Sean on Nostr: If you're worried about what Trump may or may not do during his tenure in office, ...
If you're worried about what Trump may or may not do during his tenure in office, you're looking at it all wrong. It's all transitionary, we're moving from (factory) industrial age, to (computer) information Age.
the following was written in 1997:
“We expect the Information Age to bring discontinuities—sharp breaks with the institutions and the consciousness of the past.
Here is what to look for as the process unfolds:
Changes in economic organization of the kind described in previous chapters arising from the impact of microprocessing.
A more or less rapid falloff in importance of all organizations that operate within rather than beyond geographic boundaries.
Governments, labor unions, licensed professions, and lobbyists will be less important in the Information Age than they became during the Industrial Age. Because favors and restraints of trade wrested from governments will be less useful, fewer resources will be wasted in lobbying.
Wider recognition that the nation-state is obsolete, leading to widespread secession movements in many parts of the globe.
A decline in the status and power of traditional elites, as well as a decline in the respect accorded the symbols and beliefs that justify the nation-state.
An intense and even violent nationalist reaction centered among those who lose status, income, and power when what they consider to be “ordinary life” is disrupted by political devolution and new market arrangements.
Among the features of this reaction:
Suspicion of and opposition to globalization, free trade, “foreign” ownership, and penetration of local economies;
Hostility to immigration, especially of groups that are visibly different from the former national group;
Popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, the well-educated, and complaints about capital flight and disappearing jobs;
Extreme measures by nationalists intent upon halting the secession of individuals and regions from faltering nation-states, including resort to wars and acts of “ethnic cleansing” that reinforce nationalist identification with the state and rationalize the state’s claims on people and their resources.
Since it will be obvious that information technologies facilitate the escape of Sovereign Individuals from the power of the state, the reaction to the collapse of compulsion will also include a neo-Luddite attack on these new technologies and those who use them.
The nationalist-Luddite reaction will not be uniform across regions and population groups:
The reaction will be less intense in rapidly growing economies where per capita income was low during the industrial era, where the deepening of markets raises incomes among all skill groups.
Reactionary sentiments will be most intensely felt within the currently rich countries, and especially in communities with high percentages of the value-poor and skill-poor who previously enjoyed high incomes.
The Unabomber notwithstanding, the neo-Luddites will attract most of their adherents among those in the bottom two-thirds of earnings capacity within the populations of leading nation-states.
The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, underachievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.
As new megalopolitical conditions give rise to a new consciousness of identity, along with new, complementary ideologies and morality, the old imperatives of nationalism will lose their appeal.
The nationalist reaction will peak in the early decades of the new millennium, then fade as the efficiency of fragmented sovereignties proves superior to the massed power of the nation-state. We suspect that the cynical bullying by nation-states of alternative jurisdictions, exemplified by the Russian invasion of Chechnya, will tend to deprive nations and nationalist fanatics of the sympathy of the new generations that come to maturity under the megalopolitical conditions of the Information Age.
The nation-state will ultimately collapse in fiscal crisis. Systemic crises typically arise when failing institutions suffer from rising expenses and falling income—a situation that is bound to beset the leading nation-states as retirement benefits and medical outlays balloon early in the twenty-first century. As we write, both the United Kingdom and the United States are burdened with multi-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liabilities (comparable on a per capita basis) that neither is likely to tame. Other leading nation-states face similarly bankrupting burdens.”
-The Sovereign Individual (page 259 - 261)
Since then we've had the 07/08 collapse and more recently covid.
Keep building.
We are winning.
the following was written in 1997:
“We expect the Information Age to bring discontinuities—sharp breaks with the institutions and the consciousness of the past.
Here is what to look for as the process unfolds:
Changes in economic organization of the kind described in previous chapters arising from the impact of microprocessing.
A more or less rapid falloff in importance of all organizations that operate within rather than beyond geographic boundaries.
Governments, labor unions, licensed professions, and lobbyists will be less important in the Information Age than they became during the Industrial Age. Because favors and restraints of trade wrested from governments will be less useful, fewer resources will be wasted in lobbying.
Wider recognition that the nation-state is obsolete, leading to widespread secession movements in many parts of the globe.
A decline in the status and power of traditional elites, as well as a decline in the respect accorded the symbols and beliefs that justify the nation-state.
An intense and even violent nationalist reaction centered among those who lose status, income, and power when what they consider to be “ordinary life” is disrupted by political devolution and new market arrangements.
Among the features of this reaction:
Suspicion of and opposition to globalization, free trade, “foreign” ownership, and penetration of local economies;
Hostility to immigration, especially of groups that are visibly different from the former national group;
Popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, the well-educated, and complaints about capital flight and disappearing jobs;
Extreme measures by nationalists intent upon halting the secession of individuals and regions from faltering nation-states, including resort to wars and acts of “ethnic cleansing” that reinforce nationalist identification with the state and rationalize the state’s claims on people and their resources.
Since it will be obvious that information technologies facilitate the escape of Sovereign Individuals from the power of the state, the reaction to the collapse of compulsion will also include a neo-Luddite attack on these new technologies and those who use them.
The nationalist-Luddite reaction will not be uniform across regions and population groups:
The reaction will be less intense in rapidly growing economies where per capita income was low during the industrial era, where the deepening of markets raises incomes among all skill groups.
Reactionary sentiments will be most intensely felt within the currently rich countries, and especially in communities with high percentages of the value-poor and skill-poor who previously enjoyed high incomes.
The Unabomber notwithstanding, the neo-Luddites will attract most of their adherents among those in the bottom two-thirds of earnings capacity within the populations of leading nation-states.
The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, underachievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.
As new megalopolitical conditions give rise to a new consciousness of identity, along with new, complementary ideologies and morality, the old imperatives of nationalism will lose their appeal.
The nationalist reaction will peak in the early decades of the new millennium, then fade as the efficiency of fragmented sovereignties proves superior to the massed power of the nation-state. We suspect that the cynical bullying by nation-states of alternative jurisdictions, exemplified by the Russian invasion of Chechnya, will tend to deprive nations and nationalist fanatics of the sympathy of the new generations that come to maturity under the megalopolitical conditions of the Information Age.
The nation-state will ultimately collapse in fiscal crisis. Systemic crises typically arise when failing institutions suffer from rising expenses and falling income—a situation that is bound to beset the leading nation-states as retirement benefits and medical outlays balloon early in the twenty-first century. As we write, both the United Kingdom and the United States are burdened with multi-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liabilities (comparable on a per capita basis) that neither is likely to tame. Other leading nation-states face similarly bankrupting burdens.”
-The Sovereign Individual (page 259 - 261)
Since then we've had the 07/08 collapse and more recently covid.
Keep building.
We are winning.