proponents of disruptive technology argue that you can’t just force everyone to conform to some new standard of living. And they are right, because you don’t have to. The same way the automobile or the Iphone didn’t have to force everyone to own a one to keep up with their job. They were disruptive enough on their own that people naturally found ways to build up an industry around them and make billions of dollars. And now, most people in the modern world view these things as assets, regardless of how unsustainable they are.
nation-states are similar in this way. The formula for a nation-state was perfected by the europeans, which kicked of centuries of colonization that ultimately, ended in what some might see as winner states and loser states. But, before that time, the norm was for communities and cities to govern themselves, or at the very least, as part of a smaller, more confederated unit.
this is not a normal way for humans to organize and build communities. We are all just waiting (protests, riots, famine) for a more efficient, more livable, and more disruptive system to come along and render our 2-hour daily work commutes and immigration offices as obsolete. I think, whether we choose to believe in this alternative system or not, it is ultimately the direction we will head as a species. It might just take hundreds of more years of climate collapse, famine, war, jihad, genocides and extinctions for us to figure that out. The modern system, perhaps for the past 200 years, has been built on a house of cards: oil, slavery, exploitation, human suffering. These are things that cannot go on forever. Oil runs out. Slaves revolt. The exploited becomes no more.
attempts at making the world more “globalized” are really just reinforcing smaller, centralized entities that enable dysfunctional structures, that diminish any of the potential benefits of a hypothetical centralized global system. When people say “globalized” what they mean is “centralized globalization”, an idea perpetuated by High Net Income Earners who use their wealth to expand their markets abroad. True globalization can only exist decentralized, given that we preserve these standards