I lost you there. Who was experiencing 300 years of liberty? Here's a view that might give some comfort: Politics follows economics; economics follows technology, and technology isn't slowing down. The foundations of the power structures that you identify are dissolving.I do not welcome the Feudalism which marches doggedly, bringing a close to three hundred years of Liberty, against all nature, which may never come again.
The West has experienced three hundred years of unprecedented liberty, freedom, and social mobility. I was saying it appears to be ending, at least in the US. By all evidence, Liberty is an anomaly against nature. Natural Selection creates Plutocracy. Money is power, and the masses fail the Prisoner's Dilemma and are unable to work together against it, excepting rare charismatic leaders, most of whom immediately create another dictatorship after revolution anyway. I hope so. But I think your argument doesn't take into account game theory. That is, that the masses will always fail the Prisoner's Dilemma. Technology or not, the public will never be able to suppress the power of wealth if they can't work together, and all of human history suggests they can't. —Nineteen Eighty-FourWho was experiencing 300 years of liberty?
The foundations of the power structures that you identify are dissolving.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.
But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
I see what you are saying; but the point I was making is that only recently has that liberty been available (albeit in lesser measure) to woman and non-white men. I'm not so certain. Economic exclusion is what enables power. I don't know whether or not technology will increase or decrease economic exclusion in the longer term. Technology is changing much too fast, and politics far too slow to make reliable projections at this time. Human nature varies on scale, and it depends a lot on the possibilities of interaction, and how boundaries are drawn. Aside from the centralized administration of services like Uber and Airbnb, IMO they indicate positive possibilities for granular economic models.The West has experienced three hundred years of unprecedented liberty, freedom, and social mobility. I was saying it appears to be ending, at least in the US.
By all evidence, Liberty is an anomaly against nature. Natural Selection creates Plutocracy. Money is power, and the masses fail the Prisoner's Dilemma and are unable to work together against it, excepting rare charismatic leaders, most of whom immediately create another dictatorship after revolution anyway.
I think Distributed Systems might be the next big revolution. I hope it is, actually. By "distributed systems", I mean any decentralized service, physical or digital. Decentralised transportation, Uber without a company behind it. Decentralised internet, both physical connections—weather balloons, microsatellites, take your pick—and the web servers we connect to. Currency. Everything. It's a hard problem. It's mathematically hard. But we're just now developing both the mathematics and computational power for it to be possible, for the first time in history. That might be your Technological → Economic → Political revolution. I'm still skeptical; this is mostly a tangent. But it's possible. Decentralisation will be a big revolution, if it happens.Aside from the centralized administration of services like Uber and Airbnb, IMO they indicate positive possibilities for granular economic models.
It's my hope. I just lobbied insomniasexx to be a curator of The DAO, yesterday. :)