The UK riots and the Speeding Up of History

The standard line of the official English-speaking media is that the riots in the UK were fundamentally different from the democratic protests we have been seeing in, for example, the Middle East. The English rioters, we are told, were a bunch of criminal, non-political, inarticulate nihilists who just wanted to steal things. That, of course, is exactly what the official media in the Middle East say about protesters there. Revolutions everywhere consist of large groups of poor people who want to “steal” things (i.e. who want to take wealth off the rich and redistribute it to the less well-off). Fundamentally, the English riots were no different in this respect. If the state is not prepared to redistribute wealth then other methods have to be found. The English rioters were deemed “criminals” but the theft involved was much, much less than the theft perpetrated by the financial industry on England over the past decade. In a way, the riots were a response to that. They are a response to the fundamental injustice of the current system that people live under. People have an understanding of what is really going on that was not previously there. If those with power and wealth behave like a bunch of criminal thugs then why should poor people behave any differently?

So the riots in England were just another manifestation of a growing phenomenon we are seeing nearly everywhere in the world. We are seeing massive protests in Israel, as well as in India, China, and the Arab Middle East. We are also seeing them in Spain and Greece. Latin America has practically undergone a collective revolution with leftist governments taking power, redistributing wealth, and uniting in order to end US control over their continent.

Why are all these things happening now and with increasing frequency? The answer is fairly obvious and commonly understood: the Information Revolution is speeding up history even more and creating the conditions for an outbreak of authentic democracy and progressive forces nearly everywhere around the globe. The ability of the existing power-class to control information (and thereby society) is being destroyed by the internet, by Twitter, by Facebook, by Youtube, by email.

There was a time when any tin pot dictator could destroy an entire town, murdering everyone in it, and hardly anybody would know about it. Now, if the dictator does that, the images are all over youtube in a matter of minutes, and the public outrage is unmanageable.

This change does not just apply to tin pot dictators in minor countries but to traditionally powerful institutions like the US military as well. Until quite recently, the US military could behave basically as it wished in the developing world, and nobody either there or in the West would know much about it. Now if the US military, for example, kills some civilians in Iraq, it is beamed relentlessly into every living room in the Middle East with access to the internet or to satellite TV. This is part of what made the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so prohibitively difficult and expensive for the US. The game has changed, and changed RADICALLY.

The situation in China is particularly interesting. Over the last couple of decades there we have witnessed the biggest move of people in history out of poverty. If China wants to be a world power, then it needs wealth, and if it wants wealth it needs an educated middle class. Educated middle classes do not tolerate being censored by governments, and the power of the Chinese government to control information is eroding fast. This is leading to a dramatic increase in the REAL freedom of the Chinese people.

In the 15^th century the discovery of the printing press in Europe lead to a huge increase in democracy, wealth and freedom, as the old power-order of priests, monarchies and aristocrats was overthrown. Slavery was abolished, human rights were established, women were liberated. Unimaginable events that had never happened in human history happened for the first time. The ability of the then existing power-class to control information (and thereby society) was destroyed by the printing press. This took a couple of hundred years. Now what we are seeing is history speeding up even more. The power of the rulers to control information and society is eroding at such a rapid pace that all sorts of amazing things are likely to happen, not just in a matter of centuries, but in a matter of decades, years, weeks, days, hours and minutes.

Those who currently have power will tremble with fear, and shriek that the world is falling down around our heads and descending into uncontrolled anarchy. And life for most people will improve immeasurably, in ways that were previously unimaginable.