Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`
I see a movie coming too.
The top have more time on their hands and they only have 1 job.
Maintain power via keeping the masses content enough to stay complacent, docile and most importantly: risk-averse.
The top will utilise all sorts of techniques to accomplish this, including complex shopping malls, entertaining sights and smells, and cool technology that keeps you glued and serves as an obstacle to you developing any kind of charisma or social skills that may prove useful to gaining confidence. Confidence that may be needed for breaking out of your comfortable risk-averse bubble. Confidence that may be needed to build the courage to compete for more power.
Other techniques utilised include the statistically insignificant threat of 'terror', that puts the fear of God into you, and makes you forget that a lot of your taxes are going toward manufacturing war-machines and surveillance equipment that will be well-utilised by the top - to further compound their power.
With this cocktail of techniques and more, it's often tough for me to see how the bottom percenters will have the (a) time and (b) resources; to revolt. Interesting to get some new perspectives nonetheless.
Since we keep redefining what poverty means, and the poorest in developed nations are wealthier than the wealthiest people 150 years ago, there won't be a violent revolution, only peaceful reforms. I can't see us returning to 18th century French peasant status, which is what it might take for example.
conversely, people in the US might argue people were better off just a few decades ago, before global capitalism and wage stagnation, but the manufacturing will re-shore with AIs filling the roster, working with the lights and air-conditioning off 24 hours a day producing wealth, but for whom with up as far as 50 percent unemployment predicted shortly.
Surveillance technology will become so advance, privacy will be a thing of the past as David Brin outlines in his book 'The Transparent Society'. It could be the corporations/governments watching everyone or sousveillance (everyone watching everyone). Personally I imagine Google Earth street view in real time, at the least (let me google this to see if it already exists).
Someone could write a virtual reality, where we plug in cranial jacks, hook ourselves up IVs that feed us and keep us hydrated, while we live in the matrix to keep us occupied. We might still need to exercise, which would be the only obstacle preventing people from being 100% lazy bums.