The third great wave

That has been said many times before...

It wasn't a paradise for the psuedo-slaves, doesn't matter if you call them serfs or not.

One interesting aspect to think about is if 0.1% of the population owns everything and all they do is trade the output of their factories, they won't have much use for almost all of the worlds land and no interest in almost all of the worlds population. They'll really like the worlds resources until technology makes that irrelevant due to solar or fusion or refining everything out of the ocean or nano-assemblers or whatever.

By analogy, in plains grassland regions, for centuries your worth as a human and a measure of your power was the number of horses you owned. Now, almost nobody owns horses and nobody cares how many horses the hobbyists own other than a small separate distinct subculture of horse people. I had a professor and have a cousin who are horse people, its a respectable, time consuming, mostly harmless, expensive hobby that no longer determines your worth as a human being or worth as a leader or your power over other humans. Anyway the analogy with capital is obvious. When you don't need capital anymore, its worthless other than to tiny subcultures of hobbyists. Very soon, collecting capital will be like collection kerosene lamps, or at most its like collecting antique furniture. People who are into it will be deeply into it and hyper competitive amongst themselves with all kinds of crazy ways to keep score and dominate each other and 99% of the population simply won't care and won't participate. Its vital to realize that most hobbies used to be someones business model, their income stream, their way of life, the millstone around their necks, the core of the economy. Now they're just something eccentric people do instead of watching "Survivor" on the couch like a good American would do. And thats the inevitable future of capitalism. As an eccentricity, I think capitalism might be an OK hobby for the occasional weirdo in a post-capitalist world.

Need to find a way to feed ourselves, organize ourselves, and trade human services among ourselves without capital although with a currency of some sort, because none of us will have any capital at all other than the weirdo hobbyists still into that ancient stuff. So... self replicating solar powered factories that make self contained solar powered hydroponics gardens, like a futuristic makerbot squirting out a futuristic aerogarden, and I trade bitcoins with friends on poker night or for arts/crafts or services.

To some extent you see this already. What does SV care about developers outside SV? Oh nothing you say? Well then, its already happening. What do neocons say about people who are permanently no longer part of todays economy? They don't care at all? Well then. They're not evil, just don't care. Like asking the horse people I know how important jet-ski's are to them, what do you think they're going to say? Everyone else is cool with that, at least as long as they still have bread and circuses and a roof of some sort over their heads, and none of that is going to require capital anymore, which is good, because none of us will have capital anymore, either by choice or not.

More hypothetically for me now; horribly immediately for some in Pakistan and Palestine.

But you know how technology goes, especially this kind of technology, it won't be long until everyone has drones. And I don't think any of us will be immune from being victims either.

Even just from a self-interested position, if the U.S. were smart we'd be pushing for international treaties against the use of militarized drones. Just like international treaties against chemical weapons. In both cases, they make warfare just too horrible, and the only way to minimize their use is to make clear international norms that put them beyond the pale.

Of course, instead, we won't even sign the anti-landmine treaty. And are setting an example of maximizing use of militarized drones. One gets the feeling the current governments of the U.S. in the current context wouldn't have agreed to anti-chemical weapons treaties either, if they had a do-over.

We feel a need to put a sort of narrative on these things, but thing develop as a mesh. There is a lot focus on labour replacement technologies this year. But, it could easily be that the technologies historian look back on will be communication technologies. The formation of a global human culture interacting more intimately with each other than Illinois was with Louisiana when the Beatles first said all you need is love.

Who knows what the future brings. Maybe it brings peace and brotherhood.

A democratic nation-state fights a war in a very different way than one without such sophistication. The American political will to fight arises out of its sense of justice and duty. We really believed we were fighting for freedom. Until it became abundantly clear that we weren't, we were happy to throw men and money into the meat grinder for years upon years.

A non-democratic nation fights for as long as the person directing the war maintains his ability to do so. That is the key difference between a western power and an emerging nation. We've got beliefs that can be orchestrated into terrific displays of force, other nations have to coerce the means to project force from the people somehow.

It's what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. As long as most Americans believe that what we are doing there is right, we'll keep at it no matter what. Oh we might pour more or less money into it, adjust our military footprint, but we're going to keep fighting the good fight for as long as we believe that it's the good fight. That belief is robust, it will resist attempts to dislodge it, the same way that a person's irrational beliefs aren't simply changed.

The Vietcong eventually came to realize this. They used their dwindling resources to stage attacks, not where they were needed militarily, but where they would be filmed. The culmination of this strategy was the Tet Offensive, which was carefully orchestrated to look far more large-scale, at least on cameras, than it was. It was an amazing feat, and it accomplished exactly what it had set out to, to tip the balance of public opinion against the war. Militarily, it was a failure, none of the attacks went anywhere and the fighters faded back into the jungle as quickly as they emerged.

It wasn't anything like how many soldiers we lost that caused us to pull out. It was the public perception of how the war was going, what we were doing there, where it was going.