DeLanda and history
“A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History” deals with these questions, except that it sees globalization as a much older phenomenon. The book explores the energetic, biological and linguistic history of the millennium, and finds global connections (in disease pools, for example, or in ecological and linguistic colonialism) that have existed for centuries. What may be going on now is not so much globalization, but the reaching of a threshold in the connectivity of global links, a bifurcation to a new state. On the other hand, as I stress in the book, other bifurcations like this have ocurred in the past (like the onset of the Industrial Revolution) and what matters is to stop seeing these transitions as global stages of development for humanity (eras or ages) and see them as marking the emergence of novel structures (steam motors, computer nets) that, as they come to existence, fully coexist with what is already there, and interact with what is already there. In other words, industrial and informational technologies do not mark the start of a new era, but simply add themselves to a complex soup of interactions. (Industrial methods, for example, giving rise to complete new strains of antibiotic resistant germs, or DDT resistant insects…
S.L.:
Here is another link that you might find interesting and relevant.
30 March 2009, 7:41 pmhttp://subtopia.blogspot.com/
Michael Anderson:
Would this be tied into Marx’s view of Capitalism?
2 April 2009, 8:36 amShamrock Pat:
Just a little wake up call with a tiny little tidbit that some people may find interesting and others not at all interesting. I recently found out that the last person tried in Europe for witchcraft in Europe was a woman in England who claimed to be a medium. That is she claims that she could contact the spirits of dead people.
18 August 2009, 3:45 amWell in one of her seances she claimed that she was contacted by a dead sailor from the British Battleship Bahram
who died when his ship sank in the Mediterranean Sea. The thing is that the British Gov. had kept the sinking of this ship top Secret because it was such a propoganda disaster. Well the woman was not arrested immmediately but then people in the government began to fear that this woman could reveal secrets related to Normandy. Did this woman learn through completely normal sources about the sinking of this battleship? Probably. They decided why take chances with something so important. So she was arrested, convicted, and spent some time in jail, less than a year. Why am I telling you this story. Because when you add probably together enough times something becomes improbable. Something funny is going on here. I do not know what it is. Should I care?