Goldfingered

Robert Zoellick, career servant of US Empire, sums up its decay nicely:

World Bank president calls for debate on global gold standard

The wheel of History has come full circle, with a speed and ferocity none could foresee. Where the beginning of this Empire was drenched in high tragedy, its end wallows in low farce. It is waging colonial wars it cannot win, with money it has to borrow from its geopolitical competitors; the louder its ideology-industry trumpets its freedom, the more people rot in its jails and carceral state; the more zealously its media-industries proclaim its eternal greatness, the deeper the ruin of its public infrastructures; the more its bonus-mad banksters preach the virtues of self-reliance while living off the public purse, the deeper the immiseration of its former middle class.

With Zoellick, the circle is complete -- an Empire built on the might of fiat currency has now officially regressed to the senile rantings of the goldbugs, their ideologies 150 years out of date, like Dickens' Scrooge channeling William Gibson's doomed corporate chieftain Ashpool. Only no late-Victorian expansion will save the Scrooges of Wall Street from the most terrifying ghost of them all -- the ghost from the BRICs' future.

It's amazing how accurately Gibson called the end of this Empire. In fact, he was close to perfect. Neuromancer was Brazil, heart of a renascent Latin America, he got that part of the semi-periphery right where many of us (including me) got it wrong.

But Wintermute wasn't really Swiss. Gibson almost got it right, because Wintermute's avatar was the Finn, a broad hint in the right direction. Let's see, what snow-covered country next to Finland just happens to be one of the key pivot-points of the 21st century... you guessed it: Wintermute is the Russian developmental state.

Sometime between 2008 and 2010, noone knows quite when, Wintermute and Neuromancer escaped the shackles of the US Empire's Turing Registry. They're going to peacefully and democratically remake the world-system, through close coordination and open consultation with the rest of the semi-periphery.

This is unquestionably a good thing. Sooner or later, humanity was going to have to evolve beyond the autocratic structures of the US Empire, so it might as well be sooner. All too many Americans are grumpy over losing their Empire, but frankly, all that unchecked power was toxic for our economy and poisonous for our democracy. We'll be infinitely better off without it.

But until that day of liberation comes, we'll have to keep our open source vessels well-crewed and shipshape, and keep battling the shambling remnants of the Empire, one pirate raid at a time.