I think they all sincerely believe in some sort of “approximate meritocracy and Darwinian competition” folk theory, where even if they are compassionate rather than contemptuous towards precariat, they think it’s the only way the world can work. They’re TINA theorists.
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Effectively they’ve used the failure of 1910s vintage communism to convince themselves aggregate low-wealth political interests is not a contender at all in the Darwinian political arena, except in extremist Venezuelan form which of course can’t happen here.
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Just like in 2016, institutional elites had concluded that of course illiberalism had been permanently falsified in 1933 and ethnonationalosts couldn’t aggregate into political contenders at all, except in extremist Greece/Italy form which of course couldn’t happen here.
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Initially I thought healthcare would be the rallying symbol. But now I think the angries are young and healthy enough that they feel the pain of high rents far more than the cost of healthcare. Many are even choosing to live dangerously without health insurance.
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In general, in all these democracy riots, the systematic political miscalculation is believing live players to be dead players. Weakening players are not dead players and dead players are not extinct players. There are downcycling weapons-of-the-weak available at every stage down
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Live player/dead player is a choice to act with agency *in whatever form it is available to you*. So weak live players band together in collective action tactics as they weaken. Disenfranchised players band together in civil disobedience actions as they weaken. Etc.
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No sufficiently large constituency ever just lays down and meekly dies just because more powerful players have declared them terminal losers marked for extinction. There's always a subset willing to fight to bitter end, for at least delivering a bloody nose to the "winners".
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It's like that trope in horror movies or thrillers where the beast/villain is down for the count, but with the last breath of life, grabs the hero by the ankle and drags him down too. gandalfbalrog.gif
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A couple more points. There's an arc to this 3 act story with 2 dimensions. Shifting focus and downward devolution in abstraction level of the discourse.
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Shifting focus:
Act 1 = culture war
Act 2 = class war
Act 3 = technological war.
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Downward devolution:
Act 1 = war of ideas/ideologies (vote with words, virtue signals)
Act 2 = war of economic trends (vote with dollars, economic signals)
Act 3 = war of material trends (vote with lifestyle choices/designs)
Replying to
Harambe inaugurated Act 1 with a nihilistic null signals, a skip-to-the-end doomerism around discourses that were already visibly futile
Ok boomer is inaugurating Act 2 by explicitly disengaging from the idea-level discourse and says "see you in the ballot box/market/court"
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My Harambe article from 2016 where I first used the term "Great Weirding"
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Simpler version of the whole story:
2016: Vote with memes
2020: Vote with dollars
2024: Vote with feet
This is assuming the core 3 tragic problems remain unsolved and nobody sees any net increase in agency/imagination.
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In 3 years it's obvious that traumatized whiteness has not actually been solved by Trumpism. It's just handed out some palliative care in the form of twitter owns. In the next year, that will "settle" into a permaweird limbo equilibrium, kinda like Richard Spencer.
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In the 4 years, best case for traumatized precarity is that Warren will try and fail to deliver medicare for all, trust busting, or student loan forgiveness or UBI or anything. And the precariat will start abandoning urban economies for remote work economies.
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That will trigger Act 3, the technological vote-with-feet/lifestyle choice era. There is big mood in favor of abandoning increasingly unlivable metros, but people so far don't feel the pain enough to act on *communal* out-migration fantasies. Only individual/family trickles-outs.
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By 2024, this mood will have organized itself in the form of entire subcultures having identified and targeted and begun moving towards "microcolonization" destinations (kinda like some libertarians have already targeted New Hampshire). Domestic urban pilgrim streams.
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I'm calling this a colonization pattern because that is what it will be. Since the target zones are not empty or political blank slates. There have been many examples of this sort of movement in history and the sustained conflict that results between "locals" and migrants.
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We've been focused on climate migration/refugees across national borders because the biggest early failures are/will be failures of weak states in the face of climate-related collapses. But in the next wave, even strong stages with functional institutions will start to unravel.
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So domestic migrations rewiring the political landscapes of large countries will dominate in a few years. I'll make a fun but low-confidence prediction. If we're still doing this meme thing, the top meme of 2023 will have some sort of physical mobility/migration theme.
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The chances of political action fixing electoral college system in the US are low to zero. The system simply isn't that adaptable. But one thing that CAN do it is massive migration to hinterland and real reversal of the urban migration that began in the 1880s.
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To be clear this is not a good thing. Technologically, climate action is best driven by densification and energy efficiency. We're just not going to go down that route. By 2024 we'll have concluded that climate action at the scale/speed we think is necessary is impossible.
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So we'll default to the pop-science/tech idea of what's the best Plan B, which will be most people choosing to create survivable lower-density/lower-scale communities that mitigate local impact of effectively abandoned global climate action efforts.
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This is going to be ridiculously ineffective. A bunch of people in miserable little communes larping their favorite post-apocalyptic scenarios. But it should be entertaining to watch if you happen to pick one of the minority of good ones to spectate from.
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If this seems like a doom-and-gloom thread, it isn't really. There's plenty of room for positive dynamics to be spun up in this 3 act saga. My narrow point is that these motivating "broken system" problems aren't solvable and won't be solved.
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But any positive dynamics are going to take longer than 10 years to have an impact. Collapse is faster than wealth-creation processes. Which is why you get busts while they race each other. Amara's Law of returns (overestimate short term/underestimate long term)
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In purely technological revolutions, the interim tends to be between 1-3 decades. But when you're also simultaneously reinventing political and economic institutions, it could take much, much longer. Hence the dark-age scenario, which is more serious than people want to believe.
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Think of it as this. Whatever "this" is, it's the result of software eating the world. The only question is what are we rhyming with here?
1910s (3rd industrial revolution, mostly tech)
1800s (1st industrial revolution, tech+economic)
1650s:(westphalia... tech+econ+political)
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The entire stack of modernity is shearing. The pace-layering is hard to call. But the length of the "dark age" can be anything from 10 to 100 years depending on the details of the shearing dynamics. The bigger the stack refactoring you think is going on, the longer the dark age.
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Optimism versus pessimism is a very tedious kind of debate since history has always been multiharmonic cyclic overlaid on secular trends that can be interpreted as either progress or decline.
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The interesting question is predicting the lengths of the counter-cycles of the overall trend you think prevails. If you're fundamentally an optimist who thinks the arc of history is about progress overall, your task is to time the dark age lengths.
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If you're fundamentally a pessimist, your task is to time the irrational-exuberance bubble epochs and short them. Permabear and permabull are both derpy futurist positions. The meaningful bets are on the transience of dark and gilded ages against a secular arc-of-history posture.
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If you, like me, plan to basically ignore Act 2 of 2020-24 while hardening your economic defenses for long haul, this is the skip-to-the-end question we actually have meaningful time to consider. The issues driving 2020 are all past the point of no-return.
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