I’m be seen a few “we live in post liberalism” takes” over the years and I take them with enough salt to rim a frozen margarita at Florida Boomer bar. Which is to say a lot.
Institutional power reflects different design parameters for civic institutions but the people have power and you can count on human nature.
I’m watching the same concerning set of competing interests ravenously competing for strips of resources off the zero sum carcasses of the remaining social contracts. It’s all exit scams is simply too cynical a view. The future is arriving and we don’t have a clue what it will look like.
You could say the sky is falling, the Federal Reserve is a political actor, it’s all for sale, and corporate interests drain our budgets just as surely as public employee pensions
And yet I think we have a shot. I frankly I just don’t think all hope is lost. I am not here for an apocalypse in search of meaning even though I do think we have a much harder path ahead of us than the “uninterrupted prosperity” Americans have enjoyed. Artificial intelligence can scapegoat a few problems but it’s just that some debts come at a great cost to all of us.
I believe in positive sum outcomes for people willing to coordinate across networks. I wouldn’t be so interested in decentralization if I wasn’t concerned about how we coordinate in a low or no trust word. Artificial intelligence may even help us navigate it with the computer demands and security that cryptography was always meant to provide.
If hold community together through incentives and they cannot consistently come at the cost of the whole. America is an experiment in everyone being allowed to compete if they can decide on their own game. We are nodes ourselves.
If a node cannot hold its place in the network the messages may get rerouted or degraded but they do not disappear. Information networked provides hope and agency for those searching to add to the network. For those willing to exchange attention and currency we can provide temptation and distraction. The devil doesn’t need new tools. The old ones worked just fine.
Don’t be afraid of the knowledge we have chosen to accept. The only thing ever standing between you and connecting to a network is your capacity to access the information available and play where you land in the game. Maybe you get a shitty hand or your starting position sucks but we have the chance to speed run now.
I wish more people saw the opportunities we have in front of us. I know it’s harder to imagine a good life when so much is possible but we know many good paths already. There are no set game plays in an open world even if you can find and mimic what has worked. Love your people, learn skills that help them, and stay connected to each other. Divisions don’t protect us from change.