I really enjoyed this article. For me, I have two main ones. Professionally, it is four freedoms computing and ways to empower people with it. Privately though, since I got out of the military, has been an obsession with geopolitics and geostrategy. You might be surprised how interrelated I increasingly think the two are.
What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me. I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
>What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me.
Yeah, it's just how the lives of billions are organised, changed, and affected, no big matter...
>I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
That's the very theory put forward just before 1914, about how a war in Europe was not possible anymore, because of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" promoting "safety and stable cooperation" between countries. The possibility of war was laughed at as "The big delusion". We know how that turned out.
Then there was the same idea, of the "end of history", with the triumph of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" put forward after the USSR collapsed. We also know how that turned out.
Historically, "economic freedom and classical liberal values" have been very good at war and fierce geopolitics.
For me it just started as trying to understand the why of the Iraq war. I worked my way up the chain from my grunts eye view and kept going up that chain. I think it had a very similar appeal to computers when I was younger, in that I could understand things that most others couldn't, and that was and is a good feeling in a strange way. Combined with a very American upbringing and the fact I swore an oath to the constitution also makes me feel like it is my duty in some way, especially given the kind of insight I have grown into. I started with the question "why", and my eyes didn't really open till I realized I was leaving all the other W's out. This is the obsessive part as referenced in the post, because a part of me wants to let it all go and just focus on trying disrupt society through tech, or art, or something equivalent, but it seems a Sisyphean task I can't let go of.
Not OP, but why not geopolitics? It's like thinking how your village's future will look like, but in a planet level...
For example the Iraq war quagmire has lead to Al-Qaida and ISIS (well, forest fires in Russia also caused grain harvests in Russia to suffer, food prices to go up, and the Arab Spring to happen), this has lead to the refugee crisis in Europe, that combined with austerity has lead to the rise of populism in Europe, and Brexit.
