We expanded more on Jesse’s concept of The Network State and how it looks to supplant the Nation States of yore. We may be in the early innings of a new type of global conflict, being waged with weapons that the majority of the populace (and possibly many in their governments) do not even recognize as being weapons.
The front lines are in cyberspace, along economic fault lines, and rather than feeling the effects physically, we experience it cognitively.
One of the original quotes in the AxisOfEasy newsletter was William Gibson’s “The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed”.
This week Jesse reiterated a similar sentiment and it’s an ongoing theme of his:
What we think is the present, is really already the past. What we think is the future, is already the present.
Charles brought up the stone cold game theory of climate change and we wondered whether society has hit peak tolerance for the narrative, or whether it will be intensified even more after the pandemic is seen to be in the rear-view mirror.
Books Mentioned:
- Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
- I wanted to mention Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, but I never got it in…
As a physicist, I find it very frustrating that the modellers have built CO2 into their models, but not all the other things (such as expanded land under cultivation) that have accompanied the human population explosion of the last 200 years.
Somethings to be investigated: is it mere coincidence that the “little ice age” began in the 14th century immediately after the black death halved the population of Eurasia? And the “little ice age” persisted for the 350 years until the population had recovered around the start of the 19th century.
My personal opinion is that the CO2 effect is saturated. Humans may well be contributing to climate change but most likely via land use changes. That very much changes the envronmental calculus.