What Era are We Living within?

I remember when I became aware of an important social phenomenom: the specifics of trade, and how the majority trades, and how your trade, influence your "level" in society. In the Agrian (Direct/Small-Scale Farming) Era, most people maintained farms, in order to sustain themselves and their families... with improvements in farming technology, more time was freed up, and more organisation was put to food production, leading to food security.

Food security means population security. Long-term plans. Social security. You can no do things like build the Great Wall of China over several hundred years, or many, many generations. A society can't really afford the time and effort for engineering if they have inconsistent food production, and most people under-fed.

It occured to me, as we were studying steam power and how it affected the Industrial Revolution in England, and thus, worldwide, that China had the same technology, even earlier, but refused to use it en mass because they were already trying to increase gainful employment/size of work-force, and having machines doing most of the world would be against the goals of the state at that time. I actually saw this issued discussed explictly in a kung-fu movie set back in that time period (sorry, I don't know the proper name for it, I really didn't do history for very long in school), I think it was one of the Wong Fei Long series starting Jet Li.

Anyhow, we have all sorts of social-changing technology now, from nuclear power to electronic voting machines to sex toys to videogames. How each technology is used depends more on social concerns than on pure functionaltiy.

For example, several countries oppose nuclear power, because of the perceived danger: disposal of necessary waste, and the risk of a "meltdown" like Chernobol(sp?)/Wormwood. Other countries oppose nuclear power, not for themselves, but for others, since they fear it could lead those other countries to possess nuclear weapons. The chief concern is never a cost-benefit analysis as you'd expect in a truly captialist, commerical-interest-comes-first society.

It is not that democracy reigns, either... it is that the ruling class feeds the public the "slanted truth" and the public resonates it. Because the mainstream way of trade when it comes to information is to comply with a few assumptions:

1. they're good and bad(evil) options
2. we are chosing the good ones
3. we live in a democracy because of voting

These are all "memes" in the true sense of the word: they're mental genes, and they influence perception and thus behaviour. For example, because of #3, the repositioning of the US as a "police state" is seen as impossible by most people, and even those who have experienced the reality of the changes which have already taken place lack the vocabulary, or perhaps, will, to discuss it, since everyone "knows" that democracy = freedom.

Anyhow, I got off-track. I think this era that we live in is a combination of commercial and social (Sociocommercial?). It has the legacy of even the industrial era, with factories still mass-producing things, but with a class of "time-rich" people already widely in evidence, due to affluent parents, part-time jobs, being in the education system, or even having been laid off but not in a rush to find new jobs.... and a lot of these time-rich people are doing things largely for social, rather than commercial reasons (like me and this blog).

Yet, we can't discount commercial reasons or influences. A lot of out culture and development comes from sources which we would never even be aware of, if not for the commercial motive. For example, "keyeske - see his youtube channel" mentioned that Persona influenced him a lot - see his youtube vid where he says this -, and I find the roots in Jungian Psycology to have helped encourage my interest in formal study of the subject (whereas, before, I viewed all formal study as a giant waste of time).

Well, Persona was and is a commercial product. In fact, the reason why the Snow Queen story was removed (and the Ambrosia quest by extention, together totally about 60% of the videogame), was due to "commercial constraints": there wasn't enough time-money to make the full game available for the launch window. Since Atlus US seems... sorta anemic when it comes to initiative, it's unlikely that they would have taught of later releasing the full version, plus some improvements... like how Atlus JPN did with P3 and P3:FES (upgrade and dual), thus driving Atlus US to relase P3:FES (based on the dual JPN edition, which includes an enhanced P3 and the additional FES story).

I should mention, though, that not everyone is living in the same era. The word "ghetto" was used during Nazi oppression of Jews to describe the seggregated areas where Jews were forced to lived in order to stagnate their economic power whilst awaiting execution; although potrayed as somewhat kool places where rap artists are born, or something, areas called ghettos nowadays have similar effects: economic depression, and shortened life-span (although, not necessarily by Nazis). Although, I can't fully appreciate that since I life in a bizarre place.

Moving further, they're people who don't even have access to running water. They have to walk miles each day just to get water rations. And, forget about electricity.

I can hardly imagine what that must be like, but you hear about that and then about the fact that there's a growing housing crisis which will displace 2/3 of the population of the world within a generation, and you get the feeling that we've already passed the "peak point" of success, and us who are fortunate to have running water, electricity, and access to education (not necessarily formal; self-study works, esp. with e-book and other ways of getting access to knowledge) have almost an obligation to solve some of the world's problems... no only because it is "right", but moreso because it is commercially smart.

Hanging around playing aimlessly whilst people live below a basic standard of living was tried before, a little thing called the French Revolution resulted and serves as one of the sharpest and most famous reminders that, as leaders, and forunate people, we need to also have "social responsibility", and also, a commercial mind, or else, the very fabric of society will collapse.

Well, I didn't expect to write all of this... but after reading the article about FF7 as a refection of Japanese society, by kotowari, I guess I sorta got off on an inspired tangent.

Also, there's a brief article on that same site about P1 (Persona 1, "Revelations: Persona".