The phrasing itself certainly is catchy. The sentiment that history repeats aspires to common sense and is hard to disagree with. In the history of the United States and Europe , wars have ended with confiscatory terms of government surrender inevitably breeding more wars. Revolutions, like those in France and Russia, that gave an individual absolute power—Napoleon and Stalin, respectively—inevitably end up as failed empires brutal dictatorships.
Even individuals are subject to this advice. Couples who do not learn from their fights break up. In the 21st century, specific events in Syria have proven a repeated lessons about civil wars , like the Vietnam war, that when great powers intervene to fight proxy battles, conflict becomes protracted.
So far, the need to maintain flexibility even by gatekeepers, so as to maintain their networking power, weights this balance in favor of continued innovation. Change is inevitable.
Human beings are communicating social creatures, and every new disruptive innovation in communication causes significant innovation and reorganization of commerce and civic engagement. With the exception of cable television, these have ultimately proven more positive and negative. I therefore remain optimistic as to widespread positive change, especially with the rise of a more politically active socially engaged generation.
And people are already using those same digital media to try to effect change. The wellspring of attention to anti-black state violence or to unpacking the gender binary or to calling attention to wealth inequality — all of these are social and civic conversations that are not new but that have been catalyzed through digital media.
The technology could help to overcome social problems. But in order to do so, there will be … the need to deal with globalization issues. In the first Industrial Revolution, conflicts were happening within the same country: The workers that were losing jobs because of the innovation, first attacked the machines Luddism , later negotiated the introduction of the machines against some social protection measures.
In this case, the risk is that negotiations that occurred in the 19th century will not be possible in the 21st. So, the first point to fix is about globalization and tax payment.
After that, it would be possible to discuss the rest. For example, children worked in agricultural societies for centuries before the Industrial Revolution. It appears to me that many of the institutional changes were motivated by fear of particular kinds of change and from biases for the well-known and for protection by authority figures.
Certainly, any change creates opportunities for bad actors to take advantage of persons who find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances, but there are also many good actors that use the change to do more for others. I believe this pattern is at work today, just as it has in the past. It is interesting to read about a time when things were definitely getting worse and see how someone like Douglass made sense of that.
I think American darkness will continue but that civil society will eventually reemerge, as it has in democratic countries over the last two centuries. But what emerges has to be something different from the Democratic Party form of neoliberalism, which honest and good people find problematic. There are sincere people who care about the country who have turned to America First as a reaction to neoliberalism. As a university professor, I see my students as capable of the kind of civic innovation you are asking about here.
John Pike , director and founder of GlobalSecurity. In the First Gilded Age the railway trust oppressed farmers and robber barons oppressed all kinds of folks, but eventually — after a few decades — that economic model was overthrown and collapsed.
In principle, the Second Gilded Age should also end within a few decades. But at least the farmers could name their problem and organize for a solution. In the s, very few people understood the Microsoft operating system monopoly, and that was simple compared with the toxic algorithms of today. Bryan could campaign for Free Silver, but what is the comparable demand today?
However, I believe that in the next decades innovations will continue to be introduced in a smooth way. Progress will continue, and in many parts of the world will accelerate, due to the extension of the internet and innovations in social programs.
Or will more enlightened forces prevail. I do think we will see an arc similar to the Industrial Revolution of years ago and I have made this parallel myself before.
We will see we are seeing many of the same things now — consumers demanding more nuance, transparency and control of their privacy; demanding higher security practices and standards; and looking for state and federal legislation to set boundaries based on social values rather than technological capabilities. This will be particularly applicable in machine learning pattern-recognition systems that are potentially incorporated into the criminal justice system, but also in personal autonomy and individual rights and freedoms balanced against perceived security benefits.
There will probably be separate but parallel actions regarding private corporate data collection and management and consumer rights as opposed to government data collection and activities with impact on civil rights mass surveillance, facial recognition, border controls.
Such positive innovations can be supported by targeting grant money and other resources to groups aiming to produce positive social and civic innovations with technology.
Startups could also be included, as successful startups scale up and cross-national boundaries. Rather than supporting a patchwork of actors to address some large issue such as foreign actors influencing public votes by distributing false story lines on social media, comprehensive bands of long-term investments must be applied to address whole situations in this case, all free democracies need an umbrella set of efforts to fend off negative actors. This means that we now need significant resources applied to the key challenges we face socially and civically in our online habitats.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals could be used as source of thematic directions in which to apply such efforts. This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. If you want to know more or withdraw your consent to all or some of the cookies, please refer to the cookie policy.
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Erik Qualman. Firsts , First Time , Repeating History. Erik Qualman Mike Colter. Memories , Short Memory , Repeating History. History really does repeat itself and recently I was reminded of that while looking through a batch of old political buttons.
Have you? The scourge of polio and other diseases was a terrible reality that most of us alive today apparently have forgotten. There is a growing movement in this country to not have children inoculated because of potential links to autism.
I think we ought to start passing out those buttons again. Wade when the backlash against the Supreme Court decision was still young. Here we are 40 years later and the fight is still going on.
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