People often say how bad the internet is, but the funny thing is, it is the best world humanity has ever created. For one, it is the only place I want to really contribute to, and thus, spend my time and energy on. In a way, that's the only measure of how one likes, or believes in a system, it is the real vote. I vote for the internet, more than any other form of man-made organization.
But that is purely from an ideological standpoint. It is a utopia, after all, and no one can truly live there. When you get sick, or injured, you can't get fixed up by the internet. It's the medical professionals, the hospital, the medical insurance, and the charities.
So in that sense, we have these two worlds that we depend on, one spiritually, the other physically. But of course, the physical world is depending more and more on the internet, and the internet is taking over the responsibility of the physical world more and more extensively, and I guess, if we ever manage to fully merge the two, then we will have the ideal world government that people like Einstein believe is the real solution to so many conflicts.
But we are very far from that day. The internet is merely a utility in our real life, for the most part. In a way, that's a good thing, because the internet moves a bit too fast, and that tends to break things too readily. Slow can be a good thing, esp. for critical things.
The 2024 election is a shit show, but in a way, it is a war worth fighting, and even by losing it, people will get the necessary lessons from it, and maybe that is the only way for people to grow. Yes, I'm using the word "grow", not "learn", because most learnings don't stick. Only growth sticks, it's irreversible. (Well, most often, most things aren't worthy of being learned irreversibly, that would be overfitting right?)
Now here's the terrible feeling. Say we're all in a race towards a better world, but in a mostly collaborative, not competitive, way (i.e. the more of us are doing well, the better the whole will do). And say I'm so behind atm. Now when I see someone who's so ahead of me is slowing down, or even worse, tripping in a nasty misstep, there will be two conflicting feelings that emerge. Feeling sad, which is rationally, but also, feeling less bad about myself, because I see that I'm relatively less behind now. The latter feeling, is actually the real sad part, because that signifies true despair, that I have become totally passive.
But let's take a step back from the deep analysis. The obvious question from this election is the following: if more than 50% of US citizens think Trump will be a better president than Harris, then how many Chinese citizens think our status quo is better than a democratic system? Education is really, really hard. Too many people don't care, and also, too many care in the wrong way, because we're yet to reach a consensus about right vs. wrong. In an optimistic view, this grand divide is the way for people to wake up and see things the way they are. Look at all those poor Californians, now asking, how could this happen? Why hasn't Harris won by a landslide?
In the same way, Northern Europe can do very little to help the climate, if US and China don't give a fuck.
Heck, some people are already speculating, will there be WWIII?
And again, this is all coming back to the notion at the beginning of this piece: the real world has problems that the internet alone can't solve, the internet doesn't have governing power (in a way, that's not necessarily bad). What we need is probably still what Einstein wanted, a true world government, but the thing is, the hard part is not its technical establishment or operation, but reaching necessary level of consensus to move toward that goal by all nations. The pressing thing is, if that is indeed the right solution (or maybe even the only solution), then what if we ultimately fail to reach that consensus, before it's too late?
Well, then we'll just be dinosaurs, with brains. Brains that are so good at thinking, but ultimately, not good enough, collectively speaking.