It's funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes.
No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.
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The industrial age has made us (falsely) believe that an "industrial base" has to necessarily be a nation-state scale at minimum. No. A complete industrial tech stack can be built as a fairly narrow single-billionaire pillar.
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A traditional "industrial base" has steel, sulphuric acid, power plants etc. at the bottom, and space programs and aircraft carriers at the top. This kind of stack can now be replicated with a *very* narrow footprint. I think you could do it for $3-4 billion in a small city.
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"Nation-state industrial base" has basically been miniaturized to billionaire scale. In terms of civilizational capability, it's the equivalent of mainframes evolving into smartphones (smartphone equivalent of civilization being postapocalyptic billionaire redoubt)
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I mean, I'm larping extended-universe builder in bits form, but with a few billion you can actually do it in atoms space. There are no necessary capabilities of nation states that cannot now be maintained by a small-scale billionaire.
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If there is to be a broad-based, inclusive, participatory form of civilization to succeed the nation state, it cannot be based on atoms-tech. It has to be based on software-tech that billionaires can neither replicate, nor compete with.
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Putin vs. oligarchs, and China vs. its oligarchs are probably the last chapter of the ancient conflict between wealth clans and impersonal nation states that the latter have a decisive advantage in. If the nation states weaken by say another order of magnitude, the oligarchs win.
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I'm an ideologue here. I like some billionaires, dislike others. If there's no broad-based civilizational condition, I'd be willing to pick among billionaires rather than being out in the wilderness in some sort of ratty indie survivalist camp full of starving people in henleys.
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In many ways, this is already happening of course. I've called it a 4th world condition. And the gated communities are underwritten by billionaire developers, not by states. A lot of us live in one billionaire bubble, earning and spending in other billionaire bubbles :D
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