I realize this is nothing new, but I feel it is relevant to the discussion, I have noticed a sharp rise in degenerate behaviour over the past 3 months which is adding fuel to big bang
Democracy has been described as four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Unmoderated majority rule means that the mistakes, the ignorance and the prejudices of the majority will become law. Minorities will be devoured, and the resulting society will be one of enforced and fearful homogeneity.
Nietzsches philosophy contemplates the meaning of values and their significance to human existence. Given that no absolute values exist, in Nietzsches worldview, the evolution of values on earth must be measured by some other means. How then shall they be understood? The existence of a value presupposes a value-positing perspective, and values are created by human beings (and perhaps other value-positing agents) as aids for survival and growth. Because values are important for the well being of the human animal, because belief in them is essential to our existence, we oftentimes prefer to forget that values are our own creations and to live through them as if they were absolute. For these reasons, social institutions enforcing adherence to inherited values are permitted to create self-serving economies of power, so long as individuals living through them are thereby made more secure and their possibilities for life enhanced. Nevertheless, from time to time the values we inherit are deemed no longer suitable and the continued enforcement of them no longer stands in the service of life. To maintain allegiance to such values, even when they no longer seem practicable, turns what once served the advantage to individuals to a disadvantage, and what was once the prudent deployment of values into a life denying abuse of power. When this happens the human being must reactivate its creative, value-positing capacities and construct new values.
[Epicurus] regarded the unacknowledged fear of death and punishment as the primary cause of anxiety among human beings, and anxiety in turn as the source of extreme and irrational desires.
As capitalism marches off the plank of zero marginal costs, what happens to physical value? Are we simply going to replace physical trading of assets for stuff with trading non-physical assets for non-physical values such as someone plunking down $200 dollars for a Spartan race or a tuff mudder(literally signing a death waiver and risking being burned, electrocuted, and even making good on that death waiver) just so they can put up pics online and share their accomplishment with their friends? Rats in a maze paying tolls...
Capitalism is dead and we're all scared shitless so we keep running around the track playing the "remember when?" game.
What replaces this system? We don't have a choice, but identifying it early and understanding its workings offers more insight and advantage than talking politely at the wake or discussing who was mentioned in the will.
I'll say territorial governments will be cannibalized by kinder-gentler (more efficient) corporations who will in turn be swallowed by more cost-efficient (zero-to negative* cost) DAC's.
*negative costs (at least earthly ones) could be achieved by mining resources off-world--Blade runner had this world around 2019, maybe push it back 10-15 years and add DAC's instead of the pharaoh "overlord of AI." If you've read Nick Land's Meltdown and combine it with Blade Runner, I think you'd have my vision of what the future will look like--we lose to AI, but win, because we lose our humanity 'organic parts" in a slow-burn entry into godless eternity, heaven, hell--less borg, more darth vader with R2D2's knack for going full matrix. After awhile it becomes clear, "If you don't need an organic arm or a leg or face or liver or brain....." Boom, welcome to eternal-spirit-states live on a universally expanding network of ohms. Who says those God myths weren't good for anything? They've been building our subconscious towards this goal all along.
