Current mood:	hungry
Current music:	M83 -- 0078h

This is her fault

autodidactic felt the need to prod me about this earlier post, as follows :

Where do you think humanity in general is on the whole "evolution" scale? Which direction do you think we'll go? Think we'll descend into anarchy or devolve? Sometimes I wonder.

Since it's late, and this stuff has been consuming most of my useful brain-power the last couple of weeks, and daoistraver has been tossing up some sweet shit about economics, and just because I'm a mouthy bastard my reply got kinda lengthy, and I figg'r'd I put it where somebody else might say something about it. Mebbe force me to go back and make some sense out of it later . . .

I don't think I can place evolution on a 'scale' so much. From my spot here in the middle of it I've gotta say I think we're about --->this<--- close to a major change, but for a short-lived species like us that could still be a couple lifetimes. Our evolution at this point needs to be looked at socially and technologically, though -- the physiological aspect has become tertiary and precessional at best. The next big steps I'd say go something like :

• Finding a way to anchor the amassed information and technology we have, to protect it from malicious humans and 'acts of God.'
• (Related to the last) Decentralizing all of our communications technology. Fuck the wires, fuck satellites even. All the available means of communication need to be synthesized.
• All that information and communication needs to be sorted, but on demand and exclusively by the interested party.

If we can make that step we'll have functionally achieved a couple of mythological goals all at once, viz. access to the Akashic records and telepathy. It might involve a couple of seriously unpleasant wars in the process, but once we have instantaneous and non-local communication we'll be able to drop the current government-style social structure. That's part of why I tend to avoid calling it "anarchy" (let alone claiming that it would be a "descent") and go with "postarchy" : the point is that one of the upcoming steps in our development will invalidate the idea of government in any recognizable sense. Fluid enough communication and rapid transit allow partnership and 'corporate bodies' to form as needed and dissolve as soon as they become an unecessary burden. Defense could be taken care of just by letting your karass (to borrow a word) know that you're in trouble -- affinity groups will arise as the next-gen cognate for 'nations.'

Aat least, that's one way I can see it going. Honestly I'm having more trouble holding my optimism these days than even a year or two ago. Another future I can see doesn't give us quite as much of that communication technology -- things progress similarly to how they are now for at least a hundred years, just moreso. The U.S. finally gets told to pony up for all these years of bunked-ass trade deficit bullshit, which (surprise surprise) leads to a run on world currency markets and banks. The resulting collapse and depression largely stifles innovation, and collapses a number of the multinationals as well as a good number of governments. What happened to the airlines post-9/11 will happen to all of the companies that rely on government graft and subsidy and bail-out, except the governments won't have anything to hand out anymore. The reconstruction, when it occurs, is much more balanced than the world we're in now, as the new governments are more wary of the get-rich-quick schemes that fucked them last time. We'll see more collectives and cross-national guilds, which will help keep power from bunching up in one nation, and stimulate more healthy competition -- these groups are less prone to hold assets, as profits are moved mostly to the individuals making up the group. Intra-guild rivalry will do as much to prevent monopoly as any outside competition. Also more small-scale competition -- with a lot of the current infrastructure and communications technology still available the start-up businesses we're seeing struggle now will be able to come into their own. Manufacturing and transportation companies will largely become services for smaller innovators and design artist/engineers, but this only really gels toward the end of the reconstruction. Africa and South America will come out ahead, compared to now -- Africa will finally get some time to itself, probably deal with some internal fascist governments and settle into a mature democratic cycle; South America will finally get to reap the rewards of their resources and production capacity without the U.S. constantly meddling and fucking them over. Asia, Europe and North America though will lose the most, as their governments will have the hardest time getting over the old way of doing things.

Or, yeah, we could just blow ourselves up. But I've still gotta say that's an outside chance. Information dense systems tend to increase in density at catastrophes the more often they've survived previously; I'm willing to say that we've made it over a few hurdles since the primordial goo, and we'll probably make it a few more.

And now it's time for the rice & corn & sausage & eggs I've been promising myself all night.