As an American, it’s not that uncommon for people here to think America is in decline. The corpo media and most politicians will never admit it, but there is no metric in which average citizen does not see things getting worse.
The main difference is that most Americans lack the global perspective to realize how serious and permanent this decline is. They don’t understand that things will never return to how they used to be.
They don’t understand that things will never return to how they used to be.
They also fail to understand how much worse things are going to get from here before they even marginally get better again.
Our aging infrastructure simply won’t end up having enough resources to be shored up to modern standards, and a lot of the country will start living with rolling blackouts and power for only short stretches in the day as that will end up being the only amount of power the failing grid can support without burning cities down. This will be exacerbated quickly by AI buildout.
The blackouts can also double as a way to censor the internet, adding new controls to the networks while power is down for everyone else, and when things come back online, it’s more and more tightly controlled.
A few years ago I saw a very old logging truck filled with logs stuck in the middle of a small city street for two days while it got repaired so it could be moved. Just wait until half of our roads are clogged with dead vehicles that we no longer have the resources or tools to move because all other big industrial vehicles have broken down as well. How long before every street is littered with dead vehicles we can no longer afford to move and Americans are forced into walking and cycling to get around them since major arterial roads may not be completely blocked.
Food will be scarce and costly, we don’t have a rural landowning population that can grow their own food anymore, especially as a lot of private land has been poisoned and isn’t fit to grow food on. Hell, if you have an old septic tank, you have to be sure you know exactly where it is and plant food well away from it, if you even have the room since those things can take up a lot of space underground.
Further, when septic tanks, sewers, and water systems fail to be maintained, we may have to resort to old style outhouses, which will further poison towns and cities until it becomes a massive public health hazard that nothing will be done about because our country is too broke. Laws that prevent citizens from collecting rainwater will be increasingly seen as draconian since rainfall will be one of the few (relatively) sources of clean water available, and even after collection it needs purifying with boiling and a small amount of bleach.
As an American, it’s not that uncommon for people here to think America is in decline. The corpo media and most politicians will never admit it, but there is no metric in which average citizen does not see things getting worse.
The main difference is that most Americans lack the global perspective to realize how serious and permanent this decline is. They don’t understand that things will never return to how they used to be.
They also fail to understand how much worse things are going to get from here before they even marginally get better again.
Our aging infrastructure simply won’t end up having enough resources to be shored up to modern standards, and a lot of the country will start living with rolling blackouts and power for only short stretches in the day as that will end up being the only amount of power the failing grid can support without burning cities down. This will be exacerbated quickly by AI buildout.
The blackouts can also double as a way to censor the internet, adding new controls to the networks while power is down for everyone else, and when things come back online, it’s more and more tightly controlled.
A few years ago I saw a very old logging truck filled with logs stuck in the middle of a small city street for two days while it got repaired so it could be moved. Just wait until half of our roads are clogged with dead vehicles that we no longer have the resources or tools to move because all other big industrial vehicles have broken down as well. How long before every street is littered with dead vehicles we can no longer afford to move and Americans are forced into walking and cycling to get around them since major arterial roads may not be completely blocked.
Food will be scarce and costly, we don’t have a rural landowning population that can grow their own food anymore, especially as a lot of private land has been poisoned and isn’t fit to grow food on. Hell, if you have an old septic tank, you have to be sure you know exactly where it is and plant food well away from it, if you even have the room since those things can take up a lot of space underground.
Further, when septic tanks, sewers, and water systems fail to be maintained, we may have to resort to old style outhouses, which will further poison towns and cities until it becomes a massive public health hazard that nothing will be done about because our country is too broke. Laws that prevent citizens from collecting rainwater will be increasingly seen as draconian since rainfall will be one of the few (relatively) sources of clean water available, and even after collection it needs purifying with boiling and a small amount of bleach.
We are so deeply and absolutely fucked.