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I Just Saw an Amazon Van Drive by…
It reminded me of why we must invigorate our “form a more perfect union”, and build towards a less flawed utopia concept, via a non-violent revolution on a scalable platform for a purer democratic system…
Whew…! That subhead was a mouthful. Yet…
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The Amazon van’s ubiquitousness is a metaphor of the future we are relinquishing. This is not a walk down nostalgia highway with a dream about reinstalling the USPS as the colossally-dominant deliverer of packages. The metaphor is only tangentially related to Amazon’s services. What I see disappearing is our civic connectedness. Allowing private entities to grow more politically powerful and cohesively efficient than our civic, We The People, relationship is setting us up for failure.
Think of the Roman technologies that disappeared — for over a thousand years — after the empire’s decline including aqueducts, paved roads, indoor flush toilets, lighthouses, complex cranes, and much more. Technology may last somewhat longer than civic society, yet most everything will disappear without a responsive civic society. Has our crescendo occurred, and our descent begun, or are we still rising? Picture this. Add a shotgun rider on each Amazon run with predator drones hovering, and the powerful private entity could keep thriving for years, maybe tens of decades after the fall of our civilization. At some point however, everything is absorbed into various medieval, autocratic, fiefdoms, and the great bulk of society suffers.
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Therefore, private interests must never have as much political, social, or financial control over our lives, and government as they have had, and do have today. We must reinvigorate civic energy as we redesign our entire approach, and move into a fully functional 21st century, not merely a private, and products based one.
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Realize that our current political formulation can never transform our civic platform, at best doing gradual cosmetic updates. Like putting solar shingles over asphalt shingles, over wooden shingles, over a thatched roof. So our civic project is more a house of cards than an improving system, although it may seem effective with a cursory inspection. We need a full remodel not merely an updated layer of shingles or…
