Politics in the Age of Technology Induced Social Fragmentation

Most of world's people culturally live in different time periods ranging from 1820s to 1970s (Western time). This should be taken into account in international relations to avoid conflict and to speed up transnational construction projects.




When forging political coalitions to push through great infrastructure projects in the near future, we need to take into account continued rapid acceleration of two opposing social trends:

 
Trend A: Continued disintegration of unitary mass culture.

Mass culture was previously spread among the majority by top down mediums like television/newspapers or concepts like religion/geographic nationalism. As the demographic still affected by these mediums and concepts gets older and/or poorer, mass culture will become increasingly peculiar and less unifying for the whole population. In a way, that is worrying since the glue holding the diverse personality types will really only continue to exist among the diminishing baby boomer block.

Horizontal Internet communication allows the diverse rich spectrum of human breeds to not only find those similar to themselves but also to only communicate and interact (socially polarize) among those like themselves. Thus we see emergence of micronations and tribes within these micronations to a level unseen before. This explains why there is greater amount of difference within Millennial generation than there is between Millennials and Boomers. We see such technology enabled socially polarized clusters reflected in rising acuteness of various movements (libertarians, atheists, etc). There is little to dampen the fervor of these micronations since social media and search engines increasingly cater to people's informational preferences thus isolating, reaffirming, and making them more "acute" by the day. All of this of course was said when newspapers, television, and radio came into being since people could select among the channels, stations, or papers. Horizontal, socially emergent, bottom up, and cheaply widespread nature of the Internet is a qualitative step above these past mediums. There is possibility of major disruptions comparable to immediate post-Guttenberg press period.

At the very minimum, a cutting edge hybrid of proportional representation and direct Internet enabled democracy will need to be provided so at least the major personality clusters (SJs, SPs, NTs, NFs) can have political parties to represent their sensibilities. However, it is not sufficient to just provide the tools for these social clusters, tools that allow a political release valve for their feelings and energies. We need to start thinking of a unifying strategy and platform to prevent major paralysis stemming from intergenerational bias, intercultural bias, and particularly 21st century biases (micronationalism versus globalism and "inter-era bias"[see below]).


In the Western world, the disintegrative trend has started among the elites many decades ago, moved on to the professional upper middle classes in the 1960s, and is finally reaching majority of the population. The process of atomization and cultural disintegration described above is rolling like an accelerating wave from most culturally developed countries to all areas of the world. Four decades ago, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Between Two Ages made it clear that world's population lives in overlapping "eras" (preindustrial, industrial, post-industrial, technocratic [post-capitalist]).

One could be upper middle class in Nigeria living in industrial period culturally reminiscent of America in the 1840s, one could be lower class in Berlin living in early technocratic period, one could be an Afghan elite living in a pre-industrial stifling society, one could be a rural educated kid in Bahrain independently discovering the values of the hippy movement of 1960s America, etc. Russian Federation for instance, displays many cultural tendencies of late 1940s early 1950s USA. The overlaps and permutations are endless and there is great urgency to avoid mass psychological disturbances and violent frictions from reactionary conservative movements.

It is the shared responsibility of the trend setting Millennials at "ground zero" of cultural atomization (North America) to figure out how to lead productively in the informational spheres like TedTalks, documentaries, conferences, and newest mass media. With their proper informational leadership, they can show how to go forward as a global society without becoming stifling or reactionary.

Trend B: Continued increase in popular desire for more collectivism and community among those who already spent years living in very fragmented atomized societies.

An example of this was seen in the manufactured "Reagan revolution". As minority of the population (Ivy Leaguers who discovered their ego and hedonistic potential that comes with it) grew tired of the rest of society not catching up with them and the loneliness that comes with it, they chose to reabsorb themselves into a new form of corporate nationalism (that emphasized endless individual material expansion and dropped the need for collective sacrifice of prior exhausted FDRist nationalism). In the years ahead, we will see top down and bottom up calls for a still newer nationalisms that try to remedy mistakes of the American experience of both 1930s-1970s period and unfortunate 1980s-2008 period.

One possible solution and an inverse of Reaganism may be material nationalism (such as communal claim to land and key natural resources within nation states), physiological nationalism ("we are all human! and no matter how diverse got common physical needs!"), psychological nationalism ("we got common emotional needs!") and a mix of all 3. At the same time, the middle classes will insist on continued room to build hyper individualism (if desired) and further personal autonomy in psychological, interpersonal, and material realm (example: perhaps the people collectively own the land but you own your own unique shelter and property on this land).

It is possible that the educated intuitive suburban youth in the Western world will continue to further individualize and create ever more acute microtribes indefinitely but the shared viral experience of global information will increasingly provide a sense of a real global community and desire to be part of it somehow.


Reconciling the Trends Politically

At first it seems that we have a recipe for endless conflict. First, the perpetual exponentially increasing friction within Trend A. Then the clashing of Trends A and B as some more backward segments of global intelligentsia strive to break free of mass community and older nationalisms while cutting edge intelligentsia tries to reassert some new postmodern community and high tech inclusive nationalisms.

Just as hippies in say, Indonesia, sell out and discover their own version of Reaganism, all of a sudden they see a trend coming their way from Japan that puts everything into question once more. Most human personality types can only psychologically handle and absorb so many paradigm shifts and trends in their lifetime (much less a decade).

This is why political platforms of the near future should be as broad and deep as possible. The material, psychological, and physiological nationalisms mentioned previously can be scaled up to the whole globe or scaled down to a small city. Lets review the MPP:

Material: (Land and key resources like minerals in the land are our collective commons and are to be managed by us as we democratically see fit)

Psychological: (We are all humans and have commonalities like need for self-esteem, autonomy, love, influence, etc. And these desires will be provided for via proper political representation and management of the collective commons)


Physiological: (We are all humans and have commonalities like need for water, food, shelter, and some material matter to manipulate with tools, turn into tools, etc. And these desires will be provided for via proper political representation and management of the collective commons)

These three obviously blend together and play off each other and are broad and deep enough to provide a common political platform for a majority of human personality clusters. A society can safely be federal, unitary, decentralized, part of a supranational unit, diverse, homogeneous, etc as long as these three nationalisms are emphasized politically. Cultural, ethnic, and value nationalisms will still exist and play a major role but unlike MPP they provide for major source of unhealthy friction. De-emphasizing them will be a major challenge and calling for word's elites in the decades to come (just as de-emphasizing and separating religion and state was for elites in centuries prior).


As could be guessed, mass infrastructure development is to play a major role in putting MPP to the forefront of popular attention and to make MPP possible. In essence, to create a new type of global "glue" that would hopefully go a long way to neutralize the frictions of Trend A and frictions between Trend A and B and to put the energy generated by these frictions towards productive use.

Although 21st century will be marked by top down elite emphasis on collaboration and cooperation, even competition can still be allowed to co-exist when it comes to infrastructural achievement. This would sublimate the psychological tendencies of more aggressive human personality clusters into a socially healthy mass effort. A way to think of this is a sort of "space race" right here on earth (example: "we beat them in building this amount of fourth generation vertical farm complexes!"). Ethnic, cultural, intergenerational, and inter-era differences will still manifest themselves in the types of infrastructure projects that communities build. And of course, in an awful potentiality of resource wars. More on that in a future article. Resource wars are serious business.

Super Summary: Infrastructure as key word and mantra so we don't forget why civilization is possible at all

Infrastructuralist focus is needed to make 3 new forms of healthier scalable 21st century unifying nationalisms possible (MPP). Infrastructure itself is scalable and can range from microcomunity level to planetary level. Infrastructure focus redirects the friction within Trend A and friction between Trends A and B towards productive efforts. Infrastructure pushes towards more informational sharing and friendly cooperation between communities that operate on different political scales and whose people live in different cultural "time periods".

Infrastructure sets short, medium, and long term national goals that pushes cooperation between different personality clusters and creates unity among them that doesn't stifle them on a personal emotional level. Having and building the means towards more energy, food, shelter, and resources is less disagreeable than national goals stemming from one dominant ethnic or cultural faction. In order for infrastructural focus to be had at all, short, medium, and long term goals need to be quantified and put out for the public to manage (example: quadrupling arable land within 20 years, eliminating a certain desert within 10 years, etc).

Finally, for these goals to be properly decided on and implemented, a major technocratic reform towards a more advanced proportional representation and direct democratic hybrid political system is to be undertaken.

Inequality of Wealth Distribution and Economic Growth

The forest was in chaos. Parts of it were burning and the food was scarce. Remembering how wonderful the forest used to be, various animal groups sent ambassadors to a very ancient owl. The wise owl remembered  historical cycles and hopefully had clues on how to reset the forest so it could be productive again. They gathered by the gargantuan oak tree where the owl lived.

"Is this what it took to come see me?" the owl hooted. "That's fine. I got some time to say the least, gather around."

"You see, most animals are needed to make the forest work. The beavers who are skilled at dams, the messenger birds, the defender bears, and the wily foxes. Each is as important as the next for proper societal function," the owl said.

The animals shouted, "foxes are the most important since they are 1% of the population and have the most food, they are the smartest and most capable! That's why they get at least 10% of everything always!"

"Well, perhaps. Don't listen to everything newspapers say. After all, they're owned by foxes," owl said.

The owl got comfortable and elaborated upon a few scenarios.

"Some animal theorists assure us that as the economy expands, the ruling foxes need to skim less and less from the pie. They say that if our economic pie is 100 slices today and foxes take 10%, then they can take 9% if the pie grows to 1,000 slices. Everybody wins?"

The animals nodded and murmured approval, "yes yes they'll need to loot less with time, we'll all have more!"

"Let me show you how that is rubbish!" declared the owl. He smiled at the puzzled expressions of the crowd. "If population and economy is both 100 then during the first generation one fox gets 10 slices while 99 chumpsters get 90 slices (.909 slice per chumpster). During the second generation, if both economy and population grow equally to 1,000 then reduction of fox share to 9% will yield 90 slices for 10 foxes (9 slices per fox) while 990 chumpsters split 910 slices amongst them (.919  slice per chumpster)."

He continued, "you see fellow forest dwellers, everybody always wants more resources with every passing year. Foxes, their offspring, and their families also want annual increases and they're in a political position to actually get them. Unless forced otherwise, they will expand their wealth at least at the rate of economic growth. Here's why.."

The owl pointed his wing at a sketch.

"Scenario I : Lets say we start with 100 slices and foxes take their usual 10% (10 slice) cut. Our pie grows 10% annually while the amount foxes take for themselves grows only 5% annually which means they're reducing their share gradually over time. After the first year, our pie is 110 slices and foxes take 10.5 slices. By year 10, we have 259 slices with foxes taking 16 of them. This means the share of how much they take has fallen from 10% to 6.17% in just a decade. If this continues and populations of foxes and non-foxes (chumpsters in fox vernacular) grow at a stable and exactly proportional rate, the foxes will be reduced to poverty chumpster status within a few generations."

A ripple of understanding went through the crowd, "since they lose when expanding insufficiently quickly, lets then peg the rate at which they grow their wealth to the rate at which the economy grows!" they roared.

"We're getting warmer" smiled the owl. "We've heard from various mammals that were dropped on their heads when little.."

*laughter*

"..we heard from them that not only should economy not grow at the rate of the herd but that we should enter post-growth!! Having taken everything the foxes want to consolidate their gains forever and turn everything into a "sustainable" equilibrium zoo!! As if life was equilibrium!"

*rolling laughter*

"Well, we can't stand still, that is, grow as fast as we breed considering the chumpster population usually breeds at greater rates than the fox one. If the orange trickster incomes are pegged to growth and have a guaranteed minimum pie cut, then there'll be massive privation for the rest. Keeping in mind the population growth rates of various animal classes is essential when determining forest policy. Especially in these troubled times we can't allow things to develop where one class wishes the other was depopulated or reduced in size just to maintain privileges, much less expand privileges.."

"Well lets expand the economy at a much faster rate than herd growth!", yelled the animals.

"Very good, obviously that's the solution, yet even with ratio of economic to population growth being top heavy, we must still prevent the 1% from claiming larger share than their usual 10%..."

"Hey can you speak from that higher bare branch over there so we can hear you better?" somebody called from the crowd.

"Sure thing", said the owl as he hopped upwards. He then unfurled another sketch.

"Scenario II  : Economic pie is expanding at twice the rate of the population (which remains internally proportional). Economy expands 1,000% and population expands 500% every generation. Foxes gradually expand the amount they claim by 2% of the total pie.

1st generation) POPULATION = 100 animals (1% fox  99% chumpsters)
PIE = 100 slices
1 fox takes 10 slices (10% of pie), 10 slices per fox
99 chumpsters split 90 slice, .909 slice per chumpster

2nd generation) POPULATION = 600 animals
PIE = 1,100 slices
6 foxes split 132 slices (12% of pie), 22  slices per fox (120% increase)
594 chumpsters split 968 slices, 1.629 slice per chumpster (79.20% increase)

3rd generation) POPULATION = 3,600 animals
PIE = 12,100 slices
36 foxes split 1,694 slices (14% of pie),  47.055 slices per fox (113% increase)
3,564 chumpsters split 10,406 slices   2.919 slice per chumpster (79.18% increase)
..... "

"As you can see, even with phenomenal growth, a tiny minority beginning to increase their total cut begins to stagnate and reverse the party for all. This greed may bring more slices today yet leave forest burning tomorrow."

The animals cried, "that's not fair!! 99% of animals deserve these increases over time! There's more of us!"

"Yes furry and feathery ones. The ancients had a guiding principle for herd survival. They said to limit the amount of resources the best off animals get to no more than 10 times the amount that worst off animals get. More importantly, they said to peg the rise in resources that the best off get to the rise of resources that the worst off get. That means that if field mice get 10 slices the foxes would get no more than 100 and if foxes wish to get 110 next year they better work out conditions where the mice can get 11 next year."

"It's not in their nature to share!!" said the animals "You mentioned the ancients. Wasn't there a time when we were ruled by turtles and kinder hunters like your fellow owls? Wasn't the forest more bountiful? Wasn't the.."

"Hah! Indeed," said the owl. "There is one more thing I need to say before I forget. You must also never allow usury to develop and never neglect rapid construction of infrastruc..."

Suddenly a loud shot rang out. The owl froze briefly, clutched at its chest, slumped, and fell down to loud gasps. The owl lay dead.

A very old fox burst into the clearing. It was panting and had a wild yet serious expression on its snout.

"The humans!" it gasped. "They're here! There's guns and mercenary dogs, the whole herd is in danger!! We're being attacked!"

The crowd forgot about everything as panic spread.

"The humans did this, they spoiled the forest! They used some owls as spies. We're forming a defensive grid with the wolves by the river bank. Follow me, we'll overcome this together like we always have! The beavers are in charge of logistics. Defend the forest!"

"I knew that owl was up to no good, talking down to us from those branches.." snorted a beaver elder.

The animals began to run.

click to enlarge

Heavy Industry Requires Direct State Control

Demand for big capital intensive consumer products like hospitals, trains, spacecraft, schools, bridges can only be adequately provided by the state




The sight of former textile and paper factories being turned into overpriced lofts in many Western cities shows how light industry can pick up its belongings and leave the country at a moment's notice. Competition in manufacture of small relatively portable consumer goods (anything smaller than a civilian car) has produced an enormous jump in technological evolution of gadgets. These are the glaring successes of capitalism that cannot be ignored. Thomas Friedman and Karl Marx have spent half of their famous books describing these efficiency victories of the market. The breakneck pace of progress in small consumer goods has made declining economic/social power (of most of the world's population) more tolerable by negating some of the suffering. Although proletariat of the world (99% of world's people who don't purely live off capital investment such as neurosurgeons, 80 grand a year white collar workers, McDonalds staff, etc) have been becoming increasingly impoverished from mechanization, light industry provided some relief. Shiny televisions, increasingly powerful computers, and Wi-Fi cellphones have masked the decline somewhat. After all, a dollar in 2009 buys exponentially more computing power than a dollar in 1999 or 1989 so small electronics are seeing a form of mind blowing deflation.

The capital intensive products of heavy industry have lagged behind pathetically however. A dollar in 2009 doesn't make you travel substantially faster around the world than a dollar in 1989. Neither does it give you a lot more quantitatively and qualitatively better education or health. Space progress is not the only macro technological arena that has stagnated. What happened to the space shuttle is happening in virtually every macro heavy industry reliant area of planetary activity. The major lag in development of HI products versus LI products deserves major international attention.

What are HI products? Let's name some:

1) aircraft, trains, spaceships, bridges, tunnels, mines, deep sea oil platforms, heavy transport ships, submarine habitats, deep space habitats, power plants, large farms

2) machines that create the parts for the value added products above and machines that create these machines, factories where these machines are located and that have the personnel that is employed to run the factories

3) supporting infrastructure to items in 1) and 2) such as transport infrastructure linking the extraction of raw materials to the processing plants to the assembly plants to the distribution plants (vertical downstream and upstream chains)

60 year old bridges are being driven on by 3 year old cars. A person from 1840s would easily recognize the trains of today when it comes to their function and utility. This person would not undergo the same awe as a horse riding mail courier would at the sight of video conferencing from laptops and such.

What people forget is that bridges, spaceships, and factories full of cutting edge robotics are just large value added products. Sure, a factory that makes engines for spaceships may have more moving parts within it than a cellphone but when it comes to the totality of a particular assembly line's singular functioning, it is but a product that is in demand for a buyer. An iron ore extraction plant is also a product with multitudes of customers (large scale consumers). So why is it that the market has consistently failed to produce evolutionary leaps in HI consumer products as breathtaking as the ones in LI consumer products?

Well, the common reply is that because these big consumer products are capital intensive, it's hard to get investment for really exotic large scale experiments in new means of large scale production and extraction. The argument goes on to point out that due to the long term nature of these difficult projects, it's hard to get enough investors with the patience and vision to really stick around.

The problem in a nutshell boils down to insufficient capital, insufficient patience (especially in an era of quarterly results and fast paced financial sector gambling with quick returns), and insufficient appetite for risk as is common in companies controlled by shareholders rather than singular ego driven 19th century style oligarchs. To be fair, often governments put too much restriction on really revolutionary projects such as private space exploration. However, at the end of the day, the global stagnation in high macro technology and infrastructure is the result of capitalism fundamentally failing at meeting peoples demand for complex value added HI consumer products.

Do people want to fly from London to Tokyo in half the time in safe hypersonic craft? Yes they do. Do they want their drinkable water to be cleaner, cheaper, and more available? Of course. Lets not even get into the desire for modes of transport that aren't powered by small explosions of hydrocarbons. Since demand is not being met, the only solution to start meeting it is direct total state control of strategic heavy industry products. Control can include or exclude outright ownership but it has to be total (total control without direct ownership is not a contradiction from the standpoint of state capitalism and there are plenty of examples of it). The state has the patience, the vision, and the capital to really start making the same leaps in progress as are occurring in cellphones for instance.

For example: the next generation airplanes shouldn't just be more bloated whales with tiny wings.
They should be substantially faster (hypersonic or even scram jet), cheaper to fly (or free depending on how far the government subsidizes them or decides if ability for travel is an inalienable right), and of course constantly safer and more comfortable.

The simple demand above that we come to expect from LI consumer products (with every new generation laptop, fridge, or lawnmower) may evoke laughter. This laughter is deserved as the current capitalist mode of delivering improvements in HI goods involves is inefficient by its very nature. Even when state governments work hand in hand with large corporate actors to say, build a new high speed railroad, the profit motive keeps the whole enterprise at a very cautious, very expensive, inefficient snails pace. One has to just look at the empty lot where Freedom Tower should have been a few years ago. The shareholders (citizens) of large capable states deserve better for their involuntary investment.

That is why direct control by the state of key strategic HI sectors of the economy is a must. People would not even notice the change as this action would take some key industry from mid-level state capitalism as practiced now to maximum level state capitalism as was practiced under Lenin's New Economic Policy. Soviet success of industrialization within one generation (replacing horses with tractors, bringing electricity to areas previously without it, large scale construction of colleges and universities, etc.) found a worthy successor in modern China. Chinese leadership has built incredible gleaming infrastructure within a generation while allowing light industry capitalism to provide things that capitalism is good at providing (hats, shoes, tables, flashlights, DVD players). Things like bridges and new airports however were provided by the state corporations after careful planning with long term future in mind. Chinese have avoided disasters like the Big Dig due to more direct control over all the players throughout the entire vertical business chain. One does not even need to mention the success of Singapore in providing ever improving quality housing (most people there live in public housing).

Of course there is the argument that the state may have the same deficiency at raising capital for these megaprojects. Not every country has a billion tax payers and a large land area. This is not a problem at all as it invites real productive international cooperation in tangible improvement in people's lives. European citizens would jump on board immediately if they knew how much cheaper (if not free) their train rides would be if EU owned enough mines, raw material processing centers, and train assembly lines. When 20-50 countries put their capital together they can reap the benefits of mass production in HI sector. Hypersonic 21st century aircraft, spaceships, small nuclear power plants, floating desalination plants can be stamped out cheaply (with excess remainder bartered with other societies in exchange for anything from coffee to sugar to titanium).

The limit of course would be cooperation at international UN level involving vast majority of the world's actors. That will have to wait a while as the world is undergoing consolidation of regional economic blocks.

The regional economic block that will deliver the best HI goods will eventually become the spine of the first global government. Although it would be preferable if humanity immediately jumped towards global cooperation in management and production of HI consumer goods, the regional block formation seems like a safer way of going about it. Nothing would be more productive for the world (in comparison to the current US dominated vampiric free trade blood draining) than gentle competition between European Union, North American Union, China, South American Union, etc  in who can build better tunnels, mines, spacecraft, etc. It is already happening in a way between large multinationals backed from either Washington DC or Brussels but there are still insufficient political controls. It will be interesting to see the business strategy behind HI products emerging from USAN since this block is being driven in part from resentment from Western economics.

(sidenote: this article is not an argument for more state control but more of an analysis of a process already happening and dissection of fundamental reasons for it. As head of the US democratic party, Howard Dean, recently mentioned, the silly ridiculous argument between socialism and capitalism is finished. It never made sense and only served as a pretext to continue the feud between Eastern and Western planetary elites. It makes more sense to have more state control on international level from the perspective of many rich people and it will thus be done. EU's model of regional integration is now copied by entire continents and the process of continental integration will happen a lot more rapidly now. Unfortunately, the profit motive [now bumped to a higher level and driving gaggles of state heads] and the difficulties listed earlier in the article continue in this process until eventual integration of key economic blocks into a system of world governance and more centralized HI decision making. The alternatives to global integration via non-EU models [Anglo-American led corporate globalization] involve too many risks of violence and unimaginable horrors.)

As for today, with 1 in 6 of Americans having had insufficient food in 2008, the least the state can do is take direct control of middlemen distributors (like Wall Mart and Costco) to better negotiate for and coordinate food supplies to the major urban hubs where people have less access to cars. For the price of 1 week in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authorities can operate hundreds of such distribution points in strategic areas to prevent social unrest.