The global elite are about to lose their grip. It won’t happen all at once; it may not even be a total loss. Still, as more and more of what makes this world go, slips farther and farther into the virtual world, the current meat space political elite will be displaced by a different kind of elite. The current elite who don’t make the transition will be left behind.
In virtual space, the elite will be those who make the Internet work. Not just coding and protocols, but those who manage to drag the social and economic center of gravity onto the network. It’s been taking place for quite some time. To some degree that new elite will be the big name entrepreneurs, but they won’t have it to themselves very long. We have a new rising technocracy that will change the meaning of the term “technocrat.” It’s not so much the coders as those few coders who are able to see where it’s all headed. It’s the people with the vision and drive to make things go there.
Meanwhile, we should see a good bit of warfare over the direction the network is taking. The old meat space elite are doing their best to force the network to serve their old agenda. This will fail, but not before it first appears to be working.
This is where it gets difficult and fuzzy for me. I tend to believe that, as the old elite manage to seize some measure of control over the current network, the new elite will create a new network technology that will be impossible to subvert that way. There’s no way for me to guess what it will look like or how it will work. What I see is that the techno-elite will refuse to be let their network be lost to the old elite. They’ll do whatever it takes to come up with something that can’t be taken from their hands.
As usual, this will be made possible by the utter necessity of the old elite scrambling for some advantage amongst themselves. Every time the old order passes, it’s because they seek some advantage amongst themselves and enable the new order to arise. Rome hired Germanic mercenaries, but the Germanic tribes invaded in force later. The Medieval kings needed the money from the surging middle class merchants, and eventually the merchant class took over the governments. Now, the elite are seeking advantages in cyber warfare, and the cybernauts will eventually take over the government.
For the technology sector, we have a major hindrance in the rise of huge centralized monopolies-in-effect. These monopolies are binding the network to the old ways of doing things. Thus, we should expect that, either these monopolies will get a clue and make major changes in their business models, or they will be broken. Centralization is itself a vulnerability in the virtual realm. The network is inherently decentralized, so the tension will eventually break the hardened monopolies.
Here’s a hint: There will be a major shift toward enabling the most radical individual demands, such that all manufacturing and services will drift toward custom one-of-a-kind solutions made to order, and away from mass production of identical products. As more and more of life can be done that way, it will be increasingly necessary to do it that way.
We cannot see yet what shape the new virtual world will take, and what kinds of service and features will take hold and remain viable in the midst of the coming chaos. You and I as heart-led agents of the God’s Kingdom are watching to see where it will go. We need to discern just who we are before this gets too far along, so that when the path God has for each of us is revealed, we will simply recognize it and be ready to charge ahead.
