/lit/ - Literature

Doing a reading of ancient greek history right now; I find it interesting that there is, in our contemporary history, a parallel between the traveling merchant citizen mercenaries, aka highly skilled, nomadic, many-sided and "worldly" global people, much like the greek hoplite in the ancient mediterranean and middle east, and the same prostitutes of the polis of the time, and modern "influencers" or cam girls, who despite being worthless in the eyes of most and subject to great shame, have greater freedom over their lives through their prostitution of themselves.

Just like in the old greek world the men who farmed inland were taken advantage of and captured by armies either colonized by or in support of mercenary hoplite greeks, today, skilled programmers, financial analysts / quant people, AI pure math phenoms, and your average company hopping genius also travels the world and subjugates or hires out their talent (for subjugating, I guess think more influencing-- e.g., amazon making cities compete to see which of them will be the site for 40,000 employees to "move in." literally the same following intermixing of different people as in the greek colonization by an oikistes).

And in the same way that in the old greek world most wives were in a situation akin to the inland farming men above, in that in the greek world, only those who married the rich and powerful (i.e., true citizens) got quality of life and more importantly (outside of periclean athens) citizenship in that class (think ivy education, social status, wealth), so too are today's women, even those that pretend to go into the above listed masculine careers, really just gunning for "citizenship" in the global citizenry. And those that choose to not go this route and relinquish their shame can never achieve anything of any true "honor" or value, like citizenship, but as prostitutes can own property, be emancipated from "slavery," and lead their own lives, even if not amounting to much (think patreon, cam girls, streamers, etc.).

All this is to say that more than before, our structure of the world is increasingly incompatible with our representative, statehood-based democracy, and will eventually result in a new system replacing it (perhaps on a global scale) to better align with how these things are working. There's definitely room for more thought on this point in comparison to the archaic period of ancient greece before the hellenistic period, and perhaps it's not all so well paralleled, but I think there's purchase in it somewhere.