Ok, let’s get down to brass tacks. The riots in Britain are an important event, and combined with the decision to double down on austerity they tell us a lot. This is my baseline, loose model for the next generation.
The decision has been made by Cameron and society in general that the way to respond to the riots is to crack down, hard. They are sentencing people to long sentences for minor crimes (a year for stealing a bottle of water) and they are extending the punishment to families, kicking people out of housing if a member of their family was arrested. They are discussing cutting people off from social networks, and in Calfornia today the powers that be cut off cell phone service during an entirely non-violent protest.
The decision has been made to double down on repression. To extend repression to families, a logical extension of our socieity’s obsession with family as above all else, and a very aristocratic thing to do, which reeks on the 17th century. In terms of social media, Wikileaks was the bleeding edge of this, when Paypal, VISA and Mastercard cut off Wikileaks, despite them having been convicted of no crimes, it was clear that access to the modern economy would be held hostage for those who didn’t play the way the oligarchs wanted them to play.
Repression of this sort always spirals. Cut-offs from the internet, from cell phone use, from specific sites, will continue to spread. Sometimes they will be temporary and blanket. Sometimes they will hit individuals. Sometimes they will hit specific sites in specific areas. Access to the modern credit economy will continue to be used as a weapon. There will also be continued removal of the right to travel, with no-fly lists moving to trains, and later to bus stations and eventually there will be a ramp up of stops of automobiles.
This sort of stuff is easy to get around, right now, by anyone relatively bright and even slightly technologically savvy. So there will be a renewed, and successful push towards what might be called the biometric surveillance state. You will carry ID, your biometric data will be centrally located as well as stored on ID, and this data will be used to control what privileges you have access to (you have no rights.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, throwing youngsters into prison for very minor crimes is a mistake. It will harden them, and connect them. This is especially true in British prisons, because British prisoners are a hardened bunch of criminals. But it is a mistake no matter where, because in America and Britain, having ever be thrown in jail means your life is over. Every decent job does a criminal record check, and if you have a criminal record, you will never ever have a good job again. At that point you might as well become a criminal, and why not a revolutionary?
Which leads to the crackdown on hackers. Throwing young, bright, technically savvy young adults in with the criminal element is, again, a mistake. The rise of the surveillance state means that tech savvy is going to become very important to anyone who doesn’t want to live by what might be called “Society’s new rules”. And the young hackers have a revolutionary mindset. The combination of men with nothing to lose, with men who have tech skills and believe society is corrupt and needs to be brought down, will be explosive. And since the biometric security state will be done on the cheap, by the sort of incompetents who run the current wars and the current security apparatus, there will be plenty of cracks in the system to exploit.
Likewise the increase in punitive sentences is a mistake, pure and simple, because it means people have less to lose. If a relatively minor crime gets you in for years, and destroys your life, many will make the calculation that they might as well fight, might as well use violent force, rather than be taken.
Meanwhile the ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell. At this point companies simply don’t want to hire anyone who has been unemployed for longer than about 3 months, and have a strong preference for the currently employed. If you don’t find a new job in 3 months, you are probably never going to have a good job again. The data is clear on this, what is also clear is that the developed world has made a hard turn for austerity, one which will do damage for years to come. A decade is modestly optimistic.
This will increase social disorder, of course, and our lords and masters and the remnants of the middle and working class who scream “they’re criminals, pure and simple”, will double down on repression, again and again.
This is, of course, a big mistake. It may turn into a relatively stable solution set in some countries, but they won’t be places you want to live unless you have the morals of totalitarian, and in others it will lead to revolutions, while in others it will lead to outright failed states. We can hope that a few will turn aside from this path. So far in Europe only one country has, Iceland.
As with most of my predictions, folks will scoff at this one, think I’m hysterical, and doom-monger, and so on. But this is just social mechanics played out over time. This is the glide path, it can be stopped, but it is unlikely to be.
