End of the year/beginning of the year summary here.
Overall, nothing’s really changing in the world since the last. Developed societies progress as their largest industries secure more commodities, obtain more investor capital, use more taxpayer money to fund that society’s pharmaceutical, military, technological, travel or agricultural advancements, and history gets left in the dust, ready to be remade as an overly-dramatized Hollywood film. Or taught, event-by-event, for fifteen minutes apiece in a high school history class no one’s paying attention to.
Only the names and (sometimes) places change. Not the patterns.
Things really do move like a sine wave through time. One step positive, one step negative, two steps positive, nine steps negative. Example: the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria = old school land grabs, tyranny and destruction. They’re not much different than the Philippine-American War, The Opium Wars, the Mexican-American War, Indonesian invasion of East Timor, World War II, twentieth century British Imperialism.
Not much at all.
“We want what you have (territory, resources) for our own benefit, because: Us.”
“We own what’s just as much yours as ours (land, water, utilities, trade, things that would make your population thrive), and it benefits us far more than you, so your development means a potential decrease in our not having things, and we want to limit that.”
“You are inferior genetically, religiously and mentally, so you don’t deserve it (life). We are better than you, so we do.”
And then there are the wars and fighting in Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar. Same thing, really. People have been battling each other for power and ethnic/religious differences since they first took land and stopped living like the animals they hunted. Once you make people stationary and give them property and increase their material needs, it’s like road rage or bullsh– office politics or a general, confined lab animal insanity at play: they start wanting what others have, and to see their transgressors or backstabbers or psychic raiders punished before turning around and inflicting weird kinds of mind games on one another or themselves, which sometimes turn physical, simply because they’re bored or just going crazy in their mentally over-stimulated, physical confinement.
And then there’s the king or queen or ruler of old putting treasury gold (or slave labor) toward things like international trade, sea exploration, civic growth, armament, or modern industrialization in general, whatever century we’re talking. That’s still there, too. In America, you can see similar progress from out of the Pentagon, money for technological development of virtual reality, AI, microchips (the tech industry was first developed by the Pentagon), then excessive government subsidies to big farmers, exemptions and protections through international trade agreements, money to the banking industry, pharmaceutical industry, you name it.
And then there’s the stuff that goes on politics. But don’t get me started. Please.
Except to say power often breeds corruption, going all the way back to good old Julius Caesar getting knifed in the back, front, below the belt, neck, wherever. Why? Because he didn’t do what everyone else in politics wanted him to, and was getting too corrupt by their standards. Forget about the populus—they had no idea what was going on behind closed doors. (I mean, they may have sanctioned the exact same outcome had they been on the inside, but we’ll never know, will we?)
Hell, you can go as far back as the Bible to hear people speaking out about political corruption, from the outside looking in.
It’s all the same today. More or less. For example, look at how much gaming of the system Trump got up to in his first term. And that’s just four years in hundreds.
We will get our AI playthings, though. And social media. And Netflix. And Amazon. And Black Friday. And Prime Day. And Target and Walmart. And the NFL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, and so on.
Which, depending on what we’re talking, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of the outcomes a monarchy, rising bourgeoisie or wealthy business class would never have wanted would have been a general education of the masses, for any purpose other than a flowing upwards of wealth. But we have that education—well, exposure, anyway. We may have bread and circuses everywhere (though now we have to pay for it), but we also have the internet and social networking, which can sometimes, slowly, edify. Once the internet evolved, distracting people and preventing them from becoming politically active wasn’t so easy anymore. Thus, Netflix, Disney+, Facebook, Amazon Prime Day, FOX News, MSNBC, CNN, etc. And, thus, attacks on wokeism, progressivism, social justice, and the continued attacks on any possible redistribution of wealth, expansion of social welfare, unionization or low-consumption lifestyles.
The patterns don’t change, mostly. As long as there’s a lot of money out there. And it concentrates in the pockets, bank accounts and stock portfolios of a few. Who end up running the societies, and want things to stay the way they have for centuries.
Speaking of which: Donald Trump. Again. And, of course, Elon Musk. Watch these two a–holes the next four years. If a falling out doesn’t occur (à la Trump and Steve Bannon [or any number of other administration officials Trump fired for no good reason]) and he doesn’t piss off too many low conscientious or older Republican voters who hate really rich tech people anyway, it may just prove to worm Musk into a position to become leader of the free world in the not-too-distant future. Never before has its richest person been in a slot so proximal to apex political power, and certainly never before has he been a U.S. president*. He may shy away from a future run, but, honestly, I don’t think his ego would allow him to sleep at night if he didn’t at least try.
What he’s doing now is gaining an understanding of how Washington really works. It’s every cartoonish supervillain who’s ever held authoritarian or monopolistic views of the world being shown the passcode of every door, vault and nuclear arsenal in the government, after making friends with everyone around. It’s like inviting a vampire inside your home. It’s like telling a narcissistic sociopath all your deepest, darkest secrets. It’s that greaseball, pedo-stalker redneck getting chummy and pounding beers with your dad every single night. What the hell do you think is going to happen?
And Trump? Same out-of-touch nonsense. Mostly bad decisions that are mostly self-serving, internationally alienating (though allies eventually fall in line with the world’s largest economy), domestically stupid (unless you’re near his tax bracket), economically destructive, and on and on and on.
And back to AI. It is going to take over the world, by the way. It’s starting now. You’re living it. It’s the Age of the Automobile, Atomic Age, Golden Age of television and dot-com boom all over again, and it’s happening right now. The question will be, what kinds of efforts will be made to safeguard the world against the amok-running people will have it undertaking twenty-five-to-fifty years from now?
Oh, and then there’s climate change. Good old climate change. (Not really.)
*- Though this one would need a Constitutional amendment.
