Neo-feudalism: the dragon

I only link to stuff anymore that really got me off. Here's Bruce Sterling's take on the unholy symbiosis of the high tech startup society and the new international Money Lords who are driving the middle class out of existence, delivered at a design conference in Berlin. He just nails it (sorry for the messy link, but I'm doing this on an iPad and don't know all the commands):

http://t.ritholtz.com/bigpicture/#!/entry/startups-are-not-disruptive-the-global-rich-get-richer,51849d3bda27f5d9d0ba0d68/media/1

When will a global conscience arise? There is no evidence of it among most of the Money Lords.

H/t boing boing via Ritholtz

Scenarios for the future from the Rockefeller Foundation

Actually sort of interesting, although they carefully ignore the problem of concentration of wealth and power (although it is implied; see below).

Via:  Scenarios for the future of technology and international development

 

The scenarios are driven along orthogonal dimensions of “political and economic alignment” and “adaptaive capacity.”  If you believe as many do that extreme inequality leads to social rupture, then we will be somewhere in the bottom half of this matrix, in Hack Attack or Smart Scramble.  For example, many on Tea Party right simply want to get a Congress that won’t bail out California (or any other state).