He can only extrapolate from events that already happened. Human made global warming is a first time, so difficult to say what will happen from a historical perspective.

Human-made global warming appears to go back to the advent of agriculture, though, so for all intents and purposes it has been a constant throughout the history of which we speak.

Maybe that's what you meant after all.

What was this based on?

Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution for example.

We see our history as a dot, because we live in it.

But people in the future will take a more long-term view and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.

The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.

Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.

We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.

Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.

This is a difficult time compared to what? The black plague? WW1?

This is the easiest time ever to be alive.

I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the internet has broke democracy.

The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.

This professor is still living in the unipolar moment that has passed.

I think it is more accurate to say it broke the power of the aristocracy by causing a labour shortage.

The black death happened in the 14th century, the reformation in the 16th

I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.

I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.

Do you have any links to any material/info on this topic? I'm sure some folks have begun talking about protocols.

Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.

I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.

Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.

In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.

> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.

Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.

What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela, South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much worse even for decently developed countries with democracy and a solid economic foundation.

Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people across multiple growing countries, and broad (sometimes related, sometimes not) anti-democracy trends, I really wouldn't be that optimistic.

What would make one think that e.g. the Coup Belt in Subsaharan Africa will some day get more democratic? The fundamentals aren't there - the populace is generally poor and poorly educated. Strongman rule over years/decades can erode the little civic society that existed, and then it's very very hard to get an effective democracy functioning.

There's a pervasive sense in online discussions these days that if it's cynical, dark or depressing, it has to be the truth. It's like Occam's razor for today's modern doomer: the bleakest explanation must be the correct one. And I'm not saying that things are easy or that democracy is guaranteed, but I am saying that pessimism isn't inherently more realistic than optimism.

Cynicism sells in the 21st century.

It's not really cynicism.

It's just that people today only care about the next 20 or 30 years. They don't really care if, over the course of the next 200 years, two nations can rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing concern for them.

Maybe this was your intention or maybe not, but this is kinda what I'm talking about. It presupposes that there will be nuclear exchanges and annihilation in the first place, because, well, why wouldn't there be? Life is shit, tensions are high, and that's the grim dark end we all see coming anyway?

Isn't that the human condition? Historically, it was no doubt an evolutionary advantage to always think that a lion is about to pounce, so to speak. That doesn't just go away. The instincts still need something to work with even after all the real threats are gone.

The cynicism comes from the fact that many people (including me) have decided to check out from what is going on in the world and instead focus on what we can control in our daily lives.

It also comes from the fact that in many countries the social contract is broken.

You are still expected to pay your taxes but the services provided are increasingly of bad quality such as schools,hospitals, judicial system and so on.

So much so in fact that it seems to me that this relationship that the people have with the state is becoming more and more one sided. Like in an abusive relationship of some sort.

Look at the number of people who don't bother to vote anymore because at the end of the day it does not make much difference to their lives.

There is profound sense of injustice in the world at the moment but it is being swept under the carpet.

And then it fell in the hands of radical islamists. Is this the outcome that everyone was hoping for?

This is not an assessment. It's the truth. Jolani is a former al-Qaeda member whose organization is still considered a terrorist organization. The US even had a prize on his head.

> Your response is that of a coward that would rather live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of their own lives.

You response to an opinion that is different than yours is to insult someone who is willing to engage with you. If you are not interested in debating, no point in commenting.