When I was a kid, I stumbled upon a book called Future Shock, by someone named Alvin Toffler. I remember the book for a few reasons. One is it was based on the idea that the pace of change was accelerating and that humans were ill-equipped to handle the onrush of the future. The other memorable part of the book was the claim that society was moving from an industrial age to a super-industrial age. The book was written in 1970 and I read it in the early 80’s, when it was obvious there would be no super-industrial age.
The book is close to 500 pages and it could have been boiled down to 50 pages. In fact, it could probably be condensed into a blog post. The main point of the book was that societal change was accelerating. That point was made just about every way possible and then filled out with predictions that turned out to be all wrong. That was something else I learned from the book. Futurists are extremely long winded. That said, he sold millions of copies and became something of a rock star, so he knew what he was doing.
In fairness to Toffler, by 1980 he had figured out that his super-industrial society idea was a flop, so he came out with an updated vision of the future called The Third Wave. This book predicted that the developed countries would move from industrial to technological societies. He coined the term Information Age. In fairness, he was not wrong about most everything like he was in the previous book. For example, he predicted the end of the nation state and the growth of the global entity that transcended the nation state.
That said, he was still wrong about most stuff. For example, he predicted that technology would result in greater democracy with populations exerting greater control of society and instituting more local control. Pretty much the exact opposite has been the result of the technological revolution. I think we can also say that the idea of a managerial class rising out of the technological revolution was something that many conservatives were onto long before Alvin Toffler predicted it. Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941.
Anyway, that all came to mind when I saw this posted on Breitbart. George Gilder is a futurist, an economist and an advocate of intelligent design. He is co-founder of the Discovery Institute. It’s probably accurate to describe him as a techno-utopian, one of those guys who sits around thinking about the singularity. He has a book out predicting the end of Google and the rise of a block chain technology as the salvation of humanity from technocracy. The Breitbart piece is an effort to sell books to conservatives.
Gilder is also a rabid philo-Semite. He wrote a book called The Israel Test, in which he credits everything good in the world to Israel. That won him endless praise from neocons and Buckley Conservatives. He has argued that antisemitism is the hatred of capitalism and excellence. The only reason to mention this is that like all futurists, Gilder is a bit of grifter. The futurism game is not any different from reading tarot cards or doing astrological charts. The idea is to tell the mark what they want to hear. Flattery always sells.
That’s futurism’s main attraction. It allows the futurist, as well as his audience, to avoid dealing with present reality or learning much about past reality. They cherry pick from the past to create a narrative that results in the future of their making. When times are bad, the futurist peddles a future that is devoid of the bad things of today. When times are good, well, all the great stuff of today is going to be awesome in the future. There’s never been a futurist that predicts doom. Those guys are called prophets and we remember them.
In the 1970’s when American manufacturing was in trouble, Alvin Toffler wrote about a future of super-industry, where everyone had a super job. In the 80’s when things were looking up, the future was going to be even more super. The futurist is primarily concerned with future earnings and no one is buying a book or paying for a speech about how crappy things are going to be in the future. That’s why Gilder is out with a book claiming techno-feudalism is going to be replaced by a new utopian algorithm that makes everything super.
Now, what about his central claim about Google? That it’s model for skimming off the economy is doomed to failure? The fact that he seems to not have the slightest idea how Google makes money or how it is arranged as a business is not encouraging. Comparing Google’s business model to Marxism is just marketing. It is boob bait for the bubbas that read people like Michelle Malkin. The book is probably littered with the usual abracadabra words and phrases that titillate the audience of Conservative Inc.
The fact is, Google’s business model was a complete accident. Like most tech companies, it was supposed to be a pump and dump. Page and Brin wanted to sell their search engine once it gained popularity. When they could not find a buyer, they figured out how to turn it into a roadside bandit, charging tolls via ad dollars. They correctly saw that the search engine was a bottleneck and the bottleneck is always the best place to skim from the users. Google simply taxes people on their way from one service to another.
Can this model last forever? Nothing lasts forever, but as a state protected monopolist, they will exist until the state decides otherwise. Given that Google has more than enough money to buy every elected official in Washington, no one in politics is in a hurry to break up Google. Throw in the fact that like the state security agencies, Google can spy on all of the elected officials and their aides, Google and the rest of the oligarchs will remain in power until the revolution. But, that’s not a promising future, so futurists ignore it.
Imagine the consternation during the deer hour at the fusion center if the power failed.
Those damned electricians were called, but they haven’t shown up yet.
Besides, their last repair wasn’t worth sh*t.
And what’s with these wierd block by block power outages. The servers at State, the EEOC, and DOJ are all barely running on backup- and the A/C is failing.
(See those cell towers? Those dishes are rented space by each provider. Repair means a guy with climbing skills swapping out modules. But down at the bottom is a lonely little shed where the real action happens. Shadowban this, mf’ers.)
No, that’s wrong. The OSS was formed for manhunters to chase down the werewolves, Germans who were sabotaging power stations, water mains, and phone lines after the war.
Ya know, the NYT and Wall Street firms have high-speed repeater links. They may have feeds from the building, but are often a standalone unit in an isolated area. Visible on building exteriors. Our beloved government, with it’s outdated equipment kludge, might have a few vulnerable comms points too.
University maintenance is often Henry’s nephew, not some slick outside company.
Forget throwing sheep on the train track in a farmer’s strike. Tomorrow someone else will be dropping boxes of broccoli, trying to get gov’t bozos to relent.
Direct, quiet neutralization might be something to brainstorm. Besides, the bullets will be rationed anyways.
(A former colonel told me everybody in Romania had guns. Each household was only allowed six bullets, so the black market in bullet sales helped pay the rent.)
Cloward-Piven theory, overwhelm a govt system to demand a reset (with your people waiting in place)? The helots gotcher C-P right here, pally!
The Somalis held an Eid festival in the Vikings Stadium, 10,000 strong, slaughtering a live animal on stage and holding the bloody carcass aloft in joyous celebration of their faith tradition.
Imagine the eeking and ooking if the lights failed. Tis a damn shame, it is.
Toffler (which my spell check converts to ‘toddler’) had one prediction right. In some version of Future Shock, Toffler predicted homosexual marriage.
http://www.sweetliberty.org/nobarbarians1.htm
Need to seriously read this, there is a youtube video of this as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0C7pyNzpg8
“[Toffler] was still wrong about most stuff. For example, he predicted that technology would result in greater democracy with populations exerting greater control of society and instituting more local control.”
I would submit that it’s still too early to tell. The internet has radically altered the landscape with regard to the dissemination of information. Those in power are fighting back right now (via censorship of social media) but it’s a losing battle for TPTB.
The ultimate end result of this could easily end up being exactly what Toffler predicted. Time will tell.
“That said, he was still wrong about most stuff. For example, he predicted that technology would result in greater democracy with populations exerting greater control of society and instituting more local control.”
That’s not such a bad guess. It’s only with the internet that direct democracy has become possible on a large scale. It has not materialized, but that may only be a matter of time. In fact, it’s mostly lack of will and imagination that are the problems. You could institute it tomorrow if you wished, at least in Euro-style multi-party systems. Here’s how you foment revolution in five easy steps:
1) You establish a website where members can vote for items on the parliamentary agenda.
2) You let every member pick a party affiliation.
3) So on every item, your vote on the website will be cast automatically, according to the party affiliation you’ve chosen.
4) But at any time, members may choose to vote manually. That way, individual members don’t have to vote on everything, only on issues where they disagree with the party they chose.
5) Then the result from the website is transferred proportionally to your parliamentary seats, i.e. if there’s a 40-60 split, your seats also vote 40-60.
That way, you could offer prospective party member the appealing option of effectively voting for the party they’re used to, but retain a right to withdraw that vote at any time.
So this is what it would look like: the legacy parties will propose some anti-white legislation, and under normal circumstances they’ll have the vote stitched up before they even take it to the floor, but with Krullocracy, they’ll be blocked by a sudden surge of individual voting in the Krull Party.
The next step is to give your members the option of letting non-parliamentarians – anyone you prefer – manage your vote, completely circumventing the political party apparatuses. It’ll do to the party rule what social media did to the legacy media.
Except people get nervous when they hear about this concept. They prefer to be serfs.
My apologies. Not as well read as some of you. All this talk of soothsayers has conjured up the name “Nostradamus” 🙂
Seems fortune-telling has been with us for a long time.
Funny to think when I was a kid the year 2000 seemed like a long way off.
We were all supposed to be living like The Jetsons
This book is worth reading. His three key points are sound.
1. Google’s ‘free stuff for eyeballs’ business model is not sustainable. The online advertising model is broken with 25% of net users utilizing ad blocking software – up from 15% a year ago. All their user-pay plays have been busts – cloud, pay, music, health, etc.
2. The notion of machines taking over the world as espoused by fellow futurists like Martin Ford is a long way off – how are those self driving cars that were going to be ubiquitous this decade going?
3. Blockchain/P2P tech shows us path forward to circumvent the centralization – and inevitable censorship that comes with it – of the net. Look to bitchute (video sharing) and steemit (social) as working early proofs of concept.
The trick to reading any of these books is to step away from acceptance of the overall thesis and look for the “nuggets” in the authors research. Your point 1 is excellent. Did some work with one of the Google divisions that ventured into financial services a few years ago. Was surprised at how un-adept they were outside the eyeballs/advertising realm. Doesn’t mean they won’t learn, but elements of this remind me of the days when the Japs were all 16 feet tall. We know how that ended. I’ve been running my own little experiment with Facebook. I now go in only one or two times a week. Catch up on birthdays, like some kid pics then log out. No more than 10 minutes. Took the apps off phone, tablet. Left the email notification on. FB has been in full metal freak out for the last few weeks. Must get 6 or 7 notifications a day by email trying to entice me to log in. Why? I’m prime demographic—piles of disposable income—big network of similar demographics—and I’ve effectively quit. That is not a resilient business model.
Future Shock: Jackboots with tasers.
“Don’t tase me, bro!”
“There’s never been a futurist that predicts doom.” Kunstler (James, not William) continually does.
We’ve beaten Z over the head enough with this. Time to let him up.
I’m reading “Life After Google” now because, for over thirty years, Gilder has explained foreseeable tech developments in a way that put me ahead of other investors.
I had to read Malthus as a college freshman. He’s not taken seriously in most places any more although I think a real Malthusian catastrophe is looming in Africa. After whitey gets chased out the population will rapidly return to pre-colonial levels.
A large amount of American soy is grown to be exported to feed pigs in China. It’s actually a major spat in the trade war, there isn’t much difference between American and Brazil/Argentina soy so its a minor loss as markets adjust, but it is a short term hit. All that soy could be diverted to Sub-Saharan Africa if need arises. The Chinese are also slowly mechanizing African agriculture, and President Ramaphosa is about to hand over a lot of land gratis.
If I were God Emperor Trump, I’d dip in that budget to offer free transit and visas to all Afrikkaner and Boer.
Diversity Inc wants war? Here’s a frickin’ stick in yer eye, you rat bastards!
From my meddling outsider perspective (ignore my handle, I’m actually from Ohio), I don’t think most South African whites are willing to leave, most of them remain deluded liberals. They’d be better off in Australia/New Zealand, or even Argentina/Chile/Uruguay for that matter. The actual number of “Boers” is something around 30,000, and many of them are actually moving to the neighboring countries to farm there. If we really wanted to squeeze the ANC, we’d seize their offshore assets and deport all expatriate black South Africans from the West. Every so often a carrier group has to transit the Magellan Straits, it could easily be redirected.
Important to note that the South African military is pathetic. All combat-capable units are posted far away in Central African UN peacekeeping missions (IMO to guard against a coup). If it were so desired, partition would not be a logistically difficult assignment. It would be important to gain the participation of both the EU and India and the acquiescence of Russia. China is aiming to make South Africa a vassal.
ZeroHedge had a story about a lot of them heading to Russia to farm – where they get some free land. Australia seems happy to have them too.
No, that is not correct. Russia is demanding a fairly significant investment, I will be surprised if that many actually end up leaving for Russia. Australia cucked out due to the left demanding that Muslims be let in first due to “greater danger”. The ANC won’t take all the farms at once, but they will probably make farmers hand over equity stakes to the workers (i.e. cronyism)
I recall Gilder declaring in the late 90s that Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom fame had basically won the internet after his company’s purchase of MCI. I believe he also touted Paul Allen who, despite all his broadcom efforts, ended up with less of a fortune than if he had just stayed invested in Microsoft. He predicted that owning the bandwidth made them the masters of the internet. How did that work out? Hundred of billions in broadcom stock losses when the bubble burst.
Hilarious money quote from the link below: “The trouble with my business is that everyone came in at the peak,” Mr. Gilder said in a recent interview. “The typical Gilder subscriber lost all his money and that made it very hard for me to market the newsletter.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114433479738318882
So much of one’s doom timeline depends on what you see of the world. I’ve always lived in peaceful suburbs. So it’s almost impossible to imagine shit ever hitting the fan. If you always watch the news, or you’re in college, and all you see is political agitation, you think shit hits for sure in about 4 years. If you have lunch in the inner city you and witness the mass of poor dirty dumb people, drug addicts, illegals, and homeless. All multiplying, and mocked by luxury condos a few blocks away, you think this just CAN’T be sustained much longer without real tension, riots or revolution. If I never left this suburb and had no TV or internet, I’d think this country was just as swell and peaceful as it was in 1976.
It’s an excellent point, and an honest one. Looking out my window, walking down my street, buying groceries and exchanging pleasantries with cashiers and casual acquaintances, it’s not radically different from the atmosphere of McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’.
Cut the power for several hours on a summer night, and you bring people together – even in the city. Cut it for several days, of course, then you bring people to the edge of cannibalism. We’re working in a very fine margin here between reconciliation and total war…
Normalcy bias. I have it too. It is kinda hard to see the SHTF. But that doesnt mean it cant
Rawles has done pretty good with his series of Doom, then Recovery. While the stories are quite lurid, they pretty much follow the same line in each one. I didn’t buy anymore after the first two. I visit his site at survivalblog.com just about daily, because I get a lot from other posters and the great prep ideas and practices. Where he falls off the horse in his books is when his subjects talk in ways that nobody talks these days, sans profanity, and behavior like Sunday School children, in the most violent of situations. In other words, and I have accused him at his site, of being goody-two shoes. I soon realized it’s because of his quasi-Methodist upbringing and faith. He has outstanding principles and solid moral ground to stand on, but I know that once things do go sideways, a lot of that will be jettisoned. It’s almost like being on the Lawrence Welk show there. I know, I know, who’s Lawrence Welk?………..
JWR promotes a very individualistic/nuclear family model of survival that is most acceptable to those of upper-middle class income. There’s a clear reluctance to form groups in the wake of the OKC bombing militia scare, but it is the only plausible way forward.
Even catastrophes which appear blindingly obvious after the fact are anticipated in their time by very few. That is probably due to the nature of humans, not catastrophe. And, if there is one thing even more difficult to predict than bad news, it’s good news. So I place my hope in moving forward, when I have any, on my ignorance.
James;
One reason people miss seeing actual catastrophes in the making is that they have seen so many false predictions in their past. Actual signals are therefore buried in noise from ‘catastrifards’.
Why do so many people predict catastrophes_? Makes you look smart. You’re the center of attention. Might get you some power and money. Some women are drawn to men who offer to protect them from impending doom, etc.
IOW, the usual: Sex, Money & Power. Real basis for prediction_? Who cares_?
There were reasons why the Old Testament/Torah called for the the death penalty for false prophets. (In fairness, the real capitol offense was presuming to speak for WHYH.)
“If there is one thing even more difficult to predict than bad news, it’s good news.”
Bravo.
Few predicted in the Fall of 1940 that British and American troops would be patrolling the streets of Berlin in 1945. Few predicted in 1945 that no nuclear war would happen as of 2018. Few were predicting in 1985 the sudden collapse of totalitarianism in Russia and eastern Europe by 1990. Few were predicting Trump’s victory over his inane GOP opponents in the primaries, or his victory over the reprehensible HRC in 2016.
Stuff happens that isn’t always bad. I still think we’re a few years away from a neo-Assyrian slave world, but “black swan’ events can work in our favor too. I’d be delighted to be wrong.
I read this book when it first came out back in ’70. The same with Ehrlich’s nonsense, two years earlier. All I can say, the future isn’t what it use to be.
Nobody mentioned flying cars yet. Of course Dick Tracy style watch phones happened to a large extent but nobody wants to use them. Hell, phone technology has advanced to great extent but most like to text instead. What’s next, morse code 2.0?
Don’t forget DIVERSITY, that’s a great social advance. Just no for white people.
Sometimes the futurists get it right. It amazes me that in the government office I work at, I sit in a semi-circle of control desks, interacting with wall sized computer screens, and that my fellow co-workers include an Asian, an East European, and a Nigerian. It’s quite similar to the control deck of the Star Ship Enterprise of Gene Roddenberry’s TV series “Star Trek”.
How is it that Toffer got it so wrong so quickly, and Star Trek is still in syndication?
Star Trek runs continuously on BBC America.
I feel as you do- I love being alive to see this marvelous, glorious, tumultuous age.
We saw the Heights- if we also get to see the Fall or the Breakaway, we will be the most blessed generations in human history.
The trouble with futurists is that they’re half-right. Technological progress has been accelerating sort-of exponentially. However, social progress has been regressing. And even if that regress is linear, rather than exponential, eventually we’re going to exhaust all of our social capital and thus the resources needed to invent and maintain new technology.
We’re already at the point in time where futurists say that groundbreaking discoveries should be happening every few years. So what’s new? The smartphone was invented in 1992. The Human Genome Project finished in 2003. Bluetooth, YouTube, and modern web browsers were all early 2000s. It’s like we’ve had 15 solid years of stagnation.
Look up any of those lame listicles for “21st century inventions”. What’s there? The iPhone. Electric cars. Facebook. “VR”. 4G. Chip makers jamming in another few cores because they can’t make them faster anymore. A few hum-ho AI projects like winning Jeopardy or Go, which were more about having enormous memory and compute capacity rather than any brilliant algorithms. Of course, lots of new things are being invented all the time, but I’m talking about pivotal inventions that transform society and required real genius to create, not simply design and engineering improvements to older inventions, like 4K TVs or higher-res cameras.
And it’s not hard to see why. The world’s largest manufacturing base was once home to the world’s most creative population. Now that manufacturing base has been mostly exported to various third-world countries and a few second-rate powers full of thieves, imitators and plagiarists, while the creative population whittles away its time and capital on opioids and porn. So it should be no surprise that brilliant inventions are disappearing while we see endless remakes (often poor quality) of older inventions – not to mention older movies, older ideas, etc. If the trend keeps up, we’ll barely be able to maintain the technology we already have, and many of us can look around and already see signs of failure.
It appears most of the research and innovation is either being done by DARPA (with our tax dollars) or large technology interests like Alphabet (parent of Google). If some new thing emerges by some creative individual outside these labs, it gets swallowed up and becomes part of the Borg. Weapons and AI robotics, all owned and developed by government-corporate nexus. Almost everything else left to languish.
Yes, I agree: degradation and destruction of talent is probably the biggest issue, but monopolization of talent and confinement to “IQ shredders” is not helping matters either.
Ultimate boob bait going right now is Alan Dershowitz
He’s brilliantly created a perfect niche for himself
Abcd: I just find him to be overexposed and annoying.
I remember George Gilder and his schtick. I was never impressed with any of his books. My understanding is that he invested all kinds of dot-coms in the belief they were the future. He then lost big during the tech crash and then semi-retired somewhere cheap where he could live on little money (Idaho is one place I’ve heard he was living).
Megatrends was another book that came out in the early 80’s about how super everything was supposed to be. Bruce Naisbitt was the author of Megatrends, I believe.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
No matter what one predicts, assumes, or invents, the future has a way of coming out very differently than expected. Those who happen to be in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, will be lauded as visionaries, and will never ascribe their success to a large measure of luck. Someone, somewhere, was going to succeed and prosper, and it just happens to be them. There was going to be a guy who would make out like Warren Buffet, and it just happened to be Warren Buffet.
That said, you need to play in traffic for Lady Luck to find you.
So true. Every time some “concept” took off on wall Street, there were “visionaries” who bet the farm, and their companies, during the downturn.,
I used to get Gilder’s short-lived tech investors’ magazine. How many venture capital Angels can dance on the head of a pin?
One thing about the “black swans” of google and Facebook is surely who their creators happened to be. They immediately receive a loyal, politically powerful block of users driven by the added purpose of controlling a key media nexus. In retrospect one might say they were obvious swans, but everybody feigns obtuseness. Anyone slightly comp literate who lived through the period knows there were many perfectly adequate search engines and social media networks in existence years before Facebook and google. The canny advertising campaign of “google it”. I bet the best thing that ever happened to the winklvoss twins was who it was who stole their idea. It was maddening, I’m sure, but I bet they would never have made the sort of money they did if they had launched it themselves.
I’m not bright about the future at all, I was referring to the personality referred to as “red”, whether he is the individual I think or not. But many people, have not “gotten” this, some of them world class intellects like Nash, pound and Fischer. There must be something non obvious about it.
I watch a lot of Sci-fi movies from the 50’s and 60’s. In many of them, but mostly the 60’s ones, the U.N. is a big deal and seems to be performing a world government role (Star Trek has the Federation, an interplanetary U.N.), but that didn’t happen. Is this an example of failed futurism or something else?
The U.N. Is a third world money and power grab, dressed up as a guilt job on the US and the West. The concealing cloak was pulled away from that rat’s nest a long time ago.
One way to look at the UN is as a body like the Estates general in France before the Revolution. It fell into desuetude and at a crisis point was called upon to perform a miracle, which it could not perform. But those called together in its name did manage to fuck things up unroyally and sent the country into 60 years of wars and revolutions.
The key thing is to suppress the idea of using it to solve some great problem in the future, because chances are our grandkids will get killed by whatever solution it comes up with.
Whig History or Whig Futurism has a high human equality component and assumes that deep inside every foreigner is White person wanting to get out.
A broken clock is right twice a day. I will believe this malarkey when it happens.
Another nice addition to the discussion would be the Thomas Friedman ‘World is Flat’ bunch…lots of money there, though it was obviously balderdash…Yet another group, still very successful, is those pushing the Bill Gates ‘Africans/3d worlders will all be middle class just like you lucky whites’ in just x years.
Friedman is a guy who turned obsequious rumpswabbery into gold. He married a billionaire heiress. He went from movie reviewer to futurist philosopher. Here’s his house: https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/thomas-friedmans-house/view/google/
There’s never been a futurist that predicts doom. Those guys are called prophets and we remember them.
After we stone them.
Taleb nailed these futurist grifters (and the rest of our pundits) by stating they have no skin in the game. All they have to do is tell people what they want to hear. If the elite like it, the grifter will never be called on the carpet for getting it all wrong.
It’s the Singularity all of the way down. Immortality is just around the corner. We’ll be immortal gods. Glenn Reynolds over at Instanpundit always strikes me as close to that with his constant concern about longevity.
Chris;
Good insight. “We’ll be immortal gods.” Just a slight paraphrase of what the serpent reportedly told Eve in the Garden.
It’s going to get mighty interesting, if it gets out that our overlords have been consuming the placental blood of aborted babies to help their immortality along. That might be how all of these political leadership types end up living and somewhat functioning into their 90s or so.
And that’s my batsh*t crazy thought for a Monday.
Not crazy at all. Planned Parenthood, China and Israeli gangs are selling those organs to *someone*.
I thought Fidel Castro was never gonna die.
(Late edit)- apologies, few have heard the rumors that Israeli gangs are amongst the top human and organ traffickers. Most of this activity probably come from the USSR’s expatriation of Red Mafya from it’s prisons, which was hailed as a humanitarian move.
These are the guys coordinating with Eastern European criminal networks plaguing all of Europe, buying up London’s best properties, and running the Black Exchange in Ukraine, the hacker market that rules spam, identity theft, and “Russian infiltration”.
It sounds like more JQ fingerpointing.
I wish I’d been discrete and left that out.
Why not crack the aging barrier? The alternative is slow death.
Do note too that many on the Right are in a religious bubble and don’t get that huge chunks of the population aren’t that religious in terms of the afterlife stuff
The US is more church going than anywhere in Western Europe but its positive impact on our culture is nothing special
It doesn’t make American better in the broader sense and I’d argue that despite being far more church and faith focused our internal problems are comparable or worse in some ways.
“…boob bait for the bubbas that read people like Michelle Malkin.” That’s a bit harsh, don’t ya’ think?
Yeah, Michelle’s been a longtime writer at VDare, so she’s not so bad.
I finally heard why Alex Jones attacked her in a street incident. He said she had been barking accusatory questions at him, when one of her crew elbowed him- hard- in the back. Being a loud Texan, he said regretfully, “well, then I just lost it.”
The alt-right/HBD set is odd. They gave serious street cred to a lunatic like Spencer who destroyed the movement and yet is quite happy to see Alex Jones get thrown under the bus.
I’m not seeing the Alt-Right folks happy to see Jones banned at all. Quite the opposite. If they’re happy, it’s only that when the more mainstream right gets banned, it’ll bring more attention to the problem such as what we saw with Trump’s recent tweet. An Andrew Anglin ban won’t draw much attention.
I think banning Alex Jones and PrisonPaul would be great, because it will convince MAGApedes that the same old classical liberalism isn’t going to cut it. What I expect at some point is that Jones will be banned and PrisonPaul will not, in an attempt to split them up. Paul has remained steadfastly loyal to Jones despite clear ideological differences between them. I don’t trust Spencer, I find it spurious that he wasn’t banned while Jared Taylor was.
Why does it always have to be a bus? Can we freshen it up please? There are other things to be thrown under. A trolly. A Hummer. A bear. Alex Jones got thrown out of the airbus. Alex Jones got thrown out of the Airbnb.
Airbnb and several “dating” apps have banned several dissidents, infamously including Jack Posobiec who was cheating on his wife.
I remember thinking almost 15 years ago that any company that could dominate search technology could easily dominate political discourse at some point. Their acquisition of Youtube was the thing that really set off alarm bells.
As for Toffler, he kept predicting humanity would eventually figure out how to cheat death by the early 21st century and live for hundreds of years, or even attain immortality. I was enthralled with the idea…until I awoke one morning and realized that I did not have that much more time left. So much for that.
We’re going to miss it by *thaaat* much.
Sucks to be the last mortal generation, eh?
Futurism, and there are other things like it, such as the constant predictions of an economic and societal apocalypse, pick up on certain trends and stretch them out over time or impose on some thing an importance which they turn out not to have. Remember the Singularity? I hardly even remember what it was, but I’m sure there is someone out there saying that it is just around the corner.
Yes, sometimes we end up with a future determined by an accumulation of incremental changes, but we also get futures as a result of qualitative revolution due to some new invention or adaptive resource usage. I remember when housing was going to be prohibitively expensive for everyone but the super-rich because we were going to run out of copper to make plumbing with. Imagine being someone who bet the farm on that tidbit. Can you say lost shirt?
What this says about the future of Google, I’m not sure. But I doubt it can be ascertained by looking at trends.
The future of Google is either that of the East India Company or Standard Oil. Left untrammeled, it will eventually acquire governmental powers, or it will be broken up and/or nationalized. The only thing that can seriously harm them is if Apple/Amazon decide to make a loss leading search engine. But the obvious collusion in Silicon Valley prevents this.
I see the same thing. Since Z has tapped the forbidden, I’ve read that the Rockefeller family began as marranos who fled Spain, sheltered in Turkey, then went back to France.
John the senior was given $20 million dollars by the Rothschilds bankers to go start buying out oil claims. His gangs were notorious for beating up other crews and stealing their barrels. A brilliant man, he invented the corporate balance sheet- not something one learns in a log cabin.
Standard Oil became the Great Game of the 1900s oil wars, when navies’ steamships were converting from coal to oil. The East India Companies had the same ethnic owners and managers as today’s media, social media, and banks.
If we want a grasp of the future, we’d better start learning from the people who run it. We have a deep model from the past.
Aside, Calvinism is based on that same deep model. Calvinist culture relies primarily on the Old Testament, not the New. And Calvinist thought is the root of our ruling class, the Judeo-Puritans of New Amsterdam and New England.
Public-private partnerships are Crown Corporations.
A floor, or a ceiling?
I’d sure like to hear more about that revolution promised at the end. Specifics on how to kick it off especially appreciated. Or I submit that it will be a crash with plenty of ethnic and other genocides, famine, disease, nuclear plants blowing up from lack of maintenance/power and other future history book goodies.
Funny, all the time I was reading your part about Toffler I was thinking of Gilder.
It does go both ways about playing to your readership, doom or utopia.
These books for the most part don’t wear well. I couldn’t be coerced into pulling the Gilder books I have off the shelf to read again. Now Derbyshire’s ‘We are Doomed’ does get that but then I need to pour a stiff one after rubbing in the black pill.
Umnnhhh….there’s also a very good and lucrative market for Doomsday books. “CRISIS!!!” sells, at least for people who are small-time retail investors.
I thought about the ZeroHedge types, but I suspect that’s not much of a market. I could not think of a real “we’re screwed” best seller. No doomsday type gets on the TedTalk circuit.
Book of Revelations?
I always thought of that as more of a revenge fantasy….
Biggest bestseller of all time- one that founded a civilization or two!
The Limits to Growth, 1972. 30 million copies.
“no one is buying a book or paying for a speech about how crappy things are going to be in the future.” All due respect, but what about Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb? Liberals still treat that guy like the second coming of Jeremiah, even though he got everything wrong (and even had to cut a check to economist Julian Simon when he lost a bet on his predictions). Ann Coulter makes a nice living off things like Adios America, as does Mark Steyn. You can make a lot of money exaggerating people’s anxieties, e.g. every non-slasher horror film ever made.
That’s not really the same thing, is it? The whole point of that book was to rally the faithful to fight harder toward the glorious future. Those sorts of books are “If you we don’t act in favor of preferred causes, all hell will break loose!” There’s not much of a market for, “Welp, we’re screwed. Nothing to be done about it.”
In our masochistic age, there might actually be a niche for it, especially if you twist it with white guilt. A title like “Whitie, your end will be horrible. Find out why and why you deserve it here” might really sell on campus.
Or take the schadenfreude angle, something along the lines of, “The Reckoning: How Urban Bluetopias will Burn in Apocalyptic Horror.”
That might sell w us, my suggested title w SJWs and POCs. But both would sort of be geared towards a target promised triumph over their enemies so not quite ‘doom for the audience target’ criterion.
Blacks don’t read, and only around 25% of Hispanics do. When surveyed, most black HS students have either only read 1 book or none.
You have to market it to Jews & whites if you want sales.
The “if we don’t act, all hell will break loose” sub-topic of these books is just a required tacked-on silver lining, hope thing. No one wants to sound like a complete mope. But indeed, the substance of hundreds of these books is bleak futurism.
I used to peruse my mom’s goofy Christian books as a kid. And I gotta say the 700 Club type writers were always clued in to the coming “One Worldism”, as they called it. Like a crazy gypsy she was always warning me of the secular One World plan to come. “And an Antichrist will appear. And he will be its leader.” Scared the crap out of me. The coming Antichrist thing was big in certain 70’s households.
Geez, from the sound of it….she coulda been right.
On Revelations, the false Jew who dies and comes back alive to rule the world as a moral paragon isn’t some guy on a stage.
That was a prediction of the “Holocaust” Narrative, which is a large-scale repetition of the pogrom narrative.
(In Jewish parables, one man- an Adam, a Serpent, a Cain, a Noah- represents an entire people.)
Okay, but how about a guy like James Howard Kunstler?
His book, The Long Emergency, and his columns, reduced to their core, are “Welp, we ARE screwed.”
Of course, he has not enjoyed the commercial success that Toffler did or that Coulter does. Nevertheless, he has enjoyed some success and continues to write.
“Welp, we’re screwed”—isn’t that Derbyshire’s shtick?
The point of The Population Bomb was to give abortion fetishists another moral justification for baby-murder. That’s why leftists bought it. Same with global-warming alarmism, which gives leftists moral justification for high taxes on industry.
Also notice the 70s fixation on population control only seemed to focus on indigenous white Americans. There was never a perceived need to control the birthdate of other groups or a call for slowing or halting immigration.
The US was 85% White in the 70’s.
Also Americans and Europeans used more resources than basically all other groups at the time. China and India had much less development than. now. If you believe that resources are scarce and its an opinion I share than logically you want less of the people using most of the limited resources.
I prefer conservation and sustainability myself but I get the impulse.
I’m more tribal than a “Good White” though and have no problem with Us vs Them but the Left is very much a universal humanity creed which obviously puts me at odds.
Leftist concerns about overpopulation seem to have been an inverse function of the proportion of whites on the planet. Even as the global population careens towards it’s tech-maxed carrying capacity, which is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of more primitive existence, and devastating ecosystems throughout much of the world, the once environment-crazed left has mostly lost interest in the topic.
This hints at an answer to Joe Sobran’s question about in what society a progressive would become a conservative — the one in which they don’t exist.
“…an inverse function…”- what a great point. They DO lose interest in their existential causes, don’t they?
How many people is enough AntiDem?
Germany with good reason has been complaining about a lack of Lebensraum for more than a century now.
Right now that nation contains the entire population of Europe in the early Renaissance circa 1400 crammed into a nation about half again as big as the US state of Oregon!
It has roughly 15x the population density of that State and as a former Oregonian I can tell you we were complaining bitterly when it hit that dense
The US has a population of more than a 3rd of a billion people which is a hell of a lot of people , its the entire human population around 1450 !
Just because we got lucky with Normal Borluag and are willing to ruin our topsoil and oceans and burn every drop of oil for short term gains does not mean we should be doing this
The lower fertility rates , 2 or so is healthy and sound and the only reason they are causing us trouble is we can’t even comprehend the idea of no growth economies and in order to [ump the Ponzi scheme bring in foreigners
Close the border and keep it closed, expel the foreigners and let the population gradually reduce itself
we’ll have to deal with urbanization and jobs and automation and the like but baby steps.
There are plenty of people, plenty of White people, its just there are foreigners on our lands and a ruling elite that is not rooted in our people. Change that and we’ll be fine.
I must agree, the Pop Bomb was early, but not wrong. I was, defending the cucks who said we can fit ever-one into Texas.
A Kunstler comment: “Deprivation does not bring reduced reproduction, it brings increased infant mortality, which brings about attempts to increase reproduction.”
He seemed to be so early as to be partly wrong, but its coming true now. And, to be fair, there were huge famines in Africa in the 1980s.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-worlds-most-important-graph/
Actually, one of the most damning and highly visual representations of the truly grim nature of the matter can be found here:
http://metrocosm.com/us-immigration-history-map.html
I can’t advise strongly enough to bookmark that and send it to anyone with their pointy little head still poked firmly in the sand. It is… depressing.
Fuck off. If you think there are too many people on the planet, then be the change you want to see by French kissing a .44 Magnum. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite and probably a lefty shill trying to flack for the abortion business.
It’s the spay-and-neuter problem.
Gephart gave us Live Aid to feed them, they lived to have more, and now here they come.
This wasn’t directed at me but it might surprise you that huge chunks of the Dissident Right don’t care about abortion, especially since abortion is about 2/3rds non White and don’t give a crap about Christendom either
I suspect most of us are fairly secular and many are borderline agnostic. We also are aware of the havoc over population is causing the biosphere and the results which may be global conflict on a scale that makes the current crisis look like walk in the park
So yeah, there are too many people. We just want our lands for ourselves
As for the anti abortion people, I myself admire the willingness they have to take direct action and wish the rest of the Right were fractionally as ready to rumble but abortion doesn’t rustle my feathers
People on the Right typically don’t have abortions and if a random mix of future Democratic voters wish to opt of reproduction , this only had positive effects on me and mine
Its not 1980 where its all scared White girls from good families, its a majority non White and most of rest shit-libs , single Mommies or dopers
Politics is cultural and genetic and nearly every one of those aborted possibles is a future enemy or problem. Essentially none of those people will ever be on my side so I can’t be bothered to care
All that aside abortion is rapidly declining and so won’t be much of an issue.
Vox Day was talking about an article today
Why conservatives will lose a civil war, which makes a lot of good points but he forgot one.
The reason that cooperation is so hard is lack of a common ideology.
I suspect I’m not a,one in saying that I’m not a religious person at all and while I am not down with the Cultural Marxism or worse White Replacement thing,
I’m also not going to help anyone turn the US Into Gilead either and I’m outright pro birth control and family planning
Flatly we don’t trust you guys on that issue and to non believers you seem like a problem and in fact have been in the past
So yeah, we aren’t enemies but we aren’t allies and until some means of breaching that gap is found, deeper cooperation is not an option.
I read somewhere that half of the people who have ever been born are alive right now.
And whitey to blame for it.
Whitey is to blame for it and for pretty much every problem facing us.
We are the ones who developed technology to allow all these people to be fed and worse are stupid enough to intervene instead of letting nature take its course
Don’t feed strays and don’t share tech. Us vs them , no white mans burden and until Y/T gets this he’ll get kicked in the ribs over and over
I think Ann Coulter is more like a Prophet….Adios America is well on the way to becoming the American future, and is already the American present in some places.
Ann’s great, but she was about 20 years behind Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Roy Beck, Sam Huntington, Lawrence Auster, et al.
I had the same opinion of Ann Coulter, but then I checked her old columns, and turns out she’s been citing Brimelow and his book “Alien Nation” since at least 2006. I only wish she had made it her focus a decade sooner.
I stand corrected. I thought Ann got onboard the immigration restriction issue just a few years ago. Anyway, she’s doing a great job keeping the issue front and center.
By the way, thinking of those names, I remember Richard Lamm, who I believe was governor of Colorado, was very vocal about slowing down immigration in the early-mid 90’s. He was a Democrat. So was the late Barbara Jordan, who introduced legislation but passed away before it went anywhere. And Roy Beck has been a Democrat. (maybe still is?) Those were the days when Dems cared about the working man and the environment.
I take your point, but it’s worth pointing out that the reverse phenomenon sells pretty well — futurists say whatever the present trend is will continue and it’ll be great; Ehrlich et al say the present trend will continue and it will stink. I don’t think we’re constitutionally capable of hearing “we’re doomed no matter what.” E.g. how many of us think there will be serious political violence before 2020? And how many of us are seriously preparing? Not just buying a gun, but hitting the range, working on moving targets, packing bugout bags and fortifying bunkers? Catastrophes always catch us off guard, because we just can’t be “on guard” (how’s that for gloom ‘n’ doom futurism?)
As I noted in my response to Z, what about James Howard Kunstler?
I don’t know who he is, sorry. Looks interesting though.
JHKunstler’s blog’s themes were Peak Oil and the Long Emergency, now he speaks to the Golden Golem of Greatness and political-financial collapse, as part of the Long Emergency.
Center-left, outraged by Her Royal Meanness. Pithy like Z.
The blog is called Clusterfuck Nation, kinda says it all.
He may have center-left roots, but he repeatedly rails, in his inimitable style, against black social dysfunction, the race hustle, and the overall multicultural racket.
His rightwing and WN commentors are quite good, but the lefties drag everything down when they go into rote recital mode.
Rather wearying.
Steyn wrote “America Alone” 10 years ago. He sure seems spot on for the fate of Western Europe. The Eastern Europeans are proving surprisingly stubborn and sensible.