Needed a bit of optimism in my day, and thinking about this possible scenario made me feel better. Perhaps there’s light at the end of the tunnel?
The light is an oncoming fascism train and you’re smiling at it like it’s the sun.
At the heart of Fascism is ignorance. Ignorance can be readily defeated, we just haven’t figured out the best way to do so in the information age with social media creating BS faster than facts. Time keeps going, and beyond the coming tide of Fascism, is something else. As long as we can stay informed, and educated, Fascism can be overcome. It’s never taken hold permanantly because it’s built on unstable bullshit and populism. It will come, it will pass, and when it does, whoever left will want to move avawy from the ignorance that caused this rise of Fascism in the first place.
You just sparked a memory in me of a future kinda-dystopian book I was reading. Unfortunately the name of the book escapes me at the moment (I think it was a Neal Stephenson book?) but there was this part that struck me hard. The gist is that there was one internet, like there is now, and it’s just a cesspool of ads and misinformation and all kinds of toxic garbage. The difference was, people who had money enough, would basically pay for “live curators” to filter their internet so they only saw things that were verifiably true, had no awful bigotry baked in, etc etc.
Naturally this was not something poor people could afford.
Anyway apologies for going off topic. The “we just haven’t figured out the best way to do so in the information age” reminded me of that.
They said this about the rise of fission, electricity, steam power, computers. The extra production was either captured by capitalists, or simply didnt materialze. What’s different this time?
No, if you want to see that era of global prosperity, you need to address a lot of deep, fundamental issues that humanity has trouble even acknowledging let alone actually acting toward fixing. edit: Though, stopping fascism would be a necessary first step.
In the past 10 years, we watched electric cars go from the Utopian dream to a force for corporate evils to control you. What mental gymnastics are you doing to conclude that fusion would be totally different?
Are you talking about shitty car features associated with electric cars like built in tracking?
Appreciate your attempt at looking at the brighter side of things. I’m still down in the well though and can’t see any light at the top.
Don’t have the link, but in America at least, the prevalence of partisanship has been in lockstep with economic inequality.
As in, the greater the economic inequality, the greater that people have voted in Republicans that refused to cooperate with democrats on things like bills and initiatives, and who were further and further to the right. It’s also why those states with the biggest economic gaps between poor and wealthy also have the most batshite-crazy Republican governors and other elected members.
So it’s not resources that are encouraging fascism - it’s a failure to tax the Parasite Class appropriately such that wealth trickles back down to the working class. Because with obscene wealth comes obscene opportunities to tilt the political landscape in ways that encourages corporatism (the original name for fascism) and greases the system towards even more wealth accumulation by the Parasite Class. And now with almost all social services getting dismantled by DOGE, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse in America.
Yes, ignorance and stupidly account for a majority of Republican voters who are not multi-millionaires many times over. But poor people are too busy surviving to have any energy to think critically. So many of them just reach out for those exceedingly simple answers to complex problems that also promise to solve all of their problems, but never actually do.
