[Tanada]

Judging by TV ratings we see people are hungry, not for change, but for spectacle. Instead of serious discussions it seems like a majority of folks would rather watch cute kitten video's or celebrity gossip than spend even a minute taking in the news or contacting their own government.

[PrestonSturges]

Someone said civilization has three stages:
Stage 1: "Is there anything to eat?"
Stage 2: "What do you want to eat?"
Stage 3: "Where do you want to eat?"

Maybe there's one more:
Stage 4: "Who do you want to eat?"

[Tanada]

Tanada, thanks for resurrecting the model. It's neat, have any links? Kind of like Kübler-Ross on a Grander Scale.

It is my own model based on historical examples. Humans have repeated this pattern of stages from our earliest written records forward, and probably from the dawn of fixed agriculture based on crop farming.

[Keith_McClary]

Splinterlands
The View from 2050
By John Feffer

And in 2015, just before the great unraveling, the world still seemed to be in the grip of what was then labeled “globalization.” The volume of world trade was at an all-time high. Facebook had created a network of 1.5 billion active users. People on every continent were dancing to Drake, watching the World Cup final, and eating sushi. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, more people were on the move as migrants and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II.

Borders seemed to be crumbling everywhere.

Before 2015, almost everyone believed that time’s arrow pointed in the direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations. The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by Twitter and Instagram.

In 2015, people were so busy crossing borders -- real and conceptual -- that they barely registered the backlash against globalization. Officially, more and more countries had committed themselves to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty, solidarity, and equality. But everything began to change in 2015, a phenomenon I first chronicled in my landmark study Splinterlands (Dispatch Books, 2025). The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues.