Amerika

Over the past few years, the “experts” in media have revealed how little we can trust them, which means that people are getting their news by reading between the lines, just as they did in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, probably even Jacobean France.

It ended a nice gig. To become an expert, one went through a bunch of education and then became vetted by think tanks, government, or other wealthy organizations who are acknowledged leaders in the field. This produced a steady stream of experts who knew nothing outside their study areas.

We are now seeing a bifurcation of society. One group believes the official story, and the rest are removed at an arm’s length from any society-sanctioned news or opinion. They no longer trust it for a good reason: it has proven to be both wrong and manipulative.

The question here is whether the trends that organizations and thinktanks use to motivate future coordinated actions such as war, are fake or not. Governments are concerned with disinformation and misinformation because it competes with their agenda.

Similarly, non-profit groups like NGOs and industry groups funded by corporate behemoths fund science, place articles, and otherwise manipulate public opinion to promote their own narrative about our past from past to future through the present.

Technology also plays a very big role in trend formation, such as automation. This started with the washing machine and dishwasher aiding household chores, but quickly jumped to industrial applications going on to computers and phones and are now even replacing humans such as teachers. If you have a question, ask a chatbot.

During my time in the Strategic Engineering department around 2003, I was privy to a group of guys that were tasked to map out and define requirements for the next twenty years. The two main characters mapped each technological trend over time to general growth in world user requirements.

They did not consider automation trends and human trends because they assumed requirements would cover that, which it then did. They predicted that drones were in the twenty-year future, which is today. The Executive promptly ordered a competition between engineering groups for the best drone and the winner was a small but stable 18-inch radio-controlled Cessna-type aircraft fitted with a payload consisting of a digital camera and GPS device (more or less).

The art of war is trending away from twentieth century conceptualizations. Historically, during the Anglo-Boer war in 1900 South Africa implemented not only trench warfare, but also guerilla warfare. During 1914 to 1945 in WW1 and WW2, machine guns, tanks, and stationary artillery appeared, then in the 80s South Africa established maneuver warfare including self-propelled artillery. This meant that an entire battle group could relocate six hundred kilometers overnight to attack the enemy from an unexpected angle the next morning during breakfast. However, the important South African prediction being realized today is drones:

For any state fighting without the wealth of the United States and China (which is everyone else), what is cheap and effective is also necessary. Out in Ukraine, the skies throng with Chinese-made DJI Mavics, Iranian Shaheds, Russian Orlan-10s and Turkish Bayraktar TB2s. Drones may not have the same payload or firepower as a fighter jet, but then again you can’t buy a fighter jet on the internet. For the price of one F-35, you can buy 55,000 DJI Mavic 3s. For less established militaries, drones offer the chance of levelling the field to at least some degree.

Since we are living through trends predicted twenty years ago, the question is what is the trend for the next two decades? Without having access to a specialized group or think tank my guesstimates will first have to include automation trends and human trends, because requirements have become quite murky and unreliable due to requirements of the system, such as a bloated forty-four four-star generals required for Ukraine, replaced only seven functional four-star generals required for a much larger WW2.

There is a general trend in Western society to become more political as opposed to economic. In other words, the executive of an organization will not be appointed based on economic merit, but on political merit. This is part of the West’s middle-class transformation from economics to politics and is expected to get worse rather than better over the next twenty years.

However, the Western Boomers have not yet died out, so they will accelerate or double down on politicization thereby polarizing the world stage in toxic and even already apparent rogue manner of terror politicking, thereby strengthening their opposition – because the opposition does not have fake trends. In other words, we can expect a trend towards bifurcation. However, this is not seen as debilitating, but rather enforced re-focus on what requirements are really needed as opposed to desired/wanted.

What Ukraine accidentally points out, is that what they really need, is ammunition, which Boomers can’t supply. What they also accidentally point out is that China is helping America as well as Russia by supplying tens of thousands of cheap drones used to destroy Russian tanks, as if they were playing both sides.

However, the real trend to watch started to change in America when Trump initiated a Military Space Force. This is now followed up at the NATO meeting in Vilnius where they decided to expand Space-based activities through increased funding of 2% of EU GDP per country.

This is going to be confusing however, because it seems like America and Europe is merely realistically reacting to the threat of space warfare, but, according to human-trend reality, the West will not be able to re-industrialize.  In my view this is attributable to dark organizations proliferating in the West, making it clear that our bifurcation will be complete by 2040.

Tags: automation, bifurcation, human trends