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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Normal human being don't really give a shit how things are run and go with the flow. In fact that's what so unnatural about liberal democracy is this constant demand of permanent and tiresome involvement in public affairs of a whole nation.

It's psychosis at this point. Youths gunning down public speakers is not the healthy marketplace of ideas that liberals envisioned.

People would be happier dealing with their local affairs. Moreover I believe both that the HRE was far less alienating than modern Germany to individual human existence and that this is not a tradeoff against technological progress.

the HRE was far less alienating than modern Germany to individual human existence

I keep saying as much! People being tied to the land, borders being nice and tight, and everyone knowing their local ruler and their own place in society did wonders for getting people to actually feel at home.

and that this is not a tradeoff against technological progress

This, however, I'd say is not entirely true. This extreme localism is at obvious odds with economies of scale. Maybe that's an acceptable price to pay in some lens, but it clearly wasn't competitive.

I think the internet and the nature of modern warfare change this calculus. But it's a larger conversation.

Can we have that conversation?

Sure.

I generally subscribe to Nick Land's theory that the world is getting more complex at an accelerating pace, which renders attempts for control futile given a long enough timeframe.

We can see specific implications of this phenomenon in the internet, which allows political organization beyond borders, without identifiable leaders and in a way that's essentially impossible to shut down short of blunt measures; and drone warfare, which allows low cost interdiction of much more expensive military assets and renders the battlefield so observable it entirely negates concentration of forces.

Both of these instances point to what is the general direction of society as Land described in the 2000s: fragmentation and decentralization as people reduce their area of concern to immediate proximity (mediated by the non-local nature of cyberspace) because the concerns of a centralized nation state become intractable or incomprehensible and thus entirely unable to address the issues of the populations they nominally govern.

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