Human Civilization at critical junction:authoritarian collapse or superabundance | Hacker News Reader

Human Civilization at critical junction:authoritarian collapse or superabundance

eurekalert.org

31 pointsclumsysmurf23 comments

> I predicted the 2008 crash

> In August 2006, I reported that a collapse of the global banking system would take place in 2008 due to a complex convergence of financial and energy crises. My source for this revelation was a sensitive interview with a senior advisor to the US Department of Defense, with extensive access to the US military, intelligence and political establishment. “The source… said that leading US financial analysts privately believe that ‘a collapse of the global banking system is imminent by 2008,’” I wrote at the time.

So it wasn't his prediction - his un-named source predicted it...

It's literally in quotes, i.e. not his own words. So he could easily deny it being his prediction. But since it came to pass, he gets to claim credit...

I trust that he made millions betting against the market back then.

> Systems theorist who foresaw 2008 financial crash, clean energy growth, and Brexit says human species is on brink of next ‘giant leap’ in evolution to ‘networked superabundance’. But nationalist populism could stop this

that my 401k might go up, billions must own nothing and like it

The OP starts with this paragraph:

> A new scientific study published in the journal Foresight concludes that human civilisation is on the brink of the next ‘giant leap’ in evolution. However, progress could be thwarted by centralised far-right political projects such as the incoming Donald Trump administration.

OK, so I looked up the author and the journal. The author is this guy: https://www.nafeezahmed.net/about. His "study" was published by a group called "Emerald Publishing" run by a bunch of accountants and investment bankers: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/our-leadership-team

The ideas are kinda interesting, but nothing about this is "scientific."

Ehm... Some theorize such energy super-abundance but... As someone with an auto-built domestic photovoltaic system with storage and BAD EV integration [1] I fails to see abundance.

At least: I could imaging abundance for homes and some companies IF we have seasonal storage but we haven't so...

[1] because even if anything is technically there to simply connect via DC power + signal the car BMS/battery to a p.v. inverter no damn device exists on sale to do so... Just to state the sorry state of things on sale these days...

Cant’t get my hands on this one yet but would highly recommend his previous work: « Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence » read it a few times and it still resonates with me.

Which one will make rich people more powerful in the short term? That's our future.

only if the rest of us do nothing and let them remake the world. It seems likely since the rest of us seem to be disconnected socially which makes any collective action more difficult. Its almost as if the fake "social" media was meant to starve the world of meaningful connection that could lead to sustainable action.

So, barring any sort of collective action, which seems impossible as you state, what other actions do you suggest? It seems the peaceful avenues of resolution have been captured by lobbyists, billionaires, arbitration forums, etc. What is left?

I don't condone mob justice (for legal purposes), but I imagine we will see more Luigis and fewer rights in the next 20 years.

Hopefully some Mario's will also step in and plumb a better solution together than murder and violence.

Ask Bernie and AOC how that’s going

History would say otherwise.

Vigilantism and lone wolf actions seem to be what's left.

Between the attempted assassination of Trump this past election cycle, and the successful assassination of the United Healthcare CEO, those in power have to contend with the unpredictability and impossible to monitor thoughts and behaviors that have now been entirely internalized (through their own actions).

This is not everybody's (all over the world I mean) experience over last 50 years. In some places, poor people become much richer than before.

Now, everybody should be worried if this can't happen anymore, but I think that, for now, there are still options for people (ok, if you don't live in a state like North Korea, but they are probably more the exception than the rule).

there are two parts to the last 50 years. before the Berlin wall (including the two decade after), and after that. once the threat of communist revolution was solved, Western oligarchs and eastern ones were no longer that different.

Solarpunk versus everyone else.

Climbing the Kardashev scale is the only interesting problem right now, and making that contingent on everyone stopping and listening to political "system theorists" as a substitute for human desire is nonsense.

TL;DR Total human emancipation is only possible if all humans submit to our omnipotent system. I'm so tired of these people. It's like selling frameworks and management systems where all you have to do is suspend your disbelief, internalize the system of the ideology, and it promises everything. Harari at the WEF is the same kind of misleading doomer. To me these people are just itinerant mesmerists.

Any plan, future, or technology that requires accepting the counterfactual where there is no alternative to it is necessarily both wrong and misleading. It begins with a finite, materialistic, zero-sum ontology, and ends with a power struggle over only symbolically scarce resources.

I'm glad their ideas are part of the discourse because they need sunlight, as this thinking is what is behind a lot of oppressive government policy and it's important to understand it imo.

Totally agree there’s something unnerving about these utopic systems pushers.

However, there’s a strong argument to be made to to the question, what does our socio-politico-economic system look like if we leave it “un-designed” and let it grow in its natural direction? To which the answer is royal-subject-feudalism.

We’re seeing the decline of constitutional democracies before our eyes. Was it a grand experiment that will give way to the lazier solution to human order?

Feudalism is the multi-polar trap we snap back to when the serfs don’t actively put energy into a better system.

Maybe some would say fine to that. Because nowadays the serfs could have laptops and nice houses. And the freedoms that you would have limited by your rulers would be minimal.

But even so, the idea that sliding back into feudalism would defer a path to more decentralized sovereignty seems obvious.

utopians ignore the massive anticorruption effects of many small, competing factions then are routinely surprised when they turn it into a monopoly of their utopian idea that it immediately gets corrupted and coopted, usually by a strong man from their own ranks. Then they claim it wasn't real utopia and try to bring about the utopia again until the above happens again. it is basically the song that doesn't end except instead of being annoying it kills millions each repetition,

Having spent some time reading libertarianish fringe, I'm confident tons of people predict global financial crashes every day.

Some of them will be right in the end, but I wouldn't get too excited about their insights.

Le ebil national populism. LOL. Talk about non-sequiturs.

The "study" this is based on is paywalled and not on sci-hub.

A comment from the article:

<< "Industrial civilisation is facing 'inevitable' decline as it is replaced by what could turn out to be a far more advanced ‘postmaterialist’ civilisation based on distributed superabundant clean energy. The main challenge is that industrial civilisation is facing such rapid decline that this could derail the emergence of a new and superior 'life-cycle' for the human species", >>

I believe I recall hearing that originally, electricity generated from nuclear fission was predicted to be "too cheap to meter". The first part of this comment reminds me of that.

The "Findings" section of the linked abstract:

<< The paper develops planetary phase shift theory as a new collective forward intelligence framework for foresight study and practice, formalising the notion that humanity has arrived at an unprecedented historic and geological turning point. It finds that multiple global crises across both earth and human systems are symptoms of the last stages of the life-cycle of global industrialisation civilisation, which is the potential precursor either for collapse, or for a new civilisational life-cycle that may represent a new stage in the biological and cultural evolution of the human species.>>

This sounds like it's nonsense built on top of other nonsense.

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