Political Memes

Liberal order across the globe is dying, the reasons are complicated but a lot has to do with the spread of information... and misinformation, and the capacity for capital to reach people directly and influence whole populations via technology.

I'm sure smarter people than myself are researching this to a much greater degree than myself, but I was vindicated at least when Mark Carney spoke at the WEF and gave an absolutely insanely blunt message, which paraphrased said basically "The old illusions of order are fading, the cruel will now prey on the weak."

Our "first world" nations are now a part of this feeding frenzy as different factions scrabble for power and control over select ideological groups, not physical borders. As a result, the old traditions of activism and collective action are being replaced by cynicism and nihilism as more and more people realize how little control they really have, and only want to stay in their bubble-universes.

Will Smith isn't going to rap about an issue that a marketable segment of the population might not agree with, not when AI can be used to make Will Smith rap about anything you personally want to hear, or just be made eat ALL the spaghetti for your entertainment. The market is the last power standing. Our world going forward, until it breaks, is just a world of markets fighting each other and there is no rule system or international law to reign it in. They ARE the international law.

We have about a century of techno-feudalism ahead, and not the cool kind where you get hands that turn into swords and shit, it's more the kind where society slowly declines, people live in shanties and eco-refugees flood across the world until the markets finally collapse and are replaced by something else. By that time, it will probably go one of two directions: worldwide collapse back to a weird mixture of iron-age warbands and pockets of ultra-high-tech castes living in corporate fortress-states, or something like super-AI will just shred everything we know into an unrecognizable world.