Motivation

Chapter 5

History as Trajectory

Prologue

Our history is the prologue to the network state.

This is not obvious. Founding a startup society as we’ve described it seems to be about growing a community, writing code, crowdfunding land, and eventually attaining the diplomatic recognition to become a network state. What does history have to do with anything?

The short version is that if a tech company is about technological innovation first, and company culture second, a startup society is the reverse. It’s about community culture first, and technological innovation second. And while innovating on technology means forecasting the future, innovating on culture means probing the past.

But why? Well, for a tech company like SpaceX you start with time-invariant laws of physics extracted from data, laws that tell you how atoms collide and interact with each other. The study of these laws allows you to do something that has never been done before, seemingly proving that history doesn’t matter. But the subtlety is that these laws of physics encode in highly compressed form the results of innumerable scientific experiments. You are learning from human experience rather than trying to re-derive physical law from scratch. To touch Mars, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

For a startup society, we don’t yet have eternal mathematical laws for society.⁷² History is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity. It furnishes many accounts of how human actors collide and interact with each other. The right course of historical study encodes, in compressed form, the results of innumerable social experiments. You can learn from human experience rather than re-deriving societal law from scratch. Learn some history, so as not to repeat it.

That’s a theoretical argument. An observational argument is that we know that the technological innovation of the Renaissance began by rediscovering history. And we know that the Founding Fathers cared deeply about history. In both cases, they stepped forward by drawing from the past. So if you’re a technologist looking to blaze a trail with a new startup society, that establishes plausibility for why historical study is important.

The logistical argument is perhaps the most compelling. Think about how much easier it is to use an iPhone than it was to build Apple from scratch. To consume you can just click a button, but to produce it’s necessary to know something about how companies are built. Similarly, it’s one thing to operate as a mere citizen of a pre-built country, and quite another thing to create one from scratch. To build a new society, it’d be helpful to have some knowledge of how countries were built in the first place, the logistics of the process. And this again brings us into the domain of history.

Why History is Crucial

You can’t really learn something without using it. One day of immersion with a new language beats weeks of book learning. One day of trying to build something with a programming language beats weeks of theory, too.

In the same way, the history we teach is an applied history: a crucial tool for both the prospective president of a startup society⁷³ and for their citizens, shareholders, and staff. It’s something you’ll use on a daily basis. Why?

History is how you win the argument. Think about the 1619 Project, or the grievance studies departments at universities, or even a newspaper “profile” of some unfortunate. You might be mining cryptocurrency, but the folks behind such things are mining history. That is, many thousands of people are engaged full time in “offense archaeology,” the excavation of the recent and distant past for some useful incident they can write up to further demoralize their political opposition. This is the scholarly version of going through someone’s old tweets. It’s weaponized history, history as opposition research. You simply can’t win an argument against such people on pure logic alone; you need facts, so you need history.
History determines legality. We denote the exponential improvement in transistor density over the postwar period by Moore’s law. We describe the exponential decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency during the same period as Eroom’s law — as Moore’s law in reverse. That is, over the last several decades, the FDA somehow presided over an enormous hike in the costs of drug development even as our computers and our knowledge of the human genome vastly improved. Similar phenomena can be observed in energy (where energy production has stagnated), in aviation (where top speeds have topped out), and in construction (where we build slower today than we did seventy years ago).

Obviously, even articulating Eroom’s law requires detailed knowledge of history, knowledge of how things used to be. Less obviously, if we want to change Eroom’s law, if we want to innovate in the physical world again, we’ll need history too.

The reason is that behind every FDA is a thalidomide, just as behind every TSA there’s a 9/11 and behind every Sarbanes-Oxley is an Enron. Regulation is dull, but the incidents that lead to regulation are anything but dull.

This history is used to defend ancient regulations; if you change them, people will die! As such, to legalize physical innovation you’ll need to become a counter-historian. Only when you understand the legitimating history of regulatory agencies better than their proponents do can you build a superior alternative: a new regulatory paradigm capable of addressing both the abuses of the American regulatory state and the abuses they claim to prevent.
History determines morality. Religions start with history lessons. You might think of these as made-up histories, but they’re histories all the same. Tales of the distant past, fictionalized or not, that describe how humans once behaved - and how they should have behaved. There’s a moral to these stories.

Political doctrines are based on history lessons too. They’re how the establishment justifies itself. The mechanism for propagating these history lessons is the establishment newspaper, wherein most articles aren’t really about true-or-false, but good-and-bad. Try it yourself. Just by glancing at a headline from any establishment outlet, you can instantly apprehend its moral lesson: x-ism is bad, our system of government is good, tech founders are bad, and so on. And if you poke one level deeper, if you ask why any of these things is good or bad, you’ll again get a history lesson. Because why is x-ism bad? Well, let me educate you on some history…

The installation of these moral premises is a zero-sum game. There’s only room for so many moral lessons in one society, because a brain’s capacity for moral computation is limited. So you get a totally different society if 99% of people allocate their limited moral memory to principles like “hard work good, meritocracy good, envy bad, charity good” than if 99% of people have internalized nostrums like “socialism good, civility bad, law enforcement bad, looting good.”⁷⁴ You can try to imagine a scenario where these two sets of moral values aren’t in direct conflict, but empirically those with the first set of moral values will favor an entrepreneurial society and those with the second set of values will not.⁷⁵
History is how you develop compelling media. You can make up entirely fictional stories, of course. But even fiction frequently has some kind of historical antecedent. The Lord of the Rings drew on Medieval Europe, Spaghetti Westerns pulled from the Wild West, Bond movies were inspired by the Cold War, and so on. And certainly the legitimating stories for any political order will draw on history.
History is the true value of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars because it’s a cryptographically verifiable history of who holds what BTC. Read The Truth Machine for a book-length treatment of this concept.
History tells you who’s in charge. Why did Orwell say that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past? Because history textbooks are written by the winners. They are authored, subtly or not, to tell a story of great triumph by the ruling establishment over its past enemies. The only history most people in the US know is 1776, 1865, 1945, and 1965 - a potted history of revolutions, world wars, and activist movements that lead ineluctably to the sunny uplands of greater political equality.⁷⁶ It’s very similar to the history the Soviets taught their children, where all of the past was interpreted through the lens of class struggle, bringing Soviet citizens to the present day where they were inevitably progressing from the intermediate stage of socialism towards…communism! Chinese schoolchildren learn a similarly selective history where the (real) wrongs of the European colonialists and Japanese are centered, and those of Mao downplayed. And even any successful startup tells a founding story that sands off the rough edges.

In short, a history textbook gives you a hero’s journey that celebrates the triumph of its establishment authors against all odds. Even when a historical treatment covers ostensible victims, like Soviet textbooks covering the victimization of the proletariat, if you look carefully the ruling class that authors that treatment typically justifies itself as the champion of those victims. This is why one of the first acts of any conquering regime is to rewrite the textbooks (click those links), to tell you who’s in charge.
History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by media corporations on “diversity”? Is it because those media corporations that are 20-30 points whiter than tech companies actually deeply care about this? Or is it because after the 2009-era collapse of print media revenue, media corporations struggled for a business model, found that certain words drove traffic, and then doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors in the process?⁷⁷ After all, if you know a bit more history, you’ll know that the New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally profited from slavery, blocked women from being publishers, excluded gays from the newsroom for decades, ran a succession process featuring only three cis straight white male cousins, and ended up with a publisher who just happened to be the son of the previous guy.⁷⁸

Suppose you’re a founder. Once you know this history, and once all your friends and employees and investors know it, and once you know that no purportedly brave establishment media corporation would have ever informed you of it in quite those words⁷⁹, you’re outside the matrix. You’ve mentally freed your organization. So long as you aren’t running a corporation based on hereditary nepotism where the current guy running the show inherits the company from his father’s father’s father’s father, you’re more diverse and democratic than the owners of The New York Times Company. You don’t need to take lectures from them, from anyone in their employ, or really from anyone in their social circle — which includes all establishment journalists. You now have the moral authority to hire who you need to hire, within the confines of the law, as SpaceX, Shopify, Kraken, and others are now doing. And that’s how a little knowledge of history restores control over your hiring policy.
History is how you debug our broken society. Many billions of dollars are spent on history in the engineering world. We don’t think about it that way, though. We call it doing a post-mortem, looking over the log files, maybe running a so-called time-travel debugger to get a reproducible bug. Once we find it, we might want to execute an undo, do a git revert, restore from backup, or return to a previously known-good configuration.

Think about what we’re saying: on a micro-scale, knowing the detailed past of the system allows us to figure out what had gone wrong. And being able to partially rewind the past to progress along a different branch (via a git revert) empowers us to fix that wrongness. This doesn’t mean throwing away everything and returning to the caveman era of a blank git repository, as per either the caricatured traditionalist who wants to “turn back the clock” or the anarcho-primitivist who wants to end industrialized civilization. But it does mean rewinding a bit to then move forward along a different path⁸⁰, because progress has both magnitude and direction. All these concepts apply to debugging situations at larger scale than companies — like societies, or countries.⁸¹

You now see why history is useful. A founder of a mere startup company can arguably scrape by without it, tacitly outsourcing the study of history to those who shape society’s laws and morality. But a president of a startup society cannot, because a new society involves moral, social, and legal innovation relative to the old one — and that requires a knowledge of history.

Why History is Crucial for Startup Societies

We’ve whetted the appetite with some specific examples of why history is useful in general. Now we’ll describe why it’s specifically useful for startup societies.

We begin by introducing an operationally useful set of tools for thinking about the past from a bottom-up and top-down perspective: history as written to the ledger, as opposed to history as written by the winners.

We use these tools to discuss the emergence of a new Leviathan, the Network, a contender for the most powerful force in the world, a true peer (and complement) to both God and the State as a mechanism for social organization.

And then we’ll bring it all together in the lead-up to the key concept of this chapter: the idea of the One Commandment, a historically-founded sociopolitical innovation that draws citizens to a startup society just as a technologically-based commercial innovation attracts customers to a startup company.

If a startup begins by identifying an economic problem in today’s market and presenting a technologically-informed solution to that problem in the form of a new company, a startup society begins by identifying a moral issue in today’s culture and presenting a historically-informed solution to that issue in the form of a new society.

Why Startup Societies Aren’t Solely About Technology

Wait, why does a startup society have to begin with a moral issue? And why does the solution to that moral issue need to be historically-informed? Can’t it just be a tech-focused community where people solve problems with equations? We’re interested in Mars and life extension, not dusty stories of defunct cities!

The quick answer comes from Paul Johnson at the 11:00 mark of this talk, where he notes that early America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose. The slightly longer answer is that in a startup society, you’re not asking people to buy a product (which is an economic, individualistic pitch) but to join a community (which is a cultural, collective pitch). You’re arguing that the culture of your startup society is better than the surrounding culture; implicitly, that means there’s some moral deficit in the world that you’re fixing. History comes into play because you’ll need to (a) write a study of that moral deficit and (b) draw from the past to find alternative social arrangements where that moral deficit did not occur. Tech may be part of the solution, and calculations may well be involved, but the moment you write about any societal problem in depth you’ll find yourself writing a history of that problem.

For specifics, you can skip ahead to Examples of Parallel Societies — or you can suspend disbelief for a little bit, keep reading, and trust us that this historical/moral/ethical angle just might be the missing ingredient to build startup societies, which after all haven’t yet fully taken off in the modern world.

Applied History for Startup Societies

Here’s the outline of this chapter.

We start with bottom-up history. The section on Microhistory and Macrohistory bridges the gap between the trajectory of an isolated, reproducible system and the trajectories of millions of interacting human beings. Because both these small and large-scale trajectories can now be digitally recorded and quantified, this is history as written to the ledger — culminating in the cryptohistory of Bitcoin.
We next discuss top-down history. This is history as written by the winners, history as conceptualized by what Tyler Cowen calls the Base-Raters, history that justifies the current order and proclaims it stable and inevitable. It is a theory of Political Power vs. Technological Truth.
We then talk about the history of power, giving names to the forces we just described by identifying the three candidates for most powerful force in the world: God, State, and Network. Framing things in terms of three prime movers rather than one allows us to generalize beyond purely God-centered religions to understand the Leviathan-centered doctrines that implicitly underpin modern society.
We apply this to the history of power struggles. With the God/State/Network lens, we can understand the Blue/Red and Tech-vs-Media conflicts in a different way as a multi-sided struggle between People of God, People of the State, and People of the Network.
We go through how the People of the State have used their power to distort recent and distant history, and how the Network is newly rectifying this distortion in “If the News is Fake, Imagine History.”
Having shown the degree to which history has been distorted, and thereby displaced the (implicit) historical narrative in which the arc of history bends to the ineluctable victory of the US establishment⁸², we discuss several alternative theories of past and future in our section on Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, and Future Is Our Past. These theses don’t describe a clean progressive victory on every axis, but instead a set of cycles, hairpin turns, and mirror images, a set of historical trajectories far more complex than the narrative of linear inevitability smuggled in through textbooks and mass media.
We next turn our attention to left and right, which are confusing concepts in a realigning time, in Left is the new Right is the new Left. Sorry! We can’t avoid politics anymore. Startup societies aren’t purely about technology. But please note that for the most part this section isn’t the same old pabulum around current events. We do contend that you need a theory of left and right to build a startup society, but that doesn’t mean just picking a side.

Why? While a political consumer has to pick one of a few party platforms off the menu, a political founder can do something different: ideology construction. To inform this, we’ll show how left and right have swapped sides through history, and how any successful mass movement has both a revolutionary left component and a ruling right component.
Finally, all of this builds up to the payoff: the One Commandment. Using the terminology we just introduced, we can rattle it off in a few paragraphs. (If the following is opaque in any way, read the chapter, then come back and re-read this part.)

If history is not pre-determined to bend in one direction, if the current establishment may experience dramatic disruption in the form of the Fragmentation and Fourth Turning, if its power actually arose from the expanding frontier rather than the expanding franchise, if history is somehow running in reverse as per the Future Is Our Past thesis, if the revolutionary and ruling classes are in fact switching sides, if the new Leviathan that is the Network is indeed rising above the State, and if the internal American conflicts can be seen not as policy disputes but as holy wars, as clashes of Leviathans…then the assumption of the Base-Raters that all will proceed as it always has is quite incorrect! But rather than admit this incorrectness, they’ll attempt to use political power to suppress technological truth.

The founder’s counter is cryptohistory and the startup society. We now have a history no establishment can easily corrupt, the cryptographically verifiable history pioneered by Bitcoin and extended via crypto oracles. We also have a theory of historical feasibility, history as a trajectory rather than an inevitability, the idea that the desirable future will only occur if you put in individual effort. But what exactly is the nature of that desirable future?

After all, many groups differ with the old order but also with each other — so a blanket solution won’t work. And could well be resisted. That’s where the One Commandment comes in.

As context, the modern person is often morally reticent but politically evangelistic. They hesitate to talk about what is moral or immoral, because it’s not their place to say what’s right. Yet when it comes to politics, this diffidence is frequently replaced by overbearing confidence in how others must live, coupled with an enthusiasm for enforcing their beliefs at gunpoint if necessary.

In between this zero and $\infty$ , in between eschewing moral discussion entirely and imposing a full-blown political doctrine, in this final section we propose a one: a one commandment. Start a new society with its own moral code, based on your study of history, and recruit people that agree with you to populate it.⁸³ We’re not saying you need to come up with your own new Ten Commandments, mind you — but you do need One Commandment to establish the differentiation of a new startup society.

Concrete examples of possible One Commandments include “24/7 internet bad” (which leads to a Digital Sabbath society), or “carbs bad” (which leads to a Keto Kosher society), or “traditional Christianity good” (which leads to a Benedict Option society), or “life extension good” (which leads to a post-FDA society).

You might think these One Commandments sound either trivial or unrealistically ambitious, but in that respect they’re similar to tech; the pitch of “140 characters” sounded trivial and the pitch of “reusable rockets” seemed unrealistic, but those resulted in Twitter and SpaceX respectively. The One Commandment is also similar to tech in another respect: it focuses a startup society on a single moral innovation, just like a tech company is about a focused technoeconomic innovation.

That is, as we’ll see, each One Commandment-based startup society is premised on deconstructing the establishment’s history in one specific area, erecting a replacement narrative in its place with a new One Commandment, then proving the socioeconomic value of that One Commandment by using it to attract subscriber-citizens. For example, if you can attract 100k subscribers to your Keto Kosher society through deeply researched historical studies on the obesity epidemic, and then show that they’ve lost significant weight as a consequence, you’ve proven the establishment deeply wrong in a key area. That’ll either drive them to reform — or not reform, in which case you attract more citizens.

A key point is that we can apply all the techniques of startup companies to startup societies. Financing, attracting subscribers, calculating churn, doing customer support — there’s a playbook for all of that. It’s just Society-as-a-Service, the new SaaS.

In parallel, other startup societies are likewise critiquing by building, draining citizens away from the establishment with their own historically-informed One Commandments, and thereby driving change on other dimensions. Finally, different successful changes can be copied and merged together, such that the second generation of startup societies starts differentiating from the establishment by two, three, or $N$ commandments. This is a vision for peaceful, parallelized, historically-driven reform of a broken society.

Ok! I know those last few paragraphs involved some heavy sledding, but come back and reread them after going through the chapter. The main point of our little preview here was to make the case that history is an applied subject — and that you can’t start a new society without it.

Without a genuine moral critique of the establishment, without an ideological root network supported by history, your new society is at best a fancy Starbucks lounge, a gated community that differs only in its amenities, a snack to be eaten by the establishment at its leisure, a soulless nullity with no direction save consumerism.⁸⁴

But with such a critique — with the understanding that the establishment is morally wanting, with a focused articulation of how exactly it falls short, with a One Commandment that others can choose to follow, and with a vision of the historical past that underpins your new startup society much as a vision of the technological future underpins a new startup company — you’re well on your way.

You might even start to see a historical whitepaper floating in front of you, the scholarly critique that draws your first 100 subscribers, the founding document you publish to kick off your startup society.

Now let’s equip you with the tools to write it.

Microhistory and Macrohistory

In the bottom-up view, history is written to the ledger. If everything that happened gets faithfully recorded, history is then just the analysis of the log files. To understand this view we’ll discuss the idea of history as a trajectory. Then we’ll introduce the concepts of microhistory and macrohistory, by analogy to microeconomics and macroeconomics. Finally, we’ll unify all this with the new concept of cryptohistory.

History as a Cryptic Epic of Twisting Trajectories

What happens when you propel an object into the air? The first thing that comes to mind is the trajectory of a ball. Throw it and witness its arc. Just a simple parabola, an exercise in freshman physics. But there are more complicated trajectories.

A boomerang flies forward and comes back to the origin.
A charged particle in a constant magnetic field is subject to a force at right angles, and moves in a circle.
A rocket with sufficient fuel can escape the earth’s atmosphere rather than coming back down.
A curveball, subject to the Magnus effect, can twist in mid-air en route to its destination.
A projectile launched into a sufficiently thick gelatin decelerates without ever hitting the ground.
A powered drone can execute an arbitrarily complicated flight path, mimicking that of a bumblebee or helix.

So, how a system evolves with time — its trajectory — can be complex and counterintuitive, even for something small. This is a good analogy for history. If the flight path of a single inanimate object can be this surprising, think about the dynamics of a massive multi-agent system of highly animate people. Imagine billions of humans springing up on the map, forming clusters, careening into each other, creating more humans, and throwing off petabytes of data exhaust the whole way. That’s history.

And the timeframes involved make it tough to study. The rock you throw into the air doesn’t take decades to play out its flight path. Humans do. So a historical observer can literally die before seeing the consequences of an action.

Moreover, the subjects of the study don’t want to be studied. A mere rock isn’t a stealth bomber. It has neither the motive nor the means to deceive you about its flight path. Humans do. The people under the microscope are fogging the lens.

So: the scale is huge, the timeframe is long, and the measurements aren’t just noisy but intentionally corrupted.

We can encode all of this into a phrase: history is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading. Epic, because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns. Twisting, because there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns. And trajectories, because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time.

Put that together, and it wipes out both the base-rater’s view that today’s order will remain basically stable over the short-term, and the complementary view of a long-term “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It also contests the idea that the fall of the bourgeoisie “and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable,” or that “no two countries on a Bitcoin standard will go to war with each other,” or even that technological progress has been rapid, so we can assume it will continue and society will not collapse.

Those phrases come from different ideologies, but each of them verbally expresses the clean parabolic arc of the rock. History isn’t really like that at all. It’s much more complicated. There are certainly trends, and those phrases do identify real trends, but there is also pushback to those trends, counterforces that arise in response to applied forces, syntheses that form from theses and antitheses, and outright collapses. Complex dynamics, in other words.

And how do we study complex dynamical systems? The first task is to measure.

Microhistory is the History of Reproducible Systems

Microhistory is the history of a reproducible system, one which has few enough variables that it can be reset and replayed from the beginning in a series of controlled experiments. It is history as a quantitative trajectory, history as a precise log of measurements. For example, it could be the record of all past values of a state space vector in a dynamical system, the account of all moves made by two deterministic algorithms playing chess against each other, or the chronicle of all instructions executed by a journaling file system after being restored to factory settings.

Microhistory is an applied subject, where accurate historical measurement is of direct technical and commercial importance. We can see this with technologies like the Kalman filter, which was used for steering the spaceship used in the moon landing. You can see the full technical details here, but roughly speaking the Kalman filter uses past measurements $x [t - 1], x [t - 2], x [t - 3]$ to inform the estimate of a system’s current state $x [t]$ , the action that should be taken $u [t]$ , and the corresponding prediction of the future state $x [t + 1]$ should that action be taken. For example, it uses past velocity, direction headings, fuel levels, and the like to recommend how a space shuttle should be steered at the current timestep. Crucially, if the microhistory is not accurate enough, if the confidence intervals around each measurement are too wide, or if (say) the velocity estimate is wrong altogether, then the Kalman Filter does not work and Apollo doesn’t happen.

At a surface level, the Kalman filter resembles the kind of time series analysis that’s common in finance. The key difference is that the Kalman filter is used on reproducible systems while finance is typically a non-reproducible system. If you’re using the Kalman filter to guide a drone from point A to point B, but you have a bug in your code and the drone crashes, you can simply pick up the drone⁸⁵, put it back on the launch pad at point A, and try again. Because you can repeat the experiment over and over, you can eventually get very precise measurements and a functioning guidance algorithm. That’s a reproducible system.

In finance, however, you usually can’t just keep re-running a trading algorithm that makes money and get the same result. Eventually your counterparties will adapt and get wise. A key difference relative to our drone example is the presence of animate objects (other humans) who won’t always do the same thing given the same input.⁸⁶ In fact, they can often be adversarial, observing and reacting to your actions, intentionally confounding your predictions, especially if they can profit from doing so. Past performance is no guarantee of future results in finance, as opposed to physics. Unlike the situation with the drone, a market isn’t a reproducible system.

Microhistory thus has its limits, but it’s an incredibly powerful concept. If we have good enough measurements on the past, then we have a better prediction of the future in an extremely literal sense. If we have tight confidence intervals on our measurements of the past, if the probability distribution $P (x [t - 1])$ is highly peaked, then we get correspondingly tight confidence intervals on the present $P (x [t])$ and the future $P (x [t + 1])$ . Conversely, the more uncertainty about your past, the more confused you are about where you’re from and where you’re going, the more likely your rocket will crash. It’s Orwell more literally than he ever expected: he who controls the past controls the future, in the direct sense that he has better control theory. Only a civilization with a strong capacity for accurate microhistory could ever make it to the moon.

This is a powerful analogy for civilization. A group of people who doesn’t know who they are or where they came from won’t ever make it to the moon, let alone to Mars.

Can we make it more than an analogy?

Macrohistory is the History of Non-Reproducible Systems

Macrohistory is the history of a non-reproducible system, one which has too many variables to easily be reset and replayed from the beginning. It is history that is not directly amenable to controlled experiment. At small scale, that’s the unpredictable flow of a turbulent fluid; at very large scale, it’s the history of humanity.

We think of macrohistory as being on a continuum with microhistory. Why? We’ll make a few points and then tie them all together.

First, science progresses by taking phenomena formerly thought of as non-reproducible (and hence unpredictable) systems, isolating the key variables, and turning them into reproducible (and hence predictable) systems. For example, Koch’s postulates include the idea of transmission pathogenesis, which turned the vague concept of infection via “miasma” into a reproducible phenomenon: expose a mouse to a specific microorganism in a laboratory setting and an infection arises, but not otherwise.
Second, and relatedly, science progresses by improved instrumentation, by better recordkeeping. Star charts enabled celestial navigation. Johann Balmer’s documentation of the exact spacing of hydrogen’s emission spectra led to quantum mechanics. Gregor Mendel’s careful counting of pea plants led to modern genetics. Things we counted as simply beyond human ken — the stars, the atom, the genome — became things humans can comprehend by simply counting.
Third, how do we even know anything about the history of ancient Rome or Egypt or Medieval Europe? From artifacts and written records. Thousands of years ago, people were scratching customer reviews into a stone tablet, one of the first tablet-based apps. We know who Abelard and Heloise were from their letters to each other. We know what the Romans were like from what they recorded. To a significant extent, what we know about history is what we’ve recovered from what people wrote down.
Fourth, today, we have digital documentation on an unprecedented scale. We have billions of people using social media each day for almost a decade now. We also have billions of phones taking daily photographs and videos. We have countless data feeds of instruments. And we have massive hard drives to store it all. So, if reckoned on the basis of raw bytes, we likely record more information in a day than all of humanity recorded up to the year 1900. It is by far the most comprehensive log of human activity we’ve ever had.

We can now see the continuum⁸⁷ between macrohistory and microhistory. We are collecting the kinds of precise, quantitative, microhistorical measurements that typically led to the emergence of a new science…but at the scale of billions of people, and going into our second decade.

So, another term for “Big Data” should be “Big History.” All data is a record of past events, sometimes the immediate past, sometimes the past of months or years ago, sometimes (in the case of Google Books or the Digital Michelangelo project) the past of decades or centuries ago. After all, what’s another word for data storage in a computer? Memory. Memory, as in the sense of human memory, and as in the sense of history.

That memory is commercially valuable. A technologist who neglects history ensures their users will get exploited. Proof? Consider reputation systems. Any scaled marketplace has them. The history of an Uber driver or rider’s on-platform behavior partially predicts their future behavior. Without years of star ratings, without memories of past actions of millions of people, these platforms would be wrecked by fraud. Macrohistory makes money.

This is just one example. There are huge short and long-term incentives to record all this data, all this microhistory and macrohistory. And future historians⁸⁸ will study our digital log to understand what we were like as a civilization.

Bitcoin’s Blockchain Is a Technology for Robust Macrohistory

There are some catches to the concept of digital macrohistory, though: silos, bots, censors, and fakes. As we’ll show, Bitcoin and its generalizations provide a powerful way to solve these issues.

First, let’s understand the problems of silos, bots, censors, and fakes. The macrohistorical log is largely siloed across different corporate servers, on the premises of Twitter and Facebook and Google. The posts are typically not digitally signed or cryptographically timestamped, so much of the content is (or could be) from bots rather than humans. Inconvenient digital history can be deleted by putting sufficient pressure on centralized social media companies or academic publishers, censoring true information in the name of taking down “disinformation,” as we’ve already seen. And the advent of AI allows highly realistic fakes of the past and present to be generated. If we’re not careful, we could drown in fake data.

So, how could someone in the future (or even the present) know if a particular event they didn’t directly observe was real? The Bitcoin blockchain gives one answer. It is the most rigorous form of history yet known to man, a history that is technically and economically resistant to revision. Thanks to a combination of cryptographic primitives and financial incentives, it is very challenging to falsify the who, what, and when of transactions written to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Who initiated this transfer, what amount of Bitcoin did they send, what metadata did they attach to the transaction, and when did they send it? That information is recorded in the blockchain and sufficient to give a bare bones history of the entire Bitcoin economy since 2009. And if you sum up that entire history to the present day, you also get the values of how much BTC is held by each address. It’s an immediatist model of history, where the past is not even past - it’s with us at every second.

In a little more detail, why is the Bitcoin blockchain so resistant to the rewriting of history? To falsify the “who” of a single transaction you’d need to fake a digital signature, to falsify the “what” you’d need to break a hash function, to falsify the “when” you’d need to corrupt a timestamp, and you’d need to do this while somehow not breaking all the other records cryptographically connected to that transaction through the mechanism of composed block headers.

Some call the Bitcoin blockchain a timechain, because unlike many other blockchains, its proof-of-work mechanism and difficulty adjustment ensure a statistically regular time interval between blocks, crucial to its function as a digital history.

(I recognize that these concepts and some of what follows is technical. Our whirlwind tour may provoke either familiar head-nodding or confused head-scratching. If you want more detail, we’ve linked definitions of each term, but fully explaining them is beyond the scope of this work. However, see The Truth Machine for a popular treatment and Dan Boneh’s Cryptography course for technical detail.)

Nevertheless, here’s the point for even a nontechnical reader: the Bitcoin blockchain gives a history that’s hard to falsify. Unless there’s an advance in quantum computing, a breakthrough in pure math, a heretofore unseen bug in the code, or a highly expensive 51% attack that probably only China could muster, it is essentially infeasible to rewrite the history of the Bitcoin blockchain — or anything written to it. And even if such an event does happen, it wouldn’t be an instantaneous burning of Bitcoin’s Library of Alexandria. The hash function could be replaced with a quantum-safe version, or another chain robust to said attack could take Bitcoin’s place, and back up the ledger of all historical Bitcoin transactions to a new protocol.

With that said, we are not arguing that Bitcoin is infallible. We are arguing that it is the best technology yet invented for recording human history. And if the concept of cryptocurrency can endure past the invention of quantum decryption, we will likely think of the beginning of cryptographically verifiable history as on par with the beginning of written history millennia ago. Future societies may think of the year 2022 AD as the year 13 AS, with “After Satoshi” as the new “Anno Domini,” and the block clock as the new universal time.

The Bitcoin Blockchain Can Record Non-Bitcoin Events

For the price of a single transaction, the Bitcoin blockchain can be generalized to provide a cryptographically verifiable record of any historical event, a proof-of-existence.

For example, perhaps there is some off-chain event of significant importance where you want to store it for the record. Suppose it’s the famous photo of Stalin with his cronies, because you anticipate the rewriting of history. The proof-of-existence technique we’re about to describe wouldn’t directly be able to prove the data of the file was real, but you could establish the metadata on the file — the who, what, and when — to a future observer.

Specifically, given a proof-of-existence, a future observer would be able to confirm that a given digital signature (who) put a given hash of a photo (what) on chain at a given time (when). That future observer might well suspect the photo could still be fake, but they’d know it’d have to be faked at that precise time by the party controlling that wallet. And the evidence would be on-chain years before the airbrushed official photo of Stalin was released. That’s implausible under many models. Who’d fake something so specific years in advance? It’d be more likely the official photo was fake than the proof-of-existence.

So, let’s suppose that this limited level of proof was worth it to you. You are willing to pay such that future generations can see an indelible record of a bit of history. How would you get that proof onto the Bitcoin blockchain?

The way you’d do this is by organizing your arbitrarily large external dataset (a photo, or something much larger than that) into a Merkle tree, calculating a string of fixed length called a Merkle root, and then writing that to the Bitcoin blockchain through OP_RETURN. This furnishes a tool for proof-of-existence for any digital file.

You can do this as a one-off for a single piece of data, or as a periodic backup for any non-Bitcoin chain. So you could, in theory, put a digital summary of many gigabytes of data from another chain on the Bitcoin blockchain every ten minutes for the price of a single BTC transaction, thereby proving it existed. This would effectively “back up” this other blockchain and give it some of the irreversibility properties of Bitcoin. Call this kind of chain a subchain.

By analogy to the industrial use of gold, this type of “industrial” use case of a Bitcoin transaction may turn out to be quite important. A subchain with many millions of off-Bitcoin transactions every ten minutes could likely generate enough economic activity to easily pay for a single Bitcoin transaction.⁸⁹

And as more people try to use the Bitcoin blockchain, given its capacity limits, it might turn out that only industrial use cases like this could afford to pay sufficient fees in this manner, as direct individual use of the Bitcoin blockchain could become expensive.

So, that means we can use the proof-of-existence technique to log arbitrary data to the Bitcoin blockchain, including data from other chains.

Blockchains Can Record the History of an Economy and Society

We just zoomed in to detail how you’d log a single transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain to prove any given historical event happened. Now let’s zoom out.

As noted, the full scope of what the Bitcoin blockchain represents is nothing less than the history of an entire economy. Every transaction is recorded since $t = 0$ . Every fraction of a BTC is accounted for, down to one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin. Nothing is lost.

Except, of course, for all the off-chain data that accompanies a transaction - like the identity of the sender and receiver, the reason for their transaction, the SKU of any goods sold, and so on. There are usually good reasons for these things to remain private, or partially private, so you might think this is a feature.

The problem is that Bitcoin’s design is a bit of a tweener, as it doesn’t actually ensure that public transactions remain private. Indeed there are companies like Elliptic and Chainalysis devoted entirely to the deanonymization of public Bitcoin addresses and transactions. The right model of the history of the Bitcoin economy is that it’s in a hybrid state, where the public has access to the raw transaction data, but private actors (like Chainalysis and Elliptic) have access to much more information and can deanonymize many transactions.

Moreover, Bitcoin can only execute Bitcoin transactions, rather than all the other kinds of digital operations you could facilitate with more blockspace. But people are working on all of this.

Zero-knowledge technology like ZCash, Ironfish, and Tornado Cash allow on-chain attestation of exactly what people want to make public and nothing more.
Smart contract chains like Ethereum and Solana extend the capability of what can be done on chain, at the expense of higher complexity.
Decentralized social networks like Mirror and DeSo put social events on chain alongside financial transactions.
Naming systems like the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Solana Name Service (SNS) attach identity to on-chain transactions.
Incorporation systems allow the on-chain representation of corporate abstractions above the level of a mere transaction, like financial statements or even full programmable company-equivalents like DAOs.
New proof techniques like proof-of-solvency and proof-of-location extend the set of things one can cryptographically prove on chain from the basic who/what/when of Bitcoin.
Cryptocredentials, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Non-Transferable Fungibles (NTFs), and Soulbounds allow the representation of non-financial data on chain, like diplomas or endorsements.

What’s the point? If blockspace continues to increase, ever more of the digital history of our economy and society will be recorded on chain, in a cryptographically verifiable yet privacy-preserving way. The analogy is to the increase in bandwidth, which now allows us to download a megabyte of JavaScript on a mobile phone to run a webapp, an unthinkable indulgence in the year 2000.

This is a breakthrough in digital macrohistory that addresses the issues of silos, bots, censors, and fakes. Public blockchains aren’t siloed in corporations, but publicly accessible. They provide new tools, like staking and ENS-style identity, that allow separation of bots from humans. They can incorporate many different proof techniques, including proof-of-existence and more, to address the problem of deepfakes. And they can have very strong levels of censorship resistance by paying transaction fees to hash their chain state to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Cryptohistory is Cryptographically Verifiable Macrohistory

We can now see how the expansion of blockspace is on track to give us a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory, or cryptohistory for short.

This is the log of everything that billions of people choose to make public: every decentralized tweet, every public donation, every birth and death certificate, every marriage and citizenship record, every crypto domain registration, every merger and acquisition of an on-chain entity, every financial statement, every public record — all digitally signed, timestamped, and hashed in freely available public ledgers.⁹⁰

The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit — all of that produces digital artifacts.

So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community.⁸⁹ That’s the future of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what paper records were to oral records.

It’s also a vision for what macrohistory will become. Not a scattered letter from an Abelard here and a stone tablet from an Egyptian there. But a full log, a cryptohistory. The unification of microhistory and macrohistory in one giant cryptographically verifiable dataset. We call this indelible, computable, digital, authenticatable history the ledger of record.

This concept is foundational to the network state. And it can be used for good or ill. In decentralized form, the ledger of record allows an individual to resist the Stalinist rewriting of the past. It is the ultimate expression of the bottom-up view of history as what’s written to the ledger. But you can also imagine a bastardized form, where the cryptographic checks are removed, the read/write access is centralized, and the idea of a total digital history is used by a state to create an NSA/China-like system of inescapable, lifelong surveillance.⁹¹

This in turn leads us to a top-down view of history, the future trajectory we want to avoid, where political power is used to defeat technological truth.

Political Power and Technological Truth

In the top-down view, history is written by the winners. It is about political power triumphing over technological truth.

Why does power care about the past? Because the morality of society is derived from its history. When the Chinese talk about Western imperialism, they aren’t just talking about some forgettable dust-up in the South China Sea, but how that relates to generations of colonialism and oppression, to the Eight Nations Alliance and the Opium Wars and so on. And when you see someone denounced on American Twitter as an x-ist, history is likewise being brought to bear. Again, why are they bad? Because of our history of x-ism…

As such, when you listen to a regime’s history, which you are doing every time you hear its official organs praise or denounce someone, you should listen critically.

Political Power as the Driving Force of History

How do the authorities use history? What techniques are they using? It’s not just a random collection of names and dates. They have proven techniques for sifting through the archives, for staffing a retinue of heros and villains from the past, for distilling the documents into (politically) useful parables. Here are two of them.

Political determinist model: history is written by the winners. People have heard this saying, but taking it seriously has profound implications. For example, whoever claims to be writing the “first draft of history” is therefore one of the winners. For another, history is what’s useful to the regime. A classic example is Katyn Forest: the admission that the Soviets did it would have delegitimized their postwar control over Poland during the 1945-1991 period, but once the USSR collapsed the truth could be revealed.
Political mascot model: history is written by winners pretending to be acting on behalf of losers. This is a variant of the political determinist model, also known as “offense archaeology,” and practiced by the modern American, Chinese, and Russian establishments — all of whom portray themselves as victims. The technique is to pick a mascot that the state claims to champion, such as the Soviet Union’s proletariat, and then go through history to find the worst examples of the state’s current rival doing something bad to them.

Take these real events, put them on the front page, and ensure everyone knows of them. Conversely, ensure off-narrative events are ignored or suppressed as taboo. Again taking the USSR as a case study, this involved finding endless (real!) examples of Western capitalists screwing the working class, and suppressing the worse (also real!) instances of Soviet communists gulaging their working class, as well as cases of the working class itself behaving badly. Generalization to other contexts is left as an exercise for the reader, but here’s a Russian example of what an American would call “responsibility to protect” (R2P).

These techniques are used to write history that favors a state. Here are more examples:

CCP China: Today’s Chinese media covers the Eight-Nations Alliance, the Opium Wars, and the like exhaustively in its domestic output, as these events show the malevolence of the European colonialists — who literally fought wars to keep China subjugated and addicted to heroin. Their domestic history does not mention the Uighurs, Tiananmen, and the like domestically. Xi’s CCP did stress the domestic problem of corruption via the “Tigers and Flies” campaign…but that’s in part because the anti-corruption campaign was politically useful against his internal enemies, and seemed not to ensnare his allies.
US Establishment: Today’s US establishment covers 6/4/1989 and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War heavily, because they are real events that make China and Russia look bad and the US look good. It does not mention the 1900 Eight-Nations Alliance (when the US helped invade China with a “coalition of the willing” to defend European imperialism) or the 1932 Ukrainian Holodomor (when The New York Times Company’s Walter Duranty helped Soviet Russia choke out Ukraine) as these cut in the opposite direction.

The current US narrative also does not stress the Cultural Revolution (which bears too close a resemblance to present day America), or Western journalists like Edgar Snow who helped Mao come to power, or the full ugly history of American support for Russian and Chinese communism. This isn’t simply a matter of the age of events — after all, regime media goes back further in time when convenient, distorting events from 1619 for today’s headlines, yet somehow their time machine stutters on the years 1932 or 1900. In modern America, as in modern China, the history you hear about is the history the establishment finds to be politically useful against its internal and external rivals.
The British Empire: The British in both WW1 and WW2 understandably emphasized the evils of Germany, but not so much the evils of their ally Russia, or their own evils during the Opium Wars, or the desire for the Indian subcontinent to breathe free, and so on. (This one is almost too easy as the UK is no longer a contender for heavyweight champion of the world, so no one is offended when someone points out its past self-serving inconsistencies. Indeed, documenting the UK’s sins is now a cottage industry for Britain’s virtue signalers, as beating up on a beaten empire is far easier than tackling the taboos of a still live one.)

Point being: once you get your head out of the civilization you grew up in, and look at things comparatively, the techniques of political history become obvious. One of those techniques deserves special mention, and that’s a peacetime version of the “atrocity story”:

One of the most time-honored techniques to mobilize public animosity against the enemy and to justify military action is the atrocity story. This technique, says Professor Lasswell, has been used “with unvarying success in every conflict known to man.”

The concept is as useful in peacetime as it is in war. Why? Because states get their people hyped up to fight wars by stressing the essentially defensive nature of what they are doing and the savage behavior of the enemy. But war is politics by other means, so politics is war by other means. Even in peacetime, the state is predicated on force. And this use of force requires justification. The atrocity story is the tool used to convince people that the use of state force is legitimate.

Coming from a different vantage point, Rene Girard would call this a “founding murder.” Once you see this technique, you see it everywhere. Somewhat toned-down versions of the atrocity story are the go-to technique used to justify expansions of political power.

If we don’t force people to take off their shoes at the airport, people will die!
If we don’t stop people from voluntarily taking experimental curative drugs, people will die!
If we don’t set up a disinformation office to stop people from making hostile comments online, people will die!

Indeed, almost everything in politics is backed by an atrocity story.⁹² There’s a sometimes real, sometimes fake, sometimes exaggerated Girardian founding murder (or at least founding injury) behind much of what the government does.

Sometimes the atrocity story is framed in terms of terrorists, sometimes in terms of children…but the general concept is “something so bad happened, we must use (state) force to prevent it from happening again.” Often this completely ignores the death caused by that force itself. For example, when the FDA “prevented” deaths by cracking down on drug approvals after thalidomide, it caused many more deaths via Eroom’s Law and drug lag.

And sometimes the atrocity story is just completely fake; before Iraq was falsely accused of holding WMD, it was falsely accused of tossing babies from incubators.

With that said, it’s possible to overcorrect here. Just because there is an incentive to fake (or exaggerate) atrocities does not mean that all atrocities are fake or exaggerated.⁹³ Yes, you should be aware that states are always “flopping,” exaggerating the severity of the fouls against them or the mascots they claim to represent, trying to bring in the public on their side, whether they are Chinese or American or Russian.

But once you’re aware of the political power model of history, the next goal is to guard against both the Scylla and the Charybdis, against being too credulous and too cynical. Because just as the atrocity story is a tool for political power, unfortunately so too is genocide denial — as we can see from The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverup of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine.

To maintain this balance, to know when states are lying or not, we need a form of truth powerful enough to stand outside any state and judge it from above. A way to respond to official statistics not with either reflexive faith or disbelief, but with dispassionate, independent calculation.

The bottom-up cryptohistory we introduced in the previous section is clearly relevant. But to fully appreciate it we need an allied theory: the technological truth theory of history.

Technological Truth as the Driving Force of History

The political power model of history gives us a useful lens: history is often just Leninist who/whom and Schmittian friend/enemy. But it’s a little parched⁹⁴ to say that history is always and only that, solely about the raw exercise of political power. After all, a society must pass down true facts about nature, for example, or else its crops will not grow⁹⁵ — and its political class will lose power.

This leads to a different set of tech-focused lenses for analyzing history.

Technological determinist model: technology is the driving force of history. While the political determinist model stresses that history is written — and hence distorted — by the winners, and thereby propagates only that which is useful to a given state, the technological determinist model notes that there are some key areas — principally in science and technology — where many (if not most) societies derive a benefit from passing down a technical fact without distortion. There is after all an unbroken chain from Archimedes, Aryabhata, Al-Kwarizhmi, and antiquity to all our existing science and technology. Hundreds of years later, we don’t care that much about the laws of Isaac Newton’s time, but we do care about Newton’s laws. In this model, all political ideologies have been around for all time — the only thing that changes is whether a given ideology is now technologically feasible as an organizing system for humanity. Thus: political fashions just come and go in cycles, so the absolute measure of societal progress is a culture’s level of technological advancement on something like the Kardashev scale.
Trajectory model: histories are trajectories. We mentioned this concept before when we discussed history as a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories, but it’s worth reprising. If you’re technically inclined, you might wonder why we spend so much time on history in this book. One answer is that histories are trajectories of dynamical systems. If you can spend your entire life studying wave equations, diffusion equations, time series, or the Navier-Stokes equations — and you can — you can do the same for the dynamics of people. In more detail, we know from physics (and Stephen Wolfram!) that very simple rules can produce incredibly complicated trajectories of dynamical systems. For Navier-Stokes, for example, we can divide these trajectories up into laminar flow, turbulent flow, inviscid flow, incompressible flow, and so on, to describe different ways a velocity field can evolve over time. These classifications are derived from measurements made of fluids over time. And the study of just one of these trajectory types can be a whole research discipline.

That’s how rich the dynamics of inanimate objects are. Now compare that to the macroscopic movements of millions of intelligent agents. You can similarly try to derive rules about how humans behave under situations of laminar good times, turbulent revolutionary times, and so on by studying the records we have of human behavior — the data exhaust that humans produce.

This analogy is actually very tight if you think about virtual economies and the history of human behavior on social networks and cryptosystems. In the fullness of time, with truly open datasets, we may even be able to develop Asimovian psychohistory from all the data recorded in the ledger of record, namely a way to predict the macroscopic behavior of humans in certain situations without knowing every microscopic detail. We can already somewhat do this for constructed environments like games⁹⁶ and markets, and ever more human environments are becoming literally digitally constructed.⁹⁷
Statistical model: history aids predictions. From a statistician’s perspective, history is necessary for accurately computing the future. See any time series analysis or machine learning paper — or the Kalman filter, which makes this concept very explicit. To paraphrase Orwell, without a quantitatively accurate record of the past you cannot control the future, in the sense that your control theory literally won’t work.
Helix model: linear and cyclical history can coexist. From a progressive’s perspective, history is a linear trend, where the “arc of history” bends towards freedom, and where those against a given cause are on the wrong side of history⁹⁸. Others think of history as cyclical, a constant loop where the only thing these technologists are doing is reinventing the wheel, or where “strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times create strong men.” But there’s a third view, a helical view of history, which says that from one viewpoint history is indeed progressive, from another it’s genuinely cyclical, and the reconciliation is that we move a bit forward technologically with each turn of the corkscrew rather than collapsing. In this view, attempts to restore the immediate preceding state are unlikely, as they’re rewinding the clock — but you might be able to get to a good state by winding the helix all the way past 12’o’clock to get the reboot. Or you might just collapse.
Ozymandias model: civilization can collapse. History shows us that technological progress is not inevitable. The Fall of Civilizations podcast really makes this clear. Gobekli Tepe is one example. Whether you’re thinking of this as an astronomer (where are all the intelligent life forms out there? Is the universe a dark forest?) or an anthropologist (how did all these advanced civilizations just completely die out?), it’s sobering to think that our civilization may just be like the best player in a video game so far: we’ve made it the furthest, but we have no guarantee that we’re going to win before killing ourselves⁹⁹ and wiping out like all the other civilizations before us.
Lenski model: organisms are not ordinal. Richard Lenski ran a famous series of long-term evolution experiments with E. coli where he picked out a fresh culture of bacteria each day, froze it down in suspended animation, and thereby saved a snapshot of what each day of evolution looked like over the course of decades. The amazing thing about bacteria is that they can be unfrozen and reanimated, so Lenski could take an old E. coli strain from day 1173 and put it into a test tube with today’s strain to see who’d reproduce the most in a head-to-head competition. The result showed that history is not strictly ordinal; just because the day 1174 strain had outcompeted the day 1173 strain, and the day 1175 strain had outcompeted the day 1174 strain, and so on — does not necessarily mean that today’s strain will always win a head to head with the strain from day 1173. The complexity of biology is such that it’s more like an unpredictable game of rock/paper/scissors.
Train Crash model: those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Another way to think about history is as a set of expensive experiments, where people often made certain choices that seemed reasonable at the time and ended up in calamitous straits. That’s communism, for example: a persuasive idea for many, but one that history shows to not actually produce great results in practice.
Idea Maze model: those who overfit to history will never invent the future. This is the counterargument to the Train Crash model — past results may not predict future performance, and sometimes you need to have a beginner’s mindset to innovate. Generally this works better for opt-in technologies and investments than top-down modifications of society like communism. One tool for this comes from a concept I wrote up a while ago called the idea maze. The relevant bit here is that just because a business proposition didn’t work in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work today. The technological and social prerequisites may have dramatically changed, and doors previously closed may now have opened. Unlike the laws of physics, society is not time invariant. As even the world’s leading anti-tech blog once admitted:

Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way, it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead, they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches — until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.
Wright-Fisher model: history is what survives natural selection. In population genetics, there’s an important model of how mutations arise and spread called the Wright-Fisher model. When a new mutation arises, it’s in only 1 out of N people. How does it get to N out of N, to 100%, to what’s called “fixation”? Well, first, it might not ever do that. It might just die out. It might also get to N out of N simply by luck, if the population of N is small — this is known as “fixation by genetic drift,” where those with the mutation just happen to reproduce more than others. But if the mutation confers some selective advantage $s$ , if it aids in the reproduction of its host in a competitive environment, then it has a better than luck chance of getting to 100%. Similarly, those historical ideas that we’ve heard about can be thought of as those that aided or at least did not interfere with the propagation of their respective carriers, often the authorities that write those histories. Some of these ideas have tagged along by dumb luck, while others are claims that were selectively advantageous to the success of the regime - often by delegitimizing their rivals and legitimizing their own rule, or by giving them new technologies. This is a theory of memetic evolution; the ideological mutations that add technological edge or political power are the ones selected for.
Computational model: history is the on-chain population; all the rest is editorialization. There’s a great book by Franco Moretti called Graphs, Maps, and Trees. It’s a computational study of literature. Moretti’s argument is that every other study of literature is inherently biased. The selection of which books to discuss is itself an implicit editorialization. He instead makes this completely explicit by creating a dataset of full texts, and writing code to produce graphs. The argument here is that only a computational history can represent the full population in a statistical sense; anything else is just a biased sample.
Genomic model: history is what DNA (and languages, and artifacts) show us. David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here is the canonical popular summary of this school of thought, along with Cavalli-Sforza’s older book on the History and Geography of Human Genes. The brief argument is: our true history is written in our genes. Mere texts can be faked, distorted, or lost, but genomics (modern or ancient) can’t be. Languages and artifacts are a bit less robust in terms of the signal for historical reconstruction, though they often map to what the new genomic studies are showing about patterns of ancient migrations.
Tech Tree model: history is great men constrained by the adjacent possible. As context, the great man theory of history says that individuals like Isaac Newton and Winston Churchill shaped events. The counterargument says that these men were carried on tides larger than them, and that others would have done the same in their place. For example, for many (not all) Newtons, there is a Leibniz, who could also have invented calculus. It’s impossible to fully test either of these theories without a Lenski-like experiment where we re-run history with the same initial conditions, but a useful model to reconcile the two perspectives is the tech tree from Civilization. Briefly, all known science represents the frontier of the tree, and an individual can choose to extend that tree in a given direction. There wasn’t really a Leibniz for Satoshi, for example; at a time when others were focused on social, mobile, and local, he was working on a completely different paradigm. But he was constrained by the available subroutines, concepts like Hashcash and chained timestamps and elliptic curves. Just like da Vinci could have conceived a helicopter, but probably not built it with the materials then available, the tech tree model allows for individual agency but subjects it to the constraint of what is achievable by one person in a given era. The major advantage of a tech tree is that (like the idea maze) it can be made visible, and navigable, as has been done for longevity by the Foresight Institute.

You might find it a bit surprising that there are as many different models for understanding history — let’s call them historical heuristics — as there are programming paradigms. Why might this be so? Well, just like the idea of statecraft strategies that we introduce later, the study of history can also be analogized to a type of programming, or at least data analysis. That is, history is the analysis of the log files.

Data exhaust model: history as the analysis of the log files. Here, we mean “log files” in the most general sense of everything society has written down or left behind; the documents, yes, but also the physical artifacts and genes and artwork, just like a log “file” can contain binary objects and not just plain text.

Extending the analogy, you can try to debug a program by flying blind without the logs, or alternatively you can try to look at every row of the logs, but rather than either of these extremes you’ll do best if you have a method for distilling the logs into something actionable.

And that’s why historical heuristics exist. They are strategies for distilling insight from all the documents, genes, languages, transactions, inventions, collapses, and successes of people over time. History is the entire record of everything humanity has done. It’s a very rich data structure that we have only begun to even think of as a data structure.

We can now think of written history as an (incomplete, biased, noisy) distillation of this full log. After all, if you’ve ever found a reporter’s summary of an eyewitness video to be wanting, or found a single video misleading relative to multiple camera angles, you’ll realize why having access to the full log of public events is a huge step forward.

A Collision of Political Power and Technological Truth

We’ve now defined a top-down and bottom-up model of history. The collision of these two models, of the establishment’s Orwellian relativism¹⁰⁰ and the absolute truth of the Bitcoin blockchain, of political power and technological truth…that collision is worth studying.

Let’s do three concrete examples where political power has encountered technological truth.

Tesla > NYT. Elon Musk used the instrumental record of a Tesla drive to knock down an NYT story. The New York Times Company claimed the car had run out of charge, but his dataset showed they had purposefully driven it around to make this happen, lying about their driving history. His numbers overturned their letters.
Timestamp > Macron, NYT. Twitter posters used a photo’s timestamp to disprove a purported photo of the Brazilian fires that was tweeted by Emmanuel Macron and printed uncritically by NYT. The photo was shown via reverse image search to be taken by a photographer who had died in 2003, so it was more than a decade old. This was a big deal because The Atlantic was literally calling for war with Brazil over these (fake) photos.
Provable patent priority. A Chinese court used an on-chain timestamp to establish priority in a patent suit. One company proved that it could not have infringed the patent of the other, because it had filed “on chain” before the other company had filed.

In the first and second examples, the employees of the New York Times Company simply misrepresented the facts as they are wont to do, circulating assertions that were politically useful against two of their perennial opponents: the tech founder and the foreign conservative. Whether these misrepresentations were made intentionally or out of “too good to check” carelessness, they were both attempts to exercise political power that ran into the brick wall of technological truth. In the third example, the Chinese political system delegated the job of finding out what was true to the blockchain.

In all three cases, technology provided a more robust means of determining what was true than the previous gold standards — whether that be the “paper of record” or the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized establishment.

A Definition of Political and Technological Truths

It isn’t always possible to decentralize the determination of truth away from a political establishment. Some truths are intrinsically relative (and hence political), whereas others are amenable to absolute verification (and hence technological).

Here’s the key: is it true if others believe it to be true, or is it true regardless of what people believe?

A political truth is true if everyone believes it to be true. Things like money, status, and borders are in this category. You can change these by rewriting facts in people’s brains. For example, the question of what a dollar is worth, who the president is, and where the border of a country is are all dependent on the ideas installed in people’s heads. If enough people change their minds, markets move, presidents change, and borders shift.¹⁰¹

Conversely, a technical truth is true even if no human believes it to be true. Facts in math, physics, and biochemistry are in this category. They exist independent of what’s in people’s brains. For example, what’s the value of $π$ , the speed of light, or the diameter of a virus? ¹⁰²

Those are the two extremes: political truths that you can change by rewriting the software in people’s brains, and technical truths that exist independent of that.

A Balance of Political Power and Technological Truth

Once you reluctantly recognize that not every aspect of a sociopolitical order can be derived from an objective calculation, and that some things really do depend on an arbitrary consensus, you realize that we need to maintain a balance between political power and technological truth.¹⁰³

Towards this end, the Chinese have a pithy saying: the backwards will be beaten. If you’re bad at technology, you’ll be beaten politically. Conversely, the Americans also have a saying: “you and what army?” It doesn’t matter how good you are as an individual technologist if you’re badly outnumbered politically. And if you’re unpopular enough, you won’t have the political power to build in the physical world.

Combining these views tells us to seek a balance between nationalism and rationalism, where the former is thought of in the broadest sense as “group identity.” It’s a balance between political power and technological truth, between ingroup-stabilizing narratives and inconvenient facts. And you need both.

So that’s how the political and technological theories of history interrelate. Technological history is the history of what works; political history is the history of what works to retain power. Putting all the pieces together:

We have a political theory of history that says “social and political incentives favor the propagation of politically useful narratives.”
We have a technological theory of history that says “financial and technical incentives favor the propagation of technological truths.”
We have a set of examples that show how politically powerful actors were constrained by decentralizing technology.
We have more examples that show that some facts really are determined by societal consensus, while others are amenable to decentralized verification.
And we understand why groups need both to survive; the backwards will be beaten, while the unpopular will never have political power in the first place.

Can we generalize these observations into a broader thesis, into an overarching theory that includes the clash of political power and technological truth as a special case? We can. And that leads us to a discussion of God, State, and Network.

God, State, Network

The collision between the top-down and bottom-up views of history, between history as written by the winners and history as written to the ledger, between political power and technological truth…that encounter is a collision of Leviathans.

To understand this, imagine two schoolboys fighting on a playground. It’s not long before one of them says “my dad can beat up your dad!” There’s profundity in this banality. Even at a very young age, a child believes he can appeal to a higher power, a Leviathan, a powerful man who can sweep the field of his enemies, including Robert from recess.

Men are not so different from children in this regard. Every doctrine has its Leviathan, that prime mover who hovers above all. For a religion, it is God. For a political movement, it is the State. And for a cryptocurrency, it is the Network. These three Leviathans hover over fallible men to make them behave in pro-social ways.

Once we generalize beyond God, once we realize there’s not one but three Leviathans in a Hobbesian sense, much becomes clear. Movements that aren’t God-worshipping religions are often State-worshipping political movements or Network-worshipping crypto tribes. Many progressive atheists are by no means astatists; they worship the State as if it were God. And many libertarian atheists may not believe in either God or the State, but they do believe in the Network - whether that be their social network or their cryptocurrency.

This deserves some elaboration.

What is the Most Powerful Force in the World?

The first Leviathan was God. In the 1800s, people didn’t steal because they actually feared God. They believed in a way that’s hard for us to understand, they thought of God as an active force in the world, firing-and-brimstoning away. They wanted god-fearing men in power, because a man who genuinely believed in God would behave well even if no one could punish him. That is, a powerful leader who actually believed that eternal damnation was the punishment for violating religious edicts could be relied upon by the public even if no human could see whether he had misbehaved. At least, this is a rational retrofitting of why being genuinely “god-fearing” was important to people, though they might not articulate it in quite that way. God was the ultimate force, the Leviathan.

By the late 1800s, Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead.” What he meant is that a critical mass of the intelligentsia didn’t believe in God anymore, not in the same way their forefathers did. In the absence of God, a new Leviathan now rose to pre-eminence, one that existed before but gained new significance: the State. And so in the 1900s, why didn’t you steal? Because even if you didn’t believe in God, the State would punish you. The full global displacement of God by the State (something already clearly underway in France since 1789) led to the giant wars of the 20th century, Democratic Capitalism vs Nazism vs Communism. These new faiths replaced g-o-d with g-o-v, faiths which centered the State over God as the most powerful force on earth.

That brings us to the present. Now, today, as you can see from this graph and this one, it is not just God that is dead. It is the State that is dying. Because here in the early innings of the 21st century, faith in the State is plummeting. Faith in God has crashed too, though there may be some inchoate revival of religious faith pending. But it is the Network — the internet, the social network, and now the crypto network — that is the next Leviathan.

So: in the 1800s you wouldn’t steal because God would smite you, in the 1900s you didn’t steal because the State would punish you, but in the 2000s you can’t steal because the Network won’t let you.¹⁰⁴ Either the social network will mob you, or the cryptocurrency network won’t let you steal because you lack the private key, or (eventually) the networked AI will detect you, or all of the above.

Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation.

Rubber Hoses Don’t Scale

Now, the obvious response is that a state like Venezuela can still try to beat someone up to get that solution, do the proverbial rubber hose attack to get their password and private keys — but first they’ll have to find that person’s offline identity, map it to a physical location, establish that they have jurisdiction, send in the (expensive) special forces, and do this to an endless number of people in an endless number of locations, while dealing with various complications like anonymous remailers, multisigs, zero-knowledge, dead-man’s switches, and timelocks. So at a minimum, encryption increases the cost of state coercion.

In other words, seizing Bitcoin is not quite as easy as inflating a fiat currency. It’s not something a hostile state like Venezuela can seize en masse with a keypress, they need to go house-by-house. The only real way around this scalability problem would be a cheap autonomous army of AI police drones, something China may ultimately be capable of, but that’d be expensive and we aren’t there yet.¹⁰⁵

Until then, the history of Satoshi Nakamoto’s successful maintenance of pseudonymity, of Apple’s partial thwarting of the FBI, and of the Bitcoin network’s resilience to the Chinese state’s mining shutdown show that the Network’s pseudonymity and cryptography are already partially obstructing at least some of the State’s surveillance and violence.

Encryption thus limits governments in a way no legislation can. And as described at length in this piece, it’s not just about protection of private property. It’s about using encryption and crypto to protect freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of contract, prevention from discrimination and cancellation via pseudonymity, individual privacy, and truly equal protection under rule-of-code — even as the State’s paper-based guarantees of the same become ever more hollow. Because the computer always gives the same output given the same input code, unlike the fallible human judiciary with its error-prone (or politicized) enforcement of the law.

In this sense, the Network is the next Leviathan, because on key dimensions it is becoming more powerful and more just than the State.

The Network is the Next Leviathan

When we say that the Network is the next Leviathan, which we can abbreviate as “Network > State” it is useful to give specifics. Here are several concrete examples where the Network’s version of a given social practice is more powerful than the State’s version.

Encryption > State Violence. When there is strong encryption government can’t crack, that means communications states can’t eavesdrop on, transactions they can’t intercept, and digital borders they can’t penetrate. It means nothing less than the ability to organize groups outside state control, and thus a diminution in the power of states to control.
Cryptoeconomy > Fiat Economy. We just discussed this in the context of the Network’s Bitcoin being money the State can’t easily freeze, seize, ban, or print. In theory this is just a special case of the point on encryption, but its implications are broad: all manner of financial instruments, corporate vehicles, accounting, payroll, and the like can be done on-chain outside the control of states.
Peer-to-Peer > State Media. There are two kinds of state media: state-controlled media as in China’s Xinhuanet, or state-control media as in America’s The New York Times. The latter controls the state, the former is controlled by the state, but both fight freedom of speech. Network-facilitated P2P communication is anathema to them, particularly if end-to-end encrypted. Citations in particular are worth calling out here — archival references like Google Books, or NCBI, or archive.is can be linked to prove a point, even if official State channels aren’t presently favoring that point of view.
Social > National. Social networks change many things, but a critical one is that they change the nature of community. Your community is your social network, not necessarily the people who live near you. When the network identity is more salient than the neighor relationship, it challenges the very premise of the Westphalian state, which is that (a) people who live geographically near each other share values and (b) therefore laws should be based on geographic boundaries. The alternative is that only people who are geodesically near each other in the social network share values, and therefore the laws that govern them should be based on network boundaries.
Mobile > Sessile. Mobile is making us more mobile. And law is a function of latitude and longitude; as you change your location, you change the local, state, and federal laws that apply to you. As such, migration is as powerful a way to change the law under which you live as election. COVID-19 lockdowns may be just the beginning of State attempts to control Network-facilitated physical exit. But in normal circumstances, smartphones are helping people move ever more freely, while the borders of physical states are frozen in place.
Virtual Reality > Physical Proximity. As a complement to mobile, the Network offers another way to opt out of State-controlled physical surroundings: namely, to put on a VR (or AR) headset, at which point you are in a completely different world with different people surrounding you and different laws.
Remote > In-person. The Network allows you to work and communicate from anywhere. Combined with mobile, this further increases leverage against the State. The concept of the network state as a division of the world by people rather than by land is particularly important here, as network states are natively built for getting voluntary subscription revenue from people around the world. The diaspora is the state.
International > National. The Network gives people more of a choice over what specific State they are subject to. For example, they can move a server hosting their website from country to country with a few clicks.
Smart Contracts > Law. The State’s paper-based legal system is costly and unpredictable. A similar set of facts in two different cities in the same country could result in a different ruling. Lawyers are expensive, paper contracts have typos and illogic, and cross-border agreements range from complex to impossible. We’re still in the early days of smart contracts, but as we get well-debugged and formally-verified contract libraries, this is an area where the Network is poised to take over from the State. Imagine truly international law: it’s done programmatically rather than via pieces of paper, across borders outside the domain of legacy states, and by global technologists rather than country-specific lawyers.
Cryptographic Verification > Official Confirmation. Perhaps the most important arena in which the Network is stronger than the state is in the nature of truth itself. As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system. It’s the ultimate triumph of the technological truth view of history, as there are now technical and financial incentives for passing down true facts, regardless of the sociopolitical advantages any given government might have for suppressing them. To foreshadow a bit, this ledger of record is history written by the Network rather than the State.

These examples can be multiplied. As mentioned before, Uber and Lyft are better regulators than the State’s paper-based taxi medallions, email is superior to the USPS, and SpaceX is out-executing NASA. If you think about borders, you now need to think about the Network’s telepresence (which defeats physical borders) and its encryption (which erects digital borders). Or if you care about, say, the US census, the Network gives a real-time survey which is far more up to date than the State’s 10 year process.

In short, if you can bring the Network to bear on an issue, it will often be the most powerful force. This is essentially what every startup founder does, all the time: they try to figure out the Network way of doing something, without going through the State. There’s an app for that!

This is conceptually important, because a startup society founder that can reposition a particular conflict such that it is the Network against the State has a chance to win. But if they go through the legacy State, they’ll be an alligator out of water, and they will likely lose.

Network > State: Trump’s Deplatforming

Applying the “Network > State” formulation to recent events, think about January 2021, when — at the behest of the New York Times Company and all of mainstream media — Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter combined to deplatform a sitting president and disappear his supporters’ app from the internet.

This was undeniable proof of the US government’s impotence, because the “most powerful man in the world” was clearly no longer even the most powerful man in his own country. The informal Network (the US establishment) trumped the formal State (the US government).¹⁰⁶

Obviously, Trump and the Republicans weren’t in control of events. Less obviously, elected Democrats weren’t either. Oh, sure, many of them added their voices to the cacophony. But because the First Amendment constrains government capacity to restrain speech, they couldn’t tell the tech CEOs to shut down opposition voices - but the publishers could. And because the final control over these networks is in private hands, state officials didn’t have the final say.

Put another way, the people with their fingers on the button are no longer elected officials of the state. Does the US government feel like it is in charge? That is what Network > State means.

The State is Still A Leviathan

To be clear, the Network does not win every conflict with the State. In many cases the actual outcome is “State > Network.” Indeed, the conflict between these two Leviathans will shape this century like the conflict between the God and State Leviathans shaped the last.

Some examples of “State > Network” include Ross Ulbricht’s arrest by the US government, the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency, the European Union’s GDPR regulation, the COVID lockdowns that inhibited any digital nomad’s ability to exit, the rising number of government internet shutdowns, and the US establishment’s push to censor the internet.

Let’s review a few cases of particular importance: the techxit from San Francisco, the political defeat of tech founders in China, the biasing of AI in the name of AI bias, and the digital deplatforming of establishment critics in both the West and East.

SF city government > Bay Area tech founders. Despite how competent the tech founders of SF were on the Network, the political billionaires of the San Francisco city government managed to use their control of the State to turn the city into a hellhole. Intentionally or not, this had the effect of driving out the new money, their potential competition.

Yes, there have been some successful tech-funded recall efforts recently, but it’s likely too little, too late. It’s akin to a stock price showing a bit of an upward trend after a huge and irreversible drop. Because the Bay Area’s monopoly is over. Technology has now globally decentralized into web3, and San Francisco (and even Silicon Valley) has now lost its position as the undisputed tech capital of the world. You no longer need to go to the Bay Area to build a startup — you can found and fund from anywhere.

This is, on balance, a good thing — the fact that tech is no longer highly dependent on the triple dysfunction of SF/CA/USA is crucial to the world’s future. Note also that while the defeat of tech in SF was due to State > Network, the reason tech lives to fight another day is thanks to remote work, which allowed movement away from SF in a “Techxit.” And remote work is a case of Network > State.
CCP > Chinese tech founders. Until about 2018, Chinese tech founders were celebrated by the CCP. Imagine if Zuckerberg and Dorsey were given the equivalent of Senate seats for their contribution to the economy, brought into the establishment rather than standing at a remove, and you’ll get a sense of what the tone was like. Jack Ma (Alibaba founder), Pony Ma (Tencent founder), and their peers were either one of the 95 million CCP members (<7% of the country) or praised by CCP media.

Then everything shifted. Just like America, China had its own establishment-driven techlash.¹⁰⁷ The huge cost of pausing of the massive ANT Financial IPO on some regulatory pretense was a signal. For the last several years, the CCP has put what it considers to be the “national interest” over enormous sums of money, incurring at least a trillion dollars in cost for COVID lockdowns, shutdowns of IPOs, and overnight bans of entire industries like gaming and Bitcoin mining.

This looks stupid. Maybe it is stupid. Or maybe they know something we don’t. The CCP’s early action in the 2000s and 2010s to ban foreign social networks looks farsighted in retrospect, as if they hadn’t built their own Weibo and WeChat, then US executives in Silicon Valley would have been able to deplatform (or surveil) anyone from China with a keystroke. So, unfortunately, perhaps signaling that there are “more important things than money” and gearing for conflict will turn out to put the CCP in a better position for what comes.

Be that as it may, the Chinese techlash is an example of “State > Network.” The CCP-controlled Chinese State beat the international Network of Chinese tech founders. But it didn’t win forever, as many of the most ambitious founders and funders in China are now using the Network to move abroad and escape the Chinese State.
Biasing AI with AI Bias. Jon Stokes has written at length about “AI ethics” and I’d encourage you to read his work. But in brief, this entire pseudofield is about putting a thumb on the scale of AI algorithms in the name of balancing the scales, particularly at influential tech giants like Google. It’s about ensuring that members of the US establishment are always looking over the shoulder of technologists, making sure that their code is 100% regime compliant¹⁰⁸, just as the Soviet Union did with its commissars, the NSDAP did with gleichschaltung, and Xi has done with Xuexi Qiangguo.¹⁰⁹

The fundamental concept is about asserting moral control over a technological field. AI “ethics” doesn’t really contest what is true or false, it contests what is good and bad. And what is bad? Anything that advances a politically unfavorable narrative. As a concrete example, in 2021, Ukraine was widely reported to be a corrupt country full of Azov Battalion Nazis. By mid 2022, those reports would have been reclassified as “disinformation” and pushed down to page 10 of the search results¹¹⁰, if the AI bias people had their way.

Now, the usual dodge is that there’s always discretion involved in the selection of any machine learning training set, and judgment used in the configuration of any algorithm, so who is to say what “unbiased” means? But the goal here is to make sure that discretion does not scatter randomly, or at the discretion of the individual investigator, but instead consistently points in a single “ethically approved” direction, whether that be submission to NYT (in Blue America) or CCP (in China). It’s centralized political control by another name.

Note also that the name of their field has been chosen to ward off attack. What, are you against ethics in AI? (These are the same people who speak mockingly of “ethics in journalism” when it suits them.)

So, a better term for it is “AI bias,” not as in the study of bias, but as in the study of how to bias AI. And the power the AI bias people have is enormous. A few zealots in the right places at big tech companies can and will distort the Google results of billions of people, until and unless Google’s monopoly is disrupted, or unless the right people within Google push to make their algorithms transparent.¹¹¹ Newspeak isn’t a dystopia for them, it’s an instruction manual.

And they might well win. The episode where Merriam-Webster changed the dictionary in real-time for political purposes is only the beginning; the new Google is about to use its power to centrally change thought.

This is considerably worse than Baidu, which more straightforwardly filters searches that are “problematic” for the CCP. Because the AI bias people pretend that they are doing it for the powerless, when they are really doing it to maintain the US establishment’s power.
Digital Deplatforming. Another example of the State trumping the Network, of political power exercised against technological truth, can be seen in the muzzling of regime-disfavored voices on social media.

As always, this is obvious in China. Say something the CCP doesn’t like on Sina Weibo and your post disappears, and possibly your account and maybe you’re brought in for “tea” by the security forces. But in the West, if you say something the regime doesn’t like on Twitter, your post disappears, and possibly your account, and — in American protectorates like the UK — maybe you’re brought in for “tea” by the security forces.

Ah, didn’t expect that, did you? But click those links. The only reason that UK-style hate speech laws haven’t yet come to the US is the First Amendment, which has also limited to some degree the totality of private attempts at speech and thought control.

Nevertheless, even by 2019 we could see the convergence of the American and Chinese systems in this respect. Just as WeChat blocked mention of Tiananmen, Facebook blocked mention of an alleged whistleblower. Operationally, it’s the same thing. In the East it’s official government censorship, whereas in the West it’s unofficial private censorship, but that’s not a substantive difference - it’s censorship as ordered by the Chinese and US establishments respectively. The substantive difference is that in the West there’s a third faction of decentralized censorship resistance.

The point is that sometimes Network > State (which is new), and sometimes State > Network (which is what most people expect), and the competition between these Leviathans will define our time.

But is it always competition, or could it also be co-optation?

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

As Larry Ellison put it, “choose your competitors carefully, because you’ll become a lot like them.” This is a tech founder’s version of the Hegelian dialectic, where thesis and antithesis mix to form a synthesis.

In other words, when you have three Leviathans (God, State, Network) that keep struggling with each other, they won’t remain pure forms. You’ll see people remix them together to create new kinds of social orders, new hybrids, new syntheses in the Hegelian sense. We already mentioned the Chinese version of this fusion (“the backwards will be beaten”) in the context of political power vs technological truth, but it goes beyond just the determination of truth to how society itself is organized. For example:

God/State: the mid-century US was “for god and country.” It stood against the USSR, where people worshipped the State as God. (Though the US also had a peer-to-peer Network component in the form of permitting capitalism within its borders, and the USSR did too in the form of the “Communist International,” the global network of spies fomenting communist revolution.)
God/Network: this might be something like the Mormons, or the Jewish diaspora before Israel, or any religious diaspora connected by some kind of communications network. It’s a community of shared values connected by a communications network without a formal state.
God/State/Network: this is something like the Jewish diaspora after Israel. Our One Commandment model also draws on this, as a startup society can be based on a traditional religion or on a moral imperative that’s on par with many religious practices, like veganism.

These are political examples of mixing Leviathans, but there are other ways of thinking about the concept.

Synthesis: The Network/God

One important synthesis that deserves special mention is the “Network/God”: a Network God, an AI God, a GPT-9 or DALL·E 10 that gives instant, superhuman answers to difficult questions using the knowledge of all of humanity.

After all, people already do confide to Google as if it were God, or at least a confessions booth. In the 1980s there was a popular children’s book called Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and you can imagine an app version of this where people ask a given AI God for advice.

That god need not be a general AI. It could encode a specific morality. It could be tuned and trained on particular corpora rather than the general web. What would Jesus do (WWJD), in an app? The Chinese Xuexi Qiangguo app could in fact be seen as an early version of this — “What would Xi Jinping do?” — though one could also have decentralized versions.

What would Lee Kuan Yew do? What would David Ben-Gurion do? What would George Washington do? What would the people you respect advise in your situation? A language model trained on their corpora — on all the public text and audio they’ve emitted over their lives, which could amount to many millions of words — may achieve something like the sci-fi episode where people are revived by AI in an app. There’s already a v1, it just needs to be augmented with a VR simulacrum. And even though this kind of thing is painted as negative in media like Her and Black Mirror, it’s really not obvious that getting interactive advice from Lee Kuan Yew’s app is worse than getting it from Lee Kuan Yew’s books.

Synthesis: The Network/State

The study of God/State/Network syntheses brings us to the fusion we’re most interested in: a Network/State, of which one of them is our titular network state. And there are a few different ways to get to a Network/State fusion.

The first is the from-scratch version described in chapter one, where an internet leader builds a large enough network union online that it can crowdfund territory and eventually attain diplomatic recognition. But it’s worth discussing other scenarios, where existing governments fuse with the network — both positive and negative Network/State syntheses.

Positive Syntheses: BTC, Web3, Efficiency

Start with the observation that companies, cities, currencies, communities, and countries are all becoming networks.

As an analogy, we used to think of books, music, and movies as distinct. Then they all became represented by packets sent over the internet. Yes, we listened to music in audio players and viewed books in ebook readers, but their fundamental structure became digital.

Similarly, today we think of stocks, bonds, gold, loans, and art as different. But all of them are represented as debits and credits on blockchains. Again, the fundamental structure became digital.

Now, we are starting to think of different kinds of collections of people –— whether communities, cities, companies, or countries —– all fundamentally as networks, where the digital profiles and how they interact become more and more fundamental.

This is obvious for communities and companies, which can already be fully remote and digital, but even already existing cities and countries are starting to be modeled this way, because (a) their citizens¹¹² are often geographically remote, (b) the concept of citizenship itself is becoming similar to digital single sign-on, (c) many 20th century functions of government have already been de-facto transferred to private networks like (electronic) mail delivery, hotel, and taxi regulation, (d) cities and countries increasingly recruit citizens online, (e) so-called smart cities are increasingly administrated through a computer interface, and (f) as countries issue central bank digital currencies and cities likely follow suit, every polity will be publicly traded on the internet just like companies and coins.

And that’s just for pre-existing polities which retrofit themselves with aspects of the network. It doesn’t include the most fundamental network property of the de novo network states described herein: namely that the citizenry itself first assembles in the cloud and only then crowdfunds the earth.

Examples of pre-existing states integrating with the network include (a) El Salvador’s integration with the Bitcoin network, (b) Wyoming’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) law and Norway’s cap table bill, which are integrations with the Ethereum network, and (c) places like Estonia and Singapore, where every government workflow is already online. In each of these cases, cities and states are fusing with networks to ship new services that are useful to citizens.

This is the benign version of the Network/State fusion, the one people will flock to.

Negative Syntheses: USG, CCP, Monopoly

The malign version of the Network/State fusion is what happened in China, and is happening in America at the federal level with the tech crackdowns. In both the Chinese and American cases the State is “acquiring” centralized technology companies at gunpoint, fusing with the Network from above.

In China the recipe was (a) a few years of media demonization plus (b) mandatory Xi Jinping Thought sessions followed by (c) decapitation and quasi-nationalization –— as is happening with Alibaba and ByteDance. In America during the techlash it was very similar: (a) several years of media demonization plus (b) quasi-mandatory wokeness within followed by (c) anti-trust, regulation, and quasi-nationalization.

Sometimes the decapitation is forceful (Uber was an early target here) and sometimes it’s quasi-voluntary. Indeed, one thesis on why many of the major tech founders have stepped down as of mid-2022, other than Zuck, is that they don’t want to become personally demonized during the no-win antitrust process. It’s more explicit in China that this wasn’t a choice — Jack Ma is no longer in control of the company he founded, and many other Chinese founders have been similarly relieved of their duties.

In other words, both the Chinese and American establishments have invented rationales to essentially seize previously founder-controlled companies.¹¹³

That is, whatever the surface justification, these are hostile takeovers of centralized tech companies by centralized states. Once taken over, these companies will be turned into total surveillance machines and tools of social control. In China, this is already obvious. But in America, anti-trust may mean zero trust.

To be clear, this is partially a forecast for the future, and perhaps it can be averted, but in the aftermath of any ostensibly “economic” settlement the US national security state could get everything it ever wanted in terms of backdoors to Google and Facebook. The NSA won’t need to hack its way in, it’ll get a front door. And then it will likely get hacked in turn, spraying all of your data over the internet.

This is the malign version of the Network/State fusion, the one people want to exit from.

Synthesis: God, State, and Network

Can we put all three Leviathans together in the modern era? Is there something that’d fit?

Yes. The benign version of the network/state synthesis we’ve just described offers greater administrative efficiency, greater economic returns, and greater levels of citizen consent. But it doesn’t yet offer greater purpose, or meaning.

As a preview, that’s where the One Commandment comes in. The concept is that you don’t want or need to start an entirely new religion to build a startup society, but you do need a moral innovation of some kind. If all you have to offer is a higher standard of living, people may come as consumers, but they won’t come for the right reasons. The consumer-citizen is coming to enjoy a great society, not to sacrifice to make a society great. They won’t understand the values that underpin your startup society’s valuation. And you likely won’t be able to build that high valuation or higher standard of living without a higher purpose, just as neither Apple nor America itself was initially built for money alone. You want to recruit producers, not consumers, and for that, you’ll need a purpose.

That higher purpose could be a traditional religion, as in Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, but it could also be a doctrine with a deeply thought through “One Commandment,” a moral innovation that inverts one of society’s core assumptions while keeping all others intact.

For example, taking the seemingly trivial moral premise that “sugar is bad” and seriously carrying it through to build a Keto Kosher society involves a focused yet all-encompassing change to every restaurant, grocery store, and meal within a jurisdiction. We give more examples later.

New Leviathan, New States

The concept of three Leviathans explains why a network state is now feasible. The Network is a new sheriff in town, a new Leviathan, a new force that is more powerful than the State in many contexts. That has changed the balance of power. While syntheses are arising, so are conflicts between Network and State. And that explains much of today’s instability: when Leviathans wrestle, when Godzilla fights King Kong, the earth trembles.

People of God, People of the State, People of the Network

We’ve talked about the history of power, of God, State, and Network. Now let’s talk about the recent history of power struggles, between people of God, people of the State, and people of the Network.

Stereotypically, the people of God offer¹¹⁴ thoughts and prayers, the people of the State say “there oughta be a law!”, and the people of the Network write some code.

The differences go very deep. It’s a difference in first steps and in ultimate loyalties. Once you understand whether someone prioritizes the God, State, or Network Leviathan you understand what tactics they’ll prefer, what values they hold, and where they’re coming from.

To illustrate this, let’s apply the lens of Leviathans to analyze (a) the internal divisions within America’s conservative reds and progressive blues, (b) the conflict between global technology and the US establishment, and (c) the mental model of the base-raters loyal to the US establishment.

As we’ll see, the introduction of the Network Leviathan clarifies some conflicts and splits some factions.

American Tribes and Their Leviathans

The whole world tunes in daily to watch the endless American digital civil war on Twitter. (“I feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”) Countless words have been written about this topic. But the lens of the Leviathans offers a new perspective on these warring tribes, on the conservative reds, progressive blues, and libertarianish grays named by Scott Alexander.

The gray tribe is the easiest to analyze. It is fair to say that they are primarily people of the Network Leviathan. These technological progressives are not just atheists, they are also astatists, as they do not typically believe in either God or the State. They are genuinely internationalists in a way neither red nationalists nor blue faux¹¹⁵ internationalists are, as they don’t subscribe to American exceptionalism, and interact with people from other countries through the Network as equals.

The blues and the reds are more complex, however. It’s not as simple as “Blue equals State” and “Red equals non-State.” Not at all. A significant fraction of blues has now gone to the Network; these are the left-libertarians, the web3 socialists. And a good chunk of reds will remain loyal to the State; let’s call them secular nationalists.

So if and when things line up as Network vs State, if there’s a highly inflationary event that pits the orange Bitcoin against the green Dollar, we may see an acceleration of the ongoing realignment. Many blues will line up with grays and reds on the side of the international Network, and many reds will side with blues to defend the centralized American State.

Let’s explain.

Blue Tribe: Left-Authoritarians, Left-Libertarians

Each member of blue tribe will have to make a choice in the years to come: are they loyal to neutral decentralized networks that treat both Americans and non-Americans equally, or are they actually just loyal to the US establishment — essentially nationalists in disguise? Is their definition of “democracy” commensurate with a world where the 4% (namely the Americans) rule the 96% (namely the non-Americans), inflating away the globe’s savings, destroying local cultures, and surveilling the world at all times? Or do they believe the rest of the world deserves digital self-determination? In short, will the internationally-minded liberal choose the decentralized Network or the centralized State?

To understand this choice, let’s orient ourselves. The blue tribe is the most powerful in Western society today, and has two¹¹⁶ main internal factions: the left-authoritarians who worship the State, and the left-libertarians who are (unconsciously) people of the Network.¹¹⁷

Wokeness is a Doctrine, not a Religion

Before we begin, we need to understand that the blue belief system of “Wokeness” isn’t exactly a religion. It’s a doctrine, and it includes both people of the State and the Network.

That is, while it’s become popular to talk about Wokeness as a religion, and while there is something to this, it’s more precise to talk about it as a doctrine: namely, “a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group.” The concept of a doctrine encompasses religious and political beliefs, both God- and State-worship. And nowadays the “other group” could be a Network entity of some kind, like a social network or cryptocurrency.

So now we have an umbrella term: doctrine. God-worshippers have religions (religious doctrines), State-loyalists have political parties (with political doctrines), and Network-centrists have social networks or cryptocurrencies (with tightly enforced content moderation or crypto tribalism respectively, which are network doctrines). Each doctrine has a Leviathan, a most powerful force. And a religion is then just a type of doctrine.

With this definition, we can return to the question: is capital-W Wokeness, like Communism and Nazism before it, a religion that evolved to jump over the formal principle of church/state separation by posing as a non-religion? Well, as several have now observed, Wokeness does have cognates to many aspects of Christianity — we all have the Calvinist original sin of bigotry, we’re going to the warm hell of climate change unless we repent, unbelievers must “recant,” heresy must be suppressed, the West’s beliefs must be evangelized at gunpoint, and so on. See Curtis Yarvin’s How Dawkins Got Pwned, John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, Andrew Sullivan on America’s New Religions, Noah Smith on Wokeness as Old-Time Religion, Tom Holland’s concluding chapter in Dominion, Paul Graham on Heresy, and Michael Shellenberger and Peter Boghossian’s detailed infographic for perspectives on this topic.

But while it’s directionally accurate, calling wokeness a religion doesn’t quite fit because the wokes have a different theory of the prime mover. Wokeness is better termed a doctrine, because it’s actually crucial to note that wokes do not worship God; instead, one faction of wokes worships the State and the other is, less consciously, people of the Network. These internal denominational splits are defined by choice of Leviathan. And they’ll be important in the escalating conflict between State and Network, between Dollar and Bitcoin, between establishment journalists and decentralized media, between the American government and the global internet, as these divisions promise to split blue team in two.
Blue State: Left-Authoritarians

For the left-authoritarians among the blues, their primary Leviathan is the State, which is very real and can do violence against its/their enemies, as opposed to what they think of as an imaginary God. This is why State-worshippers mock the concept of “thoughts and prayers” in favor of “passing a law.” The State exists, after all, and can organize people to apply coercive force. But God’s vehicle, the church, no longer has enough belief behind it (in the West at least) to do the same.

This is also why left-authoritarians tend to take for granted that all ills can be solved by “praying for relief” to the State, by forming some agency, by appropriating ever more money. Taxes are secular tithes, and the Gov-fearing man is like the God-fearing man — you simply cannot pay enough money and respect to the state, because as the DNC video says outright, “government is the one thing we all belong to.” It’s not about results, it’s about fealty.

Even though they culturally love the State and hate the Network, it’s important to note that the left-authoritarians in the US have managed to recently take control of big chunks of the Network, through placing sympathizers in key positions at Big Tech companies during the techlash and Great Awokening of the 2010s. (There are incipient signs of pushback here, though, at places like Netflix and even Google, where the very wokest are being terminated.)

What do left-authoritarians generally look like from an occupational standpoint? The body of left-authoritarians are the NPCs paying the NYT monthly subscriptions for the official “truth,” slavishly turning their heads with every new software update, insisting that masks don’t work before they do, reliably surging behind the current thing. These are just foot soldiers, but interestingly the most important left-authoritarians aren’t the elected officials.

As Yarvin in particular has documented at length, the most important left-authoritarians are not formally part of the elected State at all. They are the professors, activists, bureaucrats, and journalists.

The key concept is that much of America’s control circuitry has evolved to live outside the formal state, thereby making it resistant to displacement by democratic election. They laud “democracy” but avoid it in practice, through dual class stock, tenure for their bureaucrats and professors, tax-exempt compounding for their foundations, and ideological purification of their organizations. As with the communists who endlessly burbled about their “democratic people’s republics” while eschewing elections, the left-authoritarians don’t actually subject their control of key institutions to a vote.¹¹⁸

There are different names for this left-authoritarian network that controls the state from outside by “holding it accountable.” We can call it the Paper Belt (which emphasizes their Rust-Belt-like technological backwardness), we can call it the Cathedral (which emphasizes their holiness), we can call it the regime (which emphasizes their illegitimacy), or we can call it simply the American establishment (which emphasizes their enduring power). Later we will call it NYT/USD, to emphasize their source of truth and digital economy relative to BTC/web3 and CCP/RMB.

It’s important to understand that the power of the left-authoritarians comes from getting the officials of the centralized American State and (more recently) the executives of the centralized Big Tech Network to crush their enemies.

The main technique is to “manipulate procedural outcomes”, often by getting something true to be officially deemed disinformation (as in the example of the pre-2020 election laptop story), or conversely getting something false to be deemed official truth (as in the case of the Cambridge Analytica story). The left-authoritarians are the main proponents of the political power theory of truth, as “truth” is whatever they find helpful to move political power into action.

When an employee of a media corporation talks about an article having “impact,” for example, they mean impact in the sense of a government truncheon impacting your head, via a new rule or regulation. Go read the descriptions of the prizes they award to each other, and you’ll see them celebrate themselves for making something that was previously volitional newly mandatory or forbidden. “Our report led to government action!” Whether that action was the bombing of Libya or the banning of plastic straws makes no nevermind; impact is impact.

Laws aren’t the only form of impact. Getting someone fired is too. We talk of hit pieces and cancel culture as if they’re aberrations, but they’re actually the core of left-authoritarian culture. Recall that the most prestigious thing any establishment journalist ever did was Watergate: namely, getting a president fired while selling millions of copies of their newspaper.

This episode has been endlessly romanticized, but here’s a different perspective on it: the corporate takeover of America we’re supposed to be constantly vigilant for actually already occured 50 years ago, just from the left, when a few privately-owned media corporations cooperated to get Nixon fired and the Pentagon Papers leaked, proving that the control circuitry outside the State was upstream of the mere elected government and US military.

Now, was Watergate a crime? Sure, but worse than the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? Worse than the Nasiriyah testimony? Worse than WMD? Worse than the lies used to drive America’s many wars? And, relevantly, worse than what JFK did to get elected? After all, contra his protestations, Nixon may well have been a crook, but as Seymour Hersh has convincingly reported, so was John F. Kennedy — yet the exposure of his Watergate-level election shenanigans somehow waited till thirty years after he ascended to the presidency over one Richard Milhous Nixon.

Anyway, the problem isn’t just the asymmetry of the “accountability” — that’s not really about hypocrisy, but hierarchy. The problem with America’s left-authoritarians is also that they’ve built a terrible culture. A society that puts Watergate on a pedestal is just fundamentally different from one that puts NASA (or SpaceX) on a pedestal. Because if what’s applauded is putting a man out of work, rather than putting a man on the moon, there will be a lot of cancellation and not a lot of creation. Firing someone should be a necessary evil, not the highest good.

We linger on Watergate because it was the moment when the left-authoritarian American Network outside the State became unambiguously ascendant. It was the public demonstration of a very different model from the left-authoritarian Soviets. The Soviets had a state-controlled press, but America now had a press-controlled state.

After Watergate, the left-authoritarians knew that they were the boss of the boss, that they could get the president fired, that they could “hold someone accountable” — and, conversely, that no one could really hold them accountable in any way. For example, what was the punishment for printing the “disinformation” that led to, say, the Iraq War, or the Holodomor? Suspension from social media? Reparations for the dead? Or nothing? Much easier to pin it all on a single Nixon, or even a Stalin for that matter, than a decentralized mass of nameless left-authoritarians.¹¹⁹

Two additional points before we move on from our God/State/Network-informed analysis of the left-authoritarians. First, more recently, as American state capacity has declined, the left-authoritarians have shifted their targets to the new authorities: the CEOs of tech companies in particular. They realize on some level that (a) Network > State in many contexts and furthermore that (b) the Network-aided global ascent of tech founders and populist leaders could reduce their control over the State, so they have chosen to (c) strike first by gaining control of those tech companies that have achieved state-like scale.

Their modus operandi was much the same as it is for influencing the State: use reporting to harass tech executives into firing people that left-authoritarians don’t like, then push them to enact policies that left-authoritarians do like — such as “content moderation” over any message other than that emanating from approved establishment outlets. The left-authoritarians have even admitted to this in unguarded moments; see for example this character talking about how “journalism is about raw power” or this admission that the media’s explicit goal was to use the State as a billy club against the Network for fun and profit.

Second, an important insight is that behind many of these left-authoritarian journalists (and activists and nonprofits) is an old-money zillionaire, a nepotistic heir of some kind. You won’t find someone at The Atlantic criticizing Laurene Powell Jobs, you won’t find someone at NPR going after Soros, and you won’t find someone at The New York Times Company that even publicly admits that their boss, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, is a rich white male nepotist. This puts their behavior into stark relief: the left-authoritarian wants to get you fired, or get your boss to fire you, but won’t even mention their boss. They are fundamentally just dogs on a leash, hit men for old money, assassins for the establishment.
Blue Network: Left-Libertarians

There is a split among blue Americans. Some of them, the left-libertarians, are actually best modeled as people of the Network — meaning, the social network. They truly aren’t primarily loyal to the Democrat party or even the institutions that are upstream of it, but to their community online — which increasingly diverges from the party line. These are the deplatformed sex workers, the ones engaging in risky public activism rather than the ones merely funding it, the anarchists, the journalists so consistent in their beliefs that they’re actually striking against their nepotistic owners, and the ethical anti-imperialists. They really don’t identify with the US establishment that much, even if they sometimes wish it would execute the redistribution strategy of their dreams. Their primary people are the others in their social network. And that Network is becoming their new Leviathan.

For the professional protester, for example, they can use the offline tactics from Beautiful Trouble or Roots to Power to laboriously organize an in-person procession outside a government office…or they can do the same thing online by simply posting a hashtag and materializing a digital crowd, then going direct with their cause rather than negotiating with an establishment journalist for exposure. So what’s giving them more leverage these days: the institutions that surround the legacy State, or the features of the decentralized Network?

Another factor pushing left-libertarians away from the US establishment is the strong left-authoritarian shift towards holiness over coolness. Fredrik DeBoer actually discussed this shift while it was underway, while society was still transitioning from the old-time religion of Judeo-Christianity to the new doctrine of wokeness:

Silicon Valley types, by contrast, believe in things…Tangible values about progress and culture. The Californian ideology plus the blockchain or whatever. There’s content there…

The media has none of that. The old school media values of truth telling and muckraking have long since been abandoned by the media itself, as real values require sincerity and media culture abhors sincerity. You can’t sit on Twitter all day telling shitty jokes about how nothing matters and then turn around and say “but also we’re the guardians of truth and democracy.”

If Silicon Valley has captured the value of media for shareholders and is slowly strangling the industry to death, righting the course will require people within media who are willing to stand up and say, “Here are my values. They are what they are. I embody them without irony and thus I am vulnerable. If you value these things too you have to fight to save our industry.” Such a position would require a willingness to leave blank sarcasm aside and to start writing again for the world instead of only writing to appear clever to other writers. Can the media make this kind of move? I don’t see how they can; the social capture of the entire industry is just far too acute.

As smart as this post was, things didn’t work out quite as DeBoer expected. The push toward sincerity — towards filling that God-shaped hole — ended up cleaving the blues in two.

That is, contra DeBoer’s forecast (“I don’t see how they can”), some of the earnest blues actually did declare themselves champions of “moral clarity”, and have now gone over purely to unironic State-worship, to applauding multi-day prayer vigils with Liz Cheney for the wrongs visited upon their sacred Capitol. As Glenn Greenwald has written about at length, there’s no daylight anymore between the Democrats and the Department of Defense, no criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency by CNN.

This fusion wasn’t the full communism that DeBoer sometimes claims to prefer, but it was a fulsome declaration of values by the media¹²⁰ nevertheless. It’s the culmination of the trend towards devout wokeness that Scott Alexander identified years ago in “Gay Rites are Civil Rites.” The left-authoritarians have done to wokeness in a few years what Nietzsche noted had been done to Christianity over the span of eons: namely, they’ve transformed it from a revolutionary ideology into a ruling-class ideology.

But every action has a reaction, every activity spawns a Soros-like reflexivity, and Scott Alexander was actually ahead of the curve again here as well. Before “Gay Rites are Civil Rites”, he also identified a second dynamic of relevance, the trend away from devout wokeness that he described in “Right is the new Left.” And this brings us to back to the left-libertarians.

The kind of blue that listens to Gray Zone, Red Scare, or Jimmy Dore is repelled by State worship. They don’t want to choose something as down the middle as pledging allegiance to the American flag and the national security state for which it stands. They actually believed the things they said against the establishment, and don’t endorse it simply because it’s ostensibly “their” team now wearing the NSA headsets.
Blue State vs Blue Network

The left-libertarian subgroup of blues has begun to flirt with decentralized media and web3, because they’re realizing the Network could be more interesting than the declining American State. Could Substack be more remunerative than Sulzberger? Could Satoshi’s community deliver more for them than Bernie’s? If they need to redefine all that as “socialism,” so be it! And if their funding stream is changing, their ideology is slowly shifting too. Yes, they may have started as mere pawns of America’s left-authoritarian establishment, but what they value is increasingly coming from the decentralized global Network rather than the centralized American State. So they are beginning to uncouple. And that’s the emerging Network-vs-State division within blue tribe.

Red Tribe: Secular Nationalists, Internationalist Capitalists

Each member of red tribe, the conservatives, will also have to make a choice in the years to come: do they believe in the founding principles encoded in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, or will they simply enforce whatever edicts emanate from an increasingly malign US establishment — supporting statists in practice? Is their definition of “America” commensurate with a world where the US federal government is itself the most determined opponent of liberty, inflating away their savings, deconstructing conservative America’s culture, and surveilling them at all times? Or do they believe American cities and states deserve digital self-determination? In short, will the American nation choose the decentralized Network or the centralized State?

This will eventually be a conscious choice. Right now, it’s an unconscious three-way split. The three-legged stool of Reaganism — the religious conservatives, the secular nationalists, and the internationalist capitalists — side with the God, State, and Network Leviathans respectively.

These are their primary identities, because they correspond to that thing which they think of as the most powerful force in the world: almighty God, the US military, or (implicitly) the global network of trade and communication that will soon simply be identified with cryptocurrency.

Red God: Religious Conservatives

During the Cold War, religious conservatives believed in an almighty God, unlike the “godless communists” they fought against. Today, the people of God among the reds have sharply reduced numbers, but their moral compass remains the man on high. Insofar as there is a religious revival, it may be driven by the One Commandment-based startup societies we describe later on. See Rod Dreher on the Protestants, Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari on the Catholics, and Tablet’s Big Tent to get a sense of their views.
Red State: Secular Nationalists

The people of the State among the reds are more prominent. These are the secular nationalists, the national security hawks, the people who may not like the left-authoritarians but who will nevertheless reflexively support the US in every foreign intervention. They may agree that the US is trending in a bad direction, but they think China is far worse. As such, they’re still building drones, coding surveillance, and cheering videos like this one where the US admits to fomenting the color revolutions that are often otherwise denied.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to this group — after all, they aren’t burning their own country down! — but unfortunately, on foreign policy they are helping to burn down other people’s countries, and often for no good reason.

The issue is that in the absence of a compelling alternative, or an undeniable collapse, you’re simply not going to convince a secular nationalist that America and China are both becoming digital totalitarian states, or that a US establishment that has pushed half a dozen countries into murderous chaos isn’t quite the moral exemplar that they think it is.

The reason is because the red statist is a secular nationalist: they don’t have a God, but they do believe in the State, the good vision of America as a shining city on a hill. It really doesn’t matter if this doesn’t exist — it’s the USA from their youth and from their movies. It’s Top Gun America, and they’ll keep paying to watch the inspiring remakes, not the depressing footage of what the US military actually did in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria.

There’s both a laudable aspect to this kind of loyalty, and a frustrating one. These folks are like the Soviet soldiers that dutifully served in Afghanistan. You might argue they’re fighting for a cause that is at best pointless and at worst evil, and that they’ll only come home to find their shelves empty and their culture crushed…but you have to acknowledge they’re risking their lives regardless.

Fundamentally, the red secular nationalist often understands how bad the US establishment is at home, but doesn’t want to hear about the needless destruction wreaked by the US military abroad. In this they have the opposite set of blind spots from the blue left-libertarian, who can clearly see the ruin of countries unfortunate enough to experience a 21st century US “intervention,” yet imagines the same government that’s a chaotic destroyer abroad can become a benevolent redistributor at home.

In other words, while the red secular nationalist maintains an implicit Hollywood-movie-style belief in a US military that can beat up anyone, the blue left-libertarian persists in their belief that the State’s civilian government could fix anything at home if only enough people willed it. Using the lens of the Leviathans, these are both clearly ways the State becomes a stand-in for God, in its terrible Father and benevolent Mother forms respectively.
What about China, huh?

Let’s digress and engage the China point for a second, as it’s the go-to argument of the red secular nationalist. To paraphrase, the red nationalist often concedes that US military intervention abroad has been regrettable, but CCP dominance would be so much worse that we need the US military to not just stick around but to expand and grow stronger.

The short counterargument is that it may instead be best for countries to rearm, and take on their own defense — rather than having an increasingly chaotic US try to fight a Second Cold War on others’ behalf in the middle of an internal Cold Civil War and what might become a Second Great Depression.

That is, we get there by a different route, but we arrive at much the same conclusion as an isolationist rightist or an anti-imperialist leftist. Whether you think America is too good for the world, or whether you think it’s an ill effect on countries abroad, or some complex combination of both, we may want (and observe) US military withdrawal and regional rearmament rather than a Second Cold War.

What’s the long-form version of the argument? Start with the observation that the CCP is more oppressive at home than the US establishment, but it’s also empirically less destructive abroad.

Why? Not because of benevolence, but because the CCP is checked by the US military abroad. Thus China is focused on building up Africa while America is blowing up the Middle East. Yes, you can argue the Chinese are building colonies in Africa…but they’re functional colonies, with new roads and ports to carry raw materials, unlike the blasted hellscapes left by US military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the like. With that said, we should have no illusions: China’s neighbors in Southeast Asia know the dragon would throw its weight around without a US military presence. Right now it can’t, because China is boxed in by the US military. Conversely, at home the CCP has no organized domestic political opposition, so it can be absolutely ruthless.

The US establishment has the opposite set of constraints: unlike China, it doesn’t face organized military opposition abroad, so it’s highly incautious in its foreign policy. But also unlike the CCP it does face organized domestic political opposition at home, so it can’t be as ruthless domestically as it wants to be.

Let’s drill into the domestic point first, and then the military point.

It’s really crucial to understand that the US establishment is not more ethical than the CCP when it comes to civil liberties. It’s just less competent! After all, the US establishment also does warrantless surveillance via the NSA, unconstitutional search and seizure via the TSA, arbitrary confiscation of property via civil forfeiture, and so on. And that’s just what’s already been rolled out — the ambitions of the US establishment are just as totalitarian as the Chinese state’s, as we can see from its partially failed attempts at disinformation agencies, civilian disarmament, digital censorship, and the like. Up to this point, these pushes have not been thwarted by the “ethics” of the US establishment, but by some combination of political opposition, Constitutional constraint, and bureaucratic incompetence.

They keep trying, though. The US establishment isn’t organized enough to coordinate all the pieces, but unfortunately the recently captured Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are capable of that level of coordination, as we saw during the Parler deplatforming, and the Tiananmen-like censorship of the “whistleblower.” So we’ll see what happens.

Now on the military point.

During the Cold War, the Soviet constraint meant the US was more cautious in its interventions, and actually generally achieved far better results. South Korea was better off than North Korea, West Germany was better off than East Germany, and Taiwan was better off than Maoist China. Even given all the lies on all sides around Vietnam, had the US won in South Vietnam, it’s quite possible that would have been a South Korea too; but because it lost, countless people had to flee and communism claimed many lives in Southeast Asia.

After the Cold War ended, however, the US military became a hyperpower - and gradually evolved into a global fomenter of chaos rather than the generally conservative guardian of stability it was before 1991. The Iraq War can be seen as a transition point, as can Samantha Power’s R2P doctrine that left Syria in ruins. By 2022, the question of whether America produces chaos with its military interventions can hardly be gainsaid — even the most committed American nationalist is hard pressed to name a country that’s better off after a recent US military intervention, something that wasn’t that hard to do from 1945-1991.¹²¹

OK, so let’s put it all together.

There is truth to the idea that the US military is checking China, and that China would act more aggressively in the absence of the US military…but it’s true in the same way the Soviet military was once checking the US, and then the US military acted more aggressively in the absence of the Soviet military. That is, it’s true that the Soviet military was on balance not a force for good during 1945-1991, but it’s also true that the US military has on balance not been a force for good during 1991-2021.

It’s complicated. Even if their military did in some sense restrain the US from randomly blowing up the Middle East, it’s tough to argue that you’d still want the Soviet Union to still be around to limit US military intervention. Similarly, it’s hard to contend that the price of constraining China’s lawful evil ambitions in East Asia should be tolerance for America’s chaotic evil interventions in the Middle East, that defending against a potential Chinese drone armada should mean acceptance of endless destabilization by the US military.

Ideally there’s a third way, a better choice - and that third way may simply be decentralized defense, where countries like Japan and Germany re-arm, rather than outsourcing everything to the US or folding to China. This has its own issues, of course — but if we’re moving back into the 1800s and 1700s, as per the Future is Our Past thesis, limited wars between gold-limited great powers are arguably preferable to gigantic global conflicts between unlimited superpowers.

In short: the secular American nationalist has an option that doesn’t involve either capitulating to China or pretending the US military is currently achieving fruitful things abroad. That third way is to support regional rearmament rather than fighting everyone else’s wars on their behalf.
Red Network: Internationalist Capitalists

Getting back to our original topic, the third group within red tribe are the internationalist capitalists. We identify them as people of the Network. This is arguably something of a retcon, because the internet as we currently know it was barely a factor during the Cold War.¹²² However, this subgroup involved the folks in favor of commerce and trade networks, both within and across borders — the capitalists.

Today, that kind of capitalism is almost synonymous with internet startups and technology. The most valuable companies in the world were born on the Network. And the future of network capitalism is crypto-capitalism, because it’s not just transactions that can be represented on-chain — it’s entire financial statements, and companies themselves, and eventually the entire economy.

The rise of Bitcoin means red people of the Network have a very specific way to think about their Leviathan, something distinct from both God and the State. Because BTC cannot be seized with one click by either the US or Chinese governments, it’s a symbol of international freedom and prosperity that is more powerful than any State.

On balance, I’m sympathetic to this group as well, but it has its own internal issues. For one thing, Bitcoin Maximalism in particular is similar to Woke Capital in its fundamentalism. The main difference is that maximalism is zealous mononumism (devotion to a single coin) rather than monotheism (a single god) or monostatism (a single state). The Network doesn’t make the fanatical aspect of humanity vanish; it just moves it from God or the State to the Network.
Red State vs Red Network

We now see that the God, State, and Network Leviathans all have their supporters within the conservative movement.

An interesting point is that secular nationalists, being dispositionally conservative, can often stick with a symbol long after its substance has changed. Think about the many “Russian nationalists” who stuck with the Soviet Union even when it was a complete inversion of what had existed prior to 1917. Then compare this US Army ad from 2008 with this recent ad from 2021.

So, in the event of any conflict between the Network and the State, such as a possible struggle between the inflating dollar and the deflationary Bitcoin, the right-statists could take the side of the national flag while the right-capitalists take the side of the digital currency. That is, if and when it’s clear that the continuation of American empire depends on the ability to continually inflate, the people of the State may side with the legacy state, and the people of the Network will side with the decentralized network.¹²³ So, that’s the Network-vs-State division within red tribe.

The Realignment

If we add up all these pieces, we get a possible future where the left- and right-libertarians from both parties line up against the left- and right-authoritarians.

We’re already starting to see this if we look at Substack vs establishment journalists, Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald vs Fox News/NYT, BTC vs USD, web3 vs Big Tech, the migration of ethnic minorities to the Republicans and the migration of neoconservatives to the Democrats.

People have talked about zombie Reaganism, but in this scenario a new coalition would be finally popping into view. And it’s a totally different carving of the political spectrum than the Reagan era. Rather than nationalists and capitalists (the right) against internationalists and socialists (the left), it’s internationalists and capitalists (left- and right-libertarians) against socialists and nationalists (left- and right-authoritarians).¹²⁴

That Realignment would be the Network against the State. The authoritarians would outnumber the libertarians domestically, and have the institutions on their side. But the libertarians would have stronger individual talent, as they’d draw the iconoclasts, and they’d also draw support from the rest of the world.

Tech vs Media, aka PC vs PC

Let’s switch gears here and apply the lens of the Leviathans to a different conflict. Why are global technology and the US establishment at odds?

Economics. You can say it’s because technology disrupted everything from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, as argued here. Looking at just the 80% drop in US media revenue alone from 2008 to 2012, it’s hard to believe that wasn’t a factor.
Geography. You could note that the pre-2020 center of technology was Silicon Valley, which is 3000 miles away from the Bos-Wash corridor that houses the US establishment.
Demographics. You can claim it’s because tech is largely immigrant and the US establishment is 20-30 points whiter. Certainly by the high evidentiary standards of America’s leading disparate impact analysts and critical race theorists, this fact alone is prima facie evidence that the US establishment is institutionally racist towards their tech disruptors.
Psychology. You can contend it’s due to a psychological difference between technical/financial types vs social/political elites, between people who focus on what is true versus those who care about what is popular. This relates to the distinction between technical and political truths.
Metabolism. You might observe that the rivalry is particularly pronounced between US tech and media. The other arms of the US establishment, like academia, Hollywood, and government all needed multi-year cycles to ship anything, while only the news media had the 24/7 metabolism to match tech’s DNA. So they became the point of the spear for the US establishment’s counterattack. This is also why tech favors newsletters, podcasts, slide decks, and other types of fast-turnaround content that the establishment doesn’t natively specialize in.
Bifurcation. You can remark that there’s a deep structural similarity between a socialist professor and technologist founder: both feel like they should be in charge. That’s why tech is a cultural fork of the US establishment, just as the US itself was a fork of the British Empire. It’s the same root, different branches. The ambitious intellectual who would in a previous life have become an academic theorist, jurist, or journalist is now a founder, engineer, or investor.¹²⁵ Because there’s a common thread between media and tech, which is the handling and presentation of information. Computer science took it one step further: it collapsed the distinction between the word and the deed, and turned a generation of intellectuals into software CEOs. Many people who previously thought they’d just advocate for a law to be passed and not worry about the details found out how hard it was to build things, to manage people, to turn a profit, to be the one in the arena. They became people of the Network. And then they came into conflict with those who remained people of the State.

All of these are factors. But the last one probably gets to the root of the issue, because fundamentally, tech-vs-media is a clash of Leviathans.

After all, the immigrant technologist moves between countries while keeping their technical skills and network connections. For them, the Network provides their primary community, while the State is secondary. Conversely, the American establishmentarian gains their power from the State. It is all about passing a law or influencing a policymaker. And if the Network interferes with this process, perhaps by giving people access to information that undermines the State? Then so much for the Network.

Tech-vs-media is then best understood as a collision of fundamental values, between the people of the Network and the people of the State.

The Conflict: Technological Progressives vs Technological Conservatives

You can think of the “people of the Network” as technological progressives, and the “people of the State” as political progressives (charitably) or technological conservatives (perhaps more realistically).

Both are seemingly aligned at a high level on the goal of solving problems like controlling COVID-19, building housing, or reducing car crashes. But the people of the Network usually start by writing code and thinking about individual volition, whereas for the people of the State the first recourse is passing laws and collective coercion.

Put another way, the people of the Network start by thinking about getting a piece of the network to call their own. A domain name, something they can build up from scratch, starting with a bare website like reddit.com and ending up with a massive online destination that everyone voluntarily seeks out. The primary goal of the technological progressive, the tech founder is to build — and for no one to have power over them.

By contrast the people of the State start by thinking about capturing a piece of the state. To win an election, to influence legislation via a nonprofit, to write an article that has “impact” in the sense of impacting policy, to be appointed Undersecretary of something or other…this is their mindset. The goal is to get a piece of this gigantic baton that is the government, to get a club to coerce people (for their own good of course), to maybe get a little budget along the way, and to finally “change the world” by changing the policy. To make something that was previously discretionary either mandatory or forbidden, to redirect the flow of printed money, to exert force through the law. The primary goal of the political progressive is thus the opposite of the technological progressive: their goal, verbalized or not, conscious or not, is to exert power over others.

Now, this is a caricature. Of course there are good people of the State, just like there are bad people of the Network. It is possible to use a minimal amount of coercion for good against genuinely bad actors; this truth is the difference between minarchism and anarchism.

But obviously, these worldviews collide. One group wants no one to have power over them, while the other seeks to exert power over others.

As a possible future scenario, one way this could be resolved is if the people of the State use the law to smash American tech over the 2020s, thereby gaining more power domestically. But tech has already gone global thanks to remote work, and most technologists are immigrants already…so the people of the Network may simply shift their attention overseas — or not come in the first place. So the federal action would merely drives away immigrant founders, and the American State would lose power on a global scale. (Local and state governments in the US may respond differently, which is an intriguing twist).

The same thing is also happening in China, by the way, where many of the most able technologists are now alighting for new countries — and no longer coming to the US, where they aren’t welcome anyway.

The Enormous State, not the Entrepreneurial State

As a bit of a sidebar, a frequent argument that American people of the State make is that the people of the Network owe their very existence to the State. After all, was it not their god, the US government, that funded the internet? Do we not need public monies to back basic research? And shouldn’t the people of the Network therefore dutifully bow their heads and submit, joyfully paying ever more in tribute to the sacred Uncle Sam?

There are a few responses to this. One is that the antecedent of the people of the Network were the pre-internet industrialists, who certainly were not well treated by the State in the early 1900s. Another is that while the UK similarly gave rise to the US in some sense, Americans do not genuflect in the direction of the British Isles five times per day.

But the deepest response starts by acknowledging a kernel of truth: there was a period from roughly 1933-1970 when the centralized US government did the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, and Apollo. The transistor and early internet came out of this era as well. And there were some later innovations also catalyzed by the State (albeit often by non-bureaucrats who managed to commandeer bureaucrat funds) like the Human Genome Project and the self-driving car.

However, both before and after this period, the centralized State was not the locus of technical and scientific innovation. That should be obvious today for anything in digital technology; academia has been raided by tech companies and venture capitalists. But it’s also true for the period before the (well-intentioned) Vannevar Bush memo that kicked off the government centralization of science. After all, most of physics — from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein — was discovered before the National Science Foundation (NSF) was even created.

That said, let’s talk about the 1933-1970 period itself. This period of “peak state” was real, but in overstated form it has become the basis for books like Mazzucato’s Entrepreneurial State — which I disagree with, and which Mingardi and McCloskey have rebutted at length in the Myth of the Entrepreneurial State.

Here’s why I disagree with the thesis of the Entrepreneurial State:

The name itself is oxymoronic. As macroeconomists never tire of telling us, governments aren’t households, because unlike actual entrepreneurs the state can seize funds and print money. So there is no financial risk, and hence nothing of “entrepreneurship” in the entrepreneurial state.
The book doesn’t consider the fact that most math/physics/etc was invented prior to the founding of NSF, and therefore doesn’t need NSF to exist.
It further doesn’t acknowledge that it was possible to do science and technology before the massive centralized state, through the distributed model of the “gentleman scientist,” and that this model is returning in the form of open source and (now) decentralized science.
It doesn’t take into account the waxing and waning of centralized state capacity due to technology.
It doesn’t contend with the state-caused slowdown in physical world innovation that happened during the post-1970 period, which Thiel, Cowen, and J Storrs Hall have all documented.
It doesn’t look at how difficult VC or angel investing actually is, so it doesn’t really ask whether those “investments” by the state had real returns.
Most importantly, it doesn’t engage with the counterfactual of what would happen if we had many independent funding sources, rather than a single centralized state.

So, it’s true that there was a period mid-century where all other actors besides the US and USSR were squashed down and centralized states dominated innovation. But it’s not because they were necessarily better at innovating, it’s because they were better at dominating, due to the centralized tech of that time. It was more about the Enormous State than the Entrepreneurial State. And that’s why the technological progressives of the Network don’t reflexively genuflect before the political progressives of the State.

The Base-Rater as a Flat-Curver

Someone who worships an almighty God won’t readily change their beliefs. Neither will someone who worships an almighty State.

Once in a while, a religious millenarian’s belief is put to the test when there’s a concrete prediction made by the faith that doesn’t pan out. That’s also what happened for the “secular” believers in communism when the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union fell. These events are always fascinating for the non-believer - whether it’s Heaven’s Gate, QAnon, “Mueller Day,” or the “withering of the state”, it’s interesting to see what happens when a prophecy doesn’t work out.¹²⁶

Indeed, that’s why people wrote books like The God that Failed when they turned away from communism. A Leviathan had given up the ghost. Whether that Leviathan was God itself or the State, it was a crushing collapse of faith. As per the book of the same title, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.

This offers a useful way of thinking about the blue and red statists alike, the left-authoritarians and the secular nationalists we discussed earlier. The American State is their God replacement, and they truly can’t envision a world without it. Whether they think of it in terms of “the Constitution” (the conservative framing) or “our democracy” (the progressive framing), the civic religion of the US is their religion, especially when faith in God has fallen off a cliff.

So, they may not be dispassionately rational when forecasting whether their God, the State, might fail. There are three ideas that are helpful here.

The first idea is Flatland. The premise of Flatland is that it’s a 2D plane, and entities within Flatland can’t really understand 3D things. They encounter spheres as circles that start as points, expand to their maximum radus, and then contract back down.
The second idea is the premise that historical time is far longer than human time. We live on a tiny piece of a grand historical curve, a trajectory that looks flat to us over months and years, because historical time (usually) moves slowly.
The third idea is what Tyler Cowen diplomatically calls a “base-rater”, the establishment type who essentially thinks everything remains constant. This is the kind of person who’ll sardonically remarks “Oh, this time is different, huh?”, not realizing that (a) they’re quoting that statement out of context, and (b) the obviously fallacious opposite of that saying is the assertion that “things will never change.”

Put these ideas together and you start to get a mental model of the base-raters, the blue and red statists. They think everything will always stay the same, that it’ll stick at a base rate.

The only cycles they’re familiar with are short ones: the cycle of breath over a few seconds, the cycle of sleep over one day, and the cycle of seasons over one year. But they aren’t familiar with any cycle that extends beyond one human life, because they usually don’t know much history beyond what the establishment has pointed them towards.

Because they don’t think about cycles, they don’t think about curves. They live on a kind of Flatland, except rather than being flat as in the sense of two-dimensional, it’s flat as in the sense of a curve with zero-derivative. But as Ray Dalio has noted, things may not stay flat in historical terms for long. As such, the blue and red statists may be in for a rude shock. Using the lens of the Leviathans, they really think their God, the State, can never fail.

If the News is Fake, Imagine History

The collision of Leviathans has knocked something loose. Access to all that information from the Network has changed our perception of the present, and with it the perception of the past. The historical inevitability and (even more importantly) the desirability of the US establishment’s victory over all opponents is now very much in question. Both outside and inside the US, there’s the sense that the US-dominated postwar order is either on its last legs or already over, and that the ancient legislators and endless remakes reflect a fading culture trying to hang on by its fingernails to prevent what comes next.

Though people are gearing up as if on autopilot for a Second Cold War, it’s not obvious that the US will make it out of the first round given its internal Cold Civil War. The decline in state capacity, in internal alignment, in budgetary resources, in wherewithal, and in political will is tangible. It’s true that the most dedicated establishmentarians do still operate as if the empire will always be there. But the question of what America’s role in the world should be next remains unanswered, because the question of what America represents at home remains unanswered.

Within the US, groups on both right and left are now asking themselves in different ways: are we the baddies? The left asks whether the US is institutionally racist, the right asks whether the US is irredeemably leftist, and more factions on each side¹²⁷ want a national divorce.

As we can see from the graphs, America is not really a single “nation state” anymore; it’s at least binational, with two warring groups. There’s been a collapse in institutional trust, and in each other. And the questions now arising are fundamental.

Is the US establishment a force for good in the world?
Is the US establishment a force for good at home?
Would others copy today’s America of their own free will?
Would the US establishment tell you the truth?
Was it ever a force for good at home or abroad?

My perhaps idiosyncratic answers to these questions are: no, no, no, no, and yes. No, I don’t think the US establishment is nowadays on balance a force for good abroad or at home, or that the US model would be cloned today by someone setting up a new state, or that the US establishment can be trusted to tell the truth. I do, however, think the Cold War America of 1945-1991 was on balance better for its citizens and allies than its Soviet opponents.

But while I can justify¹²⁸ these answers, my responses aren’t as important as why these questions are arising in the first place. The reason is that the US establishment has lost control over the narrative. The distortion of the present, and the past, has caught up to them.

Distortion of the Present

“If the news is fake, imagine history.” This pithy tweet reverses Orwell, because he who is acknowledged to be faking the present can no longer distort the past. That is, once enough people see that the establishment has been lying about today’s events, they naturally begin to think the establishment might have been lying about yesterday’s news as well.

To calibrate this, let’s start with a grab bag of media failures from the recent present, the last 5-15 years or so. You’ll no doubt have your own list.

Remember the “oops” on the Iraq War, after the media corporations that were supposed to “hold the government accountable” instead helped justify the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses?
Remember the thousands of reports on “Russiagate” that completely disappeared after the Mueller report?
Remember when the NYT said Hillary Clinton had a 91% chance to win, giving the strong impression that the 2016 election wasn’t even close?
Remember the detailed, emotional, multipart Caliphate podcast, endorsed by Sam Dolnick, a senior member of The New York Times Company’s ruling Ochs-Sulzberger family, which turned out to be completely fake?
Remember the Miles Taylor episode, where a junior functionary was falsely represented as a senior administration official?
Remember when Sulzberger’s employees published editorial after editorial against free speech, before they pretended they were for it, before they opposed it again?
Remember when they said YouTube’s remaining freedom of speech was a bad thing in the US, and then praised its freedom of speech the next day when it was helpful in getting their content into Russia?
Remember when Kara Swisher reported that innocent high school student Nick Sandmann had done something wrong for merely standing still in front of a man who strode up to him pounding a drum?
Remember when Kara Swisher’s Recode also said COVID-19 was “contained,” before it ended up killing more than a million Americans?
Remember all the official disinformation on COVID, how they called people racists for warning about it, and said that masks didn’t work before they did?
Remember when everyone switched sides on vaccines, and everything else related to COVID, as Michael Solana ably chronicled here?
Remember when the US establishment published reports credulously predicting that inflation would be transitory?
And remember when there was minimal mainstream coverage of the 2017 battle for Mosul, the world’s largest military operation since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the war that Obama was supposed to have ended?

You probably didn’t remember that last one, mainly because there was minimal coverage, but watch this and then ask why you’ve never heard of it before.

In each of these cases, we have something predicted to go to zero that ends up at millions, or a certainty that winds up a nullity, or a hot war featuring the US military and 482 suicide car bombings that somehow registered on the public consciousness as zero.

If the US establishment could erase Mosul from memory in the age of the internet, you start to see how Putin’s Russia could pretend the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was just a “special operation.” And you start to realize that it’s not sufficient to simply “take the articles with a grain of salt”, and discount them a bit. By listening to the establishment, your perception of reality may be off by one million fold.

Patterns of Information Distortion

There are a few common patterns here, ways in which the information supply chain has been distorted.

Channel distortion. That which favors the US establishment is magnified 100X, while that which disfavors it is downranked 100X or silenced entirely, such that the net distortion is 10,000X or more. We can think of this as analogous to channel distortion in signal processing. Media corporations aren’t just censors, they’re sensors - and self-interested ones. That is, they’re ostensibly measuring the world, but they actually have self-interested reasons for reporting that some numbers are low (like inflation and crime) and others are high (like whatever social ill they want to address). There are many such channel distortions, including (a) absence of criticism of media owners, (b) A/B testing to promote literal hate speech for more clicks, (c) self-referential quoting to give the impression of impartiality, and so on.

Narrative alignment. The way the establishment determines what to put on the front page out of millions of possible stories should remind you of the political power theory of history. It’s only things that support the narrative: their favored state policies will always succeed, their disfavored tech competitors will always fail, their errors are honest mistakes, your errors are firing offenses, the opponents of the establishment are x-ists and traitors, free speech is the enemy, and so on. Quantitatively speaking, it’d be relatively straightforward to use word2vec or something more recent to literally score and rank stories for their narrative alignment.

Power over truth. In these incidents, if you stop to count, you often realize that the reports were off not by say 50%, but by 1000X or more. Why do these “reporters” still have their jobs, then? Because their job wasn’t to make money, but to make power. That is, they weren’t trying to predict the future correctly for the sake of making good investments, but to repeat the party line to keep people in line. They’re like actors, in that their role was to say (or write) the right thing at the right time, to manufacture your consent, to misinform you about everything from weapons of mass destruction to the probability of inflation, and to then claim democratic legitimacy after people voted on the basis of their official misinformation.

Comparison to an aligned sensor. It’s worth comparing the reports by these media corporations to reports by an aligned sensor, one where there is no way for the sensor to “win” at your expense by distorting the information it’s giving to you. Your gas tank does not report that the gas is at 90% before suddenly dropping to 20%. Your bank account does not zoom up in order to fake you out and get you to buy something from the bank, and then silently down again, like an establishment journalist trying to manipulate someone before an election. The metrics on your dashboard at work are not typically falsified by people to make them more sensational. In each of these cases, you are receiving reports from either a dispassionate machine or an institution (like your company) where you have economic alignment and no significant principal/agent issues. By contrast, the media corporation can report false information to you and still make money; it has a mind and wallet of its own, unlike the sensors you own.

Network rescue. Note something else: the only reason you are hearing about these incidents, and the only reason the rebuttals to them ever came out in the first place, is the Network. It is only because the State’s filtering of social media is not yet complete, that their downranking of dissident voices not fully efficient, that their late-breaking attempt to impose speech and thought controls on a free society not fully consummated, that (a) the initial refutations were even published and (b) that you are seeing some of them combined into one document.

This last point is worth hovering on. Why do we know about these distortions of the present? It’s again because of a collision of Leviathans, because the Network routed information around the State, giving people actual rather than ostensible freedom of speech.

The Network Delivered Actual Freedom of Speech

We elaborate on this in the Fragmentation Thesis, but the Network is accelerating a great decentralization of Western society that began shortly after the peak centralization of about 1950.

Towards the end of this process, in our current era, the US establishment got so fat and happy that it forgot how aggressive its predecessors had been in imposing speech and thought controls. Basically, the establishment didn’t realize they’d inherited a highly regulated, centralized communications apparatus where the vast majority of Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned a media corporation or were employed by one.

As such, in the 1990s and 2000s, the American establishment could seem to eat its cake and have it too — enjoying the rhetorical windfall of claiming to have a free society, while in practice holding an enormous distribution advantage over the common man (“never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel”).

Now, it was true that the US was more free than the USSR, but it is not true that the US was more free than the Internet. As we discuss later, social media is American glasnost and cryptocurrency is American perestroika. So as the internet scaled, and Americans actually got the rights to free speech and free markets that they were nominally promised, the establishment started to feel threatened.

Why? Because while speech only influences volitional behavior (like voting), volitional behavior in turn influences coercive behavior (like legislating). So, if the US establishment lost control over speech they would have lost control over everything.

The Establishment Launched the Counter-Decentralization

Thus began the great Counter-Decentralization in 2013, the techlash plus the Great Awokening, what Jack Bratich calls a “war of restoration” by an establishment that had been economically disrupted by the Network but that retained the capability to morally denounce its enemies.

The threatened US establishment increased the volume of attacks on their rivals in both senses of the term; the sheer quantity of attacks and the level of vitriol soared, as you can see from the charts. Their rivals were basically everyone — tech, Trump, China, Russia, Israel, Brazil, Hungary, Brexiteers, Macron — everyone that wasn’t a loyal part of the US establishment’s social network.

And from 2013-2020, against all odds, this multifront campaign seemed to be working. America’s establishment spent down huge amounts of reputation, but they managed to wokify Google, Amazon, Apple, and the major tech companies, deplatform Trump and get him out of office, and terrorize the country with massive riots. They completely reversed course¹²⁹ from the Obama era, silently stole the China issue from Trump, and polarized relations with Russia. They canceled, deplatformed, demonized, and dominated for the better part of a decade.

Then, suddenly, after February 2021, there was a distinct slackening of support, of intensity. The coalition that had predated Trump, that had arguably caused Trump, didn’t seem to outlive Trump. At the time of writing, it’s hard to tell whether this is a momentary shift or a permanent one, but social engagement is down. People have tuned out. The US establishment is only talking to their hardcore supporters now. All the other social networks they’ve attacked — essentially everyone in the world who isn’t a true blue American State-worshipper — they aren’t listening anymore.

Instead, they’re reassessing their relationship with the US establishment, and with the US itself.

Distortion of the Past

The distortion of America’s present has led people to re-evaluate America’s past. Once they realize they’ve had Gell-Mann Amnesia, they start to wonder if their mental model is one of Gell-Mann America.

Recall that Gell-Mann Amnesia refers to the phenomenon where you read something in the paper about an area you have independent knowledge of. Suppose it’s computer science. When you read articles on the topic, you see grievous falsehoods, and inversions of cause and effect. Then you turn the page and read about, say, Palestine as if the reporting on that topic was trustworthy. You forget what you just saw, that the reporting was flawed in the area where you could independently check it. You get amnesia.

The mechanistic reason for Gell-Mann Amnesia is the hub-and-spoke topology of the pre-internet information environment. Suppose you were an expert in computer science, another person was an expert on Japan, a third knew about the bond market, and so on. You are spokes that are all connected to the hub (say, The New York Times) but not each other. Each spoke has superior local information, and can falsify NYT reports in their own domain, but has no mechanism for coordinating with other spokes, let alone establishing a superior hub. Until the internet, the blockchain, and the advent of cryptohistory.

The long-term consequence of Gell-Mann Amnesia is Gell-Mann America. People know now that we are systematically misled about the present. But at least we live in the present, so we have local information that can falsify many news stories. We do not live in the past, so all we know is that we may be wildly off-base in our understanding of history. There are no people from the past around to give first hand accounts…though we can read their books and sometimes watch their films.

Here are some quick links that may surprise you about the past.

In 1958, President Nasser of Egypt laughed at the idea that Egyptian women would ever be forced to wear the hijab. Surprise: the Muslim world was far more secular within living memory.
After World War 2, Operation Paperclip put reformed German scientists to work on the American space program. Surprise: the real Hidden Figures were Nazis.
Germany sent Vladimir Lenin into Russia, potentially as part of a strategy to destabilize their then-rival in war. Antony Sutton’s books document how some Wall Street bankers apparently funded the Russian Revolution (and how other Wall Street bankers funded the Nazis years later). Leon Trotsky spent time in New York prior to the revolution, and propagandistic reporting from Americans like John Reed aided Lenin and Trotsky in their revolution. Indeed, Reed was so useful to the Soviets — and so misleading as to the nature of the revolution — that he was buried at the base of the Kremlin Wall. Surprise: the Russian Revolution wasn’t done wholly by Russians, but had significant foreign involvement from Germans and Americans.
The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns The New York Times Company, owned slaves but didn’t report that fact in their 1619 coverage.
New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for helping the Soviet Union starve Ukraine into submission, 90 years before the Times decided to instead “stand with Ukraine.”
Herbert Matthews, also a New York Times correspondent, helped Castro win power in Cuba, leading to the murderous Cuban revolution and the subsequent Cuban missile crisis that almost resulted in nuclear war.
Another American “journalist,” Edgar Snow, wrote books such as Red Star Over China that praised Chairman Mao to the heavens before, during, and after Mao embarked on programs of mass murder and collectivization.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, architect of the US administrative state, recruited young men to sleep with gay seamen in order to entrap them.
The American architect of Bretton Woods, the IMF, and the World Bank, Harry Dexter White, spied for the Soviets. He was one of dozens, according to the Venona decrypts, declassified after the end of the Cold War.
Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States during Roosevelt’s term in 1940, toured the Soviet gulag of Magadan and pronounced it fine and dandy, right before he just barely lost the VP nomination for 1944 to Harry Truman — who then became president in 1945.
The “liberating” Soviet Red Army raped its way across Eastern Europe in the 1940s, the same communists that The Times extolled as giving women a “better sex life” in its 2017 anniversary series on the Russian Revolution.
The NYT’s Otto Tolischus reported Poland invaded Germany in 1939, reversing the direction of the Nazi assault.
Seymour Hersh details in The Dark Side of Camelot how John F. Kennedy’s men in Illinois helped rig the 1960 election, an unmentioned scandal a full decade before Watergate.

And that’s just¹³⁰ the 20th century, with a focus on the Cold War!

Once you start seeing that many dissonant facts, plenty of them from the same organizations like The New York Times Company that call themselves the “paper of record” and the “first draft of history,” that literally run billboards calling themselves the “Truth”…you start to realize that there is an unreliable narrator problem.

What if Sulzberger is more like Keyser Söze? What if his employees are highly self-interested professional prevaricators? What if they’ve always been like that? What if you can’t trust anything they say, and by extension anything the US establishment says, without checking it yourself?

As the Cold War ended, and the internet rose in the late 1990s, a spate of movies came out — The Matrix, Memento, The Truman Show, Fight Club, The Game, Men in Black, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind –— all about a constructed reality where our memories aren’t real. It’s almost as if with the rise of the Network, that there was a dim realization in the collective subconscious that everyone had been lied to, deceived, anesthetized, sedated by the centralized States of the 20th century — not just by the fascists and the communists, but the democratic capitalists too.

Just like someone who grew up in China and migrated to the US in adulthood would find that they’d have been lied to — that Mao wasn’t really “7 parts good and 3 parts bad,” but far worse than that — those who grew up in the US and migrated to the Internet in adulthood are starting to realize that something is up.

The reason is that the American establishment didn’t really understand what the internet would mean for them. Because during the 20th century they’d made obvious-but-threatening truths, like the existence of Soviet spies in the US, rude to talk about. Then a progression happened: after the obvious became rude, the rude became unsayable, the unsayable became unthinkable, and the unthinkable went unthought. And once it went unthought, it was no longer even thought about as a potential threat. Moreover, the original people who’d consciously suppressed that obvious-but-threatening truth had passed away.

So these unthought ideas were then sitting there waiting in a dusty tome, waiting for someone to happen upon them, and accidentally rediscover them and put them on the internet. Whether Google Books or Wikileaks or the Soviet archives or the censorship-resistant web, there are now too many secrets in plain view.

The question now is whether a newly awakened US establishment can use its control of chokepoints like Google and its various “fact-checkers” to suppress access to these inconvenient truths, or whether web3-mediated services will make it permanently difficult for the State to suppress the Network. You as the reader may have some input on that.

Jurassic Ballpark

As a not-so-side note, in addition to falsified newspapers and history textbooks, your distorted impression of the past — your Gell-Mann America — likely comes from movies, to a greater extent than you might think. If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it often implicitly reduces to a few scenes from a Hollywood movie.

Let’s call this phenomenon “Jurassic Ballpark.” If you recall the scene from Jurassic Park where they splice in amphibian DNA to spackle over the gaps in their genetic reconstruction, that’s similar to what media consumption has done to your brain.¹³¹ You’re unconsciously splicing movie scenes into real-life as a ballpark approximation. The gaps in your knowledge have been filled in by TV and movies. These are unreliable narrators. For example:

What’s your image of the US military? Often something from Top Gun or Transformers. Even the negative portrayals depict it as all-powerful.¹³²
What’s it like to run a business? The evil CEO is a TV trope. Countless stories cast a corporation with limitless resources¹³³ as the main bad guy, from the Terminator franchise to Lost.
Who’s going to save us from the virus? Why, the competent public servants at the CDC, as portrayed in Contagion.

By contrast, you very rarely see depictions of journalists, activists, professors, regulators, and the like as bad guys. The public lacks televised narratives for how people in those roles can go wrong. That’s why the behavior of journalists in real life was such a surprise to Paul Graham:

One of the biggest surprises of my adult life is how unethical reporters are. In movies they’re always the good guys.

“In movies they’re always the good guys.” Indeed! If you think about it, superheros are literally portrayed as journalists (that’s the day job of both Clark Kent and Peter Parker), and journalists are likewise portrayed as superheros (see movies like Spotlight and The Post). The Intrepid Reporter is as much of a stock character as the Evil Corporation.¹³⁴ You don’t hear much about the evil reporter, though. You don’t hear much about the evil communist, either.

Why? More than 20 years ago, Reason Magazine ran a story that still holds up well today, called Hollywood’s Missing Movies, about how the film industry airbrushed the drama of the Cold War out of the 20th century. So it’s not just that the movie industry ran positive portrayals of US establishment journalists, they also ran positive portrayals of out-and-out communists - but I repeat myself.¹³⁵

There are exceptions. Once in a while you do see a House of Cards that depicts evil nonprofits, Democrats, and journalists. Once in a while you do get a Dallas Buyers Club or Ghostbusters that depicts evil regulators from the FDA or EPA. And more recently you’ve started to see a few movies that even depict evil communists, not in the interchangeable cartoon villain sense of a Rocky IV, but in the ideological sense - the Lives of Others, The Way Back, Bridge of Spies, and the Death of Stalin respectively depict the spying, gulaging, imprisoning, murdering Communist states for what they really were.

Still, these are very much exceptions. AI video analysis could quantify this, but if you took the top N most popular movies and TV shows over the past several decades, in terms of raw hours of footage watched, I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists.

Of course, these are fictional stories, but as Graham’s quote illustrates, they serve as real world archetypes. Even the FDA knows what a Tricorder is, and they think of it as “good” only because it was portrayed as good in Star Trek. But most of the time biomedical innovators are portrayed as evil, with all the attendant consequences. False histories shape our reality. We all live in Jurassic Ballpark.

Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, Future Is Our Past

New countries begin with new stories.

Once we’ve dislodged the “arc of history” from our heads, that thing we didn’t even know was there, the story that told us of the US establishment’s inevitability and institutional goodness…once we’ve realized just how similar that story is to the USSR’s similar narrative of inevitability and institutional goodness…once we’ve realized we can’t count on the US establishment to be the “leader of the free world” or even to successfully manage its domestic affairs anymore…what’s left?

We’re going to need new stories. Movies where the big decision doesn’t end up on the US president’s desk, where the US military isn’t counted on to save us from aliens. News feeds that don’t put American events by default on the frontpage. Supply chains and digital services that don’t rely on an increasingly unpredictable and anarchic America. Stories that decenter the US, in other words, but that still give the world hope.

That movie point is a disorienting one, isn’t it? You might be tempted to say it’s not important. But it’s all-important. We don’t tell fictional stories about the Kazakhstani military saving the world because it wouldn’t be realistic. And after 2021, it isn’t realistic to make stories about the US establishment saving the world either.

For example, a movie like 2011’s Contagion that depicts a competent CDC is now just too far away from reality to permit suspension of disbelief. So instead we get a movie like 2021’s Don’t Look Up, which depicts a chaotic America that’s still somehow the center of events, still the country which the world relies on, but whose internal chaos causes it to fall short. The next movie in that imaginary trilogy will probably not center America. What could it center instead?

Unfortunately, the default right now would be to center China. The Chinese are after all putting out blockbuster movies like Wolf Warrior 2 and Battle of Lake Changjin where they beat the Americans, save the world, and end up as number one. They have that civilizational confidence. And these movies are not laughable like they would have been even a decade ago. China is a real contender for the crown, unlike Chad or Chile. So that’s the set of stories that is waiting in the wings.

One response is to deny this and double down on American nostalgia, rolling out Top Gun: Maverick and electing people born in the 1940s forever. This is what the US establishment is currently doing, hanging on for dear life to the postwar order, denying that any change is underway — and thereby refusing to gracefully adapt.

Another response is to come up with new stories that center neither China nor America, but that do center certain universal values - and that give a bridge between America and what comes next, as America itself was a bridge between the British Empire and the post-WW2 world.

We give four concrete examples in this chapter. But to be clear, just because a story decenters America doesn’t mean it has to be punitive. That is, these stories don’t have to condemn the US, anymore than the postwar order of 1945-1991 put the UK in the dock, or the 1991-2021 order really beat up on the Soviets that much. Indeed, a new story could well feature past aspects of the US in laudatory ways. The main commonality is that we need new stories that no longer assume the US establishment will continue to be at the center of the world, or else people will be psychologically unprepared for that eventuality.

Another way of thinking about it is that the right kind of new story turns constants into variables. Just as Bitcoin turned the constant of the US dollar into a variable, we need new stories that turn the constant of the US establishment into a variable. By decentering the US establishment in our mental models, we enable decentralization. We envision a world where the US may not be there for us, because it was not always there in the past, and may not endure far into the future.

Here are four such stories. The first is the tale of the fragmentation of the postwar consensus. The second is a generalization of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. The third recapitulates the Fourth Turning concept from Strauss and Howe, as well as Turchin and Dalio’s work, all of which predict significant conflict to come in the West. The fourth talks about how our future is our past, how the mid-20th century is like a funhouse mirror moment, and how we are now seeing a bizarre phenomenon where we repeat past events but get opposite outcomes.

All of them turn constants into variables, as they describe a pre-American era where the US didn’t yet exist, and thereby prepare us for a post-American period where the US in its current form no longer exists.

The Fragmentation Thesis

The Sovereign Individual, written in 1999, is an incredible book that nailed many aspects of our digital future decades in advance, Bitcoin prime among them. We won’t recapitulate the whole thing here, but in short the thesis is that after many generations in which technology favored centralization (railroads, telegraph, radio, television, movies, mass production) since about 1950 it is now favoring decentralization (transistor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency).

So by this measure, peak centralization was about 1950, when there was one telephone company (AT&T), two superpowers (US/USSR), and three TV stations (ABC/CBS/NBC). Even though the 1950s are romanticized in the US, and there were certainly good things about the era, that level of centralization was not natural. This was an enormous degree of cultural homogenization, conformity, and sameness relative to the pre-1914 world just a few decades prior. Many aspects of individual initiative, creativity, and freedom had been dulled down or eliminated in the standardization process.

Read William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man or James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution for a portrait of this midcentury time period. At the time, the mid-century US was more corporatist than entrepreneurial. Yes, the system was capitalism, but a highly managed and regulated sort of capitalism. It was all about joining the big company and working your way up, not founding one, except for the rare and just beginning startup phenomenon on the West Coast, which was a million-fold less common than it is now.

Everything was significantly to the economic left and social right of where it is today. Yes, the USA wasn’t communist, but it did have 90% top marginal tax rates, to stop any new people from getting rich and potentially threatening the system FDR built. Similarly, the USSR was far more socially conservative than is commonly remembered, doing things like taxing childless women to reduce their status if they didn’t reproduce.

Typically, those who complain about filter bubbles are actually complaining that there is more than one. Namely, they are annoyed that all information doesn’t derive from establishment sources only. That situation actually did obtain in the mid-century US, when tens of millions of Americans all assembled in their living rooms at the same time to watch I Love Lucy.

Then it all decentralized, fragmented. The story is told in essays like Paul Graham’s “Refragmentation,” and in The Sovereign Individual. And we call this the Fragmentation thesis.

The Frontier Thesis

In the late 1800s, Fredrick Jackson Turner gave an influential talk on the concept of the frontier as the crucial driving force in American history. At that time, it was understood that the free land of the frontier was crucial to the US in several ways - as a way for the ambitious to seek their fortunes, as a national aspiration in the form of Manifest Destiny, as bare land for social experiments.

Today, of course, the concept of the frontier and Manifest Destiny is not only not admired, but has been pathologized since the 60s by the same deconstructionism that is one half of wokeness. You know the story: the American frontiersmen, like Columbus before them, were racists, colonialists, and imperalists.¹³⁶

But two points on this before we proceed.

The first is that there were $N$ tribes fighting in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish, the British, and the like. The Europeans simply represented tribes $N + 1$ , $N + 2$ , and so on. Had one of the Native American tribes developed a technological edge over any of the European tribes, had they invented oceanic navigation, they would likely have invaded Europe. We can infer this because (a) when the Mongols had a similar technological edge they did invade Europe and (b) many North American tribes were by contemporaneous accounts people accustomed to war. So, it’s old-fashioned, but it’s probably healthier to think of the Native Americans more like the 300 Spartans than as helpless victims — brave warriors who fought valiantly but lost to superior forces.

The second is that if you read books like Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here, it makes clear that history is a boneyard. Contra the opening notes of Microsoft’s recent Ignite conference, there’s probably not a single ethnic group on the planet that simply peacefully occupied their plot of land since “time immemorial.” One tribe’s homeland was once their distant ancestors’ frontier.

So, with that as preface, let’s generalize the frontier thesis. One way of thinking about it is that the frontier actually opened in 1492, well before the founding of the Americas. What’s little known is that Columbus’ voyage to the New World was in part driven by the Ottoman blockade of the Eastern Mediterranean; it was an attempt to find an alternative path to India around the Ottomans, but it ended up using technology to reopen the frontier in the face of political roadblocks.

From 1492 to 1890, Europeans had what they considered a frontier. It started with transatlantic navigation and the discovery of the New World, then proceeded to European colonialism, and from there to the independence of the US and Western expansion via Manifest Destiny. Towards the end of this period, authors like Charles Nordhoff in Communistic Societies of the United States noted how important the frontier was, how bad it would be if that avenue for ambitious men was closed off, and how nasty the Trade-Unionists were getting.

Hitherto, in the United States, our cheap and fertile lands have acted as an important safety-valve for the enterprise and discontent of our non-capitalist population. Every hired workman knows that if he chooses to use economy and industry in his calling, he may without great or insurmountable difficulty establish himself in independence on the public lands; and, in fact, a large proportion of our most energetic and intelligent mechanics do constantly seek these lands…

I do not doubt that the eagerness of some of our wisest public men for the acquisition of new territory has arisen from their conviction that this opening for the independence of laboring men was essential to the security of our future as a free and peaceful state…

Any circumstance, as the exhaustion of these lands, which should materially impair this opportunity for independence, would be, I believe, a serious calamity to our country; and the spirit of the Trades-Unions and International Societies appears to me peculiarly mischievous and hateful, because they seek to eliminate from the thoughts of their adherents the hope or expectation of independence. The member of a Trades-Union is taught to regard himself, and to act toward society, as a hireling for life; and these societies are united, not as men seeking a way to exchange dependence for independence, but as hirelings, determined to remain such, and only demanding better conditions of their masters. If it were possible to infuse with this spirit all or the greater part of the non-capitalist class in the United States, this would, I believe, be one of the gravest calamities which could befall us as a nation; for it would degrade the mass of our voters, and make free government here very difficult, if it did not entirely change the form of our government, and expose us to lasting disorders and attacks upon property.

Nordhoff was right. The aggression of the Trade-Unions eventually led to the communist revolutions which killed tens of millions of people globally, led to “lasting disorders and attacks upon property”, and generally became the bane of the world.

We can attribute some of this to the pause, to the closing of the frontier in 1890. That closing took away paths for ambitious men, and ensured that they couldn’t easily become founders on their own plot of land - they had to become union organizers, or revolutionaries, or demagogues of some kind. Without the frontier, it all became zero sum. And thus we entered the steel cage match of the 20th century between fascism, communism, and democratic capitalism. There were some important frontier-related technological developments during this period in space shuttles (and cruise ships!), but the frontier itself was not open.

Humanity managed to survive through a bloody 20th century. After 1991, the frontier reopened as commerce on the internet was legalized. By the late 2010s, the combination of centralization and wokification (in the West) and Xi-ification (in China) threatened to close this frontier too, but BTC and web3 and the open metaverse have given the digital frontier a new lease on life.

Today, if we assess where we’re at, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land, the internet, the sea, and space. Right now, there are 7.7B people on land, 3.2B on the internet, about 2-3M on the high seas, and less than 10 currently in space.

So, practically speaking, an “internet frontier” is easier than the other three. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to use the concepts from the network state to reopen the physical frontier, through a hybrid internet/land strategy, as described in this book.

To summarize, (a) the period of European greatness corresponded to the open frontier from 1492-1890, (b) the period of total war corresponded to the closing frontier from 1890-1991 which ushered in a necessarily zero-sum world, (c) the peaceful reopening of the digital frontier could lead us again to a time of greatness, (d) the American and Chinese establishments are trying to close that frontier and trap us into the same steel cage match of the 20th century, (e) but with sufficiently good technology we might be able to escape these political roadblocks and (f) reopen not just a digital frontier, but a physical one: on remote pieces of land, on the sea, and eventually in space. This is what we refer to as the generalized Frontier thesis.

The Fourth Turning Thesis

The Fourth Turning and Ages of Discord both predict very significant unrest within the US in the coming years. Ray Dalio does as well in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, though he confines most of his comments to monetary apocalypse. Their models are somewhat related.

The Fourth Turning came out in 1997 and is based on a quasi-cyclical theory of Anglo-American history, where conflict erupts roughly every 75 years. If you believe in these patterns and want a possible underlying driver of them, 75 years is about one long human lifespan. So perhaps those who do not remember¹³⁷ history really are doomed to repeat it.

Turchin’s predictions came out around 2008 in a Nature article, and he’s written them up at length in War and Peace and War. He has impressive timestamped graphs with specific forecasts as to why conflict will rise, using various measures for societal instability like elite overproduction and the wage share of the masses.

Dalio’s thesis is that we’re about to experience events that have never happened before in our lives, but have happened many times before in history. He goes back further than the Fourth Turning to the British and Dutch empires, and has some quasi-quantitative analysis to support his view.

All three of these works predict significant physical and/or monetary conflict in America in the 2020s, and (in Dalio’s case) a consequent changing of the world order. We call this the Fourth Turning Thesis.

The Future Is Our Past Thesis

Take a look at this video of unmixing a fluid. Isn’t that bizarre? You can see the same process going backward in time, in an unexpected way. This is not the kind of trajectory we expect to see, but it happens under certain conditions.

And it’s one model for what’s happening in the world, as we redecentralize after a century of centralization. In other words, an important consequence of the fragmentation thesis is that our future may be more like our past. If peak centralization was around 1950, with one telephone company (AT&T) and two superpowers (US, USSR) and three television stations (ABC, CBS, NBC), we grow more decentralized as we move in either direction from that point.

Essentially, the invention of the transistor in 1947 is like a mirror moment. And as you go forward and backward in time you start to see events repeating, but as funhouse mirror versions of themselves, often with the opposite outcome. Our future is our past. Let’s go through some examples:

Today, the internet frontier reopens; back then, the western frontier closed.
Today, we experience COVID-19; back then we experienced the Spanish Flu.
Today, we have tech billionaires; back then we had the captains of industry.
Today, founders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey seem to be winning against establishment journalists; back then, the likes of Ida Tarbell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller.
Today, we have cryptocurrencies; back then we witnessed the era of private banking.
Today, we have a populist movement of digital gold advocates; back then, we had a populist movement against gold in the form of the Cross of Gold speech.
Today, we have the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar America; back then, we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany.
Today, in Weimar America, we have right and left fighting in the streets; back then, in Weimar Germany, we had left and right fighting in the streets.
Today, the capitalists successfully teamed up with the generals against a sitting president; back then, the generals sided with the sitting president against the capitalists.
Today, we have what Turchin considers antebellum-like polarization; back then, we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization.
Today, we have Airbnb; back then, we had flophouses.
Today, we have Uber; back then, we had gypsy cabs.
Today, The New York Times sides with Ukraine to fight nationalist Russia; back then, The New York Times sided with communist Russia to starve out Ukraine.
Today, we see the transition from “neutral” to yellow journalism; back then, we saw the transition from yellow to “neutral” journalism.
Today, figures like Mike Moritz think of China as energetic and America as laconic, but back then folks like Bertrand Russell thought of America as energetic and China as laconic.

We can think of more examples, with respect to the emerging Second Cold War.

Today, we’re seeing the Chinese and Russians again line up against the West, except this time, the Chinese are the senior partner in the relationship.
Today, we may see a third group arise outside of the Cold War axis, except this time rather than being the “Third World” and non-aligned, it may be “Web3” and economically aligned.
And today, depending on how the economics play out, that third faction may come in first, the Second World may come in second, and the former First World may end up last.

And if we go back further in time:

Today, we see a US that’s gradually federalizing into individual states and an Indian state that’s unified many subcontinental ethnic groups. Back in the late 1940s, we saw an India that was gradually centralizing away from individual princely states, and a United States that unified many European ethnicities.
Today, we’re seeing so-far unsuccessful calls for wealth seizures in the US; back then, we saw Executive Order 6102, the successful seizure of gold.
Today, we’re seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder and startup societies; back then, in the 1770s, we saw pseudonymous founders of startup countries.
Today, we’re seeing the re-encryption of the map; further back in time, before 1492, maps had terra incognita.

The careful observer will note that these events aren’t all happening in exactly the same reverse order. It’s not A/B/C/D and then D/C/B/A like a melody. Moreover, the first set of events is more spaced out over time, while the second is highly clumped together, with internet-era events years, rather than decades, apart. Finally, the repetition of each event is often not exactly the same as the previous, but often a “version 3.0.” For example, Bitcoin is not simply the same as gold, but a version 3.0 that combines some aspects of gold and some aspects of digitized fiat currencies.

Still, there seems to be something going on. What’s the unifying theory here?

One model, as just discussed in the Fragmentation Thesis, is that technology favored centralization in the West and especially the US from arguably 1754-1947 (Join, or Die in the French and Indian War, unified national government post-Civil War, railroads, telegraph, radio, television, movies, mass media in general, and mass production). And technology is now favoring decentralization from roughly 1950 to the present day (transistor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency). So, in the West, the grip of the centralized state has begun to slacken. The East is a different matter; after a century of communism, socialism, civil war, and Partition, China and India are more internally unified than they’ve been in a long time.

Before we immediately jump to thinking that world is ending, though, we should note that during the rise of Western centralized power people (understandably) complained about centralized power and homogeneity, just as today during the fall of Western centralized power they are complaining about fragmentation and lack of common voice. That doesn’t mean we’ve come full circle, exactly. As per the helical theory of history, we might have progressed or regressed. But there may be an underlying cycle: “the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.”

Anyway, this model would explain why we’re seeing an inversion: there was an upward arc that favored the centralized State, but now we’re in the middle of a downward arc that favors the decentralized Network.¹³⁸ So various historical events are recurring with the opposite results, like the fluid flowing in reverse. And that’s the thesis on how our Future is Our Past.

Left is the New Right is the New Left

Marx’s concept of a class struggle has been so influential that people don’t realize that sometimes those revolutionary classes won, and became ruling classes. And then in turn fought the subsequent revolutionary classes.

In fact, they often did.

Understanding this is important if you want to build a startup society. Unless you are significantly differentiated from the establishment — unless you have a “10X value proposition”, as a venture capitalist would put it — you’re not going to attract citizens.

Social differentiation means being revolutionary in some sense. Not necessarily in the sense of the Paris Commune. But morally revolutionary in the sense of inverting some premise that society at large thinks is good, yet that you can show — through your meticulous study of history — is actually bad.¹³⁹ That moral inversion is the moral innovation that’s the basis for a startup society, and it leads us ineluctably to left-vs-right.

Why Discuss Left and Right at All?

Wait. Can’t we just do technology without politics, or use technology to escape politics? Unfortunately, no, because politics is about people who disagree with you. If you’re working with computers, or robots, or pure math, you don’t have politics. If you’re in a highly aligned society, you don’t have politics either. But to build such a highly aligned society from scratch, you need to think about politics.

Put another way, if the startup founders of the 2000s and 2010s had to level up beyond technology to learn business, the startup society founders of the 2020s need to add history and politics to their curriculum. Because a theory of left and right is necessary for nation formation.

Our theory begins by discussing the split between visions of moral and technological progress, the analogy between political and financial arbitrage, the market for revolutionaries of both the political activist and tech founder type, and the concept of startup societies as a way to reunify moral and technological progress.

Next we discuss left and right as real constructs, using the spatial theory of voting to obviate the objection that left and right don’t really exist, and qualifying our observation by noting these are point-in-time constructs.

Subsequently we discuss how left and right change over time, using examples from what we call the left, right, and libertarian cycles, in the context of both State-oriented political movements and more recent Network-centric tech startups.

Finally, we discuss several specific “flippenings” through history where winning teams changed ideological orientation upon victory, and give a thesis on what the next flippening will look like.

Reunifying Technological and Moral Progress

Before we get into left-vs-right, the concept of starting a new project with a moral rather than technological innovation will be unfamiliar to many tech founders. So let’s make it familiar.

First, we need to understand the surprising similarities between startup founders and political activists, between those focused on technological innovation and those interested in moral good. The turn-of-the-century progressives thought of these as the same thing: progress was both technological and moral progress. Public sanitation, for example, was both a technological innovation and a moral good (“cleanliness was next to godliness”).

More recently, technological and moral innovators have grown to be at odds, because the US establishment now regards its economic disruptors as enemies.¹⁴⁰ As we’ll get to, the idea of funding presidents of startup societies around the world could reunify technological and moral progress. But what exactly do we mean by “moral progress”?

Moral Progress is Moral Innovation is Moral Inversion

If you want to produce moral and not just technological progress, you’re going to have to introduce new moral premises that invert what people previously believed. So one man’s moral innovation is another man’s moral inversion. Here are some specific examples:

smoking was acceptable, is now considered “bad”
alcohol was “bad” during Prohibition, is now acceptable
profit was “bad” under Communism, is now acceptable
college was once considered merely acceptable, but in the postwar era became “good”

Some observations immediately come to mind.

First, from this list, you should be able to generate many more examples (we avoided the very obvious ones). And you might realize that a significant fraction of today’s public conversation is devoted to debating whether X is morally good or bad, usually without stating it quite so bluntly.
Second, a moral innovation need not flip something all the way from “good” to “bad”. Simply flipping it from “bad” to “acceptable” or “acceptable” to “bad” can be highly consequential.
Third, we can see that moral progress is not as straightforward as technological progress. The moral step forward that Communism proposed - the premise that “profit was bad” - was actually a terrible innovation that led to tens of millions dead and a worse-off world. By contrast, the Enlightenment’s moral innovations were good, at least in the sense that they led to technological development.
Fourth, that last point shows that benchmarking what “moral good” means is nontrivial. Does it mean deontologically good, or consequentially good? That is, is this moral principle good in some abstract sense, or is it good because it produces measurably good results?¹⁴¹
Fifth, if a given society has its moral foundations generally right, then most of the proposed moral innovations or inversions will actually make people worse off if imposed on the populace at large.

All of this is true. Nevertheless, a key realization for a tech founder should be that a significant fraction of people want moral progress. Just as much as the technologist wants to get to Mars, a large chunk of society wants to feel like the good guys fighting in some grand cause. And if you don’t give them that cause, they’ll make one up, and/or start fighting each other. (Note that Mars is itself a moral cause when framed in terms of “backing up humanity” or “exploring the final frontier”.)

Another realization is that consent can bound the scope of moral innovation. The communist revolutions of the 20th century were evil not just because of their murderous results, but because they ran a giant human experiment on people against their will. Those who wanted to opt out, to exit, were stopped by Berlin Walls and Iron Curtains. But the forgotten American “communistic societies” of the 1800s were generally good, because only those who wanted to be there remained. Anyone who didn’t like it could leave. That’s why the reopening of the frontier is so important: it gives space to morally innovate without affecting those who don’t consent to the experiment.

A third realization is that technological innovation drives moral innovation. While human nature may be roughly constant, technology is not. So new tech causes the introduction of new moral principles, or the re-evaluation of old ones. Consider the premise that “freedom of speech is good”: that means one thing in 1776, another thing during the era of highly centralized mass media, and yet another in an era when everything reduces to speech-like digital symbols transmitted over the internet.

A related realization is that moral innovation drives technological innovation. Once it was no longer considered morally “evil” to propose a heliocentric model, people could develop more accurate star charts, which in the fullness of time got us to oceanic navigation, satellites, and space travel. Conversely, if you introduce the moral premise that “digital centralization is bad”, you move down the branch of the tech tree that begins with Bitcoin.

A final realization is that just like most attempts at technological innovation fail, most attempts at moral innovation will also fail. However, if those failures occur within the bounded confines of a consensual startup society, they’re more acceptable as the price of moral progress. And if you think society has in many ways now generally become bad, it may not that be that hard to find ways to improve on it through a moral inversion.

Political Arbitrage and Financial Arbitrage

A moral inversion is a form of political arbitrage. Nietzsche criticized it when Christianity did it, but also had to admit it worked.¹⁴² Why did it work? One view is that “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” is essentially the same concept as buy low/sell high. You’re supporting something when it’s low and shorting it when it’s high.

The mood of the words is very different, of course. The political arbitrage of supporting those with low status and attacking those with high status is typically framed as a moral imperative, while the financial arbitrage of buying assets with low value and selling assets of high value is usually portrayed as a dispassionate mechanism for gaining financial capital. But recall that people do sometimes make moral arguments for buying low and selling high (“it helps markets become more efficient”). So you might invert the mood of the words on the other side too, and think of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted” as a dispassionate mechanism for gaining political capital.

There’s a related observation: the concept of “buy low, sell high” assumes there are many different assets to choose from, many axes to arbitrage. By contrast, the concept of “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” tacitly assumes only one axis of powerful-vs-weak. However, multiple axes of power exist. For example, a man who organizes a million dollars for charity may be economically comfortable, yet can be socially weak relative to the establishment journalist who decides to afflict him for his tweets. So the ability to designate just who exactly is “comfortable” and who is “afflicted” is itself a form of power. Someone who can pick who to label as “comfortable”, who can pick the axis of political arbitrage, can keep knocking down the “comfortable” while themselves remaining very comfortable. And that means the concept of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted” can also be a mechanism for maintaining political capital.

Putting these ideas together, once you start reclassifying much of the moral language flying through the air as a kind of political arbitrage, you can start thinking about it more rationally. Political arbitrage involves backing a faction that is politically weaker today than it could or should be. An early backer that risks their own political capital to make a faction more justly powerful can also gain a slice of that power should it actually materialize.

Think about the status that accrued to the Founding Fathers, to the early Bolsheviks, to Mao’s victorious communists, to the civil rights activists, or to the Eastern European dissidents after the Soviets fell. These very different groups of social revolutionaries all took significant status risks — and gained significant status rewards come the revolution.

The Market for Revolutionaries

Once we see the mapping between financial and political arbitrage, we realize there is a market for revolutionaries.

Today, there are two kinds of revolutionaries: technological and political. And there are two kinds of backers of these revolutionaries: venture capitalists and philanthropists. The backers seek out the founders, the ambitious leaders of new technology companies and new political movements. And that is the market for revolutionaries.

Equipped with this framework, you can map the tech ecosystem to the political ecosystem. You can analogize tech founders to political activists, venture capitalists to political philanthropists, tech trends to social movements, YC Startup School to the Oslo Freedom Forum, the High Growth Handbook to Beautiful Trouble, startups to NGOs, big companies to government agencies, Crunchbase to CharityNavigator, and so on.

Just as there is an entire ecosystem to source and back tech founders, there is an entire ecosystem to do so for political activists. It’s less explicit in key respects, of course. There aren’t term sheets between political philanthropists and their young proteges, there aren’t “exits” to the tune of billions of dollars, and we don’t usually see political activists bragging about their funding in the same way that tech founders talk up their investors. Indeed, often the funding trail is intentionally obscured, to frustrate opposition research.

But the process of going from a revolutionary’s bright idea to a small group with a bit of funding to a mass movement is similar to the journey of a tech startup. And the endgame can be even more ambitious; if the top tech founders end up running companies like Google and Facebook, the top political activists end up running countries like Myanmar and Hungary.¹⁴³ It’s “going public” in a different way.

Take another look at the careers of political activists as varied as Aung San Suu Kyi, Viktor Orban, Vaclav Havel, Hamid Karzai, Ahmad Chalabi, Joshua Wong, Liu Xiaobo, and the like. All of them fit this model. Western resources backed them to come to power and build pro-Western governments in their region. That doesn’t mean these political founders always won (Wong and Xiaobo very much did not) or executed well (Karzai and Chalabi did not), or even stayed West-aligned indefinitely (Suu Kyi and Orban did not). But if you track each of their careers back, you’ll see something like this episode, when Soros was funding Orban and both were on the same side as revolutionary forces against the Soviets. At that point in time, Soros was the philanthropist and Orban his protege, much as a venture capitalist might back an ambitious young founder. That’s a classic example of how backers seek leaders in the market for revolutionaries.

Startup Societies Reunify Technological and Moral Progress

You might find it surprising, or disquieting, to think about all these different political revolutions as being similar to VC-backed startups. But revolutions are difficult to bootstrap, so there’s often a great power sponsor. The French were crucial to the American Revolution, for example.

What’s the relevance for us? Well, the startup society reunifies the concepts of technological and political revolution, pulls together the two different kinds of progress, and presents a new path to power. Because now both the tech founder and the political activist can declare themselves presidents of a startup society.

Backers can fund startup societies using the mechanisms of tech, out in the open, with explicit contracts, and consent by all citizens. But they can also achieve the moral innovation desired by the political revolutionaries. And if these startup societies are built out on the frontier, whether digital or physical, then the moral innovations are no longer imposed top-down, but adopted bottom-up by the people who opt in. That gives a better way to achieve the goals of ambitious young political reformers.

In short, once we see that a tech founder builds a startup company to effect economic change, and a political activist builds a social movement to effect moral change, we can see how the startup societies we describe in this work combine aspects of both.

Two Ideologies

The Spatial Theory of Voting

Now we turn to left and right.

The simplest approach is to talk about the left and right as if they are permanent categories; you’ll hear this when people talk about “the left” and “the right” as groups.

The second order approach is to contest this binary. People will (correctly!) note that realignments happen, that the left/right dichotomization doesn’t fully encode¹⁴⁴ political behavior, that the masses aren’t as ideologically consistent as the elites, that the categories vary over time, and so on.

The third order approach is to acknowledge this complexity but invoke the spatial theory of voting, which allows us to quantify matters. As reviewed in this PDF, the spatial theory of voting allows us to analyze everything from Congressional votes to Supreme Court decisions to newspaper editorials. When we do so, the first principal component of political variation does indeed correspond to the left/right spectrum.

The fourth order approach is to then note that this (real!) axis actually rotates over time. It’s more about relative tribal positioning (voting with members of the same political tribe) than absolute ideological positioning (voting for a constant ideological position). Revolutionary tactics eventually succeed in gaining power for one tribe, and ruling class tactics eventually fail to defend power for another tribe, so the “left” and “right” gradually switch over historical timescales even as the tribal names remain the same.

Fights Create Factions

Two factions consistently arise because coalition-forming behavior is game-theoretically optimal. That is, when fighting over any scarce resource, if one group teams up and the other doesn’t, the first group tends to win.

This is a fundamental reason why humans tend to consolidate into two factions that fight each other over scarce resources till one wins. The winning team enjoys a brief honeymoon, after which it usually then breaks up internally into left and right factions again, and the battle begins anew. After the French Revolution, factions famously arose. After World War 2, the once-allied US and USSR went to Cold War. And after the end of the Cold War, the victorious US faction broke down into internal hyperpolarization. A strong leader might keep this from happening for a while, but the breakdown of a victorious side into left and right factions is almost a law of societal physics.

Left and Right as Temporary Tactics, Not Constant Classes

The names for the two tactics that arise in these battles may hail from the French Revolution¹⁴⁵ — the left and the right — but they’re almost like magnetic north and south, like yin and yang, seemingly encoded into our nature.

The left tactic is to delegitimize the existing order, argue it is unjust, and angle for redistributing the scarce resource (power, money, status, land), while the right tactic is to argue that the current order is fair, that the left is causing chaos, and that the ensuing conflict will destroy the scarce resource and not simply redistribute it.

You can think of circumstances where the right was correct, and those where the left was. A key concept is that on a historical timescale, right and left are temporary tactics as opposed to defining characteristics of tribes. For example, Protestants originally used left tactics relative to the Catholic Church in the time of Martin Luther. Then, hundreds of years later, the American descendants of those revolutionaries - the Protestant establishment, the WASPs – used right tactics to defend its position as the ruling class. As we discuss, many such flippenings occur in history, where a given tribe uses leftist tactics in one historical period and its cultural descendants use rightist tactics in another.

What’s the guideline for when a tribe will use left or right tactics? The tribe that’s defending (the ruling class) uses right tactics, and the tribe that’s attacking (the revolutionary class) uses left tactics. Because institutional defenders tend to win, each individual member of a revolutionary class feels like they’re losing. But because institutional defenders have to constantly fight swarms of revolutionaries to hold onto their position, the ruling class also feels like it’s on the back foot.

While there are big victories where the tribe using right or left tactics manages to sweep the field of their enemies for a brief interval, a new tribe usually arises that is to their respective left or right, and the battle begins anew. Can we ever escape this cycle of conflict over scarce resources?

Frontiers Mitigate Factions

The key word there is scarce. Everything changes when the frontier opens up, when there is a new realm of unoccupied space, where resources are suddenly less scarce. There’s less obligate wrangling, because an aggrieved faction can choose fight or flight, voice or exit. The would-be revolutionary doesn’t necessarily have to use left tactics to overthrow the ruling class anymore, resulting in a right crackdown in response. They can instead leave for the frontier if they don’t like the current order, to show that their way is better, or alternatively fail as many startups do.

The frontier means the revolutionary is simultaneously less practically obstructed in their path to reform (because the ruling class can’t stop them from leaving for the frontier and taking unhappy citizens with them), but also more ethically constrained (because the revolutionary can’t simply impose their desired reforms by fiat, and must instead gain express consent by having people opt into their jurisdiction).

These are, however, reasonable tradeoffs. So while the frontier is not a panacea, it is at least a pressure valve. That’s why reopening the frontier may be the most important meta-political thing we can do to reduce political conflict.

Two Ghosts, Different Hosts

We’ve talked about the left and right as tactics. You can also think of them as two ghosts, with different hosts. In any population, at any given time, one subpopulation will be hosting the leftist ghost and the other will be animated by the rightist ghost.

Left and right in this sense are almost like spirits that flit from host to host, occupying the minds of millions of people at the same time, coordinating groups against each other. And as you start looking at the history of religions or political movements, you can start to see that each has a “left mode” for revolutionary offense and a “right mode” for ruling class defense.

Why then do people often discuss left and right as if they were permanent classes rather than temporary tactics?

One answer comes from an analogy to tech startups. Just like a startup wants to maintain the pretense of being “revolutionary” for as long as possible, and a big company wants to maintain the pretense of being “dominant” for as long as possible, so too does it take a while for a revolutionary leftist to admit that they’ve becoming ruling class, or for a self-conceptualized member of the ruling class to admit they’ve actually become dispossessed. Paradoxically, both such admissions are demoralizing. Obviously, for the former member of the ruling class to concede that they’ve completely lost is a blow to morale. But for the former revolutionary to recognize they’ve won likewise takes the sails out of their movement, the moral justification for their revolution.

Another reason is that the switching tends to happen gradually, over historical timescales. So it’s not unreasonable to talk about “the left” or “the right” in a given period. Today, though, we’re in a realigning time where the switching is more visible.

My Left is Your Right

Note that we take no position on whether left or right strategies are objectively “good.” In our model, these are just tactics used by warring tribes, by two different social networks going at it. The revolutionary tribe uses left tactics and the ruling tribe uses right tactics. But if the tribe using leftist tactics starts winning, it starts using rightist tactics to defend its wins, and vice versa.

As an analogy, take a look at this GIF of two magnets. They repel each other into mirror positions. Think of this as an analogy for left and right: my left is your right. Whatever you adopt, I’ll have to adopt the mirror tactic.

Americans saw this in fast-forward during COVID. First the Republicans were concerned about the virus, and the Democrats were calling people racists for paying attention to it. Then once Trump started saying the virus wasn’t serious, positions flipped, with the Democrats calling for (and implementing) lockdowns and the Republicans fighting them on libertarian grounds. Then Trump flipped again to supporting vaccines, while Biden, Harris, and other Democrats said they wouldn’t trust a rushed Trump vaccine. Then the vaccine came out (the same one developed under the Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed!) and many Democrats were suddenly all in favor of mandating that which they once wanted to avoid, while many Republicans now booed this as an intolerable infringement on liberty.

You can rationalize these twists and turns. Those who do so commonly invoke Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?” You might say that the US was first too apathetic towards COVID-19, and then it overreacted. Committed partisans can no doubt give logical explanations for the observed sequence of events.

But forget about these details for a second and focus on the flip-flops. Whatever position one group adopted, the other did the opposite. The parsimonious explanation is that it was just magnets repelling, factions fighting. Professed ideals were just a mask for tribal interest. This fits the model of left and right swapping over time, because we’re now seeing those swaps happen in real-time. In such a period, the conflict is more obviously tribal (“Democrat-vs-Republican”) than ideological (“left-vs-right”).

Putting it all together, we propose that (a) left and right are quantifiable phenomena we can see via the spatial theory of voting, (b) the left/right axis is real but rotates with time, (c) they’re ancient and ineradicable concepts, arguably on par with yin/yang or magnetic north/south, (d) they’re complementary tactics to gain access to scarce resources, (e) if one group uses a left tactic, the other is almost forced to adopt a right tactic in response, and vice versa, (f) the frontier reduces political left/right issues because it reduces conflict over scarce resources, (g) we can think of left as revolutionary tactics and right as ruling class tactics and (h) the tactics constantly swap hosts over historical timeframes.

Let’s now drill into that last point, perhaps the least obvious: namely the concept that left and right change hosts over historical timeframes. Our study begins by introducing the left, right, and libertarian cycles.

Three Cycles

The Left Cycle

The left cycle is the story of how the revolutionary class becomes the ruling class.

Think about the following concepts: Christian King, Protestant Establishment, Republican Conservative, Soviet Nationalist, CCP Entrepreneur, or Woke Capitalist. Each of these compound nouns has within it a fusion of a once-left-associated concept and a right-associated one.

That prefix is important: once-left-associated. At one point, Christians led a revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire, Protestants led a decentralist movement against the Catholic Church, Republicans led an abolitionist movement against the South, the Soviets led an internationalist movement against the nationalist White Russians, the CCP led a communist movement against the capitalists, and the Wokes led a critical movement against American institutions.

But then they gained power, and with power came new habits. The revolutionary left that justified the rise to power morphed partially into an institutional right that justified the use of power. By its nature, a revolutionary group adopts leftist tactics to gain power, but once it wins, finds it needs to use rightist tactics to maintain power against a new crop of leftist insurgents. Lenin promised land, peace, and bread — then Trotsky quickly organized the Red Army. Thus does the leftist revolutionary rebuild a rightist hierarchy.

The Left Cycle Image

If you told this in story form, a manifesto-motivated group of revolutionaries would fight the man and gain power, only to have some Stalin character compromise the revolution, capture it, and just become the man all over again. Then you’d need a new manifesto and revolution against that order. The excellent short film Dinner for Few captures much of this dynamic.¹⁴⁶

If we take the 1000-year view, this is the long cycle that starts with Christian revolutionaries tearing down the Western Roman Empire by 476 AD, gives eventual rise to the ruling Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire, and then (1000+ years later!) sees Martin Luther nail his Ninety-five Theses to the Church of Wittenberg in 1517 AD as a new manifesto that spawns a whole new crop of Protestant revolutionaries.

Is there any alternative to this cycle, to a ruling class gaining power at the end of the revolution? Well, if a revolution doesn’t result in some kind of order, it looks more like a Pol Pot or Seven Kill Stele scenario, where the “revolution” is kept up through endless killing. Something like that may be how past civilizations collapsed.

Thus, some kind of order after the revolution is preferable. That brings us back to the left/right titrations: Christian King, Protestant Establishment, Republican Conservative, Soviet Nationalist, CCP Entrepreneur, Woke Capital. Each of them justifies the new ruling class, the new order, with the language of the revolutionary class.

Note also that not every one of these titrations has exactly equal fractions of revolution and institution. But the model happens repeatedly through history. A successful revolutionary class becomes the institutional class, then a realignment happens, and the new institutional class encounters a new revolutionary class.¹⁴⁷

The Right Cycle

The right cycle is the story of this epistle: strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times create strong men. Here’s the visual:

The Hard Times Cycle Image

This cycle starts from the right and becomes left. If we turned this into a story, it’d start with the rise of a small group of highly aligned Spartans. They grow on the borders of empire, so-called “marcher lords” with a strong sense of ingroup spirit, what Ibn Khaldun would call asabiyyah. Then they radiate out and start conquering the world. Their indomitable will carves a swath through the degenerate empire that surrounds them. They eventually achieve total victory. Strong men create good times.

But as they scale, they can no longer do everything on trust and need to start implementing processes and taxes. They also start attracting lazy parasites to the wealth they’ve created, people who want to join something great rather than build something great. And they have within their walls many of the people they just conquered, who don’t share their values and indeed didn’t much like being conquered. No one wants to work as hard or be as ruthless as that early Spartan band, given the easy wealth now available, so they enjoy themselves and busy themselves by fighting with each other over trifles. So good times create weak men.

Eventually this bureaucratic, disaligned, decadent empire falls to a new band of Spartans from the outside. And thus do weak men create hard times, and in turn fall to strong men.

The Libertarian Cycle

The libertarian cycle is the story of how a libertarian founder rebuilds the state.

First, a libertarian(ish) founder leaves the stifling bureaucracy of a big company to start their own. Most immediately fail, but through pure maneuver warfare and relentless execution, that founder might be able to make enough money to hire someone. In the early days the most important quantity is the burn rate. Every single person must be indispensable.

Eventually, if successful, the company starts building up some structure. Conservativism takes over. With the business growing consistently, the founder adds structure, career tracks, and a stable hierarchy. Now the most important quantity becomes the bus number, the number of people who can get hit by a bus such that the company is still functional. Suddenly every single person must now be dispensable.

The Libertarian Cycle Image

This is like the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity. The founder has to invest in a bureaucracy that impersonalizes the company and turns every employee into an interchangeable part. Otherwise, one person could quit and crash the company.

Around this time, the parasites start entering. They don’t want the risk of a small or even mezzanine-size business. They want lots of perks, high salaries, low workload, and the minimum work for the maximum return. They aren’t truly equity-aligned; the company is just a job that pays the rent. The interchangeability actually attracts them! They know they don’t need to pull their weight, that they aren’t that accountable individually for the business’ success or failure. The system will support them. This behavior is rational for them, but it degenerates into entitlement, and eventually causes collapse of the company’s business model, though this may take a very long time.

Finally, some stifled employee decides to exit the stultifying bureaucracy and become a libertarian(ish) founder, and the cycle starts anew. As per the helical theory of history, all progress is on the z-axis: they build the company, scale a bureaucracy to assist with that, see it take over, and incentivize the best to exit. Thus does the libertarian founder rebuild the state.

The Unified Cycle

We can synthesize these into a unified theory of cycles.

The left cycle starts with a group of revolutionary leftists that then become institutional rightists.
The right cycle starts with a group of determined rightists that then become decadent leftists.
The libertarian cycle starts with a group of ideological libertarians that end up building a bureaucratic state.

If you put them together, you get revolutionary, determined, ideologues (a left/right/libertarian fusion) whose glorious victory ends in institutional, bureaucratic, decadence (a different kind of left/right/libertarian fusion!)

Most people haven’t studied enough history to have an intuition for cyclicity on a 100-year or longer timescale. But many people are familiar with the lifecycle of successful tech startups, which exhibit this behavior on a 10-year timescale. That’s about the longest kind of experiment we can run repeatedly within a human lifetime. And fortunately the results have been widely witnessed.

That is, within our lives, we’ve seen many examples of a startup disrupting an incumbent¹⁴⁸ through scrappy tactics, becoming the incumbent themselves, and then employing incumbent tactics to defend itself against a new wave of startups coming up against it.

We’ve also seen firsthand that a successful tech startup is typically a left/right fusion. It has the leftist aspects of missionary zeal, critique of the existing order, desire to change things, informal dress and style, initially flat org chart, and revolutionary ambition. But it also has the rightist aspects of hierarchy, leadership, capitalism, accountability, and contractual order. If you only have one without the other, you can’t really build a meaningful company. Right without left is at best Dunder Mifflin Paper Company¹⁴⁹; left without right is an idealistic co-op that never ships a product.

Finally, we’ve also seen that just like most revolutions, most startups do fail. Failed startups don’t capture enough of the market for dollars, while the failed revolutions don’t capture enough of the political market for followers. But those startups that do succeed then need to fight off both startups and even bigger companies, until and unless they become a global goliath themselves (which is rare!).

The unified theory is thus a centralization, decentralization, and recentralization cycle. The revolutionary, determined, ideologues break away from the establishment, and then - if they succeed - build a giant centralized empire, which subsequently degenerates and spawns the next set of revolutionary, determined, ideologues.

New Boss: Not Exactly The Same As The Old Boss

The concept we’ve described here isn’t Marxism¹⁵⁰, which doesn’t have the concept of groups shifting sides from left to right and vice versa. The Marxist tacitly stipulates only one transition, where the “poor” beat the “rich” and usher in the inevitable age of communism, and that’s it. There isn’t cyclicity in their theory of history. It’s a one-way ascent to utopia.

The unified cycle theory is more similar to the plot of Animal Farm, where the “new boss is just like the old boss,” Nietzsche’s concept of master religions, the Lessons of History excerpt on systole/diastole, or Scott Alexander’s finite automata model.¹⁵¹ These each tell a story of cyclicity; Orwell’s book is focused on elite cyclicity (“new boss same as the old boss”), Durant’s chapter treats economic cyclicity, and Alexander’s post discusses cultural cyclicity.

The Libertarian Cycle Side By Side Image

But the unified cycle theory is not about a perfect circle at all — the new boss may be much better or worse than the old boss, may not be exactly the same. It’s closest to the helical theory of history, because we don’t necessarily come back to the same place on the z-axis. Many of these revolutions may actually leave everyone worse off, representing setbacks on the z-axis, just like many startups fail. There is however the occasional crucial revolution — usually frontier-opening in some sense — that pushes humanity forward on the z-axis and improves the world for the better.

Holy War Wins Wars

One way of thinking about the unified cycle theory is to fuse our theory of left as revolutionary class tactics and right as ruling class tactics. A leader needs aspects of both to win. The left gives the holy justification to fight the war, the right gives the might to win the fight, and together they allow that leader to prosecute a holy war. To take two examples:

Mao was a communist, but he was also absolutely a “strong man” created by “hard times.” He had that rightist ruthlessness about him, and unlike the stereotypical vegan pacifist of the libertarian left, his men were willing to impose capital punishment for any crime, real or imagined. Without some of that conventionally right-coded physical might he wouldn’t have won against a Nationalist opposition that was willing to use military force.¹⁵²
Conversely, if you think of the Poles and Estonians revolting against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, they weren’t only making conventionally right-wing arguments for capitalism and nationalism and traditional religion, they were also making left-wing arguments for democracy and free speech. Without some of that conventionally left-coded humanism they wouldn’t have won against a Soviet Union which claimed greater holiness.

The point is that in any holy war, the left is the word, and the right is the sword. It’s the priest and the warrior; you need both.

The left programs the minds. The priests and journalists, the academia and media, they imbue the warriors with a sense of righteous purpose. They also justify the conflict to the many bystanders, convincing them to either not get involved — or to get involved on the warriors’ side. In this concept of left, the priests transmit a revolutionary zeal that justifies the war against the opposing order, blesses it, consecrates it, says it is necessary and virtuous, motivates the warriors, boosts their morale, and turns them into missionaries that can defeat any mercenary.

The right furnishes the resources. They bring the warriors themselves, the farmers and the miners, the engineers and the locomotives, the rugged physicality, the requisite hierarchy, the necessary frugality, the profit and the loss, the determination and the organization, the hard truths to keep a movement going that complement the moral premises that get a movement started, the point of the spear that prosecutes that holy war.

Why do you need both right and left to win? Unless it’s a robot war (and we’ll get to that later) you need high-morale fighters, so you obviously need the rightist component as we’ve defined it. But the less obvious part is that you can’t win without the leftist component either, because mercenaries will run out of morale well before zealous missionaries.

Just to linger on this, the right often underestimates anything that’s non-physical.¹⁵³ If that describes you, don’t think of what the left does as just words, as woke slogans or religious mumbo-jumbo. Think of what they’re doing as writing the social operating system, the software for society, the code that coordinates huge numbers of human beings towards a common goal by telling them what is good and bad, permissible and impermissible, laudable and execrable. All logical deduction or martial action is then downstream of these moral premises.

To summarize: you really do need both the word and the sword to win a war, both the left and the right. And that concept applies outside the context of literal war, to a variety of large-scale political movements, because (to invert Clausewitz) politics is war by other means.

Again, this doesn’t mean that every movement has a precise 50%/50% titration of left- and right-wing concepts, nor that there is some globally optimum combination of X% left and Y% right that works across all time periods and societies, nor that the “center” always wins. The main point is that a moribund left or right movement can often be energized by infusing ideas from the other side.

A group using right tactics often has a deficit of zealous meaning, and is hanging onto a ruling class position while forgetting why they need to justify it from scratch to skeptical onlookers. Conversely, a group using left tactics often has a lack of hard-nosed practicality, attacking the ruling class without a concrete plan for what to put in its place come the revolution. Forming a left/right fusion that’s informed by these concepts is quite different from what we typically think of as a left/right hybrid, namely passive centrism.

Four Flippenings

As Saul Alinsky put it in Rules for Radicals: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” One could imagine a third installation in that fictional trilogy, and it’d be about what happens when the Have-Nots win and become the Haves.

We call this a political flippening, after the term from cryptocurrency. A flippening is when the #1 suddenly becomes the #2, and vice versa. It occurs when a revolutionary class flips a ruling class, only to become a new ruling class. The former ruling class then gets pushed into oblivion…or becomes a new revolutionary class.

We’ll cover several flippenings in this section: the left/right inversion of the white working class, the American and global flippenings of the last 100 years, a set of historical flippenings that put these dynamics in broader context, and the ongoing flippening between the ascending world and the descending class.

The Proletarian Flippening

The first flippening story is about the inversion of the working class. How did Stakhanov become Archie Bunker? That is, how did the white working class flip from the core of the left to the core of the right in one hundred years?

First: who’s Stakhanov, anyway? He’s the jacked Chad of socialist realism, the mythical Soviet worker who all the men wanted to be and all the women wanted to be with, the one who supposedly shoveled the coal of ten men in one day, the comrade who was a real bro, the guy in the “worker’s paradise” who somehow took no vacation time at all. Here’s a pic of the (likely fictional) Aleksei Grigorevich Stakhanov, from the 1930s.

And who’s Archie Bunker? Well, he’s the bigoted patriarch of a once-popular 70s show called All in the Family. Bunker’s role was to get dunked on in every episode by “Meathead,” his enlightened, college-educated son-in-law. He’s a foil for the TV show’s writers, representing all that is benighted and backward in the world. And here’s a pic of the (definitely fictional) Archie Bunker, from 1971.

So: these are two very different portrayals of the white working class, just a few decades apart! How did they flip? Why did they flip?

The Working Class as Revolutionary Rationale

In the first half of the 20th century, the person all enlightened people claimed to care about was the working man. The working man! Upton Sinclair’s book was for him. Orwell and the Popular Front fought alongside Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War for him. All the buckets of blood shed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin — all of that was ostensibly for him. Hitler too claimed to be for the working man, the Aryan one of course; the full name of his faction was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. In hearing both the communists and fascists tell it, the working man was the most honorable, humble, put-upon, long-suffering victim of a ruthless capitalist class…and also the brave, muscular, tough backbone of the necessary revolution.

That’s the context in which the Stakhanov posters (and their Nazi equivalents) went up everywhere.

Of course, in practice, communism was slavery, because the workers had to surrender 100% of their earnings to the state. As such, the Stakhanov posters were more cynical than any capitalist breakroom infographic. The Soviet worker couldn’t protest, couldn’t strike, couldn’t change jobs, couldn’t really buy anything with his “salary.” And those were the lucky ones! The unlucky ones were forced by Trotsky to dig the White Sea-Baltic Canal with their bare hands, or deported to Siberia by Stalin. As in Nazi Germany, arbeit did not macht frei.

But, be that as it may, communism had traction. At its peak it covered “26% of the land surface of the globe.” It was a secular ideology that commanded the zeal of a religious movement — pure State-worship, in our terminology, the total replacement of G-o-d with G-o-v. Decades after it had somewhat calmed down in the post-Stalinist USSR, it was in full murderous swing in the PRC and Cambodia. The political formula which put the working man on a pedestal as the put-upon victim of the powerful enabled one man after another to gain power worldwide — Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Il-Sung — and then enslave the working man in the name of liberating him.
The Working Class as Revolutionary Obstacle

Then something interesting happened. The US managed to avoid communist revolution (barely — see Henry Wallace and Venona), scrape through the tumultuous 60s, and split enough of the proceeds with the union workers that they identified with America rather than the “godless Russian commies.” The physical manifestation of this was the Hard Hat Riot in 1970, when American union workers beat up the “dirty hippies” cheering for North Vietnam.

Now, suddenly, the heretofore ignored negative qualities of the working man were brought to the fore. He was white, first of all. And racist, sexist, and homophobic. Ignorant, too. He needed to be educated by his betters. And thus All in the Family with Archie Bunker began airing, depicting a very different kind of working man. Not Stakhanov, not the uber-Chad of socialist realism, not the star of “boy meets tractor,” but an obese layabout that represented everything wrong with society — and who was now the oppressor.

And who was he oppressing? Well, the new proletariat: women, minorities, and LGBT. Demographics that didn’t have that much political power when communism was roaring to dominance in the early and mid 1900s, but which gradually grew to represent >50% of the American electorate — a political prize waiting for anyone who figured out how to tap into it. A political arbitrage opportunity, if you will, where the value of the arbitrage was measured in power rather than money.

And this is how the white working class moved from oppressed to oppressor. But one more event had to happen: the fall of the Soviet Union.
Communism Was Centralized Left

The women/nonwhites/LGBT group of “minorities” (which >90% of the global population belongs to, if you stop to think about it) gradually became the core justification for the New Left, just as the working class had been the justification for the Old Left.

But there was a transitional period.

For many years, the Western left still had a foot in both camps, with Soviet sympathizers coexisting with New Leftists.¹⁵⁴ After all, the hippies punched by union workers had been aligned with “Hanoi” Jane Fonda, and were pro-Communist or at least anti-anti-Communist. They were “objectively pro-Soviet” using the terminology Orwell disliked. Even as late as the mid 1980s, a lion of the Western left like Ted Kennedy offered to do a deal with the USSR if they supported him for the US presidency.

The Soviet Union wouldn’t be around forever, though. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the war in Afghanistan, the rejuvenation of American morale and defense spending under Reagan, the freedom movements in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and of course the total failure of their own economy to produce consumer goods, the USSR was on its last legs. Gorbachev inadvertently doomed the empire in his attempt to reform it, by liberalizing speech along with economics at the same time. The double whammy of glasnost and perestroika destabilized a once tightly controlled system. Gorbachev did do a bit of cracking down (the raid on the Vilnius Tower comes to mind), but fundamentally he wasn’t as ruthless as Stalin, and a critical mass of his people wanted capitalist consumer goods anyway. So, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and an attempted restorative coup by “hardliners” in August 1991, the whole evil empire collapsed by Christmas Day 1991.

At this point the Western left was at a crossroads. In China, 13 years earlier, Deng Xiaoping had managed to outmaneuver Mao Zedong’s chosen successors, throw the so-called Gang of Four in jail, and turn China towards the “capitalist road.” Now, the other big communist champion, the Soviet Union, was going down for the count.

It appeared that the centralized left, the left with a designated and identifiable leader, the centralized left of the USSR and PRC, of Stalin and Mao…that centralized left would eventually lose its nerve and be beaten by the centralized right of the United States.¹⁵⁵

So, after 1991, there was no more centralized left, no more communism, aside from holdouts like Cuba and North Korea that were of no global consequence. Instead it became all about the decentralized left, the fusion of the civil rights movement and Foucaltian deconstructionism, what we now call wokeness.
Wokeness is Decentralized Left

If you’ll note, the wokes don’t have a single leader like Stalin. They have no single book like The Communist Manifesto. They don’t even like to be named. This is notable for a movement that is otherwise so interested in verbal prestidigation, in renaming things!

Regardless of whether people call them “politically correct” or “SJWs” or “wokes” or what have you, they’ll try to scratch off the label and say that they’re just being “good people.” (You, of course, they have no problem calling you all kind of names.)

You can call them Democrats, and that’s in the ballpark, but many wokes are more radical than Democratic party candidates (though still vote for them) and many rank-and-file Democrats still aren’t wokes.

You can also note that the boundaries of wokeness are fluid. Anyone can just start voicing woke rhetoric. You may even sympathize with some of their stated ideas (as opposed to their actual practice). I do¹⁵⁶, in fact, at least with the motte version - who’s against equal treatment under the law? Of course, it never stops there.

You can notice that they do have their symbols and hashtags and flags (which, when hoisted, indicate control of territory as any flag does) but that they often shy away from admitting that what they’re doing is deeply political. It’s again just being a “good person.” Then they return to writing policies and renaming streets.

They do have organizations, many NGOs and media outlets, of which Sulzberger’s NYT is perhaps the most influential. But there’s no single directing group, and there’s a very long tail of sympathizers.

Put it all together: no single leader, book, name, or organization. So if the communists were centralized left, the wokes are decentralized left. If communists were like Catholics folding into a single hierarchy, wokes are more like Protestants where anyone can set up a shingle as a preacher.
Communism was State-first, Wokeness is Network-first

Just as an aside, there’s a subtlety if we apply the lens of the Leviathans. While Communists were centralized, they were not entirely people of the State. The reason is that they had both the Soviet state and the international Comintern network of spies and revolutionaries. But they were primarily people of the State after 1917, as the global movement was downstream of the Soviet government.¹⁵⁷

Wokes are the opposite. They are primarily people of the Network, as their habitat is outside the elected State. The control circuitry for the US government resides outside it, in media, academia, nonprofits, and the unfireable civil service.

But just as the communists don’t control all states (though they wanted to), the wokes do not control all networks (though they want to). Their major weakness is that they do not yet have total control over the English internet, the Chinese internet, or the global crypto networks. But the wokes are trying manfully to gain such control. And the switch from glorifying Stakhanov to denouncing Archie Bunker actually helps with this, as social media users are much more helpful in gaining power over the Network than factory workers.

Why? In the 20th century, the factory floor was the scene of the action and communism was all about the strike. This was a collective action that seemed to help workers, by redistributing wealth from the hated bosses. Over the medium term, of course, adversarial unionization actually harmed workers because (a) they had to pay union dues that gobbled up much of the pay raises, (b) they got a second set of managers in the form of the union bosses, (c) their actions lead to a reduction in competitiveness of their strike-ridden employer, and (d) in the event their country actually went communist they lost the ability to strike completely. Nevertheless, union organizing helped the communists gain influence over states. General strikes could bring entire countries to a halt.

In the 21st century, the internet is the scene of the action and wokeness is all about the cancellation. There’s no factory floor, no formal union leader, no centralized direction from Moscow. Instead, anyone can decide at any time to use the rhetoric in the air to lead a campaign against their “oppressor” in combination with others who subscribe to one or more woke principles. It’s open source, it’s decentralized left.

Like the strike, the cancellation is a collective action that seems to help the “marginalized”, by redistributing status from the hated oppressors to the cancellers. The likes, retweets, and followers get redistributed in real-time. Over the medium term, however, cancellation actually harms the “marginalized” because (a) everyone can now cancel each other on some axis, making life highly unpleasant and (b) constant cancellation leads to a low-trust society. Nevertheless, cancellation helps wokes gain control of networks. Social media swarms in the 2010s could bring tech executives to their knees, just as general strikes in the 20th century could bring countries to a halt.
From Working Class to Wokest Class

So, that’s how Stakhanov became Archie Bunker. Once the US had integrated its working class tightly enough to defuse its revolutionary potential, and centralized right beat centralized left in the USSR and PRC, the left needed a new group it could use to justify its revolution. It found it in the “marginalized” that it has now ridden to power as Woke Capital.¹⁵⁸ From the working class, to the wokest class.

The American Flippening

The second flippening is about the inversion of the Republican and Democrat parties over the last 155 years. As context, most Americans know vaguely that the Republican and Democrat parties “switched sides,” that Republicans were on the left in 1865 and on the right by 1965, but not exactly how¹⁵⁹ that happened.

How did the GOP move from the “Radical Republicans” of Lincoln’s time, to the conservative Republicans of mid-century, to the proletarian truckers of the post-Trump party? And how did Democrats go from secessionist Confederates to anti-anti-communist liberals to woke capitalists?

The Short Version

The short version is that the Republicans gained moral authority after the Civil War, used that to gain economic authority, then got critiqued by the (repositioned) Democrats for being so rich, then lost moral authority, and consequently also lost economic authority, bringing us to the present day. The Democrats were on the opposite end of that cycle.
The 1865-2021 Cycle

Now the longer version.

Let’s warp back to 1865. Immediately after the Civil War, the Republicans had total moral authority — and total command of the country. During the process of Reconstruction and what followed, they turned that moral authority into economic authority, and became rich by the late 1800s. After all, you wouldn’t want to have a Confederate-sympathizing Democrat traitor as head of your railroad company, would you?

Gradually, the Democrats began repositioning¹⁶⁰ from the party of the South to the party of the poor. A major moment was William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896. Another huge move was FDR’s re-election in 1936, when black voters shifted 50 points from Republican to Democrat, though they still voted Republican at the municipal level.¹⁶¹ The wrap up was in 1965 when black voters moved another 10-15 points towards Democrats, though the civil rights era was really just the culmination of a multi-decadal trend.

After 1965 the Democrats had complete moral authority. And over the next 50 years, from 1965-2015, the Democrats converted their moral authority into economic authority. You wouldn’t want a Republican bigot as CEO of your tech company, would you?

Now that cycle has reached its zenith, and a critical mass of high income and status positions in the US are held by Democrats. Some stats and graphs will show the story. Democrats have:
- 97% of journalists’ political donations
- 98% of Twitter employees’ political donations
- >91% of professors in the top US universities
- 26 out of 27 of the richest congressional districts
- >77% of political donations from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google
Meanwhile, the Republicans have by many measures become the party of the economic and cultural proletariat. There are of course exceptions like the Supreme Court and state legislatures which are majority Republican, but see this chart from the Brookings Institute, which shows that >70% of US GDP is now in Democrat counties. See also this set of graphs from 2019, and that’s before the money printing and small business destruction that occurred during COVID. The dominance is even more total when one thinks about cultural institutions.¹⁶² What’s the Republican Harvard — is it Bob Jones University? What’s the Republican Hollywood — some guys on 4chan making memes?

So, Democrats have become the party of the ruling class, of the establishment. And the Republicans are repositioning as the party of the proles, of the revolutionary class. This is why you see Democrats doing things like:
- tearing up over the Capitol six months after tearing down George Washington
- denouncing free speech
- setting up disinformation offices
- shifting from investigating the government to “investigating” the citizenry
- scripting the recruiting ads for the CIA and military
- putting Pride flags on attack helicopters
- advocating for corporations to fire people at will
- defending deplatforming as a private property right
- embracing the national security establishment
- allocating two billion dollars for the Capitol Police
- approving 40 billion dollars for war
It’s like the quote from Dune: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” Now that the Democrats are strong, they are acting like rightists. And now that the Republicans are weak, you see them acting like leftists:
- criticizing America’s imperial influence in the world
- opposing war and military aid
- not trusting the FBI or the police
- expressing qualified sympathy for America’s current rivals
- talking positively about unions
- introducing anti-discrimination laws to protect Republicans
- lobbying for free speech
This explains the weird flip-flops of American politics over the last few years. We’re in a realigning time where many institutional things are flipping from blue to red and back before finally going bright blue or red. Free speech is now coded red, while the FBI is now blue. Because Democrats are the ruling class now.

Note that this isn’t an endorsement of either side, just an observation that two ultra-long-timeframe sine and cosine waves have now shifted into the opposite relative phase. The parties that many identify with and implicitly think of as constant were not constant. The radical Republicans attained socioeconomic power and their defense of this order made them conservative; the reactionary Democrats lost socioeconomic power and gradually repositioned as revolutionary. Now they’re flipping again.

This doesn’t mean everything is flipping, of course. Democrats are still pro-choice, Republicans still pro-life. Republicans still have an institution or two, like the Supreme Court and some states. Just as Democrats after the Civil War were very weak, but not eradicated, and able to serve as spoilers.

However, the two parties have flipped on all the institutional bits, even if many Republicans maintain the Monty-Python-like pretense that the conservative America of their youth has just suffered a flesh wound, and many Democrats maintain the Soviet-like pretense that the ruling class is still a revolutionary party. Mexico has a great name for this kind of thing, the PRI or “institutional revolutionary party,” but there’s a more familiar metaphor: the startup.

As noted earlier, a successful startup wants to think it’s still the scrappy underdog, because that’s good for recruiting and morale. But now the Democrats are no longer a startup. The party has completed a 155 year arc from the defeated faction in the Civil War to America’s ruling class.

There’s a Ship of Theseus aspect to this, though. All the parts got swapped out, and the parties switched sides, but somehow the triumphant Democrat coalition of 2021 ended up geographically and demographically similar to the Republican lineup of 1865: Northeastern-centric liberals arrayed against conservative Southerners in the name of defending minorities.

And if you go even further back in time, this mirrors the English Civil War of the 1640s. Briefly, the people that came to Massachussets were the ideological descendants of the Roundheads, and the ones who settled Virginia 20 years later were the descendants of the Cavaliers, so it isn’t a surprise that descendants of the same two tribes went to war about 200 years later¹⁶³ in the mid 1800s, or that their ideological descendants are gearing up for another conflict right about now. See Scott Alexander’s review of Albion’s Seed for the quick version.
Not Everything Flipped

You could plot the geographical, demographic, and ideological coalitions of the two parties over the last 155 years. You’d see a few different staggered sine wave-like phenomena before they snap into the funhouse mirror image of 1865 that is 2021. But if we drill into the ideological aspects of the flip we see some interesting things.

At the surface level, the symbols remain intact: Democrats and Republicans still use the same logos, just like the Chinese Communist Party has kept the hammer and sickle more than 40 years after Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist revolution. On a policy level, as noted, not everything has flipped: Democrats remain pro-choice, Republicans remain pro-life. But on an ideological level, that’s worth a bit of discussion.

Certain kinds of people are born revolutionaries. So when the Democrats flipped over from revolutionary class to ruling class, when they shifted from (say) “defunding the police” to funding the Capitol Police¹⁶⁴, the born revolutionaries got off the bus. It’s not necessarily any one issue like the police, or military, or COVID restrictions, or regulations — the trigger is different for each person — but the common theme is that the born revolutionary just has a problem with what they perceive as irrational authority.

Visualize the startup founder who just cannot adjust to a big company after an acquisition, or the writer who just refuses to hold back a story because of his editor’s political demurrals. Born revolutionaries of this stripe include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and many Substackers and tech founders. They just can’t bend to the establishment. But they also have real disagreements with each other, which is why they’re independents, and why they can’t mouth a party line. So the born revolutionary is really far more anti-establishment, and hence today anti-Democrat, than pro-Republican. Many of the most accomplished in tech and media share this characteristic — they don’t want to listen to authority because they think they know better, and in their case they often actually do. They’re fundamentally insubordinate and disobedient, rule breakers and novelty seekers, ideological rather than tribal, founders rather than followers — and thus sand in the gears of any establishment.

Other kinds of people are ideologically predisposed in the opposite direction, to what some might call “imperialism” and others could call “national greatness.” As the Republicans fully flipped over from ruling class to revolutionary class, and went from organizing the invasion of Iraq to disorganizedly invading the Capitol, the neocon types like David Frum and Liz Cheney switched sides. In our tech analogy, these are the big company executives who only join a company once it has 1000+ people and leave out the back when the writing is on the wall. They’ll take less upside in return for less downside, and are more focused on guaranteed salary and prestige. They’re cyclical, as opposed to counter-cyclical like the revolutionaries. They follow the school-of-fish strategy, going with the crowd at all times. And in this context, their animating characteristic is not so much that they’re “pro-Democrat” but that they’re anti-revolutionary. Much of the national security state and military establishment is also like this; they are fundamentally rule-followers, institutional loyalists, and top-down in their thinking.

So that means that right now, immediately after the American realignment, we see all four types: (a) revolutionary class Democrats who still think of their party as the underdog, (b) ruling class Republicans who similarly (as David Reaboi would put it) “don’t know what time it is,” (c) revolutionary anti-establishment types like Greenwald, and (d) ruling class anti-revolutionaries like Frum and Cheney.

Over time, if history is any guide, the independent thinkers will move away from the ruling class to the revolutionary class, while a much larger group of herd-minded followers will join the ruling class. Returning to our tech analogy¹⁶⁵, think about how a few of the most independent-minded people have left Google, while many more risk-averse people have joined it. At Google, there isn’t much of the early startup spirit left, but there is a paycheck and stability.¹⁶⁶ That’s similar to the dynamic that characterizes the Democrats in their formal role as America’s ruling class: they largely control the establishment, but they’re losing the talent.
The Second American Civil War?

Returning to the previous section, is 2021 really just a repeat of 1865? Well, if history is running in reverse as per the Future-is-our-Past thesis, maybe not. Maybe 1861-1865 has yet to happen; maybe the Second American Civil War is yet to come. We discuss this possibility later in our sci-fi scenario on American Anarchy.

However, if we really push on the historical analogies, there’s another factor that was just incipient during the 1860s but that dominated the era to follow. After North-vs-South slugged it out, America shifted its attention to the (Wild) West. Similarly, after whatever Democrat-vs-Republican donnybrook might ensue, we may shift our focus to tech.

Because technology is a third faction. A group that was once identified with the West Coast before the pandemic, but is now best thought of as decentralized network.

At least, about half of it can be thought of in this way. The technology companies still physically headquartered in Silicon Valley would likely be heavily involved on the US establishment side in any Second American Civil War, providing surveillance, deplatforming, and digital enforcement for the ruling class. But the decentralized global technologists — those that are into the overlapping but quite different movements that are BTC and web3 — would have a very different attitude. They may not really be “pro-Republican”, but they would be anti-ruling-class, and especially against the inflation and censorship the ruling class would need to support its war machine. Any truly global, decentralized platform would natively resist censorship requests by the US establishment.

That may be the next step in the American Flippening: the conflict between the decentralized people of the Network and the centralized people of the State, between global technology and the American establishment.

The Global Flippening

The third flippening is about the global reversal of the last 30 years, where the communist countries became ethnonationalists and the capitalist countries became ethnomasochists. In this flippening, the countries on the economic left moved to the cultural right, and countries on the economic right moved to the cultural left. The ideologies reversed, but the geopolitical rivalries remained the same.

Global Cultural and Economic Axes Image

The visual above tells the story. The most right-wing country in the world is now CCP China, the ethnocentric champion of the Han, the place where “sissy men” are now banned from TV and whose self-admitted goal is irredentist reunification. Its core premise is ethnonationalism, which can be paraphrased as “Chinese people are the best.”¹⁶⁷

Conversely, Woke America is to America as Soviet Russia was to Russia. It is the most left-wing country in the world, the place where whites go to the back of the line for vaccinations and the self-admitted sponsor of global revolution. Its core premise is ethnomasochism, which can be paraphrased as “white people are the worst”.¹⁶⁸

At this point, you may be sputtering in disbelief, in which case I refer you to these¹⁶⁷ two¹⁶⁸ footnotes to give a tissue for that sputtering. You may think this is obvious, in which case read this section only for entertainment. You may argue that the right and left categories have no meaning; if so, go read the earlier section on the spatial theory of voting and note that there’s always a first principal component in any map of ideology space. Or you just may be confused, contending that the US is still “conservative” and China is still “communist,” and want proof of the switch.

So here’s the detailed argument.

The Global Axis in 1988 was Politico-Economic

First, what was the political spectrum in 1988, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall? From right to left:
- USA: center right under Reagan
- Western Europe (NATO): center / center right
- Switzerland: neutral center
- PRC: migrating right, less ideological, hard to place under Deng Xiaoping
- India: left, socialist
- USSR, Warsaw Pact: far left
I don’t think any of these ideological positions should be too controversial. These countries explicitly identified themselves as conservative, socialist, or communist respectively. India was socialist, but not a member of the Warsaw Pact and not pointing guns at the West. China was nominally communist, but also not hostile to the West, and entering the second decade of the capitalist reforms begun by Deng in 1978. The US was the champion of the capitalist right in spots like Chile and South Korea, and the USSR was the global sponsor of the communist left in places such as Cuba and North Korea.
The Global Axis in 2022 is Ethno-Cultural

By 2022, what did the global political spectrum look like, right after the Russo-Ukraine war?
- US Establishment: ethnomasochist far left, denoted by the Progress Flag
- Western Europe: center left, but with increasing variance
- BTC/web3: pseudonymous center
- India, Israel, Singapore, Visegrad: center right
- Republican America: nationalist right
- CCP China, Russia: ethnonationalist far right, the Z flag and “We Will Always Be Here”
The first thing we note is that the major axis has shifted. The primary axis is no longer the politico-economic axis of capitalism-vs-communism, but the ethno-cultural axis of ethnomasochism-vs-ethnonationalism. Is it the ultimate evil for a state to consciously represent its majority race (as America contends) or is it the ultimate good (as China contends)? Or should it be neither, as the pseudonymous economy contends?

The second thing we see is that the middle has shifted. Switzerland is no longer neutral, as it’s siding with the US now. Cryptocurrency and cryptography is now Switzerland, what Obama called the “Swiss bank account in your pocket.” And — as just noted — it offers an ethical alternative to both American ethnomasochism and Chinese ethnonationalism, namely pseudonymous meritocracy.

The third thing we note is that we don’t use the American flag to represent the US establishment as it is very much a disputed symbol, with some in the establishment claiming it while others claim it is disturbing. So instead, we use the Progress Flag for the US establishment as (a) this is proudly raised by the State Department and in the White House and (b) it sharply distinguishes the establishment from a Republican America that very much does not fly the Progress Flag, but might instead fly the Thin Blue Line flag or (eventually) the flag of Bitcoin Maximalism.¹⁶⁹

The fourth thing (which is not on the figure) is that we don’t think of Republican America as coincident with the US establishment anymore. That’s because the US is a binational state with two warring ethnicities (Democrat and Republican) rather than a single nation state. We didn’t put a separate Republican flag on the figure, though, as placing it on the nationalist right would seem to cluster it near China, and Republicans dislike China as much as they dislike the Democrats. So you need to go to more dimensions than just a linear axis, which we discuss in the next chapter on NYT/CCP/BTC.

The fifth thing we note is that Europe is now broadly to the right of the US Establishment on ethno-cultural issues, whereas it was to the left of the US in 1988. (See Macron and Orban’s comments, for example, if this isn’t on your radar.)

The last and most important thing is that this is a rough inversion of the 20th century, as the formerly communist/socialist countries are on the ethnocultural right, while the capitalist bloc is on the ethnocultural left.
Evidence for the Global Political Spectrum of 2022

How can we establish that this ethnocultural axis is a reasonable one-dimensional representation of reality? Let’s do it in stages.
1. Existence of an axis. First, the #1 and #2 powers of this era are the US and China, establishing these as the poles of some axis in the first place.
  - Here’s a graph of global GDP, showing the US and China as #1 and #2.
  - Here’s a graph of global military power, again #1 and #2.
  - Here’s Ian Bremmer’s G-2 concept.
  - And here are several books and articles that talk about this include Destined for War, The United States vs. China (FT review), and Getting China Wrong.
2. Unity of NYT, Harvard, and Democrats as the US Establishment. Next, let’s establish that there is alignment between America’s informal government (NYT, Harvard, etc) and the formal government (elected Democrats and career bureaucrats). Basically, we want to show that (a) this an interconnected social network and (b) it is on the ethnomasochist left.
  - The Progress Flag was raised over the U.S. State Department and
  - The Progress Flag is raised in the White House by the US Press Secretary and a Navy Admiral
  - 97% of journalists’ political donations went to Democrats
  - 90.1% of Harvard students voted Democrat
  - 98.82% of partisan contributions at Harvard’s FAS went to Democrats
  - 90% of professors at top universities are Democrat
  - NYT’s use of ethnomasochist words went exponential in the 2010s
  - The graphs in Yglesias’ article on the Great Awokening show that white Democrats are to the cultural left of black Democrats on many issues
3. NYT denunciation of entities to their right. Third, let’s show that the US establishment’s leading paper, the New York Times, has run articles indicating that China, Russia, India, Israel, Singapore, Hungary, and France are “fascist” and “authoritarian” and hence to its right. We note that none of these countries are being denounced as “communist” or to NYT’s left.
  - China: “Can China Be Described as ’Fascist’?”
  - Russia: “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.”
  - India: “The Rise of Modi: India’s Rightward Turn”
  - Israel: “Israelis May Have Committed Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza Protests, U.N. Says”
  - Singapore: “David Marshall, 87, Opponent Of Singapore Authoritarianism”
  - Hungary: “He Used to Call Viktor Orban an Ally. Now He Calls Him a Symbol of Fascism.”
  - France: “France’s Far Right Turn”
4. China and Russia are to the cultural right of the US. Next, let’s establish that China and Russia take culturally conservative positions on marriage and family that put them substantially to the right of today’s West.
  - Russia: see their actions in favor of “traditional families”, and Richard Hanania’s piece on Russia the “Great Satan in the Liberal Imagination”.
  - China: read about their ban on “sissy men” and promotion of traditional marriage and family.
5. Europe is also to the cultural right of America. Now, let’s show how European countries have put out statements noting that they are actually also to the right of America on ethnocultural issues, albeit not as far from the US as China and Russia are.
  - France on wokeness: Macron, France Reject American “Woke” Culture That’s “Racializing” Their Country
  - Visegrad on immigration: Visegrad Four grouping push back on new EU migration plan
  - UK on immigration: The UK’s “Anti-Refugee Bill”: What Everyone Should Know
So if you put all those together, we have (a) the existence of a US/China axis, (b) a group of institutions that can be reasonably regarded as the voice of the US establishment, (c) a set of NYT denunciations of other countries as being to the right of the US establishment, (d) positions from China and Russia that are far to the ethnocultural right of the US establishment, and (e) a set of statements from European heads of state like Macron and Orban indicating that the US establishment is also to their left.

Note that even if you dispute the absolute position of any given country on this axis, it’s now hard to argue with their relative position. That is, if you click the links above, you’ll see that NYT does think of Russia and China (and France, Hungary, India, Israel, and so on) as all being to its right on ethnocultural matters. And Russia and China do think of the US establishment as being to their left on the same things.

I belabor this point because it’s somewhat implicit. The capitalist-vs-communist divide of the 20th century was an official, declared economic divide. By contrast, today’s ethnonationalist-vs-ethnomasochist divide is an unofficial, undeclared cultural divide. It is nevertheless the primary global axis of conflict, and a very real reason for hostility between the Sino-Russians and the US Establishment.¹⁷⁰ Even if the geopolitics have remained similar, with the Chinese and Russians of Mackinder’s world island still aligned against the Anglo-Americans, the ideologies have flipped.

The Historical Flippenings

Our fourth flippening story is a survey of historical flippenings. How did the revolutionary class become the ruling class, through history?

From Christian crash to Christian kings. Early Christianity was the original communism; it delegitimized and then tore down the Roman Empire. Then, many generations later, the Holy Roman Empire that consciously took the name of its distant predecessor turned Christianity into what Nietzsche called a “master” religion, one that fortified hierarchy rather than undermining it. Christians were on the left in Roman times as the revolutionary class. Then, upon winning, descendants of those Christians eventually went to the right as the ruling class.
From Protestant heresy to WASP establishment. Much later, Martin Luther began a Protestant insurgency against the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire. Even later than that, descendants of these Protestants made it to the US to give rise to the WASP aristocracy! Protestants were on the left as the revolutionary class. Then upon winning, eventually descendants of those Protestants went to the right as the ruling class.
From ChiCom revolutionary to princeling. Today’s Chinese Communist Party is another example. What do people call the descendants of the early Communists, who fought both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek to gain full control of China? Why, they are princelings. A more cut-and-dried example of the transition from revolutionary class to ruling class would be hard to find.
From marginalized minority to Woke Capital. And perhaps the most important contemporary example is Woke Capital. The women, minorities, and LGBT groups that replaced the working class as the Democrat party’s base are now to Woke America what workers and peasants were to Soviet Russia: their mascots, with all politics done in their name. It didn’t really matter to the communists that workers and peasants actually went to the gulag in the Soviet Union, and it doesn’t really matter to the wokes if women and minorities actually suffer from crime and inflation in Woke America — what matters for the movement is the power gained by the rhetoric.

So the CIA and Army now frontpage their female spies and soldiers. The US State Department tells us Black Lives Matter. And when American helicopters descend on their targets they do so while flying the rainbow flag. The meme is now real: wokeness now justifies American nationalism just as Communism rationalized Russian imperialism. It’s what tells those pulling the triggers that they’re killing for a higher cause, that they’re morally superior to those in the gunsights. It’s the revolutionary ideology that justifies the ruling class.

We could do more, but you see the pattern. Once you’ve seen several cases of historical flippenings, it changes your perspective on current events. The ideological shifts become more predictable. It’s a bit like an experienced investor who’s seen many a company rise and fall talking to a first-time entrepreneur. When you’ve seen it before, the pattern recognition calms your nerves and allows you to distinguish the truly “unprecedented” from the highly precedented.

The One Commandment

Communities are Causes First, Companies Second

Every new startup society needs to have a moral premise at its core, one that its founding nation subscribes to, one that is supported by a digital history that a more powerful state can’t delete¹⁷¹, one that justifies its existence as a righteous yet peaceful protest against the powers that be.¹⁷²

To be clear, it’s a huge endeavor to go and build an entire moral edifice on par with a religion, and work out all the practical details. We’re not advising you come up with your own Ten Commandments!

But we do think you can come up with one commandment. One new moral premise. Just one specific issue where the history and science has convinced you that the establishment is wanting. And where you feel confident making your case in articles, videos, books, and presentations.

These presentations are similar to startup pitch decks. But as the founder of a startup society, you aren’t a technology entrepreneur telling investors why this new innovation is better, faster, and cheaper. You are a moral entrepreneur telling potential future citizens about a better way of life, about a single thing that the broader world has gotten wrong that your community is setting right.

By focusing on just one issue, you can set up a parallel society with manageable complexity, as you are changing only one civilizational rule. Unlike a political party, you’re not offering a package deal on many issues that people only shallowly care about. With the one commandment you are instead offering a single issue community, and attracting not single-issue voters but single-issue movers.

The Concept of a Parallel Society

Just as a note on terminology, we consider a startup society to be a new community built internet-first, premised on a societal critique of its parent community, and founded for the purpose of addressing that specific societal problem in an opt-in way — namely, by recruiting people online to voluntarily form an alternative society that shows a better way. The implication is that a startup society is still pretty small and near the beginning of its ambition, just like a startup company.

A parallel society is roughly equivalent to a startup society, but the implication is that it could be much larger in scale. It’s parallel because it stands apart from mainstream society as a parallel version, as a fork. It’s not set up in opposition to the mainstream on every dimension, but a parallel society is certainly differentiated from the mainstream on a key axis.

You can think of the relationship between “startup society” and “parallel society” as similar to the relationship between “startup” and “tech company”; the former is early stage, while the latter can be of any stage.

The analogy works in another way. Just like a “tech company” can refer to a fully remote organization, a partially physical company with some office space, or a globally recognized multinational like Google, a “parallel society” is also an umbrella term that can denote a wholly digital network union, a partially physical network archipelago, or a diplomatically recognized network state.

That’s important, because you may be able to realize the goals of your startup society with a purely digital network union, you may need the physical footprint of a network archipelago, or you might need the formal legal recognition of a full network state. It all depends on the nature of your one commandment: can it be accomplished purely at the community level, does it require a physical buildout, or does it require changes to the legal system?

A few specific examples will make this clear. We’ll describe startup societies based on a wholly digital network union, others based on a partially physical network archipelago, and yet others that need diplomatically recognized network states.

Examples of Parallel Societies: Digital Network Unions

Renewal Culture: the Cancel-Proof Society

Let’s start with an easy example of a one commandment-based startup society, which only requires a purely digital network union and doesn’t require a full physical footprint like a network archipelago, let alone diplomatic recognition like a network state.

This is the cancel-proof society.

Suppose you’re the hypothetical founder of this startup society. You begin with a history of the last 15 years showing all the bizarre examples of social media cancellation, something like Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

You note that these cancellations represent a moral failure by the people of the State and the CEOs of the Network. Their partisan warfare and engagement algorithms trapped many innocents in the crossfire of social war. Now a stray comment by a civilian is routinely turned into a human sacrifice to make an ideological point. It’s as if a passerby took such offense to your offline comment to a friend that they opened fire.

Those who agree that normal online behavior shouldn’t come with risk of a social death penalty imposed by random people are the basis of your new society. They agree with your historically informed, moral critique. And the one commandment may be something like “cancellation without due process is bad”.

How do you implement this? One solution is just a network union that provides a combination of (a) guild and (b) cancellation insurance.

You assemble a group of people in a Discord, optionally take a stake in each other by issuing a DAO token, and work together to promote each other’s work and help each other out. This could be a guild of, say, graphic designers or young adult fiction writers or electrical engineers. The token of the DAO would be optional — it wouldn’t be meant to be some massive new thing like Ethereum. It’s just a way to record who contributed time and/or money to the startup society, and how much they did. People would give in order to get, a bit like StackOverflow Karma. And those with more money than time may buy the token to support those in the guild with more time than money.

Now, 99% of the time this startup society is just doing “peacetime” activities, like helping people find jobs, organizing promotion for new product launches of members, facilitating introduction, or just hanging out at meetups.

But 1% of the time someone in the guild is under social attack. In that situation, the guild can choose to publicly respond as one or — if grievously outnumbered — can quietly support the affected party with a new job after the uproar has died down. In such a circumstance, the one commandment kicks in, and there is internal due process around the attempted cancellation. Did the person actually do something wrong, and if so, is the correct penalty more like a hundred-dollar fine or an apology rather than a career-ruining publicly calumny?

The concept is that this kind of startup society serves a dual purpose: it’s useful in “peacetime” but it also gives people a community to fall back on in the event of digital cancellation. And that’s how one could build a cancel-proof culture.

Examples of Parallel Societies: Physical Network Archipelagos

Keto Kosher: the Sugar-free Society

Next, let’s do an example which requires a network archipelago (with a physical footprint) but not a full network state (with diplomatic recognition).

This is Keto Kosher, the sugar-free society.

Start with a history of the horrible USDA Food Pyramid, the grain-heavy monstrosity that gave cover to the corporate sugarification of the globe and the obesity epidemic. Also discuss the cure in the form of keto and low-carb diets.

Then operationalize this cure in the form of a partially physical network archipelago. Organize a community online that crowdfunds properties around the world, like apartment buildings and gyms, and perhaps eventually even culdesacs and small towns. You might take an extreme sugar teetotaller approach, literally banning processed foods and sugar at the border, thereby implementing a kind of “Keto Kosher.”

You can imagine variants of this startup society that are like “Carnivory Communities” or “Paleo People”. These would be competing startup societies in the same broad area, iterations on a theme.

If successful, such a society might not stop at sugar. It could get into setting cultural defaults for fitness and exercise. Or perhaps it could bulk purchase continuous glucose meters for all members, or orders of metformin.

Digital Sabbath: the Partially Offline Society

Cars are on balance a good thing. But you can overdo them. Mid-century America did. It obscured the San Francisco waterfront with ugly elevated highways, impeding the walkability of this beautiful area. That highway was removed in the late 20th century.¹⁷³ And the removal was an acknowledgement that sometimes we can have too much of a good thing.

24/7 internet connectivity is like that. It’s good that we’re doing things like Starlink, to bring internet access to the entire world, to provide free online education, and to get them into the global economy.

But it’s bad if you can never disconnect from the internet. That’s why apps like “Freedom” are so popular. That’s why people use commitment devices like timed cookie jars to hide their phones. That’s why apps like Twitter and Snapchat got popular on the basis of artificial constraints, like limited characters or disappearing messages, because they were optimizing for fallible humans rather than infallible machines. That’s why Tsinghua cuts off the internet at night, why Apple now provides screen time metrics, and why books like Atomic Habits and Indistractible sell so well.

What if this optimization for fallibility didn’t have to be an individual thing? What if there were a society that helped you with internet distractions and self-control, that recognized that the internet was good, but that times and places without the internet were also good — just as cars are good, but a San Francisco waterfront without cars is also good?

One way of accomplishing this would be a Digital Sabbath society where the internet is just shut off at night, from 9pm to 9am. Some buildings and rooms would furthermore be enclosed in Faraday cages, to put them offline on purpose. Areas would start to be flagged as online and offline areas, a bit like smoking and non-smoking areas on planes. All internet use would be conscious and focused, as opposed to unconscious and involuntary.

Over time, such a society could even try to build apps to give individuals back control over their internet use, with open source machine learning tools running locally on devices in a privacy-protecting way to prioritize notifications, block distractions, and encourage productivity.

The Digital Sabbath society is an example of a network archipelago that’s focused on improving self-control around internet use. For obvious reasons, you’d need a physical footprint, and wouldn’t be able to do this purely digitally.

Examples of Parallel Societies: Recognized Network States

Your Body, Your Choice: the post-FDA Society

Now let’s do a more difficult example, which will require a full network state with diplomatic recognition.

This is the medical sovereignty zone, the FDA-free society.

You begin your startup society with Henninger’s history of FDA-caused drug lag and Tabarrok’s history of FDA interference with so-called “off label” prescription. You point out how many millions were killed by its policies, hand out t-shirts like ACT-UP did, show Dallas Buyers Club to all prospective residents, and make clear to all new members why your cause of medical sovereignty is righteous.

But to actually achieve personal medical sovereignty, your startup society would need some measure of diplomatic recognition from a sovereign outside the US — or perhaps a state within the US. It would need to actually be what we call a network state, as it would need legal recognition from an existing government.

For the case of doing it outside the US, your startup society would ride behind, say, the support of Malta’s FDA for a new biomedical regime. For the case of doing it within the US, you’d need a governor who’d declare a sanctuary state for biomedicine. That is, just like a sanctuary city declares that it won’t enforce federal immigration law, a sanctuary state for biomedicine would not enforce FDA writ.

With this diplomatic recognition, you could then take the existing American codebase and add one crucial new feature: the absolute right for anyone to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference. Your body, your choice. That’s how you’d get an FDA-free zone.

Analysis of Parallel Societies

Now we see why a focused moral critique is so important. It combines (a) the moral fervor of a political movement with (b) the laser-focus of a startup company into (c) a one-commandment based startup society.

Such a society is not a total revolution. We aren’t starting completely de novo. Each startup society is simply taking a broken aspect of today’s world, often a State-caused or at least State-neglected calamity, writing the history of that state failure, and then building an opt-in community to solve the problem.

It’s a tightly focused parallel society making one impactful change.

Why Not More Than One Commandment?

Why is it so important to introduce one commandment rather than zero or $N$ ?

The short answer is that you don’t want to write something as complex as a social operating system from scratch, and in fact others will prevent you from doing so. But you also don’t want to avoid innovating on a broken society. So introducing one (1) tightly focused change at a time in a startup society with opt-in citizens allows testing of the new commandment.

The longer answer revolves around an important paradox of modern society: namely, that many people feel uncomfortable evangelizing religious morals, yet very comfortable evangelizing their political ethics.

The first part is easy to understand. Westerners are nowadays often shy about telling others to practice their religion. Why? They may feel they haven’t figured it all out, so who are they to say? Or they know they can’t live up to their ideal moral code, like someone who wants to diet but can’t always restrain themselves, so they refrain from commentary to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. They also may not want to be attacked as a crazy cult leader. All of these are understandable hesitations for either (a) evangelizing a traditional religion, (b) inventing a wholly new one, or (c) forking an existing religion. (The last is kind of like starting a new denomination of Protestantism, where you keep much of the old codebase but add in some crucial distinctive factors.)

But think about the second part. While there is great hesitation in Western society around religious evangelism, there is seemingly no hesitation around political evangelism. Indeed, this is considered an ethical duty, usually in exactly those terms, with the word “ethical” used in place of “moral” but serving a very similar role, and with at least two large competing political parties fighting for the souls/votes of their believers.

Therein lies the paradox: while political and religious movements can both be considered doctrines¹⁷⁴, in that they come packaged with a number of directives on how people must live, the same person who is shy about telling other people about morality is often incredibly confident when yelling at other people about politics.

That’s why we advise one commandment for your new startup society. It’s something in between being too shy and too overbearing. It’s in between avoiding religious-sounding evangelism entirely and indulging in political-sounding evangelism too much. Don’t avoid taking a moral stance, because that means you passively succumb to your surroundings. But also don’t try imposing an all-encompassing political ideology to start, because that’s too hard and means total warfare with your surroundings.

Instead, just pick one flaw in modern society that you do feel confident in building a startup society to redress, and go with that. One commandment, not zero or $N$ .

What About Older Doctrines?

So far we’ve talked about a one commandment, but implied it is a new moral innovation, like cutting out sugar or limiting internet use. What about older religions, political codes, and moral commandments?

You can certainly return to an older known religious code, adopting it in whole or in part. In a startup society, where everyone opts in, you can make this happen more easily because religion in many countries is mostly about private practice: so long as people agree in a peer-to-peer fashion to practice their religion a certain way, the state allows them to do it.

It’s harder to return to an older political code, because you are now talking about public law rather than private law. Still, if you build a large enough startup society, and pick the right laws, there is probably something at the town, city, or province level that you can do — either within the West or outside it.

Parallel Systems Catalyze Peaceful Reform

How did the US beat the USSR? Because it built and defended a parallel system.

Rewind back to how the Soviet Union fell. As Stephen Kotkin noted in a brilliant interview, the most important fact about the Soviet Union was that they genuinely were communists. Outsiders perceived the Soviets to be cynical, but they were wrong; their cynicism had limits. At the end of the day, the Soviets were devout believers in their ideology.

How could it be otherwise? Soviet citizens weren’t stupid, and people knew there were things that didn’t add up, but they were operating within a constrained information environment. The censorship was so pervasive that it controlled thought. The degree of self-deception was so all-encompassing that even the nomenklatura like Boris Yeltsin didn’t know how truly poor the Soviet Union was till he visited an American supermarket and threw up his hands at how far behind the USSR was. Unlike Orwell’s O’Brien, the Soviet leaders deceived themselves too.

So, fundamentally, any proposed edits by Soviet elites to the USSR would have been just on the margins. They were information and values constrained. They actually needed a totally different system. Yet their system resisted both revolutionary and incremental reform.

The solution was the parallel system of the United States. An alternative society starting from different moral premises that eventually produced undeniably better results.

That’s the same basic thing that reformed the People’s Republic of China. The mere existence of successful parallel systems in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and especially Singapore is what drove Deng Xiaoping to adopt capitalism. Ezra Vogel’s book is excellent on this.

So, in both cases, it was a parallel system that beat the Soviet system and the Maoist system.

Parallel Systems Once Required Contiguous Land, Now They Don’t

In the 20th century, the only way to build a parallel system was to fight and win a war (often a hot one) against the communists or fascists who were intent on conquering your territory. The parallel systems of the US and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were maintained against the USSR and PRC at enormous cost by fighting for large contiguous regions of land. That was a very State-centric approach.

In the 21st century, our approach suggests a Network-centric way to build parallel systems: create one opt-in society at a time, purely digitally if need be, justifying it with a historical/moral critique of the present system that delegitimizes State violence against them and allows the experiment to continue.

Many will fail, but for those that succeed, we can merge together the good changes and discard the bad ones, and eventually get a parallel society that differs in many respects from (say) the original US codebase, but that maintains enough similarity that it’s “backwards compatible” and citizens can migrate over. Much like the relation of the USA to Europe during the 1800s, this is a way to reproducibly build a New World on the internet to reform existing states.

Four Points on One Commandments

Let’s review.

First, by starting with a seemingly simple moral premise and taking to its logical conclusion, a one-commandment-based startup society ends up changing huge swaths of life, but in a focused, exit-constrained, and intellectually consistent way.¹⁷⁵ Just think about what “keto” really means when it’s extrapolated out to the scale of an entire town, and sugar poisoning is taken as seriously as lead poisoning.

Second, one-commandment-based societies allow for scalable, parallel, consensual exploration of sociopolitical space. Different groups that disagree with each other on how to live can nevertheless support the meta-concept of many different one-commandment-based experiments. And indeed, both a carnivore community and vegan village would likely have better health outcomes than the default Western diet, even if these communities disagree on core moral premises.

Third, there’s a network effect between societies. Each starts off highly focused, of course — much as a startup company tries to attract customers with a single focused product, each startup society tries to attract subscribers with a single focused commandment. And as with a startup company, any individual experiment towards a new sociopolitical order may succeed or fail. But so long as some one-commandment-based startup societies succeed, they can copy each other’s proven moral innovations.

Fourth, each of these one-commandment-based startup societies is supported by a history. Listen to someone from the Keto Kosher society and they’ll be able to rattle off an account of how the USDA Food Pyramid led to epidemic obesity. Chat with a Benedictine Option monk and you’ll hear about the religious culture they’re trying to preserve. And talk to a citizen of the post-FDA society and they’ll give you a history of the few strengths and many weaknesses of the FDA, from ACT-UP to drug lag. Some such societies are focused on new technologies and some are not, but all of them are based on an ethical code premised on their reading of history. And that’s why history is the foundation of any new startup society.

Next Section:

The Tripolar Moment