If history ever recorded the experiences of people like us during those falls, we might have the wisdom today to associate with historic events far beyond the scope of our lived experience. But only the lives of the wealthy and powerful are recorded. Our stories don’t get told. So maybe the best we can do today is to ensure our peasant descendants have our stories for when their empires fall. Perhaps posting on social media is the wisest thing we can think to do?
Edit: A couple other thoughts struck me. The wealthy have been the only ones capable of passing their hard earned knowledge to their descendants by affording the written word and preserving it. Today is the first time in history, we, the peasantry, can afford to leave the hard earned knowledge of experiencing poverty and subjugation, to our peasant ancestors and we can do so in much greater detail than the written word alone.
Preserving the experiences of the poor and working class is paramount to the protection of future generations. Yet most of it is stored on servers and hard drives owned by companies that would rather future workers not known our hard earned lessons about what it’s like being working class and how were kept subjugated. X and Facebook and Twitter etc. deleting or barring access to, our collective history should be considered class warfare across generations. Yet they have no issues using all that data to train the systems they will use to reduce their own dependency on a labour class at all and reducing the value of our existence to the economy to what is, perhaps, below subsistence.
There have been authoritarian regimes in the modern world in countries with high literacy rates. There’s a lot written down by regular people living through those times.
The US situation isn’t all that different to the end of the Soviet Union. People think ideology makes it the complete opposite of the US, but hardliners worrying more about conforming to ideology rather than having a functional economy is one of the reasons the Soviet Union finally collapsed.
No, it won’t be the end of civilization, it’s the collapse of a super power which has happened before, and relatively recently.
If history ever recorded the experiences of people like us during those falls, we might have the wisdom today to associate with historic events far beyond the scope of our lived experience. But only the lives of the wealthy and powerful are recorded. Our stories don’t get told. So maybe the best we can do today is to ensure our peasant descendants have our stories for when their empires fall. Perhaps posting on social media is the wisest thing we can think to do?
Edit: A couple other thoughts struck me. The wealthy have been the only ones capable of passing their hard earned knowledge to their descendants by affording the written word and preserving it. Today is the first time in history, we, the peasantry, can afford to leave the hard earned knowledge of experiencing poverty and subjugation, to our peasant ancestors and we can do so in much greater detail than the written word alone.
Preserving the experiences of the poor and working class is paramount to the protection of future generations. Yet most of it is stored on servers and hard drives owned by companies that would rather future workers not known our hard earned lessons about what it’s like being working class and how were kept subjugated. X and Facebook and Twitter etc. deleting or barring access to, our collective history should be considered class warfare across generations. Yet they have no issues using all that data to train the systems they will use to reduce their own dependency on a labour class at all and reducing the value of our existence to the economy to what is, perhaps, below subsistence.
The only war is class war…
There have been authoritarian regimes in the modern world in countries with high literacy rates. There’s a lot written down by regular people living through those times.
The US situation isn’t all that different to the end of the Soviet Union. People think ideology makes it the complete opposite of the US, but hardliners worrying more about conforming to ideology rather than having a functional economy is one of the reasons the Soviet Union finally collapsed.
No, it won’t be the end of civilization, it’s the collapse of a super power which has happened before, and relatively recently.
Human history is more than the rise and fall of superpowers, which are often the consequences of those things.