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Even people who ''complain'' about power structures — at least ones who do in an organised and compelling way — have a power structure. [[Critical theory]] is a power structure. Power structures often outgrow their original purpose, because it is not the ''purpose'' but the ''power'' that is exciting. | Even people who ''complain'' about power structures — at least ones who do in an organised and compelling way — have a power structure. [[Critical theory]] is a power structure. Power structures often outgrow their original purpose, because it is not the ''purpose'' but the ''power'' that is exciting. | ||
===Frontiers, utopian anarchy and why [[this time is different|this time isn’t different]]=== | |||
We live in an era of technological and political change. It has been going since the industrial revolution. The utopian narrative over that time is that technology can wrest power from the elite and deliver it to the masses. But this is to ignore history and the cold evolutionary logic of the complex adaptive systems that we inhabit. | |||
America is the archetypal utopian anarchy. It diesnn’t The wild west was tamed by the railroad. The pattern has repeated: the telegraph, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, free love, computing, micro-computing, women’s movement, file sharing, the internet the metaverse, the cryotoverse. All of these start with a grand narrative: the promise of radical change: the redistribution of wealth and social power. But narratives need direction and the more is at stake, the more quickly will leaders, svengalis, power structures and power brokers emerge. These are the monopolistic forces of scale. Those who acquire power will acquire more of it: wealth begets wealth. The utopian state of equal empowerment is not stable. | |||