Alt Text: an image of Agent Smith from The Matrix with the following text superimposed, “1999 was described as being the peak of human civilization in ‘The Matrix’ and I laughed because that obviously wouldn’t age well and then the next 25 years happened and I realized that yeah maybe the machines had a point.”
You should read the duology (I’ve only read the first book) Monk and Robot, which is solopunk. The premise is that robots got tired of doing what they were built for, and decided to form a treaty with humans allowing them to wonder into the wild and live without human contact.
Monk and Robot
This sounds like a great one to follow up on after having recently started Murderbot, thanks!
American civilization? Yes,definitely. Human civilization? I genuinely don’t think so. I believe in us as a species and think the best is yet to come (after we rid ourselves of bigots and authoritarians).
Most of human civilization has been run by kings, emperor’s and dictators. I see the worlds rich population gaining more control than ever while the possibilities for everyone else is less and less. The lower and lower middle class have become too easily influenced by fake news and propaganda. How do we advance when people can be manipulated to go against their own best interests?
The further you get from the gold standard the worse life you’ll have. Though you might have more social media and gadgets you’ll have a smaller house and worse quality food/services, as everything is financialized through debt in a futile attempt to force the elderly who own all the assets to consume every greater amounts, as automation progressively decreases the costs and companies find more advanced ways to shrinkflate products.
It literally was the peak though. Maybe early 2000s minus 9/11. But after 2010 it absolutely went downhill.
Oh goodness no. We had the War on Terror for 15 years after 2001. Global civilization took a serious crash dive after that. The terrorists won.
So much horseshit happened around 2000 that forever split our timeline…
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W Stealing the election
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Bin Laden attacking and making the entire world forever lose their mind and hope
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Never ending wars and climate destruction because no-one cared anymore about collaboration
That 4 year period altered the world’s trajectory for the worse on so many levels.
W lies and propaganda led to Putin and Trump and it set the stage for all of the anti queer and anti immigrant rhetoric
W lies and propaganda led to Putin and Trump
At least talking about Putin, that jerk and his family (both actual and “family”) created most of the lies, propaganda and war in the ex-Soviet space themselves. Starting right with year 1991 (Yeltsin had a different public image, but it was one team), hijacking a honest democratic movement, breaking what institutions limiting them USSR still had (under democratic excuses), and making every regional conflict a thorn in its body, either hard to remove or fulfilling their goals when removed. Consummating their achieved right to answer legal arguments with cannons in 1993, their achieved right to arbitrarily wage war on their compatriots in 1996, and their achieved right to kill anyone they don’t like in 1999. They literally rule Russia as an occupied country, they even live mostly abroad.
So by 2000 Russia was already deep in shit. Dunno about USA.
Bin Laden attacking and making
the entire worldthe USA forever lose their mind and hope
FTFY
If you don’t think the anti terror bullshit panic didn’t spread around the world, then you weren’t paying attention. A lot of governments used it to pass all kinds of anti democratic bullshit in guise of “security”
