[ExI] Power vs. Money

[Kelly Anderson]

Many people equate power with money. While it is true that many of the
most powerful people do have large sums of money, the converse is not
true. Large sacks of money do not necessarily convert directly to
power, at least without putting forth some effort. Bill Gates, for
example, went years without donating to candidates of either party as
a political no op and ended up being faced with a justice department
investigation into his monopoly and no friends in power to save him
from the big bad government. After that point, he donated heavily to
candidates of both parties... coincidence? I think not.

So how is this relevant to the future...? While I made the case a
couple of weeks back that we will all be rich in the future, I am now
going to assert that in one important way at least, we will not all be
powerful. While we can simulate power over others in virtual worlds of
our creation, we will not all exercise real power over our peers,
except in the same kinds of small numbers that exercise such power
today. So power will maintain its importance (to those who care about
it) into the foreseeable future.

I would assert that power will become even more concentrated as we
move forward, and that the ranks of the powerful will become smaller
and smaller. In the past, there were more locally powerful barons,
dukes and so forth, and now power is collected in the cesspools we
call national capitals, and even worse, places like the United Nations
and Brussels for the EU.

In the future, the nation state seems doomed to me, because you can't
govern a global village of highly interconnected individuals with 120
separate sets of rules. I don't really like that part of the future,
but it does seem somewhat inevitable. Push it off as far as we can, I
don't think it will be pushed off indefinitely. The best we can hope
for is some kind of united states where individual states maintain
some independent rights, but there is also centralized world wide
power to police those things that do not have location as a
significant property. Stupid efforts at anarchy like Wiki Leaks push
the day of the international brown shirt closer than it might
otherwise be, but I digress.

The point is, that it seems nearly inevitable to me that power will be
concentrated in even fewer individuals than have power today. Perhaps
through some miracle of technology individualism will be largely
eliminated, and we will merge into a single unibrain of some
architecture we cannot now understand. Perhaps we will develop into a
true democracy where everyone has enough bandwidth to pay attention to
all of the details... but totalitarianism seems to me to be the most
likely outcome, at least at some points along the historical path...
it probably will oscillate some.

So, does anyone envision a future where we all have more power than we
do now? If so, how do you see that working?

-Kelly