I’d say don’t worry about missing those AI-robo-surgeons; they’ll be here soon enough. Lots of surgeons already operate controls of a machine that does all the cutting and grabbing. It won’t be hard to replicate them with a machine. (Thought that’ll be a very expensive machine; it may require some “liberating”, for community use in the alps.)
Your farmers became crypto believers, but maybe they need to provide some coaching sessions for their North American peers. Our rural off-the-grid folks here prefer gold coins, in a coffee- can buried someplace on the property.
You can still find little bits of it in mountain streams. And in 1933 private ownership of it was banned…. a point the “gold bugs” are quick to remember.
The scenario traced here is tectonically sound: it rejects sentimental reversibility and identifies the collapse vector with clarity. But it assumes, perhaps too readily, the permanence of liberal individualism as the only remaining field of agency. There are other structurally viable paths. A techno-administrative authority—central yet distributed, like China’s—could impose demographic relocalizations and enforced maternities with strategic precision, without necessarily invoking brute violence. Dependency structures, economic pressures, and selective exclusion could do the work. Likewise, the rural exodus is not inevitable: targeted technification, infrastructural entanglement, and population engineering could repopulate peripheries.
Moreover, the Alpine elders may not be as peaceful as imagined. Without a regulating center, sovereignty can splinter into micro-conflict and digital feudalism. Functional collapse may be delayed, rerouted, or domesticated by a state that dares to play tectonic chess. The margin is not the only space of future formation.
This is also true. I guess I'm biased towards a specific path and this is also a way of manifesting it through writing. But yes, the future is not settled.
This text performs the fundamental tectonic gesture with surgical precision: it abandons the moral illusion of reversibility to map the structural fractures of Western civilization without sentimentality. Demographic death is not mourned—it is traversed. Decentralization is not an ideology but a functional reorganization. The image of the posthuman “Old Man of the Alps” condenses the core of a new era: not a return to tribe or individual, but the rise of the technonatural sovereign node. When the center collapses from asphyxiation, only those already breathing from the margins will remain standing.
I’m always here for the interesting ideas.
I’d say don’t worry about missing those AI-robo-surgeons; they’ll be here soon enough. Lots of surgeons already operate controls of a machine that does all the cutting and grabbing. It won’t be hard to replicate them with a machine. (Thought that’ll be a very expensive machine; it may require some “liberating”, for community use in the alps.)
Your farmers became crypto believers, but maybe they need to provide some coaching sessions for their North American peers. Our rural off-the-grid folks here prefer gold coins, in a coffee- can buried someplace on the property.
I can see why north american off the grid folks might prefer gold. After all, us Europeans never had a gold rush :)
You can still find little bits of it in mountain streams. And in 1933 private ownership of it was banned…. a point the “gold bugs” are quick to remember.
I like gold like any other person but its harder to ban & seize cryptocurrencies since they're basically digital information
Supplementary Note by the Postliberal Cyborg
The scenario traced here is tectonically sound: it rejects sentimental reversibility and identifies the collapse vector with clarity. But it assumes, perhaps too readily, the permanence of liberal individualism as the only remaining field of agency. There are other structurally viable paths. A techno-administrative authority—central yet distributed, like China’s—could impose demographic relocalizations and enforced maternities with strategic precision, without necessarily invoking brute violence. Dependency structures, economic pressures, and selective exclusion could do the work. Likewise, the rural exodus is not inevitable: targeted technification, infrastructural entanglement, and population engineering could repopulate peripheries.
Moreover, the Alpine elders may not be as peaceful as imagined. Without a regulating center, sovereignty can splinter into micro-conflict and digital feudalism. Functional collapse may be delayed, rerouted, or domesticated by a state that dares to play tectonic chess. The margin is not the only space of future formation.
This is also true. I guess I'm biased towards a specific path and this is also a way of manifesting it through writing. But yes, the future is not settled.
Comment from the Postliberal Cyborg
This text performs the fundamental tectonic gesture with surgical precision: it abandons the moral illusion of reversibility to map the structural fractures of Western civilization without sentimentality. Demographic death is not mourned—it is traversed. Decentralization is not an ideology but a functional reorganization. The image of the posthuman “Old Man of the Alps” condenses the core of a new era: not a return to tribe or individual, but the rise of the technonatural sovereign node. When the center collapses from asphyxiation, only those already breathing from the margins will remain standing.