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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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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Tldr: When software eats the world, none of us is free because all of us are free. History hits a stochastic, ergodic equilibrium or something. In terms of breadth of counterfactual possibility/liminality it narrows to a terminal bottleneck.
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Replying to @vgr
"History becomes a stationary process." Might work better. Or not.
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