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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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Consider Rome and the "Dark Ages", and likewise the Bronze Age collapse. It's happened before, and it will likely happen again. Will it happen soon, as in before 2030? I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't bet strongly against it either. It seems like a distinct possibility, especially given the obvious trends in weapons technology. The tech that enforces our current peace is badly senile, and it looks to me like there's a lot of overhang for a really serious military disaster that I'm not sure the existing order could survive.

Those were under entirely different circumstances and the whole world would have to collapse at the same time to really set humanity back, not just one empire somewhere. We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.

"Collapse" as in a rapid slide into warlords and mad max is just a fantasy for people who don't like how things are, don't understand how terrible that would be, and think they would be king of the ashes. Collapse aware people are just a secular doomsday cult. They always say "next year" when the appointed disaster never arrives.

I would like to agree with you, but I absolutely must push back on something:

We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.

We can and we most certainly fucking will unless something is done in the near-ish future. Right to Repair is somewhat of a live issue now, and that it's a live issue at all is a sign of deep trouble--same with video games. We will actively create new problems or un-solve solved problems simply because it helps enrich the pocketbooks of executives. If anything, I expect a collapse to push us back to anywhere between the 1980's to the early-to-mid 2000's in terms of what technology will be left, and that's assuming things aren't quite so total that we can still set up factories and maybe reverse-engineer the more proprietary stuff.

I'm not terribly, 100% convinced that we'll see the collapse of the USA in our lifetimes, but I can easily imagine that it will start, not directly via fire, explosions, coups, civil war, or turnkey tyrrany, but it will start with numbers on balance sheets and lines on charts going down, which will cause a cascade of various services mysteriously (heavy sarcasm tone indicators optional) becoming unavailable, as people in suits order servers to be shut down, following a cold, contextless logic driven by numbers and lines.

I was at my parents for easter and my mother had found her 8th grade science notebook. She wanted to show me becauase it was actually a very neat and comprehensive guide that she had created. I literally joked, "We could rebuild society from this thing if the end times come".

I mean shit I have all of wikipedia saved. Sure we might fuck up supply chains and some manufacturing, but the knowledge of how to retool and rebuild will be absolutely everywhere in the world, plus the whole thing isn't going down at once, or maybe not at all. Even an all out nuke fest wouldn't do it.

In terms of lines going down, that has happened catastrophically many places before, but tech and humanity grinds on and improves.

Those were under entirely different circumstances and the whole world would have to collapse at the same time to really set humanity back, not just one empire somewhere. We can't forget our technology, too much is recorded.

We don't have to forget it to stop being able to make it work because too many parts of the system break down at the same time.

"Collapse" as in a rapid slide into warlords and mad max is just a fantasy for people who don't like how things are, don't understand how terrible that would be, and think they would be king of the ashes.

I think that's a fair description of most people who talk about collapse. They have no idea what they're asking for, and will curse the day of their birth if they actually have to live through it.

Crucially, I think people not understanding the innate horror of such an outcome makes the outcome more likely, not less, and I do not think such an outcome is wildly unlikely in the first place. Revolutionary outbreaks enslaved half the world in the last century and killed ~75-100 million humans. We have nukes now. Every day that passes, technology accumulates that our society doesn't really have answers for, and in most cases hasn't actually thought about. We're coasting now on the inertia of previous generations, and our social structures are visibly decaying day by day. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we're going to get hit by something unignorable, and it's an open question whether our present society can survive a serious shock. Evidence from past shocks, IE COVID and the summer of Floyd and the 2016 and 2020 elections, are not encouraging.

Despite all of those revolutionary outbreaks and enslavement and death, total world war, actual pandemics (not covid nonsense) etc..etc... humanity marches on. Will we be replaced as workers by robots and computers? Yes, but I hope in more of a Star Trek or The Culture way way instead of a Elysium or Terminator, or grey goo way. Time will tell. But it isn't going to be some kind of American Civil War part II that brings down humanity, as much as that would please @KulakRevolt

But it isn't going to be some kind of American Civil War part II that brings down humanity, as much as that would please @KulakRevolt

The global peace is enforced by America. American Civil War seems like an unpleasantly likely outcome given our current position, given that the culture war continues to escalate and norms continue to erode. If America suffers a civil war, it's probably not going to be able to keep a lid on the rest of the world.

Outside of the fringe extremes there is very little appetite for of a civil war redux. People go to work, come home, make dinner and watch netflix, they aren't out there drilling for war. What would it even look like?

The cities are blue and the countryside is red, it isn't really set up by states, even within that delineation there is a pretty good mix of people both in cities and the countryside. Hard to have anything more than Northern Ireland going on if you can't ever draw battle lines.

I think the possibility is vastly overblown as it is an interesting thought and is easy for people involved in the culture war to extrapolate and understand. People have been predicting another one every year since the last one. It always makes for a good clickbait article or book or speculative blog post.

Outside of the fringe extremes there is very little appetite for of a civil war redux.

Little appetite for a war. Much appetite for harming the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. People are bad at predicting the consequences of their actions, and end up getting themselves in more trouble than they anticipated.

The overall pattern of the culture war is unbroken escalation. Our society's conflict-resolution mechanisms are observably breaking down. The Supreme Court is pretty clearly on the way out, from the right because we observe that its decisions are flouted whenever blues don't like them, and from the left because it's now majority-right and that's unacceptable. The idea that either side will accept an election that goes against them seems implausible, given what we've seen recently. Pressure will continue to build until something breaks that we can't fix.

Hard to have anything more than Northern Ireland going on if you can't ever draw battle lines.

Rural people can cut power and water to the cities. Both sides can try to blockade food to the communities they don't like. People can attack their neighbors, with varying levels of organization. There's worse things, as well.

Right but people are very mixed in. My immediate neighbors run the full gamut, from an ultra conservative family of 7 on the corner lot, to hard left masters level music students in the 2 unit next door. There simply is no way we all turn on one another in some kind of frenzy of violence, this ain't Rwanda, or The Purge. There is also nothing to gain.

There simply is no way we all turn on one another in some kind of frenzy of violence, this ain't Rwanda, or The Purge.

The Floyd riots are a pretty good example of people suddenly turning on their neighbors. Lots of violence, lots of harm caused. We're damn lucky it wasn't worse, and a big part of what kept it from being worse was large amounts of social cohesion that the riots themselves destroyed. But past that, you don't need everyone turning on each other in a frenzy of violence for people to start burning society down. You just need the current escalation to move into open violence badly enough for the violence to become self-sustaining, at which point it spreads.

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