Hacker News Reader

Quite a few societies don’t collapse but simply go into a long decline and then get taken over by other societies.

Do we even have multiple societies anymore? IMHO this is becoming debatable, and ceding heterogeneity could be viewed as a dangerous gamble.

View on HN

I think that's a very good point. Maybe not that we don't have multiple societies, we definitely do[1], but that no one is willing to take the wheel of the so called "globalized" part of the world.

[1] See e.g. China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, large swaths of people without internet. The list goes on and on.

While differences do currently exist, China is increasingly similar to the west in many ways (source: lived here on and off 20 years, also lived AU/UK/US). One of the main differences is entrenched centralized political control not subject to electoral terms, although that comes with really significant downsides it also creates a truly impressive potential for rapid change on critical issues (eg. environment). The disconnected peoples are effectively systemically marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as "societies". They will likely suffer from climate change, sea level change and other coming catastrophes more than the global society. I see only one path forward, a hegemony of global capitalism unbound by political will and environmental destruction. One of the few avenues for potential resolution is private sector mitigating technology development. If only people would stop going to work for FAANG and selling ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com