The Weekly Sift

Usually I take the news one week at a time, but today’s featured post takes a step back to examine a much wider time span: I’m looking at the technological developments that led to the first Gilded Age in the late 19th century, and trying to draw a parallel to the current internet/social-media/AI technologies that have landed us in a new Gilded Age. We may be in for a reprise of the fascism/communism/democracy struggle that dominated the 20th century. Lately it’s been easy to focus on the dystopian possibilities of the tech revolution, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the utopian possibilities as well.

As in the 20th century, it’s all going to hang on who manages the new society, and for who’s benefit. Right now this Second Gilded Age is being managed by tech oligarchs for their own benefit, just as the First Gilded Age was managed for the benefit of the Rockefellers and Morgans. But that changed, and our own situation could change as well.

That post is tentatively titled “Revolutions too big to see”, though I still hope to come up with something better. It should be out before 10 EDT. If you like it, I hope you’ll promote it to other people who might like it. I feel like this is more important than my usual blog posts, and I hope it can get a wider readership.

The week didn’t have a truly dominant news story, in my opinion. The weekly summary will divide its attention among primary elections, the USS Abraham Lincoln fiasco, Trump in the catering truck, and a variety of ignorance-based executive orders like the new recommendations for vaccines. Expect to see that around noon.