The Dark Ages are a somewhat bleak period of history spanning several hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire. When people think of the Dark Ages we often talk about the Crusades, kings & queens, feudalism, and the general decline of the economy, intellect, and culture.
After doing a little bit of research on the topic, it becomes clear that those who lived and died during this time didn't really think of it as the Dark Ages. But I suppose that's how history works, eh? Just like Plato's allegory of the cave, we do not realize that we live in darkness until we actually step into the blinding light. These things tend to be defined in retrospect rather than in the moment.
Cyclical nature of history
History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. Are we headed into a new dark age with the decline of the American Empire? There's certainly a good argument to be made that humanity is hurtling toward a cliffside; stepping on the gas rather than applying the breaks.
Or perhaps we are living within a time period that will be referred to the Dark Ages after the fact. That's also a distinct possibility. We could have lived our entire lives within the Dark Ages and not even have realized it, just as those who lived through the first one. The blinding light has yet to illuminate itself.
Certainly that would be the preferred option.
Nobody wants all of society to collapse while having to start over from square one. Which of course assumes that we survived the collapse, which seems... unlikely to say the least. 8 billion people is a lot of mouths to feed in the event of the systemic failure of factory farming along with all our other infrastructure (water, power, etc).
If crypto can actually do the thing that it claims it can do, perhaps we can keep this broken system propped up just long enough to make the difficult transition from where we are now to where we need to be. The days of people being in charge seem to be coming to an end. People are fallible, and power corrupts. The goal is to eventually put our ideals and rules in charge of themselves. We have the technology to do it, but the infrastructure is still severely lacking. Nobody said automating an idea would be easy, but that does appear to be the end-game, nonetheless.
Year of our Lord, 2022
The way in which time is measured, is odd to say the least. I have made the claim that if blockchain actually does the thing it was designed to do, we will have to rewrite the history books themselves. It will no longer be the year 2022, but rather year 13, with Year Zero being assigned to 2009, the year Bitcoin was born. That is the level of importance that this technology signifies.
Everything before the creation of Bitcoin would likely be referred to as the second Dark Age. It is not so much that life during the Dark Ages was so terrible, but rather that what came next was so radically different than before that the past became retroactively barbaric in nature when looked at through the lens of the present.
What would it take to get there from here?
It's quite simply a matter of power. Imagine a world were crypto communities rise up and have more power than any country in the world. What does it look like when people can choose their own governance models? What does it look like when intellectual property does not exist and all data becomes open source? What happens when every little dirty secret that every government/corporation/bank has perpetrated comes into the limelight for everyone to see?
And I'm not even implying that 'evil' people need to be punished for what they've done. I'm only interested in making society a better place. If that means wiping the slate clean and starting over, so be it. We have thousands of years of evidence to suggest that making examples of people who get caught is not a very good deterrent overall.
Negative reinforcement has massive diminishing returns. In most cases it appears as though our treatment of criminals actually makes the problem worse, not better. Of course they'll always be sure to parade the one guy who turned his life around and became a millionaire or whatever to make us believe that everything is working as intended. Good stuff, but the statistics tell a completely different story.
Conclusion
So what do you think? Do you think we are living in the Dark Ages right now, or will it occur after the collapse of the American Empire? Perhaps such a thing isn't even possible in this modern age. After all even if our economic systems collapse and the grid goes offline for a bit, much of the data we need to reboot society will be right there waiting for us.
Time is speeding up. The last Dark Age lasted hundreds of years, but is it reasonable to assume that could ever happen again given such insane advances in technology? When the Roman Empire fell, what was lost? How is that time incomparable to modern day? Has crypto already presented us a solution in the face of this overwhelming problem? I guess we'll see how it plays out.
It's easy to see the vulnerabilities within society and see crypto as a solution to many of these problems. It's also easy to see many vulnerabilities in crypto. How could Bitcoin possibly take over if a huge chunk of the infrastructure it relies on (internet, exchanges, banks, computers/phones) are all controlled in a centralized manner? I think what many fail to realize is that these networks tend to defend themselves by any and all means necessary. Such are the tenants of decentralization. The convenient (centralized) solution is employed until it becomes invalidated by a changing environment. This is the entire reason why crypto even exists in the first place.
At the crux of it all is money and the value it represents. Whoever is building the most value inevitably is going to win out during a battle of attrition. Either crypto is a scam and it's all going to zero, or it will gain enough adoption to flip the entire economy on its ear. If politicians can be bought to fight against Bitcoin, we see they can also be 'hired' to do the exact opposite. Ah well now I'm rambling I guess I'll just kill it.
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