“There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Are we starting one of these weeks?
Come with me while I go over 6 climaxing trends, any of which would be monumental enough. All together, these mega trends will shake humanity to its very core. What a time to be alive!
1 A.I. is here!
Since Chat GPT broke out into the world, there has been a lot of hype, conjecture and speculation on what it will do to humanity. Nobody really knows, but many are trying to reason it out. From here we have the full spectrum of possibility: from skynet dystopia, to a benevolent Computerised Hyper-Intelligence.
A huge spectrum yawns open between these two extremes, but that's nothing new in our history. The splitting of the atom led to both breakthroughs in medical sciences and clean energy generation, all the way to planet-annihilating nuclear weapons.
So what’s different this time?
What is different is the speed! It’s all happening at a breakneck speed, and seems to be accelerating!
Decades in weeks!
Our technological philosophers speak now of unleashing individual human potential by giving everyone their own personal “Chat GPT”. Both tantalising and frightening, all at the same time.
We could easily expand on this point with robotics, but I feel that AI is the cornerstone to watch. Robotics will be simply an extension of AI.
2 Mass Media on life support
Since the printing press was invented, those that held power understood the frightening potential of the written word multiplied ad infinitum.
Censorship has been with humanity for so long, and the censors have become so adept, that we have trouble seeing it anymore. It is the invisible muzzle on the collective mind of humanity. If those in power were wise enough to release the full potential of our species, imagine the greatness we could have already reached.
The latest incarnation of communication technology is the internet. Despite its penetration, the prior king, television, has clung on, and with it the powers have clung onto their grip of this spigot. Anyone notice the heamoraging viewership of TV news?
As more and more free ideas escaped over and around the censors, all the censors know to do is clamp down harder. The Twitter files, the fall of cable news, the slo-mo death of facebook (more like the aging and death of its user base), juxtaposed by the rise of the independent podcasters and bloggers, are all signs that we are in the midst of a titanic revolution of information.
The tighter the legacy power’s censor, the more minds break free from their grip. It is a thing of chaotic beauty. Truth is power. Brutal and raw. Can humanity handle the truth? Finally I think we are going to find out.
An appendix to this point is required:
Our social relationships in the era of internet fuelled social media.
I have suspected that human interaction has not been able to keep up with the pace of Social media. Collectively we have not taken to this new vast communication mode with grace, maturity or civility. Hate and outrage is what keeps people engaged the best according to the bottom lines of the private social media companies (behemoths). We now discover that their algorithms promote hate by default because that is what will earn the most advertiser dollars.
Social media 1.0 is has run its course, and we starting to are witnessing a more decentralised Social media 2.0. Harder to control, it is evolving and reacting to attempts at more heavy handed censorship from the centre at a rapid pace. Those in power are losing the game of whack-a-mole.
How this will look is anyone's guess, but I hope we can grow up and be nicer to each other on these new platforms.
3 The cycle of Empire
‘History does not repeat, but it rhymes’ (provenance still debated).
Human history is loudly punctuated by the slow rise and rapid fall of empires, and since the vanities of empire are often the fuel of historians, it could never be otherwise. Our cultures are permeated by this more than any other single aspect of history, and the perspective is always from the centre of empire. They are all benevolent, till they are not!
The US empire has been in place since about WW2. All empires are unique, but this one is more unique than most. It’s genesis was unconventional. It morphed out from the British empire which, during the tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century, had the pillars on which it rested, destroyed. And secondly, it is the first non overtly Totalitarian Empire. I explore this in my next point so I won’t belabour it just yet.
It may be said to have had the first unconventionally bloodless genesis, but ominously, it looks ready to make up for that deficiency in its fall. It will be the first fall of empire to transpire in the nuclear age. By this I mean it will be the first to be tempted by the literal ability to burn it all down as it descends.
4 Capital Fascism
Although capitalism has been with us in one form or another for many generations, its toxic maturity is contemporary.
This maturity is contemporaneous with the US empire, making this latest episode of empire, a strange beast indeed. The non-totalitarian empire. The true string pullers appear to be a disparate cabal of players whose only claim to fame is to have learnt how to game our corruptible capitalist system best. Democracy is their fig leaf, and the US is there playground de jour. The appearance that the masses who live in democratic countries have control over the course of their nations or of civilisations in general is an illusion at best.
For the players of the game of capitalism, wisdom is an impediment. The unfortunate outcome is those who have won all the power and riches, are the same who have abandoned wisdom. They have been bestowed with god-like powers over the globe of humanity with none of the wisdom to wield it well.
This has bred a dangerous beast indeed. Dangerous when confronted, and deadly when endangered. As threats to their power multiply and accelerate, we can only expect trouble.
5 Economic tremors
So many words have been employed in the analysis of our current economic miasma. Those wading in the weeds of this swamp may have lost sight of the grander picture. ‘Not seeing the forest for the trees’. The whole edifice is falling.
The last century of economics has adopted a trend of decoupling money from tangible commodities, to intangible faith. The transformation of money into currency. We used to have for the longest time a shiny yellow metal, hard to find but easy to identify as an independent arbiter of the issuance and veracity of money. Now we have colourful paper and plastic currency tokens that represent a collective debt pushed at ever greater speeds into an intangible future.
So few words are devoted to exploring the simple unsustainability of this foundational presupposition. It is not a surprise that most people are ignorant to the perils of this system. A testament to the power of humanity’s wilful ignorance and wishful thinking.
It is becoming harder and harder to ignore that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ (Hamlet, by William Shakespeare). The bond markets (the deepest and most liquid financial markets on the planet) are slowly waking up to this. This maybe because: acknowledging this is the end of the line. Admitting we have driven into a cul-de-sac. But waking up they are, and their recent erratic behaviour is telling indeed. Reporting on this sounds like: discussing drug addiction with a schizophrenic heroin user.
Like it or not, a reckoning is upon us and we are no longer speaking of years in the future. It's now months at best.
6 The birth of Crypto
Economics is not an appendix to society. It is a fundamental feature of society. It is a vital form of intra and inter-societal communication. It is the very mechanism by which our species has been able to forge beyond being just a hunters and gatherers.
Free market economics is the correct economic term to use. Capitalism only a side effect, and a pernicious one at that. Today capitalism, to the free market, is akin to the tail wagging the dog.
The effectiveness of free market economics rests on the effectiveness and neutrality of its life blood: Money.
This blood is our medium of exchange, our unit of account and our store of wealth.
These are the very lubricants of trade, the impetus of commercial development, the medium of economic communication, for Money is literally the language of economics.
The coercion of money by the banking elite, which began some centuries ago, has corrupted the free market economic system, turning it into the rampant cancerous capitalism we experience today. Reform this from the centre is impossible. Those that could reform it gain too much of their power from the corruptibility of its presuppositions.
In order for humanity to wrest itself from the shackles of this invisible but cancerous influence, this cancer must be thoroughly exorcised.
By some stroke of luck or providence, just over a decade ago an genius computer science breakthrough was made in the shadows of obscurity. With a rare and selfless wisdom, an anonymous and enlightened person (or group) bestowed the amazing discovery of Bitcoin onto the world.
Again by luck or providence, it survived its first decade of dangers and tribulations to become a real force to challenge the whole corpus of economic corruption. Completely voluntary and neutral, it birthed a digital life raft for ours and future generations to sidestep this corruption of the very money itself that we have laboured under for so many generations.
First the powers that be ignored it, then they laughed at it,
now they are desperately fighting it.
Will we win?
Conclusion
Any one of these trends unfolding on a civilization is quite enough to rattle our cages, but to have them all simultaneously unfold and ricochet erratically off each other, will make the next months and years historically monumental.
Notice I do not mention environmental issues such as carbon and resource depletion or pollution. Nor do I mention the culture wars raging in corners of our globe or the hot conflicts in Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, etc... . These are side shows and in many ways are either outright contrivances, or useful props of the string pullers. These are secondary effects of the big 6 I have mentioned above. We can expect more of them to keep us in fear and distracted.
I have been contemplating these issues for some time now, and now having condensed them here I realise that the last 3, fully half of them, are about economics.
It is a testament to how importantly intertwined, yet mysterious to most, the importance of our economics is in our lives.
I hope this condensed version of our current state of affairs. Have I missed anything? What do you think of all of this? Please leave a comment below.