Here’s an important question to sit with: When government power and corporate power fuse into a single control structure, what’s left for the rest of us?
Most people try to answer with politics: Vote harder. Protest louder. Or wait for that “constitutional moment” that never comes.
I want to offer you a different answer. It’s called subversive innovation, and it might be the most underrated force for human freedom on the planet.
Subversive innovation runs on a simple, three-part formula:
One: Lower transaction costs. In other words, make it cheaper for people to cooperate directly with each other.
Two: Raise predation costs. That means, make it expensive for anyone to prey on us, whether governments or criminals.
Three: Reduce switching costs. That is, make it easier to walk away from systems that fail you.
That’s it. Three approaches. But the devil, of course, is in the details.
So let’s make this a little more concrete.
One Big Example
Ever heard of Bitcoin? It’s a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. It’s not perfect. But it’s a good example of subversive innovation. Set all that aside for a moment, though, because that’s not the only interesting bit.
What’s interesting is that Bitcoin is a moral teacher.
Think about what actually happened. Thousands of people collaborated to build and defend a global monetary network with no CEO, no president, and no master. Nobody gave them permission, because nobody could. It was developed peacefully in freedom.
Now, run Bitcoin through the subversive innovation formula…
Transaction costs? Bitcoin cut out the parasitic gatekeepers who have put a toll on every financial transaction for centuries.
Predation costs? It uses cryptography to raise the price of theft and manipulation to prohibitive levels.
Switching costs? For the first time in living memory, ordinary people have a real exit from fiat money.
Bitcoin also planted a flag on the battlefield against unjust authority. It took a phrase we recite but rarely practice—“the consent of the governed”—and turned it into running code.
The Ecosystem
And it inspired thousands of successors, an entire ecosystem in constant churn. The ecosystem now includes self-sovereign identity, so you become the steward of your own data instead of a product harvested by rentiers. Or what about mesh networks, which decentralize the very architecture of the internet, liberating information from ISP conglomerates and authoritarian overseers?
Each of these is a subversive innovation. Each shifts power away from the tower and toward the tapestry—that is, away from power hierarchies toward lateral relationships among sovereign individuals.
I’ve said elsewhere that if underthrow is the end, subversive innovation is the means. Here’s the Aesop image I keep returning to: We’re in the transition from fearing the bear to empowering the bees.
The bear is big, singular, and dominant. The bees are small, numerous, and coordinated by something the bear can’t comprehend. The bear can raid one hive, but he can’t fight the swarm forever. Subversive innovators ask: How can We the Remnant start to function more like a swarm?
The Dark Twin
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before we get carried away, a warning… Every technology that opens a path to self-sovereignty has a shadow. Call it oppressive innovation. It might be the same technological substrate, but different innovators behind the scenes.
Oppressive innovation inverts the formula. It raises the cost of cooperation and lowers the cost of predation. Think surveillance architectures. Or programmable money like a CBDC that answers to the issuer rather than the holder. What about digital chokepoints—like this—on speech and commerce?
Make no mistake: state and corporate actors are building these systems right now—not to lighten your subjugation but to deepen it. So we can be neither naive nor complacent. The race is real, and it is running right now. Will we be caught flat-footed while the powerful build a digital cage for us right here on the starting line?
Betting on the Bees
Here’s why I remain cautiously optimistic: Steven Pinker’s research in The Better Angels of Our Nature points to something remarkable—Violence and predation as strategies for acquiring resources have trended downward over the centuries. That’s no accident. Better political organization and more widely distributed productive means make war less attractive. They also make political shenanigans—war by other means—less attractive, too.
Picture humanity as a bell curve, with SOCIOPATHIC at one tail, COLLABORATIVE at the other. Most of us are clustered in the peaceable middle. If Pinker is right, that whole curve has been drifting—with occasional lurches, fits and starts—away from the SOCIOPATHIC tail.
Subversive innovation is how we keep that improvement going. But notice, it’s not just about technology. It includes institutional innovations—that is, new ways to enshrine individual rights, to protect property, and apply common law so that people bear more of the costs they would rather impose on others.
In any case, markets and moral practice—applied over and over—mute the lesser angels of our natures.
This is also why the old theoretical debates about ideal end states amount to dormroom debates. We want to keep our north star, but stay nimble. The world changes too fast for academic arguments that persuade too few, and the perfect constitutional moment never seems to come. While theorists debate ideal endpoints, builders are busy shifting the curve.
Swarm Order
So here’s the charge.
If we cherish self-sovereignty, self-organization, and self-government—we have a duty. Not to win the next election, nor to settle the next debate. Our duty is to build systems that move the human curve toward free collaboration, away from centralized sociopathy.
Our duty is to move directionally toward ways of making peace more profitable and predation more expensive.
Every crypto wallet, every mesh node, every self-sovereign identity whose reputation we hold in our hands is a kind of vote that gets counted whether or not any authority tallies it.
So, let’s arm the bees, bring down the bear, and build the post-political world. Indeed, let’s think harder about what kind of world our kids should inherit. And then go make it.
I’m Max Borders. Let’s criticize by creating.
