I have some online articles and information to dump here. If you have your own to share, send me an email or drop a comment on this post. This might help keep track of some of the cracks I see happening around us today. There's a pretty ominous article a friend shared with me as we were discussing some of the information on TWhbP. It was posted on CTV News March 25, 2024 - 'Secret' RCMP report forecasts a bleak future in Canada. The article discusses this heavily redacted document that was given from RCMP to our politicians. It's so nice of our politicians to have spent our tax money, found a potential threat to our way of life and then starts importing new Canadians to be friends while society is upended? Is that supposed to help us?
I try not to get too political, as I think this existential threat extends beyond our political leanings. I find our current situation untenable and have taken to this blog as an outlet, but our current situation has not just been started by today's politicians... it's been going on for a long time and made worse by both our major parties. Infighting around political leanings is a privilege we might not have for many more generations. Democracy takes the voice of the people, and when people are asleep we get pillaged. It's by design. It's really why I wish we had ranked choice or some sort of proportional representation (Thanks JT, you had one thing to do!)... we could maybe shift the game of politics from "ping-pong" to "ring around the rosie".
The document from the RCMP starts as follows:
The global community has experienced a series of crises, with COVID19, supply chain issues, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine all sending shockwaves throughout the world. The situation will probably deteriorate further in thc next five years, as the early effects of climate change and a global recession add their weight to the ongoing crises Recent experience has raised the important question of how adaptable and ready RCMP Federal Policing is to new and unexpected crises.
Based on open source information from 2022-06-06 to 2022-10-30, the following scanning exercise identifies shifts (signals of change) in the domestic and international environments that could have a significant effect on the Canadian government and the RCMP, Open source, foresight, material, horizon scans, and environmental scans from law enforcement agencies, government agencies, and private entities both domestic and international were consulted.
Pretty great stuff.... 😒. Check the article out for some of the breakdow and remember this is from the Canadian RCMP using publicly available data. It's pretty light material due to the redactions, but some of the topics that make TWhbP made the paper, Blockchain and AI are on the list. 🎉🥳🎊
Cracks happening south of the border
I don't want to posture what is happening in USA is something that can happen in Canada, but we have some good ideas what society breaking at it's foundations might look like, if we take a look down south. There is a failed city (maybe more? I just found info this the other night) that has already entered MadMax type levels of upheaval.
The city is Oakland, and it looks to be failing on the back of mismanagement and what looks to me to be a small deficit? Their city is dying due to $90-130MM (sources are scattered on this) owed, why isn't the state or fed stepping in? They bail out their oligarchs, so why not the average joe? It's created a space where anarchy is the law of the land. One source I saw said there's only 34 police on duty for a city of 400k. Obviously I'd need to go and view first hand, but we have some videos (which I hope aren't doctored or falsified).
I'm not going down to California to see with my own eyes, and checking the news on Google looks pretty similar to what's going on around in any city in North America. So I take this info with a grain of salt, but I do see this reality in a smaller sense in Waterloo Region, Ontario. I guess Oakland just has some mismanagement from the top, and I think the leadership had disdain for the residents too? They were gentrifying the neighbourhoods and the residents were being rennovicted and not able to buy back into the market. They took to living on the streets and the rest is history. Oakland might fail in the next couple years, I'm hoping they'll get their shit together but I'm not too hopeful.
I've mentioned in the past that the decline of society will be slow, but when we start to see cracks I don't think we should all just go about our days. I think we should start putting together the materials to maybe patch the cracks? Maybe take care of the cracks, keep an eye on them so we can assess if this is going to cause some pain this generation or maybe next? This year or maybe 10 from now? Our Region of Waterloo is looking to increase many taxes from property to water. The fact of the matter is wealth accumulation is stopping the working class from being able to provide. Our oligarchs use our streets, they benefit from a strong workforce raised with public education. They are the winners of capitalism, so why not share your victory with your compatriots?
Where's the tech at bro?
So we already see some cracks in the walls of society. Cool cool. I've shared some AI models I've been playing around with to generate text or images. I've found AI models to generate 3D character models and even video using ollama on your personal computer hardware. So yea, things are starting to be very falsifiable at an alarming pace.
Google just revealed Willow, their new quantum chip. No big deal, it just does a calculation that would take septillions of years for a classical CPU to do, and Willow "brrrs" through it in 5 minutes. What a time to be alive! More info can be found on Google's blog here. And Google just casually drops this in their blog with info like this:
It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.
Okay, so we have a quantum computer chip and it's like something that reaches into other universes to do calculations? Fuck, and society is on the brink of collapse? It'd be real nice to get faster than light travel and other cool things off the ground, but if we can't keep the cracks from growing, we ALL lose out on the nice things discovered by our most brilliant. With the advent of AI, we can lift up all of our achievements that our species has created, look at them in new and novel ways to discover new inventions that likely would take us much much longer to discover. We've really opened Pandora's box and I think it's a coin flip if we get cool sci-fi tech in a utopian society, or devolve back to the stone age. I'd be interested to know where you sit in this dialectical view? Will we be entering a post-scarcity society that includes elevating the masses or will we continue on with our wage-slavery to keep the oligarchs in power?
Isaac
PS - Background images will probably be exclusively generated by AI. I don't want to steal art, and now have the ability to generate my own. The one in the header used a prompt from the article "I don't want to posture what is happening in USA is something that can happen in Canada, but we have some good ideas what society breaking at it's foundations might look like, if we take a look down south. There is a failed city (maybe more? I just found info this the other night) that has already entered MadMax type levels of upheaval."