my understanding is that two things will prevent this extreme:
1. As it has been for the past century, new capabilities of hardware and software will allow further security restrictions and
simultaneously more people wanting to fight that security. Even as our rights are undermined by those of corporations by seemingly paranoid (but actually rather strategic) bills like the Patriot Act, there is and always will be a small resistence: the 'Tivos,' the 'Napsters' and on and on to shake things up. People are simply too willing to take our money for products that we
really want to ever go away entirely.
2. The sights that corporations have set for the human race far exceed our capabilities. We are not going to build on the moon. We are not going to be able to afford manned missions to Europa in this economy. The price of energy will become far too expensive to produce some to any of these nifty computer products anyway. We are living in an age of excess, pushed on us by economies that encourage our greed and the gobbling of resources at a rate that exceeds the Earth's ability to produce them. Earth will fight back with extreme temporal shifts, and logic will fight back with extreme economic dumps, and empires spread too thin, such as ours, will fail. China's gonna be big as far as it looks right now.
I mean there is always the off chance that our pressure to adopt alternative energy technologies actually succeeds, but the energy required to
shift to these new energies looks pretty grim too, what with the demand for basic necessities (supplied by none other than this very energy we are about to hit a hurdle on) about to shoot through the roof. I don't see a Dark Ages ahead. More like a big flop. Then again, maybe I have been reading too much into the news ... or too little? All this is mere speculation. We'll see what
really happens soon when gas hits 5 dollars a gallon in the midwest. Then there are going to be some changes.
Edited by maxeem_com, 28 September 2005 - 07:17 AM.