In 2030, You Won’t Own Any Gadgets
This is called feudalism, and will end with the majority being deprived of any opportunity to accumulate wealth in any form. The majority will be sharecroppers and serfs.<p>&quot;... and you&#x27;ll like it.&quot;<p>Just like feudalism 1.0 we will be lorded over by decadent nobility whose primary pastimes are gambling, political intrigue, and sexual abuse of the powerless. The gambling will take the form of market games with exotic financial instruments and the political intrigue will be an arms race to game democratic systems by misleading and indoctrinating masses of people in increasingly sophisticated ways. The sex habits of these degenerates will look a lot like the pastimes of Jeffrey Epstein, or worse.<p>The democratic facade will probably be kept, but the majority of voters will be voting on the basis of pure fantasies similar to today&#x27;s Qanon type conspiritainment nonsense. People will be so thoroughly disinformed that they&#x27;ll be unable to even properly frame a problem or choose an option that would empower them. They&#x27;ll be arguing over flat Earth vs. the return of the ascended masters vs. some kind of barely-biblical religious eschatology. The majority of these narratives will be generated by GPT-like bullshit generators with goal functions of &quot;maximizing engagement.&quot;<p>There will be an endless stream of &quot;right&quot; and &quot;left&quot; movements too, and they&#x27;ll be comprised of ineffectual drivel and properly classified as a form of entertainment. The right will be a bunch of LARPers trying to relive an imaginary past or some kind of fashy traditionalist &quot;volkisch&quot; fantasy, and most of the left will be fighting for whatever marginal issues of social justice have <i>nothing</i> to do with economic equality or actual political empowerment.<p>Anyone who gets close to fighting for any kind of actual empowerment will get &quot;shadow banned&quot; (pushed to the bottom of the queue or silently hidden) and buried in bullshit. Nobody will be &quot;disappeared&quot; or even harassed. That&#x27;s primitive totalitarianism. They&#x27;ll just be hosed down by the firehose of falsehood until their message disappears. AI will allow almost instantaneous detection of actually hazardous forms of dissent, and the automated bullshit bots will be summoned immediately.<p>The mainstream educational system will be vocational only, preparing the masses for serfdom, and will lack any kind of liberal arts or deep historical education.<p>The sum total of all human knowledge and thought will of course be available online, but that kind of stuff is not viral. The greatest irony of the new dark age is that something a trillion times greater than the Library of Alexandria is instantly available to everyone, but nobody looks at it because they&#x27;re busy staring at catchy memes or forwarding tabloid nonsense and outrage porn articles. The noise will drown it all out for most people and the platforms where most people spend their time will not be pushing that stuff.<p>We -- meaning the majority of the visitors to this site -- won&#x27;t have it quite as bad though. We are the ones who build the control system (&quot;as a service&quot;), so we&#x27;ll basically be the knights, priests, etc. that make up feudalism&#x27;s relatively small middle class. We&#x27;ll be able to own a little bit and afford to send our children to higher-class schools.<p>Maybe this is just how history repeats, and once the new frontier opens all the people who don&#x27;t want to live in this dystopia will go to Mars. Of course some day humans will need to learn how to not do this to themselves, but the solar system is big enough that maybe we can put it off for a while.<p>Isn&#x27;t Earth a bit like this in The Expanse? Haven&#x27;t had a chance to watch that one yet but I&#x27;ve heard something like that.<p>Edit:<p>I am pretty pessimistic about anyone doing anything about this for reasons that are explained above. Nobody seems to care, and those that do care are instantly hooked by Alex Jones style conspiritainment (or higher-brow bullshit like &quot;alt-right,&quot; &quot;neo-reactionary,&quot; &quot;woke,&quot; etc.) and effectively neutralized. If your head is full of garbage it doesn&#x27;t matter if you want to change things. You can&#x27;t even imagine or frame anything better, let alone take steps in that direction.<p>The way out may be deceptively simple: a fair tax code that is mildly progressive and most importantly <i>lacks loopholes</i>, serious financial industry regulation to re-channel finance from gambling to productive investment, fair trade reform to repatriate productive work and level the playing field against countries that exploit workers and the environment, legal restrictions on disinformation (fantasy LARPing as news, opinion as news, etc.), enormous improvements to the educational system, campaign finance reform, and many other simple things. It doesn&#x27;t take a revolution (yet), but simple and sane things are not sensationalistic and thus have low virality. In-your-face woke accusations of racism or LARPing as a Nazi brown shirt are the kinds of things that get attention. The kid eating bugs on the playground got attention too.