Beautifully written. I kind of feel… hopeful and hopeless at the same time? I’m in the US and I love to see the rest of the world pulling away from this country. We’re poison. Get as far away as you can. But I also want to hope that things will improve here for my people, and this… doesn’t sound like it’ll help us much…
Same boat. It’s caused a stress I’ve never felt before.
Excellent article, well worth the read.
It seems odd to say you can’t expect revolutions to happen when they did historically happen. That a paradigm shift where 99% of scientists go from thinking in one worldview to thinking in another single one is not revolutionary because it isn’t instantaneous.
I also doubt that non-western cultures don’t have a concept of revolutionary change like that. Most obviously Islam, for which Mohammed is a similar watershed to the Christian Jesus. And Japan has the beginning and end of the Edō period, China has its loss of heavenly mandate or more recently the cultural revolution, and colonization is going to be a relatively abrupt change in many cultures’ history.
I appreciate the segment as introducing nuance to consequences of the US shooting itself in the foot, but its framing seems iffy.
I was also disappointed that it doesn’t go into the “and the new can not be born” part at all. Why would the places now detached from US hegemony not already be in the process of developing a new paradigm? Might Chinese protectionism already harbor a nascent paradigm ready to become the new international standard? Or are primarily western projects going to feast off the infrastructure of the dying old order and grow strong enough to take its place?
I don’t know, I was hoping the expert would have answers. Or at least some kind of description of the forces US hegemony used to counter that may no longer be countered.
I just tried to post this independently, then saw it already posted several times. It gives a realistic, but crushing view on the current state of tech, the old us hedgemony and how it holds up in the current political climate. Very good read, but you can skip the intro paragraph.