internet supplants america

Modern Americans have outgrown our republic.

The American federal government has, for 200 years, been the most powerful company in the world.

It won wars, offered a shared myth of freedom to its citizens and the world, created a global order, facilitated incomparable global trade, gave freedom to businesses (a weird + new kind of group entity), and generated wealth beyond compare.

It was a strong enormous spider whose legs smothered all current human civilization. It was the single strongest non-conceptual power that glued humans across the globe together.

Until the internet was born. The internet is that American spider’s web. And, unlike America’s eight strong but numbered legs, the web is infinitely intricate and more connected. Texts, books, images, and films are distributed to billions of people every second. Internet servers are the center of the world order, not Washington DC. That was true a decade ago.

But it takes more than a second for a bureaucratic institution to collapse. An institution with an ever-amending constitution, an ever-evolving identity, and more redefinitions of “the pursuit of happiness” than grains of sand on a beach. An institution with nobly architected buildings, politicians who wear the most formal attire, and committees that are presided over by arcane procedures and gavels. Noble, blood-born, shifty institutions hardly collapse overnight.

But over decades—yes.

People are moving to a new world, away from where the capitol building is located. The Capitol is located in the physical world. People are moving to the digital world.

40% of waking time in the US is spent online. Another 20% is spent digitally offline—in word-processors, photo-apps, and video games. Another 10% is spent listening to digital sounds—recordings of music, podcasts, subway announcements. People don’t yet, but are very close to, living in the digital world more than the physical.

And the institutions that have power over people are of course the ones that operate where people live. The federal government cannot extend in the digital world. Tech companies can.

The rise of simplistic populist dictators doesn’t come from some positivistic vision for what society can look like in the future of the digital world. People are not voting for any vision of the physical world.

The landslide election of a simplistic authoritarian who stands against the values of the most powerful company on earth to-date (US federal government) is no less than a vote to dismantle centralized physical power so that we might enter the digital realm. It’s a vote for physical institutions to no longer have hold on us. It’s a vote that corresponds to the greatest migration humanity’s ever seen—the digital migration. It’s a vote for decentralization in the physical world so that there may be centralization in the digital… centralization of digital institutions and platforms.

So: expect this.

The American federal government, and generally physical powers, will collapse.

Tech companies, and generally digital powers, will rise.

The greatest human migration to date is underway.

Different worlds make different requests of humanity.

What does the internet ask of us?

Hitler was in advertising.
Stalin was a news editor (as was Mussolini).
Mao was a librarian.

Revolutions always come from the medium, and the medium today is Internet.

Revolutions typically don't work.

Tread safely.

This sound very Peter Thiel

This feels abstract to the point of uselessness. If there is a supplanting power it will come from men, not "the internet" and will not be different in kind from what has happened before.

If you are hypothesizing that when regime change happens in the future, the men will make use of the internet then that doesn't seem like a novel contribution.

If you are saying that there will no longer be physical countries with borders and government will take place on the internet, then why would a competing man of action not just take the physical realm while leveraging the ability to communicate using the internet?

Tech companies are mostly dead institutions filled with people who are programmed by the creations they themselves made. If power moves to them, it will be by the hands of specific individuals who are just acting in their own interests and commandeer these dead institutions. This is no different than how power was seized in any other time in history.

So I disagree, no migration is happening. And if you want influence, then directly works towards influence using the best levers available today, which is obviously the internet.

>>2553
>generally physical powers, will collapse.
>The greatest human migration to date is underway.
These are a contradiction. I assume you mean people physically moving around and taking new territory for themselves, which is the height of physical power. If you mean the western style abstracted citizen-state is due for death, you could maybe make that case, but not the collapse of physical power, upon which all else is based.

The internet is a communications medium. People spend a lot of time communicating (and a lot of time indoors, with tools, etc). That has nothing to say about the value of the physical, only that there are layers on top of the physical that have come to dominate in terms of attention. But attention and reality are two different things, and reality is hierarchically dependent on the physical.

Digital powers may rise but I'm skeptical they will be "companies". Internet-first cults, religions, nations, and fraternities, maybe.

>>2574
I think the point where we see differently is whether we would say the internet is a real place a person can go.

I'm starting to believe that the internet is a real place. And that we're collectively moving our attention, and ultimately our lives, to this place. There are dystopian ways to picture this (matrix). There are optimistic ways to picture this (high resolution digital worlds of color and abundance). But if you do believe this, as I do, then this transfer of power, and this migration, is unique, in that it is transferring not just hands but also mediums.

One implication is that the way it'll make most sense to assess/understand sociology and also power will be by looking at digital space. My bet is that in twenty years, if you looking at physical space only, you'll have a very hard time of understanding how people & culture are evolving, but that if you look at digital space only (social network patterns), you'll have a very good sense.

>>2579
Ah sorry, I meant a migration **from the physical to the digital world.

I think we'll build our lives within digital space rather than within physical space.

I don't think physical powers will be destroyed or collapse. But I think you'll see less and less human activity in physical space.

We're already seeing less today. People work full time jobs by sitting unmoving at a desk in front of a screen. If we ask, what are they doing?, it makes more sense to answer by talking about the information they're moving around than the physical objects they're moving around. (You could also frame it as an increase in intellectual work).

But it's not as extreme as it could be, because people also walk around and eat physical food and play sports and read physical books and talk with friends.

The prediction I'm making is that in twenty years, if you ask, what are people up to?, it will make sense to answer more in terms of events in the digital world than events in the physical world. The physical world may look eerily still, other than the electrons flowing through wires at data centers.