Democracy is already dead. As in who spends more or buys more Ads wins elections. For decades now.
Trump and the Brexit vote broke the traditional media-advertising complex but that got fixed fast.
Compare the revenues of the MIL complex to the rest of the options available on the Fortune 500. People dont realize how big the gap has grown between what nation states can afford and what transnational corps are raking in. Its a no brainer where the best and the brightest end up working.
But the good Greeks did us a great service by shpwing us they couldnt afford those cars without taking loans from German banks. And by not being able to repay those loans, proved what a fucking house of cards the whole story about being a 'power house' is.
Scary. Its really fascinating how they have such capacity to spread into every nook they can find. We spent a lot of time wondering how such an exotic looking thing, showed up in basically an urban closed off area (barely any windows) where you rarely see any kind of fungus growing. Must be producing a ton of spores.
I dont know what metal that was but there was a grey coat of paint on it. Sometimes they coat the metal to prevent rusting or whatever, but the rusting happens under the coating anyway. So maybe possible the underlying metal was rusting and the fungus was feasting on the coating. It was quite a humid space.
Not really. Read Pareto's Circulation of the Elites.
The mistake is assuming all those who have some amout of power all have the same agenda.
Such a state is never possible purely because people's personalities, needs, values, environment exist in a wide spectrum. Littlefingers and kissengers loose something everytime they win.
Its like a virus cant kill the host without killing itself.
Reminds me. I saw a bizarre fungus growing on an old Airport audio speaker left in storage. The speaker was a 5 foot high metallic tower. And this 4 inch high alien looking thing was growing on it. It had attached itself via a beautiful root like system of tenticles to the metal surface. Some one tried to kick it off and it was so tightly fused to the metal it broke the stem but the root system stayed fused. So they then scraped it off with like a chisel and there was a hole in the metal underneath. It looked like it was eating the metal. These were ancient speakers so that metalic frame was quite thick and heavy and it was really freaky to see how it had been sort of dissolved away. That storage unit hadnt been opened in 2 months. So the growth couldnt have been very old either. Left us all wondering what things would have looked like if no one had bothered to open the unit.
Target EU govt and mil complex jobs. They have older stacks, favor experience and have more funds these days thanks to the war. Plus much less stress than in private sector.
Is this what Zgmunt Bauman called the transition from Solid Modernity to Liquid Modernity?
With rents going up and switching jobs more frequently than past generations it becomes harder to stuck around in one place long enough for strong communities to form.
Not only that, the rate of change is increasing or speeding up. Brains are not really capable of handling constant change.
There is much more to learn. There are more unknowns. And there is much more competition.
If you take competitive sports and look at size of support stuff its ridiculous these days compared to 20 years back. There is coach, physio, shrink, nutritionist, biz manager, social media manager etc
So now extrapolate and imagine what things will look like 10 years or 20 years from now on the that trend line. Its just not sustainable.
People have to think about rate of change in the environment that surrounds us.
Well today the Supply side (of content) has outstripped Demand for content by a huge factor.
Demand for content from people with disposable income and interested in creative output, has dropped below demand for content from corporates to play attention/market capture games.
Cuz available global attention is finite and corporates will outspend everyone to capture it to peddle whatever. So creatives are basically front line troops in the wars for finite global Attention.
Until we see global consensus on better attention allocation systems than the current garbage there are no easy paths ahead.
Its not some accident Google ended up with all this data.
There is a reason they give you Free stuff like video, email, chat, search etc.
People have forgotten the only way (in the past) to solve the Info Explosion that results when networks grow, is trying to understand Peoples needs better. That was the intention behind data collection. But ofcourse the story went off the rails when advertisors and marketers and politicians found value in all that data.
But there is an upper bound to how much value there is, just like there is an upper bound to how much milk you can extract from a cow.
Once you build huge ever scaling infra assuming there is no upper bound and then an upper bound is hit, what happens?
Nothing good. Excess cows start getting slaughtered. Larger the system. Greater the over run. More slaughtering. Dont expect what you got for free to stay free. Expect all your data to be sold off at fire sales.
Michael Goldharber - People have limited attention to give anything, but unlimited capacity to receive attention.
The Attention Economy has been inflated exploiting the above inequality.
Bottom line is the social media is not designed to optimize allocation of limited Global Human Attention. It does a fine job squandering it. And people are begining to notice.