Up-Wing Propaganda

Blackshirts are down with the Up Wing, you know, subversive innovation, dispersed knowledge, and underthrow.

Andre Benz

Dynamic, open systems — cultural, economic, scholarly, scientific, and artistic — erode central control. They rely instead on decentralized innovation, competition, and criticism. They have many characteristics, but today, I want to spend the rest of my time exploring just one: the importance of dispersed knowledge.
—Virginia Postrel

Recall that Underthrow’s color designations are neither Red nor Blue:

Blackshirts earn their color because they question the whole goddamn thing. So, of course, the Reds and Blues reject them utterly. But the Blackshirts are clever. They know that [political] tug-o-war is wasteful. Indeed, the rope stays taught because both sides pull so hard. How might that fact be exploited?

The answer to this question comes in many forms.

In his new book with an unfortunate title, James Pethokoukis is far less concerned about whether one sits on the Left or the Right. He thinks today's important allegiance is either Up or Down.

Consider this passage, courtesy of

Robin Hanson

:

Up Wing is my shorthand for a solution-oriented future optimism, for the notion that rapid economic growth driven by technological progress can solve big preambles and create a better world of more prosperity, opportunity, and flourishing. The most crucial divide for the future of American isn’t left wing versus right wing. It’s Up Wing versus Down Wing. Down Wing is about accepting limits, even yearning for them. Down Wingers are doomsayers. Up Wing is about accelerating past limits, much as a rocket accelerates thus through Earth’s gravity well. Up wingers are boosters. Down Wing eschews risk, especially from innovation, unless possible threats to everyday life and the environment are well understood. The burden of proof is on the risk taker. Up Wing embraces calculated risk-taking, especially from innovation, as essential to human progress and sees the capacity for such progress as central to our humanity. The burden of proof is on the defender of stasis.

Who defends “stasis”?

Down Wingers live in a never-ending present. They see America as a zero-sum society where only the elite would benefit from tech and economic acceleration, if even possible. Some Down Wingers think climate change is such as existential threat that rich countries much liver poorer and poor countries must never become rich. Down Wingers think human love artificial general intelligence would mean mass unemployment, disrupting communities, civil unrest, and a ruined planet — and then it would kill us. Americans exploring the solar system and perhaps beyond? Not if uber-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are building the rockets. Better to tax away their futures so government can spend the money on more down-to-Earth challenges. 

I’m reminded of Virginia Postrel’s descriptions of dynamism and dispersed knowledge in her 1999 book, The Future and Its Enemies—arguably the most potent articulation of the Up Wing, up there with The Sovereign Individual, written in the same year.

In my book, I use the metaphor of a tree to explain the dynamist and stasist visions of knowledge in society. To dynamists, knowledge is like a spreading elm tree in full leaf: a broad trunk of shared experience and general facts, splitting into finer and finer limbs, branches, twigs, and leaves. The surface area is enormous, the twigs and leaves often distant from each other. Knowledge is dispersed. It is shared through complex systems of connections. We benefit from much that we ourselves do not know but other people do. For stasists, by contrast, the tree is a royal palm, the sort that lines the streets in Los Angeles: one long, spindly trunk topped with a few fronds, a simple, limited structure. Everything that is important to know can be easily grasped by those at the top.

I had to reiterate Postrel’s concept in my 2018 book The Social Singularity and every book since. James Pethokoukis had to reiterate the concept for a new generation here in 2023. And in a manner of speaking, we’re all cribbing Hayek, Oakeshott, and Mises, who were cribbing Smith and Hume.

I push for subversive innovation because I am an Up-Wing propagandist.

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It’s also why I think we have to be committed Blackshirts, too, so we stay Up focused and not get dragged into such wasteful political warfare, which is waged horizontally, not vertically.

What if, one day, the Blackshirts decided to shimmy out onto the rope, each with a dagger in clenched teeth? The Reds and Blues would want to stop them, but they couldn’t. If either side let go of the rope to go after the Blackshirts, the other side would gain the advantage. So they would keep pulling while yelling curses at the Blackshirts, who would ignore the obscenities. Some Red or Blue ghouls would no doubt hurl stones at the Blackshirts. But maybe there will be enough Blackshirts for one of us to make it. If one succeeded in cutting the rope, the Reds and Blues would fall. The tug-o-war would be over.

The point of this colorful allegory is simple: Underthrow is for Blackshirts.

It’s not just a call for readers to don subversive colors. As H. L. Mencken wryly put it, we yearn to fly the black flag. (Better, of course, to cut ropes than slit throats.) Blackshirts earn their colors because, like Mencken, we remain skeptical of the whole bloody enterprise. We must therefore muster the courage to climb out over the gorge. And cut.

For too long, we’ve been fattened on a steady diet of civic lore about democracy, but that system only helps lock partisans in perpetual warfare. The war is meant to settle two questions: Who gets the resources? And who gets control? Each team holds out hope that one day, they’ll get to shove the One True Way down everyone’s throats. They just have to pull harder.

Blackshirts, of course, see things differently.

And that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. I say “we” because it’s becoming clearer that doers like you see the value of reading this before going off to do that. If I can be the inspiration or catalyst for the next Vitalik Buterin, I will have made my little dent in the universe. But I admit my goal is much more ambitious. I want to inspire a thousand Vitaliks, Satoshis, and Srinivasans to launch a thousand subversive innovations from the remaining Up-Wing patches on the Earth—perhaps to escape the gravity well of stasis.