Elsewhere, @johncoate pointed us to the yearly tradition of the State of the World online debate on the WELL. This is a long and deep forum thread led by Bruce Sterling (here as @bruces) and Jon Lebkowsky.
I would strongly encourage @Jan, @Richard, @amelia and all our curious POPRebels to check it out and ponder, because this years’s SOTW is a lot about populism. Bruce tackles it especially in posts 5 to 10 (start here). The money quote:
People like to focus their attention on The Donald, because the actual media is in abject collapse, so there’s nothing but demagogic social media and the right-wing TV machine, and The Donald is great
at that. However, this sensibility I’m describing is not merely American or Trumpian, it really is the State of the World. Other nations have more advanced versions of it than Americans do.There used to be certain planetary regions and polities that were markedly different from the rest, but in MMXX, even though everybody claims they’re antiglobal, sovereign and patriotic, everybody’s very the-same.
He then goes on to enumerate: Russia, India, South Africa, Britain, Estonia…
Do you think it is true that anti-global age is more global than globalism? In what sense? Bruce seems to have a sort of economic theory lurking in the background:
Mainstream consumer capitalism is dying, fast and silent and for good, like its shopping malls. There aren’t any “consumers,” there are just oligarchs and the rabble. (post 7).
Thoughts?
(Happy new year to everyone… actually, happy MMXX, to maintain the SOTW way of writing it 
)