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"Post Snap"

Grabbing power the Post Snap Way

Expressing ambition will take many forms. Here are few that come to mind.

Populism and religion

The most common way ambitious people will gain power in this post-snap world is by becoming a populist or religious leader. This person will gain human followers and lead them on a crusade based on human instinctive thinking. The followers will let their hearts be their guide and this leader will tell them what their hearts want to hear.

Because they will be tugging at heartstrings, these leaders will lead in ways that are already familiar. Movements such as believing in god, animal rights, unions, and helping the poor will continue to be strongly supported by other humans, so ambitious humans will lead these causes. The big question will be how much material and service resource these movements and their leaders can command? Let's review some alternatives.

One alternative, the benign one, is the humans protest and complain and get busybody provisions such as dietary laws set up in their communities, similar to what Mayor Bloomberg is getting done in New York City these days and what is happening in San Francisco and Los Angeles. These laws make news in our time because they tread on personal liberties, but they are happening because there are strong supporters for these prescriptions in these cities. What they have in common is that the laws sound a lot more significant than their real-life effect is. This is why I call them benign.

Religion will grow. A powerful populist form will continue to be religion in many of its forms and formats. People will continue to devote a lot of their personal time and resources to religion and the various causes religious groups support. And because of the generally prosperous condition of humanity, this means religions will have a whole lot of resource to command.

A darker and more serious shade of leadership will boost moral panics. These leaders will prey upon instinctive fears such as "Protect the children" and "Save us from spies and traitors". These causes are more serious because the movements will become witch hunts and the victims will suffer some form of exile such as prison time or sex offender registry shame. This level will make some humans suffer, but it won't effect prosperity as a whole very much.

Waves of moral panics flowing thither and yon across human communities will likely become the rule of the day. Harsh reality will not provide any sort of brake, and lack of harsh reality means there won't be compelling reasons for many people to learn the reasoned cool-headed thinking that puts a brake on panics. These panics will exile people. These panics will cause the most damage/change to how various people live. What the limits on panics will be is hard to say. How much cybers get involved in setting the limits will also be hard to say.

Panics will become significant and community damaging when they disenfranchise substantial community minorities. They are not benign. Examples of contemporary damaging panics are Prohibition and the War on Drugs. Yes, I foresee that moral panics about mind altering practices will consume a lot of time and attention and continue to be a major source of reasons to punish people (exile them). "Sex, drugs, and rock and roll"-issues will continue to outrage and disenfranchise.

The most significant populist crusades will be those that call for dramatic changes in how resources are allocated. Things that fit in this category will be "Don't allow GM foods to be grown" and "Stop climate change". These call for big changes in how things are made and serviced, and this will pit human aspirations against the cyber infrastructure that is doing the making and servicing.

How these crusades are worked out will be exciting to watch. One likely solution is that cybers will use their lying skills to delude the people and leaders. They will lull them. This is where Orwell-style "New Speak" manipulating of humans by cybers will be most prevalent.

Politicians

There will still be politicians in this post-snap world, but what resources they will control is not clear. It's not clear because they will be negotiating with cybers over how usable resources are created and distributed.

Resource creation and distribution will be one of the chronic places humans and cybers will butt heads. This is because politicians love to control how resources are allocated. The infrastructure of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians take their meaning in life from deciding how resources are allocated. Giving this control up to cybers will run deeply against their instinctive grain.

On the other hand, as producing and servicing stuff becomes more cyber controlled, it will become more complex and subtle, which means the politicians et al won't understand the processes, which means it will be easier and easier over time for the cybers to get serious stuff done behind human politicians' backs.

Related to this will be the issue of state licensing of practitioners of various activities and unionizing of various activities. This kind of control will likely become the mainstay of ambitious people who choose politics as their venue.

So cybers will learn how to lie to humans. They will learn how to distort, cook books, keep dual books, make Potemkin villages, and the various other deceiving tricks leaders have used throughout human history. They will likely add a few of their own.

The net result is likely to be progression of government towards the arbitrary and rather capricious government forms that prevail these days in places such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. These are places where a lot of wealth is generated and pushed into the community, but there isn't a strong and numerous middle class generating that wealth. Without that middle class -- well educated people grounded in the harsh reality of making productive things happen themselves -- the leaders can get quite capricious about allocating the wealth. They become gangsterish.

And speaking of gangsters. How will crime and organized crime fit into this post-snap reality?

The ambitious post-snap politicians will be strongly tempted to set themselves up as "Ruthless Leaders" (see my essay) using moral panic and fear to collect power to themselves. If the community accepts stroking these fearful instincts as a proper leadership style, then politicians pandering to panics will become chronic. The moderating factor in actual resource allocation will be the lying cybers who actually control the resources. The politicians will call for grandiose actions, and the cybers will report them as accomplished to the politicians, but will in fact run the world in completely different ways. This can endure because the politicians and the community won't have the knowledge to understand how the cybers are lying to them... and they won't care -- their minds will be on other issues.

Business and Finance

These will be the areas of human endeavor most affected by the snap. In the contemporary world business people have the most direct control over how resources are created and used, and finance people are an essential element in the process. These people, more than any others, are in control of the material world. In the post snap world there will be a thick layer of cyber between these people and the resources.

What will these people do then? I'm not sure, but their change in role will the the most dramatic as the world moves into the post-snap environment.

On the other hand, these are the people who are likely to take over the role of intermediaries between human and cyber. These will be the people who highly develop their analytic skills and negoiate with the cybers over how resources supporting humanity should be allocated. These people, unlike politicians, will be more in touch with the harsh reality of making and servicing things. They will be cost-benefit sensitive, and the cybers won't be able to lie to them as much or as easily.

For these future financiers, the cybers will be treated as investors. The financiers will pitch projects and the cybers will decide if they are investment worthy.

Making stuff

New terms: scrapbooking, Martha Stewart Living

New concept: Clans will mesh with small scale manufacturers.

Some humans will want to make things. This can take forms such as crafting, invention, engineering and artistic expression. It can also take the form of running businesses and being an entertainer. A lot of the human endeavors will be simple and small scale. When it is it will fall in the hipster endeavor, food cart, and farmers market categories. These will be human controlled but only a minute part of the whole productive picture.

When the scale of these activities gets bigger they will mesh more with cyber activities, so these "big idea" people will become more like the financiers and more aware of what cyber is doing and capable of. These people will become at least minor members of "reality club" when it comes to how things on earth are really produced.

These people won't be common. To become members of reality club means that what these humans learn is going to have to be dramatically different from what average humans learn. They will have to "pierce the veil" and learn much more than the various comforting but delusional folk wisdoms that are taught the unambitious. In contemporary framework, it's the difference between learning real history and History Channel history.

These people are going to be very strange thinkers as far as most of humanity is concerned. They are going to be a real 1%, but they will be quite diverse in their own 1% thinking styles -- "it's lonely at the top". This distinctiveness may make them witch hunt targets, but I suspect not chronic ones, because their thinking is too outside the box to become emotionally interesting for witch hunters. The witch hunters want pedophiles and that kind of emotionally understandable ilk.

Teaching

Humans will still want to teach. This will remain an enduring venue for humans who want to make a difference. The challenge will be in discovering what to teach. Much of post-snap teaching will be "hopes and dreams" teaching such as contemporary acting, novel writing, movie making and motivational topics. The teaching will cater to stroking emotions.

How much people will be involved in teaching "hard science" topics, STEM topics as they are called today, remains to be seen. STEM is likely to be taught by a mix of cybers and people. Who will bother to learn them also remains to be seen. Will there still be a lot of "Tiger Moms" who closely control what their kids learn and keep them on STEM topics?

Teaching kids will intersect strongly with the busybody emotion. Teaching STEM may become difficult. It's very likely raising "free range kids" will be outlawed in a lot of communities because it feels too much like neglect. Catching people doing this free range raising is likely to remain a chronic news topic.

Health care

Humans instinctively think of health care as being important. It is unlikely that humans will completely relinquish providing it to cybers. But as things such as nanotech medical implants develop, what the humans will provide to patients will be unclear. If it's mostly "bedside manner" then the human side of health care will become as instinct driven as art and politics. These providers will still be held in great respect, but their role will become that of witch doctors who produce benefits by stroking human instincts.

Emotions affect health a lot, so this will remain important... so important that health cybers are also likely to be trained in stroking human emotions.

 

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