There is a paradox at play regarding technological advancement and the ability to disrupt. Mobile banking did not develop and advance so much in Western Europe or America but in Africa. Whilst Africa as a continent has struggled with infrastructure in some ways they leap frogged the West when it came to using mobile banking. The reduction of cost for cell-phones and the quick relative growth of wireless towers as a service combined with the increased security of mobile banking meant the way of banking using a ‘dumb’ phone developed ahead of anything in the West really.
Of course with smartphones we have caught up but there are other examples of technological hangovers and incompetence. The USA still relies on card stripe technology whilst the rest of the world has pretty much all gone to chip and pin. Chip and pin of course is around in America but it is not ubiquitous and has taken much longer to roll out. In general the more advanced a society becomes, the more comfortable, the more affluent the harder it is to enact radical change and do large scale projects. The industry lacks the will and vision to implement such changes.
This is for a plethora of reasons, increased worker power is a hidden cause of stagnation. New York City is a great example of this paralysis with regard to their transport network. Powerful unions and rules make improving the subway astonishingly expensive. This would be easier to stomach if the city itself was committed to law and order, punishing fine dodgers, making that subway a safe and more welcoming place but these latter issues are now issues of social justice reform and to enforce those laws is not allowed. The crisis therefore gets worse, money runs tight and the repairs and new work never happens, it’s already too expensive and the declining ridership begins to create a vicious spiral. The bottom races up as infrastructure collapses.
Many of these problems were of course exacerbated by government’s responses to covid. Their principal fix to shutting down the economy amounted to flooding the market with more money than ever before. The low won out because they got cushy benefits and quit their jobs, the high of course won as well but again the middle was punished and the lower middle especially punished. In the city where I live the public transport was already fragile but now has had a slew of service cuts and ridership has fallen as the once yuppie class can work from home. There is just no will left to fix or improve anything and so people accept the crappy nature of public transport or the ever crowded roads. Those roads of course are now generating unique problems.
Technological solutions can be found for many problems but we as a society are lacking in the will to implement them. I’ll give one example of a modern problem that could easily be countered with intelligent use of technology and robust law enforcement. On many highways around major urban centers there is a problem with road racers. These knuckle dragging imbeciles are too poor and anti-social to use dedicated race courses and so resort to becoming gangs and blocking stretches of highway and freeway to race on. The gang will align and then deliberately slow traffic behind them by acting in a coordinated fashion. This is of course dangerous and highly disruptive to ordinary road users trying to get home at night. The cars will then drag race each other only to stop and repeat the process. Should local highway patrol or police even bother responding the cars take off, knowing that for the crime they have committed the police are not sanctioned to engage in a pursuit. The offenders of course have pinched other peoples license plates as further camouflage.
What is to be done?
It really is quite simple with the technology we have and if we had a willing legal apparatus. Drones are the perfect solution. Drones are relatively cheap, have surprisingly good tracking software. I’ve seen a mid range commercial drone be set to follow a friends car on a lone back road and was pretty astonished. If we want to stop these street races we need a couple of drones, drone operators to silently track the cars to where the people live. The cars are then impounded and destroyed. Rinse and repeat until the numbskulls get the message, putting them in jail is not even required here. Confiscation of property and destruction of their ability to ‘get away’ ends this dangerous anti-social practice.
Of course this will not happen. The complexity crisis is not the only crisis we face. The comfort crisis, whilst talked about, is also there. The real damage from woke policies does not just extend to the increased risk now of bridge collapse or airplane traffic incidents it extends as paralysis. Many woke policies trade conflict - easier to engage in conflict against cowed white men (Republicucks) than it is to go after the criminal underclass. That criminal underclass is after all their ally in the low high vs the middle. Americans and Westerners saw the power of the state during Covid. British police used drones to harass innocent white folk out walking in the countryside. This is the conflict they want and can handle. That they will not deploy this technology against the low criminal minority is maddening to anyone reading this substack. We want to live in a high trust and functioning society but the ever aspiring middle are trapped. They aspire to their elites who worship the lower classes who cause this disruption and so the middle in their hopeless attempt to ape the wealthy accept this new normal of degraded life and security. It is dressed after all in the most popular social signifier of the age: wokeness and sympathy for the criminal.
This post has been a bit more blackpilling than what I usually write but we should take hope to some extent. Many of the problems we face could be easily solved by men like us taking local positions of power and implementing smart solutions. It has to start somewhere. Why not with you?
All the laws, technology and tools are available to fix every problem. It is only a matter of the people running things.