The US is going to need to go through a complete meltdown. A Great Depression probably wouldn't make people angry and organized enough to cause the change that we need.
My prediction is that the United States won't stick around for too long (if you take a history textbook perspective on this, which you can see other failed societies have made the same mistakes that we are now repeating).
I think we have a fighting chance to create the desirable society that eliminates corporatocracy. Did you know the planet contains 13,000 zettajoules of geothermal energy? The entire world uses 0.5 zettajoules of energy per year. And we can harvest this, but there are patent wars to suppress this from easily happening.
Let's look at the other resources available, which cost us nothing at all. Wind? 3 states of wind energy can power the entire United States. Water? The UK alone could be powered by water/tide energy alone. Solar? One hour of thermal energy in the day could power the United States for an entire year if we harvested it properly.
Travel by plane? Who does that when you could travel by AT3's mag-lev trains, which can reach speeds up to 4,000 MPH with zero moving parts and zero emissions. Oh, and it uses about 10% of the energy of an airplane. Yes, they work in land and water.
What happens when technology replaces humans? You no longer need to work. In our capitalistic society, it's called unemployment. If you look into the Venus Project, it's called you get bored and start thinking about space exploration.
Once people figure out that we don't really need these corporations, we'll never have this type of problem come up again. The corporations are holding us back and creating scarcity (real or perceived) at every opportunity. Like I said, I don't think the United States is going to get it right, we're in far too deep over our heads. And the attitudes and apathy of the American people never ceases to amaze me (in a bad way) as an undergraduate.
It's not like if you outlaw corporations, suddenly a new form of organization will appear where nobody is greedy any more. It's not like "the corporations" are sitting on the secret to infinite wind energy and they're just afraid of change. Corporations are made up of people. They are not perfect because people are not perfect and organizing large groups of people is hard. Outlawing corporations will not solve either of those problems.
Yeah. And you can't exactly say that corporations never do good, either. Because an overwhelming amount of the time, they do. Even when they do bad things, they often do it at the whim of the public. (To pick a lesser example: remember that the people really DO like sensationalist news and cheesy, humorless sitcoms.)
Blaming corporations does nothing. Trying to FIX corporations, yes. Trying to REMOVE them is ignorant and short-sighted.
A broadcast medium, or a mass producer, makes more money making something a lot of people like a little, than something which polarizes customers into love and apathy.
From this springs every horror and alienation in the 20th century pop culture.
Upside: it's a passing technological phase, and we're nearly all the way through.
I wish it was a passing phase. But people love it everywhere. I saw it two years ago on Reddit, and have since seen it flame up into a ridiculous deluge of fringe theories and an absolute death of everything interesting.
People like everything but fair and detailed reporting. News reflects this. Same with culture. People like buying vast amounts of worthless things. It doesn't matter what field it's in. Geeks collect as much as rifle hunters, they just collect different things. That's led to an industry that specializes in creating excess.
Reddit is still a mass producer of sorts, and the score stands in for money - the same dynamic occurs. That which titillates the many out-scores that which fascinates the few. (Reddit has tried with limited success to protect enclaves: subreddits. They have created smaller and more elite lowest-common-denominators. Better than nothing, for now.)
I say it's a passing phase because where tech is headed is: auto-generated completely personal everything. The limit of "the few" is "the one", and the mass production dynamic breaks down at that limit.
They've been predicting that since, what, the 20s? I've seen every attempt to give personalized information and it never works. In fact, every attempt I've seen is nothing short of laughable.
The problem with that concept is that it assumes we know exactly what it is that we like, and that it's easy to communicate that. Neither assumption is correct. As we learn, we constantly adjust what we like, at a fairly extreme rate, and it tends to be impossible to express in any way other than the extremely specific.
Which jmtame submitted an "ask HN" about earlier today. I don't know how realistic its premises are, if they are to be found in jmtame's comments in this thread. The first few minutes sound pretty fruity and pretentious, but I'll withhold judgement until I've given it a few more minutes. But, I'm suspicious of folks who think they understand a huge array of topics well enough to make pronouncements on them that are contrary to a majority of experts in each field. (And, of course, I realize the irony of making such a statement in a thread that I started by pontificating on a topic on which I am clearly an interested amateur rather than an expert in the field.)
My prediction is that the United States won't stick around for too long (if you take a history textbook perspective on this, which you can see other failed societies have made the same mistakes that we are now repeating).
I think we have a fighting chance to create the desirable society that eliminates corporatocracy. Did you know the planet contains 13,000 zettajoules of geothermal energy? The entire world uses 0.5 zettajoules of energy per year. And we can harvest this, but there are patent wars to suppress this from easily happening.
Let's look at the other resources available, which cost us nothing at all. Wind? 3 states of wind energy can power the entire United States. Water? The UK alone could be powered by water/tide energy alone. Solar? One hour of thermal energy in the day could power the United States for an entire year if we harvested it properly.
Travel by plane? Who does that when you could travel by AT3's mag-lev trains, which can reach speeds up to 4,000 MPH with zero moving parts and zero emissions. Oh, and it uses about 10% of the energy of an airplane. Yes, they work in land and water.
What happens when technology replaces humans? You no longer need to work. In our capitalistic society, it's called unemployment. If you look into the Venus Project, it's called you get bored and start thinking about space exploration.
Once people figure out that we don't really need these corporations, we'll never have this type of problem come up again. The corporations are holding us back and creating scarcity (real or perceived) at every opportunity. Like I said, I don't think the United States is going to get it right, we're in far too deep over our heads. And the attitudes and apathy of the American people never ceases to amaze me (in a bad way) as an undergraduate.