Be honest, please: in a world that has farcebook in it, this entire discussion is both moot and obsolete. Civilization will go in whatever direction Zuckerberg et al tell it go, or else. Just wait and see. That is, unless you people quit your addiction to his digital opioids here and now, and deprive the man and his entourage of the absolute powers he has been striving openly for all along.

When the power finally goes off, and doesn’t come on again because everyone was so busy learning to code AI algorithms or VR game ecosystems that they forgot what an electron is, this idea of “civilization” whether western, eastern or Martian, will be a fireside legend (once how to start a fire is discovered again, which may take time) that the children are highly skeptical of, until their elders who remember what a city was or what one looked like all lit up have finally passed on.

Then, in maybe another thousand years or so, there might be people with the idle luxury of pontificating about which brand of civilization is the exceptionalist-est one.