Anatole France quote that’s been on my mind a lot lately: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
I’m generally in favor of working to preserve existing institutions, but unlike most others who are also in favor of that, I’m under no illusions about any sort of divine moral legitimacy of those institutions, derived from constitutions, codes of law, or religions.
I’m primarily in favor of institutional stability because I’m deeply skeptical of burn-it-down ideas leading to improved new ones. They’ll simply put a new set of people on top/bottom. Absent genuine new knowledge to form a new basis, nothing really changes.
When new institutions do better than the ones they replace it’s because they use some new technological capability to achieve fundamental new behaviors. Like printing press, steam, telegraph, radio. New “values” don’t drive change, they merely change who’s on top.
Which means, revolutionary institutional creative destruction without technological advance merely buys turn-taking on top at the cost of net, sharp wealth destruction each cycle. Worth it overall? Perhaps. It’s fair in a negative sum way.
I operate on the dangerous assumption that I’ll always be in the middle, no matter how much top and bottom trade places. Top and bottom are about the history of power, the middle is about the future of information.
“Values” people advocating a tear-down-build-new approach with zero interest in, or understanding of, the role of technology in institutional evolution (even as they rant at tech, while piously tweeting phone videos, oblivious to irony) angry up my blood.
Even the ones who do vaguely realize that tech is what disrupts equilibriums giving them a new opportunity to pursue their agendas tend to not really get it.
In the short term, politics is a values voting machine. In the long term it’s a technological weighing machine.
The medium is the message. The medium is the mission.
Medium statements eat mission statements for lunch.
The winning ideology that gets to construct new power landscapes is the one that most fully embodies the medium.
Capitalism beat communism not because it had better values but because it better embodied the message of the medium: mass production with interchangeable parts.
The winner out of 2020 will be whatever best embodies the spirit of software/mobile phones. Sneer at your own peril.
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I try to have minimalist politics. Never let a political opinion do work that can be done by an opinion about something else. It’s the worst way to discover and adopt an opinion about anything. Lorem ipsum for wisdom needed where better content can’t be found.