Well, I'm back

[David Horn]

(01-23-2018, 05:13 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(01-23-2018, 11:51 AM)David Horn Wrote: We're entering the second Age following the Industrial.  That alone is enough to change the tenor of things.

Can I demand a recount?  The common wisdom might put us in the fourth age, if you count hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial, post scarcity.  This suggests nukes, computer networks and renewable energy tumps chemical weapons, industrial production and oil.

But I don't doubt old patterns might break, that the tenor might change.  No more crisis wars between major powers?  Guerrilla wars become more common?  Awakenings become the turning of change, not crisis?  The patterns found in western history become irregular?

Too soon to tell.

I meant to imply that we're in the second Age to follow the Industrial.  First, there was the Information Age, which still had a true form to it.  Now, we're Post-modern, whatever that actually means.  If you plot the inception of each age as a graph, the rate of change is clearly exponential.  

FWIW, I see the inception of the Information Age as the date EINIAC first came into existence -- similar to the date Watt debuted the steam engine.  The real work occurred in the 50s through the 90s, when we turned Information from a tool into a product.  This century has taken that to a different level, where information is a given, and the new products, if they actually are products, are social platforms for hoi polloi and massive wealth for the few.  We're just now beginning to see that mature.

We can be sure that the oligarchy will use it to their advantage, if they can.  They already have been.  It was announced at Davos that, worldwide, the top 1% have garnered fully 83% of the gains since the crash of 2007-8.  That's unsustainable, but clearly continuing and even growing.  There will either be a reckoning or we will see the world devolve into a few with everything and the rest struggling, but happily connecting on their social media, numb to their own fate. The theory calls for a reckoning.  We'll see.