SEAT OF POWER IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY
Generations of historians have venerated the mapmakers, the ocean voyagers, the adventurers, the quasi-scientific explorers, even when most are exposed as having lusted for the booty of empire. Exposed are the fabled roads of silk converging at crossroads with roads of blood, of famine, of slavery. Exposed is the continuum of human predation reiterated as “progress” or manifest destiny on the economic balance sheets of state enterprise. Even the sociopathic calculus of war itself became the vanguard of a dark remote adventurism of power elites. An unrelenting narrative of progress informing enduring peaceful coexistence among nations, races, resulting in great intervals between wars, a proliferation of humanitarian organizations, a ramping up of the United Nations, a flood of deserving nominees for the Nobel Prize; all came with the promise of modern science and technology. Add to all this the promise of innovation, invention and technology such that the large scale integrated circuit might never be conceived as a weapon of conquest, even as financial bombardiers seated at computer terminals loot whole countries of their treasure through program currency trade, predatory lending practices, austerity schemes, flimsy derivatives and so on.
Yet the weaponization of the icons of progress, the computer, the diverse media, globalized industry, while not representing the whole of progress is proving to be the dominant force in the perils to the very survival which our planet and its peoples face in the twenty-first century.
“That horse astride which you now nobly sit may turn out to be Trojan in origin”