Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 1:37 am AI has its limitations as demonstrated. Though I do believe that Burja comes closer than anyone I've run across to articulating the same reasons this is not an information age, why it's not, and what would generally be required to get to an information age.

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Dec 02, 2011 12:02 am

Barbara Tuchman wrote: The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2026 1:02 pm

In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/03/08 ... -collapse/

An emergency room physician, initially unable to diagnose a disoriented patient, finds on the patient a wallet-sized card providing access to his genome, or all his DNA. The physician quickly searches the genome, diagnoses the problem and sends the patient off for a gene-therapy cure. That's what a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist imagined 2020 would look like when she reported on the Human Genome Project back in 1996.

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 1:37 am AI has its limitations as demonstrated.

aedens wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 10:44 am The caparison to H is the most sincere laughter I have had in well way over two decades.

At the same time, record-high public debt and sovereign debt markets increasingly dominated by large, highly leveraged hedge funds had created “a new sovereign-financial stability nexus,” which poses growing risks.

“The new fiscal-financial stability nexus may mean more frequent and sharper drops in sovereign bond values,” said Frank Smets, acting head of the BIS monetary and economic department, adding such swings could rapidly tighten financial conditions.

De Cos said the BIS’ message was one of “urgency” in terms of the need to bring down debt levels in key economies, “because the fact is that today debt is high, and this is financed through non-bank financial intermediaries.”

Do Samo Burja and Higgenbotham from Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel share a similar view regarding the end of industrial civilization and the fact that an information age has not happened?

Yes, Samo Burja and the anonymous intellectual behind Dark Age Hovel (often associated with traditionalist, neo-reactionary, or "bronze age" critiques) share striking alignment in their diagnoses. Both argue that the Industrial Revolution essentially stopped before completion and that we have not entered an information age.

Both thinkers share the view that our current society is stagnant rather than progressing.

The End of Industrial Civilization

Samo Burja: The sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis argues in his essay, The End of Industrial Society, that industrialization exhausted its social innovations before completing the transformation of society. He contends that we are living in the lingering, entropic aftermath of a halted Industrial Revolution, marked by lost foundational knowledge.

Dark Age Hovel: The author of Dark Age Hovel shares this perspective, viewing our contemporary era as a late-stage industrial society where technological momentum is stalling and civilization is degrading or in "slow collapse" .

The Myth of the Information Age

Samo Burja: Burja directly challenges the idea that we live in a novel "Information Age." He notes that current digital infrastructure and the "Internet of Things" have failed to introduce the fundamentally new "social technologies" required to elevate civilization beyond the Industrial era.

Dark Age Hovel: This author similarly critiques modern tech, viewing digital devices and the internet as surface-level symptoms of a deeply stagnant system rather than a true leap into a new historical epoch.

Both conclude that instead of moving forward, we are living in a "post-industrial" trap, where institutional decay prevents us from capitalizing on the raw technological power we inherited from the past.

Notes from the edge of civilization: June 28, 2026

In India, factory workers are training robots; the UK is criminalizing clean-ups; and Australia is paving the way for all of us to 'show our papers' online.

A new report from The Guardian describes factory workers in India being asked to wear head-mounted cameras while they sew garments, fold towels, build, sort, and perform other physical tasks. At first, some workers found the setup funny; that is until they realized they were producing training data, known as ‘egocentric data’, for the robots who would eventually replace them.

Large language models like Chat GPT and Grok were trained on huge volumes of text scraped from across the internet. But humanoid robots like the ones Elon Musk is developing need data that teaches them how to move through the real world. And increasingly that data is coming from human laborers doing repetitive, precise, underpaid work. A few weeks ago, we told you about a company called Shift that offers free apartment cleaning to New Yorkers who allow human cleaners to wear cameras while they work. The pitch: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data.”

But just like with everything else, there’s a way to cut costs by offshoring the work. So instead of workers in New York gathering data in exchange for free housecleaning, increasingly the data is coming from garment factories, construction sites, warehouses, and informal labor markets in India, where workers already earn just a few dollars a day. Now their movements are becoming a valuable digital asset for companies racing to automate industrial work, and they get nothing in return except maybe a soft drink once in a while.

This is the next stage of the AI economy: not just stealing words, images, music, and creative work, but extracting human movement. And then eventually, humanity itself.

At any rate, the worker sells their labor once, then the recording of that labor gets cleaned, annotated, packaged, licensed, resold, and used to build systems that may eventually make the worker unnecessary. It’s the cycle of life, right?

The quote that says it all comes from Lalita, one of the garment workers profiled in The Guardian story: “We are not even getting our full worth for the work we do now. Who is going to pay us when we are replaced by robots?”

Bingo!