The End of Industrial Society(palladiummag.com)
palladiummag.com
The End of Industrial Society
https://palladiummag.com/2021/03/24/the-end-of-industrial-society/
33 comments
You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then.
The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability. Would you work for a faux "anarcho-tyrannyist" firm where you have no idea who the CEO is and who the managers are that can fire you or cut your salary?
> The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability
But this is of course palpable nonsense. The entire point of kings and aristocracy was to formalise the notion that the de facto elite was in fact a class of people so superior to everyone else as to render the notion that they should be held accountable for their actions by mere commoners as laughable. The difference between a king and a president isn't that the latter's status as an elite is more ambiguous, but that the president has some semblance of accountability to the public whereas with the king, it's a case of the public being accountable to the king.
But this is of course palpable nonsense. The entire point of kings and aristocracy was to formalise the notion that the de facto elite was in fact a class of people so superior to everyone else as to render the notion that they should be held accountable for their actions by mere commoners as laughable. The difference between a king and a president isn't that the latter's status as an elite is more ambiguous, but that the president has some semblance of accountability to the public whereas with the king, it's a case of the public being accountable to the king.
There are plenty of people in current government who are de facto not accountable to the public. Sometimes that lack of accountability is even intended by design. Are Supreme Court Justices accountable to the public for their interpretation of the law?
I said semblance of accountability for a reason. Still, Supreme Court justices are appointed in limited number by elected politicians - who have to justify the appointment based on their supposed professional credentials - to discharge a specific set of duties
They certainly would not be more accountable if their appointments were more aristocratic in character (i.e. they inherited them from their ancestors who had been appointed for arbitrary reasons by an unelected monarch) and, like aristocrats, they didn't have to explain how and why they exercised the powers given to them.
They certainly would not be more accountable if their appointments were more aristocratic in character (i.e. they inherited them from their ancestors who had been appointed for arbitrary reasons by an unelected monarch) and, like aristocrats, they didn't have to explain how and why they exercised the powers given to them.
On paper, SCotUS _can_ be held accountable by the public through their representatives. The process is called impeachment. The house _can_ impeach a sitting Justice, and the Senate _can_ vote to remove them from office. This currently is unlikely, but the it _is_ possible.
The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible.
The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.
The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible.
The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.
In what meaningful sense are kings and aristocrats "formally transparent"? The history of aristocracy (historical and contemporary) is the history of hiding money and power. The arc of liberal democracy has consistently bent away the kinds of secrets and implicit power structures that aristocracies thrive on.
? The history of aristocracy is about amplifying perception of power.
Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are.
The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power.
The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy.
There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence would be to their detriment, and they were not 'aristocrats' though they would have probably desperately like to be that.
Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are.
The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power.
The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy.
There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence would be to their detriment, and they were not 'aristocrats' though they would have probably desperately like to be that.
> Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are.
This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front.
And note: that is the justification for power, which defines its perception. A king's true source of power has historically been his wealth (and therefore the size of his army and supporting court), or the support of extremely wealthy parties (churches, merchant classes, etc.). Every regent in history has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public from realizing that he is just a man, one whose wealth (and therefore power) can be taken.
This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front.
And note: that is the justification for power, which defines its perception. A king's true source of power has historically been his wealth (and therefore the size of his army and supporting court), or the support of extremely wealthy parties (churches, merchant classes, etc.). Every regent in history has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public from realizing that he is just a man, one whose wealth (and therefore power) can be taken.
And so the Declaration of Independence was a direct shot against that. "All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" is a direct attack against the divine right of kings (and nobles).
The justification matters less than the ever present belief that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
This is largely why the French Revolution was so vehemently opposed by foreign leaders and why they tried almost everything to get another king on the throne in France or to destroy it trying. It was a living, breathing, functioning and preferable alternative to monarchy. If not clamped down upon it was only a matter of time until it spread.
This is largely why the French Revolution was so vehemently opposed by foreign leaders and why they tried almost everything to get another king on the throne in France or to destroy it trying. It was a living, breathing, functioning and preferable alternative to monarchy. If not clamped down upon it was only a matter of time until it spread.
Who guarantees the "kings and aristocrats" are really the ones pulling the strings? They are frequently just puppets.
Puppets of whom? The only (European) historical examples of puppet masters I can think of are the Church and other nobility — certainly no one from outside the class. If a merchant became powerful enough, they found a way to join the nobility, either directly or by marriage.
We are all just puppets enslaved by the processes we create and confused by our limited experience.
It's interesting: Thiel's "truth that few people agree with you" is that capitalism & competition are antonyms, not complements. And he's in favor of the "capitalism" side. His whole business career is about eliminating competition and enjoying monopoly rents. A return to "kings and aristocracy" is the ultimate culmination of this: a king has ultimate monopoly power over the kingdom, where they not only own all the land, but have ultimate say over everything that goes on in the kingdom.
There's an opposing side to this dichotomy though: embrace competition. American democracy, with its separation of powers, is an example of this. The founding fathers explicitly set the government at odds with itself, because when "ambition is made to counteract ambition", the ambitious are so busy fighting each other that ordinary businessmen and citizens can go about their business relatively unmolested.
To answer your question: I'd absolutely work for an anarcho-tyrannist firm where I have no idea who the CEO is and managers can fire me on a moments whim, as long as I can walk into another firm tomorrow and get a new job. Job loss is only traumatic if all your eggs are in that one basket; if there's always another job waiting for you, just go get fired and take it.
There's an opposing side to this dichotomy though: embrace competition. American democracy, with its separation of powers, is an example of this. The founding fathers explicitly set the government at odds with itself, because when "ambition is made to counteract ambition", the ambitious are so busy fighting each other that ordinary businessmen and citizens can go about their business relatively unmolested.
To answer your question: I'd absolutely work for an anarcho-tyrannist firm where I have no idea who the CEO is and managers can fire me on a moments whim, as long as I can walk into another firm tomorrow and get a new job. Job loss is only traumatic if all your eggs are in that one basket; if there's always another job waiting for you, just go get fired and take it.
The separation of powers could be expanded to a far greater extent. In particular the modern bureaucratic state, with its long-term sinecure positions at the highest levels, is entirely antithetical to the whole idea of checks and balances, or "ambition being made to counteract ambition". This is where former aristocracies might provide a better model.
I'd agree with that.
There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter.
My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.
There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter.
My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.
That, of course, is ultimately extremely defeatist compared to the ideals that the USA claims (the practice and history, on the other hand, would be another discussion).
One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves.
But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.
EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.
One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves.
But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.
EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.
In the internal logic of these claims, it's not "defeatist" so much as looking at things as they are. A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not. It's not about renouncing egalitarian ideals at all, it's being serious about pursuing them to the greatest feasible extent.
> why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?)
> Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power.
Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.
> why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?)
> Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power.
Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.
There's a neat little rhetorical trick you're doing here:
> A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not.
"Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter.
In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?
> A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not.
"Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter.
In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?
> ...it's about formalizing and legitimizing power.
Again, power is a pervasive feature of any complex society. Do you pick formal and legitimized power, or power that's completely illegitimate and shorn of any formality?
> Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.
Again, power is a pervasive feature of any complex society. Do you pick formal and legitimized power, or power that's completely illegitimate and shorn of any formality?
> Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.
> If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.
This is specious reasoning. There's a process that turns both of us into mulch (it involves a woodchipper), but you shouldn't attempt that process based on the inference that a reverse process (a mulch-to-human machine?) must therefore exist.
This is specious reasoning. There's a process that turns both of us into mulch (it involves a woodchipper), but you shouldn't attempt that process based on the inference that a reverse process (a mulch-to-human machine?) must therefore exist.
It's not like I'm inventing anything here. Back in the times and places where noble titles were taken seriously as markers of increased social legitimacy, stripping people of them was an acknowledged thing. Far more reversible than things like the guillotine, which in practice was way more comparable to your human-to-mulch machine - and that in its long-range society-wide effects, as much as its more immediate ones.
What nonsense. Generally the only way to remove a title was war, or in the rare case of a sufficiently powerful liege, to commit a serious crime against the them.
> Back in the times and places where noble titles were taken seriously as markers of increased social legitimacy, stripping people of them was an acknowledged thing.
It was not an "acknowledged thing." It was a bloody, brutal affair. Men fighting for titles is probably the one thing that measures up to religion in terms of lives lost.
And all of this before refuting the central point: the duke of some random duchy in 1305 had no "increased social legitimacy" in any way that matters to contemporary humans. He was able to petition whatever king he served, and he could rule over his own land insofar as someone with a bigger army didn't mind. It is, on face value, ridiculous that we're discussing this as a viable state of affairs.
It was not an "acknowledged thing." It was a bloody, brutal affair. Men fighting for titles is probably the one thing that measures up to religion in terms of lives lost.
And all of this before refuting the central point: the duke of some random duchy in 1305 had no "increased social legitimacy" in any way that matters to contemporary humans. He was able to petition whatever king he served, and he could rule over his own land insofar as someone with a bigger army didn't mind. It is, on face value, ridiculous that we're discussing this as a viable state of affairs.
That wasn't just men fighting for titles, it was quite literally men fighting for their turf. The modern equivalent would be an all-out war among drug cartels. Later on, with the onset of the early modern era powerful monarchies managed to check the violence and gradually turned noble titles into more of a social reward for public services rendered. This is the context that those who view "kings and aristocracies" positively might have in mind.
Well, that's an interesting point. Before we follow some far-right vision of restoring the nobility, we'd better find out exactly which version they have in mind. We'd also better think seriously about what constraints are going to be able to prevent it from turning into the worse version.
These fancy historical metaphors should be put next to actual modern examples of monarchy in action: the British and European aristocracy and the covert power they wield and the hidden wealth they hoard, the House of Saud and other Gulf Arab royals and their excesses, and what is the ruling regime of the DPRK if not a virtual monarchy under the Kims?
Bullshit. Invent any new title you want, you will still get powerful people who aren't holders of that title and whom control the holders of that title. If thats all you wanted, inventing a new position won't do shit. This only furthers the argument that what you actually wanted if that was your goal is to start severely limiting the power of someone who reaches a certain level of wealth or influence etc.
I think you are making the mistake of reading too hard into these writings and somehow managed to invent a meaning in it. The reality is unfortunately as simple as that these people imagine they would get to be kings and rule over everyone. The philosophy dropout verbose word vomit is required to obscure this simple and obviously idiotic point because of course why would anyone pay attention to it otherwise.
I think you are making the mistake of reading too hard into these writings and somehow managed to invent a meaning in it. The reality is unfortunately as simple as that these people imagine they would get to be kings and rule over everyone. The philosophy dropout verbose word vomit is required to obscure this simple and obviously idiotic point because of course why would anyone pay attention to it otherwise.
>>After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.
Making it less likely that companies become very large, profitable and valuable discourages investment in companies of all sizes, by reducing returns on small cap and venture capital investing.
As for direct effectd, "taxing the shit out of" the rich, as you suggest, would impact far more than large incumbents. It would reduce the incentive for the rich to invest in general, by reducing the size of the reward for becoming very wealthy, encourage capital flight and expatriation of the highly ambitious and capable, and reduce the after-tax income of the best investors, and with it, the volume of new investment.
Making it less likely that companies become very large, profitable and valuable discourages investment in companies of all sizes, by reducing returns on small cap and venture capital investing.
As for direct effectd, "taxing the shit out of" the rich, as you suggest, would impact far more than large incumbents. It would reduce the incentive for the rich to invest in general, by reducing the size of the reward for becoming very wealthy, encourage capital flight and expatriation of the highly ambitious and capable, and reduce the after-tax income of the best investors, and with it, the volume of new investment.
Agreed, but somewhere around the neighborhood of that discussion hovers an increasingly growing concern as our global economy gradually grows cognitively denser over time with no discernible change in the trend. Remunerative jobs increasingly demand the kind of analytical, problem solving, critical thinking skills approximated in an inexact but kinda-sorta correlative manner by IQ tests. Roughly a quarter of the world population is below 80 IQ.
You can somewhat mitigate that by emphasizing perseverance, grit and commitment character traits, and reward those appropriately at the policy layers. Especially in employer roles, where those traits have been markedly lacking in the modern era. But that only takes you to around 15-20% say. At say 15% that still leaves about 1,185,000,000 people in the world steadily getting left behind in the burgeoning global economy. Even if you take the most aggressive estimates to filter that further, that's still a distributed population of around say 2-500 million. It doesn't make it any better that many of their jobs are prime candidates for replacement by increased automation unless they are in last-bastion niches (some of them quite large still, but with really bad compensation) that will only fall to Moravec-class robots.
There are no easy solutions here, it is a thicket of third rail politics, and incredibly nasty, unpleasant historical echos. But we must walk this difficult and treacherous road ahead of us with eyes open, lest we lose our humanity by trying to sweep this trend under the rug with patches to existing policies like these "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" proposals. We need better patches (IMHO; I'm not a fan of trying out Second System Syndrome with wholesale changes at the societal level, I'm more in favor of trying out incremental patches that are auto-sunset after a pre-determined fixed period unless overridden by a future generation's vote).
You can somewhat mitigate that by emphasizing perseverance, grit and commitment character traits, and reward those appropriately at the policy layers. Especially in employer roles, where those traits have been markedly lacking in the modern era. But that only takes you to around 15-20% say. At say 15% that still leaves about 1,185,000,000 people in the world steadily getting left behind in the burgeoning global economy. Even if you take the most aggressive estimates to filter that further, that's still a distributed population of around say 2-500 million. It doesn't make it any better that many of their jobs are prime candidates for replacement by increased automation unless they are in last-bastion niches (some of them quite large still, but with really bad compensation) that will only fall to Moravec-class robots.
There are no easy solutions here, it is a thicket of third rail politics, and incredibly nasty, unpleasant historical echos. But we must walk this difficult and treacherous road ahead of us with eyes open, lest we lose our humanity by trying to sweep this trend under the rug with patches to existing policies like these "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" proposals. We need better patches (IMHO; I'm not a fan of trying out Second System Syndrome with wholesale changes at the societal level, I'm more in favor of trying out incremental patches that are auto-sunset after a pre-determined fixed period unless overridden by a future generation's vote).
> You have to remember the basic idea behind a lot of these word salads is that "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" and that "Of course I am a high iq intellectual who will be the nobility and not a feudal worker, why is there any doubt?". Everything starts making sense then.
A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have.
The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.
A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have.
The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.
The best solution for people proposing autocratic solutions is to give them exactly what they want, good and hard. (Of course the collateral damage to innocent people is not worth it.)
America + Europe have been getting Democracy! good and hard for quite a while, time to shake things up
If anyone wants an autocratic system we should give in to their wish, and give them, and only them exactly what they want. If they don't want rights and want to be ruled by a dictator I am sure they would have no problem with it. Leave the rest of us alone please.
Do you have a source for the claim that Thiel supports a return to monarchy?
has Thiel ever specifically claimed to be a monarchist? not that I'm aware of - but he has close ties with Curtis Yarvin who is a technocratic monarchist, has explicitly expressed anti-democratic sentiment, and hangs around in a mixed crowd of paleolibertarians (a system which leads directly to the sort of hyper-capitalist corporate monarchies Yarvin yearns for) and crypto-fascists like Trump. His behaviour, the company he keeps and his stated beliefs all point to him being a reactionary.
"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
Which he clarified this way after so much outrage.
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
Which he clarified this way after so much outrage.
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
What about this paragraph, then?
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.
This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.
It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.
This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.
It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.
Oh, I agree, I just ran out of time to say it which you said in a better way then I could.
It’s uncomfortable for the Thiel-funded new right movement that their dream state is essentially realized in present-day Russia, and they’re not able to explain how their ideas would lead to a different outcome.
Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This describes both Putinism and the American right’s goals. It’s not a coincidence that they were increasingly cozy with Russia until Putin rolled into Ukraine.
Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine…
Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Good old territorial expansion is part of this value system.
Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This describes both Putinism and the American right’s goals. It’s not a coincidence that they were increasingly cozy with Russia until Putin rolled into Ukraine.
Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine…
Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Good old territorial expansion is part of this value system.
> It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged
That's silly. Canada is the loyalist colony. They are still part of the Commonwealth. If Theil is a monarchist, then surely Canada is more the good guy to him!
And we should question how "anti-Progressive" monarchism actually is. Given that the American Revolution was driven in large part by a desire to expand beyond the Appalachians (which King George III had banned with the Proclamation of 1763), and that the Empire banned slavery outright in 1833, a full 30 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, I think we can say that First Nations and enslaved peoples -- focus of core Progressive causes -- would have both been better off as subjects of the Crown, in a Loyalist America.
So maybe monarchism is good?
That's silly. Canada is the loyalist colony. They are still part of the Commonwealth. If Theil is a monarchist, then surely Canada is more the good guy to him!
And we should question how "anti-Progressive" monarchism actually is. Given that the American Revolution was driven in large part by a desire to expand beyond the Appalachians (which King George III had banned with the Proclamation of 1763), and that the Empire banned slavery outright in 1833, a full 30 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, I think we can say that First Nations and enslaved peoples -- focus of core Progressive causes -- would have both been better off as subjects of the Crown, in a Loyalist America.
So maybe monarchism is good?
There are no real de facto monarchies left, perhaps other than the saudis. Canada and UK are monarchies on paper only, the real power is wielded by the democratic system. I am sure the Queen has some powers available to herself, but if she actually try to wield them it would be highly unpopular.
An important question that needs asking is what happens if we run into a situation where that "slowness" of democracy gets more people killed and only a well-paced solution with some cadence to it could do the job (not "super fast", but like say a major change with a 1 year debate period and 10 year implementation period sustained steady progress)? Not arguing for a dictatorship, but out-of-the-box innovative thinking to invent a much more novel/radical political system.
I think we saw the answer to that in February/March 2021. Apart from the USA where the situation was politicised by a rather special president, most advanced democracies moved remarkably quickly to institute unprecedented emergency measures in theface of the pandemic. Democratic processes were temporarily simplified with the executive taking more power for a short time.
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> Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine…
As an American, that just makes no emotional sense. My lifetime experience is that Americans just plain don't think about Canada much, and it wouldn't make much sense as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." Mexico makes far more sense in that regard. Canada (or at least parts of it) would probably be most useful as place for political enemies to be forced into exile.
I'm under the vague impression that Ukraine has a much more important place in the Russian psyche than Canada is in the US one. There are always important differences in the details with stuff like this, so it's not very enlightening to do a mad libs style substitution
As an American, that just makes no emotional sense. My lifetime experience is that Americans just plain don't think about Canada much, and it wouldn't make much sense as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." Mexico makes far more sense in that regard. Canada (or at least parts of it) would probably be most useful as place for political enemies to be forced into exile.
I'm under the vague impression that Ukraine has a much more important place in the Russian psyche than Canada is in the US one. There are always important differences in the details with stuff like this, so it's not very enlightening to do a mad libs style substitution
Russians didn’t think about Ukraine either twenty years ago. The ancient Slav connection mythology is manufactured by the Putinist project.
When a place is a void in the public’s mind, that’s the ideal target to fill it with nationalist fury. The people of Belgrade didn’t think very often about Bosnia in 1980; thirteen years later their leaders were running a genocide to cleanse Bosnia of the elements that supposedly threatened Serbian unity.
When a place is a void in the public’s mind, that’s the ideal target to fill it with nationalist fury. The people of Belgrade didn’t think very often about Bosnia in 1980; thirteen years later their leaders were running a genocide to cleanse Bosnia of the elements that supposedly threatened Serbian unity.
Even so, I think Mexico would be a far more logical first target in that scenario than Canada, especially if the Canadians took pains not to annoy the new leaders.
Climate change makes Canada much more useful than Mexico. The United States has enough arid desert already.
> Climate change makes Canada much more useful than Mexico. The United States has enough arid desert already.
Yeah, but that's moving the goalposts. I was only commenting on suitability as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." There are already hooks for that w.r.t. Mexico, but they'd have to be created out of whole cloth for Canada.
Yeah, but that's moving the goalposts. I was only commenting on suitability as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." There are already hooks for that w.r.t. Mexico, but they'd have to be created out of whole cloth for Canada.
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It's interesting because present-day Russia easily combines every disadvantage of the neo-Reactionary dream state, and none of its advantages. Vladimir Putin still has to fight for his legitimacy (in a way that plausibly distorts his policy choices) because he has not leveraged his mass public support by proclaiming himself an actual Tsar. (Of course he could also settle for a far more conventional role as legitimate President of a democratic nation state, but many observers would argue that he seems to be aiming at something different. Which is why this is a sensible question to begin with.)
> “present-day Russia easily combines every disadvantage of the neo-Reactionary dream state, and none of its advantages”
It’s because the advantages are either theoretical and illusionary, or only enjoyable by an extremely narrow oligarchy.
It’s like asking why North Korea seems to have all the disadvantages of Stalinism but none of the advantages.
It’s because the advantages are either theoretical and illusionary, or only enjoyable by an extremely narrow oligarchy.
It’s like asking why North Korea seems to have all the disadvantages of Stalinism but none of the advantages.
That's pretty much true of most people spouting off about a Big Regime Change. I know entirely too many Communists who think that they're going to spend their time designing uniforms, or just raising baby goats. Everyone thinks that they're gonna get their ideal world out of it.
The difference is that communism purports to be an egalitarian system (what actually happens in practice during a regime change is another matter of course), so there is nothing strange about it. But doing footwork for a deliberately anti-egalitarian system by design is funny given the chances most of these people have of ending up in the inner circle.
Jonah Bennett goes deep down the anti-semitic neoreactionary rabbit hole [1]. Interesting how Peter Thiel keeps funding these types of people [2].
[1] https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
[1] https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
All that can be true while palladium can also be one of the only publications that grapples with big theories and forecasts of geo politics and social shifts.
Are there many others? FP seems more focused on essays targeted at an audience of one written for ver specific inside baseball reasons. HBR and the likes have become laughable top 10 lists and passing superficial junk.
Are there many others? FP seems more focused on essays targeted at an audience of one written for ver specific inside baseball reasons. HBR and the likes have become laughable top 10 lists and passing superficial junk.
>Jonah Bennett previously worked at The Daily Caller and he resigned from Palladium when it was discovered he had authored some racist messages and was friends with various white nationalists.
This is the very definition of ad hominem -- you don't want to confront the messages of the essay, so you try to discredit it by highlighting that one of its authors had opinions you disagree with.
This is the very definition of ad hominem -- you don't want to confront the messages of the essay, so you try to discredit it by highlighting that one of its authors had opinions you disagree with.
I have no need to discredit Jonah Bennett--he did a fine job of that himself--and moreover he is not the author of the article. I will concede that my comment skates close to the ad hominem edge, but knowing about the publisher (as with Murdoch, Sulzberger, and Bezos, for Fox, NYT, WaPo respectively) seems useful nonetheless, for while it may be noble to argue about and discuss the ideas in the article in good faith, it's also worth asking whether Palladium is edited and published in good faith.
Also worth pointing out that Samo Burja spent about a month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine insisting that everyone was underestimating the Russian military and that they would take Ukraine in a rout.
Public intellectuals need to be constantly judged and re-evaluated in the light of their actual predictive capacity. Burja certainly presents as an intelligent person, but since I’ve been paying attention to him the value of his insight has been dubious.
Public intellectuals need to be constantly judged and re-evaluated in the light of their actual predictive capacity. Burja certainly presents as an intelligent person, but since I’ve been paying attention to him the value of his insight has been dubious.
Links?
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Sorry, it is 2022 and simply labeling people as non-progressive is not interesting anymore.
Labeling them as crypto-monarchists is though. It’s actually a neat throwback to 2012 before the current polarized state of online discourse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6785801
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6785801
Journalism would be so much better with context like this.
I wonder if there any initiatives that provide it. Maybe the blockchain would be of help here.
I can't tell how many layers of irony this comment contains.
This context is quite biased by ideological preconceptions.
Please. I mean, yes, but we should be 'doubly skeptical' of everything from The Atlantic, the New Yorker, the NYT, Fox, Bloomberg and WSJ and Foreign Policy as well.
Yes.
I really wish more people knew that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief at the Atlantic, literally beat political prisoners bloody while he was an IDF prison guard at the world's largest detainment camp.
I really wish more people knew that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief at the Atlantic, literally beat political prisoners bloody while he was an IDF prison guard at the world's largest detainment camp.
It’s deleted now, or maybe on the internet archive, but one of the best rebuttals from Internet comments I’ve ever seen was on a Goldberg piece about the trope of neocon puppet masters claiming he had a superior spidey sense of what was anti-Semitic and what wasn’t. The killer punchline at the end was “Buck up, Geppetto!”
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> These social technology cores decay with time as they obsolete their own foundations, and as errors and parasitism build up
A lot to explain there.
> Yet even in the case of Britain, the key social technologies failed after the Second World War, as the latitude afforded to aristocratic scientists and industrialists was replaced by a system of bureaucratic processes.
And there.
I found this unreadable, sorry. Lots of abstract assertions with no support offered for them.
A lot to explain there.
> Yet even in the case of Britain, the key social technologies failed after the Second World War, as the latitude afforded to aristocratic scientists and industrialists was replaced by a system of bureaucratic processes.
And there.
I found this unreadable, sorry. Lots of abstract assertions with no support offered for them.
Agreed. I found an interesting thesis that made me think "OK, parts of this sound plausible to me, help me connect the dots."
But then there were no dots to be found, let alone connections.
I am a very literal person, and in my youth I used to think this was a bit of a handicap, as "big thinkers" needed to be able to think of things in more abstract ways. As I've gotten older, though, I think I've become more aware of my blind spots that this literal thinking can cause, but I've also become more confident in that 90% of "big thinking" turns out to be marketing bullshit. Big ideas are one thing, but if you can't give clear, simple-to-understand examples of the point you are trying to make, you're probably full of shit.
But then there were no dots to be found, let alone connections.
I am a very literal person, and in my youth I used to think this was a bit of a handicap, as "big thinkers" needed to be able to think of things in more abstract ways. As I've gotten older, though, I think I've become more aware of my blind spots that this literal thinking can cause, but I've also become more confident in that 90% of "big thinking" turns out to be marketing bullshit. Big ideas are one thing, but if you can't give clear, simple-to-understand examples of the point you are trying to make, you're probably full of shit.
A “big idea” that sounds abstract to a literal thinker, should be seen as a hunch or an intuition about a situation. It can never be explained in satisfiable depth to a literal thinker. Only in hindsight will it be obvious.
You expect proof, or a literal pathway of thought and explanation, because it has served you well. This is the guaranteed route to proving an idea, if such a literal route exists. Such ideas are grounded in axioms that exist or can be built on smaller already established truths.
It is far more difficult to explain literally a strong hunch, that an excellent intuitive thinker has but which is lacking the necessary foundation axioms. Maybe this hunch or novel idea cannot be structured upon existing truths, because it looks beyond its current viewpoint. Or maybe the idea is about a situation that is happening outside the established system.
This doesn’t make this idea less valuable to pursue further. It might just be several magnitudes harder to wrap ones head around.
You expect proof, or a literal pathway of thought and explanation, because it has served you well. This is the guaranteed route to proving an idea, if such a literal route exists. Such ideas are grounded in axioms that exist or can be built on smaller already established truths.
It is far more difficult to explain literally a strong hunch, that an excellent intuitive thinker has but which is lacking the necessary foundation axioms. Maybe this hunch or novel idea cannot be structured upon existing truths, because it looks beyond its current viewpoint. Or maybe the idea is about a situation that is happening outside the established system.
This doesn’t make this idea less valuable to pursue further. It might just be several magnitudes harder to wrap ones head around.
"This doesn’t make this [big abstract] idea less valuable to pursue further."
But such ideas often need to be heavily driven by the one with the idea. Even people receptive to the idea often misunderstand such a vision.
So for practical purposes the idea is BS unless the person with the idea is actively working on it. It doesn't need to be proven yet, but if the person with the idea isn't working on it, probably nobody else will.
Sure, sometimes big ideas inspire others, but often the ispiration is more of a winding path rather than a direct "I read this big idea and did it".
But such ideas often need to be heavily driven by the one with the idea. Even people receptive to the idea often misunderstand such a vision.
So for practical purposes the idea is BS unless the person with the idea is actively working on it. It doesn't need to be proven yet, but if the person with the idea isn't working on it, probably nobody else will.
Sure, sometimes big ideas inspire others, but often the ispiration is more of a winding path rather than a direct "I read this big idea and did it".
I disagree, or rather, I don't think I did a great job describing how I define my version of "literal thinking".
To use a specific example, virtually all big, new ideas are some version of the "underpants gnomes" meme: (1) collect underpants, (2) ???, (3) profit. That is, all of these big ideas have a big helping of unknowns that need to be figured out - after all, if things were already all known, it wouldn't be much of a new, big idea.
However, in my experience, big ideas that are likely to come to fruition are ones where proponents are actually able to break down the unknowns in the "2. ???" step into discrete problems that need to be solved or elucidated. This is in direct contrast to "bullshitters" who have a distinct inability to even identify what the critical unknowns are in the first place.
For example, take the crypto space (low hanging fruit I know because there is so much BS and grift in the crypto space). I think there are some areas where crypto ideas will prove useful - I've commented before that finding a replacement for the antiquated backend settlement our financial system uses in the US is a perfect application. But I contrast this with tons of crypto ideas where proponents care barely explain why setting is a benefit over existing solutions, or else they conveniently ignore all the issue the existing system solves that they pretend somehow don't exist with crypto.
To use a specific example, virtually all big, new ideas are some version of the "underpants gnomes" meme: (1) collect underpants, (2) ???, (3) profit. That is, all of these big ideas have a big helping of unknowns that need to be figured out - after all, if things were already all known, it wouldn't be much of a new, big idea.
However, in my experience, big ideas that are likely to come to fruition are ones where proponents are actually able to break down the unknowns in the "2. ???" step into discrete problems that need to be solved or elucidated. This is in direct contrast to "bullshitters" who have a distinct inability to even identify what the critical unknowns are in the first place.
For example, take the crypto space (low hanging fruit I know because there is so much BS and grift in the crypto space). I think there are some areas where crypto ideas will prove useful - I've commented before that finding a replacement for the antiquated backend settlement our financial system uses in the US is a perfect application. But I contrast this with tons of crypto ideas where proponents care barely explain why setting is a benefit over existing solutions, or else they conveniently ignore all the issue the existing system solves that they pretend somehow don't exist with crypto.
It took me a while to realize that if people with experience do not agree with something but cannot explain why, you shouldn't ignore them, particularly if the area is complex. They may just be wrong but also they may have an insight that you yourself might have found hard to articulate.
You've hit the nail on the head with this. I often see "big idea" thinkers who I find to be brilliant, like Jordan Peterson, criticized, and I think a lot of that comes from literal thinkers who 1. apply a rigorous evidentiary standard when assessing their writings, when they should instead see them as well-articulated cases for a "hunch" and thus not expect them to contain proof for their theories, and/or 2. don't see the utility of expositions of hunches.
I wouldn't put this guy on a par with Jordan Peterson. JP appeals to masses of people because he explains his ideas -- he doesn't prove them.
You can state a big idea, but then you have to illustrate it. That can be with hard facts, or it can be poetic, but there needs to be something.
You can state a big idea, but then you have to illustrate it. That can be with hard facts, or it can be poetic, but there needs to be something.
Most of the people who hate Jordan Peterson never read his books or listened to his lectures.
They were told to hate him and that if they agreed with his positions they were bad people.
There is an effort to get people to rationalize their hate but when they try to rationalize it they realize it's complete cult ideology not based in reality. Ending up as fans of his.
It happened to me. I was told how bad he was. In fact he is super reasonable to the majority.
https://youtu.be/XQR6rDOCxM0
They were told to hate him and that if they agreed with his positions they were bad people.
There is an effort to get people to rationalize their hate but when they try to rationalize it they realize it's complete cult ideology not based in reality. Ending up as fans of his.
It happened to me. I was told how bad he was. In fact he is super reasonable to the majority.
https://youtu.be/XQR6rDOCxM0
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And also nutty statements like this:
> Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments
...which seems to indicate a lack of familiarity with the relationship between American+European governments and their citizens.
> Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments
...which seems to indicate a lack of familiarity with the relationship between American+European governments and their citizens.
As an EU citizen I was de facto forbidden to enter other EU countries until relatively recently (because of the pandemic), not sure why do you find that conclusion far-fetched.
Also, because I may want to actually visit the US sometime in the future I've been making a conscious decision not to visit Iran, for example (even though I find Iran to be a beautiful country, at least from the photos I can find on the web). I know there's no explicit "if you have visited Iran you cannot visit the USA anymore" policy coming from the US visa officials, but I feel like that's the direction things are going right now so why risk it?
Also, because I may want to actually visit the US sometime in the future I've been making a conscious decision not to visit Iran, for example (even though I find Iran to be a beautiful country, at least from the photos I can find on the web). I know there's no explicit "if you have visited Iran you cannot visit the USA anymore" policy coming from the US visa officials, but I feel like that's the direction things are going right now so why risk it?
Half of Americans think our visa/visitor/immigration regime is capricious and unfair, and the other half wants it to be worse. As part of the former group, I apologize on behalf of my countrymen. But Americans are not forbidden from visiting Iran and there is nothing the US government will do to me if I take a holiday there (and survive the experience).
Cuba seems a bit more on point, but it's worth mentioning that the point is not to prevent travel there, but to prevent money from flowing there. And even that's incredibly leaky - pretty much everyone I know has been to Cuba at least once. I should have included the full quote:
> Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments, so seeing the still-gleaming cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou up close won’t be an option.
It's not like the US State Dept is afraid that Americans are going to realize the socialist paradise of Cuba. The only circumstance you could imagine US travel to China banned would be the kind of sanctions that prevent all economic activity with China first - which haven't even been applied to pariah states like Iran or Russia.
And it's worth pointing out that Europeans freely travel to Cuba.
The idea that the US government would prevent citizens from traveling to China because they're afraid that citizens will see it as some sort of gleaming paradise is nonsense on its face, especially to someone who grew up here.
Cuba seems a bit more on point, but it's worth mentioning that the point is not to prevent travel there, but to prevent money from flowing there. And even that's incredibly leaky - pretty much everyone I know has been to Cuba at least once. I should have included the full quote:
> Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments, so seeing the still-gleaming cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou up close won’t be an option.
It's not like the US State Dept is afraid that Americans are going to realize the socialist paradise of Cuba. The only circumstance you could imagine US travel to China banned would be the kind of sanctions that prevent all economic activity with China first - which haven't even been applied to pariah states like Iran or Russia.
And it's worth pointing out that Europeans freely travel to Cuba.
The idea that the US government would prevent citizens from traveling to China because they're afraid that citizens will see it as some sort of gleaming paradise is nonsense on its face, especially to someone who grew up here.
The issue is that Europeans who have visited Iran are no longer eligible for the USA visa waiver program.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...
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Americans have been de facto banned from visiting Cuba as long as I’ve been alive. I can totally imagine similar policies for Russia and China in the not too distant future.
"de facto" is used as an antonym of "de jure". Travel to Cuba is controlled by 31 C.F.R 515.560. It is controlled by statue, therefore it is "de jure".
This does not require US or EU governments to forbid anything to their citizens. It may require US and EU governments to act so that China will see US and EU citizens as extremely unwelcome.
> Lots of abstract assertions with no support offered for them.
Agreed. And it ignores things like the UK airplane industry, which was (post-war) somewhat ahead of the US with planes such as the Comet (eek!) and the Vulcan (yay!). But there are other examples.
Agreed. And it ignores things like the UK airplane industry, which was (post-war) somewhat ahead of the US with planes such as the Comet (eek!) and the Vulcan (yay!). But there are other examples.
"Massive white-collar overproduction means the victory of sharp elbows over sharp minds."
Some of the oil states have hit this in a big way. Egypt, for one. Egypt at one time guaranteed employment for all university graduates. That resulted in the government employing a quarter of the workforce. The US is around 14% government, and it's mostly local government - teachers and cops. In the US, this becomes about half the people with college degrees doing jobs that don't need a college degree. A college degree in the US no only no longer guarantees a middle class lifestyle, it may have negative economic value due to debt.
The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional.
We see this in college administration, where the administrator to professor ratio has doubled in 25 years.[1] If you look at pictures of factories from the early 20th century, there's a common pattern - a small administration building in front of a large factory. We no longer see that.
I'd expected the US to hit "peak office" about two decades ago. We may see that now, but it's because of working from home, not a reduced need for white collar work.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
Some of the oil states have hit this in a big way. Egypt, for one. Egypt at one time guaranteed employment for all university graduates. That resulted in the government employing a quarter of the workforce. The US is around 14% government, and it's mostly local government - teachers and cops. In the US, this becomes about half the people with college degrees doing jobs that don't need a college degree. A college degree in the US no only no longer guarantees a middle class lifestyle, it may have negative economic value due to debt.
The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional.
We see this in college administration, where the administrator to professor ratio has doubled in 25 years.[1] If you look at pictures of factories from the early 20th century, there's a common pattern - a small administration building in front of a large factory. We no longer see that.
I'd expected the US to hit "peak office" about two decades ago. We may see that now, but it's because of working from home, not a reduced need for white collar work.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
Ultimately what we need is not a "victory" over anyone, but rather something where 100% of everyone's need (food, water, shelter, and medical care) are met barring purely random accidents.
So... The US and Europe haven't stopped being manufacturing hubs. The kind of manufacturing changed to high end goods, and automation has greatly decreased the amount of labor involved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_... the thesis is only possible if all you look at are the cheapest consumer goods, where moving to places with the lowest cost labor is a necessity.
A common criticism of that high level view of US manufacturing is that it is a bit of a lie, and a lot of it is about hedonic adjustments for new Intel chips being faster than old ones. Without that, the graph of manufacturing output in dollars looks like a steady downward slope from the year 2000 on.
got a link to someone actually arguing that with data?
Industrial society didn’t end, it just moved to Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.
Someone is manufacturing all these “post-industrial” radio transceivers, screens and datacenters, after all. Still others are mining and drilling the required natural resources.
Bretton Woods and the Dollar as world reserve currency effected this shift from West to East.
Someone is manufacturing all these “post-industrial” radio transceivers, screens and datacenters, after all. Still others are mining and drilling the required natural resources.
Bretton Woods and the Dollar as world reserve currency effected this shift from West to East.
>The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life.
I would like to argue that this is the other way round:
A corn field is a highly parallelized and automatized food creation machine. Is there a significant difference between operating crops and life stock or an industrial machine? I don't think so.
Industrialization means that we have transferred the automation of life onto previously manual processes. The countryside was brought into town.
This process is far from finished. Does anybody on HN doubt that the bureaucratic processes will be automated in a not so distant future? The stalling, the increase in bureaucratic processes is good because it makes it even more profitable to invest into process automation. This will overcome the 'post-industiral trap'.
That said, the observation at the end of the article is still very interesting:
>...will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.
Do social technologies have the potential to create systems with far greater capabilities than the ones we have? Is Facebook the 'Wright Flyer of social networks' or is Facebook already the Saturn rocket?
I would like to argue that this is the other way round:
A corn field is a highly parallelized and automatized food creation machine. Is there a significant difference between operating crops and life stock or an industrial machine? I don't think so.
Industrialization means that we have transferred the automation of life onto previously manual processes. The countryside was brought into town.
This process is far from finished. Does anybody on HN doubt that the bureaucratic processes will be automated in a not so distant future? The stalling, the increase in bureaucratic processes is good because it makes it even more profitable to invest into process automation. This will overcome the 'post-industiral trap'.
That said, the observation at the end of the article is still very interesting:
>...will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.
Do social technologies have the potential to create systems with far greater capabilities than the ones we have? Is Facebook the 'Wright Flyer of social networks' or is Facebook already the Saturn rocket?
> Is Facebook the 'Wright Flyer of social networks' or is Facebook
already the Saturn rocket?
No. This is Facebook [1], that flappy steam powered umbrella machine that shakes itself to pieces and kills the pilot.
Honestly, I think if there were any reason to think "Industrial society is eating itself", social media (and tech addiction) would be the number one suspects.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8
No. This is Facebook [1], that flappy steam powered umbrella machine that shakes itself to pieces and kills the pilot.
Honestly, I think if there were any reason to think "Industrial society is eating itself", social media (and tech addiction) would be the number one suspects.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw_C_sbfyx8
> The COVID-19 pandemic showed East Asia to be the best place to put key elements of the supply chain. ... Importantly, authorities see it as vital to enable the gathering of many people together in crowded spaces. ... Because of this, you cannot simply send everyone home forever.
Meanwhile, the 25M people of Shanghai are approaching their third month of complete welded-apartment-door level lockdown.
Meanwhile, the 25M people of Shanghai are approaching their third month of complete welded-apartment-door level lockdown.
I was thinking this very thought when I read that bit. Maybe the point was more about the system of government being one that could force it's citizenry into servitude; either way I'm not so excited about the prospect.
> If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
This is an interesting idea: that the shedding of industry by an industrial society is irreversible. There is no way to go back, no matter how desperately that might be desired.
But the reason presented seems kind of flimsy. What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned? The idea isn't explained before or after the statement.
This is an interesting idea: that the shedding of industry by an industrial society is irreversible. There is no way to go back, no matter how desperately that might be desired.
But the reason presented seems kind of flimsy. What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned? The idea isn't explained before or after the statement.
The cause isn't adequately explained, but it's hard not to see the ramifications of the outcome everywhere you look. We live in a society that couldn't rebuild, if it had to, the New York City subway, or the Interstate Highway System, or the national electric grid, or numerous other features of industrialized 20th century America.
>We live in a society that couldn't rebuild, if it had to, the New York City subway, or the Interstate Highway System, or the national electric grid, or numerous other features of industrialized 20th century America.
We live in a society which lacks the collective will to do such things. It's only after the knowledge required to do so is lost that it can't be done again.
Unlike after the fall of Rome, there are machine tools all over this country that make it possible. We don't have to rely on manpower, or beasts to do the work. Sitting in basements, garages, barns, forests. We've got the natural resources. We also have a widely distributed archive of machinists books, literacy, and the hacker ethos on our side.
Mostly it's the financial distortions of the price of money, and tax policy, that have moved our manufacturing offshore, for now.
We live in a society which lacks the collective will to do such things. It's only after the knowledge required to do so is lost that it can't be done again.
Unlike after the fall of Rome, there are machine tools all over this country that make it possible. We don't have to rely on manpower, or beasts to do the work. Sitting in basements, garages, barns, forests. We've got the natural resources. We also have a widely distributed archive of machinists books, literacy, and the hacker ethos on our side.
Mostly it's the financial distortions of the price of money, and tax policy, that have moved our manufacturing offshore, for now.
there are machine tools all over this country that make it possible [...] sitting in basements, garages, barns, forests
That may not be as true as you imagine. Entire factories, refineries, chemical plants, etc. were dismantled and shipped to china during the 1990's and 2000's. Once there, they were re-assembled and put back into production. I have met people who were involved in this work. The equipment did not get retired, it got sold.
That may not be as true as you imagine. Entire factories, refineries, chemical plants, etc. were dismantled and shipped to china during the 1990's and 2000's. Once there, they were re-assembled and put back into production. I have met people who were involved in this work. The equipment did not get retired, it got sold.
I understand that scaling infrastructure back up takes time and effort. I understand the long timescales involved in even the most basic of factory setup. I watched as it took a year to move the gear shop I was working at.
However, we were discussing not being able to reboot society at all. If you know how modern machining works, and have access to a supply of material and students to teach, it can be booted back up in reasonable timeframes. It wouldn't have to take a few Millenia to be re-invented again.
You can make machine shop level of flat surfaces with the Whitworth method. Steam technology on the small scale is something that can be done in the home shop. Once you don't have to rely on muscle to machine materials, you can scale up quickly.
Eric Flint wrote 1632, a work of alternative fiction which plays out this scenario by catapulting a mining town in West Virginia back to the year 1632. Food was the critical gate to pass through, but they made it.
However, we were discussing not being able to reboot society at all. If you know how modern machining works, and have access to a supply of material and students to teach, it can be booted back up in reasonable timeframes. It wouldn't have to take a few Millenia to be re-invented again.
You can make machine shop level of flat surfaces with the Whitworth method. Steam technology on the small scale is something that can be done in the home shop. Once you don't have to rely on muscle to machine materials, you can scale up quickly.
Eric Flint wrote 1632, a work of alternative fiction which plays out this scenario by catapulting a mining town in West Virginia back to the year 1632. Food was the critical gate to pass through, but they made it.
> We live in a society which lacks the collective will to do such things. It's only after the knowledge required to do so is lost that it can't be done again.
You’re assuming that the social organization and culture required to do these things can’t be lost just like knowledge. I think that’s incorrect. It’s like how third world countries know what they should do to develop their economies—stop allowing government officials to take bribes, etc. But they can’t.
You’re assuming that the social organization and culture required to do these things can’t be lost just like knowledge. I think that’s incorrect. It’s like how third world countries know what they should do to develop their economies—stop allowing government officials to take bribes, etc. But they can’t.
Like feudal post-Roman world couldn't repeat any large Roman infrastructure for a millennium.
>What does "mint preliminary social capital" mean and why is it impossible after industrialization is abandoned?
he is referring to what he describes at the beginning of the essay: preindustrial social forms and traits that lend themselves to industrialization, like high social trust between strangers
he is referring to what he describes at the beginning of the essay: preindustrial social forms and traits that lend themselves to industrialization, like high social trust between strangers
I took "mint preliminary social capital" to mean, fundamentally, trust. The kinds of trust needed for a society to consent en masse to the collective capital project of (re-)industrializing are difficult to attain in the face of decaying material needs of the skilled labor force (if those skills even propagated forward to begin with.)
> What, then, is the core engine of our own civilization, and in what way might it decay? While we lack an incontrovertible answer, the Industrial Revolution appears to be a leading candidate.
I find this historically shallow (or short-term). IMO, at the core of civilization is the concept of "domain" (from the old latin meaning, which is like "realm" or possibly "kingdom")
I like to recall that all the "old and obsolete industrial practices" are more fundamental than the novel and up-to-date "computer networking, artificial intelligence, and other “emerging technologies.”"
and when I say more fundamental, I mean that's it's not possible to have the later without the former.
I find this historically shallow (or short-term). IMO, at the core of civilization is the concept of "domain" (from the old latin meaning, which is like "realm" or possibly "kingdom")
I like to recall that all the "old and obsolete industrial practices" are more fundamental than the novel and up-to-date "computer networking, artificial intelligence, and other “emerging technologies.”"
and when I say more fundamental, I mean that's it's not possible to have the later without the former.
People, like the WEF, who spend a great deal of time trying to anticipate the future "revolutions" and post-"revolutions" are just a bunch of self-important assholes.
The point about the economy and "revolutions" and other things is that it's an extremely complex chaotic system. Exponentially more complex than anything any computer can model. And details matter. Details matter very very much. A accidental conversation in a hallway or a pebble rolling across a road can lead to world shattering revelations and new technology that will forever after change humanity's trajectory.
This means you cannot predict the future anymore than you can recreate an ice cube from a puddle it makes after it melted.
The required information is simply not available.
The point about the economy and "revolutions" and other things is that it's an extremely complex chaotic system. Exponentially more complex than anything any computer can model. And details matter. Details matter very very much. A accidental conversation in a hallway or a pebble rolling across a road can lead to world shattering revelations and new technology that will forever after change humanity's trajectory.
This means you cannot predict the future anymore than you can recreate an ice cube from a puddle it makes after it melted.
The required information is simply not available.
I don't agree with the premises. The arguments are not fleshed out. The conclusions feel absurd and lack supporting logic.
However, I was able to get past those things and enjoy the journey as an imaginative flight of fancy. The author might be better suited to fiction?
However, I was able to get past those things and enjoy the journey as an imaginative flight of fancy. The author might be better suited to fiction?
A semi-interesting read on a topic I often think about.
I’ll boil it down to “new systems generate new social systems, that become imitations of themselves, that then cannibalizes the initial system.”
The insight I see here is we need new social technology.
The “hands on” founder is back with Gen Z, along with verticalized ambitions. There were easy wins building on the institutional tech stack we've inherited, but today you are more likely to conform or fail if you launch a transformational innovation on that stack.
Instead, I see founders going to the source of each institution to create change. Cul de Sac in AZ going after that.
In the same way, we’re designing a vertical reinvention of the org as a guild. There’s institutions we’re build on for sure, but the security comes more from community than the enforcement of agreements by traditional institutions.
I’ll boil it down to “new systems generate new social systems, that become imitations of themselves, that then cannibalizes the initial system.”
The insight I see here is we need new social technology.
The “hands on” founder is back with Gen Z, along with verticalized ambitions. There were easy wins building on the institutional tech stack we've inherited, but today you are more likely to conform or fail if you launch a transformational innovation on that stack.
Instead, I see founders going to the source of each institution to create change. Cul de Sac in AZ going after that.
In the same way, we’re designing a vertical reinvention of the org as a guild. There’s institutions we’re build on for sure, but the security comes more from community than the enforcement of agreements by traditional institutions.
This is Internet Rationalism, distilled and bottled: masturbatory rediscovery (there's a reason we've been calling it "post-industrial" for the last 40 years) mixed with a healthy dose of neoreactionary handwringing ("civilizational collapse").
You can imagine my shock at discovering that Palladium is funded by Thiel[1] (non-partisan, indeed!), and that one of their founders is now working on Web3 (post-industrial, indeed!).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570
You can imagine my shock at discovering that Palladium is funded by Thiel[1] (non-partisan, indeed!), and that one of their founders is now working on Web3 (post-industrial, indeed!).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570
> Not only marketers, but scientists, statesmen, industrialists, politicians, philosophers, and writers shaped ersatz social technology to fill the gaps, but completely failed to guarantee knowledge succession of the generative core of knowledge. The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.
Quite the Just-So Story. Any evidence that people used to be highly concerned with first principles and this has somehow dropped off? I won't hold my breath.
Quite the Just-So Story. Any evidence that people used to be highly concerned with first principles and this has somehow dropped off? I won't hold my breath.
Yes, a slightly challenging read, but it's not a dissertation, rather more an opinion piece.
There are some interesting ideas and constructs, not commonly presented, here.
Maybe rather than criticising it for not spoon feeding you with extracts/soundbites from sources that may appear to be of "academic substance" (but ultimately most likely assumptions themselves), consider it a source of ideas to explore and form your own opinions on.
There are some interesting ideas and constructs, not commonly presented, here.
Maybe rather than criticising it for not spoon feeding you with extracts/soundbites from sources that may appear to be of "academic substance" (but ultimately most likely assumptions themselves), consider it a source of ideas to explore and form your own opinions on.
The entire article hinges on the principle that everything collapses because there is "on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers." Translation: the knowledge economy isn't as robust as the industrial economy because, reasons.
He never gets into those reasons because he doesn't seem to understand industrial production, and many get it wrong. The industrial worker is actually not an intrinsically special person. The engineers behind the industrial systems, sure. But those engineers still exist in the knowledge economy, and the barrier to become an engineer in a knowledge economy, I would argue, is far lower. In many ways, the industrial worker can be a liability to the knowledge economy, not an asset, because they need to be trained, systems need to be made to met their capabilities, and they will hold on to those systems for a labor generation, while innovations get tabled.
I actually agree with a lot of isolated premises in the article, but he arrives at the conclusion in a roundabout way. He says, for instance, factories in a post-industrial society would be local. Yes, I agree. We will only have resource streams and local cities would have factories that make everything. That's the actual realization of a pure knowledge economy, with many millions of decentralized factories making everything, with a few smart engineers running things, and people dropping out of the labor pool. This is all good, and does not lead to technological decline in any way.
He never gets into those reasons because he doesn't seem to understand industrial production, and many get it wrong. The industrial worker is actually not an intrinsically special person. The engineers behind the industrial systems, sure. But those engineers still exist in the knowledge economy, and the barrier to become an engineer in a knowledge economy, I would argue, is far lower. In many ways, the industrial worker can be a liability to the knowledge economy, not an asset, because they need to be trained, systems need to be made to met their capabilities, and they will hold on to those systems for a labor generation, while innovations get tabled.
I actually agree with a lot of isolated premises in the article, but he arrives at the conclusion in a roundabout way. He says, for instance, factories in a post-industrial society would be local. Yes, I agree. We will only have resource streams and local cities would have factories that make everything. That's the actual realization of a pure knowledge economy, with many millions of decentralized factories making everything, with a few smart engineers running things, and people dropping out of the labor pool. This is all good, and does not lead to technological decline in any way.
> Translation: the knowledge economy isn't as robust as the industrial economy because, reasons.
While I didn't agree with everything in the article myself, I would say the translation is actually more along the lines of:
"As a civilization becomes more efficient, fewer of the members of the population need to know how to actually do anything. The civilization becomes less robust in the face of new pressures because all everyone knows how to do is sit around in their underwear and play Call of Duty when they aren't LARPing being a knowledge worker."
If you can survive without chopping wood, soon enough you'll forget how to chop wood. If a civilization can survive long enough without anyone knowing how to build/repair the technology that sits a level below the current water mark, it will. See: Cobol codebases.
While I didn't agree with everything in the article myself, I would say the translation is actually more along the lines of:
"As a civilization becomes more efficient, fewer of the members of the population need to know how to actually do anything. The civilization becomes less robust in the face of new pressures because all everyone knows how to do is sit around in their underwear and play Call of Duty when they aren't LARPing being a knowledge worker."
If you can survive without chopping wood, soon enough you'll forget how to chop wood. If a civilization can survive long enough without anyone knowing how to build/repair the technology that sits a level below the current water mark, it will. See: Cobol codebases.
Yeah, I know the argument, but how many people in industrial society know how to do anything? The engineers build the systems that the factory workers use. In fact, the workers generally know only one subset of some problem that is being solved by the manufacturing process.
You have to be able to show how this "knowledge gap" causes a collapse because the "new engineers" fail to understand the building blocks and the systems will erode over time. As long as the standards exist someone can "follow the recipe."
I can totally concede that over long epochs of time of stability there would be a wax and wane of technological prowess and that at some point interest, or active knowledge, would be lost. But as long as the knowledge is still there then it would not take much for this future society to repair and regain its knowledge.
I see absolutely no justification for a collapse scenario. Your CoD LARPers will have to unclog their toilet eventually.
You have to be able to show how this "knowledge gap" causes a collapse because the "new engineers" fail to understand the building blocks and the systems will erode over time. As long as the standards exist someone can "follow the recipe."
I can totally concede that over long epochs of time of stability there would be a wax and wane of technological prowess and that at some point interest, or active knowledge, would be lost. But as long as the knowledge is still there then it would not take much for this future society to repair and regain its knowledge.
I see absolutely no justification for a collapse scenario. Your CoD LARPers will have to unclog their toilet eventually.
You seem to have missed the point of my brief comment. I didn't fail to understand the passage. I understood it and found it implausible.
The lovely thing about this "old knowledge" or "old ways" fetishism is that the knowledge economy is a superset of all previous paradigms.
If you were to ask a blacksmith 400 years ago what he thought about people living in a modern air conditioned house and all the luxuries it affords, with a backyard hobby forge, making steel swords, he would probably be freaking miffed. A hobby?!? Forging stuff for a past time?!? I have to make 20 swords a day or my head gets cut off!
Short of catastrophe, we will not be going back. The future may look different, but the knowledge and technology will continue to improve. If we stop driving cars and stop making cars because we have clean cities with many avenues of public transportation the knowledge of 'how to make a car' still exists.
And there will be some dude in that hypothetical society building a car for a hobby.
If you were to ask a blacksmith 400 years ago what he thought about people living in a modern air conditioned house and all the luxuries it affords, with a backyard hobby forge, making steel swords, he would probably be freaking miffed. A hobby?!? Forging stuff for a past time?!? I have to make 20 swords a day or my head gets cut off!
Short of catastrophe, we will not be going back. The future may look different, but the knowledge and technology will continue to improve. If we stop driving cars and stop making cars because we have clean cities with many avenues of public transportation the knowledge of 'how to make a car' still exists.
And there will be some dude in that hypothetical society building a car for a hobby.
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> While the great illusion persisted, we’d have more and more trouble maintaining current customary industries housed in client states such as Germany and Japan.
He lost me here. I've (recently, and this is strictly my point of view) become of the opinion that the only true lasting civilizations are the East (mainly China) and the West (The Ruhr area being its center). Civilizations have sprung on the shadow of these two giants but they were mercantile: The Roman Empire, The Islamic Khalifs, Portuguese traders, the USA are all civilizations relying on linking East and West. These two areas of the world had two things in common: 1. Lots of people, and 2. they were industrial.
They produced stuff and they needed to trade. The journey to trading between these two was so profitable that it enabled the financing of whole civilizations which claimed the titles. There are little signs that this order will change. These two areas go through their ups and downs but seems to bounce regularly (World War 2, China civil war, Japan, etc..) to reclaim their status.
Offshoring, so far, has only kicked off an internal market in China. Most countries who are doing offshore industrial jobs still rely on the motherland for technology, organization and development. The US seemed promising on the East coast (the most Western part of the US?) but it didn't last that long.
Of course this doesn't address a post-industrial world: There are no guarantees that these two areas will remain the dominant ones. But my guess is that it'll be the case like it has historically been.
He lost me here. I've (recently, and this is strictly my point of view) become of the opinion that the only true lasting civilizations are the East (mainly China) and the West (The Ruhr area being its center). Civilizations have sprung on the shadow of these two giants but they were mercantile: The Roman Empire, The Islamic Khalifs, Portuguese traders, the USA are all civilizations relying on linking East and West. These two areas of the world had two things in common: 1. Lots of people, and 2. they were industrial.
They produced stuff and they needed to trade. The journey to trading between these two was so profitable that it enabled the financing of whole civilizations which claimed the titles. There are little signs that this order will change. These two areas go through their ups and downs but seems to bounce regularly (World War 2, China civil war, Japan, etc..) to reclaim their status.
Offshoring, so far, has only kicked off an internal market in China. Most countries who are doing offshore industrial jobs still rely on the motherland for technology, organization and development. The US seemed promising on the East coast (the most Western part of the US?) but it didn't last that long.
Of course this doesn't address a post-industrial world: There are no guarantees that these two areas will remain the dominant ones. But my guess is that it'll be the case like it has historically been.
> With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word.
How far we have fallen. We replaced handshakes with contracts that most people followed. Now few even follow contracts and break them willingly all the time.
Every job/business arrangement seems to just bring in more people into your life that you will hate someday.
How far we have fallen. We replaced handshakes with contracts that most people followed. Now few even follow contracts and break them willingly all the time.
Every job/business arrangement seems to just bring in more people into your life that you will hate someday.
More like a handshake, a reputation at stake, and a threat of death penalty, if you want to take a more honest look at what would happen if you committed mutiny.
No idea what the deal is with this site, it seemed intriguing but found this on their articles index. Probably should read it before making any judgments but... its mothers day, who has the time?
> The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers
> Only a powerful modernizing force could overcome the tribal loyalties that divided Afghanistan’s fragile state. That force was the Taliban.
> The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers
> Only a powerful modernizing force could overcome the tribal loyalties that divided Afghanistan’s fragile state. That force was the Taliban.
Without reading the articles themselves, we can’t judge those titles. It is sometimes true that truly evil forces are responsible for progress.
Modernization is not inherently good or bad. That it might be propelled by an organization that itself is evil says nothing about the author or modernization.
Modernization is not inherently good or bad. That it might be propelled by an organization that itself is evil says nothing about the author or modernization.
> its mothers day
Not here it isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day
Not here it isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day
It's a very good article. You should read it. Especially if you disagree with the title.
The article begins by suggesting that the (“first”) industrial revolution remains much more important and revolutionary than the “later” (2nd, 3rd, 4th) industrial revolutions by appealing to a general sense that the later ones dont feel as impressive, but weirdly he doesn’t seem mention (at least based on my skim) the objective sense in which the original industrial revolution was overwhelmingly more notable: growth rates went from ~0.1%/year to ~4%/year, a speed up of roughly 50 times, which has not happened since. (Growth has now probably slightly slowed.)
Like, you dont have to think that everything about automobiles is great to still need to acknowledge that one super important part of cars being developed is that they were waaaay faster than horses.
Like, you dont have to think that everything about automobiles is great to still need to acknowledge that one super important part of cars being developed is that they were waaaay faster than horses.
I like to say "countries that don't produce tangible goods are at the mercy of those who do". Push come to shove, the service economy is worthless. What matters is production of real goods that you can hold in your hand. At least agriculture is still a top priority despite calls from weirdly misled groups to end subsidies.
Personally, seeing how easy it is to laser cut metal or get a CTO part or a PCB in China makes me jealous. There are similar services in the EU, but not as good, more expensive, and not as widespread (i.e. you can find them in Germany and the UK, but not in many other countries... at least postal services work well, I guess).
Personally, seeing how easy it is to laser cut metal or get a CTO part or a PCB in China makes me jealous. There are similar services in the EU, but not as good, more expensive, and not as widespread (i.e. you can find them in Germany and the UK, but not in many other countries... at least postal services work well, I guess).
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Conservatives need to lay off the Marx and French post-structuralism, and maybe go back to Burke or something. The incongruence between the aesthetics and message of these articles causes confusion to readers because most aren’t familiar with dialectical materialism (and the ones that are see through the poorly executed subversion attempt). You can tell because a lot of the comments on these articles are complaining about the style.
Conservatives using Marx! The IRONY!
I don't believe the article but even if it is true all it would take is to stop making it illegal for that decline to be visible. A negative interest rate signals that society wants to preserve excess capital but is failing to do so. The author conveniently dodges the elephant in the room which is the aging population in the west and which will soon manifest itself in China.
The tone of this article does not match its contents.
This is some cherry picked data to suit a narrative, presented as a matter of fact. That is a mistake.
This is some cherry picked data to suit a narrative, presented as a matter of fact. That is a mistake.
Hum, grumble mumble... We surely are at the end of a cycle in human development terms, witch means the actual society going to change in something new, BUT "Industrial Society" is not actually a society in humans terms.
We have had countless "industrial society" in various different societies, from Japanese steel, China ceramic and shipping (far in the past), metallurgic industry from Celts, Roman industry, cord and weapons industry in more recent times, ... surely "industry" as a concept have changed.
It's still a matter of work in certain location with a certain supply chain to produce a certain (big) amount of goods, in tech terms we have switched various times and now we are about to change from subtractive manufacturing (CNC mills) to additive ones (3D printing) etc such tech change ALSO change more or less the human society but there are still two separate things.
Actual economically-driven, neoliberal society yes completely fails to evolve, because real progress is against certain business, because managerial/profit driven development is incompatible with real innovation, that's an enormous issue of the present time, but again not an "industrial society" issue.
Transportation changes thanks to TLCs and tech evolution, climate change push will probably push us from roads to air/water ways, so a future without major roads and rails infra that demand stability and a certain concentration will probably vanish in a more mixed and flexible ones, the need of big factories will change reducing a bit with tech progress, how we live will change accordingly, but again that's not an industrial society end, nor the actual society end...
It's still probably too early to say when and how such changes happens if they'll happen. There are still too much variables in the game.
We have had countless "industrial society" in various different societies, from Japanese steel, China ceramic and shipping (far in the past), metallurgic industry from Celts, Roman industry, cord and weapons industry in more recent times, ... surely "industry" as a concept have changed.
It's still a matter of work in certain location with a certain supply chain to produce a certain (big) amount of goods, in tech terms we have switched various times and now we are about to change from subtractive manufacturing (CNC mills) to additive ones (3D printing) etc such tech change ALSO change more or less the human society but there are still two separate things.
Actual economically-driven, neoliberal society yes completely fails to evolve, because real progress is against certain business, because managerial/profit driven development is incompatible with real innovation, that's an enormous issue of the present time, but again not an "industrial society" issue.
Transportation changes thanks to TLCs and tech evolution, climate change push will probably push us from roads to air/water ways, so a future without major roads and rails infra that demand stability and a certain concentration will probably vanish in a more mixed and flexible ones, the need of big factories will change reducing a bit with tech progress, how we live will change accordingly, but again that's not an industrial society end, nor the actual society end...
It's still probably too early to say when and how such changes happens if they'll happen. There are still too much variables in the game.
So far yours is the only substantive response to the post (edit: although a few others popped up after I wrote this). I agree with most of the broad ideas you bring up which are insightful. However, the tone of your comment does not seem to be quite acknowledging that we are in reality now in a somewhat dire situation. Anyway I have a few questions.
I too see many issues with "managerial/profit driven development" and true innovation. However, do you suppose that we should remove the profit motive? What do we replace it with? Because unfortunately people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI. The problems with these paradigms are even more severe than with corporations.
My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game. And again, although there are quite a few cheaters, and least there is a game you can play. If you take away the rules and points, you are left with just politics. Or, in the case of a centralized AI, highly concentrated politics related to who controls the AI. And the rest organizing themselves how? Because another part of this equation is that humans are animals and will inevitably construct hierarchies related to mating and resource distribution (just like other animals).
Large scale ultra-local production empowered by things like 3d printing seems to be on its way. But its very far from taking over. And right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production. And the few community gardens we have are negligible in terms of total calories. Also, almost all items, from construction materials to household goods, require oil to produce. Its nice to fantasize about algal oil or something, but large scale deployment is nowhere near here.
To me what could possibly work or at least be a step in the right direction is to use something like advanced cryptocurrency and smart contract technology to reimplement things like money and government in ways that are more fair, cohesive and sane. Combine or even integrate that with truly distributed real time and redundant information systems for large scale data aggregation, visualization and query. My idea is kind of going along the lines of the centralized 1950s style AI, at least as far as being able to get holistic views. But it incorporates modern ideas about the robustness of distributed networks. So we can effectively and transparently share and aggregate global information using peer-to-peer protocols, but not be restricted to a single authoritarian interpretation.
But I am very curious to hear, did you have specific ideas about moving beyond the "managerial/profit driven development"? It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan. I think most are envisioning a vast network of "intentional communities" where everyone just shares. Again, the reality of that is not going to be as great as you think. Because it means replacing the "game" of profit with just pure politics. Most of the intentional communities become kind of like little cults. Organization will happen one way or another. If there isn't some points accumulation or other structure then you default to manipulation, stabbings, etc.
I too see many issues with "managerial/profit driven development" and true innovation. However, do you suppose that we should remove the profit motive? What do we replace it with? Because unfortunately people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI. The problems with these paradigms are even more severe than with corporations.
My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game. And again, although there are quite a few cheaters, and least there is a game you can play. If you take away the rules and points, you are left with just politics. Or, in the case of a centralized AI, highly concentrated politics related to who controls the AI. And the rest organizing themselves how? Because another part of this equation is that humans are animals and will inevitably construct hierarchies related to mating and resource distribution (just like other animals).
Large scale ultra-local production empowered by things like 3d printing seems to be on its way. But its very far from taking over. And right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production. And the few community gardens we have are negligible in terms of total calories. Also, almost all items, from construction materials to household goods, require oil to produce. Its nice to fantasize about algal oil or something, but large scale deployment is nowhere near here.
To me what could possibly work or at least be a step in the right direction is to use something like advanced cryptocurrency and smart contract technology to reimplement things like money and government in ways that are more fair, cohesive and sane. Combine or even integrate that with truly distributed real time and redundant information systems for large scale data aggregation, visualization and query. My idea is kind of going along the lines of the centralized 1950s style AI, at least as far as being able to get holistic views. But it incorporates modern ideas about the robustness of distributed networks. So we can effectively and transparently share and aggregate global information using peer-to-peer protocols, but not be restricted to a single authoritarian interpretation.
But I am very curious to hear, did you have specific ideas about moving beyond the "managerial/profit driven development"? It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan. I think most are envisioning a vast network of "intentional communities" where everyone just shares. Again, the reality of that is not going to be as great as you think. Because it means replacing the "game" of profit with just pure politics. Most of the intentional communities become kind of like little cults. Organization will happen one way or another. If there isn't some points accumulation or other structure then you default to manipulation, stabbings, etc.
Profit motives aren't inherently the problem; the problem is what is justified or not in pursuing them - in particular, how their pursuit comes to clash with morally-valued interests such as human and non-human suffering. E.g. in _my_ mind at least, there is 0 fundamentally wrong with, say, creating profit by solely using your own things and your own personal labor. The only thing that suggests otherwise is religious dogma. But when you start hiring others who must work or else starve, when you start to create enough waste above and beyond and so forth, that's where things start to become more complicated because you are adding the potential for harming someone or something else against its will into the mix.
> people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI.
Maybe we should try to figure out how to create an AI "idea generator" that can probe idea space more freely and see if it can break us out of our thinking rut. IOW use the AI not to govern or control or have power over anything, but use it to inspire us and break us out of our boxes.
Maybe we should try to figure out how to create an AI "idea generator" that can probe idea space more freely and see if it can break us out of our thinking rut. IOW use the AI not to govern or control or have power over anything, but use it to inspire us and break us out of our boxes.
> Because unfortunately people seem to fall back to some sort of centralized system like a scientific committee or centralized AI.
Manhattan Project, Apollo, ARPAnet, how many public sector monumental counterexamples do you need
Manhattan Project, Apollo, ARPAnet, how many public sector monumental counterexamples do you need
> do you suppose that we should remove the profit motive? What do we replace it with?
Not remove, layer it. In the past we have had public universities and big "free" "innovation labs" from private those NOT managerial driven but just "we have big money, we fund some very skilled technicians who innovate on their own and see the outcome, something very nice for our business will appear". Such model have produced the most quick and revolutionary innovation we have seen in last century et least.
My view is: States funds public universities whose target is pure research, innovation for humankind. They do not produce goods, just ideas and initial implementations. Companies for their profits, States for Citizens needs pick those ideas choosing what to implement, sell etc. Private research can't really compete so there will be a bit but not too much to steer society in dangerous evolution, States having the biggest concentration of talents and research can surveil and make Citizens informed enough to decide if something is good or not.
> My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game.
Although in practice we have seen the contrary: some innovate better than other conquering certain positions, than they start killing potential competitors thanks to money they have amassed... IMVHO innovation can only be stimulate by intellectual means, push needs and rewards means pushing dangerous innovations,, something good can arrive, but also much bad things.
> right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production
And it's cause is only partially the climate change, much is due by for-profit market moves, where it's more profitable having big food players instead of countless small ones. That's why IMVHO profit must be contained, it's not self-contained because the ideal free market can exists, only if kept free by force, by nature it derive quickly toward hierarchy against humans needs... The main point here is that States as Democracies represent the sole real free market: the people, all together unable to really form a monopoly or oligopoly.
> It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan.
IMVHO money is a very misunderstood topic: so far money are a kind of substrate of anything lent to states in the form of public debt; that's not "money" that's a very old scam, dating back from the '300 or even certain Greeks polis. Money must be a unit of measure of a substrate, determined, not owned, by the public, no private parties involved. A symbol we use to weight nearly anything.
If we made money like that, than profit change aspect: we do not have financialization much more than a thin layer because having no value as a substrate have no value, so no option for profit, at all. In that case a company can have benefits from good ads, but can't live only on ads, it need something valuable underneath etc.
That's the real key all actual élites do not want because actual money is the best way to keep people in line with soft tie almost no one really see and revolt.
Not remove, layer it. In the past we have had public universities and big "free" "innovation labs" from private those NOT managerial driven but just "we have big money, we fund some very skilled technicians who innovate on their own and see the outcome, something very nice for our business will appear". Such model have produced the most quick and revolutionary innovation we have seen in last century et least.
My view is: States funds public universities whose target is pure research, innovation for humankind. They do not produce goods, just ideas and initial implementations. Companies for their profits, States for Citizens needs pick those ideas choosing what to implement, sell etc. Private research can't really compete so there will be a bit but not too much to steer society in dangerous evolution, States having the biggest concentration of talents and research can surveil and make Citizens informed enough to decide if something is good or not.
> My take is that involving profits is a way to introduce rules and score keeping to the game.
Although in practice we have seen the contrary: some innovate better than other conquering certain positions, than they start killing potential competitors thanks to money they have amassed... IMVHO innovation can only be stimulate by intellectual means, push needs and rewards means pushing dangerous innovations,, something good can arrive, but also much bad things.
> right now, for example, we have a crisis in food production
And it's cause is only partially the climate change, much is due by for-profit market moves, where it's more profitable having big food players instead of countless small ones. That's why IMVHO profit must be contained, it's not self-contained because the ideal free market can exists, only if kept free by force, by nature it derive quickly toward hierarchy against humans needs... The main point here is that States as Democracies represent the sole real free market: the people, all together unable to really form a monopoly or oligopoly.
> It just feels like people who want to completely drop money or profit from this usually don't have a great plan.
IMVHO money is a very misunderstood topic: so far money are a kind of substrate of anything lent to states in the form of public debt; that's not "money" that's a very old scam, dating back from the '300 or even certain Greeks polis. Money must be a unit of measure of a substrate, determined, not owned, by the public, no private parties involved. A symbol we use to weight nearly anything.
If we made money like that, than profit change aspect: we do not have financialization much more than a thin layer because having no value as a substrate have no value, so no option for profit, at all. In that case a company can have benefits from good ads, but can't live only on ads, it need something valuable underneath etc.
That's the real key all actual élites do not want because actual money is the best way to keep people in line with soft tie almost no one really see and revolt.
> Money must be a unit of measure of a substrate, determined, not owned, by the public, no private parties involved. A symbol we use to weight nearly anything
Maybe you can give me an example or reference? I don't understand what you mean.
Maybe you can give me an example or reference? I don't understand what you mean.
Well, perhaps the ideal start is from a fictional past example: I look for poultry, you have them but I have nothing to trade you want; you want a knife. Now a neighbor have a spare knife but again nothing that I can trade is interested for him/her, while another neighbor let's say want shoes, I have them, and trade shoes with ceramic, the other with the knife want ceramic so we can manage such 4 party exchange. Such system does not work much, it's too complicated finding matching objects in the neighborhood for any exchange.
So we invented a symbol, money, we all agree to accept and start saying "hey, for my chicken I want 10 coins, for my shoes 30, ... we can all exchange coins for anything else and the volume of exchanges makes "the right price" of anything, more or less, depending on various factors, like scarcity vs abundance.
Such simple system work well enough, have issues like how to choose a symbol no one can temper easily because if I can produce coins in my backyard I destroy the system for instance etc. Such issues can be solved by a public authority who decide an initial quantity of money, distribute it with commonly agreed criteria, check it's authenticity etc. Such authority MUST be public because MUST been unable to make profit from that money making/handling. Being public have no profit to make, those who work for such institution can't do that in disguise, their money is public, they can't have personal interests involved etc. They must be civil servant like in the ancient Athens where the police was made by slaves, they know if they act well they can live a good life, if not they are dead. Similar things happen in various European cities where the elected government must be formed of strangers checked for any absence of conflicting interests but rewarded enough for their role if they openly perform well.
Again, not perfect but work. Profit, A BIT of, is now a weapon to push people to act a bit avoiding the classic "if you get paid for doing nothing you'll do nothing" and similarly avoid those who decide to live with a purpose because we have various cohort of "people" in the sense that there are the very active who work "too much" ruining lives around them, disturbing a calm evolution of the society etc and we have people who do not want to do anything at all, various others in between etc. Being as society we need to find a best possible place for anyone because that's why we make a society in the first place, and we can bend attitudes a bit, but not more than a bit. In such democratic fictional society we need to pursue the common good without being against personal interests nor individual attitudes. The Roman's said "In medio stat virtus" (in the mean lie the virtue), the Swedes have invented the Lagom concept witch happen to be essentially the same etc. We need a bit of push to profit to avoid stagnation and dispersion but we need to limit it to avoid derailments where people start to live to work instead of the contrary.
Actually money are not like that: EU central bank is formed by EU States central banks witch in turn are formed by the biggest private banks and insurances of their relevant countries, the USA FED is equally a private institution bolted to the public government in an old scam. Only few States have public central banks but such states tend to be dictatorships not Democracies so again the public is the private game of the ruler... Money actually are lent to the public for an interest rate that can't mathematically be paid except if you borrow foreign money so money now is debt. Being the thing anyone want money is not The Value, the substrate of anything.
States need taxes NOT to redistribute richness ensuring a narrow enough fork between richest and poorest for the common welfare but to finance their operations etc. The entire economy is a classic scam due to this absurd distortion at the economy atom. Profit is not anymore producing something good and so get rewarded, being able to buy more, but harvesting money from others etc such system can only end if we agree that a society much be ruled by the people, a Democracy, not a classic Aristocracy, nor a modern Corporato-Timocracy nor something lead "by leaders inn disguise who direct the flock of people" (cfr. Gustave le Bon, Eduard Bernays, ...) like the neoliberal society of today.
I do not know how to make that happen, I do not know how it happen in the past, all I know is how to maintain it witch is the "in medio stat virtus" at any level, richness, welfare, culture etc...
So we invented a symbol, money, we all agree to accept and start saying "hey, for my chicken I want 10 coins, for my shoes 30, ... we can all exchange coins for anything else and the volume of exchanges makes "the right price" of anything, more or less, depending on various factors, like scarcity vs abundance.
Such simple system work well enough, have issues like how to choose a symbol no one can temper easily because if I can produce coins in my backyard I destroy the system for instance etc. Such issues can be solved by a public authority who decide an initial quantity of money, distribute it with commonly agreed criteria, check it's authenticity etc. Such authority MUST be public because MUST been unable to make profit from that money making/handling. Being public have no profit to make, those who work for such institution can't do that in disguise, their money is public, they can't have personal interests involved etc. They must be civil servant like in the ancient Athens where the police was made by slaves, they know if they act well they can live a good life, if not they are dead. Similar things happen in various European cities where the elected government must be formed of strangers checked for any absence of conflicting interests but rewarded enough for their role if they openly perform well.
Again, not perfect but work. Profit, A BIT of, is now a weapon to push people to act a bit avoiding the classic "if you get paid for doing nothing you'll do nothing" and similarly avoid those who decide to live with a purpose because we have various cohort of "people" in the sense that there are the very active who work "too much" ruining lives around them, disturbing a calm evolution of the society etc and we have people who do not want to do anything at all, various others in between etc. Being as society we need to find a best possible place for anyone because that's why we make a society in the first place, and we can bend attitudes a bit, but not more than a bit. In such democratic fictional society we need to pursue the common good without being against personal interests nor individual attitudes. The Roman's said "In medio stat virtus" (in the mean lie the virtue), the Swedes have invented the Lagom concept witch happen to be essentially the same etc. We need a bit of push to profit to avoid stagnation and dispersion but we need to limit it to avoid derailments where people start to live to work instead of the contrary.
Actually money are not like that: EU central bank is formed by EU States central banks witch in turn are formed by the biggest private banks and insurances of their relevant countries, the USA FED is equally a private institution bolted to the public government in an old scam. Only few States have public central banks but such states tend to be dictatorships not Democracies so again the public is the private game of the ruler... Money actually are lent to the public for an interest rate that can't mathematically be paid except if you borrow foreign money so money now is debt. Being the thing anyone want money is not The Value, the substrate of anything.
States need taxes NOT to redistribute richness ensuring a narrow enough fork between richest and poorest for the common welfare but to finance their operations etc. The entire economy is a classic scam due to this absurd distortion at the economy atom. Profit is not anymore producing something good and so get rewarded, being able to buy more, but harvesting money from others etc such system can only end if we agree that a society much be ruled by the people, a Democracy, not a classic Aristocracy, nor a modern Corporato-Timocracy nor something lead "by leaders inn disguise who direct the flock of people" (cfr. Gustave le Bon, Eduard Bernays, ...) like the neoliberal society of today.
I do not know how to make that happen, I do not know how it happen in the past, all I know is how to maintain it witch is the "in medio stat virtus" at any level, richness, welfare, culture etc...
Very good article. I disagree with the comments here that it’s too theoretical/high brow. From time to time I discuss these topics in a circle of friends and the language we use isn’t much different from the language of this article. There isn’t much “new” thinking here, but if it’s your first time then you’re exposed to a big question mark. It’s a fairly benign introduction to the genre of post-competent societal literature that has yet to have a name. Knut Hamsun is long gone, so we’ll need a new champion.
An argument can be made that the pessimism exhibited in this article is pointing its finger at the HN comments that are saying it’s too difficult to follow. Yes, the article is right on the money.
To paraphrase: due to social forces we have an inkling of capability left to actually do the things that our ancestors have done that brought us here. Yes, we have technology, but without the means to rebuild it, we are fucked. There is no next step because we haven’t completed this one yet, and already we’ve lost competency. This isn’t a new concept, plenty of books games etc discuss it - Fallout, Warhammer 40k both deal directly with tech that is no longer understood.
I would say we need more over-all rounded people. Your job where you sit in front of a computer writing code is great, but you should really know a variety of things and be able to piece together the gaps. Another good article earlier had an HN comment about how an “unqualified” customer analyzed damaged o-rings by the vibration of a motor. At the very least, learn how to grow some vegetables. Forget automated hydroponic irrigation systems. Just don’t be a complete idiot and this article will make complete sense to you.
Oh, and ignore people saying this is some right-wing dog whistle sponsored by Peter Thiel. These people live in a hell of their own making.
An argument can be made that the pessimism exhibited in this article is pointing its finger at the HN comments that are saying it’s too difficult to follow. Yes, the article is right on the money.
To paraphrase: due to social forces we have an inkling of capability left to actually do the things that our ancestors have done that brought us here. Yes, we have technology, but without the means to rebuild it, we are fucked. There is no next step because we haven’t completed this one yet, and already we’ve lost competency. This isn’t a new concept, plenty of books games etc discuss it - Fallout, Warhammer 40k both deal directly with tech that is no longer understood.
I would say we need more over-all rounded people. Your job where you sit in front of a computer writing code is great, but you should really know a variety of things and be able to piece together the gaps. Another good article earlier had an HN comment about how an “unqualified” customer analyzed damaged o-rings by the vibration of a motor. At the very least, learn how to grow some vegetables. Forget automated hydroponic irrigation systems. Just don’t be a complete idiot and this article will make complete sense to you.
Oh, and ignore people saying this is some right-wing dog whistle sponsored by Peter Thiel. These people live in a hell of their own making.
> We can imagine a possible scenario of the collapse of our own civilization. Our ability to perceive decline would be compromised early in the process.
Social media and the Internet is the new opium of the masses. We view the world through this crappy lens and it never matches what's really going on. We think we have a clear picture, but everywhere there is chaos and decline. Klaus Schwab's 'Great Reset' proposal won't cut it. We need mobilized mass revolution and political will to get out of the various messes we are in.
Social media and the Internet is the new opium of the masses. We view the world through this crappy lens and it never matches what's really going on. We think we have a clear picture, but everywhere there is chaos and decline. Klaus Schwab's 'Great Reset' proposal won't cut it. We need mobilized mass revolution and political will to get out of the various messes we are in.
The article has a somber tone, lamenting the holes that have opened up in our societies and economies since the heyday of industrial production.
It mentions but does not expand on the central social problem with industrial production: a small group of people can produce enough product for the whole world. And this problem becomes more acute, the more advanced industry becomes.
(There are other problems with industrial production such as environmental destruction and resource depletion, but these problems seem to be more widely diagnosed and understood.)
We have not yet solved the problem that industrial production is too efficient. I use the word "solved" as I consider the economic system from a humanistic perspective. Much like wealth concentration can reduce the flow of money and disincentivize commerce, the concentration of production can do the same.
I think it's an error that efficiency is the only outcome that needs to be optimized, an error often accompanied by facile arguments about comparative advantage, freeing people to do more productive work, and infinite demand. Post-industrial society is, in my opinion, the result of these arguments failing in the real world.
I think the next stage of economic development is a recognition that efficiency must be weighed against redundancy. (As well as conservation, but again this is more widely recognized.) This wouldn't be a return to pre-industrial society, where redundancy was a necessary background given the limits of transportation and communication. Rather it would require a new mindset that sacrifices efficiency for redundancy in a deliberate tradeoff.
It mentions but does not expand on the central social problem with industrial production: a small group of people can produce enough product for the whole world. And this problem becomes more acute, the more advanced industry becomes.
(There are other problems with industrial production such as environmental destruction and resource depletion, but these problems seem to be more widely diagnosed and understood.)
We have not yet solved the problem that industrial production is too efficient. I use the word "solved" as I consider the economic system from a humanistic perspective. Much like wealth concentration can reduce the flow of money and disincentivize commerce, the concentration of production can do the same.
I think it's an error that efficiency is the only outcome that needs to be optimized, an error often accompanied by facile arguments about comparative advantage, freeing people to do more productive work, and infinite demand. Post-industrial society is, in my opinion, the result of these arguments failing in the real world.
I think the next stage of economic development is a recognition that efficiency must be weighed against redundancy. (As well as conservation, but again this is more widely recognized.) This wouldn't be a return to pre-industrial society, where redundancy was a necessary background given the limits of transportation and communication. Rather it would require a new mindset that sacrifices efficiency for redundancy in a deliberate tradeoff.
Samo Burja has been grinding the "were on the brink of collapse" narrative forever.
Does he define what a social technology is?
(2021)
A fantastic read. Thanks for the post!
Samo Burja, the author, is undoubtedly a more serious and educated person. However, he promotes a “Great Founder Theory” which is not so very different from the old “great man theory” of history.
To a large extent, I applaud anyone who can make a good living grifting off of Thiel’s self-regard, but most political economy essays should be read skeptically, and doubly so for anything in Palladium.