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Comment by antpls | Hacker News Reader

(I live in EU)

For the 3rd and 4th points, we could rather envision a massive decentralization of power, which would be effectively a change in the model, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Telecom, batteries and local energy production will allow much more flexible forms of local auto-organisations and decision-making.

Parts of centralized institutions will be obsolete or further decentralized to better fit local specificities.

The only irreplaceable aspect of the biggest countries is their military army, but we could also imagine a federation of each state's armies through common interests (which would be something like EU : cooperation of local armies toward a common goal). We could imagine that more autonomous regions with more autonomous armies means less single points of (global) failure.

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When the NSA says power will move to the private sector, I don't think they're referring to 'the people', but the wealthy who control most of the private sector.

A feudal oligarchy.

Oligarchy, I'll buy. But why feudal, specifically?

An oligarchy without collusion to divvy up feuds is just straight up pure capitalism.

The nobility provides digital “land” to the serfs in exchange for data, time (being an audience), and sometimes money. The serfs choose where to spend their resources, and by doing so they increase the value of the lands while also becoming more reliant on them (less likely to migrate, more likely to come to their defense).

Edit: this focuses on the commoners side, and I agree with what JetSpiegel said regarding the top-level aspect.

>Parts of centralized institutions will be obsolete or further decentralized to better fit local specificities.

I predict something a bit different. ie - Most "centralization" will move to the private sector, and they will become more and more powerful.

Governments will become less and less powerful. Less and less able to check corporate hegemony. More and more decentralized as they weaken and fracture.

Corporations, meanwhile, will consolidate powers. Become more and more independent of weaker decentralized governments that are, naturally, not going to be terribly unified in facing the corporates down.

> Governments will become less and less powerful.

And why would governments accept this?

They won't. They'll build costly surveillance into everything and attack individual liberties for the sake of social control. They'll sap potential for positive disruption, out of paranoia, and ironically ensure the unsteerable inertia of existing institutions takes us all off a cliff.

Typically central government favours legislative solutions, it's primarily the gadget agencies that press for technology solutions.

Though I admit sometimes the futurist manage to create a big hype around some technology and everyone pays lip service to the coming technology rapture.

Or they could say put a limit how big cooperation can be an enforce restrictions on each market. Don't let sprint and t-mobile merge for instance. Force companies over a certain market cap (say $10B) to split.

That way governments could stay in control without stomping on the liberties and freedom of it's citizens.... after all the government is there at the service of the people... right?

It sounds good and I agree, but I think corruption runs too deep. Our government is flush with the money of profiteers and is weak in its collective will to uphold the principles that made it good.

So, the world will eventually become a high-tech network of city-state corps, each specializing in an industry and engaging in trade? Sounds like a good book.

A lot of this information could definitely be framed in a different way to make it sound almost Utopian, I agree, but I think it is hard to argue against the idea that we're relying on technology more and need cybersecurity to scale up. Otherwise its going to be like everyone with access to a computer has a bazooka. Speaking of which, I wonder if there will come a day when the solution to this problem is just heavily restricting access to hardware, background checks before you can buy a laptop/smart phone, etc.

The EU isn't cooperation of armies towards a common goal, or really cooperation of anything towards a common goal. The EU is "cooperation through massive centralization of power under a unified command structure". Nothing decentralised about it.

NATO is decentralised. We can see this clearly because of the bunfights about whether members are spending enough on their own armies to be good contributors to the alliance. Also, NATO has no political goals beyond defending its members against any attack. It's not like the EU which has an expansive ideological vision of the future.

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