So what in God's name am i meant to write about... There's a lot of things going on in the world at the moment. Which ones are most important? What's the issue which I think define our little window of time? I'm not sure.
The rise of cryptocurrencies? The rise of Decentralised applications? Gender identity politics and the re-engineering of social norms across NATO? The rise of Nationalism in the previously ruling nations? The fact that I just called them the "previously" ruling nations? Inward facing propaganda apparatus, the cacophony of media bias and rising awareness of this fact? CRISPR and the advent of full blown genetic editing?
There's so many more. And they're all huuuuuge. Huge huge. Where do you begin... Any one of those is totally world changing.
Anyone heard of an ICO? An "initial coin offering"? There is currently underway a new wild west, a new gold rush, a new unregulated grab for riches. All over the world, there's a increasingly-less-hidden-but-still-quiet frenzy going on around things called "cryptocurrencies". Now the idea might be very familiar to most folks here, but the rest of the world seems to still not know. Yesterday at the car wash i was explaining what Bitcoin is to the guy in the next Bay who also happened to be the real estate agent who sold my folks their last house. "yeah someone was telling me about them" he said wiping down his shiny silver Mercedes. The conversation started because he asked me if i knew anything about this "crowdfunding thing" someone had told him to look into.
Everything's shifting way down deep underneath the base of our current systems, and up at the top we see the rumblings and strangeness of looming financial threats, and weird news about "negative interest rates" whatever they are, or people like Elon Musk trying to explain how A.I could destroy us all if we don't watch it, and how a basic minimum income might be the only way to stop chaos once the machines take our jobs.
But are people really listening? I'm not sure that they are. Deep deep underneath are the beginnings of new systems which are potentially set to replace our old systems. The word "decentralisation" is now a very persistent whisper. Dapps are on the rise - decentralised applications bypassing classical structures and ensuring no single point of ownership or control - it's a total shift away from corporate structure and Alpha decision making we're all taught is right and just and fair and to be encouraged and protected. Around the world, very clever people are busy making things which facilitate a whole new paradigm for all of it. They're changing the deep deep structures.
How is this full-on assault on the status quo going to be greeted by the current rulers? It's the fundamental nature of the change which is staggering. Usually we innovate and add and we don't have to get rid of the old system - we sort of make it better in a way but it's still the recognisably the same thing. In this case, we're not doing that. We're creating a different system for humanity to use - the basic ideological principles are different. They say a system is as good or as bad as the people who use it, but the system also dictates the parameters for interactions so it restrains and guides its users. By changing the system so fundamentally, we're going to see human interactions change and power shift. In a very big way. A lot of people in power spend all of their time trying to get more or trying to work out how not to lose what they already have. How will they fight this potential total disintegration of their power?
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe this is nature expressed through humanity trying to rebalance a system which has got crazily out of control - maybe the common idea of decentralisation has taken hold in humanity and much like a game of whack-a-mole, no matter how you try to suppress it, it will just pop up in some other individual who will quietly start working on a new dapp to change the way everything works, until eventually the balance is restored and humanity begins to interact in a less destructive way communally. I wonder if there's a field of study which explores that idea...
A scary thought - Is the drive towards decentralisation actually the emergence of the one-world system so many people are scared of? There's another question. Is this new great and global solution actually somehow going to turn into tyranny? I'm assured it can't, but I've stopped trusting what people say when there's a lot of momentum. We seem to be characterised by momentum a lot - I wonder if it's always been that way. The crowd surges this way and that and ideas build and the momentum spreads and things change and everyone's on board and waving flags and shouting and going to concerts, but it looks more and more like sheep being herded - not just in one sphere of life, but in all our social spheres.
There seems to be a great drive to social-consciousness of a sort. An idea is put forward as correct, and you hear that it's good and much like Hansel it's "so hot right now" without anyone ever having to say that. Suddenly everyone everywhere is behind the idea, and it's all you see and hear about. Of course on social media but even on the mainstream (of course they leave a delay so that social media still feels informationally privileged somehow) but it's ultimately the same narrative. I've digressed onto that inward facing propaganda thing, but it's all linked. Are we so heavily guided these days, and were we always? You must have noticed that this is true. The way an idea pops up and then it's everywhere, and then it's unthinkable to disagree with it, and then it's law and then it moves on and now it's the norm and nobody can envisage a time where it was not the truth of things. It's weird. Scary actually. But the people who accept the new idea as truth the most vocally are rewarded socially - they're the vanguard, the forward thinkers, the new people, the right people.
Anyhow, back to cryptos. I don't know if they're the emergence of a new one world system so beautifully designed that we all think it's an opposing force. Or maybe they really are an opposing force - a big human "you can't stop us" to the greed and tyranny of existing corporate structures. I hope it's the latter. I hope it's a force of nature which is assisting the rebalance of human interactions across all spheres. I hope it's whack-a-mole goodness unable to be stopped. But can you imagine how viciously they will fight to stop it if it is the latter. That'll get interesting. I'm assured that at this point even if they take down the internet to try to stop it, the internet can be rebuilt by people all over the world and the decentralised apps will be able to function. That's how they're thinking... It's a really big change.
It's 45 degrees celsius here, so I'm going to stop writing.