On Thu, 4 May 2017 13:49:03 -0400 Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> wrote:
The global Superstate scenario is "real" in the sense that many people actually seem to believe in it, approve of it and want to make it happen. Such is the power of propaganda in the age of ubiquitous broadcast communications, moving whole societies into fantasy worlds designed to facilitate economic growth under a top-down command hierarchy.
The Superstate scenario is "real" in the metaphorical sense that the Internet, trans-national corporations and high speed long distance transport of materials and consumer goods have already turned Homo Sap into a meta-organism that behaves like a colonial fungus bent on consuming the world's resources as quickly and completely as possible.
Yes. And one could argue this isn't new - and from a political point of view it actually isn't. "The System" used to be called the british empire, or the roman empire, I guess the chinese had their own versions too, etc. The only difference is that as technical means get more 'efficient', totalitarianism gets more efficient.
But the prospect of world peace and prosperity under a benevolent global State is "not real at all"
The system is certainly not benevolent, but 'peaceful' if seen from the point of view of rulers? It certainly can be. And it's 'peaceful' as long as the subjects obey. Which they do.
in the sense that the global industrial economy is locked into self-destructive feedback loops driven by perverse incentives. Any Utopian plan that does not take the context of a global economic collapse and human population crash into account is a futile exercise in abstract speculation.
Well, the plan of the oligarchy isn't exactly utopian nor benevolent I'd say, so that's not much of an objection.
We are now inside the historical singularity: A system where the exponential growth rate of change in human affairs (new discoveries, technologies, etc.) has advanced too far to permit reliable long range projections of future developments. The rate of ongoing change is too high, creating too many hidden variables and too much turbulence. Under these conditions, even brute force solutions that seek to /impose/ predictable order via murder and terrorism on global scale will not yield reliable results.
I don't know. I think "brute force" is a well established and pretty reliable method, which is getting even more reliable thanks to...the 'high tech' garbage favored by unthinking (or plainly malevolent) 'engineers'.
The only things we can predict with much confidence today are that the better established laws of physics will remain intact, and that macro scale human motives and behaviors that have not changed over the last few thousand years will likely change slowly if at all. Given these baseline factors, we /can/ predict, with some confidence, that we will be dropping out of the singularity soon: Macro scale human demand for basic material commodities (including food) now exceeds the planet's carrying capacity; that demand is still growing, while the rate of resource exhaustion and human habitat destruction continues to accelerat e.
I don't think that's so clear cut although I don't mean to sound like a cheerleader for corporate fascism.
The Scientician faith and its Corporate Capitalist patrons tell us that technological "quick fix" solutions will be created when and as needed to keep the world as we know it intact. Like all respectable apocalyptic prophesies, those of the Scienticians are likely to be reasonably accurate right up to the point where the Heavens open up and Bog and all his Holy Angels come down and fix everything for us: That part never happens.
I'm not completely following. The scienticians don't subscribe to any apocalyptic prophesy. Quite the opposite, the shitbags are Optimists who believe in Eternal Progress.
I do not advise people to "give up" on anything but the status quo, and I do not predict the extinction of the human species.
Well, I can avoid predicting anything and just point out that Huxley's predictions become more correct by the day.
We are the toughest weeds Nature ever made, capable of living on pack ice and hard rock desert using only Neolithic technology - and loving it. I do suggest that those who are able to do so get to work devising practical solutions for survival and recovery to the best available New Normal. The world's present rulers are hard at work on those problems right now, but their objectives center on worst case scenarios where retaining their present level of power is the primary objective, and everyone but themselves is expendable. < pardon my language, but fuck those people.
so far they are fucking us
:o)
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