New America

I have been thinking about the future of life a lot this week, with a new optimism. This year may go down as the great turning point where we as human beings began to turn the corner from a Type 0 Civilization to a Type 1 Civilization. These are terms tossed around by Michio Kaku, the famous string field theorist. A Type 0’s technology feeds off a dying planet (coal, oil) while a Type 1 encompasses the whole planet and draws energy from a living star.

In America, in particular, I feel like this year may prove crucial to the future. Gas prices and energy costs are skyrocketing, and the media won’t let us forget what our pocketbooks won’t let us ignore. (I think everybody has a pocketbook of sorts, including men.) At the same time, the price tag for information is shrinking rapidly. Within a year or two, one hundred dollars will buy enough memory to hold the sum content of what most Americans store in memory. Music and video will be not be cost free. The time it takes to watch targeted advertisements is consumer currency. Time is money.

There was an interesting sidebar in the New York Times magazine discussing the fate of same-sex marriage in California. On the ballot in that state this election year will be a referendum. The NYT magazine questioned why straights would choose to ratify same-sex marriage when its hard to see any incentive for them to do so. This is kind of backwards thinking: in the new American economy, where citizens chafe tax rate hikes, oil is the single priciest commodity, and price-free media offsets the high energy costs… any way to increase government revenue through new solutions will be embraced.

States that choose to allow gay marriage will benefit from the new tax money this generates. In a tightly budgeted near-future, that may be crucial enough to blind bigots. Bolder solutions still, like the decriminalization and eventual taxation of marijuana, may already be inevitable. Back to California again, that state taxes “medical marijuana” sales at 8 percent, and the state revenue this generates is approximately one billion new dollars for Californians. The residents have an incentive to demand this continues; other states will be quick to follow.

Another benefit of regulating marijuana is that non-regulated, sometimes violent street dealers have disappeared in the state. Its not the kind of solution that I think a Republican would embrace in the near-future, because that party seems to use denial to stretch out Americans’ suffering so that it is most profitable for the biggest corporations. But the near-future does not look like it will belong in the hands of a Republican anyway. We in America, for the historic first time, have elected a black man as the nominee for the more liberal of our two major political parties.

He has a better than average chance of winning.