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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That can be true at the same time as the opposite proposition that they’re also the ones most likely able to secure a pretty deep survivability of political collapse (mountain bunkers stashed with gold and guns and equipment and medicines and spare parts...)
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The same way medieval feudal lords held on to their estates with or without strong kings. You hire a personal army, have loyal people running your affairs, rule like any minor king or baron would.
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Ah, but that's the thing. a) For its early history, feudalism was a violent meritocracy - the king was just the best warlord, put there by men personally loyal to them. It took centuries to build up legitimacy as an actual position that had power which could be passed on...
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Billionairism is also something of a violent meritocracy and we have the tech to get to a higher steady state, faster now. And sure, didn’t say the billionaire citadel had to be an absolute autocracy. Devolving power to subordinates is fine if the system is stable under that

