Conversation

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.
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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