Is this a noteworthy event? Well, is
it!?! I don't know. Being interested (or uninterested) in royals
seems entirely arbitrary. Really, they are just someone else's
family and they're rich. But not so rich that it is obscene and
therefore worth rubbernecking. They are an old family with old homes
and traditions and such. However, imho the best that could be said
about them is that they let go of power and kept all their stuff.
However, considering the personal hazard which comes with being a
celebrity in the modern era maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
We live in an era with a lot of
problems but it is likely that people living in every era have
thought the same. Do wolves have an existential crisis when it
becomes difficult to catch deer? Do they blame other wolves for
catching too many deer? Do they research how much protein they could
obtain by eating insects instead? Wolves survive or don't without
much hand-wringing, which from my vantage point seems wonderfully
simpler.
I think it is to our detriment that
power must disguise it's raw brutality. Democracy was created to put
checks on power and confront its arbitrariness but it really just
pushed it out of sight. Now we have a system where the powerful
spend a lot of effort ensuring lies are truths because no
matter what, they're going to get what they want. What else do you
do with power?
It is disconcerting living in this time
of radical changes in communication. The world of the 20th
century was one where power could much more efficiently control what
ideas were mainstream. When you owned newspapers and tv and
therefore had a say about who got promoted in those industries it was
your prerogative. Now, with the internet, a lot more ideas are on the
table. For better and for worse.
This shows the
inherent weakness in power. For all their think-tanks they weren't
able to foresee what the unintended consequences of the technological
revolution would be. The publicly funded US defence department
developed the internet to prevent an attack at one location from
disabling their entire nuclear arsenal. The most important design
goal was robustness. This technology was transferred to the private
domain for business to profit from (well played power) and led to our internet of today
which is difficult to control (oops!) Technically, it would have been
possible to create an internet which fit nicely into our existing
top-down, hierarchical media model if that had been the goal from the
beginning, sadly the cat's out of the bag.
This hasn't improved the lot of most
people because power has simply shifted to the new mandarins; apple,
google, facebook. But we can be assured that these organizations
will also, eventually, fail to read the tea leaves correctly and fall
from their lofty towers. And when they do, I'm sure we won't be
interested in the fact that their descendants are visiting Canada.
So bravo royals, way to maintain the ability to go nowhere without
everyone looking and pointing.
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