Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution for example.
We see our history as a dot, because we live in it.
But people in the future will take a more long-term view and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.
The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.
Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.
We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.
Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.
This is a difficult time compared to what? The black plague? WW1?
This is the easiest time ever to be alive.
I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the internet has broke democracy.
The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.
This professor is still living in the unipolar moment that has passed.
I think it is more accurate to say it broke the power of the aristocracy by causing a labour shortage.
The black death happened in the 14th century, the reformation in the 16th
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
Do you have any links to any material/info on this topic? I'm sure some folks have begun talking about protocols.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.