It may well be one of the shortest-lived civilizations in human history.
How you characterize the past depends on what you value most today. Conventional Western analysis is just barely able to see certain turning points ahead, but only to the degree that what one sees can be explained in familiar terms:
See, the nation state is more than just a country or a government — those have existed for thousands of years. The nation state aims to bind massive numbers of people in a territory together with myths of common cause, culture, and patriotism. This allows a single government to extract much more revenue and build much bigger armies. And this large scale government rose with the industrial era, because countries required large scale armies to defend the industrial production in a given area.
The scale provided by nation states allowed industry to invest and grow in areas that were relatively safe from plunder and destruction by barbarians or rival countries. Since a factory can’t so easily pick up and move, it needs a stable environment and protection in order to make the large capital investment worth the risk. Therefore, powerful nation states attracted more industry, and thus became richer in the process. Less stable regions, with smaller governments unable to protect their capital did not become as wealthy.
But that situation is rapidly changing as wealth becomes less about material production, and more about information technology, and human capital. These things are extremely mobile, and not very susceptible to plunder. They therefore do NOT require a massive nation states to justify investments.
This explanation is not false, but it’s also not how things will be explained once society stands on the other side of the shift. The Networked Civilization will no doubt use some of the same terminology and categories, but the fundamental nature of the shift in values will generate a different outlook. It is the characterization that will change. Once society becomes geographically rootless, the concept of what it means to be human will morph dramatically.
The sense of tribal identity never left us, and never will, but was driven into the background. In a decentralized and rootless networked world, your sense of tribal identity will become almost entirely virtual. This is the fundamental nature of the coming shift in society. Your physical presence will become a mere afterthought in everything you do. The people closest to your soul will be largely folks you never encounter physically.
It’s not that you physical existence will cease to need care and maintenance, but that society will completely shift in how we think about it. It will suffer a new kind of neglect.
Truly understanding this requires that you learn to think from a more eternal frame of reference. From that perspective, contemplate what it will mean. Social interaction will cease to be physical. You’ll find yourself communicating, even with people in the same physical room, through network protocols, if not networked devices. The awkwardness of nerds and geeks will become the norm, as the network protocols hide that disability. Instead of physical interaction dying completely, though, it will be the assertion of the network protocols over the physical. The fundamental sense of being human will be dominated by what happens on the networks.
Frankly, this is what will kill the elitist plot they call “The Great Reset.” It all depends on power and influence that will become wholly irrelevant in the Networked Civilization:
People, companies, and capital are more mobile than ever, and frequently shop around for the best jurisdictions in which to live, work, and run a business.
Smaller countries and city-states are actually better positioned than nation states to take advantage of this — without the need for massive military and government spending, they can offer government services as a product, based on the actual cost.
There are already a number of signs of the transition to government as a service provider, such as Caribbean nations selling citizenship through investment, Estonia selling e-citizenship, places like the country Georgia, Panama, Portugal and so many others offering competitive tax rates to attract residents and business.
Of course it may seem like these small nations will be threatened by massive governments with huge armies that could take over, sort of like what has happened with China and Hong Kong. And this is still a threat. The dying nation state will not go out without a fight. They will fight to preserve their power in a changing world. They’ll exploit crises like pandemics and terrorism to make it seem like we still need the nation state.
But these efforts will inevitably fail, because nation states can no longer grow rich through conquest and plunder.
It’s easy to move vast wealth when it is all in information technology, and the human mind, capable of working from anywhere in the world, connected via the internet. The need for large governments and armies to protect the capital is fading, because the ability of large governments and armies to take the capital is fading.
I believe the author of the linked article is too optimistic about governments, though. There will always be The Cult, and the attendant elite who seek to rule and oppress. The current crop of devotees will fail with their bogus Tower of Babel. Once this cultural shift takes hold, a new techno-elite will arise who will ally together to oppress. It won’t be long before a competition between governments will not drive prices of government services down, but will give birth to virtual governments that cartel together to drive prices up.
One thing does seem certain: You need to treat technological expertise as more than a mere business or hobby. You need to see it as the language and customs of human interaction itself. The analog of today’s social awkwardness will be tomorrow’s technology incompetence. If you don’t have a ready, almost instinctive, grasp of things like Android and iOS, you will be utterly dependent on those who do have it.
The point I’m making here is that we need to translate the gospel message into the new language of the networked society. We must speak to them where they are today, and where they will be tomorrow.
On a related noted, I’m personally predicting that Microsoft will have no choice but to ditch the Windows OS at some point. The corporate leadership is already leaning hard on making their identity and profit from Office 365. Expect them to rename it several times until they settle on something that people recognize for what it is, the premier standard in data interaction. Given how completely MS has embraced running the Linux kernel on their OS, you can expect them to shift operations farther in that direction. Already, major MS software products can run on Linux natively.
Google will fail to compete against them in that market, but will most certainly eclipse them in the OS department. The Chromebooks will explode and become the standard, much as Android has on smaller devices. Apple has already felt the fatal bite, as their very good ecosystem has become ever more marginalized, due to their arrogance toward their customers. It will become a niche market for those desperately trying to be cool. It’s not that Linux will take over the market directly, but a tamed and corporatized version of it. The Linux community has already been betrayed, but largely doesn’t see that yet. Still, the free-form Linux distros will continue to grow their presence on the Net.
The breaking point for general consumer acceptance of free-form Linux would be when connecting devices is as easy as it happens with Windows now. There are some things Linux does well automatically, but there are plenty of devices that simply won’t work. Those that do work often require too much hassle to get there. Right now, I prefer to use my Windows laptop for anything about which I have doubts. It has so far worked well with every random device I plug into it, but for my Linux desktop, it requires research and choosing devices carefully. It doesn’t matter why this is so; consumers have zero interest in why Linux developers have trouble with this. Until it changes, Linux will continue to see very low adoption.
But I’m confident that a significant number of barriers will fall soon, as the difference in fundamental system security becomes a dire necessity against the rising ransomware attacks. Linux is simply less vulnerable, and easier to recover. The market will shift against Windows on this issue. Already, both Russia and China are moving wholesale to Linux, partly for reasons of cost, but also for reasons of having more control over how the OS works, particularly in terms of leveraged espionage through Windows.
