10-25-2018, 12:00 PM
(10-23-2018, 06:37 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Looks like Ragnarok already got to completing the walkthrough of WinterStorm's list.
Going back to the digital revolution, which could be called "the Internet eats the world," I am halfway between WinterStorm's vision of a techno-utopia and Ragnarok's dark future of deep state control. Yes, surveillance and data collection and AI are pervasive, but I don't see it as a huge threat to human liberty, or as taking us far beyond our earlier twentieth century way of life.
We still drive cars to get everywhere, like we did 60 years ago, and put up with all the inefficiencies and risks because we like the freedom it gives us. We still need a job to pay the bills. We still depend mostly on the private sector for the benefits of life. We pay for TV and watch TV with different patterns, but "Netflix and chill" is still being a couch potato in front of the boob tube!
All true. However, my vision of the future is only a utopia by today's standards. It would be like trying to predict the 1950s from the vantage point of the late 1930s. And predictions of the future, aside from the industrial utopian dreaming that was common, were very pessimistic. It is my belief that society will turn utopian simply because that's simply what happened every other point in the cycle. What this means is that we are likely to see a strong economic boom in the 2030s and 2040s (probably starting sometime in the 2020s) and lasting until the 2050s or 2060s. We will live the digital utopia that is the dream of today. However, like every High, there will be major problems. The next Awakening will be the first fully digital one, and thus, it will raise issues pointed out by Ragnorok in his reply if these issues are not settled in this Crisis.
Cyberpunk was invented in the 1970s and 1980s, and it described an advanced cyberpunk society deep in a 3T. The 3T ended before we could see this full-blown flowering of a cyberpunk society. We will, however, finally get to experience this type of cyberpunk in the 2070s (just wait until Cyberpunk 2077 comes out). Before that, however, Cyberpunk will be expressed in somewhat different ways. Today, we live in the age of Cyberpunk. It is slightly different from the cyberpunk of a few decades ago because now we are well into the 4T. Digital technology is used for propaganda, war, and for the general reconstruction of society today. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are today all places where propaganda gets created and distributed. The same technology is used for war. Drones, robots, surveillance, and cyber-enhanced battle have become the new trends in war.
During the High, cyberpunk will have a different expression, one that looks more like cyberprep or postcyberpunk. It will be the digital utopia that has been advertised for some time now (just like the 1950s for the earlier industrial era). But there will be issues that we are familiar with today, such as digital privacy, surveillance, artificial intelligence, robots, intellectual property, cybersecurity, cyberwar, etc. People will be substantially more affluent than today, and we might even get to end poverty. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google have likely consolidated their positions, and will likely mostly stay in place until the next Awakening. So because Microsoft was not overthrown by Linux in this 4T (and that is looking increasingly unlikely), they will simply become (well, they actually are) a core part of the national infrastructure. It will simply be a sci-fi type of paradise where rights abuses are swept under the rug, kinda like a future Minority Report that uses AI instead of psychics. Besides, the media today is full of stories of abuse by digital technologies. Everyone remembers the story of a company robot harassing homeless people. There are many stories of impoverished people being abused by algorithms, such as simple errors disqualifying applicants for public assistance on websites (a failure of egovernment, of technology planners, and conscience), buggy and glitchy software, algorithms that predict whether or not you are "a risk", etc.
We still drive cars only because there has not yet been a replacement technology. Electric cars are a replacement for gasoline powered cars. And while they don't look different from gasoline cars on the outside, on the inside, the car is a fundamentally different technology. Even gasoline powered cars are entirely different beasts today. Automated cars are another replacement technology, which I believe will take off once the 1T gets rolling. Flying cars is another one, even if only in taxi form. We watch TV, but do a lot of other things too. The younger you are today, the less TV you generally watch. Your time is split among TV, gaming, and internet for entertainment. While we do many of the same things, the difference is that our relationship to technology (which has remained largely fixed since the 1930s) has gone a fundamental and revolutionary shift. We no longer have CRT. Now, we have LED TVs. We no longer have traditional light bulbs. We now have LED bulbs. We no longer drive mechanical cars. We now drive computers with car parts attached as peripherals, to use the common narrative today. All of this entails a very different economy. These are digital technologies, which give us new capabilities that were impossible in the non-digital version of it. LEDs, for instance, give people the ability to control it over a network, changing brightness and colors, and even using a computer program to automate the behavior of the light. So while things seem the same, the way we are capable (or are required) to relate to it is entirely different.