Contraptions

In today’s episode, in honor of Bastille Day next week, and Fourth of July last week, I want to talk about the ongoing evolution in elitism, and the problem of how the emerging new elites can be better than the old ones being toppled.

1/ Elites are a constant and arguably necessary presence in history. Political revolutions that try to do away with elites invariably seem to either fail quickly, or install new elites without meaning to. So the question for me is not how to get rid of elites, but how to try and ensure the ones we end up with are better than the last lot.

2/ I’m going to sketch out a rough theory of elitism and its dynamics, and then get to posing the question itself, and then propose an answer, from the perspective of both the new TBD elites, and the masses they define, so let’s get started.

3/ First, the concept of an elite is not dependent on a particular structure of society. Elites might be kings, nobles, elected leaders, bureaucrats, scholars, scientists, priests, cult leaders, media leaders, business executives, or subcultural inner circles. The prevailing idea of masses is induced by the prevailing idea of elites as a complement.

4/ So there’s always a subset that regards itself, and is regarded as, entitled to a sustainably better than average human condition, with attendant privileges. And importantly, it is a stable equilibrium. Those who are worse off, the non-elites, and think the elites don’t deserve their better conditions, still live with it. The masses rarely disturb the peace unless they are under extreme stress.

5/ Elitism and privilege go together of course. The word privilege literally means private law. Elites are a group for whom laws apply differently, or a different set of laws apply. In the most extreme case, they are formally above the law entirely. That’s the usual definition of a monarch and the dividing line between monarchs and ordinary nobles.

6/ The nobility might have a privileged code of law, but they are still governed by a rule of law, even if it’s not the same one as applies to non-elites. This special treatment has to be pretty special though, so I don’t use privilege in the broad social justice sense of the term, as in white privilege. That’s a different, more diffuse sense of privilege as a structural advantage. I’m talking narrow privilege where you can get exceptional, personalized treatment under whatever rule of law applies to you.

7/ For example, in medieval Europe, the nobility had hereditary property rights, governed by Church law, and the commoners mostly didn’t have the same sorts of property rights, only duties. But what made the law for the nobility special was that it was personally administered, with exceptions being more important. Laws honored in the breach rather than observance, as Shakespeare put it.

8/ So for example, there were laws against consanguinous marriages, but the Church did brisk business in allowing exceptions. Or you have indulgences absolving you of sins that are more easily available to nobility. Or in more modern times, draft exemptions. That’s what privilege looks like.

9/ So one way or the other, some subset of humans will create not only better than average conditions for themselves through private laws, they will even get exceptional treatment under that private law. Or a position above the law entirely.

10/ A big part of the stability of this condition is personal social capital: knowing the right people, with the right level of trust, to get rules bent or interpreted in your favor. Or being treated as an exception. Or in the extreme case, laws simply made to your specifications to benefit you and disadvantage others. In the most extreme case, they simply don’t apply to you.

11/ If you ignore human fallibility and corruption, and look at this as a systems design, it is actually kinda smart to divide the world into 3 zones this way: a zone where the rules apply absolutely, a zone where they can be bent and exceptions are possible, and a zone outside the laws. It gives you a broad ability to evolve the system.

12/ It’s like how, in The Matrix, the architect declared that the city of Zion, Neo, and the Oracle were as much part of the design of the system as Agent Smith. You could even argue that though the architect was God, Neo was the emperor, the citizens of Zion, both red-pilled and native-born, were the nobility, the Oracle was the chief priestess, and the bots like Agent Smith and the blue-pilled people in the Matrix were the non-elites.

13/ But back in our world, I asked my Twitter followers whether they consider themselves part of the current elites. Out of 468 respondents, 34% said yes, and 66% said no. Which seems about right since I write for a pretty privileged class of readers.

14/ Okay, so with this definition, if you look back at history, it looks like a series of experiments in elitism rather than a series of experiments in governance. Some of them end well, some end badly. But all of them end. The conceptualization of an elite class is not stable.

15/ Definitions of elites shift pretty slowly, and typically only move significantly when the technology of trust changes. It used to be about provably noble blood-lines. Then it was about visibly living by a particular code, noblesse oblige. Then it was about money, then it was about education. Maybe in the far future, it will be about being red-pilled out of an AI simulation, so the rules don’t apply to you.

16/ Now, while a notion of elite is stable, there is what Vilfredo Pareto called circulation of elites. He traced how two kinds of elites, which he called lions and foxes based on earlier terminology from Machiavelli, tend to simply take turns being the elites. Foxes rule by the power of the pen, lions through the power of the sword.

17/ As I have said, the economy of elitism is sort of system independent, and is based on personal trust and social-capital based computing within a calculus of privileges — exemptions from the law.

18/ A good model of this calculus is Selectorate Theory, which is described in The Dictator’s Handbook, compares all kinds of political systems in terms of 3 groups: influentials, essentials, and interchangeables. Influentials are always elites, interchangeables are never elites, and some essentials are elites. It doesn’t matter whether it is a dictatorship or democracy. This is how governance by elites happens.

19/ My final theoretical point is about knowledge. The relation among elites and masses is one usually based on what are called noble lies, where elites exploit their privileged access to ideas, information, and education, to craft false consciousnesses for the masses to inhabit. Think of them as blue pills. How you feel about these noble lies, or blue pills, is a big part of your philosophy of elitism.

20/ You can distinguish two basic approaches of elitism. There is what is sometimes called Straussian elitism, which is generally conservative, but not always, and is based on the paternalistic belief that elites lying to the masses for their own good is a good thing. So you get a distinction between esoteric elite red-pill knowledge and exoteric, non-elite blue-pill knowledge meant for the general public.

21/ The other approach, which you could broadly call pluralism, is more democratic in spirit, and eschews noble lying, at least conscious noble lying, based on the principle that even if it gets noisy, messy, uninformed, and ignorant, it’s a good thing to level the epistemic playing field, and not privilege some flavors of knowledge structurally. I’m pretty strongly in this camp. There is no blue versus red pill. Everything is available for anyone to learn.

22/ Okay, now that we have this basic historical sense of what elitism is, and how it works, we can ask, what makes for good elites versus bad elites? It is important to keep a sense of the real history of elitism when you talk about this question, because it is easy to get caught up in theories. In the collage image accompanying this podcast, I’ve included several famous historical examples.

23/ The storming of the Bastille, the American Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and Lee Kuan Yew, Nehru, and Jomo Kenyatta giving their famous speeches. I also included a picture of Muammar Qadaffi’s corpse after he was killed by a mob — it is important to remember that elitism can end like that. So this is the gestalt of what elitism as a historical practice is. Or to use an esoteric word, the praxis of elitism as a consciously held philosophy.

24/ But we shouldn’t anchor too much on these iconic moments when one set of elites takes over from another, or when non-elites temporarily bring down elites altogether, creating a vacuum. The essence of elitism isn’t in these moments of creative destruction of elite power, but in quieter unaccountable workings away from public scrutiny.

25/ So think of closed-door board meetings, experts in a committee meeting setting health standards, Congressional committees hashing out the details of a bill, lobbyists waiting to meet a senator to push some agenda, unaccountable editors in a press room deciding which public figure to attack. Unaccountable tech leaders deciding how an algorithm should work. That’s day-to-day elitism.

26/ This unaccountability by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is what it is. To the extent the elites are agents of the will of society at large, there is just so much detail involved in the exercise of actual power that there is no possible way all of it could be made transparent to everybody. At best you can be slightly less opaque and unaccountable than the last crowd.

27/ There’s also a middle-class, provincial version I don’t want to discount too much, like a local city leader calling in a favor with the local police chief, or a powerful business person talking to a school principal about their child. Any behavior that exercises privilege is elite behavior. The defining bit is not amount or scale of power, but the fact that it is exercised in privileged ways — private law, with a degree of unaccountability and exceptionalism.

28/ Now that I’ve painted a portrait, there’s a fork in the road. You can either accept that this is the way the world works and always will, or you can imagine some sort of utopia where there are no elites and no zone of society that operates on the basis of privilege.

29/ Whether you are a commune anarchist who believes direct democracy or consensus will get rid of elites, or a blockchain libertarian who thinks code-is-law will get rid of elites, down that road I think is mainly delusion. I’ll just point to a famous article, the Tyranny of Structurelessness and leave it at that. Getting rid of elites does not work.

30/ One reason is of course that elites have power and they use that power to keep themselves in power even as structural definitions and models of elitism change, become more or less informal, and ideologically different and so on. Angry masses understand this aspect of the persistence of elites. But this is not the biggest reason.

31/ The biggest reason, which revolutionaries routinely discount, is that humans seem to desperately want elites of some sort. Maybe not the current sort, or the current model, and definitely not the current specific people, but some elites. Maybe you want black instead of white, women instead of men, techies instead of lawyers, or trans instead of cis, the point is, you want elites.

32/ There may be strong preferences for a system of choosing elites. That’s kinda what ideology is. Or looser preferences. For example, I tend to prefer fox elites over lion elites, a large selectorate to a small one, and pluralism over noble lies. I also prefer strong mid-level mini-oligarchic patterns of power to either imperially centralized patterns or extremely fragmented, decentralized patterns.

33/ The psychological function of elites appears to be to model how life can and ought to be lived. But this is a pretty loose specification. Christians think in terms of What Would Jesus Do. Confucians in ancient China thought in terms of how to codify the will of the Emperor into law. Woke elites think in term of how to turn intersectional theory into prescription, and anti-Woke elites think in terms of making classical liberalism great again.

34/ It’s important to keep your definition of elites broad. For example, many people pretend that people like court jesters (and people often classify me as one) are among the non-elite. Maybe formally, but informally, they wield power and privilege — in my sense of access to exceptional treatment — in ways that makes them elite. So today in the US, the cast of Saturday Night Live, stand-up comics, and people like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah are definitely elites.

35/ Anti-elite philosophy and philosophers are also necessarily elite simply by virtue of how their influence operates. So whether you’re taking about the Taoist sage Zhuangzi in ancient China or important figures like Robert Anton Wilson in the Discordian subculture of modern America, they’re all elites. Just because you laugh at other elites with sticks up their asses doesn’t make you not elite.

36/ There’s many theories of this psychological function. There is a basic ethics theory of people just wanting guidance on how to have a good life, and looking for teachers. There is the theory of elites as surrogate parental figures. There is the Girardian theory of mimetic envy. Each theory explains some aspects and some situations well, and others poorly, but the point is, that psychological function exists. Elites are models of how to live life.

37/ Okay, so now that we know what elites are, who counts as elites, how elitism and privilege work, and why they are both psychologically necessary for societies and structurally hard to eliminate, you can finally ask, what makes for good elites.

38/ It’s an important question to ask right now, because the current regime of elites is definitely nearing its end. Chris Hayes wrote a good book about this back in 2012, called Twilight of the Elites, and there’s been a lot of other writing about it, like Moses Naim’s End of Power, and Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public.

39/ The elites are of course not going quietly. My friend Nils Gilman wrote a great article about the reaction, called The Twin Insurgency, and there is in general a lot of attention on how the current elites are rapidly trying to secure what they have, and sort of batten down the hatches.

41/ But I think the old elites are kinda done for in the next decade. My hypothesis about this is a simple one about how elites fail. In general, elites fail when their relationships with each other become more important than their relationships with the world. Not just masses, the world. The inner reality of the elites absorbs all their attention: whether it is court intrigues, scholarly debates in journals, boardroom battles, product architecture arguments, rivalries among schools of economists, or media wars.

42/ Once an elite class has turned into this kind of inward-focused blackhole unmoored from the larger universe, it’s only a matter of time before it self-destructs. With or without help from the revolting masses. It doesn’t really matter how much power they have. Their hold on that power is a function of the strength of their connection to the world.

43/ This is one reason the function of policing is in the spotlight, because the job of the police is to enforce a particular relationship between elites and masses. When this enforcement gets particularly one-sided, they turn into a Praetorian Guard like in ancient Rome. So calls to defund, deunionize, or demilitarize the police, and theories of how policing itself can be ended as a function, are also part of new experiments in elitism.

44/ Whether it goes down in flames or more peacefully, change of some sort is coming. If my theories are correct, any non-elite period will be short-lived. The shorter, the bloodier. The current idea of power may be ending, but the role of elite power and privilege will not end. Policing as we know it may end, but some enforcement of elite-mass relationships will remain. It will simply take on a new form in the new medium.

45/ Already you see weird kinds of new elites, like online personalities, offline protest coordinators, skilled hackers, and people who are good at crafting spectacles like videos of bad “Karen” behavior. Much of this gets labeled populism, but it’s important to note that each of these manifestations of so-called populism comes with its own breed of new elites, mostly descended from old elites.

46/ I think the populist phase of the culture wars might even be over. The actual commoners are exhausted from decades of violence, both physical and cultural. They can at most come out to riot online and offline occasionally. The real battle now is between old and new elites, and within old and new group. And of course, it’s confused by lots of overlapping membership.

47/ For example, in the last few weeks, an open battle has broken out between tech industry thought leaders and media leaders. And right now there’s a weird letter doing the rounds on Harpers magazine, signed by a bunch of old elites denouncing a bunch of the new elites.

48/ The elite wars have really gotten going now, because everybody senses old institutions are dying, and emerging ones are at the point in their evolution where they are ripe for capture by one faction of wannabe elites or another.

49/ Basically, you could say a new era of experiments in elitism is about to get underway, with more or less blood on the streets around the world. The question again is, what experiments should you support? How can you minimize the bloodshed? How can you try and ensure the new elites are good. If you’re a candidate elite, how do you plan to be good?

50/ I don’t know the general answers to these questions, but I suspect I have an approximately equal claim to being a D-list member of the elite in both the old and new worlds. So I can only share my answer. I think the key to being a good elite is to take your function — serving as a model of how life should be lived — seriously. This means thinking more about your connection to the world than your connection with other elites.

51/ If you want to define this function more precisely, I think it has to do with the idea that humans are ideally the measure of the world, not the other way around, and privilege is about being among those who get to measure the world rather than being measured by it, and in doing so, create ways to measure non-elites. So if you voted to self-identify as an elite in my Twitter poll, ask yourself: how do I measure the world with my life.

52/ The price of your privilege — which, remember, is special, personalized treatment under private law via access to social capital — is that you are expected to be at the forefront of relating to the wider world, and taking its measure on behalf of all humans. Which means facing uncertainty, and taking on risks, physical, intellectual, and psychological. This is why there is a natural relationship between being a member of the elite, and being expected to lead in the fullest sense of the word.

53/ To lead is to ultimately function as a model to non-elites on how to live, and not just live, but live with, for want of a better word, courage. Since that’s what it means to be the measure of the world, take risks, and deal with uncertainty. Otherwise you’re just a parasite pretending to be a lordly predator. And there’s no real way to fake this. People can tell when you are living courageously.

54/ To be non-elite in 2020, on the other hand, is to be measured in a hundred different industrial-bureaucratic ways. The world measures you. Height, weight, gender, wealth, skin color, zip code, credit score, criminal record, degrees, job titles, parentage, and so on. This is what makes you part of the industrial-age masses. This idea didn’t come from nowhere, and is only a century or so old. It’s the complement of the industrial age definition of elites.

55/ Being utterly unique and specialized with your 100-dimensional address in society is pretty new. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset studied how this industrial non-elite human differed from the peasants of the past. My gloss on his theory is that the masses were measured the way they were because the elites were measuring the world in a specific way: through science and rationality.

56/ One of the main proposals for new elites on the table right now looks like an extreme form of industrial bureaucratism, namely intersectional bureaucratism. The other one looks like a throwback to agrarian feudal elitism, with nobility and peasantry. Both are of course lazy and lousy, and you can tell because neither is in the least bit courageous, and both involve an existing set of elites primarily dealing with each other rather than with the world.

57/ If you think you aren’t elite now, or won’t be elite in the future, your part of the equation is to ask, first, whether you think elites are necessary, and if so what kind you want. A way to restate that question is to ask: how do you want to measure yourself against the world? The elites you want are the ones measuring the world itself in a complementary way.

58/ Whatever it is, it is a particular model of courage that inspires you enough to follow. Your main challenge is spotting real courage facing the world, which does not lie in facing competing elites. If your chosen elites are elites primarily by virtue of battling or beefing with the elites you don’t choose, they are not good elites, and you are not choosing particularly good elites to define who you are. Both of you are going to be miserable.

59/ The good news is, there’s never been such a culture of widespread experimentation in new modes of being elite, so you have a lot of choices. The bad news is, it’s going to get really ugly while it plays out. The future elites are going to be playing Game of Thrones for a while, and the future masses are going to be playing Hunger Games for a while.

60/ So all I can say is, may the best elites win, and may the best measure of the masses prevail.

Today I want to talk about big moods, a phrase you may have seen on twitter, and also a related concept I made up called little moods.

1/ You may have seen the phrase “big mood” on twitter over the last few years, especially used when expressing resonance with a mood someone else has expressed. But it’s gone well beyond social media now, and things that look like big-mood dynamics are now showing up in corporate America as well.

2/ The basic memetic pattern is: someone might post a gif of a cat hissing saying “how I feel about recent events” and somebody else might quote tweet that with the phrase “big mood.” That’s typical usage today on social media. The corporate equivalent is something like employees signing a letter to the CEO around some cause.

3/ I also want to talk about the complementary idea of a little mood, which I don’t think is a thing yet, so maybe I’m coining the term here. But let’s start with big moods.

4/ The phrase itself indicates two things: a degree of individually felt intensity and a recognition of broader social resonance. The subtle thing to note is that a big mood is not due to emotional contagion but shared causes in a shared environment.

5/ In other words, a big mood is not when I’m sad because you’re sad and you’re my friend. A big mood is when, for example, we’re both reacting with sadness to some headline news we hear at roughly the same time, and I am agreeing with your expression of that sadness.

6/ That is oversimplifying it a bit though, because big moods don’t generally map to generic emotion words like sad or happy. A big mood is a unique type of shared mood that usually doesn’t have a word for it.

7/ This is why it is usually not communicated with emotion words, but things like reaction gifs or music clips. Or sometimes people might make a joke saying “what’s the German word for this feeling?” which they then describe with an awkward long phrase.

8/ So when you say big mood, you’re not just using a commonplace word for a vaguely similar stat as someone else, you’re indicating a very precise kind of atunement and emotional harmony that is beyond the reach of conventional emotional vocabulary.

9/ Here’s another lens on it. Big moods are the emotional equivalent of a concept in logic called common knowledge. Common knowledge is something that I know, you know, I know you know, you know I know you know, and so on ad infinitum. It’s a piece of knowledge that is as collective as it gets in some group of people.

10/ A big mood is something like that for an emotional state, it forms what I’ve previously called a sentiment superstate in a specific group.  

11/ Normally, big moods are limited to local social groups and subcultures, and relatively transient, lasting maybe days to weeks. But sometimes they can be more broadly shared and last a really long time.

12/ So for example, the pandemic blues we’re all in right now are a really big global mood that has now lasted several months. And before that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 sparked two big moods — there was redemptive jubilation among his supporters, and despair among his detractors.

13/ Sometimes a big, long-lived big mood can be so persistent that it can define an entire culture. An example is blues music. It’s an entire genre of music that has roots in the big mood of being enslaved, and it can be inherited across generations.

14/ Another that I grew up around is the big mood of Punjabi culture, which was deeply traumatized by the India-Pakistan partition. The Punjabi big mood manifests through overcompensation in the form of a boisterous drinking and partying culture, to the point that it’s now become a stereotype of the community.

15/ A third example is what Koreans call Han which is this idea of a deep trauma felt by Koreans since the Japanese occupation in World War 2. You’ll see people attributing the stereotypical Korean hot temper to this really big, 80-year old national mood of Han, which might even have an epigenetic component at this point.

16/ A final example, which I recently learned about from my friend Sagar Dubey, is the tradition of Iranian lamentation music called Noha, relating to the martyrdom of Husayn Ali at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, which is the founding event of the Shia sect. This is definitely a really powerful big mood that has lasted about 1300 years at this point, and is the mood of an entire religion.

17/ My point with this list of increasingly bigger and longer-lasting big moods is that there is a conceptual continuity between big moods and culture in general. Even if the big mood you’re feeling right now is a transient one that’s restricted to your twitter subculture of a few hundred people, and might be gone next week, there is a potential for a kind of scale and longevity that you may not appreciate.

18/ Beyond a point of course, it’s more than a mood, big or otherwise, and has turned into a persistent cultural background state, or even the mood of an entire religion like in the Shia example. But I think there’s a genuine organic connection there between big moods and culture.

19/ So there’s a space of big moods here from big to large, transient to long lived, and in the foreground of culture to the background. And remember, big moods are directly induced by the shared environment rather than spread through social contagion. What spreads is the recognition of it being a shared state.

20/ And perhaps most importantly, big moods cannot be easily resisted. So trying to unfeel a big mood is like trying to unsee something or unknow something. You have to be living under a rock or in some sort of oblivious state to be immune to a big mood.

21/ In the short term, ignoring a big mood might be healthy, because you can be happy even if people around you are not, but in the long term if you don’t develop a sensitivity to big moods, both local or global, and transient or enduring, you’ll get left behind. Which is of course a big mood in itself, so you can’t really ignore big moods, because that is itself a mood.

22/ But even though you can’t avoid big moods, when they are less intense, there is room to experience the complementary state, which is what I call a little mood. A little moods is a mood that is widespread, but is not yet widely understood to be widespread, and may never get there. So they are not emotional common knowledge.

23/ An example is the mood of an early stage startup scene that has not yet become overheated, like the years between the dotcom bust and the iPhone, especially around 2002-2007. The big mood was that tech was dead. But the little mood was that it was thriving.

24/ Or the mood around crypto between around 2013-16, when it was no longer a tiny subculture, but not yet a mainstream big mood that everybody in entire regions was participating in and resonating with, which happened around 2017.

25/ So to repeat, it’s important to note that a little mood is not a mood that is unique to you, or an exceptional individual mood. It is one that is widespread, but you are not aware is shared by other people. It can even be global, in which case it is what is called globally local.

26/ A little mood is the emotional equivalent of what in logic is sometimes called mutual knowledge. When you and I both know something but don’t know that the other person knows it too. A little mood is like that. Widespread sentiment that is not yet understood to be widespread. If a big mood is a common sentiment superstate, a little mood is a mutual sentiment microstate.

27/ This means that it comes as something of a surprise to learn that other people are feeling the same way. When you find out that somebody shares a little mood with you, a special bond based on being initiates into an esoteric state of knowledge or sentiment can be the result, and this is pretty exciting.

28/ You might have experienced this. You are really excited about something, but nobody else around you feels the excitement. But the first time you meet someone who is excited in the same way, it feels really special. I remember feeling this way about the internet in 1994, about social media around 2007, and about crypto around 2013. Now I feel it around VR.

29/ In all these examples of little moods, a lot of people are experiencing a kind of individual hypomania, often from being individually exposed to some novel environmental circumstance that is not yet commonly or collectively experienced.

30/ So that experience divides people into those who have had the experience and are still connecting with each other over their mutual knowledge and mutual sentiment, and those who are unaware that this experience even exists. 

31/ This should be obvious, but little moods are naturally much more diverse than big moods. Until people experiencing a little mood connect over mutual sentiment, which then grows into collective sentiment, they can’t form big, homogenizing resonance modes around it. There’s not yet a sentiment superstate. And definitely there’s no persistent cultural mood yet.

32/ The thing about little moods is that they can only exist in the shadow of  sufficiently laissez-faire big moods. When big moods are too powerful, little moods wither and die. It doesn’t matter what the big mood is, and whether it is positive or negative. Intense big moods kill little moods.

33/ For example, if you have a triumphalist big mood in a political group that has just won an election, or an economic sector that has just experienced a big boom and created a lot of wealth, it kills little moods as surely as a negative big mood, like the pandemic.

34/ Speaking of negative and positive, let’s talk about how those valences connect to big and little moods. Here’s my hypothesis: even though both big and little moods can be positive or negative, I suspect most big moods skew negative, even if they don’t look like it. For example, I think MAGA is a negative big mood even among supporters of Trump. It is a mood of revengefulness and redemption for past wrongs.

35/ On the other hand, most little moods tend to be positive, for the simple reason that they depend on individual contact with novelty, and if that novelty is negative, it’s either a problem that gets solved quickly, or bad news that spreads really fast and turns into a big mood overnight.

36/ Negative little moods simply don’t stay little for long. They turn into big moods even if they don’t make the news, or they get solved as problems. But something like a first experience with a new technology can only spread slowly as more people have the experience and connect around it. There’s a natural rate limit.

37/ The final conceptual point I want to touch upon is how cultures differ in processing big moods, which becomes especially interesting if you think of culture itself as the outcome of historical big moods that have turned into tradition and institutions. So culture is like a long blockchain of past big moods.

38/ Cultures obviously differ in how they process big moods. For example, in individualist cultures like the United States, the suspicion of anything collective and negative tends to be translated into individual medicalization of collective problems.

39/ This leads to, among other things, a tendency towards drug abuse, and a hyperactive psychological imagination. You’ll notice that on American twitter, if you express resonance with a big mood, a certain type of person will immediately jump in to inquire about your mental health, saying something like “are you okay?”

40/ This is a somewhat contrarian position but I don’t think there is a mental health crisis in the United States. What we attribute to epidemics of depression or anxiety, I think, are a kind of referred pain. Because American society is bad at processing big moods at the collective level, it shows up as apparent depression or anxiety.

41/ Other countries have other biases. A friend from Argentina told me that there, almost everybody has a therapist, which doesn’t strike me as particularly healthy, but it does harmonize with the overall more sociable nature of Latin American countries. It also explains their dysfunction on other fronts, requiring non-sentimental forms of sociability, like managing the economy.

42/ Another example is India, which is a highly religious country, with a tendency to process big moods in religious ways. So on WhatsApp there is a lot of sharing of prayers, and emergent rituals around collective prayer. Nobody will ever admit they are depressed or anxious. They’ll just share some sort of religious thing, and with hundreds of gods, there’s a god for every big mood.

43/ So let’s summarize our theory. There are big moods that are collective sentiment superstates, and little moods, that are mutual sentiment microstates. There’s a yin-yang relationship between them. Little moods are generally positive, and big moods are generally negative. Big moods can spread and persist and turn into culture.

44/ To tie it to recent events, you could say that globally we’re in a big mood for big moods. Change is in the air, deep cultural change driven by big moods turning into new cultures that displace old cultures. So you should be paying attention to this stuff, or you’ll get stuck with the worst sort of big mood, which is the left-behind mood.

45/ To close this, I want to connect this to the business world. Normally, stuff I’m tracking on social media doesn’t line up with stuff I’m tracking in corporate culture and management, but in this case they line up. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, if you work in corporate America, you’ll have noticed that there’s a big mood for big moods. It’s not usual the usual flavor-of-the-month or fad-driven condition that management is usually in.

45/ One personal bit of evidence I’ve noticed is that in my consulting work, I’m increasingly helping people with what I call big mood navigation problems rather than typical organizational or process problems. There is a level of ungoverned emotional intensity that you don’t normally see in the corporate world. And I’m going to bet it’s going to end with management and leadership textbooks getting rewritten. We’re going to be talking about mood-based management and leadership in a few years.

So that’s it for this week. Big moods and little moods. Pay attention to them both in the broader zeitgeist and in places where they don’t usually matter, like inside businesses. This stuff is important and is driving big changes that we’ll be living with for the rest of our lives.

So that’s it for this episode of breaking smart. For those of you new to this list, Breaking Smart is my weekly subscription newsletter on technology and culture, where I serialize some of my my longer writing projects like my book-in-progress, The Clockless Clock, and an essay series, The Great Weirding. Most issues are essays, and the free issues are usually podcast episodes like this one. So sign up and subscribe if you liked this episode. I’ll see you next week with another episode, on something else.

In today’s episode, I want to talk about a new phase in the pandemic, marked by a shift in the role of the pandemic itself from foreground story, to background setting of other stories. I also have a couple of interesting announcements at the end.

1/ So this week, several non-pandemic things are dominating the headlines, the big one in the US of course being the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. Now this is of course a familiar type of story by now, except that this one has very low ambiguity, and has had a much more violent response, including the burning of a police precinct building last night.

2/ A couple of days ago as this was starting to unfold, a twitter user named Robert Evans voiced the opinion that the pandemic might not be the biggest story of 2020, to which another user named Mach0 replied with what I thought was a very astute comment: “I'm pretty sure now that coronavirus isn't the story. It's the setting.”

3/ Now that’s a very clever line, and is the inspiration for the title of today’s episode, From Story to Setting. I think the pandemic has entered a new phase, where it is no longer the front-page story, but it is definitely the background context for every story. For example, in this case, social distancing is an element in protests, and everybody involved is already on edge, so you get a more raw, high-tension version of the script playing out. The story is familiar, but it is playing out against a new kind of background.

4/ I want to unpack what it means to for a big, all-subsuming condition to evolve from story to setting. In the case of the pandemic, we can detect 3 phases. Phase 0 was when it was just a story. A regular news story from China. Phase 1 was when it became both the story and the setting. We are now entering the third phase, when it is primarily the setting.

5/ But this setting phase is not like other settings, which is why I don’t like the phrase “new normal.” There’s nothing normal about it. But it is definitely the background setting now, just not a normal or indefinitely sustainable one. But even unsustainable things can sometimes last a really long time, even decades.

6/ When I think about what this setting is like, the main thing that strikes me is that between Phase 0 to Phase 2, we’ve gone from a setting that was very stable, reliable, and well-understood by people in the foreground stories, to a setting that is very unstable, unreliable, and very poorly understood.

7/ In Phase 0, our knowledge of the context of the stories was strong. You didn’t have to think about how Starbucks worked for example. In Phase 1, the context began unraveling, but because we were in emergency mode with limited goals, we didn’t notice as much. Our questions about the setting in Phase 1 were limited to things like “how do I pay rent” or “where do I get groceries?”

8/ Phase 2 is different. We’ve sort of figured out band-aid responses to emergency concerns for the time being. The full force of our deep ignorance about this new context is just starting to hit us. How will new outbreaks happen? We don’t know. What happens to unemployed people when the emergency measures run out? We don’t know. How will we travel? We don’t know. How will geopolitics shift? We don’t know.

9/ Another way to think about it is in terms of the relationship of foreground and background knowledge. Story knowledge versus setting knowledge. In Phase 0, when things were normal, both were solid ground. You understood the story of your life and you understood the setting at about the same level. Your story knowledge was like a walled garden on solid land.

10/ In Phase 1, your story knowledge was still solid land, but your setting knowledge began turning into quicksand. Everything outside your immediate control became uncertain at a very basic level. The game that kids play in the US, the floor is lava, became a common metaphor for this.

11/ In Phase 2, the setting knowledge has gone from quicksand or lava or water — whatever you want to call it — to a hardening vacuum. Now that immediate emergency concerns are taken care of, the sheer weight of what we don’t know is becoming clear.

12/ So if the pandemic is a setting, we know what sort of setting it is: it is a vacuum-like setting. A vacuum of knowledge, where we just don’t know the answers to far too many questions we’re used to knowing the answers to. This is of course, not normal, so calling it a new normal is stupid.

13/ So what can we expect in this Phase 2? I’ve been reading about 3 major historical precedent events to make sense of this question: the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and the reconstruction in the lead up to and after World War 2. And unfortunately, the grim news is that our situation actually most resembles the Black Death.

14/ So for those of you interested, the main books I’m reading about these three events are: Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror for the Black Death in Europe, which I’m halfway through, and live-tweeting, Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider for the Spanish Flu worldwide, which I’m just starting, and Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge for World War 2 in the US, which I’ve almost finished. Today, I mainly want to compare our condition to the Black Death.

15/ So obviously, in many ways, the Black Death is the worst precedent: it was almost 700 years ago, the technology was far more primitive, and the pandemic itself was far worse. Somewhere between a third to half of Europe’s population died then, whereas today, it’s probably going to land at less than even the Spanish Flu, which was about 2%.

16/ But in many ways, the Black Death is the right precedent. It brought a bunch of strong historical forces, which had been building up pressure, to a crisis point. It ended a 500-year historical era, namely the European Middle Ages. It was followed by a century of chaos, when it felt like the world had ended, followed by an age of exploration and a very slow rebirth with the Renaissance.

17/ In the book, Tuchman spends only a couple of short chapters on the Black Death itself, where the main wave was 1348-1350, right in the middle of the 14th century. The big story arc of the book is the before/after. In the first half of the century, a lot of strong tensions and trends were developing. In 2 years, the Black Death accelerated those trends and brought them to a crisis point.

18/ The second half of the century, and most of the book, is about the world carved out by the Black Death. There’s curiously little about the pandemic itself. But it was clearly the setting for everything else that happened. For example, pervasive labor shortages shaped the economy, and a pervasive sense of being abandoned by god shaped the collective psyche.

19/ So before the Black Death, there were growing 3-way tensions among the three estates — clergy, nobility, and commoners. There was also tension within the third estate, as the new urban merchant class of bourgeoise was starting to separate from the general class of peasantry, including people in varying degrees of serfdom.

20/ So what happened? Before the Black Death, things were going through a 14th century version of what I’ve called the Great Weirding in our time, the period from 2016-20. I just started that essay series in last week’s newsletter if you want to check that out, btw. But 1300 to 1350 were a Great Weirding period for Europe in the Middle Ages, culminating in the Black Death. It took them almost 50 years where it took us 5 years because it was a slower era.

21/ Back then, Phase 0 was the early part of the Black Death when it was still confined to isolated parts of Italy. Phase 1 was when it had spread throughout Europe. Phase 2 started around 1350, and lasted the next fifty years. Hopefully, we’ll get done with our Phase 2 more quickly, but there’s no knowing.

22/ Now here’s the thing about the Phase 2 of the Black Death: it’s clear that everything basically broke at a very deep level, which is a very strong statement coming from me. I don’t like to call complex systems broken very often. Usually when people say that, they are just complaining that the system is working for somebody else rather than for them. But when the system doesn’t work for any of its human individual or institutional parts, or even to preserve and perpetuate itself, I think it is safe to say it is actually broken.

23/ The Black Death, arguably, broke the society of the European High Middle Ages. In the transition from high to late middle ages between 1350-1400 or so, it didn’t work for anybody very well. Not for clergy, with trust in the church falling apart, not for the nobility, with the culture of feudal chivalry unraveling into Hobbesian warfare and what we would today call a warlord condition, and certainly not for the bourgeoisie or peasantry of the third estate. And it didn’t even sustain itself. It was falling apart.

24/ Now that’s what a Phase 2 condition is, and that’s why you can’t call it new normal because it neither sustains, nor leads up naturally to a true new normal. In the case of Europe after the Black Death, everything collapsed, but it took more than a century for a true new normal to emerge, what we recognize today as the Renaissance, by the early 16th century.

25/ Historians apparently call this collapsed period the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, which had 3 external triggers: a famine in 1315-16 as the prequel, the Black Death as the main event, and the start of what’s called the Little Ice Age towards the end. Socially and politically, this period was marked by the 100 years war, which was a straggling period of nearly continuous warfare rather than a single war.

26/ If you map it to today, you get a similar Crisis of Late Modernity. Our 3 events are probably the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Covid19, and climate change coming up. If the Black Death is a good precedent, we can expect at least a few decades of a broken world that doesn’t work for anybody in it, and can’t sustain itself either. That’s the worst case scenario. Hopefully we can do better than that.

27/ Which brings me to the third part. Assuming a condition of pandemic-as-setting, where the setting is characterized by a vacuum of knowledge, what kind of life condition can you expect? The answer emerging is not pleasant. I think of it in terms of a disease I call meta-covid.

28/ Meta-covid is a disease that has 3 key symptoms in Phase 1: An altered sense of time perception, which I wrote about in Pandemic Time (April 10), and a sense of things going brrrr, as in the meme, which I wrote about in life go brrrr… (March 27), and a weird sense of purpose, even in people who are not particularly purposeful, and actually prefer a playful, purposeless life. In Phase 2, the Phase 1 symptoms get altered and new Phase 2 symptoms appear.

29/ The altered time perception starts to acquire a non-specific waiting character. It’s not a waiting for normalcy or specific re-opening milestones. It’s a sort of generic waiting, like the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, or like waiting for salvation or an afterlife in a highly religious time like the 14th century.

30/ The life go brrr…. aspect also shifts, as the initial things going brrr… much of it which has a positive exhilarating feel, runs out of energy. But other things, much less positive, starts to spin up, and bad things start going brrr….We just saw an early example of a bad thing going brrr…. in Minneapolis last night.

31/ The sense of purpose also transforms. Instead of being energizing, it now feels like a burden you cannot get rid of, like Frodo carrying the One Ring to Mordor. There was an article in HBR talking about this, where a lot of leaders are talking about a sense of clarity and purpose that the pandemic has given them. The article warns that this is an emergency response exhilaration, and it can give way to regression, which is described as: “Then the second phase hits: a regression phase, where people get tired, lose their sense of purpose, start fighting about the small stuff, and forget to do basic things like eat or drink — or they eat and drink too much.”

32/ But maybe the biggest new thing in Phase 2 is two new symptoms. The first is that it becomes harder and harder to simply waste time. There is a sense of foreshortened future, where you cannot see past the unspecified thing you’re waiting for. So there’s a sense of time being limited, and a sense of pressure to get things done, and then do more things. It’s not guilt or responsibilities. You cannot get into the mood to waste time.

33/ The second related thing is that it becomes harder and harder to have fun, make jokes, and in general relax. People certainly try. There is a certain desperate kind of hedonism that can often take root. This happened in the wake of the Black Death in the upper classes of Europe. But there’s an undercurrent of despair and hopelessness that makes it not truly fun. It’s like partying at the end of the world.

34/ So that’s Phase 2: The pandemic has shifted from story to setting, it’s no longer dominating the headlines, but it has this sense of instability, ignorance, and uncertainty in the background contaminating all things. The system is breaking down, and failing to work for anybody, and not even sustaining itself. But a new thing seems very far away. Subjectively you have a meta-covid mental illness, characterized by an altered sense of time that’s like waiting for Godot, things going brrr… in bad ways, a weird sense of purpose giving way to a burdensome sense of responsibility, and increasing difficulty wasting time, or having fun.

35/ Like it or not, that’s where I think we’re headed. The immediate emergency response is over. A gradual unraveling is starting. Problems are compounding. There are fewer good and fun things in the balance. Life is slowly shifting from a positive condition to one of general despair. And based on the the Black Death, this could last long past the actual pandemic, as we go into a very deep reconstruction phase of civilization. I guess this is what the idea of a Dark Age covers.

36/ Maybe things won’t get that bad. Maybe there will be surprising positive things that pop up even as the negative things mount. Maybe the stories and setting both will turn more positive. But I think it’s important to mentally prepare for the worst case, even while you hope it doesn’t happen. So that’s it for the topic of this week, the pandemic shifting from story to setting, with a look at the precedent of the Black Death, and a look at this disease of meta-covid descending upon on all of us.

Two Announcements

Before I wrap up this episode, I have two announcements.

First, I have a new eBook out, a compilation of the 32 best newsletters from 2015-19, in a sequenced and curated form. It’s called Breaking Smart Archives: Selected Newsletters, 2015-19.

If you’re a subscriber, you already got free access to it a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not a subscriber, you can get it on the Kindle for $3.99 from Amazon. For those of you who joined recently, this eBook should be a good way to catch up on the first 5 years of this newsletter, before I switched formats recently and turned it into a subscription newsletter.

It was really kinda interesting selecting and sequencing the pieces for this volume, and the eBook is a good view of how we got to where we are in sort of a live journal format. This is the raw material that I’m hoping to treat in a better theorized form in my Great Weirding essay series, but in some ways, this collection of raw in-the-moment newsletters from that period conveys a better sense of the transformation we’ve been going through than any post-hoc theory I could make up.

Second announcement, for those of you who enjoy this short-form monologue podcast, and are interested in a more traditional conversational podcast, you may want to check out Scorpio Season, which is a conversation-format podcast I do with my friend Lisa. Episodes are weekly, and just over an hour typically, and our format is that each episode is based on a letter of the alphabet, and we make a list of topics that start with that letter and talk about them. We just recorded the 12th episode, for the letter L. You can find Scorpio Season on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google.

1/ Today I want to talk about an idea I’ve been developing, which is that the future of the business world, post-Covid, and post software eating the world, looks surprisingly like the High Middle Ages, between about 1000 to 1250 AD, rather than like any more recent historical era. Which of course leads to the question, how do you operate in this world?

2/ I also want to talk a little bit about the first ten decade of my life as an independent consultant, what I’m looking forward to in the next decade, and in that vein, I want to talk about a new initiative I helped start last month, called the Yak Collective.

3/ Next year, in February, I will have completed 10 years as an independent consultant, 10 years since my first client in 2011. I’ve probably had like 50-60 clients since then. So at a personal level, I was already in a mood to pivot to a different mode coming out of my 9-month fellowship with the Berggruen Institute, which gave me a chance to cut back on the consulting work, take a step back, and think about my journey so far, and where I want to go to from here.

4/ This planned pivot has coincided with Covid19, which has radically accelerated a trend that has been a big part of my career — software eating the world. Almost all the consulting I’ve done is, in one way or another, about software eating the world. Software eating the world is going through an inflection point I thought wouldn’t arrive till 2030. The pandemic has accelerated the schedule by 10 years.

5/ Previously, it was the margin to the industrial center, now the industrial world is the margin and the software world is the center. I don’t know about you, but I’m betting that this recovery will lead us to a world with software at the center sort of permanently, dominating not just the economy, but every aspect of our adapted way of life.

6/ But… there’s something bigger going on here. I’ve been reading a lot of history, and I’ve concluded that it isn’t just the 20 year old software-eating-the-world trend that is accelerating and going through an inflection point. There are several other much longer cycles that are going through similar inflection points. We are experiencing a sort of resonance peak in several cycles which happen to coincide in phase right now.

7/ For example, a 100 year culture of industrial synchronized clock-based time is shifting to post-industrial multi-temporality, based on subjective event-stream-based time. This is what I’ve been researching for the last year, and writing a book about, called the Clockless Clock, which I am serializing on this newsletter..

8/ Then there is a 400-year old cycle of Westphalian nation states that seems to be swinging towards some sort of city-state and regional coalitional world, thanks to how and where the battle against Covid19 is actually being fought.

9/ And going still further back, to before the Black Death, which I am reading about in a great book called A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, I think an 800-year-old cycle of centralization is reversing and giving way to a kind of decentralized, horizontally organized world last seen in the High Middle Ages, when the feudal nobility was more powerful than the monarchy, the Church in Europe had unquestioned authority, and imperial states were weak.

10/ Now if you’ve studied your history, you probably know that the Black Death, along with other factors like the rise of firearms, drove the world towards Great Powers and centralization, and weakened the feudal, manorial economy of barons and knights. I think Covid19 will drive us the other way, towards local and regional powers and decentralization. This is not an original thought. A lot of people have been saying that.

11/ The part that interests me is the implications of this huge multi-cycle inflection point for organizations and management. Assumptions shifting now are older than the oldest modern businesses. They are older than even mercantilism, which was based on the Age of Sail, and emerged in the 15th century, after the Black Death had destroyed the manorial economy.

12/ If you want to think about organizations and management in the next decade, you have to go back far, really far, to before there were modern public or private sectors, or chartered corporations. To a time when the economy meant a manorial economy, and globalization meant Templar knights going on crusades. To a time when honor-based politics was on top and economics was strongly subservient to it.

13/ Of course, the structural roles are played by different elements, and you can’t get too literal about this. You have a world awash in public debt, and likely, a wave of nationalization of large parts of the global business world. Instead of the church, you have the global liberal order.

14/ But the point of the loose historical analogy is that you can no longer rely on assumptions about business and corporations based on the last 50, 100, or even 400 years. The internet has been fundamentally undermining assumptions that were laid down as far back as 1000 AD. And Covid19 is accelerating the process of collapsing things built on those assumptions

15/ If you want to rethink the nature of organizations, business, and the economy today, you have to rethink ideas going back as far back as the 13th century from first principles. This is something I’m doing in one of my other projects, the Great Weirding, but that’s at the level of essay writing. This is a kind of thinking I want to bring into my consulting work as well.

16/ So to bring it back down to that, I’ve learned a lot in the last decades, and I think I’ve done more good than harm. There are even times I’ve felt like I added more value to a client in an hour than an entire McKinsey team in a year. This is not me bragging about my personal abilities, but a comment on just how much fresh intelligence there is to be mined from internet-first perspective, from a software-eating-the-world lens.

17/ For example, just this morning, I was leading a study group on online community governance, and we were reading a section of The Tao of the IETF, which is a seminal document in internet governance, and it suddenly struck me that governing and managing online communities, which is something I’ve been doing for over 20 years now, is actually a much harder problem than governing organizations.

18/ And much of the reason I am able to add a weirdly leveraged kind of value as an independent consultant is due to the fact that my primary home is on the internet. Even my main consulting methodology, which I call “sparring” is a skill I think I’ve honed more through 20 years of online discussions and flame wars, than through traditional business meetings.

19/ So here’s a weird way of looking at it: because the internet was something of a blank canvas in the 80s, and because the people creating its culture were not typical organization man types, they basically made up a playbook that seemed to work as they went along. And as it happens, a lot of the methods they discovered through trial and error look more like the culture of the 1300s than classic management texts from the 1970s.

20/ It’s not that Peter Drucker or Michael Porter are wrong; they were just working within organizational frameworks and mental models that are much younger, between 20 to 200 years old. And as it turns out, those frameworks and mental models are not as robust as we like to think. In fact, they’re pretty fragile, and are collapsing around us as we speak.

21/ I’m not the only one making this argument. There was a very interesting book by Matthew Fraser, that came out in 2008. It was called Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, and it argued exactly what I am arguing — that in a world where Facebook shapes reality, you can learn more from the history of Templar knights than you can from the biography of Jack Welch.

22/ There are toxic aspects of this of course. I’ve written elsewhere about the Internet of Beefs, which is about the toxic world of culture wars. If you squint a bit, it resembles the culture of jousting and tournaments in the middle ages. But other aspects are much more positive. Good internet communities seem to have some of the features of good manorial economies for example. They have a whole-life sort of quality to them, instead of an artificial separation of work and life.

23/ Which brings me to the something I want to put the spotlight on. As many of you know, I write another newsletter called the Art of Gig, which is about independent consulting, contractors, and the gig economy. About a month ago, we spun up a sort of open-source initiative with the idea of discovering more internet-native ways of developing and delivering consulting services.

24/ The group, which we call the Yak Collective, just launched publicly last week, and released its first report, called Don’t Waste the Reboot. It’s a collection of ideas about how organizations can emerge from Covid19 in a way that makes the next normal better than the last one. We’re going to be producing a lot more like that in the coming months, and you can keep up by following our work on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

25/ But what I want to highlight is not the content so much as the method by which we are trying to generate it. With the Yak Collective, we are trying to practice what I am preaching here, which is to take a really long, historical view of organizations and management going back to the 13th century, combining that with what we’ve learned from 30 years of online, internet culture, and working in new ways.

26/ If you want to support us, you can do a couple of things. First, take a look at our first report, and get in touch with me or one of the other contributors if you think your organization can use some of the kinds of fresh thinking we think we can do that traditional sources of consulting cannot. Second, you can join us live as we do a lot of our thinking. The Discord community where we do our stuff is open to everybody, and you can just join it and hang out with us. Most of our meetings are also open.

27/ And finally, to bring it back to a personal note, one reason I’m taking this on is of course, because I think people who are new to the indie economy could use some resources and support like this, and it’s a way for me to make my own second decade as an indie different from the first. Among other things, I want to try and distill some of the management and business knowledge I think I’ve learned in the last decade into teaching and writing output that others can use, and also by doing that, maybe level up myself to different challenges myself.

28/ As one piece of that, next week, I’ll be conducting my first workshop on my conversational sparring model of consulting for a few others in the Yak Collective interested in learning it. I am hoping to do more such things, and make it a new part of my consulting life. But in the meantime, of course, I have to continue my own consulting practice.

In which I shamelessly draft off Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay and suggest an approach to how, what, and where to do the building. I also have a framework I call the builder’s cone to think about it in a useful historical context.

1/ If you’re in tech, you’ve probably read Marc Andreessen’s essay It’s Time to Build (ITTB). It’s the first serious public thing he’s written in nearly a decade, after his 2011 WSJ op-ed, Software is Eating the World (SWEW).

2/ As most of you know this site and newsletter, Breaking Smart, came out of work I did with a16z on that idea, so obviously this new essay from Marc is of high personal interest to me, since it is in some sense, an important sequel.

3/ I thought I’d do this episode partly because a new generation of people in technology seems to have no idea who Marc is, and assumes he is just another VC, and that this is just another shallow take from the VC thought leader crowd that you can dismiss casually. Whether you agree or disagree with Marc, dismissing this essay casually is honestly just not a smart thing to do, so I want to try and give you a bit of an appreciation for it before diving into what I want to add to it.

4/ For those of you unaware of the history, Marc developed the first graphical web browser back in 1992, Mosaic, which later turned into Netscape. Later he also founded one of the first cloud computing companies, Opsware, with Ben Horowitz who later became his cofounder in a16z. This is basic history which I personally think everybody working in tech or reporting on it should just know.

5/ Something I don’t expect everyone to know is, he’s also a huge reader, and as you’ll know if you’ve talked to him, or follow him on Twitter. For every seemingly casual thing he says, he usually has 3 books and 10 papers he can cite. So even if you don’t agree with things he says — and I often don’t — it’s worth taking him seriously. He tends to present his thinking in a deceptively casual way, but there’s always more depth behind it than you would guess from a quick glance.

6/ Now for this essay. Like most things Marc says, I agree broadly with his argument. If you’re an engineer, with any experience at all in building things, it’s kinda hard to see this essay as anything other than tautological. I mean of course building is good. That’s the starting point if you’re in technology. The devil is in the details.

7/ I do tend to have somewhat different ideas from Marc about what aspects of building/doer culture are the important ones, and in general trust markets a little less, and state institutions a little more. He and I have had a productive ongoing conversation about this stuff for almost 7 years now.

8/ There’s a lot you can argue with in the essay, for example, his characterization of right and left attitudes towards building, but I’m not going to get into that, since plenty of others are doing that. And if you want critical views of the essay, there’s no shortage out there, and of course some of them make good points, while others are just shallow bits of the techlash. It’s what you’d expect for an essay like this in 2020.

9/ What’s interesting to note is that unlike the SWEW, ITTB has had a very divided reception, which to me is an indication of the stage of the historical building cycle we’re in more than the specifics of what Marc is arguing.

10/ In particular, In 2011, when he wrote the SWEW essay, we had just moved from what I call the alternatives stage to the disruptions stage. Now we’re moving from the disruptions stage to the macro-rebuilding stage. Marc has offered an answer to the question when to build on a grand scale, which is obviously now, or very soon, after the first response to Covid19 is behind. What I want to do is build on what Marc wrote, no pun intended, and talk about how, what, and where to build.

11/ So here’s the theory. Building goes through cycles, with different kinds of building required at each stage of the cycle. Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a good framework for thinking about these.

12/ As it applies to building, the Perez model can be thought of as 4 stages. In the first stage you build tools, in the second stage, you build alternatives to existing things. In the third stage, you disrupt existing things via a bunch of isolated disruptions. In the last stage, you do a whole sale macro-rebuilding from foundations on up.

13/ Somewhere along the way, there’s usually a big disaster, so you can link each complete building cycle to its disaster. The last two were linked to World War I and World War 2, this one is obviously linked to the pandemic.

14/ The disaster doesn’t always happen at a set phase of the cycle. For example, in WW1 it happened late in the disruption phase, when the macro-rebuilding was just starting. For example, asphalt roads being built for cars, which were disrupting horses.

15/ For WW2, it happened a little earlier, towards the end of the alternatives phase. For example, Chevrolet had pioneered an alternative to the Ford style one-size-fits all inflexible mass manufacturing. Disruption continued through the war, and the macro rebuilding happened in peacetime, with the Marshall Plan as part of the war reconstruction for example.

16/ For the Covid19 pandemic, the disaster has hit in roughly the same part of the cycle as it did in World War I, just as the disruption wave was going to give way to the macro rebuilding stage anyway.

17/ So what’s happened is: what I called the dessert course of software eating the world has coincided with a big disaster, and accelerated the process. I covered this in passing, in last week’s article on Pandemic Time, but I want to get at it more directly here.

18/ There’s two other things to think about in relation to this building cycle. The first is how individuals change, and the second is how society as a whole changes. I like to think in terms of 4 degrees of change depending on the phase of the building: reorient, revalue, resituate, and regenerate, that apply to both individuals and society.

19/ In reorienting, you change your mental models, for example realizing that digital media tools can do what paper printing can. So you wrap your mind around different tools. Like the graphical web browser, which Marc invented, rather than the printed book.

20/ In the revaluing phase you start valuing different things, for example, you value instant publishing and live conversations with readers more than the cachet of a brand-name publisher behind your book. So you build an alternative: blogs instead of books.

21/ In the resituating phase, you change how you exist in the world. For example, calling yourself a blogger instead of an author. You’ve created a new role in the world.

22/ And finally, in the regeneration phase, you change on the inside, you internalize the external label/role you’ve taken on. Like Doctor Who.

23/ Now here’s the thing, entire societies can go through this same kind of transformation. For example, in the WW1 cycle, the identity of the typical American changed from farmer to factory worker as the country urbanized, and America itself went from thinking of itself as an agrarian backwater playing second fiddle to Europe to a technological superpower. The self-image of the entire nation changed. Subjective transformation.

24/ Now what’s the upshot of all this. Here’s the thing, if you make a graph with x-axis being how deeply you as an individual are changing, and the y-axis being how deeply society is changing, it gives you a two-dimensional space where individuals can be ahead or behind society, and being matched with the times, or not.

25/ The ideal case is when the two are somewhat balanced, or when the individual is changing slightly faster, but not too fast, relative to the rest of society. The balanced case is the diagonal line, x=y. So for example, you and society are reorienting at the same rate, or revaluing at the same rate.

26/ Below that line, the individual is changing faster. The sweet spot is a cone slightly below the diagonal, which I like to call the builder’s cone. If you are too far ahead of society, too far ahead of the curve, you might be too early, and turn into a frustrated visionary.

27/ Or worse, you might end up going to the dark side and using your ahead-of-the-curve status to exploit others through profiteering, because it’s easier than building. Being too far ahead of that curve creates that tempation.

28/ Above the diagonal line is of course much worse, which is why I have represented it as a red zone. If you’re changing much more slowly than society as a whole, you get this left-behind feeling, and develop a deep sense of being exploited. Like people left behind in the 80s by Reagan’s deregulation. You develop resentment and what political scientists call ressentiment.

29/ So putting it all together, the sweet spot for builders is to be changing slightly ahead of society at large, and working at the right phase of the building cycle. So right now, we’re obviously in a macro-rebuilding phase that’s gone way past simple disruption.

30/ You should be thinking at that scale of ambition. Like Marshall plan scale, or foundational rebuilding phase, based on the logic of software eating the world. You should be reading about those periods of history to get an idea of how to proceed.

31/ I’m going to close with a bit of personal advertising. For those of you who want to take up Marc’s call to build, as you may know, the original essays of Breaking Smart were based on his software eating the world essay, and you can read them online or as an ebook.

32/ I also have an online recorded workshop based on those ideas, that you can sign up for. It’s based on live workshops I conducted in 2015 and 2016, plus some extra material. I’m thinking of adding a new recorded session on these ideas about building in the next few weeks.

So that’s it for this free episode/issue of Breaking Smart. For those of you just signed up for this newsletter, or had it forwarded to you, Breaking Smart is a weekly subscription newsletter where every week I send out either a free or a paywalled issue exploring some aspect of technology and the future. The free issues are podcast episodes or short essays on a current topic, and the paywalled ones are either an installment of one of my longer projects, or a stand-alone special topic essay. Right now, I’m working on two such longer projects, a book about time called The Clockless Clock, which has one chapter already published, and an essay collection called The Great Weirding, the first essay of which will go out next week, hopefully.

The word default has two meanings: failure to fulfill an obligation, and a preselected option. We are finding out the hard way exactly how they are related.

Key points:

* A complex system can be defined as one where every feature has a default setting, and lots of corner cases that must be taken into account.

* A complex system can also be defined as one where a default of one kind — failure to fulfill an obligation, triggers a default of the other kind — a preselected contingency response option kicks in. So when you default on a car loan, the bank might repossess your car as its default response, unless a human overrides the decision.

* The two types of defaults allow a complex system to operate effectively in a core “normal” operating mode, and protect itself against a zone of modeled contingencies with default responses to defaults.

* This makes complex systems fragile in a very particular way. When the entire system needs to shift to a new equilibrium, it becomes very hard. Every default must be reset to a new value, which means every corner case around it must be re-solved. So for example, when you impose social distancing measures on an entire population, you have to suddenly figure out what to do about special needs populations, like prisoners, or sailors on a ship.

* When the equilibrium is not just new, but dangerous, you also have to re-solve all the default response protocols to default events, because a lot of people are going to be defaulting on a lot of obligations all at once. The statistical assumptions underlying the system are going to get violated. When one restaurant defaults on rent, it makes sense to evict the business and lease out the property to another. But when almost all restaurants default on rent, you have to reconsider your response at a policy level.

* So that’s where we are now with the entire world: we are resetting defaults, re-solving all corner cases, and reconsidering our default responses to all defaults. We are not particularly good at this, so it is already turning into an unholy mess. But I’m honestly surprised that it is working as well as it is. Perhaps the system has serendipitous levels of robustness.

* But at least we have a new lens on systemic robustness and fragility that we can use in our future designs. Whenever you set a default option, ask how hard it is to move it, including all the corner cases. When a default event happens and a policy kicks in.

Welcome aboard to everybody who signed up since last week. If you signed up for the paid subscription you can read the first paywalled post I published last week, life go brr, on the go brr meme.

Hello and welcome back to the Breaking Smart podcast. In this episode, I want to pick up where I left off in my December 6 podcast, where we talked about the idea of inventing time. In particular, we talked about how to understand Alan Kay’s line that it’s easier to invent the future than to predict it, and William Gibson’s line that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. We talked about how to develop your instincts around recognizing when you’re living in a growing timeline versus a dying one.

In this episode, I want to build on that, and talk about how to navigate better in time by going beyond optimism vs. pessimism frames.

Here’s my definition of normalcy: things are normal when it’s easy to guess whether you’re living in a growing or a dying timeline. This doesn’t mean your guess is correct. It’s just means it is easy to guess. The options and their narrative meanings are unambiguous.

How do you know you’re in this condition?

You know by the fact that a particular anticipated event in the future acquires a particular significance, and you use the narrative meaning of that event to judge the good and bad things in the present. Let’s call it the Arrival Event.

For example, in 2012, two such arrival events framing the future for the United States were “software is eating the world” and “immigrants are taking over the country.” Both had implied events when the processes could be considered irreversibly complete. You could navigate around the progress of that process. It would have been your clock in 2012. Countdown timers to T=0.

The Arrival Event usually isn’t a real event. It just has to represent a significant irreversible phase transition hypothesis about history. An undeniable arrival into a new condition. In fact, the event is usually beyond the horizon in the distant future, so you’re always moving towards a horizon that’s moving away from you. But on the other hand, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Arrival Event is necessarily an imagined arrival into a pure utopia or dystopia. It can be more more real than that. So the Arrival Event you’re orienting around during normal times is somewhere between real and imaginary.

This semi-mythical Arrival Event is the temporal equivalent of a True North. A meaningful but beyond-the-horizon point in time that you can orient around. Just as you often head north, but rarely actually have the magnetic north pole within your spatial horizon, you’re always counting down towards your arrival event in time, but it’s rarely within any actual practical temporal horizon.

Now here’s my claim: the sense of a significant arrival event beyond the horizon is at the root of both optimistic and pessimistic attitudes towards the present. Both are patterns of horizon thinking. Both lead you to interpret current events, which are always a mix of good and bad, in specific ways. Misfortunes seem less burdensome if you sense good times are around the corner, and on the other hand, fortunate events seem less valuable if you feel it is all about to get destroyed anyway soon.

By definition, optimists tend to be cheerful about troubles in the present, and declare that better times are just beyond the horizon: “when this is all over….” X, Y, and Z will happen and things will be better.

Pessimists on the other hand, tend to be gloomy about positive things about the present and declare that the apocalypse is just around the corner: “enjoy it while it lasts….” because X, Y, and Z will happen and then it’ll an apocalyptic disaster.

The thing is, they are both right. Each is living in a particular fork of the unevenly distributed future being invented in the present. The optimist is choosing to live in what they think is the growing, generative part of the unevenly distributed future, while the pessimist is choosing to live in what they think is the dying, degenerating part. One is fighting to accelerate their Arrival Event, the other is fighting to delay theirs.

Importantly, both are just guesses. If in 2012, you thought that the growing future was happening in San Francisco and the dying past was in Pittsburgh, that was a guess about the relative significance of good and bad things going on in both places, in relation to your true north Arrival Event, and you made a choice based on that guess.

The thing about normalcy is that you can in fact make such a choice, because so long as the Arrival Event is in the far future, the estimated growing and dying parts tend to be clearly separated in narrative space, and moving from one to another can be as simple as moving from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. From a city you think is living in the dying past to a city you think is living in the growing future.

Or to put it another way, normalcy is when you can reduce the flow of time to a sequence of two arrows. There’s the past pointing to the significant future event T, and the post-arrival future starting at T, creating a new world. In this scheme, the present Now is not that important because you’re not oriented around it.

You can have the luxury of such a simple mental model because you’re choosing to live in a clearly separated narrative timeline: either an optimistic one or a pessimistic one. The only difference is which of the two arrows represents good times and which one represents bad times.

Now the interesting question is, what happens when you can’t separate the two that easily? What if the future is not just unevenly distributed in the present, but illegibly distributed, so you can’t easily put yourself in the middle of a purely optimistic or pessimistic narrative. This is that schizophrenic sense of being the best of times and the worst of times at once. This is the sense of being inside what I’ve been calling The Great Weirding.

One way to understand the collapse of normalcy is that you have actually arrived at the significant future event T that you were anticipating in normal times.

So T=Now. The countdown timer has counted down to zero.

It is the temporal equivalent of the phenomenon of the compass becoming useless when you are actually standing on top of true magnetic north. It’s right under your feet, so the compass can’t tell you which way to head. It’s a division or multiplication by zero.

So why and how can this happen? Because arrival events are not actually mythical events that are always beyond the horizon. Sometimes they cross over the horizon and get closer and closer, and more and more real, till we’re actually living right through them.

When that happens, the approximate separation of growing and dying futures breaks down. The estimates of whether you were living in good or bad parts of the unevenly distributed future have an encounter with ground reality. And the futures you were betting on have an IPO, so to speak.

And you have to scramble to correct your position.

What’s worse, because you have arrived, you no longer have a future arrival event as a reference measure to gauge the significance of current events, good or bad. You have no way to judge what anything means. You’ve lost your sense of proportion because you’ve lost the thing that gave you that sense of proportion. You don’t know what things in the now mean, because you can’t value them in proportion to where you’re going next.

That’s the condition of the Great Weirding. And next time, I’ll talk about how to orient when you’re in an arrival condition with a useless compass.

Today I want to talk about time, which is a subject I’m researching quite a lot these days. In particular I want to talk about two of the most-quoted lines in technology conversations that are about time.

The first one is Alan Kay’s, famous line: it is easier to invent the future than to predict it. Alan Kay is a famous computer scientist who was at PARC.

And the second line is from William Gibson, the pioneering cyberpunk science fiction writer, who is famous for the line: the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.

What I want to do in this episode is change your understanding of such lines from figurative to literal, where the idea of the future being invented is not in the sense of specific things or events “contained” by the future so to speak, or from the future and “contained” in the present, but time itself as something that is invented.

Let’s start with a few examples.

In the last few years I’ve experienced a few technologies from the unevenly distributed future, as I’m sure many of you working in technology have. And I want to talk about four in particular: riding in a Tesla, trying on an Oculus VR headset, making a cryptocurrency transaction, and trying on a Magic Leap AR headset.

So the interesting thing is, my reaction to these four experiences was different in each case.

On one end of the spectrum we have Magic Leap and crypto. Both of those things, when I tried them, they were interesting, exciting, and stimulating, it was fun to try these things. But neither felt like an inevitable part of the future, at least to me, so subjectively speaking they did not feel like an inevitable part of the future.

In terms of Alan Kay’s line, they were auditioning for the role of being part of the invented future, but they were not decisively part of it yet, at least as far as I’m concerned. And in terms of William Gibson’s line, they may or may not be part of the actual unevenly distributed future. They felt like they might equally well be part of a fork future we may not go down, like I imagine it felt to play a BetaMax tape when it was still a competitor to VHS back in the day. That’s an important idea to recognize, right, that there are technological options we discover, uncover, and develop, but don’t necessarily exercise, and go down the future they create.

The Oculus headset, now that felt a little more substantial, like it was definitely part of the future being invented, but not necessarily an actual piece of the unevenly distributed future that I was experiencing in the present. Something like it seems inevitable, it feels like it rhymes with something from the future, but perhaps what we will actually see in the future is not that exact kind of thing. You can think of it as the future in a beta-test form, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. So I’m emphasizing repeatedly the subjective aspect here because what we’re talking about here is a gut experience of the temporal quality of a technological experience. We’re not talking about rational assessments of future probabilities, we’re talking about how real a sense of time feels.

And finally, riding in a Tesla made the electric vehicle future seem utterly inevitable in a way that kinda killed the present for me. Suddenly I could no longer look at gasoline cars the same way. Driving in my own car felt different, like I was stuck in the past, waiting for the price of the future to come down to the point where I could afford to live in it. So a Tesla creates the future in the sense of both the Alan Kay and William Gibson quotes. It makes the future real in a deep way that is like making time itself real. And you know this because the feel of the present feels different, like you’re heading down a dead-end, a lame-duck future. You’ll have to either abandon it as soon as you can, or end up dying with it.

Stepping back, I think it is important to understand innovation as the process of literally inventing time itself. The mark of success is that the present starts to feel dead, like the past, and the beachhead of the future in the present, let’s call it a Gibsonian temporal colony, feels like a portal for getting back into the present. So it’s almost like there’s been a time shift and you’ve been shifted back into the past and you have to step through a portal to get back to the present. There is a sense of inevitability to your experience of the new technology, and a sense of derealization — things seeming not quite real — in your continued experience of existing incumbent technologies.

You have to get very sensitive to this feeling in your gut if you want to do good work in the world of technology, even though of course it can be very misleading. There is a chance that feeling in your gut, that deep down sense that this is the future being invented, that this is time that is more real than the time I’m living in, that can be misleading. It could be that you’re mistaken. So that’s why I again emphasize this is a subjective feeling. But I think it is a very reliable indicator. When you get that feeling, there is a much stronger chance that you’re going to be right than wrong.

So you have to get very sensitive to this feeling if you want to do good technology, whether as an engineer, an entrepreneur, an investor, or an early adopter making new culture with it. And this is not the same thing as feeling excited or stimulated by the future. It is not the same thing as logically and rationally concluding that a certain scenario is the most likely future, and investing in it. It’s a sort of all-in psychological investment of identity into a sense of time that feels more real than the one you’re in. It’s a sense of switching timelines.

And this feeling can be evoked by very mundane and unexciting things. It doesn’t have to be a big flash-bang feeling.

An example of this: when I first moved to the US, I used a microwave oven for the first time, since they were not yet popular in India. And an Indian friend of mine taught me the trick of microwaving papads, usually called papadums when you get then in restaurants in the US, which are these little dried lentil crackers you typically either deep fry or roast on an open flame. But the microwave cooked it perfectly, and that was the moment when it was suddenly clear to me that that was the future of the Indian kitchen. So that’s a pretty mundane example. It’s not like experiencing space travel or something science-fictiony like that. It’s a very mundane example of switching timelines and feeling that one kind of invented future involving a certain technology is more real than the time you’re experiencing right now.

Once you get sensitized to this feeling of going down one fork of time rather than another, and the idea of more or less real timelines, I think you’re psychologically equipped to be much smarter about how you relate to technology. You’re equipped to be bolder about how you engage with the future. So it’s a skill worth cultivating. In a way, it’s learning a kind of time travel within the present.

And learning time travel is probably figuratively the most important skill you can develop as a technologist. And I know it sounds weird, but this is the reason all of us in technology tend to love science fiction and sort of reach for ways of to think about experiencing time in much more real ways. We are actually training our gut, we’re training our sense of time being real or unreal, learning to make forks and sort of fork-switching decisions at the right time, and getting a sense of are we in the past, are we in the future, are we in the present, how do we get back into the present, how do we actually make part of the future more real and bring it into the present. So these are all sort of temporal mechanics skills that you learn once you start to cultivate this feeling.

So that’s my topic for the day, let me know what you think. We’re just at the 10 minute mark, so looks like I’m back to slightly shorter podcast lengths, and I’ll be back again next week or the week after with my next episode, thanks.

Two things happened this week. Last Friday, Alexey Leonov, the first human to walk in space (in 1965), passed away. And this morning, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir went on the first all-women spacewalk on the ISS. So two historic events. And they got me thinking about the meaning of we in its most universalist, species-level sense.

Let’s take them in order.

Alexey Leonov was the first human to walk in space. He was also on the crew of one of the earliest experiments in international space cooperation, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, ASTP. So this was at the height of the Cold War.

Before we had the ISS, the ASTP mission was as close as humans have ever come to a Star Trek like Federation. In some ways, it was a more impressive technical, social and political achievement, since it was at the height of the Cold War, and the mission had to be designed around the existing US and Soviet programs, which used different designs, unlike the ISS, which was designed collaboratively by multiple nations.

As a kid, I owned a beautifully written and illustrated book by Leonov about ASTP (he was also an accomplished artist, if you google him, you’ll find a bunch of his paintings, including space paintings), and though this may sound cheesy, that book was probably one of the things that got me interested in space technology and end up going to graduate school for aerospace engineering, where I worked on space mission problems for my PhD.

I remember a drawing of the Apollo-Soyuz docking mechanism in particular in Leonov’s book, and wondering at the time about the general problem of linking two incompatible technologies, which I think is kinda really symbolic of the whole problem of species-level human coordination. I want to digress a bit to talk about that.

If you’re an engineer you know this: in any design, any time two parts come together to form a coupling, they tend to be designed asymmetrically, because that tends to be the easiest way. So one part gets designated male and the other part female, and the logic is the logic you would expect. It’s one of the rare funny bits of sexual logic in the generally sexless world of engineering jargon.

Later, as an adult, long after I read Leonov’s book, I heard this story (I don’t know how true it is) that one of the bones of contention — which Leonov didn’t talk about in his book — was making sure the docking system design was symmetrical, in the form of what is known as an androgynous coupling, because neither side wanted to be the “female” side. Apparently the nickname of the system was “androgynous brothers”, which I find hilarious. The official justification was of course, more technical: that with an androgynous coupling, either side could play the active or passive role, and that would make for greater mission flexibility and system-level redundancy. But I kinda buy the theory that the system ended up ungendered for less technical reasons. It sorta makes sense for that era of technology.

You could say ASTP was consciously designed to not just be a showcase of global cooperation, briefly forgetting the divide between the two sides of the Cold War. It also ended up being unintentionally gender-neutral for what were perhaps the wrong reasons. Long before we had culture wars about gender-neutral bathrooms here on earth.

And speaking of gender and space, that brings us to the second historic event of the week.

This morning, I just happened to catch a retweet of the NASA live feed of the space walk. I had no idea it was going on, but I am always willing to interrupt whatever I’m doing to watch space stuff. So I started watching, and I found myself drawn to the very basic shared human things that space forces us to grapple with. For example, I found myself noting and counting the orientation words the astronauts were using, like up, down, aft, fore etc and wondering about how humans think and talk about orientation in microgravity, where there is no natural direction of up, which is of course one of the most basic shared human things, a shared sense of which way is up.

At the back of my mind I was also wondering if women coordinate and communicate any differently on complex tasks than men. The ground control person was also a woman, so the entire audio-track for the live broadcast was female, which was interesting. But the gender aspect was less interesting to me than the basic human aspect. Here we are, as bodies in space, being governed by the laws of classical physics. Inertia, movement, velocities, accelerations. That was the more interesting part.

In fact, I didn’t realize till later, when I read up on the event, that it was a historic all-women spacewalk that had to be canceled once before because they didn’t have two spacesuits of the right size.

Anyhow, the two events together got me thinking about our sense of collective nouns like “us” and “we” and how in everyday life, they tend to factor across obvious tribal, gender, or other sorts of identity faultlines. Sometimes, it can seem like there is no such thing as a shared “we” that applies to humanity as a whole.

In my more cynical moments, I tend to think that every use of the word “we” is a disingenuous attempt to humanize some people at the expense of others. My line about this is a version of the principle: you cut the cake, I’ll pick the bigger half. The identitarian version is: you decide what rights are basic human rights, I’ll decide who counts as human. Which is the version that has historically been the most common one practiced. When people say “we the people,” they typically mean a particular subset of people counting as human.

Space missions are a reminder that there is substance to both the differences and commonalities that make us human.

On the one hand, space missions reinforce the sense of idealism that yes, there is in fact such a thing as a non-vacuous universal “we” that includes all humans, and perhaps all living things. When any human does something interesting in space, we all participate in the moment. When I logged on this morning, there were 14,000 viewers of the live feed. That’s fascinating. Honestly, I’d be very interested in seeing the demographic breakdown of that audience.

When any human does something in space, what they do is human at a very basic level: they move, they breathe air, the grip things, they communicate. All the trivial unconscious shared humanity, including a sense of up, that we forget here on earth, becomes a very live concern in space. So yeah, the idealism has substance.

Hell, even a dog or monkey in space evokes identification.

Recently, a Chinese lunar lander recently even grew a sapling on the Moon, and frankly, I identify with that sapling too. Life in space is a very powerful reminder of how much all of life has in common. Yes, there is a Hobbesian struggle of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw aspect, so there is that aspect of nature as well, but it is amazing how much life has in common.

But on the other hand, space is also a reminder that we can’t pretend identity issues are entirely made-up political b******t.

We’ve had a complex bit of space technology, the ASTP docking system, possibly designed a certain way because of gender sensitivities. We apparently had the first all-female spacewalk delayed because they didn’t have two suits in the right size. And these are not cosmetic matters. It’s not all virtue signaling or identity signaling. Matters of life and death hinge on things like spacesuits being the right size. The live video showed this starkly: periodically the ground controller would ask the astronauts for suit checks. So, it’s real life-and-death stuff.

So yeah, space missions show us that both our differences and commonalities have deep substance to them.

But overall, the moral of the story of space exploration as revealed by the events of this week, reflecting on the life of Alexey Leonov, ASTP and the historic event of the first all-woman spacewalk, is a pretty uplifting one.

It’s hard, but we don’t have to choose between immutably essentialized identities on the one hand, and universalist tendencies to identity with all life on the other. Our differences and similarities are both real, and they both matter, and we — and I do mean we as a species now — we have to learn to accommodate both in our collectivist tendencies. They both matter, differences and commonalities.

And to bring this back to earth from space, when we think about this in terms of all the things that absorb us here on earth everyday as part of the culture wars, and the news headlines. And you make that seemingly sophisticated argument, whenever somebody says we must do this, we must combat climate change, we must combat sexism, we must not let identity and political correctness destroy things. Whichever side you’re on, there’s a lot of we and us words being used in conversation, and most of the time, they indicate we’s and us’es that are less than universal, and we all recognize that, and sometimes we call each other out on it.

Like one of the most common sophomoric debate tactics is, when an opponent says something like we must do X, you challenge them on what we are we talking about here. Even though this is a tactic you learn in college, it is important to call out, and force people to define and defend the level of collectivism at which they think good things are good and evil things are evil.

You kinda have to make people take ownership of their we’s and us’es.

So that’s the reflection of the week on the lessons of space walks and historic space events here on earth. If you didn’t know any of this history, I recommend taking 15 minutes to google and learn about it. It’s fascinating stuff, especially the ASTP mission.

Today I want to talk about a possible emerging successor to net neutrality, which I call charisma neutrality, which I think is a plausible consequence of a very likely technological future: pervasive end-to-end encryption. (17 minutes)

Now net neutrality of course, was part of a very important chapter in the history of technology. Though the principle is now pretty much down for the count, for a few decades it played a hugely important role in ensuring that the internet was born more open than closed, and more generative than sterile.

Even though the principle was never quite as perfectly implemented as some people imagine, even when there was a strong consensus around it, it did produce enough of a systemic disposition towards openness that you could treat it as more true than not.

That era has mostly ended, despite ideological resistance, because even though it is a solid idea with respect to human speech, it is not actually such a great idea relative to the technical needs of different kinds of information flow. So as information attributes — stuff like text versus video, and real-time versus non-real-time — began to get more varied, the cost of maintaining net neutrality in the classic sense became a limiting factor.

And at least some technologists began seeing the writing on the wall: the cost of net neutrality was only going to get worse with AI, crypto, the internet of things, VR and AR.

What was good for openness and growth in the 1980s and 90s was turning into a significant drag factor by the aughts and 10s.

What was good for growing from 2 networked computers to a several billion was going to be a real drag going from billions to trillions.

I think there’s no going back here, though internet reactionaries will try.

To understand why this happened, you have to peek under the hood of net neutrality a bit, and understand something called the end-to-end principle, which is an architecture principle that basically says all the smarts in a network should be in the end point nodes which produce and consume information, and the pipes between the nodes should be dumb. Specifically, they should be too dumb to understand what’s flowing through them, even if they can see it, and therefore incapable of behaving differently based on such understanding. Like a bus driver with face-blindness who can’t tell different people apart, only check their tickets.

Now, for certain regimes of network operation and growth, the end-to-end principle is very conducive to openness and growth. But ultimately it’s an engineering idea, not divine gospel, and it has limits, beyond which it turns into a liability that does not actually address the original concerns.

To see why, we need to dig one level deeper.

The end-to-end principle is an example of what in engineering is usually called a separation principle. It is a simplifying principle that limits the space of design possibilities to ones where two things are separate. Another example is the idea that content and presentation must be separated in web documents. Or that the editorial and advertising sides of newspapers should be separate. Both of these again got stressed and broken in the last decade.

Separation principles usually end up this way, because there’s more ways for things to be tangled and coupled together than there are for them to be separate. So it’s sort of inevitable that they’ll break down, by the law of entropy. Walls tend to leak or break down. It’s sort of a law of nature.

Whether you’re talking about walls between countries or between parts of an architecture, separation principles represent a kind of reductive engineering idealism to keep complexity in check. There’s no point in mourning the death of one separation principle or the other. The trick is to accept when the principle has done its job for a period of technological evolution, and then set it aside. But that doesn’t mean you can’t look for new separation principles to power the next stage of evolution.

One such principle has been emerging in the last decade: the end-to-end encryption principle.

The similarity in names should suggest that we’re talking about a cousin of the original end-to-end principle, and you would be right to think that. Here, what you’re saying is that only the end points in a network should be able to code and decode messages, and the pipes should not.

If you think about it, this is a loosening and generalization of the original end-to-end principle. The pipes now don’t have to be dumb, but only the endpoints can control what the pipes can know, and therefore what they can do on the basis of knowledge. The pipes are not dumb, but the endpoints are in charge. Instead of a bus driver with face blindness, all riders are now wearing masks, but their tickets can now contain any information they choose to share, and the bus driver can act on that information.

As with the original end-to-end principle, the idealized notion is messy in practice. I was talking to some friends who are more tech savvy about this than I am, and they pointed out that an endpoint device itself is effectively a tiny unencrypted network, with more than one computer, and that the pipes in the intra-device network lie outside the scope of this principle.

So for example, you can have an extra invisible chip installed by the carrier, or something in the OS that traps what you’re typing before it gets to the encryption layer. And of course private keys can get exfiltrated without your knowledge. Maybe in the future end-to-end encryption will apply to the internal environment of every endpoint device, recursively all the way down to every logic circuit. But we’re not there yet.

And even without going there, it’s obvious the principle is not watertight anyway. Today, routers can peek inside packets, but in the future, even if they can’t, they’ll be able to tell a lot simply from the geometry of the connection and transmission patterns, even with technologies like VPNs and zero-knowledge proofs in the mix.

The thing is, different types of communication have different external heat signatures, and with AI, the ability to make inferences from such signatures will improve. It will be an arms race. The question will be whether pipes can get good at reading heat signatures faster than endpoints can get good at full-stack encryption that is secure in practice, not just theory.

There is no such thing as perfect containment of information. That’s another law of physics. Actually it is another form of the same law that tells you walls always break down.

So yeah, the technology is messy, but I think it already works well enough that it will create a broad tendency towards this new end-to-end principle being more true than false. You will never be able to hide from the NSA or the FBI or the Chinese government perfectly, but you can make it very much more expensive for them to monitor what you’re up to.

Now, this new end-to-end principle is also based on a separation principle. I’m not entirely sure how to characterize it, but I think end-to-end encryption attempts to make an approximately clean separation between custody of data and control of data, and tries to ensure that no matter who has custody, the owner has control over usage. We’ll see how well it works in practice as it becomes more widespread.

Now for the real question. Assuming the principle holds more often than not, and is more a de facto default than an opt-in exception that only libertarian crackpots use, what does an internet based on end-to-end encryption look like?

I think what end-to-end encryption sustains, that is worth enshrining as a new value for this next chapter of evolution, is charisma neutrality.

What do I mean by that?

Well, I talked about technological charisma a few weeks ago, but here I’m talking about the regular human kind. The ability of charismatic leaders to tell mesmerizing stories that spread fast and energize large dumb crowds to act as mass movements.

Or at least, that’s what human charisma looks like. In practice, the reaction of thoughtful people to supposedly charismatic messaging is cynicism and resignation. They only listen to some self-important blowhard with an imaginary halo droning on and on, because somebody is forcing them to. Only a subset of idiot fanbois at the core of the crowd is actually enthralled by the supposedly charismatic performance. And to the extent charismatic messaging works as advertised at all, it does so by reading the core of the crowd and responding to it, creating a positive feedback loop, telling it what it wants to hear, whipping it up. So this ability to read the crowd is critical to exercising charisma.

Everybody not in this feedback core is exchanging cynical jokes or shitposting about it on side channels that are much harder to monitor. So what defines human charisma is not the claim to captivating content, but three structural factors.

* One, the ability to keep captive audiences in place

* Two, creating a positive feedback loop with the small core

* And three, keeping the large cynical periphery too afraid to criticize openly

And historically, this kind of human charisma has always been a non-neutral thing. The people with the guns, able to control public spaces and distribution channels by force, had privileged access to charismatic structural modes. There’s a reason dictators mounting coups go after TV and radio stations and printing presses first. It is charisma insurance.

But end-to-end encryption as the default for communication makes it harder and harder to reserve charismatic messaging capability for yourself with guns. That’s the good takeaway from the culture wars. All charismatic messaging is created equal, so the messages are forced to fight each other in a Hobbesian war of stupid idea versus stupid idea.

The old charismatic media like large public plazas, radio, television, glitzy conferences, larger-than-life billboards, and showy parades, they don’t go away, but fewer people pay any attention to them. And it’s harder and harder to keep the attention captive. All the attention starts to sink into the end-to-end encrypted warren-like space at the edge of the network, and only the opt-in idiot core stays captive.

The cynical, anti-charismatic whispering on the margins becomes the main act, and the charismatic posturing in the center becomes a sideshow. And the whispering gets louder and bolder, and starts to drown out any charismatic messaging that does get in. Center and periphery trade places.

And with end-to-end encryption, because you can’t peek at or shape information flows without permission, even if you have large-scale centralized custody of the flows, the only way to spread or shape a message is, to a first approximation, by being a trusted part of the set of endpoints that are part of it.

Of course, more resources help you do this better — the idea of a Sybil attack is essentially based on gaining dominant access to a peer-to-peer network via a bunch of pseudo-identities, so basically sock-puppets. But it is much more expensive than simply having your goons take over the public square, secure the perimeter so nobody can leave, grabbing a megaphone, and boring the crowd to death while claiming charismatic reach.

In fact, the only way to exercise charisma at all will be through literal or figurative Sybil attacks. You either create a network of bot identities to dominate the end points of an information flow, or you find actual humans who are sufficiently dumb to act as your bots. And since it is becoming technically easier to detect and prevent the automated kinds of Sybil attacks, the action is shifting to human bots, essentially armies of mechanical turks.

But here there is a self-limiting effect: the value of a network drops in proportion to the percentage of bot-like idiots in it, or actual bots, so in the limiting case, your charisma can only reach mindless zombie idiots. Worse, these are the same zombie idiots you need in your core positive feedback loop, and now you have to tell them to turn around, sneak into the periphery, and act as your mindless secret agents to convert the cynics. And worst of all, you have no edge over your rivals trying to do the same thing.

That’s charisma neutrality.

And of course, in this condition, it becomes increasingly costly to control the thoughtful people, who are ultimately the ones worth controlling. The idiots are just a means to that end.

This means at some point it actually becomes easier and cheaper to simply talk to the thoughtful people rather than browbeating them with charisma. Charisma neutrality makes charisma less valuable, more equal opportunity, and more expensive. And beyond a point it starts to amplify non-charismatic thoughtful messaging over charismatic droning.

So modern networks are charisma neutral and charisma inhibiting to the extent they are end-to-end encrypted. This has huge consequences of course. Law enforcement types worry about one particular consequence, which is that the opposite of charismatic activity, namely dark, secretive underground activity, will get amplified. Particularly stuff like child abuse and terrorism.

The optimistic counter-argument is that the more thoughtful people get empowered by charisma neutrality, the harder it will be to keep such dark matters secret and secure from infiltration or whistleblowing. And remember, unlike shaping public opinion with charisma, unmasking dark activity doesn’t take dominant numbers or Sybil attacks. A single undercover law enforcement agent might be able to do enough to take down an entire network. So the dark activity networks will have to put in increasing effort to gatekeep and vet access, and maintain more internal anonymity and expensive trust mechanisms, which will limit their growth, and make them harder to get off the ground in the first place.

In other words, I’m bullish on charisma neutrality and end-to-end encryption. It’s early days yet so we are stumbling a lot on making this work well, but the benefits seem huge, and the problems seem containable.

And of course, it is important to recognize that this principle too, just like net neutrality, is not gospel. It too is just an engineering principle that will reach the end of its utility some day. Maybe it will be because of quantum computing. Maybe it will be some unforeseen consequence of the internet of things or crypto. But for now, this is the principle we need.