Clashing Visions

Four twenty-first century visions recommend themselves. We have to pick a vision and get to work.

Source: Nicolas Dmitrichev

An authoritarian vision marked the early twentieth century. The machinations of great powers gave us democides, two world wars, and concentrations of militarized authority serving imperial ambitions. The authoritarians oppressed or starved their populations internally and clashed with their neighbors externally.

A technocratic vision marked the late twentieth century. This vision excited the popular imagination thanks to Sputnik and JFK’s 1961 pledge to put a man on the moon. It also kept the US and USSR in an international pissing contest (aka space race) that required vast resources but yielded mixed results.

Tinkerers, planners, and innovators offered an experimental vision. Social engineers wanted to try new things, promising to pull humanity out of stasis or torpor, or to determine whether a novel approach could enhance well-being. Such experiments could be imposed nationally, affecting millions of people, or locally, affecting far fewer. Keep in mind that most experiments fail.

Finally, consider a liberatory vision in which free people pursue an array of relationships and endeavors in peace and with far less interference from third parties. The liberatory vision opposes authoritarianism, which requires compulsion and demands conformity. The liberatory vision has rarely been dominant, but it persists to the irritation of authoritarian types who, despite the horrors of the twentieth century, are comfortable with strict authority as long as it helps them feel secure. Security was always the promise before the horror.

Our Century’s Big Four

Of course, technology drives cultural and political change. The pill empowered women in subtle but profound ways starting in the 1960s. Networking technology has allowed relationships to become more direct and lateralized, fostering cooperation at scale.

As we move more deeply into the twenty-first century, we must reckon with clashing visions—not only those holdovers from the twentieth century but a new set of visions that are outgrowths of ongoing dialectic processes.

• Neo-progressivism combines features of the experimental vision with those of the authoritarian vision. Practitioners engineer society via a modern administrative state. Such is arguably the dominant mode of the US federal government, notwithstanding the current administration. The idea is that progress is the result of regulation and dispensing largesse.

• Dirigisme combines features of the technocratic vision with those of the authoritarian vision. Social engineering through techno-scientific means as well as state direction of industry. This is arguably the dominant mode of the CCP, especially in Beijing, but with US authorities hoping to mirror the Chinese system in critical respects.

• Techno-utopianism combines features of the technocratic vision with those of the liberatory vision. Its goal is to create a free society through a single rationalist conception of ethics and law and an open governance system. Advocates imagine human freedom as an organizing principle but believe they can contrive a monolithic mode of governance, complete with checks.

• Decentralism combines features of the experimental vision with the liberatory vision: liberation through experimentation across multiple, local emergence vectors in a condition of membranous pluralism. Decentralists know that any experiment could fail, so they start small and scale. And they are under no illusions about grand implementation schemes, even if these promise freedom.

These four horses are racing into the future. Which one will come to dominate?

Decentralists imagine a more decentralized, collaborative, and optimistic future without being utopian. They imagine the widespread use of competing peer-to-peer currencies and credit, with daily systems improvements made within an evolutionary technical ecosystem. Decentralists also imagine cities on the sea or nations in the cloud, where like-minded individuals form communities or countries based on shared values, less bound by geography and predatory states.

In theory, decentralism could achieve an inflection point, which I call the “social singularity.” But theory is useless to us. We have to pick a vision and get to work.

Subversive Innovation Redux

To realize the Decentralist vision, we must criticize by creating.

Remember, subversive innovation offers a threefold mandate:

1. Reduce transaction costs and enable cooperation. Innovate so that it’s easier to dance with anyone.

2. Raise the costs of parasitism and predation. Protect against exploitative third parties, like overreaching banks or governments.

3. Lower exit costs. Make it easier to leave dysfunctional systems and join better ones.

Consider Roy Bates, who in the 1960s defied British censorship by broadcasting rock and roll from a pirate radio station offshore. Bates brought music to a generation of Britons who wanted something other than the tepid offerings of the BBC and other regulated media.

Subversive therapies, like psilocybin research conducted by scientists such as Robin Carhart-Harris, reveal that psychedelics can reduce authoritarian tendencies and increase nature-relatedness, as well as openness and what we might term the ahimsa disposition. These therapies also show promise in treating depression and anxiety, and promise to catalyze a spiritual renaissance (instead of a bacchanalian frenzy).

The daily practice of ahimsa is the surest path to Decentralism, because it is the moral substrate. Yes, subversive innovation requires more than nonviolence. It involves architecting systems that increase the costs of violence. Through nonviolence and subversive innovation, we can build a world of creativity and collaboration by cultivating nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, balancing our inner drives, and embracing radiative self-sovereignty.

Such a vision invites us to create rather than to criticize, to connect rather than to control.