Energy prices are going up, so it’s time to economise! I for one suggest the mass adoption of the geek lifestyle.

TFT screens and laptops, more a possession of the geek than not, consume less power than CRTs and desktops respectively. The extended periods of VGA UXGA tanning leave no room for excursions to the shops, supermarket, post-office or cinema, those needs being met by amazon.com, tesco.com, email and BitTorrent respectively, hence no need for a car, hence no need for petrol. While the geeks build their own little empires, society will collapse around them and give rise to vast socialist states which will provide electric trucks to deliver said goods to the doors of the geek-king-hermits.

The sedentary lifestyle increases body weight, thus protecting against harsh winters which can no longer be warded off by cheap gas fires. Creeping obesity also has the handy side-effect of reducing lifespan, thus solving the looming healthcare crisis faced by aging populations.

When the geek population reaches critical mass, sport of all forms will no longer be profitable competing against MMORPGs, will shut down, and leave huge surpluses of steroid-enhanced big muscley people roaming the streets looking for employment. The basketball players can be employed hitting the reset switches on the ever-heightening racks of 1U boxen, the cyclists can be employed to pedal power-generating bikes, and the gymnasts can be employed in the exponentially growing porn market.

Geeks being master manipulators of information will find themselves better equipped to survive in an economy entirely devoid of primary and secondary industry. It’s well known that the rich have fewer children, so this combined with the fact that 95% of women don’t want anything to do with geeks will solve the overpopulation problem. The male geek population will sweep the world clean of its remaining wealth, invest it on GeForce 6800s and space exploration instead of wives or children, and the female population of the world will be forced to become successful geeks themselves, or die (and thus possibly help out with the food and fuel situation not only by eating less, but also by being tasty and flammable). The space exploration may uncover future sources of fuel, and the 6800s will keep us warm in the meantime.

Art and culture will be transformed. Since rock, blues, folk, country, RnB, and classical music all require of the artist some form of destructive vitality, these genres will die and be replaced by gritty electronica, which the Baptists will find quite harmless, and redirect their energies against Catholics, that secondary source of all evil. The ensuing bidirectional jihad will draw Islam into the conflict, and end up wiping out 80% of the world’s morons. The remaining 20% will remain online posting to Usenet, web forums and blogs, where they can be safely contained.

Free from the constraints of conventional religion and culture, the geek overlords will abolish money. The left-wing geeks will replace it with Slashdot karma, and the right-wing geeks will replace it with some kind of rubber-stamp-and-ink system of recording 0wnings on the side of their cases. Disputes will be settled by Doom deathmatches, free love and happiness will emerge at the application level, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Footnote

Not unrelatedly, I just read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which although entertaining, contains speculation and dialogue every bit as rigorous as above.