futurology, take two
Jan. 28th, 2008 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculumIt will always make sense to ship compact laptops and complicated military paraphernalia around the world. Only cheap oil makes it more sensible to ship ordinary frying pans and workshirts. Hence the logic of selective de-globalization reviving selected local manufacturers.
Regarding books, it is far more likely, of course, that books will follow the course of CDs and DVDs—someone will market a cheap page-cutter / book-binder to turn PDFs downloaded at home into comfortable physical objects, or else someone will develop an e-book reader you can safely read in the bathtub or set down in wet beach sand.
And beautiful books may be as little missed by most as beautiful horse-drawn buggies are.
And though localization may rationalize the economy when it no longer makes sense to export bottled water from an area experiencing a prolonged drought, and when shirts can be made more cheaply in the next county than in the next country, the uneven distribution of raw materials means that "in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away." [Parag Khamma, in Sunday's New York Times]
Make that "Khanna" throughout; see exchange in the comments below.
Khamma's "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" (an excerpt from his forthcoming book; New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2008) makes more sense of a whole range of situations than the many less plausible geopolitical scenarios I have read in recent years. Khamma's thesis needs further examination regarding the relations of the new Big Three: China is more fragile than it looks, the European Union has demographic issues (cf. Walter Laqueur's lugubrious "epitaph for a continent"), one hopes the situation of the U.S. will also be more unpredictable than Khamma thinks, and I can think of some other rather large-sized quibbles. But in most of those cases we are talking 2038, not 2008, by which time I am unlikely to be part of the affected population unless I rival Patrick Leigh Fermor for longevity. (Some of my readers, however, will be very much affected.)
Anyway, Khamma's article needs to be read and debated as the U.S. moves into an election cycle impacted by newly inventive types of economic difficulty. His mapping of the countries of the "second world" (not at all resembling the lands of Second Life) is particularly provocative.
Regarding books, it is far more likely, of course, that books will follow the course of CDs and DVDs—someone will market a cheap page-cutter / book-binder to turn PDFs downloaded at home into comfortable physical objects, or else someone will develop an e-book reader you can safely read in the bathtub or set down in wet beach sand.
And beautiful books may be as little missed by most as beautiful horse-drawn buggies are.
And though localization may rationalize the economy when it no longer makes sense to export bottled water from an area experiencing a prolonged drought, and when shirts can be made more cheaply in the next county than in the next country, the uneven distribution of raw materials means that "in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away." [Parag Khamma, in Sunday's New York Times]
Make that "Khanna" throughout; see exchange in the comments below.
Khamma's "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" (an excerpt from his forthcoming book; New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2008) makes more sense of a whole range of situations than the many less plausible geopolitical scenarios I have read in recent years. Khamma's thesis needs further examination regarding the relations of the new Big Three: China is more fragile than it looks, the European Union has demographic issues (cf. Walter Laqueur's lugubrious "epitaph for a continent"), one hopes the situation of the U.S. will also be more unpredictable than Khamma thinks, and I can think of some other rather large-sized quibbles. But in most of those cases we are talking 2038, not 2008, by which time I am unlikely to be part of the affected population unless I rival Patrick Leigh Fermor for longevity. (Some of my readers, however, will be very much affected.)
Anyway, Khamma's article needs to be read and debated as the U.S. moves into an election cycle impacted by newly inventive types of economic difficulty. His mapping of the countries of the "second world" (not at all resembling the lands of Second Life) is particularly provocative.
