Slaves, Peasants & Serfs
Harvested as Always, Now No Longer Needed
Last week, I was cleaning out notes I had written in my Obsidian longform writing vault. I found a note I wrote in January of 2020 related to a fiction novel I planned to write tentatively titled, “The 5 Empires.” I outlined the book and drafted a synopsis.
I posted the synopsis on Subtack earlier this year: https://www.546watch.com/p/the-5-empires.
Subsequently, I put the book on hold.
Why?
The themes and events I had planned to write about to entertain an enthused, apocalyptic audience were no longer fiction. They had started to happen, as predicted, in 2025.
Here is the note.
Slaves, Peasants & Serfs — Harvested as Always, Now No Longer Needed
21st-century post-industrial societies — dominated by 21st-century technologies, their creators and their governments — are:
Modern, more subtle versions of the industrial, robber baron dominated, pseudo-republics and monarchies of the 17th to 20th centuries.
Or, are like pre-industrial, feudal, monarchical, religion-dominated societies which existed prior to the Renaissance.
The strategies, tactics, methods and polities are different, but the results are the same: exploitation, poverty, inequality, and oppression.
The entrepreneurial creators, of today, and their sycophantic elites continue to exploit the less capable among us to their own benefit. The creator-elites provide the rest of humanity with just enough “scraps” to prevent revolutionary uprisings threatening their accumulation of wealth through their ongoing exploitation of the masses using the latest digital technologies. The privacy-shredding, data-mining of our lives in exchange for a handful of useful, convenient “apps” is just one of the latest examples of their exploitation.
In the 21st century “Big tech” (AI, bigdata, quantum computing, robotics, nanotechnology, pharma, etc.) will perfect surveillance states no longer dependent on the labor or productivity of masses of uneducated humans.
Choking on human waste, unable to provide enough nutritious food, clean water and clean air resources to sustain a human population of 10 billion, in 2050, the Earth will struggle and human civilization with it.
What happens when civilization no longer needs the labor and productivity of large swaths of humans? Wars as an excuse to kill off large swaths of unproductive humans consuming scarce resources? Walling-off of humans in Northern Africa, SW Asia and, maybe, SE Asia, Central and equatorial South America letting them self-euthanize? Eugenics?
Our creators and elites currently have no “good” solutions for the effects on human civilization of the coming Bigtech, climate change, and population growth tsunamis.
Until recent times, we had room to maneuver and constraints which protected us: comfortable ratios of resources to population, limits on mobility, no real-time, ubiquitous communications.
Human life and activity continue to accelerate. All aspects of our lives are moving faster and faster. At the same time, humanity’s evolutionary road is taking on more twists and turns, with minimal warning signs, or signs that appear too late to apply the necessary corrections to keep humanity in the prosperous survival lane of its evolutionary road.
“How do We keep this car on the road while it is going too fast into what may be a hairpin curve?”
In a split-second of geological time, humanity has gone from crawling, to walking, to riding animals, to riding in horse-drawn carriages, to driving 70 mph gasoline-powered vehicles, and is now trying to learn how to drive a 200 mph Ferrari. The fundamental problem is we may not have enough time left to learn how to drive a Ferrari and may not be capable of driving it.
If you want to see the future today, study what has happened and is still evolving in sub-Saharan Africa, Lebanon-Syria-Iraq, and Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua — the breakdown of the rule-of-law, extreme poverty and inequality, an unemployed younger generation, a lack of opportunity for most, and ruled by autocrats and their elite enablers who only care about maintaining power.
Maybe enlightened development and deployment of “Big tech” will save us, but that is unlikely in the face of humanity’s continuing embrace of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.