Ask any historian of science: technology only briefly disrupts, and then reifies existing power structures. A few new people make it into the controlling class, but ultimately tech on its own cannot subvert the power structure in any durable way.
The only surprise is how many intelligent people still believe that utopia is just a few more lines of code away.
Looking at the history of science, technology actually seems pretty good at disrupting and replacing the controlling class. The Renaissance led to the general irrelevancy of the hereditary nobility across most of Europe; the industrial revolution led to the irrelevance of the landed plantation class in the U.S. and the landed gentry in Europe. This is not just a matter of the leaders of the technology revolution being accepted into the existing aristocracy; instead, there's often a series of wars and revolutions where the controlling class of the new technology replaces and then subverts the controlling class of the old order, usually bringing their particular culture and class markers with it.
What technology can't do is get rid of power structures entirely. There will still be a controlling class. It just will be made up with different people.
Society seems to be scale invariant over time. Locally it changes but the overall patterns remain the same, even as we reach unprecedented levels of population and everything it enables and entails.
Could you explain further? This seems pretty untrue on the surface to me; what’s the analogous structure to a corporation in a 1000 person nomad tribe?
I don't mind if you disagree completely, but I have been studying ancient history and archaeology for about two decades now and it's pretty glaring to me. Following this intuition has given me great insight in analysis, strategy and overall making sense of trends and data.
I don't think it's about right or wrong. It's the way I see it after many tens of thousands of pages read on the subject of archaeology and ancient history.
This idea that I have that the geometry of human relations is scale invariant is not a scientific, falsifiable proposition. That's why I said you might disagree and I don't think I would be able to argue that it is correct. But it has been useful for me in interpreting data, like I said.
It just comes across as a very clear pattern. The knowledge we have about ancient Sumer, Akkadians, Elamites, Egyptions, Phoenicians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians, Byzantines, Franks, etc etc, all the way through to WWI and WWII, Cold War and so forth, about the dynamics of warfare, of state organization, politics, social hierarchies, economic behavior, it all comes together as the very same patterns we can see across millennia.
But it all comes to me as intuition behind a LOT of reading I've done and I haven't made any effort to systematize it because I haven't needed to.
I’m also intrigued and waiting for op to elaborate.
Constant that I see:
There is power hierarchy(ies) at all times, even if individuals change (necessary for any kind of coordination).
Some related things:
- to get more power one has to actively pursue it.
- power must be used to preserve the power.
- ones power depends on the power of those below. In a sense, it is a global ponzi scheme.
Disclaimer time: don’t take it too literally. Power comes in many forms (e.g. force, money, formal control of some organization). Hierarchy is not necessarily strict, total or formal, a general, sponsor of the king or his blackmailer, all are near the top - they can do decisions that lonely rural pieful fisherman can not. Exceptions can exist, there probably was occurance when loneley rural fisherman was given an army to command, without any initiative by said fisherman.
These generalities do not mean that nothing changes, there are uncountable many variables. Just, no equality or fairness. There will be challangers, there will be winners and those who lost.
The only surprise is how many intelligent people still believe that utopia is just a few more lines of code away.