Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton. Happy New Year,26, the last year.

What do you think people 100 years from now will think about the time we're living in?

Actually, let's go a bit further.

Let's say 500 years from now.

In five centuries, assuming we aren't decimated by nuclear war or that hive mine virus from

pluribus, how are people apt to look at the time that you and I are living in?

I think, far in the distant future, when people consider our era, they'll have two general

impressions. First, that of incredible technological progress and

profound change. In a single generation, we went from landline phones to instantaneous global

communication, mostly used for twerking videos on TikTok, but still. And now, AI, large language models. Everyone in America just

got their own personal assistant who lives in their phone next to their twerking videos.

Huge profound changes altering and hopefully elevating the scope of civilization, much like the invention of the printing press,

possibly as significant as the invention of writing itself. Imagine visiting that time,

but also an era which was very alienated and lonely.

The social desert between the old epic of physical, rooted community, church, marriage and kids, clubs, and institutions,

and whatever cyborg utopia we eventually wind up in, the in-between, when we drifted out

of upteen millennia of meat space civilization, but had not yet developed coping methods

or new institutions to accommodate our needs as a hyper-social species newly adrift in an atomized

remote digital world. Physical social events giving way to ambient digital contact.

According to the American time use survey, face-to-face socializing has plummeted over the last 20 years.

From 2003, the year I graduated high school, to 2022, the year I learned not to mix scotch with back pain medication,

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