Maybe I'm just in a bad mood right now, but for whatever reason I find this excerpt really uninspiring. There's no doubt that amateurization of culture and politics is part of the solution, but at the same time it's pretty much a non-answer. He's basically just saying we need to wait 50 or 100 years for the world to change, and even then it's a pretty big leap of faith.
I don't think you'll feel that way about the full book. Send me an email (info in my profile) and I'll send you a complimentary copy. If you enjoy it, you can amend your comment; if not, no foul.
But people can start disintermediating their lives right now, without having to wait for 'the world' to change. We're seeing more and more of this - it's once again becoming prevalent for individuals families to grow their own food, educate their own children, generate their own energy, etc., and there are a growing body of open, substantive 'amateur' resources for them to turn to for external guidance.
It might take 50 or 100 years for these movements to become dominant, and for the modern institutional centralization of culture and politics to fully recede, but it seems that the way it's most likely to happen is for the 'issues' we now fight over to fade into irrelevance as people gradually cease being dependent on the context of those 'issues', not by one faction or another winning some sort of pitched conflict and imposing reform from the top, downward. I'd think that the success of a top-down reform program would actually demonstrate the failure of its motivating intention.
