Culture? Culture!

Culture

Left to themselves, human beings are quite good at running stuff, but unfortunately their primary adaptive tool, culture, offers an exploitable niche for a new kind of parasite, the power hungry little grey man (much, much less often woman).

Kings followed by Priest Kings followed by Priests with the power to tell kings what to do, followed by Oligarchs (because even when you are selfish there is power in numbers), then you get Empires, and the wheels fall off. Then various bit recycle randomly in an escalating series of attempts to stop smart people who like new things making improvements. Which is all sort of OK as long as you can Hitch Your Wagon and cross the Frontier into a New Place where you can do new things. Which ended, depending on how you look at it, somewhere around the start if the 20th century. The borders closed, the West Was Won. You had to fill out a form, to get the form, to seek permission to get authorisation to lodge forms.

Science Fiction came along on the coat tales of Cowboy Penny Dreadfuls (the window beyond the frontier for the masses toiling in the Satanic Mills) to offer hope to the smart ones who liked new things. They, the "other" One Percent, the Scientists and Dreamers and Engineers and Degenerate Bohemian Artists managed to work on the fringes and through the gaps of their cultural matrix to improve the human condition more than it had in a single century than it had in perhaps 20,000 years. And we reached out to the stars, and the nasty little grey men stopped us. They tightened the purse strings, they made it fiscally irresponsible to attempt private access to space buy making it legally effectively impossible.

However, people who thought differently inspired by Youth Culture and Science Fiction, especially Star Trek, and the replacement of Middle Class inertia with a kind of drug fuelled (mostly near lethal amounts of caffeine) mania, made new things and worked out to divert a few hundred billion dollars out of the banking system into individual often quite odd goals. They abandoned the idea that acquiring more money was an end in itself, they did everything possible to make sure they and their kids would have enough, pretty much forever. Then they looked at their vast money bins, threw the Priests out of the Temple of Mammon, and did utterly irresponsible things because they wanted Fly Cars and access to “Zero Gee” and submarines that could tke them to the deepest ocean trenches, and private spacecraft, and hundreds of other “Science Fiction” things because damnit, so twerp with a handful of forms wasn’t going to spoil their fun. Now, the strange thing about that approach to life is that even if you are not Tony Stark, if you have money you can hire people who have the brains and skills to do the things you can’t do yourself.

The government puts a decade of expensive hurdles in your way, you “waste” money jumping through each hoop despite the endless hints that you’ll never make a profit. You do it by hiring lawyers, researchers, engineers, technicians and all the vast flock of specialists needed to support the project. Along the way you solve problems, spawn new technologies and often accidentally make more money.

Or you don’t get lucky in Start Up Roulette, so you join the Open Source movement.

What we are seeing is culture fighting back against control, against the Financial 1% and their lickspittles and hired goons.