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Notes -
I've been really thinking about this tweet.
This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.
Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.
Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.
The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):
Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.
Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".
From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.
I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?
Will the implications ever become unignorable?
I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.
If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?
I'll make the non-standard argument that a lot of non-reproducing genes are good for other values, but that's probably just my own preferences.
The intermediate problem is that many of the environmental constraints here are less 'meme' or 'environment' and more result of TFR-buzzsaw policies. Whether they're intentional or not, they're probably not going to be as stable as human genetic code, and there's a non-zero chance they're going to just focus on the next least-desirable group.
The more serious problem is that modern industrial society doesn't scale down to one person, or ten thousand people, or a million, and I wouldn't want to bet too hard on a half-billion. Even assuming that the TFR-buzzaw ends somewhere, it might not stop at a point where we can still do things like 'build integrated circuits' or 'get to space' -- and if we fall below 'produce and refine fertilizer', you get some bad problems that might shove you down the path further. That's not a likely problem, but it's the sort of problem that comes up all at once.
"Minimum viable industrial society" is a very interesting question. What don't you think could scale down to that level?
Sorry, tangent, but this is really fascinating to me.
Semiconductors are the standard example. You can build a transistor in a cave with a box of scraps, but it's going to be pretty limited, and it's going to depend on material you can't just scrounge up in a random field somewhere. The actual production we do today involves collecting materials from 30+ sites around the globe, refining them with a few dozen different chemical processes each with their own feedstocks, and then brought through several layers of actual manufacturing of tools until eventually you get the final output.
Each individual step could theoretically scale down (though you'd have trouble trying to send One Dude or even Ten Dudes to run the extremely complex mine in the middle of nowhere, if only for 'and then they went stir crazy' problems. But there's still a ton of steps, they require drastically different areas of expertise, and in some cases they're just geographically separate. You don't just need a rare earths industry and quartz mining and a power plant and a metalworking field. You don't even just need the chemical feedstocks and mining tool production system and oil refining and tool development. You need all of them and hundreds more besides, and it's recursive.
Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low. If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users. Some stuff that might be possible might not be viable. Others get friction just because the level of demand changes: in our world, there's several people who have full-time jobs making nothing but M3x10 standard screws, phillips-head. Boring, but good work if you can get it. In a world of a 100 people, there's one guy who has to make every single necessary screw, and he's making up 1% of your workforce rather than 0.000000001% of your population even assuming he still has all the automation because he has to keep up with it and swap things out.
There are technical solutions or psuedo-solutions to some of these matters, but many of them have their own minimum threshold: if you want AI-powered robots, you need the semiconductor industry and TSMC and a whole industry of brushless motors and servos and yada; if you want to use genetic engineering to bypass some of the pharmaceutical industry's issues, you need a lot of infrastructure built toward that. ABS injection molding can be modeled as a tool for letting a small number of workers make a truly astronomical number of output parts, but requires its own (admittedly relatively small) industrial base... and it's also one that only make sense for unit sizes over 10k, because if you just need five of a thing, it takes more time to produce with ABS injection than it would to vacuum form, urethane cast, or cut with a CNC.
Some of these technical solutions are, in turn, their own problems in a 'minimum viable society' question. We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food, but that's downstream of mechanization and automation, geographically distributed crop production, bulk-scale automated storage, so on. You don't need GPS to run tractors, but you probably do need GPS or RTK-likes ground-only solutions to run semi-automated tractors. You don't need exact rubbers or metal formulations, but you do need pretty exacting ones to make the modern super-sized tractors. You probably do need chemical fertilizers and widely-available forced-water hydration, which isn't a big ask but still takes somebody building it.
I'm not committed to the 500m number, or to any number. There's a real bad habit of people looking at the past to just assume that the western workforce of a time was necessary to produce that time, and that's clearly not true.
But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.
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