Comment 70981

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted November 01, 2011 at 12:47:02

It's worth mentioning that in America, the Occupy movement has roughly twice the popular support of the Tea Party, and half of the negative opinions as shown by polls.

Why protest? Because it really looks like it's the beginning of the end of said Golden Age. Many people, especially those now looking at the crippling poverty in America or southern Europe, are already seeing this. Chalk it up to peak oil, global warming, a rapid expansion of first-world lifestyles into China and India or just the constant buffoonery of the world's economic leaders, but the prospects for all of this look a little dim. Everyone heard about Greece yesterday, right?

For the last decade, in reference to all of these problems and more, people just keep coming back to vague allusions about how the world will "have to change". Sometimes they talk about a new set of philosophical values, new forms of economics and accounting, or entirely new ways of relating to each other. Well, here we are. So what now?

If you want a long and in-depth list of answers, I can spell one out - technologies, economic models, political structures etc. Might even bring the first draft of my book. That would, however, be my viewpoint, which really wouldn't be much of a basis to rebuild a world upon. The other option, of course, is a long and open process of public consultation in which we all develop a way forward. That route doesn't provide any easy answers for quite a while, but it also doesn't write itself into a corner by the end of the second week.

Expect all of this to go down very rapidly in terms of the lifespan of civilizations, and painfully slowly in terms of the average human attention span.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds