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KulakRevolt  7mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   1949 thread views

After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization

anarchonomicon.com

An Epic length essay of mine in which I lay out my theory of history and why briefly summarized: The Age of the nation state is almost certainly coming to an end under the corroding forces of decentralizing military technology and institutional decay.

The future will not resemble post French Revolution centralized governments asserting their control over each other, but rather will slowly come to resemble the Greek City states (misnomer) or the Holy roman empire's vast network of thousands of polities and war making entities.

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On a long enough timeframe the USA will collapse and Balkanize, that’s true. The thesis of this thread is that it’ll happen by 2030, which is less of an obvious statement(and that furthermore that Balkanization will result in a patchwork of tiny countries with no hegemon instead of massive empires with spheres of influence).

I do think that Kulak is guilty of wishcasting, for lack of a better term. On the other hand, 2030 doesn't seem like a wildly implausible date, and I think balkanization seems like a reasonably likely outcome as well, though not nearly so likely as invasion by foreign powers invited in by one faction or another.

Why is that true? I think if anything the USA is becoming more powerful by the day. Our complete dominance of tech is only extending our cultural and military hegemony. There is an end game where tech becomes the only thing in the world that matters, if you're on top when that happens...it might be forever.

Do you think the USA will be a country in 3000 AD?

Oh so this is some kind of deep time speculation thing now? Ok. I think by 3000 AD that question won't have any meaning, but I think whatever our decedents (human/mechanical or mixed) are up to, and how far across the universe they have spread, hopefully some bot has a nostalgic subroutine and ablates their hull with the ol' stars and stripes. Shit if things work out weird over the next 40 years, it could be you!

I think on a long enough time scale it's inevitable that the USA collapses because that's just a thing that will eventually happen. I think that a confluence of crises in the neighborhood of 2030 is the most likely(this does not mean probable) near-term scenario for this, but I assign a >50% probability to the USA making it into the 22nd century in a form that is at least recognizable if probably distinctly different.

I think we are about to enter an era of unprecedented abundance, and that will be a difficult transition.

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