She has slowly taken over the world since the 1700s. Who is She? Electricity. This wild bitch lightning that Benjamin Franklin harnessed at the dawn of America -- She is the engine of everything & the patterner of the matrix in which we occur.
We read and live by electric lightning, entertain ourselves with digital screen, telecommunicate around the world, see into Deep Space & the quantum world while we are cooking with electric switches or sharing our hearts "online." The humble telegraph and the electric street-lamp have passed into radio and television and then global internet on portable devices. Almost everything that is done socially and privately in the "post-Industrial" societies is a direct function of the capacies and forms in which physical electro-magnetism is available for usage. The inner tendencies of electricity are writ everywhere in the social world and pervade all electronic media.
There is a regime inside electricity.
When Benjamin Franklin, the author of American Independence, began toying with electrical devices and kites to see if he could "turn lightning on or off" a Republic as born which has dominated international affairs ever since. As this new nation "turned on" the British Mercantile Empire... the greatest resource-and-power machine since Genghis Khan -- stood no chance against them.
Later Tesla & Edison gave America the greatest socio-electric matrix in history. Now people would begin to be raised within spaces and activities directly patterned upon the moves by which electricity is harnessed. There was some resistance from the dying remnants of European and Asian Imperial Nations (Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan) but the most electrical of countries readily dominated. China hunkered; Russia glowered.
After the securing of the Maoist Dynasty in China the decision was made to keep their philosophical principles pure while secretly learning to use all advanced "Western" technologies. Despite their principles the people who learned to use electric tools in the cities became a generation that wanted more education, individualism, free market & internationalism. Some argue that America has drifted toward Socialism and state control since its inception among rowdy pragmatic individualists on the New Frontier. Yet all the while the strong attempts at Socialist State Control were either failing and decaying or slowly drifting toward a more American style. In Europe the hybrid Socialist-Capitalist-Parliamentary-Democracy was doing the same thing... approximating the emerging social organization the is being "unpacked" through usage by us of standard electro-magnetism.
These are the characteristics of the dominant and still-emerging Global Society:
Connectivity, High Speed, Divisiveness, Dislocation, Aurality, Retro (atemporality), Ecological Ethics, Unreality, Liquidity, Triviality, Customization, Medievalism.
Such a world cries out for B.S!
