It occurred to me that as the basal layer of society shifts, governance technologies often are outdated and outmoded. Growing up in the 2000s, seeing this transition layer from a largely paper based world of state broadcast in my childhood to the development of cellular/laptop individual consumption yet somehow still mediated through centralized social channels1 most accelerated through the 2019 COVID pandemic made me reflect on such the difference looking back, standing at about a third through my life so far.
In my youth we still had transparent paper sheets projected onto the screen with exercises; my high school years were a continuation of paper sheets with some digital whiteboards/projectors; yet college and the youth growing up now exclusively know a sort of managed digital system through Canvas that in my opinion pales to the formative experiences I had growing up. Many modern websites strike me as not beautiful, and we suffer the more for it.
Systems by generation
Walking through Beijing I realized that some of the core systems of the now 70s to 80s aged generation were: railroads (model trains were in subway stations and hotels), state broadcast (CCTV), telecoms with phone calls, cities and subways, and jet-black gasoline powered vehicles as the symbol of power. Seen in this light, I ask whether the largest high-speed rail system in the world is a perpetual form or the crowning jewel or to some a swan song of another era. It was, of course, necessary—the country would likely be a small agrarian or manufacturing kingdom rather than a technological leader—but I cannot help but wonder what the outcome of connecting all the cities together by rail will lead to in that each layer builds upon the next, and sometimes catabolizes the previous layer without replacement. AI and StackOverflow, for example. One could imagine that frequent travel on the civil infrastructure built by others who hobbled past mountains for hospitals leads not to the temperament which could rebuild it if called upon.
Another recent remark online discussed how we only sort of re-created AOL chatrooms on X.com. We move quite far, yet in some ways we are running while standing in place. Nevertheless, the nexus of society does feel to shift over time as capital and time and energy are allocated. Functionally many of the old things are the same and good enough, but with the youth and time comes new ways of being. In a world of electric cars, cellphones and group chats, discoursive app/media power combined with AI, it seemed new technological cores were emerging. Columns of Cadillacs would once be the sanctity of the State, yet today one may see gasoline as older and rusted as sleek lines of grey Teslas shimmer unerringly through the streets. Yet this too might one day give way to currently inerisible manners of being: digital-brain implants or teleportation, which people might decry as essentially suicide.
Certain technologies define some eras—yet I do not exactly feel another one has started, nor that its present form significantly improves upon the last. The before-years were times of mass education, because a mass labor force was needed to man the various parts of society. With increasing amounts of automation and robotics on the horizon, some allocators may feel mass education can no longer be justified on certain cost-effect curves, even more when considering that one can essentially self-educate themselves with AI these days. Also consider that foundations such as public schooling or 40-hour workweeks we grew up in did not arise out of nowhere—they came in response to child labor and daylong shifts in the burgeoning era of industrialization—meaning the form of the future arises from the shape of today.
Thoughts on future
How, then, can you best feel the currents of the time to see where it is heading to develop what comes next? What do we owe other individuals and members of society, and what would the boundaries of society thus be? Will the form of state governance continue to perenially persist, or will it sort of wither away? I feel we are living in an era of major change, yet perhaps since the industrial revolutions of yore no individual has felt that they do not live in such eras.
Certainly the situation of childlessness is to be given note. Much remaining youth has been crucified on the realization and capitalization2 of their surplus labor on the balance sheets of companies, but without which they could not procure sustenance at all. Moreover, the de-densification problem of high modern connectivity is novel, for without enough density we could construct nothing at all. The ongoing struggle between the center and the periphery, as time immemorial but now represented between central government and business, is likely to continue.
Ages
Ghost of Christmas Past:
- State broadcast, telecoms
- Railroads
- Centralized authorities and seals
- Mass education, mass employment, low wages but guaranteed security (pensions)
- Governance by statistics and national systems (postal service)
- Cash economy; checks; the physical act of paying
Intermediate:
- Replacement of labor with offshoring
- Containerization / global supply chains
- Interstate and gasoline automobile growth
- Birth rate decline
- Cable TV fragmenting the broadcast monoculture
Ghost of Christmas Present:
- High transportation and connectivity; de-densification
- Multimedia sharing of information, texts, social apps
- Overloaded information environment
- Growth of concentrated private wealth and boutiques as state is no longer centralizing factor across information or media
- Digital payments
Intermediate:
- Car electrification and satellite connectivity
- Drone logistics/rideshare/delivery
- Surveillance-as-infrastructure (ad tech, payment rails, biometric ID)
Ghost of Christmas Future:
- Replacement of labor with automation (services first)
- AI turns things into synthetic media; hard to see what’s real
- Automated warfare
- Faster planes
All of the above is interesting for society, but readers burn for what is relevant to them—what will education, employment, socialization, and the daily texture and life in such futures look like?
- First, it will vary significantly based on locale, like it currently does
- Not sure education/credentialing will survive in its current form due to AI. Maybe only serves as elite reproduction? Mass education and literacy likely to decrease, already is.
- Think other things like socialization, marriage, etc. will be hard to predict due to high variability in life locations
- Large underclass of young people starting to form
Changes in the media environment
I think the following is still are yet to occur in news:
- Re-centralization of consortium of experts (anyone who is an expert/qualified can share their opinion)
- Mass translation
- Open-source dredging of information
Footnotes
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The novelty lies in social media algorithms acting like a mirror. In the beginning they appear to be the development of consensus, but tweaking to forward or surface certain narratives transforms it into state broadcast that appears to have the assent of the masses. ↩
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In accounting, software is often said to be capitalized when it is recorded as a long-term asset. ↩
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