Soviet Union 2.0 (2017)

I wonder if their point on architecture is a criticism on brutalism or on the "sameness" of buildings. Apartment complexes definitely follow a cookie-cutter template in US cities.

Maybe it's the novelty of it, but only a few buildings in the US have given me the same awe as brutalist architecture in former Soviet nations.

There's definitely a repetitive pattern to these buildings, but there's also something so captivating about those concrete slabs and jagged edges.

This describes a lot of problems with the US but extrapolates them to other Western countries like the EU. Most of the arguments won't work there.

The genius of Animal Farm is that it got into schools as being an anti-Stalin text when in reality it describes nearly all sociopolitical systems.

(so who would be the Viktor Tsoi of the Union 2.0?)

Anything that is done in large scale and used by the entire society becomes civilizational infrastructure and it needs to be maintained in a coordinated, centralized fashion. From the transportation infrastructure to justice, military, food.

These things were provided and maintained by the nature when human civilization was just loose collectives of roving bands of hunter-gatherers. At the stage we reached today, that's impossible.

The problem with modern world is not that it mimics Soviet Union's central planning and governance of infrastructure. If it did mimic the Soviet Union, the fundamental things that everyone needs from housing to education would be provided to everyone.

The problem is that we privatized large swaths of this modern infrastructure and we are allowing sociopaths to profit off of these fundamental societal infrastructures at great cost to entire society. Privatizing things like healthcare is as crazy as privatizing military or the police.

If you simplify things enough, then those things will tend to look similar.