Who else would like politics to be humdrum?

[David Horn]

(02-03-2022, 12:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I like your first paragraph David above that begins "I'm sure Eric will respond too".... I think unless reforms are made in the 2020s the correction in the next 2T would be made by mother nature, and it will not be to our benefit. As for "we are already there," yes we are already approaching tipping points toward destruction. But whether some tech has changed is very-much beside the point. That is not real change. Real change is what has been resisted for 40 years: political change, social reform. Such has not been made yet.

I was thinking about that watching a Perry Mason episode, filmed in about 1960. Sure, people had to pick up a telephone when it rang, or dial numbers to make a call. Now we put a mobile phone up to our ear. And I think, big fu*king deal. Just a little change to how we operate physically, but this is not a change in the way we live or in our real conditions. Some things changed in the 1960s and 70s; less restrictions on diverse groups and more opportunity for them, and in the 1980s, when inequality started moving back to what it was in the 1920s. And all the good actors I saw on Perry Mason are gone and none have replaced them. Beyond that, not much change at all.

The real problem is a VR World, and it's coming.  VR was shown quite vividly in the movie Ready Player One.  VR World can be anything we can imagine, and living there can be glorious, but it's still a vicarious experience.  At the same time, reality can suck, but too many may decide they don't care.  It's Zuckerberg's wet dream: owning the real world and leaving the vicarious one to the proles.

I'm not sure there's a way back from that kind of insanity.