/XMR/ general weekly book club - ending the book, WEEK 6

This is the sixth week of the book club, with chapter 11 of the book "The Sovereign Individual" by Sir William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson.

Now a brief (but not comprehensive enough) description of the chapter:

>Chapter 11: morality and crime in the "natural economy" of the Information Age

>The end of an era is usually a period of intense corruption. As the bonds of the old system dissolve, the social ethos dissolves with it, creating an environment in which people in high places may combine public purposes with private criminal activity.

Hinted on by the previous chapters, a transitionary period will not bear the best of sights. Artificial reality, selective news feeds, and abundant information makes it ever so easy for people to get trapped in virtual bubbles. Furthermore, as violence downscale, terrorism and organized crime will become more widespread. The latter one increasing in scope, seeping into the nation-states in their decline in a weird sort of "privatization of governments". That terrorism has of course not stayed solely inside the real world, with small groups of hackers being able to control hundreds of millions of devices or hold corporations with billions of dollars in assets at ransom. The book goes on to state that not all cultures are created equal, and society's success heavily depends on its morality relating to the idea of cultural evolution. However, unlike the previous ages, the authors predict the most successful of the society to lack shared strong moral, but rather be individualistic radicals who value efficiency.

Questions:

1. What do you think of the book, its methodology, and the conclusions reached?

2. Just as the collapse of Rome brought Christianity or the end of the Middle Ages brought Protestantism, will the Information Age bring forward a new religion or simply just a new set of morals?

3. Has the cybereconomy manifested itself as the book predicted it'd? I'd personally say that DNMs are really close to the ideal that the book describes with close-knit communities in which reputation is everything, tho they have a limited scope. However, rise of other types of gray market parallel and circular economies are promising. What are your thoughts?

And to end it on a personal note, the book has been a very intriguing one for me and presented numerous non-conventional arguments and ideas. We are now accustomed to change, but the turn of the millennia was indeed a period of large-scale change just like the authors envisioned. 9/11 and the rise of China has reconfigured the basic concept of international power relationships. Followed by 2008 and the subsequent FED subsidized bull-run have reconfigured financial markets. Corporations are increasingly "virtual", and this has only been accelerated by COVID. Politics has shifted to be widely accepted as a theater, with the nationalist and egalitarian sentiments rising in contrast with apolitical solutions. Terrorism is a norm and nobody bat an eye when a military coup was included in a YouTube video of a dance lesson, or when people started fighting back against that new system with 3d printed firearms. And of course, the internet rose to beyond being simply mainstream, but rather a function of normal life, with this very site getting created in 2003.

But as always, feel encouraged to share your own thoughts, opinions, or summaries.

The site will be updated now on Tuesday morning with this post and discussions to leave a bit more space. See previous weeks' ones at

>https://xmrbookclub.neocities.org/sig/week5.html

>https://xmrbookclub.neocities.org/sig/week4.html

>https://xmrbookclub.neocities.org/sig/week3.html

>https://xmrbookclub.neocities.org/sig/week2.html

>https://xmrbookclub.neocities.org/sig/week1.html

>https://xmrbookclub.neocities.org/sig/index.html