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 in the end it’s people who have power and you can count on human nature to be what it is.
I’m watching the same concerning set of competing interests ravenously infighting for strips of resources off the zero sum carcasse of the remaining social contract. That America is now “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. Extraction and cannabalization won’t change it
Sure, 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 at making it through the turning. I frankly just don’t think all hope is lost. I am not here for an apocalypse in search of meaning.
Though I do think we have a much harder path ahead of us than the “uninterrupted prosperity” Americans, particularly Boomers and Gen X, have enjoyed. Artificial intelligence can scapegoat a few problems and mark my words it will be used as such, but it’s just that some debts come at a great cost to all of us and they are due.
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 no one can hold a community together through incentives and our institutions make choices that consistently come at the cost of the whole it’s time for us to rethink. America is an experiment in which everyone being allowed to participate if they can decide on their own game. We are nodes ourselves in the network of America.
If a node cannot hold its place in the network the messages may get rerouted or degraded but nothing disappears forever. It just finds another path around the disordered nodes.
Information being networked provides hope and agency for those searching to add to the whole. 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. But networked information isn’t evil in and of itself.
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 out of reach 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 in the past. It’s a foreign country you cannot visit anymore.
Love your people, learn skills that help them, and stay connected to each other. Divisions don’t protect us from change. We protect each other.