The thing I miss most about the 80s is that for a moment, briefly, there was something it was like to be simply human in a global sense. We said ‘think global, act local’ and there was something that was actually about, beyond sentimentality, between ~1984-89.
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The globalization of shared consciousness sort of unraveled with the Internet, even as it grew way stronger at the level of bits and atoms. Sure it was a false consciousness but there was a subjective there there to it.
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I’ve decided to be ironically reactionary and utopian about the 80s. It was a liminal decade where a couple of different futures seemed possible. Then we kinda locked and loaded the one we’re living in. Liminal adjacent possible forked away like ghostly exit ramps not taken.
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The multiverse of psychohistory sort of fans out and bottlenecks and goes through long tunnels and lazy deltas. We’ve been in a fairly narrow bottleneck for about 30y where all multiverse roads lead to the same place.
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Paradoxically the more pluralistic and divergent actual reality is, the more bottlenecked the multiverse of possibilities is. There is a deterministic historical robustness to pluralism. Liberal democracy ends history by diversifying it maximally.
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We were the world...
But honestly, this sense expanded to a crazy degree in the 90s... the wall falling, Pepsi/Nike/Jordan all at planetary scale, "world music" (eg, Deep Forest), the same dance music playing in every country, real 3rd world awareness, WTO protests everywhere
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Nah not the consciousness. The stuff you mention I count as part of the unraveling.
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The 80’s. One of the most one-eyed, selfish, capitalist decades.
Seriously?
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The half decade that it became clear that Soviet Totalitarianism was on the ropes and the "End of History" might be a thing.
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