Up till 1950 or so, technology was on a centralizing arc. Think mass media and mass production. During this era, the West’s cultural individualism balanced out technological centralization. By contrast, when combined with technological centralization, the Eastern culture of collectivism empirically produced Maoist tyranny. But times change. Now we’re in a decentralizing era for tech. Think smartphones, cryptocurrency, and local AI models. Today, the Eastern culture of collectivism seemingly balances the decentralization of the Internet. Whereas the Western culture of individualism apparently combines with it to produce digital anarchy. Hence the cacophony we see in person, and online, every day. There are various possible answers for this issue, new syntheses of West and East, of individual rights and collective responsibilities, where one might consensually opt in to constraints. But first one would have to acknowledge that cultural change *might* be worth contemplating in the face of technological change. Or one could simply assert that culture never needs to change, as if the culture of the hunter/gatherer or medieval knight is exactly applicable to our modern era…(Balaji)