonize the price and problems of our progress but simply states: this is where we are now, and this is what it would take to change our civilization in a certain direction. Of course, people rarely like to be told plain but painful truths. Already, he will piss off the vegans when he writes that “the quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail” (p. 72), even if both here and elsewhere he advocates that the developed world should reduce its meat intake. But his biggest beef is with the tendency of public discourse around climate change to gravitate towards extremes of either techno-optimism or catastrophism. And he fully expects that his “perspective will find no favor with either doctrine” (p. 9). The “data worshippers” (p. 4) who think our online world will bring about total dematerialization ignore its material basis, while “the new tech crowd” (p. 199) who fixate on recent developments in electronics fail to realise that “existential imperatives [think food and water] do not belong to the category of microprocessors and mobile phones [which] are just small devices at the apex of an enormous pyramid of an industry” (pp. 217–218). He has choice words for renewable energy advocates too for thinking that, if only we follow “all-renewable prescriptions[,] a new global nirvana will arrive in just a decade” (p. 196). Why does he find this so infuriating? Because “those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just sets of more or less arbitrary and highly improbable assumptions detached from technical and economic realities” (p. 193). But he is similarly dismissive of the revival of apocalyptic visions around climate change: “catastrophists are wrong, time after time” (p. 212).

“Everyone can name clear examples of living and non-living things. However, as so often in biology, there is no sharp demarcation between the two.”

Personally, I found Smil’s down-to-earth bluntness refreshing. He does sometimes veer into grumpy-old-man territory, lashing out at social media and writing of “gullible minds, susceptible to cult-like visions” (p. 4). Judging by reviews I have read, some find this arrogant, ivory-tower preaching, though to me it just comes across as comical. Rather, what struck me is that his arguments show that catastrophist thinkers are right to be concerned. I was surprised that he is less outspoken here than in Growth where he explicitly mentioned the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. In this book, he seems less concerned about the exhaustion of mineral resources, though I do not quite understand why. Reserves of some materials will likely last us centuries, but when you write that, at 2020 production levels, gas and potassium are estimated to last us 50 and 90 years respectively, I am alarmed. I find that a freakishly short time. And he does not mention the snag presented by energy returned on energy invested. Reserves are not just in a simple container that you can gradually pour out; not everything is economically extractable and we have to go to ever-more extreme lengths to get at what is left, as evidenced by e.g. fracking or tar sands. His points in the final chapter about the difficulty and fallibility of long-term projections are well-taken. And yet, Smil, more than anyone else I know, has carefully considered and quantified the immense challenges of making changes to our complex societies because of their scale and inertia. And he spells out here why rapid decarbonization can only be achieved by making sacrifices utterly impalatable to the vast majority of people. Plus, he points out what I had not considered yet: the problem of delayed rewards. Even drastic reductions to emissions “will not show any convincing benefits for decades” (p. 225) due to the complexity and inertia of our climate system, which will make enacting and maintaining such drastic measures unlikely. In light of all this, I was struck by Smil’s staunch, if not stubborn agnosticism regarding our future.

Finally, a note on the book’s title. Though Smil mentions e.g. the problem of overconsumption, he does not go into the confluence of political and economic forces that allow and stimulate capitalism. He does not explore how the world works in that sense but sticks firmly to the physical basis. To me, that is fine. Smil avoids the god complex of many older authors who venture far outside their field of expertise. And he seems well aware of the dangers of doing so, judging by his amusing swipe at linguist Noam Chomsky who “adds energy as his latest field of expertise” (p. 196) by promoting the Green New Deal.

Despite some meanderings, this factually grounded book provides some eye-opening insights and a much-needed reality check.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

How the World Really Works

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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It is tempting to think of the internet as a revolutionary and transformative tool. But neither is really true, contends professor of history and philosophy of science Justin E.H. Smith. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he argues that the idea has been in the air for centuries and that the lofty aspirations and dreams of its founders—that it would improve society—have died. Some of the observations here are absolute gems, though you will have to follow Smith through some diversions to get to them. Unfortunately, the book leaves the reader hanging at the end and does not deliver on some of its promises.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning, written by Justin E.H. Smith, published by Princeton University Press in May 2022 (hardback, 195 pages)

Smith hinted at the long prehistory of the internet in Irrationality, a book I enjoyed. Here, he delivers on that promise. As before, his writing can be a bit convoluted but is never impenetrable. Readers are advised, however, that this book is decidedly not a history of how the internet was invented and initially lived as the ARPANET. For that, you should turn to e.g. A Brief History of the Future and the somewhat older Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Judging by some of the negative reviews I have seen, a number of people came to this book with that expectation, in which case The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is, well, not what you think it is. Let us take a closer look at what he delivers instead.

Smith opens with a searing critique. The lofty hopes and ambitions behind the internet—that with endless information at our fingertips and the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere, we would create a better world—have been crushed by social media’s rise to dominance over the last decade. To some extent, he joins the chorus of recent social commentaries that point out the price of constant connection: how it is addictive, erodes deep thought, undermines business and politics, turns us into bigots, and has made a business model out of mining the natural resource that is your attention.

But Smith goes well beyond moral panic and points out that not all of this is new. Books and the printing press were already condemned for eroding the art of memorising information, while one 17th-century writer complained of being distracted by trivialities such as books, maps, and letters. What is different is that the internet is “explicitly designed to prod the would-be attender ever onward from one monetizable object to the next” (p. 38), thus thwarting sustained attention. There is no interest here in conflict resolution or collective deliberation, “social media are in this respect engines of perpetual disagreement” (p. 52). Our online interactions have turned into an existential game that rewards us with “likes”, “shares”, or some other virtual currency. Often without realising it, we are using “what is essentially a privately owned point-scoring video game as if it were the public sphere” (p. 54). And this algorithmically-driven way of thinking has spilt back into our society and politics.

“Some of the observations here are absolute gems, though you will have to follow Smith through some diversions to get to them.”

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology, adds Smith. This failure is more likely explained by the underlying economic model. In other words, it is not the tool that is faulty, it is the wielder. Smith is convinced that a historical investigation into the origins and development of the internet could help us improve it and the rest of the book ponders how things got to be this way. Spoiler alert: “Things got this way as a cumulative effect of our simply doing what we have always done” (p. 56). Or to put it more bluntly: it is the humans that suck. This echoes what Mark Manson has written as a revision of his earlier thinking about social media.

What follows are four chapters that detour into related fields to various degrees. Smith is at his most convincing when he shows how long the idea of telecommunication was in the air before it became a reality with e.g. semaphore or the telegraph. Earlier still, archaeological evidence shows that we had long-distance networks of exchange that “reach as far back in human prehistory as we might wish to go” (p. 77). The late-adopter problem—the idea that we only recently invented something that other organisms do naturally—falls apart in Smith’s hands. And one might even wish to extend this further and question the distinction between natural and artificial. By that line of reasoning, our technologies “are only the concretions of a certain kind of natural activity in which human beings have been engaging all along [and] is only one more recent layer of the ecology of the planet as a whole” (p. 84); a planet rich in communication networks between animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms.

The real detours start in subsequent chapters where Smith considers the history of computing more generally. Though he admits he strays quite far from his principal concern with the internet, he contends that the two cannot be easily separated and that their histories are intimately entangled. This sees Smith wrangle with various philosophical questions. Is intentionality built into the internet? He thinks meaning only appears in the mind of the users at the terminal points of the network. Are we approaching the threshold where AI will become capable of conscious understanding? He warns tech enthusiasts that “calculating is not thinking” (p. 106). And does the mind work like a computer? He argues this metaphor is only the latest in a long line of explanations that instead reveal the dominant or fashionable technology of the era.

“Perhaps, Smith argues, technological progress does not provide us with new experiences, perhaps it just provides “ever new ways of activating the sort of experience we as human beings have always had“”

Furthermore, Smith discusses devices both imagined and real. Examples of the former are Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head which would answer yes/no questions and Semyov Korsakov’s ideoscope which was to be a mechanical memory. Examples of the latter are Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, but especially Joseph Marie Jacquard’s automated loom that was programmable with punched cards and could be considered a 3D-printer avant la lettre. Computer technology owes a debt to weaving technology and the metaphors of fabric and threads are particularly persistent whenever thinkers have envisioned action at a distance. Smith suggests some metaphors are so powerful that they can literally take shape: “manners of speaking become manners of world-building” (p. 149).

A final chapter praises Wikipedia as a rare example of a web initiative that has not been corrupted and asks how much difference there is between the mental travel allowed by browsing the internet versus reading a book or telling stories around a fire. Perhaps, Smith argues, technological progress does not provide us with new experiences, perhaps it just provides “ever new ways of activating the sort of experience we as human beings have always had” (p. 166).

Unfortunately, Smith ends here, leaving the reader hanging in my opinion. I missed a final chapter that tied together all his philosophical wanderings and circled back to the opening gambit. Although he delivers on the promise of telling us, with some detours, what the internet is and where it came from, he does not deliver on the promise of where it will go or how his historical understanding might address the problems he so explicitly highlighted at the start. Overall then, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is asks for a bit of buy-in from its readers. As I hope to have shown with the above quotes, there are some gems to be found if you are willing to accompany Smith, but I can see how the book might not satisfy everyone and leave some readers befuddled.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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