NOTE: WORK IN progress
This addresses the changes wrought from society going from top-down broadcast to interlinked connectivity with mobile phones and computers. Because this technology has become ubiquitous, it is highly unlikely to reverse.
I roughly think the internet has only accelerated the shift into this concentrated-centralized-city form, in a way that the industrial revolution necessitated the shift from agricultural to urbanized.
“De-growth,” which promotes people going to regenerative farms, small co-ops, growing their own vegetables, and living together in sustainable communities is sort of going backwards in the process of industrialization. The problem is not that the current form presents an issue, it is that the shortcuts taken: factory farmed chicken and eggs, for example, are toxic to human health.
This article attemps to address to some extents what it looks like going forward in societal development.
Important questions include:
- What is the role of labor in the future?
- To what boundary will military-political systems extend?
- How will groups of people reproduce itself?
Group Feeling
I see economics as the study of individual choices regarding scarce resources such as money, time, and skills only with regards to that of what is considered the same group feeling and trust.
The project over the past decades of assuming people were mostly fungible and culture was enough to create a unified group has failed. Moreover, it is more and more clear different underlying human biologies produce different behaviors. This extension of group feeling and trust to the entire world will be no more, but there is perhaps a bio-metabolic component to it.
Regardless of cost, a sensible person would not leave their child to be abused by some random low-wage immigrant worker termed “childcare.”
While it is good to have a general respect for nature and life, nobody considers that they should care about every bug in the backyard. State policies that disenfranchise their own citizens in favor of foreigners are backwards.
It’s very concerning that many societies now have people with different and often contradicting group feelings embedded within each other.
Trust
In societies with high trust, many things are free: tap water, clean air, the environment, stands for goods that can be unattended.
In societies with low trust, many things are expensive and low-quality.
All material constructions are the creation of groups of people with strong group feeling. Currency or any material construction is like the shell of a snail. It animates and moves itself only if the soft part exists.
The money system is a way of having labor directed. In high-trust societies it may just be an earmark or tallying method. In low-trust societies it becomes an absolute necessity. If the money system breaks but the trust in a group remains, things are workable. If the money system breaks but there is no group feeling, the size of the system will reduce to smaller units that are able to maintain coherence and trust.
Overproduction of people and labor
Ok, you have a bunch of young people. They can:
- Sit around and do nothing/cause trouble
- Government can give them make-work
What about middle-aged people who see their skills automated?
What should the leaders do, who have high group feeling with each other, do with these subjects that they to some degrees control, given that their labor may not be useful?
- Offer limited subsistence without terms
- Offer subsistence with conditions on behavior and culture
- Massacre them/deport them
- Ignore them completely
- Uplift them over generations to become the same level
- Offer unlimited material goods/wealth paradise
- Try identifying the high quality labor to get them to the leading edge
The best answer is probably something like (2) or (5) with deportations as needed for incompatible cultures. With (2) they can do things like clean the public works. Unfortunately a lot of people are dirty/liabilities.
How big will military-political systems extend?
This depends upon the projection distance of shock as opposed to missile weapons. It’s of no use to shoot missiles and bombs at people because except with the condition of attriting infrastructure to force a surrender leading to the ingress of shock weapons, it will not be possible to control people from a distance using missile weapons, unless the purpose is the removal of other networks for the growth of another network.
Moreover, social control propaganda methods have been shown to be discredited in the past decade due to increased government regulation of communication systems.
Therefore, the maximum size of a superstructure/network is delimited by the rate of replenishment by rail, automobile, plane, and boat or the ability of a new network to grow itself.
It may be possible to extend military-political sovereignty over an area only through resupply rather than creation of new networks or hubs. It will extend to the location where the force projection between two opposing military networks are roughly equal. Thus, the question of how big military-political systems will extend depends upon the relative strength of different weapons systems, something that can be planned in advance and researched but only played out through reality.
De-densification
We face a great de-densification of society in writing, nutrition, and material constructs due to faster outflows of transportation and communication.
There is a balance that must be taken between speed of communication and content of communication. Too much information at rapidfire pace, like in social media, and everything falls apart as people are unable to make any sense of coherence or action. Too little information at too slow of a pace, and a society risks becoming rigid and unadaptable. This is very similar to the classical problem of how the Chinese faced the problem of overly brittle iron (cast iron) while the West faced the problem of overly ductile iron (wrought iron) for making weapons, which Carroll Quigley outlines in Weapons Systems and Political Stability.
Steel, which is an alloy of iron and carbon, requires a carbon content of 0.3 to 2.0 per cent for weapon suitability. Too low, and it’s like a noodle. Too hard, and it’s like glass.
A society that balances between speed and density is the optimal arrangement. It will be hard enough to cut through un-dense societies while still fast enough to outmaneuver overly dense turtles.
How will groups of people reproduce itself?
Society has existed in the following forms:
- Bands of hunter-gatherers
- Agricultural villages
Does it matter what the anthill is made of?
If we assume the relevant organism size is the superstructure, the (to us) slow growth of inorganic objects and masses across the planetary biosphere, then does it matter whether its internal state consists of humans or of robots?
If we observed a new species of ant which by appearance from our vantage point seemed the same, only that upon close inspection it used some other method of storing internal state and communicating rather than DNA (say, it had memory chips and electrical signals), would this be that significant from a higher vantage point?
It is only concerning that this superstructure organism is not composed of humans if we are taking a human-perspective vantage point of looking at it from within.
If a large-scale superstructure organism eliminates all others from the planet, it does not necessitate that human life should no longer be present. It will not necessarily look like a homogeneous slime mold. The structure of the organism would only need to project power along its edges no different from how walking trails may meander through parks today. Humans certainly could exist within the superstructure, but they would not be able to organize into one of their own. In effect, humans would exist in this superstructure as animals live in the human world today, sometimes burrowing into houses as various critters do.
The quantity of people only matters insofar as it helps this superstructure stay alive and project power. While we imagine that the health and wellbeing of the population affects the superstructure’s strength—a group of motivated citizens with strong group feeling and cognition over that of unmotivated and disconnected citizens—small groups of individuals may be able to project power through the usage of technology today.
Potential Arrangements
It is best to think of societies in terms of two extremes to delimit the edges of possibility. For example, this may be a society where only men work, and a society where both sexes work. We will not consider the case of only women working.
On two other extremes may be a society that is exclusively top-down broadcast hierarchical, or one that is only peer-peer diffusion. It may be a society of exclusively specialists, or a society of only generalists.
We could imagine two different types of humans: the singleton and the identican. The singleton is the sole actor and brain; almost everything in the society is a result of itself. The identican is multiple actors, but each is roughly similar to the other in personality. Therefore, they are more likely to agree with each other.
It is clear that societies with multiple actors who all share the same uniform opinion and a society that exclusively relies on top-down methods of broadcast is brittle: it is prone to having all members align themselves on an action which may be long-term bad, but it may be fast enough to overwhelm other societies if they happen upon the right course of action.
A technologically advanced society must necessarily be composed of large amounts of specialists.
If both sexes work generally males will be better at physical and abstraction related work. Nevertheless, there is societal benefit gained in women who are productive and capable as opposed to display ornaments, so long as she is not stressed to the point of damaging the wellbeing of future generations.
The Role of Hierarchy
If everything was top-down, the entire herd running off the cliff is guaranteed.
The edges have more information that can inform the center, like if a Costco milk has mold inside the cover, it can quickly be relayed to the center for a recall, and then back down to the other edges.
Assume that inter-connectedness between nodes (individual humans) is here to stay.
Overall connectedness increases the overall strength of society, but also that of coordinated resistance movements.
Types of prestige:
- Prestige of aesthetics (being able to have a surplus, and put that into housing)
- Prestige of coordination (being the only centralized/coordinator actor)
Prestige of inertia: it occupys mindshare and physical presence like current banking system is everywhere today
I suspect the only thing that really matters and is a leading indicator is the prestige of flow, coordination, and object transformation the peoples who are going toward you
Probably what will end up winning is whatever is most coordinated and able to replace the united states rn
High-level information such as geopolitical and societal trends can direct the actions of an individual, but only relatively slowly. It deserves attention being paid to, only so long as it doesn’t interfere with the individual’s immediate needs for income.
Low-level information such as communication with people nearby is an integral part of daily living. If the low-level communications are not satisfactory, they should place themselves in an environment where it is.
The benefit to a society, therefore, is if enough high-level information is disseminated to the population so that they know the rough important trends and are sorted/placed in a location where the low-level information is suitable for their personality.
Opportunities
- Whereas the internet was once a frontier, AI, Google-default search results, and everyone globally logging on has created a thick fog of war. Despite being ever-more connected than before, we may be unable to peer into the true nature of other places lacking the knowledge of which search engines, VPN, and what specific queries to make. Whereas we previously felt like other places were a complete unknown, and then the presence of the internet made it seem to be completely known, we are returning to an era where though connection exists, what happens in other places speedily passes us by in another realm.
- Millions are hungering for the right to intellectual self-determination, their own search engines, and their own communities.
- The internet as a large mass layer has mostly supplanted the previous layer of phone calls, neighborhoods, local clubs, third spaces, newspapers, and whatnot. The necessary infrastructure for association is yet to exist, primarily along filtering for people with different natures, aptitudes, and desires.
- I am convinced this explosion of interactive and live software will replace the legacy media of old, which are merely compositions of paper-like periodicals into digital form. College rankings, for example, tell us close to nothing. Newspapers are often just rehashed primary sources.