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  1. Oct 2025
    1. Many experts think it could happen far sooner if we simply continue with the status quo. Looking back from such a vantage point, if anyone will even be able to do that, who then will seem to be the ‘winners’ of history? Will history have made losers of us all? Would the ‘fittest’ have found an exit route, some way to terraform other parts of the solar system, founding colonies on Mars or Venus that resemble Palo Alto, or even Massachusetts?

      This proposition sounds crazy, but not when you consider this is what humans have been doing since the beginning of time. When you go so far into history, the patterns of civilization and society become very apparent, yet maybe not much easier to avoid.

    2. Sometimes, the unfree did this too, against much harder odds. How many, back then, preferred imperial control to non-imperial freedoms? How many were given a choice? How much choice do we have now? It seems nobody really knows the answers to these questions, at least not yet

      This frames the archaeological narrative around tribes, nomads and others not traditionally thought of as being part of a rigid state as not only important for historical understanding, but also as a heavily politicized topic that still has implications in our understanding of freedom today.

    3. It is from such sources that we get, not just our notion of empire as handmaiden to civilisation, but also our contemporary image of life before and beyond empire as being small-scale, chaotic and largely unproductive. In short, everything that is still implied by the word ‘tribal’.

      The author writes that tribal societies were not only written and reconfirmed as 'barbaric' for millenia, but also were thought of largely as not contributing to a larger world order or production despite their often large numbers. He goes into further the effect of ideas of population on this narrative later in the article.