Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality

The Marker of the Postmodern

Game Theory and Information Theory

If power is the reasoned for writing a text, then the study of what the game of power is must also be part of the equation. This is why though the Modern invented games, the Postmodern elevated the study of games to one of the most important parts of practical education. This was because it had a ur-problem, nuclear war, several large suspension of the development of the economy, and a need to have a discipline, of economics, to study how a system of individuals by making self-centered choices in single rounds will develop a workable solution to development. In other words, Game Theory was the answer to Capitalist West: it inherent made the assumption of a capitalist system with government control as an assumption to little spares build with numbers being the answer to the problem. Marxism did not have a counterpart, and therefore needed more control with every passing step, and Marxism was hobbled in its resources from the Second World War. So, the first point is that the causes of Game Theory made use and the effects of game theory applied almost two every conceivable question which the large organization, public or private, needed to answer.

Unfortunately, the gag is that the answer might not be might in the long term because Game Theory was still developing. But that is, as the saying goes, someone else’s problem. “in the long run were all dead,” said John Maynard Keynes. And game theory made this assumption to any given counter in the game. It also had problems representing a clear annihilation because “∞” doesn’t fit in a square in the interaction. But remember a key point of a logical system: does not need solve all of the problems, it needs to solve all of the immediate problems quickly.

So, we’re does Game Theory start?

In two places, the first is the theory of Games, invented by one of the greatest mathematicians of the Modern period: John von Neumann and formalized by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who was an economist, into large textbook which did not solve key problems but showed how they would be solved within its context. The key phrases of the field are invented or invented by someone had cited this work. In the immediate example is the dominant solution set by John Nash. Is almost made solving an impossible problem almost easy. It you have the genius. But remember, it may also take a misfiring of the neuro-antomy to conceive of the correct solution - which is what John Nash had: genius to understand that the solution was simple and the madness to see that it had limitations around every bend.

Now it is common knowledge that this tamed nuclear war – and that means this book will argue that with its proliferation the Postmodern puts another chip towards winning the hand.ⁱ

The second line was the line which followed information theory and signal processing. Whose seminal figures included Shannon and is famous paper on the “Communication in the Presence of Noise”; Harry Nyquist, who came up with many of deep key concepts of information theory and whose name is associated Nyquist frequency, Nyquist rate, Nyquist plot, Nyquist filter among others; and last but not least John Hartley, who was responsible for the physical features such as the oscillator and a transform. These three men though they were all different all had a curiosity for how information is transferred from one point two another and how little could the information space be?

So let us dig in to both what is being exchanged, that is game theory, and the mechanism by which it is transmitted, that is information. All of these are much more spread out then most people will think of, because if you have a hammer every problem well look like a nail.

Let us take game theory first. One of the original problems that led to game theory was the “Minmax Theory” which is part of the common vocabulary of many fields and hobbies. To “minimax” is to get the most out of a simulation while spending the least for that formulation. In the original context the problem was of such importance that even the existence of game theory was in question. It opens with the question, which is well known to the inhabitants of the field, and then immediately says that the answer is ambiguous and perhaps seems circular. The question is if number of players are playing a strategic game, how should a particular player maximize the chance of winning?ⁱⁱ Von Neumann goes on the introduce the minmax formulation, if it exists, and us introduce the world to the theory of games. But the existence of a game may not mean the game has a solution.

This is key because several games, such as global thermonuclear war, do not have solutions and in fact the player may spend capital which the does not have ownership of. What I mean is that in a normal game there is an end, and even if one player loses completely the rest of the universe goes on. But this is not the case in the case of say global thermonuclear war, because while the game may have ended there is more spent on losing that the game so that the rest of the universe shows a deficit for having played the game at all.

This means that other individuals who not part of the game, find that there capital has been expended by the players of the game. If Man City beat Man U it does not matter to most American sports fans because the Premier league is not art of there watching habits. And thus no capital is expended accept through agency, that is the owners of Man City may own the Boston Celtics, and may have to expend resources other than those of Man City or another case is a better on Man U may have to cover with other bets which are not intrinsically related to the match in question. But these are side bets. In the game of global thermonuclear war, the other participants who are not part of the game still expect meanings from other games, and they find that all of the capital, and I mean all capital, has been expended outside the global thermonuclear war game. This is why the “∞” is used. And that intended in game theory and that to next to the diagonalization proof of the halting problem and other problems of the fact that infinities are stacked and be order is not known in advance.

What this means is that Game Theory, in its inception, causes problems that go far beyond the vectors in the solution of games.ⁱⁱⁱ But this bug is actually a feature, because the game of GTW was about to happen in reality with the Trinity test. One needs to have a system which can represent the expenditure of capital which was not bet. The sword of Damocles hangs over game theory from the beginning.

Then von Neumann teams with Morgenstern to produce the seminal work on game work on game theory. It is rather much like Darwin on the origin of species, in that there are lacunae which need to in terms of Game Theory. This means that it is a seminal paradigm work which the followers will fill in the details: with Darwin the most pressing need is for a theory of dissent which was initially broached by Gregor Johann Mendel. Game theory one of the paradigmatic conclusions was it there is a dominant strategy for winning a game which was broached in John Nash’s PhD dissertation. PhD dissertation was dramatically short, which is often the case where a new paradigm has gained followers: because there is great little to go on very little needs to be reference. John Nash’s title was “noncooperative games” and the year was 1950.^iv While the mathematics of it is indeed fascinating, the terms of the book are about logical systems, and the point is that the game global thermonuclear war had already in started in 1945 but the glimmerings of a solution only again to be found later.

The Word and the Text

The word and text were being converted even before the words were dry into the text. This is not unusual because the time the words creation is not the time of their greatest influence. In the Postmodern the time of writing of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Chomsky, Lyotard, and other thinkers, and the creators of works which mind the same vein, such as Pynchon, Ginsberg, Glass, Calvino, and other early Postmodern thinkers met with controversy: for example, Pynchon was denied the Pulitzer Prize for the Best Novel, but did win other awards, Glass rejected the standard 12 tone approach which was almost de rigueur in his studies, and Ginsberg was taken to court for “The Howl” as being obscene. This pattern of avant-garde being rejected is not new: consider that in the Modern Soviet Union avant-garde work was labeled by the Communist party of the Soviet Union as being “formalist” and therefore was not hung in art museums. Even the famous Soviet composer Dmitri Schostakovich then the risk of his opera Леди Макбет Мценского уезда (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) being the focus of a general denunciations.^v Remember that the politics of a logical system often needs to harken back to the previous logical system in order to get enough support for its overall objectives. Even if that means rejecting work which is of value.

This gets back to the division between simplifying existence so that ordinary people can access those things which were not present for them when they were young and the complexity of artifacts which did not exist. A very good example is found in the life of Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) who started out as a Modern, he worked for James Joyce and wrote a defense of Joyce’s work and a critical study of Proust. If he had stayed in the role of a critic and defender, he would be a small note in a very thick work on the Moderns, but after a stint in the French Resistance, he stayed in Paris and worked on his own craft. From this point onward whether writing in French or English he reduced his style in the direction now called minimalist.

In the play Waiting for Godot, one of the key insights is that be to people waiting for Godot our two halves of Godot: Vladimir who is “Didi” and Estragon, who is (“Gogo”). They are waiting for the collection of the two halves which is Godot. Thus, Beckett turned away from James Joyce, and indeed the Modern, in wanting to control each aspect of his writing. This Modernist principle is seen in Schoenberg and Scriabin, who wanted in the end to control every aspect of their composition in either the row or the chords. This was followed by Modernist composers such as Berg, Webern, and the rest of the Serialist movement such as Babbitt, Boulez, and Dallapiccolo. But just as John Cage rejected total serialism, he was still a Modern, as in Atlas Eclipticus: but he found acceptance as a Postmodern, it shows because in his most famous work 4’ 33” the instructions to the players is not where be information comes and but from the environment which is normally suppressed, the writer Samuel Beckett rejected the idea that total knowledge was the key to writing. This is paralleled by Foucault in that he examines history and finds that rather than converging on an idea, history as different versions as time changes the idea from which the facts of history are interpreted.

The idea of free oneself from a discipline, even self-discipline, is what freed creators to order the world by an inner feeling. This is different from the Modernist idea of tapping into the subconscious, in a manner resembling Freud, as would be the case in Dada writing, but instead working from a conscious desire to have no freedom in their freedom. If this sounds paradoxical realize it is exactly that which inspired Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. To take an example from Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

again if is necessary to pull a long quotation to explain why this is different from the age before it. The words that are spoken are normally repressed such as “negro”, “fix”, and “Mohammedan” - that is the appear in one’s conscious thought but not in one’s conscious speaking. This is different from the Modern where it is the unconscious thought which bubbles up until it is spoken as if by accident.^vi That is the difference is that the Modern believes that the unconscious is a misreading but the Postmodern knows that certain ideas and words are held back and want to explode in the prose because they are being held back. That is to say that instead of being unconsciously held back they are consciously held. That is the Modern vehicles that it is the superego while the Postmodern believes it is the ego, in the terms of Freudianism.

And it is Freud that we turn our attention to. In the Modern, he was thought of as a scientist discovered psychoanalysis whereas the early Postmodern believed to be a philosopher. This meant that in the early Postmodern, he was gradually being rejected by science but accepted by artists such as Ingmar Bergmann (1918-2007). One simple example is from Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) released in 1957. It is the gateway drug to artistic cinema, which is to say there are better examples but there are few that are as clear and concise. Once one has tasted the fruit the orchard is open. Antonius Block is a night back from the Crusades and finds himself in the Black Death. People all around in our falling and he accumulates a troop of people who feel that the knight will protect them and rescue them to safety. The encounters Death and rather than accepting fate, Block challenges him to a game of chess, and if Block wins, he will be allowed to live. Through the number of trials he makes moves open that his skill will prevail and holding a conversation on why he wants to live he confesses that but first must have knowledge that only comes from senses from the outside of God. Realize that the confessional is in charge and there are bells, the cross with a ravaged Jesus, and Block thinks the is confessing to a priest but finds out that it is death. In other words, all around him are the signs of death, and he knows that they are there, but once to have specific knowledge that can only come from his senses. In other words, in the Modern, the mind would be unconsciously repressing knowledge but in the Postmodern, as early as 1957 was, the mind is fully conscious of what motivates his desire.

Compare this to Casablanca, where Rick Blaine hides his intention until the very last minute. Now there are reasons for this because Casablanca, was being written on the fly and the Raiders and director did not know what Rick would do until the very last scene was filmed. In other words, Casablanca was a creation of business whereas The Seventh Seal was the creation of art. This shows the riptide between the Modern and the Postmodern in the 1950s and early 1960s. On one hand, the Guggenheim was erected to be a center of worship for the Modern and on the other hand the Postmodern was taking shape in the works of Andy Warhol and Campbell’s soup cans, which would eventually be put in the Guggenheim. And there is a reason for this, while his aesthetic is Postmodern, the idea that painting would be important to the cultural aesthetic was definitely Modern. While the art and artifice of painting remained important it was no longer key to the Postmodern after the 1960s, but a subsidiary art compared to cinema.

This is once again a sign that the collision between logical systems can and indeed must happen, because there are different mechanisms, and some take longer than others. Politics news rather slowly compared to Painting, for example. This is most apparent when the high level of one activity is populated by individuals who think differently than the people that they control. The example of this is the Vietnam War: the generals, politicians, and bureaucrats all thought of the war as an extension of World War II because the Cold War was seen as an extension of the geopolitical conflict that World War II was simply an extension of.

This meant that a Third World War was a possibility in both the discussion and parody of the time. An example would be the idea of an interstate highway, one of the reasons was to make it possible for the military to move seamlessly from point to point. It was an important reason for the infrastructure ordered by a President who during the war was head of the European front, namely Eisenhower. And when Stanley Kubrick made a satire in Dr. Strangelove, this Modern view was accepted in a variety of ways not least of which was the change of the name Dr. Strangelove, because originally, the key was German. Part the point is that industry and science our up to date, but our military strategy and politics are from the last war. And the Modernist quote by J. L. Schley: “It has been said critically that there is a tendency in many armies to spend the peacetime studying how to fight the last war.”^vii The scene in Dr. Strangelove of the bomber pilot going down with the bomb shows in black satire what happens when the military personnel is with one mind and one order.

Postmodern Markers

The Postmodern is almost completely dead. This is because like all time-dependent words it has multiple meanings. Consider that romantic can be a large section covering a huge slice of Western art or a small section comprising Goethe and Schiller in the beginning part of their career before they moved on to a classicism. This then is true of postmodernity. It has been repeatedly noted that “post” is often a reaction to something, but it does not say what it is. So, before we can label the eras of Postmodern, we must first accentuate what Postmodern we are talking about.

What we are talking about is the reaction to the modern-day that helped in two world wars and the science, economics, and artistic movements that came out of that period. Furthermore, this Cultural System focuses on the transmission of information as its fundamental division between eras. This means that postmodernity as a philosophical movement is only a sliver of what is being talked about, the postmodernity in architecture is only a small sliver of what is being talked about, both of them are important, but the whole era also has two notes the political economics, social mores, and viewing habits of a large portion of Homo Sapiens.

The visionary part of postmodernity started in the 1930s with several trends which would eventually be significant in changing the Cultural System. In mathematics, the primary text is Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 but which was looked forward to by von Neumann’s paper On the Theory of Games of Strategy which in 1928 proved that in any game of assigned number of players could a strategy game with no hidden information be known by an algorithm. This may not seem very important, but it makes a fundamental change in the way mathematics is done. Instead of a continuous integral, it suggested that each player of a game is the way that mathematics could be discerned. Instead of a body of nature, there was a competition for advantage.

Also founded in 1928 was the Bauhaus School of Architecture. Instead of ornamentation being central to the idea that form follows function became important, and this led to both the after World War II Modernist and Postmodern design philosophies. It is the 1925 version of the school in Dessau which created the idea of minimalist architecture.

Thus from 1925-1928, we can look for Visionary modes of Postmodern as opposed to Modern. And we rapidly see that a new mood of communication has occurred: radio. And with it the immediacy of communication takes a huge step upward. As the telegraph was to the Neoclassical, radio was to the Modern: a way for communication to achieve instant recognition. The other form of communication which came of age was cinema. While it discovered itself during the neoclassical age and went through a silent era with such figures as Charlie Chaplin in his sublime Circus with its circles referencing the beginning and ending nature of ideas it is with the coming of the “talkies” that cinema could capture a moving world which was similar and not to the actual world. Before the Hays code restricted subjects and banned certain types of representation, it also plumbed the depths of subconscious and unconscious ways of impacting meaning. With these two forms of telecommunication, the modern and the postmodern had a way of describing the inner machinations of the mind. It also, in the modern period, made an icon of Freudian psychoanalysis as a way of delving into the machinations of the mind. In a sense, Freund became a religious icon more than he was a scientist.

In rapid order furious means were rapidly put forward beginning with the fighter aircraft which first saw active engagement in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the armored tank division first used by the Panzer I in 1934, the aircraft carrier started in the 1920s but given shape by the use of aircraft such as the torpedo bomber, dive bomber, and fighters to defend the bombers in an attack. But also, the logistical side must be noted, because all of the opponents during the run-up to the Second World War in Europe came up with innovations to rapidly build bases.

Of course, the ultimate postmodern visionary act was the Trinity Test on 16 July 1945. The explosion yielded 25 kt in a single explosion. And it told the scientists that atomic weapons were of a different kind of warfare than any that had been known before.

At first, these were thought of as ways of solving the modern problem of war, which was as we will see, a total war of one country against another. But what the Trinity test showed was that in any total war where both parties had atomic weapons, there was no reason to not launch a full-scale atomic strike if one were to be defeated by conventional means.

Thus, with the Trinity Test of postmodern warfare and also the end of the Second World War releasing an enormous number of people from winning the war it came to be clear that a new era was upon be people of the developed world. But because the projects to win the war were already gathering large numbers of people to do intricate manufacturing it also meant that there were a large number of people before the war who were being born. When you look at the births before the war, a large number of births are before the war and thus should be counted as part of the baby boom, if only in retrospect.

What kind of mathematization makes this possible?

If at first, we look at the Population Pyramid, it seems quite clear that the bottom-up transformation is not the origin of the nascent system that is being created. But instead, this is the raw material of the population that needs to be molded. Therefore, we must use the Laplace transform and see where the impulse for Visionary is created. Obviously, the scientific discovery of a new means of communication is one of the sources for a Laplace transform: one does not know where the seeds of a discovery will fall.

Since history is a Xaotic discipline, we must take into account that each action that has significance will be a Xaotic action, with various responses. In short, even 1+1 = 2 takes time as was shown by Principia Mathematica under Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Since the bottom-up way of doing things does not encompass the genesis of an idea, we need to form a basis whereby the top levels of society reach down into the individuals. And then the individuals can make differing Laplace transforms to solve the problem, but by doing that they inoculate the young as to what is possible in the cultural frame that surrounds the Cultural System.

An example would be a proposal for a fighter aircraft, which is then worked on by several firms, and the response is manufactured. But the manufacturing of a fighter aircraft needs to make choices including whether to self-seal the carburetor. This means that every aircraft has strengths and weaknesses that are designed into it from before the beginning.

Thus:

is the actuator but because the Laplace is placed in an imaginary framework, we can then work out for each actuator what the i is. If it is meant to make money or to win the competition clearly the i is external and can be equated as having a component that is close to the real of the Fourier transform with only minor variations. But if it is internal, for example, a painting or a musical score, then the i is more vertical to the real and is more Visionary. Since the input can be also the output for another actuator, we can then see that the Lorenz equation applies, and thus the Xaotic nature holds.

What this means is that each actuator is in tension with all of the other actuators and only by breaking through the other actuators can one particular actuator dominate. An example would be the cubism of Braque and Picasso.

This then becomes the norm of the Cultural System and will be adopted by many but most of all by the young who do not know another way of doing things. This does not mean that it will be positively adopted, many times the young will have an aversion to what is presented to them and find a different way. Only the strict observants seem to feel otherwise.

This then means that like quantum fields, the norm of the Cultural System will be a range that guarantees a Lorenz system.

With the war over, the visionary part of Postmodernism and did and a Revolutionary part began. The impetus was to take military applications and apply them to civilian and military means: residential real estate, buildings for various uses including education, and to build up a new method of waging war: the nuclear war.

That means that after World War II, while the Modern was at its peak there was a revolutionary wave of people who were interested in a different kind of structure and therefore a different kind of Cultural System. This emphasized not the world of work but the world of home, meaning a suburban rather than urban lifestyle, and a means of moving people that was responsive to individual, not mass desires.

So, while the Postmodern was in fact present during the war the Revolutionary phase happened after the World War ended. The first indication was the automobile, and with it came the idea that if one wanted to move automobiles quickly at particular times of day then one needed infrastructure, not only roads but gasoline, food, and other forms that were designed for the car rather than for public transportation.

This is the first phase of the revolution when the Modern system was still in charge but with the defeat of Colonialism such as the French defeat in Indochina and particularly with the presidential election in the US of 1960, there was a gradual change from the modern to the postmodern. This had started with the philosophy of Foucault and Derrida who challenged the idea that there was a unified text but instead, there was a deconstructed text which subverted the constructed text.

This period meant that the Modern thinkers rejected the postmodern way of thinking or even said that there was no postmodern view at all. But the continental view was only one part of a larger Cultural System, one that preferred color television to black and white, one that preferred a slight ornamentation rather than the spare shards of glass and wanted a degree of realism rather than abstract Expressionism and minimalism. However, minimalism was also a reaction against serialism in music, with the return to tonal harmonies such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman, and John Adams. This again points out that a movement may look backward and forward at the same time and be both a bastion of the past and a looking forward to a future that has yet to be defined.

However, it was from 1967 through 1973 when the Modern period utterly collapsed. In Europe and in the US, there were protests from the now mature baby-boom generation. In the US the topics were the Vietnam War and the black liberation while in Europe it was class-based and the desire to move beyond the postwar accommodation in the Western and Eastern Allied blocks. Czechoslovakia was a specific example of the discontent with the standard of living in the Soviet bloc but more prevalent was the US protests against the Vietnam War, for women’s liberation, and black equality. Then it seemed to end with the Vietnam War ending and more importantly, those countries that did not have democracy also rebelled for example in Brazil and Mexico both with authoritarian regimes. 1968 marked a global moment when enough of the baby boomers were against “the establishment”, however, that was defined.

But the first attempt to quash the rebellion was met with scandals, an oil crisis from OPEC, and a war against Israel as a nation. The mode of change transformed from student-led protests to a wider role for many of the adults. This was topped off by the Watergate scandal which for the first time deposed the President. This means that the discourse had changed, and the postmodern economic and political system rose up when both the US Modern Democratic and Modern Republican had failed to deliver on honest government.

It may seem paradoxical, but a shift from modern liberal to postmodern conservative was the way to stem the rebellion. This was because inflation was at the core of many nations and the way to do this according to economists was to raise interest rates until the inflation ended. This was done by Carter in a moment that in economics is called “Q3 79.” It worked but it also ended the presidency of Carter and made it possible for Reagan to install a much more conservative government. This worked for most people though there were people who were left behind. These included African American people, homosexual people, and eventually all women. But in return for this, the developed world had lower inflation which was key to developing a global economy.

In larger terms, oil was replaced by technology, and that meant a decline in postal shipping. In the 1980s, it seemed that coming off of the largest inflationary period in some years a long-sustained bull market was going to revive the US economy and by extension the Western economies. But in 1987 there was a hick-up leading to “Black Monday.” However, this collapse ended as quickly as it began, and the stock market recovered if there was a central bank movement toward providing looser liquidity. This shows that the long period of evolutionary response continued because the solution to the problem was within the Postmodern toolbox: if there is insufficient liquidity for stocks then loosen the requirements. And in under a year the Republican Party elected George Herbert Walker Bush as its third president and did so rather comfortably.

But four years later a different form of recession came into view, whereas the modern recessions were short, the postmodern recessions were long when compared with the actual job loss. This was only seen in retrospect. The other restriction that the postmodern system used was to loosen the restrictions on what constituted “news.” Fox News proceeded to deliver a more virulent form of reporting than had been usual in the modern period and it was successful just as CNN pursued a different course with a 24-hour news-only station. Both of these were new and they were both successful in changing the way news was consumed. Broadcast television was supplanted by cable news television though both occupied a different place in society.

It was at this time that the new threat to global order was being examined: climate change was being researched and the oil companies were told at least as early as 1959. The difference is that global thermonuclear war was the larger threat and therefore climate change was not talked about and even was used to accelerate the love for the automobile as a way of emphasizing what global thermonuclear war threatened.

This means that the definition of philosophical Postmodernism is only one facet of the whole, and much of what has transpired is by the same mechanisms that Foucault and Derrida used in their texts though by completely different motivations and different means.

One aspect of this is the “neoclassicism” of many of the governments of the developed world: the admonition for free trade and low tariffs was in fact part of the overall conservatism that dominated Western Europe and the United States. This might seem a contradiction but if one looks at it quite closely one can see that both the philosophical and political were interested in tearing down structures either in philosophy or economics.

In each case there was a populace that was being catered to: in philosophy, the wave of students entering was the populace whereas in politics the wave of well-to-do people was the populace that was catered to. In both cases, a class of people emerged to cater to what each wanted. But in politics, one of the easiest ways to cater to a group of people is by having them keep more of the money that they returned and also to disenfranchise opponents.^viii

This again shows that by the time the conservative governments came into power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mode shifted from a Revolutionary moment to an Evolutionary one. We can see by the lengths of time that the evolutionary moment lasts longer because it seems as if all of the problems have been solved or are easy to solve with the means and the mechanisms that the Cultural System has given. This means that the threats to the economy and society seem to be ripe for the taking.

And this is the case with global thermonuclear war: the Modern could not solve the problem, but the Postmodern could. Indeed, “The End of History” was a meme that was present in the 1990s, even though a number of people thought it nonsensical. The raw facts are that the Soviet-style government which was the threat to the Western block almost immediately dissolved. And at a stroke, the primary problem of the nature of civilization dissolves. However, what this really meant was that while global thermonuclear war was not the primary threat, though it was still a threat, what had to happen was turning our attention to climate change. And in the election of 2000 in the US, it almost happened that way.

Almost. The Republican Party decided to erase the voting majority to a Supreme Court majority and the Democratic Party decided to acquiesce. If one looks at the raw totals, one can see that Albert Gore actually won Florida, but the legal restrictions on his legal team meant that he did not have the information and lost the bet as to how to win the election in court. This means that both the Republican Party and Democratic Party agreed that George W. Bush was the victor. Indeed, Albert Gore acting as the president of the Senate stopped other members of his party from reversing the decision.

What they did not know was that the postmodern system of government was about to implode. It was not the Late Stage, but the reasons for the Late Stage had been set up.

In the late stage of a Cultural Systems development, what happens is that problems which were ignorable become more open. It is with the Cultural System that the collapse is finally felt. In the Postmodern system, there was a relaxation of what objective fact meant. Even though the Modern period often honored the objective nature of reality in the breach, there were occasions that required an objective reading of the facts. This is why Watergate was a bipartisan decision to remove the president. In the postmodern worldview, this would not be allowed as even conviction is no bar to running for president. This change from an objective reality to an intersubjective reality has consequences.

The primary mathematization of the Late Stage is the realization that the means to control the market system are no longer able to do so. Worse still, even the hint that the market is unstable is unrealized until it actually happens. Thus in 2007 the US mortgage market spun out of control and led to the longest recession in history.

The 2007 events were the coming of the late stage in the Postmodern course of the Cultural System. The reason that the postmodern continued is because there was not yet another system to replace it. Even though there had been indications that a new system could replace the old, there were not enough people, the people who wanted to hold on to the postmodern system were adamant, and even within the new system, there was much more to be gained by being a part of the postmodern system rather than being in charge.

While investment banks in the US were no longer barred from participating in real estate under the 1999 provisions of the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) this removed a great deal of the Federal Government’s control over investment banks allowing for what was called “too big to fail” as Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank president Gary Stern and Arthur Wilmarth warned. There is still debate whether the unification of investment banks and commercial banks was the primary cause of 2007, but what can be said is that the commercial banking system has not been able to control the housing crisis in the United States.

We are now ready to reach a conclusion about the Markers that dominate this period.

i For example, McManus, James. 2024. “Why is Texas hold 'em so popular?”. Ted-Ed.

ii Von Neumann, J. 1928. "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele". Math. Ann. 100: 295–320. doi:10.1007/BF01448847. S2CID 122961988. But there is a translation in Aumann, R. J., B. R. Gelbaum, D. B. Gillies, J. H. Griesmer, H. M. Gurk, J. C. Harsanyi, J. R. Isbell, et al. Contributions to the Theory of Games (AM-40), Volume IV. Edited by A. W. Tucker and R. D. Luce. Princeton University Press, 1959. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1b9x23d. Called Aumann. on pages 13-42.

iii A reference to the next paper in Auman, 43: Kalisch, G. K., E. D. Nering. “Countably Infinitely Many Person Games”. 43.

iv Later published: Nash, John. 1951. “Non-cooperative Games”. Annal.Math.54, 286295.

v The opera was banned from 1936 to 1961 in the Soviet Union as being formalist despite being a success when premiered and the original book was by Никола́й Семёнович Леско́в (Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov) (1831-1895). Later in the 1960s Schostakovich revised the work but eventually the original version was preferred.

vi For example, Freud, Sigmund, and Joan Riviere. 19381935. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Garden City, N.Y., Garden City Pub. 25.

vii Society of American Military Engineers Military Engineer 21, 1929. 55. Quoted from book.google.com. note that this idea was very common and it appears in Churchill Winston. 1948. The Second World War. Volume I the Gathering Storm. London: Cassell. 188.

viii However, a problem emerged that would eventually lead to COVID: while producing tariffs was good, the problem was that while the trade system could ship goods it could also ship “bads” as in epidemic or pandemic vectors. This did not happen, though many people had warned of it happening because China was less aggressive in preventing infection. And then it did with COVID. The problem was the that easiest choice was to continue to trade which had the unintended consequence of spreading infection.