The End Of Politics AudioChapter from The Social Singularity AudioBook by Max Borders
The Social Singularity: How decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse By: Max Borders
00:00:00 The social singularity
00:04:23 CHAPTER ONE THE END OF POLITICS
00:12:25 The Worst in Us
00:16:07 Hobbits and Hooligans
00:20:07 A Teardrop in the Ocean
00:23:23 The Unicorn Problem
00:25:40 Why People Vote
00:32:04 Local Knowledge
00:34:04 Trench Warfare
00:38:10 The Rise of Hierarchy
00:43:16 Better All the Time
00:49:21 Phase Transition
00:54:49 Founding Redux
00:57:18 The Authoritarian Urge
00:58:28 The End Is Nigh
Hear it Here - https://bit.ly/SocialSingularityBorders
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DDPVCM1
What if politics as we know it is about to end?
What if humanity soon organizes itself not in hierarchies, but in hive minds?
Should we fear the robot apocalypse?
Welcome to The Social Singularity.
In this decentralization manifesto, futurist Max Borders shows that humanity is already building systems that will “underthrow” great centers of power.
Exploring the promise of a decentralized world, Borders says we will:
- Reorganize to collaborate and compete with AI;
- Operate within networks of superior collective intelligence;
- Rediscover our humanity and embrace values for an age of connection.
With lively prose, Borders takes us on a tour of modern pagan festivals, cities of the future, and radically new ways to organize society. In so doing, he examines trends likely to revolutionize the ways we live and work.
Although the technological singularity fast approaches, Borders argues, a parallel process of human reorganization will allow us to reap enormous benefits. The paradox? Our billion little acts of subversion will help us lead richer, healthier lives—and avoid the robot apocalypse.
#RussellNewton #NewtonMG #TheSocialSingularity #TheEndOfPoliticsMaxBorders
Transcript
The social singularity, how decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create
Speaker:global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse, written by Max Borders, narrated by Russell
Speaker:Newton.
Speaker:For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator...
Speaker:The road kept descending and branching off, through meadows misty in the twilight.
Speaker:—Jorge Luis Borges
Speaker:WE HAVE ALWAYS TRIED to know tomorrow.
Speaker:In our attempts, we end up shaping it.
Speaker:Our ancestors went to seers who read tea leaves, auras, or entrails.
Speaker:To best an enemy or win a lover, rulers consulted oracles for messages from the gods.
Speaker:Oracles in antiquity were thought to be divinely inspired,
Speaker:so false predictions were blamed on bad interpretation.
Speaker:Modern oracles are decidedly more fallible.
Speaker:We’re also more accountable.
Speaker:So we look for patterns in the world beyond the guts, and we channel the god of trend lines.
Speaker:Still, we make predictions we hope will come true, which is often why we make them to start with.
Speaker:Today they call us futurists.
Speaker:But to be a futurist still takes a little mysticism.
Speaker:It’s not the vagueness of Nostradamus or the Magick of Aleister Crowley but the
Speaker:spark of the science-fiction writer who plants ideas in the minds of innovators.
Speaker:Futurists know that in every prediction there is a potential act of creation.
Speaker:After all people who believe our predictions are more likely to change.
Speaker:And if enough people change, the world might just get better.
Speaker:In The Social Singularity, I’ll show that the world’s power centers are breaking up
Speaker:and that this process can — 1 — 2 Introduction liberate people from poverty, end acrimonious
Speaker:politics, and help humanity avoid the robot apocalypse.
Speaker:I realize that’s a tall order.
Speaker:But that’s just how much potential there is in decentralization.
Speaker:Decentralization?
Speaker:This is the kind of big, abstract idea editors warn could mean the death of your book sales.
Speaker:Write about a person or tell a story, they’ll say, chomping on the end of a spent cigar.
Speaker:I can’t sell a book about an abstraction!
Speaker:Well, we’ve got to try.
Speaker:The future depends on it.
Speaker:In this volume, I suggest that if we reorganize ourselves and our systems
Speaker:of collective intelligence, we will be better as a species.
Speaker:The social singularity is a point beyond which humanity will have reoriented itself.
Speaker:We’ll operate more like a hive mind.
Speaker:A lot of people are afraid of what’s to come.
Speaker:But to live in fear of the future is to underestimate ourselves.
Speaker:So this book is also about shedding fear.
Speaker:Still, it’s not your basic airplane read.
Speaker:It’s designed to challenge you.
Speaker:To break conventions.
Speaker:To reframe our thinking a little so as to disrupt
Speaker:the habits of mind that are keeping all of us from reaching our full potential.
Speaker:You see, our march toward the social singularity will be largely positive.
Speaker:Yes, there will be a great economic churn thanks to artificial intelligence and automation.
Speaker:Of course, there is always the risk of future shock, 2 and people will still
Speaker:carry within them the urge to control, to centralize, and to “rage for order."
Speaker:3 But technology is helping us to become far more collaborative,
Speaker:and there is more ordering power in that force than in any demagogue with a standing army.
Speaker:I’m not a passive chronicler of events.
Speaker:Behind this book lies a deeper purpose —a mission that is the wellspring of my thinking.
Speaker:If you’re comfortable with all these caveats,
Speaker:I invite you to join me in exploring a new set of forking paths into the future.
Speaker:For as soon as we take those first steps on any path, we’re engaging
Speaker:in acts of creation, for better or for worse.
Speaker:CHAPTER ONE
Speaker:THE END OF POLITICS
Speaker:The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Speaker:— Guy Debord
Speaker:IF YOU’RE READING THIS, chances are you own some sort of mobile computing device.
Speaker:Maybe you haven’t given up paper books entirely, but you’re surely tethered.
Speaker:I suspect you check your device at least twice a day, if not twice an hour.
Speaker:And I’d bet you have at least fifty apps.
Speaker:Now imagine you wake up one morning, turn on your device, and realize everything has changed.
Speaker:Where before there were fifty or more applications,
Speaker:there are now only two - a red app and a blue app.
Speaker:It seems the apps compete for processing power
Speaker:so now the device runs more slowly and less efficiently.
Speaker:And on this operating system—call it “DOS,” or Democratic Operating
Speaker:System—only the red app and the blue app run.
Speaker:Though the device advertises compatibility with other apps,
Speaker:everybody finds DOS only seems to work with the red one and the blue one.
Speaker:You are understandably frustrated with your device,
Speaker:especially as you remember a time when it ran much better, had far more options,
Speaker:and allowed you to customize it according to your needs and preferences.
Speaker:This thought experiment is meant to help us reflect on our sociopolitical status quo.
Speaker:Not on who’s in charge, not on the next election, but rather upon the system itself.
Speaker:Why?
Speaker:Because there seems to be a collective illusion that a democratic republic is as good as it gets.
Speaker:After all, we haven’t yet really tried anything beyond DOS. And there seems to
Speaker:be a near-universal failure of imagination with respect to how we could do better.
Speaker:In a 1947 speech, Winston Churchill made his now-famous assessment - Many forms
Speaker:of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.
Speaker:No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.
Speaker:Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of
Speaker:government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Speaker:5 This is the sort of fatalism most people accept.
Speaker:In fact, almost no one tries to imagine another social operating system.
Speaker:The most creative and ambitious ideas for social change almost always happen within
Speaker:DOS - We should pass law X or adopt policy Y. Very few are trying to figure out how to develop
Speaker:something entirely new that circumvents politics entirely or, at least, fundamentally changes it.
Speaker:It should be clear by now that I’m not interested in preserving the status quo.
Speaker:We can do better—and we must, because DOS’s days are numbered.
Speaker:For a lot of people, this will be unsettling.
Speaker:Some readers will scoff.
Speaker:Others will worry I’m trying to rock a boat that’s keeping billions of people afloat.
Speaker:Still others will say I’m an anarchist, a utopian, or a dreamer.
Speaker:And we should no doubt treat with great respect the system that took us from bullets to ballots.
Speaker:The democratic republic has become the most prosperous and arguably peaceful
Speaker:way to organize society the world has seen.
Speaker:So it’s no wonder smart people like Francis Fukuyama have argued that the democratic
Speaker:republic was the form on which most of the countries of the world would eventually settle.
Speaker:There is a lot to recommend about this form,
Speaker:particularly when considered in the arc of history.
Speaker:But there is a lot wrong with DOS. And whatever happens after DOS should be a
Speaker:welcome upgrade that addresses what doesn’t work about this particular social operating system,
Speaker:all while introducing new functions, new features, and a new paradigm of human social interaction.
Speaker:The most salient problem with our current form of governance is its symptoms.
Speaker:One of those symptoms is that politics tends to make us, ahem, ungracious.
Speaker:Recall the famous 1968 televised debates between William F. Buckley,
Speaker:Jr., and Gore Vidal, a conservative and a liberal.
Speaker:The whole thing culminates in a moment where—after a heated exchange—Buckley,
Speaker:taking Vidal’s bait, explodes - “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi,
Speaker:or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered."
Speaker:And there it was.
Speaker:The dandies of the Left and Right reduced to ad hominem attacks, almost coming to blows.
Speaker:Nielsen loved it because ratings soared.
Speaker:And politics as prime-time blood sport became an American pastime.
Speaker:Matters only got worse with the arrival of the Internet.
Speaker:What we thought would be a tool to bring out the best in us, such as creativity and
Speaker:collaboration (which it has been), has also become a platform from which people can hurl
Speaker:insults at those with whom they disagree, then easily retreat into partisan echo chambers.
Speaker:According to a documentary about Buckley and Vidal called The Best of Enemies,
Speaker:both died with the poison of political and personal animus still in their spleens.
Speaker:And as Americans continue with politics basically unchanged—though with social
Speaker:media magnifying any spectacle and offering everyone a bullhorn—
Speaker:the symptoms of partisanship are getting worse every year.
Speaker:This polarization is happening to all of us.
Speaker:As the political parade passes, people gather to watch the show,
Speaker:choosing their sides of the boulevard.
Speaker:In so choosing, they self-segregate.
Speaker:Tribal affiliations are on display.
Speaker:It’s a natural human tendency with deep roots in our evolutionary past.
Speaker:In an experiment,6 even people predisposed to favor members of their own race turned
Speaker:out to be biased in favor of people randomly assigned to wear the same team’s basketball
Speaker:jersey as they were—even when those people were of different races—and against even
Speaker:people of the same race if they were wearing a different team’s colors.
Speaker:As science journalist Sharon Begley points out, we team 6 The End of Politics up with
Speaker:people according to “whether they are likely to be an ally or an enemy."
Speaker:That illustrates how tribal we are.
Speaker:We are wired to be divided.
Speaker:Politics brings out the worst in us by tapping into these tribal tendencies.
Speaker:Sure, trading barbs is better than trading bullets.
Speaker:We all know really nice people who participate in stinging or acrimonious exchanges online.
Speaker:Maybe we do it ourselves.
Speaker:Here’s a headline you might have shared - “5 Scientific
Speaker:Studies That Prove Republicans Are Stupid."
Speaker:Or - “Yes, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder."
Speaker:In the United States, that’s more than 300 million people who are either stupid or crazy.
Speaker:Few want to acknowledge that it might be stupid or
Speaker:crazy to make such claims or for a country to divide itself this way.
Speaker:But in America, at least, it’s effectively a two-party system.
Speaker:So in DOS you have two choices of app, which means two basic choices of tribal affiliation.
Speaker:The Worst in Us
Speaker:I used to wonder whether anybody besides H. L. Mencken saw things this way.
Speaker:I found the following from legal analyst Trevor Burrus - Like any other game,
Speaker:the rules create the attitudes and strategies of the players.
Speaker:Throw two brothers into the Colosseum for a gladiatorial fight to the death,
Speaker:and brotherly sentiment will quickly evaporate.
Speaker:Throw siblings, neighbors, or friends into a political world that increasingly controls
Speaker:our deepest values, and love and care are quickly traded for resentment.7 It’s true.
Speaker:From a very young age, we’re told that when breaking bread with friends and family,
Speaker:politics and religion are verboten.
Speaker:But it’s not just that it will put relationships at risk, says Burrus.
Speaker:Democratic politics turns a continuum of possibilities into stark, binary choices.
Speaker:Tribal teams coalesce around linear, black-and-white thinking as our biases take over.
Speaker:Now that we’ve invented a problem—“which group of 50 percent +1 will control education
Speaker:for everyone?”—imposed a binary solution—“we will teach either creation or evolution”—and
Speaker:invented teams to rally around those solutions —“are you a science denier
Speaker:or a science supporter?”—our The Worst in Us 7 tribal and self-serving brains
Speaker:go to work assuring us that we are on the side of righteousness and truth.
Speaker:8 All these woeful debates become increasingly shrill.
Speaker:When it all reaches fever pitch,
Speaker:virtue signalers pen pleas for greater tolerance and more reasoned discourse.
Speaker:But it does no good.
Speaker:Tribal brains burn hotter than any of these appeals for civility.
Speaker:Until we change the rules, we’re not likely to find changes in ourselves.
Speaker:Again, I admit that when compared to tyranny and war, partisan politics ain’t so bad.
Speaker:But what if something else came along?
Speaker:Wouldn’t we start to see democracy as a golden calf?
Speaker:Politics—especially during federal elections—creates
Speaker:a system that brings out the worst in people.
Speaker:It poisons relationships.
Speaker:It pulls us in as spectators who stand agog at a completely inauthentic show
Speaker:of national politics over which any one of us has virtually no power.
Speaker:We end up mostly ignoring local issues over which we could have considerably more influence.
Speaker:As a consequence, an entire nation falls under a particular kind of spell.
Speaker:The only people to whom our opinions really matter are the pollsters, with their wet fingers held
Speaker:aloft, and the media, who hold up mirrors so distorted we can barely recognize ourselves.
Speaker:People are different.
Speaker:They are going to have differences of opinion,
Speaker:hold different values, and run in different circles.
Speaker:This is a fact.
Speaker:But we expect that a monolith of partisan opinion should extend to
Speaker:a nation of 350 million people— by brute force if necessary.
Speaker:And until they do, we’ll just get on social media
Speaker:and sock them in the face until they stay plastered.
Speaker:On Election Day, the team with the red jerseys will pull on its side of the rope.
Speaker:The team with the blue jerseys will pull on its side of the rope.
Speaker:In the end, both will end up the mud—because they’ve been standing in it all along.
Speaker:Hobbits and Hooligans What may be as disconcerting as the kind of
Speaker:people politics turns us into are the types of voters in whose hands we have placed democracy.
Speaker:Political philosopher Jason Brennan names these creatures “hobbits” and “hooligans."
Speaker:He writes - 8 The End of Politics Hobbits are mostly apathetic and ignorant about politics.
Speaker:They lack strong, fixed opinions about most political issues.
Speaker:Often they have no opinions at all.
Speaker:They have little, if any, social scientific knowledge;
Speaker:they are ignorant not just of current events but also of the social scientific theories
Speaker:and data needed to evaluate as well as understand these events.9 In this way,
Speaker:hobbits are almost as indifferent to politics as they are ignorant of the issues.
Speaker:Brennan reminds us that the typical nonvoter is a hobbit, which makes it odd that anyone
Speaker:would want to encourage nonvoters to vote for any reason beyond the most cynical.
Speaker:On the other hand, when we consider that many people who end up voting
Speaker:are probably also hobbits, we have to wonder about the arbitrariness of it all.
Speaker:After all, why should people who have no knowledge of or interest in
Speaker:social-scientific data or world history have any say in the rules you live by?
Speaker:The rest of those who decide the fate of nations Brennan calls “hooligans."
Speaker:Hooligans are the rabid sports fans of politics.
Speaker:They have strong and largely fixed worldviews.
Speaker:They can present arguments for their beliefs, but they cannot explain alternative points
Speaker:of view in a way that people with other views would find satisfactory.
Speaker:Hooligans consume political information,
Speaker:although in a biased way.10 You probably recognize hooligans from social media.
Speaker:They seek articles that confirm their preexisting opinions, but, writes Brennan,
Speaker:they “ignore, evade, and reject out of hand evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their
Speaker:preexisting opinions.”11 Thus data is only good to hooligans insofar as it supports their views.
Speaker:It’s not just that hooligans zealously form political opinions based on their
Speaker:tribal affiliations and confirmation biases; it’s also that their tribal membership forms
Speaker:their very identity, which in the United States shores up DOS and its two apps.
Speaker:In such a polarized climate, hooligans “tend to despise people who disagree
Speaker:with them, holding that people with alternative worldviews are stupid,
Speaker:evil, selfish, or at best, deeply misguided."
Speaker:Hobbits and Hooligans 9 When we consider that the great bulk of the voting population
Speaker:is made up of people who either know very little about anything (and don’t
Speaker:really care) or only want to know things that confirm what they already believe,
Speaker:we’ve got a system that runs primarily on a mix of ignorance and ideology.
Speaker:Between elections, hooligans are beating each other up at
Speaker:rallies or shutting down speeches on campuses.
Speaker:Hobbits are going about their lives, from time to time wondering what all the fuss is about.
Speaker:When we think about having our collective fate determined this way,
Speaker:it should also strike us that democracy is quite arbitrary.
Speaker:But it’s also arbitrary beyond those who participate.
Speaker:To understand that arbitrariness, we have first to unpack it.
Speaker:The late comedian George Carlin provided two relevant nuggets of wisdom.
Speaker:He said he doesn’t vote because “it’s meaningless,” and he said
Speaker:the United States was “bought and paid” for a long time ago.
Speaker:Let’s take each of Carlin’s nuggets of wisdom in turn.
Speaker:A Teardrop in the Ocean
Speaker:First, we have to face the grim truth that our vote doesn’t count.
Speaker:I realize that in fourth grade Mrs. Crabtree taught us that voting lets our voices be heard.
Speaker:But that’s not really true.
Speaker:It is akin to thinking the drummer hears you when you
Speaker:yell at him from the nosebleed seats of Madison Square Garden.
Speaker:The purveyors of these sorts of untruths probably don’t realize they’re spreading untruths.
Speaker:If they do, they think they’re only repeating
Speaker:little white lies—like telling a child Santa Claus is real.
Speaker:But Santa Claus isn’t real.
Speaker:Your vote doesn’t count.
Speaker:Crying a single teardrop into the ocean will not determine the fate of high tide,
Speaker:and the drummer playing Madison Square Garden can’t hear you scream.
Speaker:To be fair, though, some brilliant people disagree.
Speaker:Techno-evangelist Clay Shirky thinks democracy is the best we’ve got right now,
Speaker:so we’re duty bound to rock the vote.
Speaker:Not a protest vote, either.
Speaker:You have to pick the red app or the blue app.
Speaker:“It doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it.
Speaker:No one is listening,” writes Shirky.
Speaker:“The system is set up so that every choice other than ‘R’ or ‘D’ boils down to ‘I defer to the
Speaker:judgement of my fellow citizens.’ It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that.
Speaker:It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that.”12 The problem with
Speaker:Shirky’s claim is it doesn’t matter how you vote.
Speaker:Even if you vote “R” or “D,” no one is listening.
Speaker:One might argue matters are slightly improved in a parliamentary system.
Speaker:But not in the US.
Speaker:According to NBC News, only people in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina,
Speaker:Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia had anything but an infinitesimal chance
Speaker:that their vote would affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.13 Any given
Speaker:voter had a better chance of being struck by lightning on the way to the voting booth.
Speaker:As Forbes columnist Jim Pagels puts it - “The most generous estimates claim you
Speaker:have a 1-in-10-million chance of being the deciding vote in [a presidential] election,
Speaker:and that’s only if you live in a swing state and if you vote for one of the two major parties.
Speaker:Overall, the estimate is roughly 1-in-60 million.”14 Let that sink in for a moment.
Speaker:You’re almost 100 percent assured you could switch your vote in every
Speaker:major election throughout your life and the outcome would be the same.
Speaker:Following Carlin, then, your vote is “meaningless."
Speaker:Or as political philosopher Jason Brennan notes, “telling someone they can’t complain
Speaker:about an election if they didn’t vote is akin to telling a homeless person that
Speaker:they can’t complain about being poor unless they play the lottery every day.”15 Ouch.
Speaker:But matters are even worse.
Speaker:The Unicorn Problem
Speaker:Duke University political economist
Speaker:Michael Munger deepens our political nihilism with what he calls the “Unicorn Problem."
Speaker:The problem is not just with voting, he explains.
Speaker:It’s with the very idea of the state as a steward of the true, the beautiful and the good.
Speaker:Munger continues - “If you want to advocate the use of unicorns as motors for public transit,
Speaker:it is important that unicorns actually exist, rather than only existing in your imagination.
Speaker:People immediately understand why relying on imaginary creatures
Speaker:would be a problem in practical mass transit."
Speaker:But most people can’t see why the government they imagine is a unicorn.
Speaker:So to help them, Munger proposes what he humbly calls “the Munger test” -
Speaker:1. Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do,
Speaker:and what you want the State to be in charge of [or the “message” you want to send].
Speaker:2. Then, go back and look at your statement.
Speaker:Everywhere you said “the State,” delete that phrase and replace it with “politicians I
Speaker:actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist."
Speaker:3.
Speaker:If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.16 Munger admits to
Speaker:entertaining himself with this rhetorical device - “When someone says, ‘The State should be in charge
Speaker:of hundreds of thousands of heavily armed troops, with the authority to use that coercive power,’
Speaker:ask them to take out the unicorn (‘the State’) and replace it with [the politician you most dislike].
Speaker:How do you like it now?”17 When democracy advocates say the only way to “send a message”
Speaker:is to vote for one of the two parties, they have fallen victim to the unicorn fallacy.
Speaker:It’s not just that your message likely won’t be received if you do vote;
Speaker:it’s that it will be crumpled up and thrown into a dumpster
Speaker:on K Street 18 by people you know you would never want making the rules on your behalf.
Speaker:Why People Vote
Speaker:Apart from the illusion that “your vote matters” or “your voice is heard,” why do people vote?
Speaker:Most folks don’t really think their votes will have an appreciable effect.
Speaker:So why do they vote?
Speaker:Here are three big reasons - Declarative-Expressive - People
Speaker:vote to express themselves, whatever it is they’re expressing, because the immediate cost of doing so
Speaker:is negligible; Ideological-Utopian - People vote in accordance with some abstraction—a wished-for
Speaker:state-of-affairs, ideal, or unrealizable utopia; Tribal-Coalitional - People vote
Speaker:in solidarity with those they perceive as their ingroup, team, or tribe.
Speaker:As you might have figured out, these are some of the psychological bases of political hooliganism.
Speaker:But you might be wondering - What about people who are interested only in the truth?
Speaker:What about people who are calm, rational, and willing to suspend judgment about candidates
Speaker:and policies until they have enough information to determine logically
Speaker:whether said candidates and policies will work in the interests of the public good?
Speaker:Brennan calls these types “vulcans."
Speaker:And they are as rare as they are irrelevant.
Speaker:Maybe we can imagine a system in which only vulcans could vote,
Speaker:say, after passing some vulcan exam acceptable as a standard by nonvulcans.
Speaker:But even if you could get beyond the inherent elitism in such a suggestion, it’s not clear
Speaker:that any social science wielded by vulcans would generate a better form of government.
Speaker:Science writer Ron Bailey reminds us that most experts can’t be trusted,
Speaker:and that statisticians like John Ioannidis have been sounding the alarm as far back as 2005.
Speaker:Ioannidis found that “in most fields of research, including biomedicine, genetics, and epidemiology,
Speaker:the research community has been terrible at weeding out the shoddy work largely due
Speaker:to perfunctory peer review and a paucity of attempts at experimental replication."
Speaker:19 Ioannidis’s conclusion?
Speaker:“Most published research findings are false."
Speaker:Biomedicine?
Speaker:Genetics?
Speaker:Epidemiology?
Speaker:These areas are supposed to be relatively close to the hard sciences.
Speaker:These aren’t squishier social sciences like economics,
Speaker:social psychology, and political science.
Speaker:In response to democracy’s shortcomings, Brennan proposes a system he terms
Speaker:“epistocracy,” which suggests governance by those who are
Speaker:slightly more competent on matters with which they are more familiar.
Speaker:We should be leery of Brennan’s proposal,
Speaker:though not because life wouldn’t be marginally better than it is under the system we have now.
Speaker:Maybe things would be better for a time.
Speaker:We should be leery of epistocracy just as we
Speaker:should be leery of any platoon of philosopher-kings wielding stats.
Speaker:After all, there are lots of hooligans masquerading as vulcans,
Speaker:particularly in the academy.
Speaker:Epistocracy risks morphing into just another contrivance of centralized thinking,
Speaker:even if it seems marginally to decentralize voting.
Speaker:There are many more interesting alternatives on the horizon.
Speaker:But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Speaker:Giving people voting power over domains of activity in which they
Speaker:claim to be experts risks technocracy, as it opens the door to a tyranny of experts.
Speaker:Though Why People Vote 13 Brennan’s critique of democracy is dead on,
Speaker:his suggested upgrade leaves something to be desired.
Speaker:Now let’s turn to George Carlin’s second nugget of
Speaker:wisdom - the idea that US politics was bought and sold a long time ago.
Speaker:Politics without Romance
Speaker:Why do politicians constantly disappoint us?
Speaker:Late Nobel laureate James Buchanan more or less set
Speaker:out to answer this question in his life’s work.
Speaker:Buchanan was one of the founders of the public-choice school of political economy.
Speaker:And in a single essay called “Politics without Romance,” Buchanan lays out his
Speaker:general thesis in cold, dispassionate terms - If the government is empowered to grant monopoly
Speaker:rights or tariff protection to one group, at the expense of the general public or of
Speaker:designated losers, it follows that potential beneficiaries will compete for the prize.
Speaker:And since only one group can be rewarded, the resources invested
Speaker:by other groups—which could have been used to produce valued goods and services—are wasted.
Speaker:20 Those who are supposed to represent you are
Speaker:playing a game that tends to benefit favored groups (read - not you).
Speaker:Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best
Speaker:be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency
Speaker:support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.21 As
Speaker:much as we wish the forces Buchanan identifies weren’t the most powerful forces in politics,
Speaker:to think otherwise would be, well, romantic.
Speaker:If the Munger test reminds us that people you don’t like hold actual power,
Speaker:public-choice economics reminds us that people we don’t like get power
Speaker:and then auction it off to corporate or bureaucratic interests.
Speaker:In other words, once all the hobbits’ and hooligans’ teardrops have been counted,
Speaker:the incentives of the democratic republic are less about those creatures’ good and
Speaker:more about money and power mixing to gain advantages in their respective domains.
Speaker:That’s why money and power are so attracted to each other.
Speaker:Even the most ardent do-gooder in office has to engage in horse-trading to get anything done.
Speaker:You might call it selling out.
Speaker:She might call it political survival.
Speaker:Local Knowledge
Speaker:From time to time, politicians do try to do what they think is in the public interest.
Speaker:That is difficult, though.
Speaker:What after all is “the public” but a whole lot of people, each of whom differs from the others?
Speaker:And why should a lawyer from Manhattan have anything to say
Speaker:about the operations of a ranch outside Missoula?
Speaker:As our society becomes more complex,
Speaker:it becomes even less plausible to think that people in distant capitals have the
Speaker:requisite knowledge to plan for anything so far away from their spheres of understanding.
Speaker:And this is true even if the people in question are Brennan’s vulcans.
Speaker:As Friedrich A. Hayek famously reminds us, science is not the sum of knowledge.
Speaker:Most of the important stuff we know involves particular circumstances and contexts.
Speaker:Knowledge of specific circumstances,
Speaker:or “local knowledge,” is the most important and overlooked feature of complex societies.
Speaker:And as we become more complex, we will have to develop sense-making apparatuses and
Speaker:forms of collective intelligence that can handle this complexity.
Speaker:People in government, well-intentioned as they might be, are woefully ill
Speaker:equipped to make judgments about people in local circumstances.
Speaker:Even if we don’t need central control and
Speaker:planning in our increasingly complex society, we still need governance.
Speaker:Someday, though, we’ll look back on politics and shake our heads.
Speaker:It will have been a necessary phase—but not one we’ll want to relive.
Speaker:We have been undergoing a series of phases we could not have bypassed.
Speaker:The good news is we may have already entered the next phase.
Speaker:Once we realize all the benefits of this next
Speaker:phase, we’ll see how wasteful and acrimonious politics has been.
Speaker:Trench Warfare
Speaker:Right now it doesn’t seem like we are headed for a post-political era.
Speaker:Most people are so locked into the political paradigm that arguments
Speaker:about who is to Trench Warfare 15 fund whose birth control—or
Speaker:whether the city school system should get another bond—seem bigger than life.
Speaker:Each side cedes mere inches back and forth between election cycles in a kind of trench warfare.
Speaker:Such is the nature of politics.
Speaker:And in politics, the only thing we share anymore is a desire to take and hold onto power.
Speaker:The party that has the ring rules the land, at least for a while.
Speaker:The other side snatches power back sooner or later, and the whole thing starts all over again.
Speaker:Yet each side’s adherents labor under the idea that if they can just
Speaker:get and keep the ring, they will use it to good ends.
Speaker:We’ll give it to the right people, they imagine.
Speaker:The right people are incorruptible.
Speaker:We’re still waiting for the right people.
Speaker:So we go back to that titanic tug of war.
Speaker:Time and energy we could use on creative activities
Speaker:we spend locked in counterproductive struggles.
Speaker:We polarize.
Speaker:We argue.
Speaker:Our tribal-coalitional natures—as well as our unwavering belief in our own laundry
Speaker:lists of values and virtues—divide us in ways that go deeper than party affiliation.
Speaker:One side wants to take away the guns and the sugary sodas,
Speaker:the other wants to pray away the gay.
Speaker:The rest of us simply hang out at the margins.
Speaker:People can scarcely talk to each other without spitting venom.
Speaker:If there are any beneficiaries to this tit-for-tat, they’re
Speaker:rarely the ones who send their prayers up in the voting booth.
Speaker:A parasite class of special interests reaps most
Speaker:of the rewards, because the real action is on K Street.
Speaker:For the rest of us, politics is at best a spectacle, a kind of team sport.
Speaker:Was all this struggle necessary?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And again, there has been virtue in such a zero-sum game.
Speaker:Politics is a way to fight somewhat humanely over the control of hierarchy.
Speaker:The American Republic was in certain respects designed to create
Speaker:checks between factions and parties by setting them against each other.
Speaker:Ballots beat bullets and all that.
Speaker:It was thought of as a necessary evil—an alternative to the subjugation of people,
Speaker:which came from monarchy, feudalism, and aristocratic privilege.
Speaker:In the Federalist Papers, James Madison expressed concern about
Speaker:the “mischiefs of faction” found in democracies of various sizes.
Speaker:The Constitution is designed to temper the consequences of faction,
Speaker:even as the man known as its father acknowledged that the “causes of faction cannot be removed."
Speaker:22 The democratic republic was thus a kind of rationally conceived operating system,
Speaker:forged in compromise after a revolution provided an opportunity to start fresh.
Speaker:From another perspective, the development of the American-style republic was a phase transition.
Speaker:In other words, the democratic republic was likely
Speaker:to have arisen at some point due to the world’s becoming more complex.
Speaker:Some revere the founding as the explication of timeless
Speaker:principles the founders discovered using reason.
Speaker:And yet we know the founders were crafting rules at a certain stage
Speaker:of technological development and in a certain historical context.
Speaker:They were moving headlong into a future informed by reasonable assumptions about
Speaker:human nature and the new circumstances in which people found themselves.
Speaker:To understand this stage and prior stages,
Speaker:it will benefit us first to take our time machine a little further into the past, then zip back.
Speaker:The Rise of Hierarchy
Speaker:For millennia, our ancestors roamed the African steppe.
Speaker:Early humans were hunter-gatherers, anthropologists say.
Speaker:And as those ancestors succeeded at hunting and gathering, their numbers grew.
Speaker:But the world was no Garden of Eden for long, if it ever was.
Speaker:Life became nasty, brutish, and short.
Speaker:As their numbers grew, these tribal bands eventually confronted life-threatening scarcities.
Speaker:And Thomas Malthus’s warning, an error when he introduced it in 1789,
Speaker:was more or less correct back in the Paleolithic
Speaker:period - Success in procreating meant the land would reach its carrying capacity.
Speaker:To avoid Malthus’s trap, early folk had to move about.
Speaker:Their migrations contributed to the world’s great peopling.
Speaker:As early humans moved around, they collided.
Speaker:There was fierce competition for available resources.
Speaker:Peoples faced off in bloody conflict.
Speaker:Intertribal warfare meant the hunter-gatherer tribes had to become warrior clans.
Speaker:They not only had to learn to fight and kill,
Speaker:but they also had to learn to organize themselves to fight together better.
Speaker:None of this is meant to suggest that early peoples did not trade peacefully across tribes.
Speaker:Many did.
Speaker:But those who did not become traders were raiders.
Speaker:Such a harsh state of affairs meant that,
Speaker:to survive, your tribe had to develop better social technology.
Speaker:That doesn’t mean Windows for Cavemen.
Speaker:Social technology is shorthand for how people organize themselves.
Speaker:Victors transmitted their stories of glory and successful warfare strategies into the future.
Speaker:Likewise, while strength, courage, and superior weaponry go a very long way,
Speaker:social technology could make or break clan society.
Speaker:Agriculture and statecraft helped to settle some of these fighter-nomads.
Speaker:With settling came civilization.
Speaker:Still, much of history since the world’s great peopling has nevertheless been a story of warfare.
Speaker:After all, civilization often comes with wealth and power.
Speaker:In the simultaneous development of warfare and civilization,
Speaker:one social technology came to dominate - hierarchy.
Speaker:Atop this form of organization there usually stood one person.
Speaker:This leader went by many names—chief, king, warlord —but to succeed,
Speaker:the chief would have to be capable of gaining the fear, respect, and loyalty of his people.
Speaker:In accepting this leader, the clan would have gained an advantage.
Speaker:Having enabled a skilled strategist to command them as a force,
Speaker:they could operate as a single, fierce unit.
Speaker:That would be a recipe for survival and glory in an age of conquest.
Speaker:Of course, those capable of such fierceness and cunning were also capable of suppressing dissent.
Speaker:Those who wished to survive in the order were likely to accept the order,
Speaker:that being preferable to slaughter.
Speaker:Great empires soon grew up amid the detritus of war.
Speaker:The clan king became a god-king.
Speaker:The administration of empire required more layers of hierarchy,
Speaker:which meant delegating power to satraps and governors.
Speaker:The emperor would issue commands to subordinates,
Speaker:and those commands would be carried out by their subordinates in the chain of command.
Speaker:Patronage relationships became the norm.
Speaker:The order of those lording power over others took on religious dimensions.
Speaker:Values such as loyalty, honor, obedience, and patriotism firmed up the hierarchy.
Speaker:Without such values, the structure could have been weakened by either
Speaker:internal dissent or better-organized enemies.
Speaker:Hierarchy became more elaborate over time as each layer was added,
Speaker:and hierarchy persisted, apparently, as humanity’s dominant social technology.
Speaker:Despite a couple of eighteenth-century revolutions in France and America,
Speaker:hierarchy is still, in many respects, the dominant form of social organization throughout the world.
Speaker:That is, social structures like those of medieval
Speaker:Europe and feudal Japan are more common than those like modern Switzerland’s.
Speaker:Even modern Japan and Switzerland still have command-and-control structures.
Speaker:The United States—that great beacon of freedom—now bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Empire.
Speaker:America’s founders had made improvements by creating
Speaker:institutional checks and balances on power within its hierarchy.
Speaker:But its hierarchy persists.
Speaker:The question then - Is it long for this world?
Speaker:Better All the Time Now to the present.
Speaker:There is no doubt too much war in the world today.
Speaker:The good news, however, is that the human race is
Speaker:entering an unprecedented age of peace, connection, and prosperity.
Speaker:I realize you probably didn’t get that news on social media.
Speaker:The “Great Fact,” however, is that since about 1800, we’ve been growing more and
Speaker:more prosperous.23 It’s all thanks to an ongoing process of decentralization
Speaker:in which humanity reaps the rewards of innovation, production, and trade.
Speaker:More and more of the world runs on adaptive, lateral relationships
Speaker:instead of command-and-control structures and on open systems instead of closed ones.
Speaker:Nested networks of flourishing communities abound,
Speaker:and they are challenging the hierarchies around them.
Speaker:Such hierarchies include corporations,
Speaker:those old structures that pay you to be part of a hierarchy; they are starting to change.
Speaker:What should puzzle us is whether these nested networks exist despite
Speaker:or because of prevailing national hierarchies.
Speaker:Paradoxically, the answer could be “both,” depending on where and when in the world we look.
Speaker:To read the news, though, you wouldn’t think anybody could claim things are getting better.
Speaker:The media sell more turmoil than they offer positive trends over longer timescales.
Speaker:Their reports leave many of us with both a false impression and a general ignorance
Speaker:about just how good we’ve got it compared to people throughout most of history.
Speaker:Writer and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is one of the
Speaker:most famous voices pointing out that the trendlines are mostly positive.
Speaker:In an interview with New Scientist, Pinker admits being struck by a graph that showed a
Speaker:precipitous decline in homicide rates in British towns, starting in the fourteenth century.
Speaker:“The rates had plummeted by between 30 and 100-fold,” said Pinker.
Speaker:“That stuck with me, because you tend to have an image of medieval
Speaker:times with happy peasants coexisting in close-knit communities, whereas
Speaker:we think of the present as filled with school shootings and mugging and terrorist attacks."
Speaker:24 In the era of sensational headlines traveling virally through social media
Speaker:horrible things can seem more frequent, bigger than life.
Speaker:So Pinker decided to do some more digging, and he learned that even twentieth-century
Speaker:Germany had a low rate of war deaths by comparison to the hunter-gatherers.
Speaker:25 Better All the Time 19 From the perspective of history’s grand sweep,
Speaker:we’re living in an age of peace, freedom and abundance.
Speaker:Even the poorest places on earth are far better off than they were just a few decades ago.
Speaker:Indeed, in the last thirty years alone,
Speaker:the number of people living in abject poverty has been cut in half.
Speaker:Day by day, violent aggression over resources is rapidly being replaced
Speaker:by the structures of commercial competition and human cooperation.
Speaker:Commercial competition creates a positive-sum world—that is, a world of everincreasing wealth.
Speaker:Today, the struggles are often among companies competing to offer, say, better gadgets.
Speaker:Small businesses are battling it out at the intersection of Third
Speaker:and Main to serve a better taco, brew a craftier beer, or open a hotter nightclub.
Speaker:The benefits flow to the customers and those who serve them best.
Speaker:All exist in an ecosystem of value.
Speaker:In this more benevolent form of competition a fundamental
Speaker:truth remains - The fittest social technology will survive.
Speaker:Over time—as conquest culture has given way to commercial culture—we have come to
Speaker:see fewer warlords, kings, and emperors, and more bosses, executives, and CEOs.
Speaker:To some, this may not sound like such a big improvement.
Speaker:The competition is still fierce.
Speaker:Companies are still frequently cast as villainous exploiters, sometimes for good reason.
Speaker:But shifting from conquest to commerce has resulted in more
Speaker:people enjoying more good things than at any time in human history.
Speaker:And it’s only getting better.
Speaker:But in this transition, we have to ask - Will CEOs
Speaker:and middle managers also go the way of kings and lords?
Speaker:The modern nation-state and the modern corporation share social
Speaker:technologies that go back thousands of years.
Speaker:But in between hierarchical governments and hierarchical firms, there is a great teeming.
Speaker:It is not chaos.
Speaker:People truck, barter, exchange, collaborate, and cooperate.
Speaker:In some cases—such as Morning Star
Speaker:Packing Company and Zappos—a phase transition has already been made.
Speaker:Outside the firm, community groups meet over potluck dinners planned online.
Speaker:Friends find each other in dive bars and country clubs.
Speaker:Husbands and wives go home to one another; the bills get paid, and the kids get to school.
Speaker:Lovers find each other online in a kind of dating anarchy.
Speaker:And all of it happens without a director or a designer,
Speaker:a beautiful, unconducted symphony like starlings in a murmuration.
Speaker:More and more of the world operates in a place
Speaker:between rigid order and errant chaos—unmanaged yet orderly.
Speaker:More and more of the world is self-organizing.
Speaker:Phase Transition
Speaker:Complexity science predicts the global
Speaker:trend to which I alluded above.
Speaker:At the risk of oversimplifying, the theory states “complexity transitions” will happen
Speaker:according to the amount and type of information flowing through a system.
Speaker:(A “system,” in this sense, is a collection of devices or
Speaker:people that information gets transmitted among.)
Speaker:How elements of a system deal with information and resources—or, in the case of firms,
Speaker:knowledge and decisions—will determine the nature of that system.
Speaker:Because systems always exist in some environment,
Speaker:often competing with other systems, evolutionary pressures are going to
Speaker:determine whether an organization such as your club, company, county, or country survives.
Speaker:And one of the traits selected for will be how well it coordinates
Speaker:its participants’ behavior—which largely means - how well it organizes information.
Speaker:Complexity science shows that to deal with more information, systems have to change.
Speaker:The process starts with a group growing big enough to form a hierarchy.
Speaker:This usually happens when the group has outgrown
Speaker:the organizational limits of the egalitarian clan structure.
Speaker:As more power gets delegated, extending the chains of hierarchy, the system becomes more complicated.
Speaker:But the hierarchy can only handle so much complication.
Speaker:Eventually the system breaks down or changes into something that
Speaker:looks more like a network with an increasing number of “nodes."
Speaker:Lateral relationships form, which we know as “peer to peer."
Speaker:Decision-making power spreads down and out.
Speaker:And this hastens the complexity transition.
Speaker:Yaneer Bar-Yam (literally) wrote the textbook on complex systems.
Speaker:He describes the process that unfolded historically - “Ancient empires replaced
Speaker:various smaller kingdoms that had developed during a process of consolidation of yet
Speaker:smaller associations of human beings.
Speaker:The degree of control in these systems varied,
Speaker:but the progression toward larger more centrally controlled entities is apparent....
Speaker:This led to a decrease of complexity of behaviors of many individuals,
Speaker:but a more complex behavior on the larger scale."
Speaker:26 Phase Transition 21 But this could only be sustained for so long.
Speaker:As time went on, any given individual’s behavior diversified,
Speaker:and so did all the tasks performed by everyone in the system.
Speaker:Such is the overall behavior of a system becoming more complicated.
Speaker:More complicated systems required “adding layers
Speaker:of management that served to exercise local control,” explains Bar-Yam.
Speaker:“As viewed by the higher levels of management,
Speaker:each layer simplified the behavior to the point where an individual could control it.
Speaker:The hierarchy acts as a mechanism for communication of information
Speaker:to and from management.”27 But how far can introducing layers of management be sustained?
Speaker:When you reach the “point at which the collective complexity is the maximum individual complexity,
Speaker:the process breaks down,” 28 Bar-Yam adds.
Speaker:Hierarchical structures cannot handle any more complexity beyond this point.
Speaker:Complexity science tells us the battle lines will be drawn mainly in terms of
Speaker:how each organization processes information and applies knowledge to make decisions.
Speaker:And if there is a way for an organization to deal with complexity beyond hierarchy,
Speaker:that form of organization is poised to challenge the reigning paradigm.
Speaker:So, if we put our ears to the ground, we can hear the rumbling of two great
Speaker:organizational types - one that looks more like a hierarchy and one that looks more like a network.
Speaker:Hierarchy still dominates.
Speaker:It is powerful—especially as it appeals to the human desire to be in control.
Speaker:And, of course, human beings have evolved dispositions to
Speaker:be led—whether by dictators, daddies, demagogues, or divas.
Speaker:Consciously or unconsciously, people in hierarchical organizations will
Speaker:also fight for the status quo as long as they benefit from it.
Speaker:It’s human nature.
Speaker:Yet, decentralized systems can be more flexible,
Speaker:and as thinker and writer Nassim Taleb observes, “antifragile."
Speaker:So the question remains - Which form will win?
Speaker:Before trying to answer that question,
Speaker:I want to leave you with more than just the image of clashing social technologies.
Speaker:Because what we’re really interested in here is flourishing or, more specifically,
Speaker:how people can organize themselves to improve their well-being.
Speaker:The extent to which we can organize ourselves to be happier, healthier people is the extent
Speaker:to which we can organize ourselves to create more peace and prosperity.
Speaker:Hard to believe?
Speaker:Despite some of the wrenching changes that will be brought about by this
Speaker:coming clash of systems, a more abundant and humane world awaits.
Speaker:Founding Redux
Speaker:In thinking about phase transition, though, the American founding still looms large.
Speaker:The American Republic and many democratic republics since were brilliantly crafted
Speaker:systems designed to maximize freedom and limit the excesses of hierarchy.
Speaker:Or, put another way, documents like the US Constitution put forth answers to the question,
Speaker:What sort of political order can be created to unleash as much human autonomy as possible?
Speaker:But our operating system, as operating systems will, has become buggy, strained, and outdated.
Speaker:Not only are people becoming weary of a system designed to pit people against each other with a
Speaker:crude majoritarian calculus, but new systems are being developed to accommodate phase transition.
Speaker:Indeed, some of these systems don’t require the permission of authorities.
Speaker:They arise from technologically connected people
Speaker:along the lines of what James C. Scott describes in Two Cheers for Anarchism.
Speaker:More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called
Speaker:“Irish Democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary
Speaker:people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.29 Some will try to argue that an uncorrupted
Speaker:social operating system, i.e. the one originally conceived by the founders, would be a lot better
Speaker:than the version we have now—adulterated as it has been by dubious legal interpretation.
Speaker:I’m sympathetic to that view.
Speaker:But it would be difficult, if not impossible,
Speaker:to debug the program and bring back the founders’ Constitution.
Speaker:And happily, we have better options.
Speaker:For the first time in history, technology and culture are providing
Speaker:more and more opportunities to create new systems and migrate among them.
Speaker:Indeed, it used to be that to change systems,
Speaker:one had to migrate quite literally, to pick oneself up and move to another jurisdiction.
Speaker:And that, too, is an increasingly viable option.
Speaker:But migrating between systems is also something that, these days, you can do from your sofa.
Speaker:And this ease has profound implications.
Speaker:The Authoritarian Urge 23 The Authoritarian Urge Before closing this chapter,
Speaker:we should give a final doff of the hat to the democratic republic.
Speaker:However imperfect a system it has been, the democratic republic has arguably done
Speaker:better than any other form of government in controlling the worst of humanity’s ambitions.
Speaker:This cannot be overstated.
Speaker:So whatever evolves to replace the democratic republic should
Speaker:provide us with more mechanisms to check and channel those ambitions.
Speaker:It’s not a stretch to state that there is an authoritarian urge in all of us.
Speaker:For some of us it burns softly, as an ember.
Speaker:For others it can quickly be kindled into a fundamentalist fire.
Speaker:But not all ambition results in great evil.
Speaker:The democratic republic, more than any other form of government,
Speaker:has left room for the most ambitious to channel their desires to productive ends.
Speaker:So just as whatever system lies over the horizon should tamp down the will
Speaker:to power, it should ignite the spirits of entrepreneurship, innovation, and charity.
Speaker:The End Is Nigh
Speaker:“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage,” said H. L. Mencken.
Speaker:So what are we monkeys to do?
Speaker:We can get sucked into the ongoing reality show—the horse races, the scandals,
Speaker:and the controversies—with a bucketful of popcorn and a vague look of disgust.
Speaker:Or we can acknowledge the cage.
Speaker:If we succumb to tribal tendencies, the bumper-sticker rationales,
Speaker:and the “I Voted” rectitude, we will perpetuate the whole charade.
Speaker:Each hanging chad will be a vote of complicity in this monstrous
Speaker:thing that has grown upon the backs of the people.
Speaker:At the very least, we can call this thing what it is - An illusion.
Speaker:Or we can be revolutionaries again.
Speaker:We can rattle the cage.
Speaker:A million little acts of civil disobedience here and there can add up fast.
Speaker:I have done my best thus far,
Speaker:dear reader, to disabuse you of any unreflective faith in politics.
Speaker:At the least, I hope I’ve left you with some skepticism.
Speaker:My goal is not to criticize for criticism’s sake.
Speaker:Instead I want to help people see good reasons not
Speaker:to cling too tightly to a system that might have outlived its usefulness.
Speaker:When the time comes, you’ll have good reasons to let go.
Speaker:Because politics as we know it is nigh at an end.
Speaker:In other words, even if you don’t believe a word of this chapter, change is coming.
Speaker:This has been The Social Singularity. How decentralization will allow us to transcend
Speaker:politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse, written by Max Borders,
Speaker:narrated by Russell Newton. Copyright 2018 by Max Borders. Production copyright by Spokane Tome
Speaker:Media. You need to hear this.
