Thought for the week ahead:
The death spasms of a dying empire are ugly and dangerous. Also, they look very far away for a very long time until suddenly they're all around you.
All my plans for the future are now as provisional as they should have been in February 2020 ...
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@cstross
Or back in the late 1980s
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@midgephoto The difference is, I didn't live in a satellite stte of the dying empire in question back in the late 80s.
(Brexit, in 20/20 hindsight, was not only a terrible idea, it was horrifyingly badly timed.)
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@cstross I thought it wouldn't matter much which side of the Inner German Border one started off, if it all escalated to completion. But nobody in either empire seemed to be seriously playing for Armageddon as a means to be Saved.
Brexit was a magnificent victory. For Russia. Mediated mostly through useful idiots.
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@cstross most any action taken by any empire is ugly and dangerous
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@cstross
In some ways, the worst of it is the grief for the loss of the future I thought I was growing up into
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@cavyherd this, hell yes... so much of what my 80s and 90s childhood taught me to expect of the future is lost, "delayed" if one still possesses any hope... as humanity rather than collectively focussing on co-operation and progress continues to instead be bogged down in brain-dead & regressive tribalism, conflict, and pursuit of clearly insane capitalist goals at the cost of everything ... even hopes for capitalistic progress have themselves been hobbled by a kleptocratic class interested only in their own wealth. @cstross
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@yvan @cavyherd @cstross yes, this. I grew up a citizen of the EU with rights associated with that that I took for granted. Travel was easy, I had the option to work and move abroad relatively simply. That was taken from me.
I've watched the prospect of conflicts grow and turn into reality, and increasing destabilisation of post-war peace that was just a given, thanks to all the History.
It's a completely different, fucked up situation now. Fire and flood and meltdown, the adults never cared.
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@noodlemaz @yvan @cstross
& it's all just so fucking venal.
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@noodlemaz @cavyherd @cstross cannot hit a "like" button on that, need a "commiserate" button... from afar I watched the fall of the Berlin wall and the development of the great EU project - Europe, including the UK, was definitely a centre of hope. I moved to a UK in 2006 that I respected, a UK that was part of the EU, a country I eventually intended to settle in (and have) and become a citizen of Europe. But what I really experienced was to watch it all start to crumble, and UK citizenship become not worth the paper for anything other than a way to escape growing government hostility towards immigrants.
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@cstross
I have a standing offer to visit my wife's uncle in Arizona. Part of me would really like to do it.
Most of me is like "Are you sure you don't want to move back to Scotland?"
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@cstross
I wonder how long it will take for most people to recognize this is exactly what this is: the death spasms of a dying empire.
I try not to get mesmerised by imagining what the end of its spasms and the rise of the next look like. It's a curious kind of writerly escapism.
We're here, now. Flexible plans is the order of the day.
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@cstross I'm interested to see what's dying.
The parallel that occurs to me is China, where central control has waxed and waned for millennia. Does the US break up into warring states? Or maybe it's Rome: does it transition from what's left of a Republic to a formal Empire, complete with Emperor?
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@cstross seen on a T-shirt in Russia "I fell asleep in the USSR, and woke up fuck knows where"
It's possible that we have already lived through a year that will be described as part of the post-America era, but I think it will probably subjectively be more like the fall of the Roman empire where people defined it later on rather than felt it overnight.
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@djm62 @cstross There are cities in the north of Croatia which were part of the roman, ottoman, austro-hungarian empires, Venice, fascist Italy, pseudo eastern block (Yugoslavia) and now the EU…
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@cstross The machinery of empire is fine.
(No one is giving up fossil carbon, agriculture remains totally dependent on fossil carbon. The core mechanism of control is as strong as ever it was.)
What we're seeing is a change of ruling class from people with established political and social ties to factions in the imperial heartland to mammonites exalted by wealth and whose social ties are synthetic/cultic. (The analogy with Constantine's conversion is not distant.)
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@cstross This is bad, but it's not inherently unstable nor inherently likely to fail nor inherently something that diminishes the might of the empire. (redirect it, sure.)
The 1920s US had a major round of "there will be genocide until an unambiguous white majority is restored"; the 40s US set up the post-war institutions on the basis of highly inclusive principles.
The difference now is the combination of the (ambiguously controlled) panopticon and the ongoing agricultural collapse.
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@graydon @cstross Eh, I don't know... Couldn't it also be compared to the decline of the HRE, for example? This new ruling class has less desire for unity.
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@alessandro @cstross the new ruling class wants to delegitimize all sources of authority which are not THEIR sources of authority.
Because they're an alliance of cults (there's no distinction of mechanism between a grift and a cult and most people don't have the philosophical tools to think about this at all), they're really against facts, democracy, or letting outsiders exist. Standard cult. (which is a primate band formation hack.) It's not just unity it's uniformity.
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@alessandro @cstross the other thing which by and large and on the whole people will not think about is that democracy arises from rifle regiments in the 19th century; you HAVE to let the majority of the male population in on the good thing because you need them to mobilize to be a Power or Great Power. This runs ~1860 to 1915; from 1915 to about 1970, you need industrial mobilization to be a credible Power, so not rifles but rather similar. (And all politics remembers breaking empires.)
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@alessandro @cstross Today the very rich are determined to exalt themselves free of any need for their fellows to rule without constraint.
It won't work; it is not able to work. But they are determined to have their selfish god and be told that all their sins are virtues.
"All my sins are virtues" is relatively cheap in blood when it starts; you could have changed history, and thus our present, with 20 deaths in the 70s. Restoring a policy of facts will be more expensive than that today.
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@graydon @alessandro A secondary factor: the spread of multimodal container freight, which cut intercontinental transport costs by about 98% circa 1960-1980. Imperialism—in the Marxian sense—relies on maintaining distance between raw materials/capital-intensive production/consumption. That distance has now imploded. The only natural scale for an economy to function on today is global, which means the oligarchs require a global hegemony in order to avoid "domestic" threats.
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@cstross @alessandro one consequence of "natural scale is global" is that no one has even the theory of a control mechanism.
The folks with the billions, just like they are intensely aware of what climate change is doing (if they want to get the real data they can), are intensely aware that they don't know what's going on. It frightens them for materially well-supported reasons.
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@graydon @alessandro Gross planetary product is roughly $80Tn/year; a scale that dwarfs Elon Musk's riches (Musk is worth < 72 hours of planetary product). They probably feel helpless before a juggernaut, so they apply reflexes/ habits learned on a much smaller scale that are now inappropriate or counterproductive.
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@cstross @alessandro There's also this movement toward forcible simplification to restore belief in a sense of control.
(People really really do not want to believe that success or control, but not both, is a real thing about the world.)
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@graydon @cstross @alessandro
For all these reasons I can't shake the feeling that these are not the despots we need to fear will create a durable anti-liberal, anti-democratic State. Their "selfish God" precludes them from having the insight to create a preponderance of rewarded allies, rather than just a broad collection of people punished to a lesser or greater degree. It also sets them up to make errors in attribution, like "my power derives from my superiority, not my ubiquity".
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@johnzajac @cstross @alessandro None of those things are important.
"You get what you reward" is a special case of selection; selection is about copying yourself into the future. Anything complex is inherently more difficult to copy into the future than something less complex.
Brutally simple creeds ("my blood entitles me to anything") have prospered for centuries. And were, by every material measure, bad for everyone involved. And yet.
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@graydon @cstross @alessandro
I was talking about their already-hapless betrayals of key constituencies, betrayals that will continue apace because they were thoughtless and flip.
Power is ephemeral; without authority to back it up, it slips in and out of hands like an eel. That's why power can be seized, but authority must be given.
There are too many countervailing forces with adequate influence for these despots to both degrade QOL universally in this country AND retain any authority.
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@graydon @cstross @alessandro
"My" blood entitles "me" to anything is worthless. "Our" blood entitles "us" to anything is the play.
But these people honestly believe the former, and see the latter as a consideration unworthy of them.
And beyond all of these is the imperative of material survival. Food shortages, unpotable water, raging plague, supply chain shocks, inflation, unpaid military and eventual isolation of the US economically (which is possible) will send them reeling
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@graydon @cstross @alessandro
Had establishment Republicans managed to tamp down on Trump and his MAGA hordes for another 4-5 cycles, and elected a cleaned-up and much more dangerous demagogue, I think this could have been much worse.
In 2016, after Trump won, part of my brain was screaming "this wasn't the timing they planned on!" It seemed to shock the Murdochs and Ailes and Luntzs of the world that the Bannonites had alley-ooped them into power.
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@johnzajac @graydon @cstross @alessandro
Hence all the "kwisatz haderach" references back in 2016.
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@graydon Why do you say that ag remains totally dependent on fossil carbon?
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@ontploffing Tractors, trucks, and trains run on diesel. (Ships use fossil carbon fuels, but not usually diesel.) Fertilizers are synthesized from fossil carbon inputs.
The customary stylized fact has ten tonnes of fossil carbon per tonne of food.
Trying to feed people without mechanized agriculture is a problem we have to solve because we're going to lose agriculture to an unstable climate. It is certainly not solved today. "Local hand tillage" does not suffice in several ways.
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@cstross it will be interesting to see if billionaires can just buy control of every advanced economy on the planet. Certainly possible and they are well on their way. If the EU can't get a handle on misinformation supporting their domestic fascist class and start building nukes to keep off both Russia and Fourth Reich, they are at grave risk.
I hope to at least live to see 4R billionaires having Bad Tea parties and Falling-Down-Stairs accidents and the occasional inadvertent Polonium overdose.
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@oddhack @cstross
Strip away their security and give the billionaires to the crowd. They will then get the well-deserved Mussolini meat 🍖 🪝.
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@oddhack
Have you read The Global Minotaur? I think the financial sector internationally dominated world governments at the Bretton Woods conference and will continue to consolidate autocratic power until an organized global labor movement restructures the IMF/World Bank.
@cstross @lednaBM
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@cstross we are living in the crumbles
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