Group Psychology & Community Collapse in the Technological Era

International superstar sculptors replace local artisans.

In our post-technology era, money flows out from communities and does not return. Before the advent of technology, generosity supported unlucky or foolish people. This prevented them from becoming thieves. Now it pools in the hands of individuals so wealthy it can’t be comprehended, those who do nothing but collect numbers or all the properties available, to siphon what little those communities have left. On occasion they invest, but in other random communities who take a loss to gain a pittance of work.

Global Competition and the Common Man

This heightening of extremes due to tech replicates everywhere. At the local level, cabinet makers must compete with IKEA, and musicians against Adele and Spotify. There are few left to support local artisans or their artistic improvement, and industrial jobs disappear so long as the rest of the world is poorer. This creates extreme disparity, gods and ants rather than stable wealthy and unwealthy citizens. It causes unstable small business environments against massive conglomerates. It creates random collapse of communities, and the lack of stability replicates humans as creatures living on the bottom rung.

Power of the Haves

Laws might prevent these dynamics or create sufficient taxation of corporations to give stability, but technology again prevents this by supporting extreme disparity between corporate and local groups – agility and legal prowess at the corporate level are not present at the local level. Communities take what they can get to avoid starving, and have little to no negotiating power.

Educational Impotence

Social institutions combat with normalized interventions, such as public schools, but high school no longer produces a living wage and its WWI Prussian model squashes the skills required for organizational creativity, creating class-lock-in effects. A strong majority of slavish professional activities requires expensive college. There again, the extreme gap of the Pareto distribution allows only a few people with the highest marks or the best ideas graduate without debt or into lucrative jobs at dominant companies. And then within those companies this occurs again, where the luck of height or nepotism is the only stable predictor of corporate promotion. Most will stagnate, and sacrifice the majority of their time to do so, mortgaging their future and losing the opportunity for entrepreneurial mindset. America has become a nation of indentured servants.

Specialization is creating niche communities which can no longer communicate outside their specializations. The advent of digital technology will test individual consciousness against biological blindness and tribal, group allegiances.

One Ring to Rule Them All

Hierarchies originally built on competence become corrupted by power, yet are still subject to luck (Nassim, T. Fooled by Randomness). Extreme possibilities thus create extreme disparities. This explains the problems, which were not caused by moral condition but centralization from technological removal of natural power limitations. School debt, overflowing prisons, disparity of income, corporations more powerful than countries, lack of living wages, and poor monetary circulation are results. We perceive these as separate issues, but they are not.

Winner-Take-All

Governments were not prepared for this, to be powerless in the face of overwhelmingly centralized profit games. There is little most of us can understand about the world any longer, yet only the smartest of us admit this. Specialization is creating niche communities which can't communicate nor participate in civic conversations outside their specializations. They have become impotent. The potential of the centralization of wealth to create widespread volatility only increases without intentional intervention or heroic singularity.

Tribal Safety and Individual Heroism

We know this. It is in our movies and was the foundation of our country. The world, left to its own devices, results in the centralization of power and resources in the hands of a few dominant individuals who objectify and exploit the rest until collapse resets the system. Yet, like undeveloped children, we fail to investigate and run back to the safety of the group, to nationalism, tribal politics, assumptions, and blind allegiances.

A Glimmer of Hope

Yet tech itself has allowed something unique for the first time in history - the opportunity for widespread knowledge of individual value and potential. So this is the moment which will test consciousness itself - just as the advent of industrial technology led to world war and tested group values, power, and cohesion, so too the advent of digital technology will test the state and value of individual consciousness against our biological blindness and tribal, group allegiances.

For us, this means becoming awake to our inner drives and the conversations which shape our preconceptions. It means letting go of our own safety to grow and transform and develop into leaders. It means fighting for monetary security and education of all citizens who may invent something which will one day save us or otherwise rob us. It means heroic endeavor, transformational leadership, creating stability out of chaos, leaders and heroes from the individuals around us.