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by p-e-w 1060 days ago
> The internet tends to lock things in.

More generally, a globally connected civilization locks things in, once they are sufficiently widespread.

Barring an apocalypse, our present is eternity. I'm always amused when I read science fiction that assumes in the future, Chinese will be the lingua franca, or that we'll have political offices modeled after Ancient Rome, or that there's a world government, or similar nonsense.

To paraphrase O'Brien from 1984: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a crony-capitalist, meme- and outrage-driven society that always seems on the brink of collapse but never actually does collapse – forever."

1 comments

> More generally, a globally connected civilization locks things in, once they are sufficiently widespread.

This idea is known as the end of history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history