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The Network Civilization is upon us. Many current plutocrats will be destroyed because they don’t understand what it takes to stay in control, but they won’t simply go away when things change. There has never been a truly democratic government for very long anywhere, nor will there be in the future.
You wouldn’t like real democracy, and we’ve already demonstrated beyond all doubt a constitutional republic won’t happen, either. Communism and socialism are already dead, too. Those ideas as studied in the past will continue thinning and fading into mist. Radical versions with new names will take their place. A shift in civilization is not something you can easily see because it no longer requires a complete destruction of the old. Humans can now gain control of resources without total destruction.
There may well be a nuclear exchange, but there won’t be an all out nuclear holocaust. There will be blood in the streets — there already is, just not a lot of it. Cities will be leveled and large populations will be slaughtered. But none of this will be on the scale sufficient to end Western Civilization. The West will simply wither away. The transition will be very hard to detect.
Critical to understanding the future is seeing how the Occupy Movement did things. From a Western perspective, it remains a failure. From a civilizational aspect, it has already won. It shows people no longer follow the old rules and methods of political activity. Occupy has merely manifested what is coming. The same rules work fine for criminal flashmobbing in cities right now; criminals are often on the cutting edge of where civilization is heading. Not the crime, but the means of organizing human activity, of setting out the rules by which we can call something “civilization.”
There is precious little political doctrine as most people recognize it. Doctrinaire politics is long dead and good riddance. There are no real libertarians, conservative means nothing at all, and even liberalism is just a covering label. For example, people try to explain what President Obama believes in as policy — he doesn’t believe in anything. He believes in Obama. It’s been a very long time since we’ve had a president who actually knew his own policy. These days, by the time you get into office, you are bought and sold a hundred times. Obama is an empty suit, a figure head capable of putting on a good show, same as Hitler, but far less effective. Whatever he says is almost invariably scripted by other people. There is no dream to catch, only enforcing the interests of his handlers and owners. His policy is plutocrat all the way, with several competing agendas he moderates almost entirely by accident.
If you find your brain stuck in the old left-right paradigm, you’ll recognize elements of it in what you see coming, but you’ll understand nothing. Do you realize there are people I know still insisting Islam is highly protected here in the US? Yes, I realize there is a lot of progressive propaganda about being nice to everyone, Muslims included, but the actual results of official treatment indicate a high degree of prejudice against them. In terms of actual government behavior, Zionism is a far bigger sacred cow, but even that doesn’t reign supreme. It’s more a case of plutocrats protecting some use of Israel for their own profit. Again, nobody at the top really believes in anything except keeping their own position.
But a great many of them will lose it as things continue changing radically behind the scenes. It’s not that simple. Yes, we do have still a very large proportion of sheeple, but not everyone is sheeple about the same things. A sheeple in one place is an activist leader in another. The visionaries who steer things are sometimes part sheeple themselves. For example, most of the current feminist orthodoxy will survive. Not entirely as we know it, but elements of it have become so deeply ingrained, we can expect to deal with that for a very long time to come. Game will grow, but it will never dominate civilization. Truth is like that; it’s always held by a minority.
And in terms of computer technology, today’s laptop is tomorrow’s “big iron” dinosaur.
Think about how computer technology will invade every aspect of life. No, don’t fear it, because there will always be those who keep parts of the digital ecosystem free and independent. After all the long-standing efforts to borg the devices under government control, along comes something like Silent Circle to democratize privacy again. The rebels can’t win, but neither can the oppression.
There will always be plutocrats, but their flavor will change radically very soon, because the means to power are changing rapidly.