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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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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They weren’t particularly better or worse futures. Just different.
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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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Reading this makes me somewhat sad. It also reminded me of your Our Diurnal Civilisation from 2013 (a longtime favourite), where you’d written...
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“For historians looking back, the sign of a dark age is the lack of comprehensive, consistent and canonical records.” So while we have more records than ever, there is no trust and so no agreement on what’s consistent/ canonical...
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