Re: <nettime> Can the Left Meme?

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

[I was looking for patterns. The proposition that in the grand scheme of 
things everything is connected, mixed, gray-shaded, and therefore 
essentially the same, will not fly until the thermal death of the 
universe, when everything will be the same (contingent on one's position 
on the cosmological constant.) We are not there yet, and there are still 
distinguishable differences.]

Two phenomena are very new - several decades - and there is no way that 
societies have reached any equilibrium regarding these, we are still in 
the violent transition:

1. Capability of a very small number of people (few dozen?) to kill 
thousands and millions, within days, without having to go through any 
social interaction with the rest of own population (note the conspicuous 
absence of declarations of war since WW2 ... by anyone who matters.) 
They just decide and go on with it.

2. Capability of a very small number of people (few hundred?) to 
overwhelm the input bandwidth of the entire planet's population, so that 
it has more influence on a person than whatever that person's immediate 
neighbors are saying. This is the age on DoS (and it's not even DDoS.)

I think that the left and the right made their bets on these two, and 
they made different bets.

The left relies more on indoctrination, and recently it switched from 
ideologies (Marxism) to more easily managed identity politics, 
genderism, environmentalism, global warmingism. The right sticks more to 
mechanisms that have a gun at their far end, such as debt, free 
enterprise, multi-tiered legal systems.

However, it is the fact that the two are inevitably coalescing into the 
single entity, and the ensuing gravitational waves are felt all around 
the place, as everyone struggles to stay above the event horizon. Fun times.


On 6/17/17, 08:40, John Hopkins wrote:

> It could be that in this time of energy glut and technological
> development, individual speech exacts a minimal overall 'cost' on the
> (collective, species-wide) evolutionary process. But in the end, word
> (rationality) and action (violence, reward), as a social/evolutionary
> process cannot be separated or maintain a separation as you suggest
> with the left/right dialectic...

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