Precis for Brave New World V2.0
There was a time when the more people you had in your dominion, the more powerful you were as a ruler. That’s back when people were the primary units of production.
Now we’re morphing into an era where you’re still more powerful if you have more people but only because people are units of consumption. Technology is making them obsolete as units of production.
The 1% of the people that control roughly 50% of the global wealth (deferred and accumulated consumption if you will) are looking at the proposed environmental and resources crisis and thinking “artificial consumption”.
If you can get rid of the link between people and consumption then you just don’t need people. So they just have to artificially model consumption and make it real by agreeing between themselves that it is.
They need the artificial consumption model to manage both the transition period and the Brave New World. Power has to be managed on some basis.
When most of both production and consumption is virtual then the environment will stabilise and everyone left will have a grand time. And they will have created the first leg of the computer simulation that so many think we are already living in.
Except it won’t work that way;
First, you couldn’t plan it. It’s too complex. And how to get rid of all those people?
Second, even if they planned it they couldn’t pull it off. Complexity is the enemy of results.
Ending Option 1
The 1% aren’t smarter than the rest. They’ve just been luckier. So they’d lose out on first principles and get wiped out in the ensuing massacre. Then the 99% suffer and die off, as the planet wilts and is depleted.
Ending Option 2
Or the plan works to get the 99% to fight and kill each other. Which doesn’t seem that implausable.
Getting rid of the 99% of people would make the residual 1% feel very ordinary, with no poor people to compare themselves to.
As a psychological phenomenon, wealth and power only exist as a relative concept. Without poor or powerless people to compare oneself to, nothing. It’s why they love slavery, even though the utility of slaves is nowt in the age of technology.
So then the 1% all become mortally depressed, and within a generation the human race is dead.
Brave Dead World.
offshore westerly 