2023 puzzles, 2024 answers

2023 was a puzzling year. It defied expectations on a number of fronts.

In Ukraine/Russia, there were expectations that the war's staggering casualties and unclear aims for the Russian side would have demoralised its soldiers sufficiently so that with the first strong Ukrainian offensive, the front would crumble.

In the US, there were expectations that charging DJT on 91 counts, including financial fraud, passing around government secrets, and insurrection to overthrow the constitutional order, was serious enough to turn voters away from this stinking blob of bile.

It seems that in these two particular instances at least, the masses no longer behave as expected by some members of the highly educated liberal elites. These instances might turn out to be symptoms of a more fundamental process - the approaching end of liberal democracy/free market economy/capitalism.

The way societies have organised their economic and political order throughout history has not been independent of technology. The reproductive chances and thus success of various institutions and power structures have proven to be very different in hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial societies. Take, for example, slavery or feudal ties of peasants to land - largely unnecessary in nomadic societies, essential in ancient, medieval, and pre-industial agrarian societies, and an impediment to power accumulation in industrial and post-industrial societies where labour has to be mobile and to some extent creative. 

Technological innovations have been major drivers of change in the social order. The discovery of new ways to produce metals, cultivate the land, mechanise labour, reproduce information, changed not only the productivity of specific workers - it changed how societies organised their economies, fought wars, thought about ethics and morals, and set their structures of political power. 

Consider the invention of the printing press in 1440. A few decades later, discontent with practices tolerated and encouraged by the leadership of the Church swept a large section of its congregation, leading to bloody wars and conflicts, lasting for decades and claiming victims for centuries to come. The new doctrine of Protestantism that emerged from this process fundamentally changed the power relations in the economy and society, enabling the creation of the liberal/market-economy/capitalist institutions that took hold later on. But without the printing press, the rumblings of a disgruntled member of the clergy, rather than receive the mass distribution that they did by being printed and posted on church doors across the land, would most probably have had the fate of similar ramblings of countless predecessors.

Is social media the new printing press that is transforming how we produce, spread, and consume information, and ultimately how we think about the surrounding world? Are drones and automated weapons the new iron that would determine who will dominate on the battlefields and thus in the geopolitical arena? Is AI the new steam engine that will determine what jobs but also what type of labour relations will prevail in the future?

2024 will provide a lot more data that would shed light on the path to finding answers to these puzzles.

It is highly likely that in the first half of the year, millions of people will vote with conviction for DJT in the Republican primaries and for VVP in the March presidential plebiscite. What happens in the second half of the year is less certain and much more consequential.

If DJT loses, the MAGA wave might swiftly die down. Fundamental tensions in the US society may not be resolved so easily, but with economic growth and appropriate social policies, they may be ironed out until the next major crisis. With the West not collapsing (yet?) and continuing to assist Ukraine, VVP's deadly grip on the levers of power may loosen sufficiently for the war front (or the empire itself) to start to crumble on the edges, leading eventually to a regime change.

By contrast, if the proud deplorables are numerous enough in the few places that matter to bring DJT back in the White House, despite likely criminal convictions - if the mobniks continue to march en masse to their slaughter, without much of a protest - this will reveal that in a world of information overload, social media bubbles, and epistemological confusion, there is no need for mass repression/suppression of dissenting voices for totalitarian/authoritarian institutions to prevail.

Time (the year 2024 in particular) will tell whether DJT and VVP are just temporary glitches on a path of social progress or harbingers of a dystopian future.