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4 comments
  • Honestly? Not fundamentally different than right now. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.

    So far, capitalism and the liberal systems that defend it have been pretty resistant to the needs and political will of the working class. Fifty years is (probably) too short to observe a fully general change of the way governments operate. I suppose that future governments will eventually learn to leverage technology for routine business.

    It seems like the popularity of authoritarianism fluctuates over time and space (e.g. some places suck more than others), as would the actual "average authoritarianism" if such a metric could be unambiguously defined (and that's a big if, but it's a place to start). Speaking very loosely, I think that lately, there has been a "blip" in authoritarianism on top of the usual increasing authoritarianism and centralization of government since World War II.

    Even though the worst of climate change is basically scheduled to occur within the next fifty years, I don't think that governments are going to structurally change in response. I think that they will adapt to the new status quo, whatever that may be. The COVID-19 pandemic is a great example of what I think will happen: any changes deemed necessary to preserve continuity of government will be made for as short as possible subject to the whims of the capitalist class, more specifically those who lobby the people in power.

    That being said, privacy is fucked and will be even more completely fucked in the future. I anticipate that public consent for the kinds of "backdoor" spying that goes on by "abusing" existing "protections" will be successfully manufactured and codified into law.

    Anecdotally, I am about to finish an engineering degree, and it's hard to find employers in my field who aren't somehow benefitting from taking contracts from the military or police. I regularly get spam in my school email asking me to apply for positions designing weapons or vehicles for the military. Most civilian firms seem to have no trouble taking huge military infrastructure contracts; military installations are usually the first thing in their news feed because they're so goddamned proud. My experience has backed up my belief that governments will be sinking their tendrils deeper into public life. Eventually, I think it will be prohibitively difficult to participate in society without materially contributing to the police and the military (beyond the fact that some portion of your taxes goes toward them), unless we begin to organize networks without them.

  • This groundhog expects fifty more years of predominantly bourgeois dictatorship. Besides the effects of changing technology, I'm not sure that governments have changed very much since 1973. So, I don't think they'll change very much by 2073. I'm just not sure that conditions will change enough for the bourgeoisie to lose their grip on power.

  • Main thing is, AIs don't run themselves, and increasingly advanced technology, required the active participation of people to maintain it. Those techs, programmers, and engineers, are not to happy to increasingly enslave people.

    Now if people are stupid with certain thing, payday loans, "cloud" surveillance of their homes, personal electronic devices which don't have crypto failsafes, etc. Not much you can do, the dumbest third will march to their doom as usual.

    On the other end of it, corporations, governments, banks, credit agencies, medical businesses, all have the same bad habits of storing massive pools of data, and then letting the dumbest administrator have control over these things. They get hacked, and its Mr Robot time.

    Some people, communities, maybe even larger regions are going to "air gap" themselves from the rest. Probably just because people don't like the pace of tech, they don't want certain tech in their lives, they don't want nests of cameras and microphones everywhere spying on them, or fucking robots running everything.

    Over time, there will be more and more communities like this. Already you can see it with people who don't jive with the whole radical transgender agenda, or gay this or that in everyone's face. And if at the federal level they make laws that say your teen can pull the ripcord and get out of your community of "air gapped" and culturally isolated/conservative people, and go out into the "more tolerant" outside world, where social media has everyone in everybodies business, so be it.

    There's already precedence in various religious communities, more radical Mormon, or sometimes just Mormon, Amish, Mennonite, various churches deemed to be "cults", or with radical political agendas. Those churches have to let their teens go and be out in the world, or risk the government coming in and laying a heavy hand on things.

    You'll probably also get other governments outside the US supporting those who want to "Walk Away" or unofficially expat, and acquire new identities. Same with many other countries at war with each other. Over time, this may have to be formalized, because people certainly do not have to do this with the consent of any government. Thanks to AI matching software, you can find your "twin" who can pass for you. You get your exit, and new papers, they get their new papers and life as "you" in the country where you don't want to be.

    An informal trade in each countries discontented might end up as kind of carbon credits like scheme. And can certainly work as a pressure valve. Plus foster better international understanding of cultures at least.