Transcripts
The social singularity, how decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create
Speaker:global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse, written by Max Borders, narrated by Russell
Speaker:Newton.
Speaker:For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator...
Speaker:The road kept descending and branching off, through meadows misty in the twilight.
Speaker:—Jorge Luis Borges
Speaker:WE HAVE ALWAYS TRIED to know tomorrow.
Speaker:In our attempts, we end up shaping it.
Speaker:Our ancestors went to seers who read tea leaves, auras, or entrails.
Speaker:To best an enemy or win a lover, rulers consulted oracles for messages from the gods.
Speaker:Oracles in antiquity were thought to be divinely inspired,
Speaker:so false predictions were blamed on bad interpretation.
Speaker:Modern oracles are decidedly more fallible.
Speaker:We’re also more accountable.
Speaker:So we look for patterns in the world beyond the guts, and we channel the god of trend lines.
Speaker:Still, we make predictions we hope will come true, which is often why we make them to start with.
Speaker:Today they call us futurists.
Speaker:But to be a futurist still takes a little mysticism.
Speaker:It’s not the vagueness of Nostradamus or the Magick of Aleister Crowley but the
Speaker:spark of the science-fiction writer who plants ideas in the minds of innovators.
Speaker:Futurists know that in every prediction there is a potential act of creation.
Speaker:After all people who believe our predictions are more likely to change.
Speaker:And if enough people change, the world might just get better.
Speaker:In The Social Singularity, I’ll show that the world’s power centers are breaking up
Speaker:and that this process can — 1 — 2 Introduction liberate people from poverty, end acrimonious
Speaker:politics, and help humanity avoid the robot apocalypse.
Speaker:I realize that’s a tall order.
Speaker:But that’s just how much potential there is in decentralization.
Speaker:Decentralization?
Speaker:This is the kind of big, abstract idea editors warn could mean the death of your book sales.
Speaker:Write about a person or tell a story, they’ll say, chomping on the end of a spent cigar.
Speaker:I can’t sell a book about an abstraction!
Speaker:Well, we’ve got to try.
Speaker:The future depends on it.
Speaker:In this volume, I suggest that if we reorganize ourselves and our systems
Speaker:of collective intelligence, we will be better as a species.
Speaker:The social singularity is a point beyond which humanity will have reoriented itself.
Speaker:We’ll operate more like a hive mind.
Speaker:A lot of people are afraid of what’s to come.
Speaker:But to live in fear of the future is to underestimate ourselves.
Speaker:So this book is also about shedding fear.
Speaker:Still, it’s not your basic airplane read.
Speaker:It’s designed to challenge you.
Speaker:To break conventions.
Speaker:To reframe our thinking a little so as to disrupt
Speaker:the habits of mind that are keeping all of us from reaching our full potential.
Speaker:You see, our march toward the social singularity will be largely positive.
Speaker:Yes, there will be a great economic churn thanks to artificial intelligence and automation.
Speaker:Of course, there is always the risk of future shock, 2 and people will still
Speaker:carry within them the urge to control, to centralize, and to “rage for order."
Speaker:3 But technology is helping us to become far more collaborative,
Speaker:and there is more ordering power in that force than in any demagogue with a standing army.
Speaker:I’m not a passive chronicler of events.
Speaker:Behind this book lies a deeper purpose —a mission that is the wellspring of my thinking.
Speaker:If you’re comfortable with all these caveats,
Speaker:I invite you to join me in exploring a new set of forking paths into the future.
Speaker:For as soon as we take those first steps on any path, we’re engaging
Speaker:in acts of creation, for better or for worse.
Speaker:CHAPTER ONE
Speaker:THE END OF POLITICS
Speaker:The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Speaker:— Guy Debord
Speaker:IF YOU’RE READING THIS, chances are you own some sort of mobile computing device.
Speaker:Maybe you haven’t given up paper books entirely, but you’re surely tethered.
Speaker:I suspect you check your device at least twice a day, if not twice an hour.
Speaker:And I’d bet you have at least fifty apps.
Speaker:Now imagine you wake up one morning, turn on your device, and realize everything has changed.
Speaker:Where before there were fifty or more applications,
Speaker:there are now only two - a red app and a blue app.
Speaker:It seems the apps compete for processing power
Speaker:so now the device runs more slowly and less efficiently.
Speaker:And on this operating system—call it “DOS,” or Democratic Operating
Speaker:System—only the red app and the blue app run.
Speaker:Though the device advertises compatibility with other apps,
Speaker:everybody finds DOS only seems to work with the red one and the blue one.
Speaker:You are understandably frustrated with your device,
Speaker:especially as you remember a time when it ran much better, had far more options,
Speaker:and allowed you to customize it according to your needs and preferences.
Speaker:This thought experiment is meant to help us reflect on our sociopolitical status quo.
Speaker:Not on who’s in charge, not on the next election, but rather upon the system itself.
Speaker:Why?
Speaker:Because there seems to be a collective illusion that a democratic republic is as good as it gets.
Speaker:After all, we haven’t yet really tried anything beyond DOS. And there seems to
Speaker:be a near-universal failure of imagination with respect to how we could do better.
Speaker:In a 1947 speech, Winston Churchill made his now-famous assessment - Many forms
Speaker:of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.
Speaker:No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.
Speaker:Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of
Speaker:government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Speaker:5 This is the sort of fatalism most people accept.
Speaker:In fact, almost no one tries to imagine another social operating system.
Speaker:The most creative and ambitious ideas for social change almost always happen within
Speaker:DOS - We should pass law X or adopt policy Y. Very few are trying to figure out how to develop
Speaker:something entirely new that circumvents politics entirely or, at least, fundamentally changes it.
Speaker:It should be clear by now that I’m not interested in preserving the status quo.
Speaker:We can do better—and we must, because DOS’s days are numbered.
Speaker:For a lot of people, this will be unsettling.
Speaker:Some readers will scoff.
Speaker:Others will worry I’m trying to rock a boat that’s keeping billions of people afloat.
Speaker:Still others will say I’m an anarchist, a utopian, or a dreamer.
Speaker:And we should no doubt treat with great respect the system that took us from bullets to ballots.
Speaker:The democratic republic has become the most prosperous and arguably peaceful
Speaker:way to organize society the world has seen.
Speaker:So it’s no wonder smart people like Francis Fukuyama have argued that the democratic
Speaker:republic was the form on which most of the countries of the world would eventually settle.
Speaker:There is a lot to recommend about this form,
Speaker:particularly when considered in the arc of history.
Speaker:But there is a lot wrong with DOS. And whatever happens after DOS should be a
Speaker:welcome upgrade that addresses what doesn’t work about this particular social operating system,
Speaker:all while introducing new functions, new features, and a new paradigm of human social interaction.
Speaker:The most salient problem with our current form of governance is its symptoms.
Speaker:One of those symptoms is that politics tends to make us, ahem, ungracious.
Speaker:Recall the famous 1968 televised debates between William F. Buckley,
Speaker:Jr., and Gore Vidal, a conservative and a liberal.
Speaker:The whole thing culminates in a moment where—after a heated exchange—Buckley,
Speaker:taking Vidal’s bait, explodes - “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi,
Speaker:or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered."
Speaker:And there it was.
Speaker:The dandies of the Left and Right reduced to ad hominem attacks, almost coming to blows.
Speaker:Nielsen loved it because ratings soared.
Speaker:And politics as prime-time blood sport became an American pastime.
Speaker:Matters only got worse with the arrival of the Internet.
Speaker:What we thought would be a tool to bring out the best in us, such as creativity and
Speaker:collaboration (which it has been), has also become a platform from which people can hurl
Speaker:insults at those with whom they disagree, then easily retreat into partisan echo chambers.
Speaker:According to a documentary about Buckley and Vidal called The Best of Enemies,
Speaker:both died with the poison of political and personal animus still in their spleens.
Speaker:And as Americans continue with politics basically unchanged—though with social
Speaker:media magnifying any spectacle and offering everyone a bullhorn—
Speaker:the symptoms of partisanship are getting worse every year.
Speaker:This polarization is happening to all of us.
Speaker:As the political parade passes, people gather to watch the show,
Speaker:choosing their sides of the boulevard.
Speaker:In so choosing, they self-segregate.
Speaker:Tribal affiliations are on display.
Speaker:It’s a natural human tendency with deep roots in our evolutionary past.
Speaker:In an experiment,6 even people predisposed to favor members of their own race turned
Speaker:out to be biased in favor of people randomly assigned to wear the same team’s basketball
Speaker:jersey as they were—even when those people were of different races—and against even
Speaker:people of the same race if they were wearing a different team’s colors.
Speaker:As science journalist Sharon Begley points out, we team 6 The End of Politics up with
Speaker:people according to “whether they are likely to be an ally or an enemy."
Speaker:That illustrates how tribal we are.
Speaker:We are wired to be divided.
Speaker:Politics brings out the worst in us by tapping into these tribal tendencies.
Speaker:Sure, trading barbs is better than trading bullets.
Speaker:We all know really nice people who participate in stinging or acrimonious exchanges online.
Speaker:Maybe we do it ourselves.
Speaker:Here’s a headline you might have shared - “5 Scientific
Speaker:Studies That Prove Republicans Are Stupid."
Speaker:Or - “Yes, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder."
Speaker:In the United States, that’s more than 300 million people who are either stupid or crazy.
Speaker:Few want to acknowledge that it might be stupid or
Speaker:crazy to make such claims or for a country to divide itself this way.
Speaker:But in America, at least, it’s effectively a two-party system.
Speaker:So in DOS you have two choices of app, which means two basic choices of tribal affiliation.
Speaker:The Worst in Us
Speaker:I used to wonder whether anybody besides H. L. Mencken saw things this way.
Speaker:I found the following from legal analyst Trevor Burrus - Like any other game,
Speaker:the rules create the attitudes and strategies of the players.
Speaker:Throw two brothers into the Colosseum for a gladiatorial fight to the death,
Speaker:and brotherly sentiment will quickly evaporate.
Speaker:Throw siblings, neighbors, or friends into a political world that increasingly controls
Speaker:our deepest values, and love and care are quickly traded for resentment.7 It’s true.
Speaker:From a very young age, we’re told that when breaking bread with friends and family,
Speaker:politics and religion are verboten.
Speaker:But it’s not just that it will put relationships at risk, says Burrus.
Speaker:Democratic politics turns a continuum of possibilities into stark, binary choices.
Speaker:Tribal teams coalesce around linear, black-and-white thinking as our biases take over.
Speaker:Now that we’ve invented a problem—“which group of 50 percent +1 will control education
Speaker:for everyone?”—imposed a binary solution—“we will teach either creation or evolution”—and
Speaker:invented teams to rally around those solutions —“are you a science denier
Speaker:or a science supporter?”—our The Worst in Us 7 tribal and self-serving brains
Speaker:go to work assuring us that we are on the side of righteousness and truth.
Speaker:8 All these woeful debates become increasingly shrill.
Speaker:When it all reaches fever pitch,
Speaker:virtue signalers pen pleas for greater tolerance and more reasoned discourse.
Speaker:But it does no good.
Speaker:Tribal brains burn hotter than any of these appeals for civility.
Speaker:Until we change the rules, we’re not likely to find changes in ourselves.
Speaker:Again, I admit that when compared to tyranny and war, partisan politics ain’t so bad.
Speaker:But what if something else came along?
Speaker:Wouldn’t we start to see democracy as a golden calf?
Speaker:Politics—especially during federal elections—creates
Speaker:a system that brings out the worst in people.
Speaker:It poisons relationships.
Speaker:It pulls us in as spectators who stand agog at a completely inauthentic show
Speaker:of national politics over which any one of us has virtually no power.
Speaker:We end up mostly ignoring local issues over which we could have considerably more influence.
Speaker:As a consequence, an entire nation falls under a particular kind of spell.
Speaker:The only people to whom our opinions really matter are the pollsters, with their wet fingers held
Speaker:aloft, and the media, who hold up mirrors so distorted we can barely recognize ourselves.
Speaker:People are different.
Speaker:They are going to have differences of opinion,
Speaker:hold different values, and run in different circles.
Speaker:This is a fact.
Speaker:But we expect that a monolith of partisan opinion should extend to
Speaker:a nation of 350 million people— by brute force if necessary.
Speaker:And until they do, we’ll just get on social media
Speaker:and sock them in the face until they stay plastered.
Speaker:On Election Day, the team with the red jerseys will pull on its side of the rope.
Speaker:The team with the blue jerseys will pull on its side of the rope.
Speaker:In the end, both will end up the mud—because they’ve been standing in it all along.
Speaker:Hobbits and Hooligans What may be as disconcerting as the kind of
Speaker:people politics turns us into are the types of voters in whose hands we have placed democracy.
Speaker:Political philosopher Jason Brennan names these creatures “hobbits” and “hooligans."
Speaker:He writes - 8 The End of Politics Hobbits are mostly apathetic and ignorant about politics.
Speaker:They lack strong, fixed opinions about most political issues.
Speaker:Often they have no opinions at all.
Speaker:They have little, if any, social scientific knowledge;
Speaker:they are ignorant not just of current events but also of the social scientific theories
Speaker:and data needed to evaluate as well as understand these events.9 In this way,
Speaker:hobbits are almost as indifferent to politics as they are ignorant of the issues.
Speaker:Brennan reminds us that the typical nonvoter is a hobbit, which makes it odd that anyone
Speaker:would want to encourage nonvoters to vote for any reason beyond the most cynical.
Speaker:On the other hand, when we consider that many people who end up voting
Speaker:are probably also hobbits, we have to wonder about the arbitrariness of it all.
Speaker:After all, why should people who have no knowledge of or interest in
Speaker:social-scientific data or world history have any say in the rules you live by?
Speaker:The rest of those who decide the fate of nations Brennan calls “hooligans."
Speaker:Hooligans are the rabid sports fans of politics.
Speaker:They have strong and largely fixed worldviews.
Speaker:They can present arguments for their beliefs, but they cannot explain alternative points
Speaker:of view in a way that people with other views would find satisfactory.
Speaker:Hooligans consume political information,
Speaker:although in a biased way.10 You probably recognize hooligans from social media.
Speaker:They seek articles that confirm their preexisting opinions, but, writes Brennan,
Speaker:they “ignore, evade, and reject out of hand evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their
Speaker:preexisting opinions.”11 Thus data is only good to hooligans insofar as it supports their views.
Speaker:It’s not just that hooligans zealously form political opinions based on their
Speaker:tribal affiliations and confirmation biases; it’s also that their tribal membership forms
Speaker:their very identity, which in the United States shores up DOS and its two apps.
Speaker:In such a polarized climate, hooligans “tend to despise people who disagree
Speaker:with them, holding that people with alternative worldviews are stupid,
Speaker:evil, selfish, or at best, deeply misguided."
Speaker:Hobbits and Hooligans 9 When we consider that the great bulk of the voting population
Speaker:is made up of people who either know very little about anything (and don’t
Speaker:really care) or only want to know things that confirm what they already believe,
Speaker:we’ve got a system that runs primarily on a mix of ignorance and ideology.
Speaker:Between elections, hooligans are beating each other up at
Speaker:rallies or shutting down speeches on campuses.
Speaker:Hobbits are going about their lives, from time to time wondering what all the fuss is about.
Speaker:When we think about having our collective fate determined this way,
Speaker:it should also strike us that democracy is quite arbitrary.
Speaker:But it’s also arbitrary beyond those who participate.
Speaker:To understand that arbitrariness, we have first to unpack it.
Speaker:The late comedian George Carlin provided two relevant nuggets of wisdom.
Speaker:He said he doesn’t vote because “it’s meaningless,” and he said
Speaker:the United States was “bought and paid” for a long time ago.
Speaker:Let’s take each of Carlin’s nuggets of wisdom in turn.
Speaker:A Teardrop in the Ocean
Speaker:First, we have to face the grim truth that our vote doesn’t count.
Speaker:I realize that in fourth grade Mrs. Crabtree taught us that voting lets our voices be heard.
Speaker:But that’s not really true.
Speaker:It is akin to thinking the drummer hears you when you
Speaker:yell at him from the nosebleed seats of Madison Square Garden.
Speaker:The purveyors of these sorts of untruths probably don’t realize they’re spreading untruths.
Speaker:If they do, they think they’re only repeating
Speaker:little white lies—like telling a child Santa Claus is real.
Speaker:But Santa Claus isn’t real.
Speaker:Your vote doesn’t count.
Speaker:Crying a single teardrop into the ocean will not determine the fate of high tide,
Speaker:and the drummer playing Madison Square Garden can’t hear you scream.
Speaker:To be fair, though, some brilliant people disagree.
Speaker:Techno-evangelist Clay Shirky thinks democracy is the best we’ve got right now,
Speaker:so we’re duty bound to rock the vote.
Speaker:Not a protest vote, either.
Speaker:You have to pick the red app or the blue app.
Speaker:“It doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it.
Speaker:No one is listening,” writes Shirky.
Speaker:“The system is set up so that every choice other than ‘R’ or ‘D’ boils down to ‘I defer to the
Speaker:judgement of my fellow citizens.’ It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that.
Speaker:It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that.”12 The problem with
Speaker:Shirky’s claim is it doesn’t matter how you vote.
Speaker:Even if you vote “R” or “D,” no one is listening.
Speaker:One might argue matters are slightly improved in a parliamentary system.
Speaker:But not in the US.
Speaker:According to NBC News, only people in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina,
Speaker:Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia had anything but an infinitesimal chance
Speaker:that their vote would affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.13 Any given
Speaker:voter had a better chance of being struck by lightning on the way to the voting booth.
Speaker:As Forbes columnist Jim Pagels puts it - “The most generous estimates claim you
Speaker:have a 1-in-10-million chance of being the deciding vote in [a presidential] election,
Speaker:and that’s only if you live in a swing state and if you vote for one of the two major parties.
Speaker:Overall, the estimate is roughly 1-in-60 million.”14 Let that sink in for a moment.
Speaker:You’re almost 100 percent assured you could switch your vote in every
Speaker:major election throughout your life and the outcome would be the same.
Speaker:Following Carlin, then, your vote is “meaningless."
Speaker:Or as political philosopher Jason Brennan notes, “telling someone they can’t complain
Speaker:about an election if they didn’t vote is akin to telling a homeless person that
Speaker:they can’t complain about being poor unless they play the lottery every day.”15 Ouch.
Speaker:But matters are even worse.
Speaker:The Unicorn Problem
Speaker:Duke University political economist
Speaker:Michael Munger deepens our political nihilism with what he calls the “Unicorn Problem."
Speaker:The problem is not just with voting, he explains.
Speaker:It’s with the very idea of the state as a steward of the true, the beautiful and the good.
Speaker:Munger continues - “If you want to advocate the use of unicorns as motors for public transit,
Speaker:it is important that unicorns actually exist, rather than only existing in your imagination.
Speaker:People immediately understand why relying on imaginary creatures
Speaker:would be a problem in practical mass transit."
Speaker:But most people can’t see why the government they imagine is a unicorn.
Speaker:So to help them, Munger proposes what he humbly calls “the Munger test” -
Speaker:1. Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do,
Speaker:and what you want the State to be in charge of [or the “message” you want to send].
Speaker:2. Then, go back and look at your statement.
Speaker:Everywhere you said “the State,” delete that phrase and replace it with “politicians I
Speaker:actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist."
Speaker:3.
Speaker:If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.16 Munger admits to
Speaker:entertaining himself with this rhetorical device - “When someone says, ‘The State should be in charge
Speaker:of hundreds of thousands of heavily armed troops, with the authority to use that coercive power,’
Speaker:ask them to take out the unicorn (‘the State’) and replace it with [the politician you most dislike].
Speaker:How do you like it now?”17 When democracy advocates say the only way to “send a message”
Speaker:is to vote for one of the two parties, they have fallen victim to the unicorn fallacy.
Speaker:It’s not just that your message likely won’t be received if you do vote;
Speaker:it’s that it will be crumpled up and thrown into a dumpster
Speaker:on K Street 18 by people you know you would never want making the rules on your behalf.
Speaker:Why People Vote
Speaker:Apart from the illusion that “your vote matters” or “your voice is heard,” why do people vote?
Speaker:Most folks don’t really think their votes will have an appreciable effect.
Speaker:So why do they vote?
Speaker:Here are three big reasons - Declarative-Expressive - People
Speaker:vote to express themselves, whatever it is they’re expressing, because the immediate cost of doing so
Speaker:is negligible; Ideological-Utopian - People vote in accordance with some abstraction—a wished-for
Speaker:state-of-affairs, ideal, or unrealizable utopia; Tribal-Coalitional - People vote
Speaker:in solidarity with those they perceive as their ingroup, team, or tribe.
Speaker:As you might have figured out, these are some of the psychological bases of political hooliganism.
Speaker:But you might be wondering - What about people who are interested only in the truth?
Speaker:What about people who are calm, rational, and willing to suspend judgment about candidates
Speaker:and policies until they have enough information to determine logically
Speaker:whether said candidates and policies will work in the interests of the public good?
Speaker:Brennan calls these types “vulcans."
Speaker:And they are as rare as they are irrelevant.
Speaker:Maybe we can imagine a system in which only vulcans could vote,
Speaker:say, after passing some vulcan exam acceptable as a standard by nonvulcans.
Speaker:But even if you could get beyond the inherent elitism in such a suggestion, it’s not clear
Speaker:that any social science wielded by vulcans would generate a better form of government.
Speaker:Science writer Ron Bailey reminds us that most experts can’t be trusted,
Speaker:and that statisticians like John Ioannidis have been sounding the alarm as far back as 2005.
Speaker:Ioannidis found that “in most fields of research, including biomedicine, genetics, and epidemiology,
Speaker:the research community has been terrible at weeding out the shoddy work largely due
Speaker:to perfunctory peer review and a paucity of attempts at experimental replication."
Speaker:19 Ioannidis’s conclusion?
Speaker:“Most published research findings are false."
Speaker:Biomedicine?
Speaker:Genetics?
Speaker:Epidemiology?
Speaker:These areas are supposed to be relatively close to the hard sciences.
Speaker:These aren’t squishier social sciences like economics,
Speaker:social psychology, and political science.
Speaker:In response to democracy’s shortcomings, Brennan proposes a system he terms
Speaker:“epistocracy,” which suggests governance by those who are
Speaker:slightly more competent on matters with which they are more familiar.
Speaker:We should be leery of Brennan’s proposal,
Speaker:though not because life wouldn’t be marginally better than it is under the system we have now.
Speaker:Maybe things would be better for a time.
Speaker:We should be leery of epistocracy just as we
Speaker:should be leery of any platoon of philosopher-kings wielding stats.
Speaker:After all, there are lots of hooligans masquerading as vulcans,
Speaker:particularly in the academy.
Speaker:Epistocracy risks morphing into just another contrivance of centralized thinking,
Speaker:even if it seems marginally to decentralize voting.
Speaker:There are many more interesting alternatives on the horizon.
Speaker:But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Speaker:Giving people voting power over domains of activity in which they
Speaker:claim to be experts risks technocracy, as it opens the door to a tyranny of experts.
Speaker:Though Why People Vote 13 Brennan’s critique of democracy is dead on,
Speaker:his suggested upgrade leaves something to be desired.
Speaker:Now let’s turn to George Carlin’s second nugget of
Speaker:wisdom - the idea that US politics was bought and sold a long time ago.
Speaker:Politics without Romance
Speaker:Why do politicians constantly disappoint us?
Speaker:Late Nobel laureate James Buchanan more or less set
Speaker:out to answer this question in his life’s work.
Speaker:Buchanan was one of the founders of the public-choice school of political economy.
Speaker:And in a single essay called “Politics without Romance,” Buchanan lays out his
Speaker:general thesis in cold, dispassionate terms - If the government is empowered to grant monopoly
Speaker:rights or tariff protection to one group, at the expense of the general public or of
Speaker:designated losers, it follows that potential beneficiaries will compete for the prize.
Speaker:And since only one group can be rewarded, the resources invested
Speaker:by other groups—which could have been used to produce valued goods and services—are wasted.
Speaker:20 Those who are supposed to represent you are
Speaker:playing a game that tends to benefit favored groups (read - not you).
Speaker:Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best
Speaker:be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency
Speaker:support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.21 As
Speaker:much as we wish the forces Buchanan identifies weren’t the most powerful forces in politics,
Speaker:to think otherwise would be, well, romantic.
Speaker:If the Munger test reminds us that people you don’t like hold actual power,
Speaker:public-choice economics reminds us that people we don’t like get power
Speaker:and then auction it off to corporate or bureaucratic interests.
Speaker:In other words, once all the hobbits’ and hooligans’ teardrops have been counted,
Speaker:the incentives of the democratic republic are less about those creatures’ good and
Speaker:more about money and power mixing to gain advantages in their respective domains.
Speaker:That’s why money and power are so attracted to each other.
Speaker:Even the most ardent do-gooder in office has to engage in horse-trading to get anything done.
Speaker:You might call it selling out.
Speaker:She might call it political survival.
Speaker:Local Knowledge
Speaker:From time to time, politicians do try to do what they think is in the public interest.
Speaker:That is difficult, though.
Speaker:What after all is “the public” but a whole lot of people, each of whom differs from the others?
Speaker:And why should a lawyer from Manhattan have anything to say
Speaker:about the operations of a ranch outside Missoula?
Speaker:As our society becomes more complex,
Speaker:it becomes even less plausible to think that people in distant capitals have the
Speaker:requisite knowledge to plan for anything so far away from their spheres of understanding.
Speaker:And this is true even if the people in question are Brennan’s vulcans.
Speaker:As Friedrich A. Hayek famously reminds us, science is not the sum of knowledge.
Speaker:Most of the important stuff we know involves particular circumstances and contexts.
Speaker:Knowledge of specific circumstances,
Speaker:or “local knowledge,” is the most important and overlooked feature of complex societies.
Speaker:And as we become more complex, we will have to develop sense-making apparatuses and
Speaker:forms of collective intelligence that can handle this complexity.
Speaker:People in government, well-intentioned as they might be, are woefully ill
Speaker:equipped to make judgments about people in local circumstances.
Speaker:Even if we don’t need central control and
Speaker:planning in our increasingly complex society, we still need governance.
Speaker:Someday, though, we’ll look back on politics and shake our heads.
Speaker:It will have been a necessary phase—but not one we’ll want to relive.
Speaker:We have been undergoing a series of phases we could not have bypassed.
Speaker:The good news is we may have already entered the next phase.
Speaker:Once we realize all the benefits of this next
Speaker:phase, we’ll see how wasteful and acrimonious politics has been.
Speaker:Trench Warfare
Speaker:Right now it doesn’t seem like we are headed for a post-political era.
Speaker:Most people are so locked into the political paradigm that arguments
Speaker:about who is to Trench Warfare 15 fund whose birth control—or
Speaker:whether the city school system should get another bond—seem bigger than life.
Speaker:Each side cedes mere inches back and forth between election cycles in a kind of trench warfare.
Speaker:Such is the nature of politics.
Speaker:And in politics, the only thing we share anymore is a desire to take and hold onto power.
Speaker:The party that has the ring rules the land, at least for a while.
Speaker:The other side snatches power back sooner or later, and the whole thing starts all over again.
Speaker:Yet each side’s adherents labor under the idea that if they can just
Speaker:get and keep the ring, they will use it to good ends.
Speaker:We’ll give it to the right people, they imagine.
Speaker:The right people are incorruptible.
Speaker:We’re still waiting for the right people.
Speaker:So we go back to that titanic tug of war.
Speaker:Time and energy we could use on creative activities
Speaker:we spend locked in counterproductive struggles.
Speaker:We polarize.
Speaker:We argue.
Speaker:Our tribal-coalitional natures—as well as our unwavering belief in our own laundry
Speaker:lists of values and virtues—divide us in ways that go deeper than party affiliation.
Speaker:One side wants to take away the guns and the sugary sodas,
Speaker:the other wants to pray away the gay.
Speaker:The rest of us simply hang out at the margins.
Speaker:People can scarcely talk to each other without spitting venom.
Speaker:If there are any beneficiaries to this tit-for-tat, they’re
Speaker:rarely the ones who send their prayers up in the voting booth.
Speaker:A parasite class of special interests reaps most
Speaker:of the rewards, because the real action is on K Street.
Speaker:For the rest of us, politics is at best a spectacle, a kind of team sport.
Speaker:Was all this struggle necessary?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And again, there has been virtue in such a zero-sum game.
Speaker:Politics is a way to fight somewhat humanely over the control of hierarchy.
Speaker:The American Republic was in certain respects designed to create
Speaker:checks between factions and parties by setting them against each other.
Speaker:Ballots beat bullets and all that.
Speaker:It was thought of as a necessary evil—an alternative to the subjugation of people,
Speaker:which came from monarchy, feudalism, and aristocratic privilege.
Speaker:In the Federalist Papers, James Madison expressed concern about
Speaker:the “mischiefs of faction” found in democracies of various sizes.
Speaker:The Constitution is designed to temper the consequences of faction,
Speaker:even as the man known as its father acknowledged that the “causes of faction cannot be removed."
Speaker:22 The democratic republic was thus a kind of rationally conceived operating system,
Speaker:forged in compromise after a revolution provided an opportunity to start fresh.
Speaker:From another perspective, the development of the American-style republic was a phase transition.
Speaker:In other words, the democratic republic was likely
Speaker:to have arisen at some point due to the world’s becoming more complex.
Speaker:Some revere the founding as the explication of timeless
Speaker:principles the founders discovered using reason.
Speaker:And yet we know the founders were crafting rules at a certain stage
Speaker:of technological development and in a certain historical context.
Speaker:They were moving headlong into a future informed by reasonable assumptions about
Speaker:human nature and the new circumstances in which people found themselves.
Speaker:To understand this stage and prior stages,
Speaker:it will benefit us first to take our time machine a little further into the past, then zip back.
Speaker:The Rise of Hierarchy
Speaker:For millennia, our ancestors roamed the African steppe.
Speaker:Early humans were hunter-gatherers, anthropologists say.
Speaker:And as those ancestors succeeded at hunting and gathering, their numbers grew.
Speaker:But the world was no Garden of Eden for long, if it ever was.
Speaker:Life became nasty, brutish, and short.
Speaker:As their numbers grew, these tribal bands eventually confronted life-threatening scarcities.
Speaker:And Thomas Malthus’s warning, an error when he introduced it in 1789,
Speaker:was more or less correct back in the Paleolithic
Speaker:period - Success in procreating meant the land would reach its carrying capacity.
Speaker:To avoid Malthus’s trap, early folk had to move about.
Speaker:Their migrations contributed to the world’s great peopling.
Speaker:As early humans moved around, they collided.
Speaker:There was fierce competition for available resources.
Speaker:Peoples faced off in bloody conflict.
Speaker:Intertribal warfare meant the hunter-gatherer tribes had to become warrior clans.
Speaker:They not only had to learn to fight and kill,
Speaker:but they also had to learn to organize themselves to fight together better.
Speaker:None of this is meant to suggest that early peoples did not trade peacefully across tribes.
Speaker:Many did.
Speaker:But those who did not become traders were raiders.
Speaker:Such a harsh state of affairs meant that,
Speaker:to survive, your tribe had to develop better social technology.
Speaker:That doesn’t mean Windows for Cavemen.
Speaker:Social technology is shorthand for how people organize themselves.
Speaker:Victors transmitted their stories of glory and successful warfare strategies into the future.
Speaker:Likewise, while strength, courage, and superior weaponry go a very long way,
Speaker:social technology could make or break clan society.
Speaker:Agriculture and statecraft helped to settle some of these fighter-nomads.
Speaker:With settling came civilization.
Speaker:Still, much of history since the world’s great peopling has nevertheless been a story of warfare.
Speaker:After all, civilization often comes with wealth and power.
Speaker:In the simultaneous development of warfare and civilization,
Speaker:one social technology came to dominate - hierarchy.
Speaker:Atop this form of organization there usually stood one person.
Speaker:This leader went by many names—chief, king, warlord —but to succeed,
Speaker:the chief would have to be capable of gaining the fear, respect, and loyalty of his people.
Speaker:In accepting this leader, the clan would have gained an advantage.
Speaker:Having enabled a skilled strategist to command them as a force,
Speaker:they could operate as a single, fierce unit.
Speaker:That would be a recipe for survival and glory in an age of conquest.
Speaker:Of course, those capable of such fierceness and cunning were also capable of suppressing dissent.
Speaker:Those who wished to survive in the order were likely to accept the order,
Speaker:that being preferable to slaughter.
Speaker:Great empires soon grew up amid the detritus of war.
Speaker:The clan king became a god-king.
Speaker:The administration of empire required more layers of hierarchy,
Speaker:which meant delegating power to satraps and governors.
Speaker:The emperor would issue commands to subordinates,
Speaker:and those commands would be carried out by their subordinates in the chain of command.
Speaker:Patronage relationships became the norm.
Speaker:The order of those lording power over others took on religious dimensions.
Speaker:Values such as loyalty, honor, obedience, and patriotism firmed up the hierarchy.
Speaker:Without such values, the structure could have been weakened by either
Speaker:internal dissent or better-organized enemies.
Speaker:Hierarchy became more elaborate over time as each layer was added,
Speaker:and hierarchy persisted, apparently, as humanity’s dominant social technology.
Speaker:Despite a couple of eighteenth-century revolutions in France and America,
Speaker:hierarchy is still, in many respects, the dominant form of social organization throughout the world.
Speaker:That is, social structures like those of medieval
Speaker:Europe and feudal Japan are more common than those like modern Switzerland’s.
Speaker:Even modern Japan and Switzerland still have command-and-control structures.
Speaker:The United States—that great beacon of freedom—now bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Empire.
Speaker:America’s founders had made improvements by creating
Speaker:institutional checks and balances on power within its hierarchy.
Speaker:But its hierarchy persists.
Speaker:The question then - Is it long for this world?
Speaker:Better All the Time Now to the present.
Speaker:There is no doubt too much war in the world today.
Speaker:The good news, however, is that the human race is
Speaker:entering an unprecedented age of peace, connection, and prosperity.
Speaker:I realize you probably didn’t get that news on social media.
Speaker:The “Great Fact,” however, is that since about 1800, we’ve been growing more and
Speaker:more prosperous.23 It’s all thanks to an ongoing process of decentralization
Speaker:in which humanity reaps the rewards of innovation, production, and trade.
Speaker:More and more of the world runs on adaptive, lateral relationships
Speaker:instead of command-and-control structures and on open systems instead of closed ones.
Speaker:Nested networks of flourishing communities abound,
Speaker:and they are challenging the hierarchies around them.
Speaker:Such hierarchies include corporations,
Speaker:those old structures that pay you to be part of a hierarchy; they are starting to change.
Speaker:What should puzzle us is whether these nested networks exist despite
Speaker:or because of prevailing national hierarchies.
Speaker:Paradoxically, the answer could be “both,” depending on where and when in the world we look.
Speaker:To read the news, though, you wouldn’t think anybody could claim things are getting better.
Speaker:The media sell more turmoil than they offer positive trends over longer timescales.
Speaker:Their reports leave many of us with both a false impression and a general ignorance
Speaker:about just how good we’ve got it compared to people throughout most of history.
Speaker:Writer and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is one of the
Speaker:most famous voices pointing out that the trendlines are mostly positive.
Speaker:In an interview with New Scientist, Pinker admits being struck by a graph that showed a
Speaker:precipitous decline in homicide rates in British towns, starting in the fourteenth century.
Speaker:“The rates had plummeted by between 30 and 100-fold,” said Pinker.
Speaker:“That stuck with me, because you tend to have an image of medieval
Speaker:times with happy peasants coexisting in close-knit communities, whereas
Speaker:we think of the present as filled with school shootings and mugging and terrorist attacks."
Speaker:24 In the era of sensational headlines traveling virally through social media
Speaker:horrible things can seem more frequent, bigger than life.
Speaker:So Pinker decided to do some more digging, and he learned that even twentieth-century
Speaker:Germany had a low rate of war deaths by comparison to the hunter-gatherers.
Speaker:25 Better All the Time 19 From the perspective of history’s grand sweep,
Speaker:we’re living in an age of peace, freedom and abundance.
Speaker:Even the poorest places on earth are far better off than they were just a few decades ago.
Speaker:Indeed, in the last thirty years alone,
Speaker:the number of people living in abject poverty has been cut in half.
Speaker:Day by day, violent aggression over resources is rapidly being replaced
Speaker:by the structures of commercial competition and human cooperation.
Speaker:Commercial competition creates a positive-sum world—that is, a world of everincreasing wealth.
Speaker:Today, the struggles are often among companies competing to offer, say, better gadgets.
Speaker:Small businesses are battling it out at the intersection of Third
Speaker:and Main to serve a better taco, brew a craftier beer, or open a hotter nightclub.
Speaker:The benefits flow to the customers and those who serve them best.
Speaker:All exist in an ecosystem of value.
Speaker:In this more benevolent form of competition a fundamental
Speaker:truth remains - The fittest social technology will survive.
Speaker:Over time—as conquest culture has given way to commercial culture—we have come to
Speaker:see fewer warlords, kings, and emperors, and more bosses, executives, and CEOs.
Speaker:To some, this may not sound like such a big improvement.
Speaker:The competition is still fierce.
Speaker:Companies are still frequently cast as villainous exploiters, sometimes for good reason.
Speaker:But shifting from conquest to commerce has resulted in more
Speaker:people enjoying more good things than at any time in human history.
Speaker:And it’s only getting better.
Speaker:But in this transition, we have to ask - Will CEOs
Speaker:and middle managers also go the way of kings and lords?
Speaker:The modern nation-state and the modern corporation share social
Speaker:technologies that go back thousands of years.
Speaker:But in between hierarchical governments and hierarchical firms, there is a great teeming.
Speaker:It is not chaos.
Speaker:People truck, barter, exchange, collaborate, and cooperate.
Speaker:In some cases—such as Morning Star
Speaker:Packing Company and Zappos—a phase transition has already been made.
Speaker:Outside the firm, community groups meet over potluck dinners planned online.
Speaker:Friends find each other in dive bars and country clubs.
Speaker:Husbands and wives go home to one another; the bills get paid, and the kids get to school.
Speaker:Lovers find each other online in a kind of dating anarchy.
Speaker:And all of it happens without a director or a designer,
Speaker:a beautiful, unconducted symphony like starlings in a murmuration.
Speaker:More and more of the world operates in a place
Speaker:between rigid order and errant chaos—unmanaged yet orderly.
Speaker:More and more of the world is self-organizing.
Speaker:Phase Transition
Speaker:Complexity science predicts the global
Speaker:trend to which I alluded above.
Speaker:At the risk of oversimplifying, the theory states “complexity transitions” will happen
Speaker:according to the amount and type of information flowing through a system.
Speaker:(A “system,” in this sense, is a collection of devices or
Speaker:people that information gets transmitted among.)
Speaker:How elements of a system deal with information and resources—or, in the case of firms,
Speaker:knowledge and decisions—will determine the nature of that system.
Speaker:Because systems always exist in some environment,
Speaker:often competing with other systems, evolutionary pressures are going to
Speaker:determine whether an organization such as your club, company, county, or country survives.
Speaker:And one of the traits selected for will be how well it coordinates
Speaker:its participants’ behavior—which largely means - how well it organizes information.
Speaker:Complexity science shows that to deal with more information, systems have to change.
Speaker:The process starts with a group growing big enough to form a hierarchy.
Speaker:This usually happens when the group has outgrown
Speaker:the organizational limits of the egalitarian clan structure.
Speaker:As more power gets delegated, extending the chains of hierarchy, the system becomes more complicated.
Speaker:But the hierarchy can only handle so much complication.
Speaker:Eventually the system breaks down or changes into something that
Speaker:looks more like a network with an increasing number of “nodes."
Speaker:Lateral relationships form, which we know as “peer to peer."
Speaker:Decision-making power spreads down and out.
Speaker:And this hastens the complexity transition.
Speaker:Yaneer Bar-Yam (literally) wrote the textbook on complex systems.
Speaker:He describes the process that unfolded historically - “Ancient empires replaced
Speaker:various smaller kingdoms that had developed during a process of consolidation of yet
Speaker:smaller associations of human beings.
Speaker:The degree of control in these systems varied,
Speaker:but the progression toward larger more centrally controlled entities is apparent....
Speaker:This led to a decrease of complexity of behaviors of many individuals,
Speaker:but a more complex behavior on the larger scale."
Speaker:26 Phase Transition 21 But this could only be sustained for so long.
Speaker:As time went on, any given individual’s behavior diversified,
Speaker:and so did all the tasks performed by everyone in the system.
Speaker:Such is the overall behavior of a system becoming more complicated.
Speaker:More complicated systems required “adding layers
Speaker:of management that served to exercise local control,” explains Bar-Yam.
Speaker:“As viewed by the higher levels of management,
Speaker:each layer simplified the behavior to the point where an individual could control it.
Speaker:The hierarchy acts as a mechanism for communication of information
Speaker:to and from management.”27 But how far can introducing layers of management be sustained?
Speaker:When you reach the “point at which the collective complexity is the maximum individual complexity,
Speaker:the process breaks down,” 28 Bar-Yam adds.
Speaker:Hierarchical structures cannot handle any more complexity beyond this point.
Speaker:Complexity science tells us the battle lines will be drawn mainly in terms of
Speaker:how each organization processes information and applies knowledge to make decisions.
Speaker:And if there is a way for an organization to deal with complexity beyond hierarchy,
Speaker:that form of organization is poised to challenge the reigning paradigm.
Speaker:So, if we put our ears to the ground, we can hear the rumbling of two great
Speaker:organizational types - one that looks more like a hierarchy and one that looks more like a network.
Speaker:Hierarchy still dominates.
Speaker:It is powerful—especially as it appeals to the human desire to be in control.
Speaker:And, of course, human beings have evolved dispositions to
Speaker:be led—whether by dictators, daddies, demagogues, or divas.
Speaker:Consciously or unconsciously, people in hierarchical organizations will
Speaker:also fight for the status quo as long as they benefit from it.
Speaker:It’s human nature.
Speaker:Yet, decentralized systems can be more flexible,
Speaker:and as thinker and writer Nassim Taleb observes, “antifragile."
Speaker:So the question remains - Which form will win?
Speaker:Before trying to answer that question,
Speaker:I want to leave you with more than just the image of clashing social technologies.
Speaker:Because what we’re really interested in here is flourishing or, more specifically,
Speaker:how people can organize themselves to improve their well-being.
Speaker:The extent to which we can organize ourselves to be happier, healthier people is the extent
Speaker:to which we can organize ourselves to create more peace and prosperity.
Speaker:Hard to believe?
Speaker:Despite some of the wrenching changes that will be brought about by this
Speaker:coming clash of systems, a more abundant and humane world awaits.
Speaker:Founding Redux
Speaker:In thinking about phase transition, though, the American founding still looms large.
Speaker:The American Republic and many democratic republics since were brilliantly crafted
Speaker:systems designed to maximize freedom and limit the excesses of hierarchy.
Speaker:Or, put another way, documents like the US Constitution put forth answers to the question,
Speaker:What sort of political order can be created to unleash as much human autonomy as possible?
Speaker:But our operating system, as operating systems will, has become buggy, strained, and outdated.
Speaker:Not only are people becoming weary of a system designed to pit people against each other with a
Speaker:crude majoritarian calculus, but new systems are being developed to accommodate phase transition.
Speaker:Indeed, some of these systems don’t require the permission of authorities.
Speaker:They arise from technologically connected people
Speaker:along the lines of what James C. Scott describes in Two Cheers for Anarchism.
Speaker:More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called
Speaker:“Irish Democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary
Speaker:people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.29 Some will try to argue that an uncorrupted
Speaker:social operating system, i.e. the one originally conceived by the founders, would be a lot better
Speaker:than the version we have now—adulterated as it has been by dubious legal interpretation.
Speaker:I’m sympathetic to that view.
Speaker:But it would be difficult, if not impossible,
Speaker:to debug the program and bring back the founders’ Constitution.
Speaker:And happily, we have better options.
Speaker:For the first time in history, technology and culture are providing
Speaker:more and more opportunities to create new systems and migrate among them.
Speaker:Indeed, it used to be that to change systems,
Speaker:one had to migrate quite literally, to pick oneself up and move to another jurisdiction.
Speaker:And that, too, is an increasingly viable option.
Speaker:But migrating between systems is also something that, these days, you can do from your sofa.
Speaker:And this ease has profound implications.
Speaker:The Authoritarian Urge 23 The Authoritarian Urge Before closing this chapter,
Speaker:we should give a final doff of the hat to the democratic republic.
Speaker:However imperfect a system it has been, the democratic republic has arguably done
Speaker:better than any other form of government in controlling the worst of humanity’s ambitions.
Speaker:This cannot be overstated.
Speaker:So whatever evolves to replace the democratic republic should
Speaker:provide us with more mechanisms to check and channel those ambitions.
Speaker:It’s not a stretch to state that there is an authoritarian urge in all of us.
Speaker:For some of us it burns softly, as an ember.
Speaker:For others it can quickly be kindled into a fundamentalist fire.
Speaker:But not all ambition results in great evil.
Speaker:The democratic republic, more than any other form of government,
Speaker:has left room for the most ambitious to channel their desires to productive ends.
Speaker:So just as whatever system lies over the horizon should tamp down the will
Speaker:to power, it should ignite the spirits of entrepreneurship, innovation, and charity.
Speaker:The End Is Nigh
Speaker:“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage,” said H. L. Mencken.
Speaker:So what are we monkeys to do?
Speaker:We can get sucked into the ongoing reality show—the horse races, the scandals,
Speaker:and the controversies—with a bucketful of popcorn and a vague look of disgust.
Speaker:Or we can acknowledge the cage.
Speaker:If we succumb to tribal tendencies, the bumper-sticker rationales,
Speaker:and the “I Voted” rectitude, we will perpetuate the whole charade.
Speaker:Each hanging chad will be a vote of complicity in this monstrous
Speaker:thing that has grown upon the backs of the people.
Speaker:At the very least, we can call this thing what it is - An illusion.
Speaker:Or we can be revolutionaries again.
Speaker:We can rattle the cage.
Speaker:A million little acts of civil disobedience here and there can add up fast.
Speaker:I have done my best thus far,
Speaker:dear reader, to disabuse you of any unreflective faith in politics.
Speaker:At the least, I hope I’ve left you with some skepticism.
Speaker:My goal is not to criticize for criticism’s sake.
Speaker:Instead I want to help people see good reasons not
Speaker:to cling too tightly to a system that might have outlived its usefulness.
Speaker:When the time comes, you’ll have good reasons to let go.
Speaker:Because politics as we know it is nigh at an end.
Speaker:In other words, even if you don’t believe a word of this chapter, change is coming.
Speaker:This has been The Social Singularity. How decentralization will allow us to transcend
Speaker:politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse, written by Max Borders,
Speaker:narrated by Russell Newton. Copyright 2018 by Max Borders. Production copyright by Spokane Tome
Speaker:Media. You need to hear this.
