Dude, You Broke the Future [video]
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I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?)
A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it?
Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are.
Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?).
Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide.
It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless.
I think this is why China has risen so quickly. Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.
The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system.
Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis. Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Indeed, much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Dialectical materialism remains a tool of science, however limited it may be, and so should be considered as one.
Also, I think you're mistaking "doom" for "actionable movements". People are actually mobilizing to fix the problem of race (mostly within America, I might add -- while racism is a problem elsewhere, you don't tend to see as much violent resistance to fixing it as you do in the American systems). Just like people are mobilizing to fix Climate Change and much of the problems with uncontrolled late-stage capitalism.
Living in one of them it all to often feels like they are rolling back that system.
Come on, we can do better here than the tired old “not real communism” argument.
it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis
Ah yes, always followed by “it will be different next time”. How many millions more have to die?
Capitalism is a race to the bottom where the poor countries in the world are being put under the thumb. You don't have to look very far. Just look at all the CIA ops the USA has conducted in the 20th century, e.g. Allende.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolu...
There are a ton of efforts, both from state-actors[1], NGOs[2] and individuals, seeking to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide. It is not apparent that it is "fixing itself with capitalism" or that any of the previous actors think it is going to happen.
> trickle-down effects actually exist
Citation Needed because trickle-down economics has been shown to increase inequality and not increase the quality of life for those in poverty.
> Yes, capitalism needs regulation, but it is a lie to say that the entire approach is doomed to be a race to the bottom.
Why is it a lie?
[1]: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/data/oecd-internati...
[2]: https://data.oecd.org/drf/grants-by-private-agencies-and-ngo...
That's interesting, but what is the proportion of middle-class individuals to the rest of the population, in Jordan? If there's 100 kids able to play Diablo 3 in Jordan, while every other kid their age can't afford a computer, then Diablo 3 is not a very useful metric of anything.
Jordan is one of the richest countries in the region btw.
I fundamentally disagree with a left-right x-axis; we're missing out on authoritative-liberty. Hence politicalcompass.org provides a better framework.
Some of these bandaids are authoritarian, some are liberal. For example, trademarks, patents, copyright each grant power to one or more individuals (ie. a minority) over a vast majority. Here, the free market is being regulated by the government. We consider it part of capitalism.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/the-new-economic-mode...
Your thoughts on seasteading, even as a hypothetical?
This in and of itself speaks volumes. If it were truly a viable system it could start in one country which would quickly outstrip all others in technology, culture, industrial production, quality of life for its citizens... Then all other countries would gladly follow.
But they knew from the very beginning that people who could vote with their feet, would flee that system. Countries that restrict people from leaving know perfectly well that they are doing something evil.
Instead, following your startup idea, we should foster worker co-ops, which already exist today and are compatible within existing nations. One example is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
For a capitalist, this vision is like blaming the engine for the direction the car is taking.
I didn't say it did. I pointed out that if you're going to insist that mass murder under a few decades of communist regimes = real communism, then mass murder (and genocide and slavery) under centuries of capitalist regimes = real capitalism.
> Communism [...] invents all kinds of counter measure ( one of them being the revolution, and « temporary » dictactorship).
Communism did not invent revolution or dictatorship.
It is not of the same nature.
And yet I seem to have done it.
> People blaming communism makes a lot more sense
You're entitled to your opinion.
> because it does deal with what the political regime should be (once again, a dictatorship).
Since you persist in arguing about "dictatorship" instead of communism, I don't see any point in continuing this.
Edit: instant downvoter I think you missed one of my posts; here's a link to make it easier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16034997
Feel free to check out my comments page and obsessively downvote others you may have missed, if any.
You'll probably argue that this kind of dictatorship isn't to be understood in the common sense, but judging by the various communists thinkers that refer gladly to violence, as well as its historical examples, i'd say the difference aren't that clear.
I don't have to. Your own link says so in just the second paragraph:
Dictatorship of the proletariat is different from the
popular notion of 'dictatorship'Both slavery and imperialism have had a long history before capitalism. Capitalism exists in circumstances with no plausible relationship to slavery or imperialism.
It annoys me because this dialectic is so obviously wrong.
Are you even disagreeing with me?
Free people will never care about millions of their "comrades" the same way the can care about their 100-200 closest social connections.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
You could also ask: How many millions more have to die before we overcome capitalism?
Actually, it has a very concrete definition. The only thing that's flexible is where will communists move the goalpost when another downside or systemic problem is pointed out.
Not a true Scotsman, eh? The same argument can be applied to the current capitalist system, too. Some libertarians in fact do so when saying that the problems we see with capitalism don't actually arise from free markets but from precisely the state intervention in those markets that's supposedly meant to alleviate these problems.
> and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system.
It's called social democracy or social market economy. It's still largely a free market capitalist system because the means of production for the most part are privately owned.
> Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today.
Like many people being lifted out of poverty in the last decades? Like the average person having a much easier life than the average person just a hundred years ago?
That's not to say there are no problems in a free market system at all but it's not all doom and gloom. Quite to the contrary, free markets overall have been tremendously beneficial to the development of mankind.
Yes, the number of people living under the international poverty line has halved since 2000, however:
a) The international poverty line is currently set to $1.25. This means that, e.g. someone who makes $1.26 a day would be counted as "above the poverty line"... which is very much not the same as "not poor".
b) And more importantly, there is no reason to assume that the fact that people are marginally less poor today, than in 2000, is thanks to free market capitalism, rather than despite it.
In fact, there is another metric of financial well-being, than wages, or absolute or relative poverty: inequality. And that one is _rising_. And has risen steadily throughout the last century. Only in this case we can be very secure in the knowledge that it is the result of free market capitalism- because that's exactly what leads to ever smaller minorities hoarding ever larger portions of the world's wealth.
You have to define 'not poor' somehow if you want to measure poverty and do something to alleviate it. The definition of 'not poor' intended by measures such as the poverty line is: The basic needs are met.
> b) And more importantly, there is no reason to assume that the fact that people are marginally less poor today, than in 2000, is thanks to free market capitalism, rather than despite it.
So, what alternative explanation other than free markets do you have?
> In fact, there is another metric of financial well-being, than wages, or absolute or relative poverty: inequality. And that one is _rising_.
That's a common fallacy. I'm not poor just because Bill Gates is rich beyond all means.
Inequality is just that: Inequality. It could be an indicator of financial well-being but it's not sufficient proof someone or a large part of the population is poor.
Socialist policy today is often obsessed with the idea of inequality, which is a shame because in many cases financial inequality at least might not be the true underlying problem that needs to be solved.
I consider increasing inequality not so much a problem in terms of current poverty but as to continued economic prosperity and subsequent improvement of living conditions: If wealth is concentrated at a few corporations or people, possibly inherited through generations, that means that capital is less likely to be invested in new, risky businesses but instead will be lying around accruing interest.
1.26 a day is 37.8$ a month. I don't know about you, but in all of the places I know, such a person would barely be able to afford food, let alone shelter, replacement clothing, petrol and insurance for travel (or public transport -- in many places public transport would be four days worth of work for such a person at least).
> So, what alternative explanation other than free markets do you have?
The increase of social welfare safety nets.
> Socialist policy today is often obsessed with the idea of inequality, which is a shame because in many cases financial inequality at least might not be the true underlying problem that needs to be solved.
Of course it isn't, much of it falls down to social class and identity politics -- which is another debate for another day.
You can't simply apply rich industrial country standards to that. $1.25 is a global average (which by the way lately has been increased to $1.90). In developing countries $1.26 might be enough to get by.
> The increase of social welfare safety nets.
Those safety nets for the most part again only exist in industrialised countries. The reduction of poverty in recent decades however is accounted for mostly by developing countries, which typically don't have that kind of system.
No, accuracy. If there's a raft with "YACHT" scribbled on it in permanent marker, and you call it a yacht, and I correct you that it is, in fact, a raft, then my correction is not an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. To date, there haven't been any 'true' communist states. For that to be so, the workers would have had to hold the power. It is trivial to prove that in most self-professed communist countries, the workers have not held the reigns of power.
For example, in Mao's China only 11% of the communist party consisted of working class people. In Cuba, the working class never held power -- it was a revolution solely of the upper echelons (Actually, the way the revolution was performed was quite clever, I'd advise you to read about it, it's quite a marvel of strategy :)). In the USSR, for a short time, the workers held the reigns, however this was quickly made not the case. And -- to paraphrase Cliff -- if the state truly consisted of and gave power to the workers, the workers would have fought against the destruction of it.
> It's called social democracy or social market economy. It's still largely a free market capitalist system because the means of production for the most part are privately owned.
Yes. It took some of the materials from communism and bolted it on to capitalism so that the roof doesn't fall down every 20 years.
> Like many people being lifted out of poverty in the last decades? Like the average person having a much easier life than the average person just a hundred years ago?
Really? From the UK all I can see is the literacy rates getting worse and worse in either country, people being driven into unspeakable amounts of debt by private universities and bank bailouts, and Americans dying of silly things like Type 1 Diabetes just because they couldn't afford enough medicine.
Just because things are "getting better", doesn't mean that things aren't bad -- in fact, it's an open admission to that fact. Nor does it mean that under an alternate system things would be worse.
> Quite to the contrary, free markets overall have been tremendously beneficial to the development of mankind.
On the contrary, "free markets" of the current ideation have only existed for about a hundred years or so. Just because something is a market doesn't mean that you can jam it into the capitalist Free Market slot. I'd advise you to read Ellen Meiksins Wood "The Origins of Capitalism" for an academically correct view on this.
While this is true the question is: What does 'the workers holding the reins of power' even truly mean? Why didn't that state last longer in communist systems where it initially was the case (I suppose both the Paris Commune and the short-lived Soviet Republic in Germany after WWI are additional examples)?
These affairs or definitions tend to be more gradual than we commonly think. For example, we usually take for granted that both the US and France have been democracies since the late 1700s. However, by today's standards they weren't (France in particular) because they hadn't universal suffrage and excluded large parts of the population from political participation.
> Really? From the UK all I can see is the literacy rates getting worse and worse in either country, people being driven into unspeakable amounts of debt by private universities and bank bailouts, and Americans dying of silly things like Type 1 Diabetes just because they couldn't afford enough medicine.
Those are certainly urgent problems but not necessarily ones that are entirely driven by poverty:
Literacy rates drop because education systems are insufficiently funded and don't keep up with societal changes.
Rampant university debt and bank bailouts are symptoms of a crony capitalist system that has politicians and corporations collude in order to extract value from society (i.e. rent-seeking).
People dying from type 1 diabetes is a symptom of a dysfunctional healthcare system, which in rich countries is less a question of poverty but one of ideology.
The true epidemic is type 2 diabetes, though, which is caused by malnutrition and obesity (which in turn in rich countries indeed are linked to relative poverty).
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656611...
Other than that I agree with your post.
Their authoritarian government is nimble and decisive when it comes to implementing policy and they have no loyalty to any one economic or political philosophy. The Chinese are just really good at playing the game, the rest of the world is years behind.
If you watched the Q&A at the end you will know that this is just Stross' way to tell stories and he is interested in a better future. But it is on humans interested in morals rather than cash flow.
Not real Star Trek... none of the Jar Jar-verse is...
Did they even show what life was like on earth?
He jokes in the Q&A that he wants an app that finds the 3% of the sociopaths out there. I like the connection to the Book / film The Corporation [1], that labels all corporations as psychopaths. So you don't need an app to find them.
Also all this talk about corporations as paperclip AIs gets me thinking about one of the sub-plots of Accelerando. Meaning that it is likely not a new idea for Stross.
Perhaps you can find other areas where that breaks down, but as far as reasonable guesses as to what will happen with AI in the near furture, this is the best I've heard so far.
Their government certainly has a view. The population has to accept that view, because it's not a free country and the scope for dissent from that view is limited. If you're someone who actually prefers to live in a traditional building rather than the new apartment complex? Tough, the bulldozers are at the door. Unimpressed with the unbreathable air of Beijing? Tough, although that is gradually improving. Tibetan? Tough. Uighur? No, she went of her own accord.
> The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future.
We used to, but I think the the moon landings were the high point. Then we started to realise the downsides.
> just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom.
First three of those were staples of my childhood. You left out nuclear war doom, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, terrorism, and Y2K; but those have actually been mitigated by lengthy efforts. Sometimes doom-mongering actually gets things fixed.
But really we're back to Gibson's "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". The key question for any kind of left is whether and how the future gets distributed. Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out.
This seems to be the new formulation of dialectical materialism, which is similar to the old one, except the capitalist exploiters win in the end.
You keep using that phrase, but I don't think very many other people still do or have any idea what it means. Everyone's moved on to Picketty now.
But I would agree with your statement I never met a self proclaimed Marxist that actually read the entire body of works behind it; those who do are usually so terrified of the potential outcomes that they would not consider Marxism as an option.
Marxism-Leninism? [1]
Honestly, Dialectic Materialism[2] can be summarized as "the idea that ideas and real-life influence each other" and Historical Materialism[3] is the thesis that history has been shaped mainly by its material reality.
[1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism
Communism isn’t philosophy it’s an economic and political system.
Socialism can’t coexist with Communism its economic theory is not compatible with either the political or economic theories behind communism.
I don't think a computerized authoritarian dictatorship is a 'positive view'.
> It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.
The Chinese dissidents are in Berlin and enjoy more freedom.
Both the secular left and the religious right are having their "the flying saucer didn't come" moment. The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.
This also explains the rise of neo-Nazi and similar ideologies among not only disaffected former conservatives but also among some leftists and libertarians. (Yes, a good number of the latter have gone alt-right... more than the remaining leftists and libertarians would like to admit.) Those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.
This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future. Star Trek and the Left Behind series are not going to happen.
I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here.
Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union.
> those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.
I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me.
> The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.
He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea.
The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar.
I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same.
There's been a weird role reversal of some sort.
> This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future.
I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.
The solution offered by the alt-right is neo-monarchism and race nationalism. No thanks. Not only are these irrelevant and backward-looking but the latter is morally evil. Ironically it represents a rejection of the core of Western moral thought from Christianity through the enlightenment.
I agree to some extent with Thiel's stagnation hypothesis. I used to be really excited about him, thinking he got it and might work behind the scenes to try to re-invigorate a culture of genuine innovation in the West. But then he jumped on the alt-right horse and I lost interest.
One of the core hallmarks of a declining or at least demoralized/disillusioned civilization is looking backward. The right is now looking back to the Middle Ages, the 1930s, and the 1950s, while the left is still looking back to the 1960s. Reaction is what decline looks like.
Would you prefer to live in Japan? Like most, I consider the "alt right" to be on the margins but I also think it's healthy to challenge conventional wisdom.
Japan is not nor does it strive to be diverse and they do not have a lot of the problems the US has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
The latter seems a direct refutation of the alt-right's contention that racial uniformity promotes social engagement and unity. The Japanese are so alienated they barely even have sex anymore. A recent trend in Japanese restaurant design centers around making sure patrons never see another human being, not even a server.
In addition to moral reasons a big reason I can't take the alt-right's racism seriously is that I live in a very racially diverse area (Los Angeles/OC area). Being white I might even be in the minority, or nearly so. My neighbors are more often than not hispanic, asian, or black. Our kids play together, and my daughter's best friends are pretty close to a random sampling of the planet's genetic diversity.
If anything I've found the more recent immigrants to the USA to be more friendly, more socially engaged, harder working, and even more patriotic than multi-generational American natives.
Last year I witnessed the spectacle of a bunch of first and second generation immigrants actually celebrating the Fourth of July. Like really celebrating it. I've seldom seen white Americans genuinely celebrate their country like that. I'd say a good half the white Americans I know are depressed, cynical, and disengaged. This is true on both sides of the usual political divides.
Japan's problem might actually be too much isolation. At the very least some immigration probably would have prevented three decades of economic stagnation.
The neo-racist thesis is bullshit. There is no "white genocide," though there might be a bit of self-inflicted white suicide. Sometimes I think white Americans suffer from the same problems as native Japanese, namely the social diseases that stem from multiple generations of extreme wealth. Wealth promotes social alienation, laziness, a sense of entitlement, and generally taking things for granted.
I've long wondered if the cycle of civilizational rise and fall is caused by wealth. Civilizations rise on a tide of innovation, cooperation, and optimism, but then they get rich and succumb to the social diseases that result from wealth and power.
Edit: Yes there are racially segregated high-crime ghettoes in the LA/OC area, but this seems to happen when you have racial isolation combined with poverty and criminal enterprises like illegal drug trafficking. The entire metro area is incredibly diverse and the majority of it is pretty safe. The area I live in is extremely diverse and has among the lowest crime rates in the state.
Edit #2: If I didn't live in the USA I'd probably want to live in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. I'd like to add the UK too since I love a lot of their culture, but the UK's government seems just as insane and dysfunctional as ours.
Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Yarvin's Urbit, Friedman's Seasteading.*
These seem concerned with the technical debt we have, used loosely.
As the famous Ycombinator talk by Balaji Srinivasan pointed out these kinds of projects have a common theme of starting from first principals.
I blame the stagnation on the rejection of nuclear energy and biotechnology by our society. We built a fine collection of mythological fog stories around each of them, nuclear might produce mutant children and kill us all, biotechnology might produce race/class war (more mutants). Where have all of these misanthropic ideas been cultivated? Hollywood and the Universities. Actually I blame people like Mr Stross for this, the breed of people who decided we had a moral imperative not to support the use of these technologies.
The piles of fissile material, petri dishes and computer circuits don't contain any urge to murder us all. The existential funk started proper I think like yourself, with the failure of Communism, and then a loss of faith in democracy (increasing numbers of non-voters), lots of apathy.
This is why I feel like we should revitalize the old Victorian spirit of exploration, get the body moving, work together in gentleperson clubs (hacker spaces) and that shall produce more optimistic individuals. Then when we toy with new ideas we shall be less so inclined to view them darkly. I'm open to suggestions.
* To Charlie (who will be reading this thread and can tell me exactly what he thinks) I suspect these sorts of possibilities have a whiff of sulfur about them? I'm also curious to know if you've read Nick Land's essays. Context: Yarvin/Land are accusing Mr Stross of the thing he was flaking the transhumanists with, namely that his socio-political (socialist-democrat?) beliefs are a thinly veiled form of Christianity, where original sin is discrimination and paradise is multicultural utopia.
I suppose after a thousand or so years it kind of seeps in everywhere even when it becomes assumed it is on its last legs.
The story of slow moving AI is compelling, but since The Election there has been 24 hour news/outrage coverage of how we're all going to hell ever since - so at least one paperclip maximizer has influenced the motivation to make the talk.
The trouble I think is that nearly everything I can imagine Mr Stross supporting as progress basically backfires because at least half the public will have you for lunch over infringements to liberties. Once you're being tossed between the bulls horns of the left and right it's hard to imagine positive outcomes. At the start of the talk microtransactions were mentioned. That seems like a much better route because it is not partisan in nature.
Of all these, "Hyper-capitalism" is about the only thing that originates in left-wing political discourse.
Global warming is a concern that arises from observations by climate scientists.
Wikipedia tells me that a concern about overpopulation is as old as the second century BC.
"Evil AI overlord doom" is basically the concern about Superintelligence, which is propounded primarily by a few leading figures in transhumanist circles and such left-wing luminaries as Elon Musk.
Generally, what you could say about all those concerns above is that the "political left" as you put it keeps them in mind, while other political directions (you know, the conservative right) does not.
Corporation as AI is good analogy. But as with many, he stops short and repeatedly just says corporations. Please, every large group entity - governmental bodies, unions, non-profits - is an AI. And with/in those groups (and corporations) are also competing AIs.
Comments about weaponized social media: It is odd that we in the West don't want to acknowledge / know / accept the US government and US tech firm roles in the Arab Spring and Ukraine. If we even go further back, really Wikileaks were the true pioneers in weaponizing social media.
It is not that the item or service is useful or not in the short term, but that it will pursue a set goal with a single minded conviction.
Another analogy may well be the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Corporations are different because there are very strong diminishing returns on scale when it comes to how smart they can be.
Not that we're going to abandon best practices, because you never know, but it's somewhat hilarious to think about how much effort we've wasted doing something right that no one will ever notice.
https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d...
https://www.globalresearch.ca/banks-are-responsible-for-the-...
There's been a big elephant in the room nobody really wants to talk about for quite a while now: EU's most successful economies running up massive export surpluses, which really hurt the weaker southern economies [1].
In that regard, it's in very bad taste, to just go "Them southern European countries are all just lazy and don't know how to handle money" because nothing about that whole situation is as simple as that. Just like it wasn't a coincidence that Greece crashed on the tails of the 2008 recession. In our globalized world, nothing of this scale happens in a vacuum, but it's just that much more convenient to put all the blame on the people of Greece supposedly just being too "lazy and clueless", as opposed to the "diligent and frugal Germans". As a German, I can assure you: Most Germans are pretty fed up with "being frugal" and not having seen any real wage gains in decades, for the sole purpose of driving this supposedly "economic miracle" of the Germany economy.
Greece was a gigantic shame for the European idea, left out to die, used for IMF austerity experiments while being framed as "lazy people just don't know how to money", even tho it was their misery which boosted Germanys economic standing even further [2].
[0] http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to-ban...
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-save...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-...
That's a very good point that is completely overlooked in most analyses I've read (and, being Greek, I've read quite a few).
On the other hand, let's not forget that it was Greece that crashed after 2008. Not Spain, not Portugal, not Ireland or Cyprus. All these others, they swallowed the pill of austerity and their economies bounced back. Ours is still connected to the IMF and EU IV that's keeping it alive.
Not that I'm actually convinced that austerity would help us. And I do believe that the measures imposed on us ignored the reality of the Greek economy. But it was not the measures that brought us to our knees in the first place.
Was i wrong? no, its the future that is wrong! (sarcasm).