The observations in this story span the entire breadth of the phenomenon of society and are echoed by other Sumerian sources. Hunter-gatherer and pastoral people migrating to the city when hunting is sparse; the addiction—strange to them—that comes with drinking beer and eating bread; the role of temple prostitutes in recruiting people to the city, or even as agents of Gilgamesh sent to evaluate threats; the potential for tyranny that would be impossible outside the city; and how barbarians might make for better personal guards of the king of a city than those raised in the city, those with less personal martial skill yet with a vested interest in political infighting.

This close attention the epic pays to cities and the choices and situations therein is more than a prelude to the eventual friendship struck up by former nemeses Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Rather, it reveals itself to the careful readers as an inquiry—both an explanation and critique—of the city from the time when Sumerian civilization was still young. This focus on the effects of the great city of Ur on the wild man Enkidu is not surprising: of all social technologies, cities are, after all, perhaps the most important to a civilization.

Political thinkers thousands of years later, such as Plato and Aristotle went so far as to argue that the very minds of citizens of a Greek city-state—the polis—develop differently depending on the ordering of the city. The mere biology of Homo sapiens is, in this view, not the final word on what kind of being man is. Rather, that can only be discovered by examining the city and state individuals find themselves in, and that, in turn, actualizes and gives context to what they become. This thesis on what it means to be human is plausible since cities are the forges of human capital needed to maintain all other social technologies.

When industrial civilization was young in the 19th century, much of that era’s literature, as well as political and social theory, attempted to explain how Paris, London, or New York reforged peasants into factory workers and how it remade the foreign rural values in the great cities’ image. While cities have been demographic sinks both in the 21st century BC as well as the 21st century AD, requiring constant in-migration of wild men, pastoralists, and farmers to replenish their numbers, it is also cities that produce rapid social differentiation into different professions and classes needed by complex society—and always have.

Streets Give Coordinates to Society

Cities are the coordination landscape of society manifested into the physical world, allowing this landscape to be measured and studied. In all cultures, a physical address is something of a social rank, and a fairly fixed one at that, since it comes to determine who socializes and works with whom and in what ways. Where you live is always intimately tied to where you stand in society. Those who live near each other interact more frequently. Even in modern America, a society that expends much energy in obscuring a non-meritocratic class structure, one of the most mundane questions is also the most revealing and one you are obliged to answer in polite society: “Where do you live?” In a city like San Francisco or New York, the answer is suggestive for guessing income and net worth without fully revealing it, and it outright announces and defines one’s social milieu.

Movement across these urban coordinates tracks movement in social roles and hierarchy. Those who migrate into a city for work without living there serve to power its incumbent institutions, functional and non-functional ones alike. Those who permanently migrate out of a city give up bureaucratic and commercial power. There is military and religious power sometimes found outside a city, and for merchant republics, sometimes some exciting opportunities for profit as well, but to truly wield those, one must eventually return to the city, like Sir Robert Clive of the East India Company returning to London in the 18th century.

Even then, it is a challenge to use newfound power to reshape urban society. The nomadic Khitan, Mongol, and Manchu peoples might have successfully conquered China’s many cities from the outside, yet ultimately, the cities transformed and Sinicized them far more than they transformed the cities. Muhammad’s return to Mecca stands out not because outsiders and exiles could conquer a city but because they could change it when they returned. The transformation of that city transformed Arab society and created Islamic civilization.

Urban geography even reveals something about the political structure of the city. The grid plan where streets run at right angles to each other is ubiquitous in the United States. We might simply assume it is a feature of the modern world, but it is instead perhaps best thought of as evidence of a central political authority to mandate building standards and tear down existing buildings that don’t match the plan. This was as true when New York adopted the grid layout in 1811 as it was when Alexander marched into Egypt with his armies, founding Alexandria. This clear physical evidence of central authority can tell us something about otherwise enigmatic ancient cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, dating to 2600 BC. While some historians argue that the relative equal size of the dwellings suggests the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization was an egalitarian society, the orderly layout of straight streets demonstrates a great centralization of power and authority.

In fact, creating a new capital city was, for most of history, one of the best ways to transform society at large. The founder of a new city, be they Alexander or Constantine, is in the best position to control how the city is set up and who lives there. This means that at a city’s founding, there is a unique opportunity to set up and pilot the institutions that will influence the city’s power structure. Opposition, in the form of rival institutions, can simply be left behind. A new city is one of the most effective ways to change the balance of power and culture. A new institution in Washington, D.C. would be predated upon by the existing institutions, sinking into the metaphorical swamp. New Washington, however, would at first only be home to the branches of government invited there.

Technology Has Made Cities More Not Less Important 

Cyberpunks and their successors have always understood the internet to be a technology that fundamentally transcends the “legacy” physical world and its limitations. The legacy powers that the internet was supposed to replace—or at least circumvent—have instead already imposed their borders onto cyberspace. But the territorialization of the internet emerged organically. New York and San Francisco are reflected with high fidelity in their cyberspace equivalents: say, Dirtbag Left or Post-Left Twitter and venture capitalist Twitter, respectively. The most popular YouTubers and TikTok influencers stream from Los Angeles, and the most popular Instagrammers post from there too.

Cities exercise power over social media. There is a strong feedback loop between physical communities or networks and their digital counterparts built online. Much of the discourse on any social media platform, for example, is essentially identical to the discourse of any number of major cities. Much of the “YIMBY” or “housing” discourse can be traced to a specific handful of expensive cities like London or Vancouver. Internet partisans have bemoaned this reality as the “mainstreaming” of the internet. This has some truth to it. When urban discourses were carried out in bars, newspapers, and over the phone, the internet was able to still function as a separate territory, and being a separate territory, subcultures that couldn’t exist in physical space grew for a time.

If you live in a city, you are more likely to be participating in its digital counterpart. Which city you live in matters too. Being well-connected in D.C., New York, or San Francisco will let you access influential users of the site formerly known as Twitter in a way that being known only in Houston will not. Journalists, in particular, are known for relying on that site for both tracking and reporting news, especially those covering national or foreign policy stories. Los Angeles dominates the list of top Instagram accounts; you are far more likely to run in to a well-known influencer there than anywhere else.

A direct message to a larger account converts to an in-person chat over coffee, which subsequently converts into a retweet or digital endorsement that grows a smaller account. The physical-digital feedback loop emerges clearly. This type of colocation is so valuable because, despite all of our devices, relationships remain best built through frequent in-person interaction. Whether those relationships are translated online as outright endorsements, friendly banter, or scripted conflicts barely matters. Any interaction or mention is an endorsement in the attention economy, after all. 

The greater visibility of these social phenomena means that even those living outside of world cities can now virtually participate in them. This network effect means the internet has increased the cultural footprint of cities to be greater than ever before, as it allows parasocial participation in their culture from anywhere in the world. In this way, the smartphone and the internet, in general, follow the trend of previous communications technologies such as television and cinema, which allowed people to imagine themselves living in Los Angeles or New York. This was also true of the printing press, where urban theological debates came to motivate peasants and soldiers fighting in Europe’s wars of religion. In fact, it was likely true even with the advent of writing when the Epic of Gilgamesh was first etched into clay tablets. 

During the already nearly-forgotten COVID-19 pandemic and the attempted top-down social revolution of lockdowns and remote work, for a time, it seemed that this long-term trend might break. That cities would, in the future, decouple from the body of civilization and be replaced by a deterritorialized and truly atomized mainstream. It seemed plausible that centers like San Francisco and New York might give up the commanding heights of power to smaller and dispersed centers, that even these smaller and more dynamic cities, in turn, might see that ubiquitous corona of American urban life, the suburb, disperse even further until it was unrecognizable. The expectation among some in the tech community and even policymakers was a digital exurbanization of decision-making power and production. This did not come to be. 

While offices of major tech companies perhaps relocated away from city centers, work-from-home policies were significantly tightened after the policies dealing with the pandemic were rolled back with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which rapidly shifted bureaucratic priorities in early 2022. While commercial real estate saw a significant slump in demand, residential real estate sustained high prices in first-tier U.S. cities. Even when work-from-home was officially preferred policy, it didn’t mean home could be anywhere. In fact, perhaps it became more important than ever for upward mobility that your home was in the right place in the right city. In the end it wasn’t cities that took a hit, but commutes. An outcome any city-dweller would welcome.

The crowning position of cities remaining unchallenged does not mean all is well with our cities—or, for that matter, our civilization. That we grasp at straws such as the advent of the internet, doubling down on car-sustained suburbs through self-driving vehicles or even personal flying transport, or state-mandated pandemic resilience and social distancing to try and bypass the problems of our cities, shows as much desperation as innovation. The contrast offered by modern China is instructive. Shenzhen, today the center of global electronics manufacturing, was as recently as 1979 a backwater fishing town of 20,000 inhabitants. Far from the only Chinese city to see such a meteoric rise, these cities are not the supposed “ghost towns” of media stories but the physical infrastructure of the next stage of Chinese civilization.

There is no way to aspire to a better future without aspiring to functional cities because all functional institutions rely on them. There is, further, no way to reimagine or reorganize society without reimagining and reorganizing cities. No exit from this problem to a different social order is possible, because any such exit will, without innovation in social technology, after a perhaps rapid growth in urban population simply recreate our cities and their parasitic city politics and social decay. Since our industrial civilization clearly needs a refounding, many of our cities will need such a refounding as well. That will require a new Gilgamesh and perhaps a new Enkidu too, to overthrow the old order of cities and found them anew.

Republished from the philosophical journal The Side View.

Why do civilizations collapse? This question bears not only on safeguarding our society’s future but also makes sense of our present. The answer relies on some of the same technē that humanity needed to build civilization in the first place: we have to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely peruse the body of theories handed down to us.

Institutional failure comes as a surprise because organizations try to hide their shortcomings. They lean on other, more functional organizations in order to keep up appearances. During civilizational collapse, no organization can properly hide its own inadequacy, since the whole interdependent ecosystem of institutions is caving in on itself. States, religions, material technologies, and ways of life that once seemed self-sustaining turn out to have been dependent on the invisible subsidy of just a few key institutions. The environment of societal collapse reveals much of the otherwise obscured inner workings of crucial social technologies. After all, to analyze something is to break it apart!

Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse. As institutions turn to cannibalizing each other, there is little patronage or emotional energy going towards accurately describing the wider process. The notable exception that proves the rule of civilizational delusion is the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. It is an encouraging example, since it shows a societal failure arrested and reversed by an intellectual golden age called the Hundred Schools of Thought. Confucianism, Legalism, and Taoism could only come into being with this kind of epistemic opportunity.

In the West today, we operate under the influence of our own key philosophy, which we can call scientism: the tendency to rely on scientific claims to describe the functioning of society, even when there is no empirical reason to assume that they apply. We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. This is very far from the truth. We are certainly living in socially-engineered societies, but they are not scientifically planned in any straightforward way. Our organs of economic management do not secretly know how the economy really works. Our systems of political regulation are operating on the fumes of their institutional inheritance from two or three generations ago—the last spurt of institutional growth in Western societies happened roughly during the 1970s. At this time in the United States, new federal bodies such as the Department of Energy and Education were created and organizations such as NASA reached their modern form. Concurrently, the United Kingdom dispensed with organized labor as a political force in favor of an expanded administrative apparatus, and France saw the resignation of Charles de Gaulle, the architect of the Fifth Republic; neither country’s political economy has evolved much since.

Civilizational collapse always looms on the horizon. Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse. The old dictum “gradually, then suddenly” is cliché, but accurate. To ascertain whether or not we are headed for collapse, we must first analyze the functionality of our own society and pinpoint where things go wrong.

Mechanisms of Collapse

Our society is dominated by large bureaucracies. These bureaucracies break down the processing of physical goods and information into discrete tasks, such as how a factory worker puts doors on a car, or a stock trader buys futures contracts. These tasks are shorn of their context and executed in a systematized environment whose constraints are quite narrow: put the car door in, increase the portfolio value. Our society is thoroughly compartmentalized. This compartmentalization isn’t driven by the division of labor, but rather by the need to make use of misaligned talent without empowering it. By radically limiting employees’ scope of action, you make office politics more predictable. By fragmenting available knowledge, you can leverage information asymmetries to the intellectual or material advantage of the center. Some of this is necessary for scaling organizations beyond what socially connected networks can manage—but move too far towards compartmentalization, and it becomes impossible to accomplish the original mission of the organization.

Such large bureaucratic systems do not emerge organically; they require design and implementation. Empirically, we can know this simply by examining the intent of the original founders of these systems. If you want to know, say, why the FBI exists, you can find the answer in the documents of its founder, J. Edgar Hoover.  You could do the same for the IRS, or for Amazon, or for any other number of institutions.

It is very difficult, though, to apply this analysis to the construction of society. No matter how large or how small, institutions always coexist in a symbiotic relationship with other institutions. There is no Amazon without the United States government, no U.S. government without—at least—some parts of the U.S. economy. Each of these institutions depends on the others in an intricate mesh. Society is not a single institution, after all, but an ecosystem of interdependent institutions.

In addition to this complexity, non-functional institutions are the rule. Our institutions today rarely function in accordance with their stated purpose. Individuals within a given society are often very bad at judging institutional functionality. Some people spend their entire lives ruthlessly profiting from the misery of others, or greatly contributing to the prosperity of others, without even knowing that they are doing so. People who try to effect change are most often frustrated. Countless people spend their lives wrestling with a societal problem, slaving over papers for publication in academia or the nonprofit world. They act as if there is some sort of metaphorical wall which they throw their papers over, with some responsible person on the other side taking the output of their disinterested scientific study and translating it into policy, medical practice, or industrial production.

More often than not, there is nobody on the other side of that wall. Since society is so deeply compartmentalized, it rarely functions as a whole with a single purpose. Note that dysfunctionality is not a normative distinction; it often boils down to the simple reality of whether or not anyone ever follows up on key actions within the institution. It is also a question of whether or not there is a multiplier—be it individual, bureaucratic, oligarchic—behind that metaphorical wall.

Institutions often become non-functional due to the loss of key knowledge at critical junctures. Take, for example, the recent failure of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to reproduce a niche classified material known as FOGBANK that is necessary for manufacturing nuclear weapons. It took the NNSA ten years and millions of dollars to re-engineer a material that their staff in the 1980s knew how to make. That knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule. Attempts at reverse engineering do not always succeed, if they are even made.

Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society. There might be a sudden point where the superstructure gives way dramatically, such as occurred during the Bronze Age Collapse, or there might be slow accommodation to this convergence to zero, as with the Byzantine Empire.

The key dynamic here is the loss of the subtle social technologies that allow us to solve the succession problem. Running a large and complex institution requires skills which are often difficult to fully pass on. How can a successful founder ensure a successor who leads as competently as they did? The succession problem is the central obstacle to transferring the ownership and knowledge of institutions from generation to generation. In the case of the Nobel Committee, for example, the goal of succession is to produce a new chairman with similar faculties of judgment to the original chairman. In the case of ancient Egypt, it would have been making sure that the Pharaoh’s son knows how to interact with all of the powerful people in Egypt and has an intuitive feel for the subtleties of public order, diplomacy, and famine prevention. In addition to knowledge succession, there is also power succession. The son of the Pharaoh may be just as skilled as his father, but if he does not inherit his base of power, the son will be vulnerable to usurpation or invasion.

The succession problem is especially important when transferring secrets. In ancient Egypt, accurate measurement of the Nile river was a state secret, in order to allow the state to monopolize agricultural production and resource flows. This was crucial to the functionality of Egyptian civilization—it was the legitimating story of the state. By design, it was not clear to the Egyptian public how they would go about running their society if it weren’t for the expert knowledge of the state.

The failure to maintain implicit traditions of knowledge speaks to the extreme difficulty of transferring secrets between generations. Often the problem is that the kids “don’t get the joke”: if you create an institution with a false premise in order to mislead society as to your true goals, the people you hire into it might be fooled by the propaganda themselves. This is why claims about multigenerational conspiracies are always highly suspect: such organizations are plagued by succession failures in knowledge.

Avoiding collapse is so difficult because succession failure is often opaque. If the Institute of Pottery lost the ability to make good pots—to mold people into skilled pot makers—would they declare it to the world? Of course not—institutions are very rarely self-abolishing. The same holds true throughout crucial niches of our society, from social engineering to science and philosophy. All of these areas could be in profound crisis today, and we wouldn’t even know it. The intellectual apocalypse is invisible if there are no true intellectuals around. Again, institutional failure typically comes as a surprise.

And yet, clearly some functional institutions still exist, or our society would not function at all. At the end of the day, you can still go online and call a cab or go to a dealership and buy a car. This car will have doors bolted on by a worker you’ve never met, and these doors will seem to work. The same cannot always be said of stock portfolios.

History Guides Analysis of Decline

We can define civilizational collapse as a process wherein most recognizable large-scale institutions of a society vanish, coupled with a drop in material wealth, a drop in the complexity of material artifacts and social forms, a reduction in travel distance and physical safety of the inhabitants, and a mass reduction in knowledge.

Loss of knowledge is especially damaging, since it accelerates the other aspects of collapse and ensures that they will be long-lasting. Nearly all of the written evidence we have of societal decline comes from elites. Historically, literacy was restricted to the traditional elite class of a society, as they were the only ones with any use for reading and writing. This accounts for the total disappearance of writing after the Late Bronze Age collapse, since Bronze Age societies had a very small literate class. The result was a wholesale loss of civilizational knowledge. When writing reappeared in the eastern Mediterranean centuries later, it was based on the new Phoenician alphabet, rather than the old hieroglyphic system that gave birth to the cuneiform of the Assyrians or the Linear B of the Minoans. Such losses of knowledge are a constant throughout human history: as with FOGBANK, or as with the state of New Jersey recently scrambling to find a COBOL programmer with the ability to overhaul their legacy information systems.

Despite how difficult it can be to gather historical data, it’s still a far better way to understand societal collapse than purely theoretical models. Rather than picking and choosing our preferred explanations of collapse beforehand, we should first recognize that there are simply too many causal variables to control for. The best we can hope for is rigorous cross-comparison with the historical record, using sets of natural experiments between past societies. A broad historical literature of collapse does exist, especially on the Late Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire. But the scholars that pose these questions often have particular—and popular—answers in mind as to what causes collapse: environmental fragility, moral decline, an overloading of systemic complexity, and so on. The morality play is written first, the facts are found second, and this often results in a shoddy final product of a theory. Thus, the relevance of history for investigating our own society’s potential collapse is also obvious: without comparing the present to other civilizations, we can’t say much of anything useful about it.

It is hard to come to a consensus on historical cause and effect. In geology, we didn’t build another planet to discover the Earth’s plate tectonics, but rather dug among the rocks on which we found ourselves. In our macro-study of history and civilizations, we too must rely on in-depth exploration of historical examples.

That exploration is still itself theory-driven. Good historians and theoreticians explicitly acknowledge the theses they work with, so I will do the same. My theory of history is great founder theory: I propose that social technologies do not evolve out of mass action, but rather are devised by a tiny subset of institutional designers. Looking at history, we see that new organizations and social forms often arise within a single generation, showing jumps in social complexity far too rapid to be explained away by collective action or evolution. This would be the equivalent of expecting a tornado tearing through a junkyard to assemble a Boeing 747 or a Tesla Cybertruck.

Designing complex objects through collective action, or perhaps through an intermittent individual strategy similar to the open software approach, is tempting. However, unowned commons tend to be raided, and individual visions tend to differ massively. It often takes an exceptional individual with exceptional vision to create a new social or material technology. It’s hard to remember nowadays that the smartphone once had to be devised as a combination of the cell phone, the tablet, and the camera, and did not merely emerge out of mass market sentiments. It took a single individual, Steve Jobs, to see that while a combination of the car, the airplane, and the submarine would produce an inferior version of all three, the opposite case would be true in the creation of the smartphone. And then that individual had to implement the vision.

The result is usually one or more institutions, created by the individual to carry out their goals. Institutions are not naturally self-documenting. The descriptions of themselves that they provide can be misleading. Suppose you were watching the birth of a mystical movement like the Franciscans in the 13th century. At the time, you might describe them as the cult of a new god. But an observer in the 15th century would, according to the institutional information available at the time, describe them as a movement firmly within the Catholic Church. In theory, the Franciscans have always been good Catholics, but this only gets recognized after a struggle has played out. In the Middle Ages, you could often believe any heresy you wanted as long as you formally declared your loyalty to the Pope.

A different example might be the United States government today. A keen observer would examine the way that laws are made today and conclude that we have witnessed the emergence of a new legislative body all but in name, with Congress reduced to a vestigial organ of this governing structure. Law today is made mostly by the Supreme Court, or the civil service when it chooses what to implement and how, or occasionally via Presidential executive order. Yet very few people today come to such a conclusion, as the ideology of American government dictates that law is made in Congress, and does not make room for the development of new federal legislative bodies. If no one believes a hypothesis, the evidence for it remains unnoticed, even when such evidence is abundant.

Such thinking requires going beyond both public appearances and official narratives. The popular or expert definition of “law” that we use in 2020 can’t help us here. Rather, we should use the term “law” in the same sense that one would use it to empirically describe the formalized customs of medieval Iceland, or of the function of the Twelve Tables in ancient Rome, or Lycurgus’ Laws in Sparta, or Sharia law in modern-day Somalia. In none of these cases would the official self-documentation of the institutions give you an accurate picture of real conditions. Institutions are similar to individuals in this way. Deep theory-building enabled by thorough scholarship or, better yet, high quality anthropological fieldwork would be needed.

Something as seemingly objective as the occurrence of a battle can only be inferred from scattered artifacts that other people have found, or the writings of long-dead strangers. Moreover, battles are relatively low-complexity—can you imagine trying to parse through Obama’s emails to figure out what his key agenda was during the course of his administration? Could you even do this with your own emails from last year? Establishing historical knowledge is difficult. Narrative fills the gaps; stories are told both by you and Obama and FDR, and by Julius Caesar. These are always a mix of accuracy and self-interest, which is, in fact, what history is.

Material Signs of Collapse

Material evidence can provide something closer to objectivity—at least sometimes. The archaeological record shows that many large Roman cities were depopulated over the course of the 4th and 5th centuries AD. As indicators go, this is a fairly clear and obvious sign of a high urban society’s decay. Indirect evidence corroborates this, such as the reduction in atmospheric lead pollution generated by Roman mining activity leading up to the collapse of the empire. If we assume that mining activity is related to economic production, this is a good indicator of economic decline.

But even material evidence can be unreliable, since understanding it requires a high degree of contextual knowledge. The interesting question for the prospective collapse of our own society is this: if you were a late imperial Roman, and someone told you about the ongoing decline in atmospheric lead, how would you process this information? Today, if we saw a drop in lead pollution, our first assumption might be that this is due to the advent of greener technology. Economic decline wouldn’t naturally come to mind. Victory has many fathers, but defeat is an orphan. We find it hard to believe that we were once more capable of intentionally affecting the world than today. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, wanderers among the ruins of aqueducts concluded that they must have been built by giants. The classical Greeks examined the massive stone ruins of Mycenaean civilization and assumed that the great walls were built by a race of Cyclopes.

Our persistent failure to understand the monumental achievements of the past speaks not to the historical prevalence of pyramid-loving extraterrestrials, but rather to the fact that we often lose the knowledge of the social technology on which such material artifacts rested. It is easier for us to conceptualize an extraterrestrial force that constructed the pyramids than it is to conceive of the political and economic system that made such architectural feats possible. Such loss of knowledge gives us an idea of our limited ability to maintain advanced social systems over generations.

If we compare the roughly twelve identifiable Dark Ages following civilizational collapse on the Eurasian continent—the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, the end of Mohenjo Daro, the decline of the Roman Empire, Han China and so on—we always find that nearly all material technology is not self-perpetuating, but rather rests on foundations of social technology. The only material technologies that routinely survive collapse are small-scale agriculture and small-scale metallurgy, likely because the social technologies needed to sustain such smaller communities can arise organically.

Since collapse in material technology is always preceded by collapse in the practice of social technology, Dark Ages are always preceded by Intellectual Dark Ages. Knowledge of these social technologies is highly compartmentalized and, as a result, they are not understood explicitly by all parts of society. This means that a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all—all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance. Often not just the knowledge, but the socioeconomic niche that once fostered the creation of new social technology has been obliterated in all but name.

Today, our material technology is far superior to that of Rome, but our social technology may not be. Take the Industrial Revolution for example: surely the most interesting thing that has happened within the last 500 years, and a process that most currently assume is still ongoing. But if the Industrial Revolution was over, what would we expect to see? Much as we see a late Roman drop in lead pollution, today we see drops in pollution in the West. The standard explanation is gains in efficiency and greener technology. But if we take a more global perspective, it seems that we outsourced not just production, but also the pollution associated with production to China. The economists’ argument here is that we have intentionally outsourced our industries to China, obeying the industry-agnostic logic of gains from trade. It is worth considering the economists might be wrong if the promised gains from trade haven’t materialized.

One could hypothesize the American worker and manager have, over time, lost the social technology that enabled them to run the assembly lines in the first place and that, now, our support for outsourcing isn’t so much due to greed as it is an adaptation to inability. Europe, arguably, has adapted to its inability to fight wars anymore with a narrative of intentional pacifism. We should seriously consider the possibility that we are a post-industrial society not in a positive sense, but in the sense that in our society the Industrial Revolution has stopped.

Such a hypothesis is strikingly hard to defeat. A civilizational collapse under conditions of advanced material technology might look very much like what we have now. Our society is the product of what were once advanced, rational, self-catalyzing systems of production, but we have now reverted to a more customary system, where things are simply done as they were 40 or 50 years ago. We have the same bureaucratic and economic institutions as we did then, with some marginal tweaks. Thanks to narrow progress in the CPU industry, most of which has left the United States, we are now able to have Zoom calls. Unfortunately, there are few other reasons for optimism.

Collapse Is Silent

When collapses occur more slowly, it is even more difficult to find anyone acknowledging the process at all. This was true of the late Roman Empire, where one finds letters exchanged between patricians complaining that the roads were often unsafe this time of year, but little acknowledgement of the fundamental changes taking place. The collapse of the Roman Empire was much less the constant burning of cities so much as it was GDP-equivalent shrinking by about 1% per year, while remaining more or less the same on the books, for two hundred years in a row.

In the context of adaptation to the COVID-19 pandemic, markets seem to be fairly stable and even slightly better than they were a few months ago, even though common sense tells us that production has fallen massively. If such a huge drop in economic activity can be papered over with government and private sector intervention, can we imagine how many crucial slower-moving changes are going unnoticed? If our actual wealth per capita, say, has been declining 1% per year for the last 20 years, how would we even know? Civilizational collapse happens on similar or even slower time scales—even though coronavirus hasn’t left everything in flames, we may still be on the long road to collapse. Absent reform, I think we are in for a slow century of decline starting in about 2030 or so.

Intentional and, more importantly, successful reform of society is very rare. It does happen, but macro-scale social engineering is exceptionally difficult: Augustus Caesar truly did save the Roman Republic from tearing itself to shreds through unsustainable warfare. His imperial system was in turn torn to shreds through warfare after long-standing economic and intellectual decay 300 years later. The sheer difficulty of reform, coupled with the accumulation of social and cultural technical debt, provides a fairly solid explanation for why civilizations collapse.

The United States is well-positioned to attempt such civilizational reforms, since it has a remarkable ability to integrate exceptional talent from all over the world and has put that talent to work on some of the most successful institutional projects in history, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. America is, for now, in an unavoidable period of relative decline, and in 2030 or 2040 the largest economy in the world will almost certainly be that of China. But absolute decline is reversible—2060 is still an open question. A deep pragmatism runs through this country, and if reimagined, the 21st century could see another explosion in American economic, social, and cultural development.

The solution lies with a small number of people who can independently judge the generative minds behind the facts, rather than merely minding the integrity of the established body of theories and observations. If there is such a thing as a technē of civilization—the skill of managing the institutions of society and culture—it exists in very narrow corners of society. Engineering society to be self-perpetuating is an extremely difficult challenge, and we can devise all sorts of machinery to do so, but this is the bottom line. Such people are extremely rare, but if we create a socioeconomic niche for them, our civilization can rewrite its own future for the better.

The distinction between formal and informal arrangements is one that has to be given careful thought when thinking of any empire, especially a global one. King Herod was nominally a king of Judea, yet the presence of Roman soldiers is enough for everyone at the time, and today, to recognize this kingdom as part of the Roman Empire during his reign. This arrangement was common for the Roman Empire with the kingdoms of Mauretania, Cappadocia, Pontus, Bosphorus, and many others de jure or de facto sharing Judea’s status. The United States has many similar arrangements today.

American GIs landed in Iceland to take over its World War II occupation by Britain in 1940, and they never truly left, with Naval Air Station Keflavik operating to this day. From 1951 to 2006, the Iceland Defense Force that was tasked with defending Iceland was run not by the government of Iceland, which supports no standing army, but by the United States. By many estimates, 2% to 5% of Iceland’s GDP during this era was oriented to providing services to the base, similarly to how state spending on legions in ancient Britain sustained the Romanized economy there. This far-flung military garrison in a protectorate is but one of many Roman-like special relationships the United States cultivates. With nearly 5000 military sites worldwide, these bases themselves cover over 42,000 square miles of federal government territory, together approximately the size of the U.S. state of Virginia.

With 31 member states, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) includes the small nuclear-armed powers of France and the United Kingdom, manpower of over a billion people, accounts for over 50% of world military spending as of 2024, and holds three out of the five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. The much-discussed Article 5 of the treaty that gives NATO legal existence states that an attack on one signatory is an attack on all of them. This article was only invoked once in the history of the alliance, after the September 11th attacks on the United States in 2001. The alliance further obliges all member states to spend 2% of GDP on their militaries, a target many countries have fallen short of, but more have met since the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Beyond NATO itself, the United States has collective defense treaties with over a dozen nations, with Brazil, Australia, South Korea, and Japan being just a few of the more prominent examples.

When the Delian League was founded in 478 BC as a coalition of Greek city-states to fight the Persians, the common treasury of this ancient NATO was kept in the democracy of Athens. Eventually, a war against Sparta would see the fortunes of Athens wane and the city-state would come to extract onerous tribute, make harsh demands, and even mete out punitive measures against former allies who found themselves mere client states of the Athenian empire. A potential parallel is worth careful consideration as Germany today experiences permanent economic marginalization driven by energy costs in the aftermath of the 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline that once brought Russian natural gas to the U.S. ally. When examined in practice, the “international rules-based liberal order” is neither liberal, nor rules-based, nor orderly.

The Five Eyes alliance with the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia further means the entire Anglosphere in practice shares all signals intelligence efforts to the point where such efforts can be thought of as a single supranational intelligence organization. This traces its origin to a secret treaty associated with the signing of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which set U.S. and British goals for the post-war world. The Five Eyes is one of the most comprehensive espionage alliances in history.

The United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund are nominally international institutions backed by U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic heft and are, of course, headquartered in either Washington D.C. or New York. According to one of these internationally-influential D.C.-headquartered institutions, the Atlantic Council, the U.S. currency itself is a major backbone of world government:

“The U.S. dollar has served as the world’s leading reserve currency since World War II. Today, the dollar represents 58 percent of the value of foreign reserve holdings worldwide. The euro, the second-most-used currency, comprises only 21 percent of foreign reserve holdings.”

This dollar dominance means that the Federal Reserve, based in Washington D.C., is perhaps the most powerful economic institution in the world, with decision-making power on an economic scale transcending the already vast 25.4% of global nominal GDP of the United States proper. Nominal GDP is a better proxy for trade power than GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) and is useful for thinking about what commands the flow of global goods and services into North America. This monetary importance will not be as easy to quantify for future archaeologists as that of the ancient Roman solidus, as it leaves no metal trace, but it will be universally attested in the written sources future historians are likely to have.

Preserving the “international rules-based order” on which such economic and institutional arrangements are built is often given as the moral underpinning of the deployment of the immensely powerful U.S. military. Sometimes this takes the form of large-scale invasions, such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Other times they are more narrow and calculated interventions, such as the bombing campaigns on Yugoslavia or Libya, which took advantage of vast U.S. air power. Providing U.S. arms to client states or armed groups is also a favored strategy, such as in Syria or in Ukraine. The United States and its international system are not the first empire to claim universal legitimacy, but they are the first to back this claim of legitimacy with capabilities of a planetary scale.

Why United States Lead to United Nations

It might be tempting to view this undeniable global empire as an accident of history, yet there are deeper historical trends that give reason to think it was nearly inevitable that the United States of America would at least attempt to achieve such an empire. The U.S. traces its origin in the 18th century to an uneasy confederation of rivalrous colonies, peoples, and ideologies, on a continent with what was even then understood by observers to be the continent with greatest natural geopolitical potential. The vast landmass could be quickly conquered by the more advanced military and social technology of colonial powers, yet, once settled, in a matter of just a few generations would inevitably overshadow whichever motherland seeded it. 

The war of independence unleashed the revolutionary spirit in the New World much as the French revolutionary wars unleashed it in the Old. Every war is a great exertion of society, and debts are incurred in this exertion—financial, social, and moral debts. The more mobilized society is, the greater the technical debt of the social system. These debts are paid one way or another. This is why the Whiskey rebellion that started in 1791 spooked George Washington as much as it did; it was the seeming real possibility of veterans deciding how those debts would be paid. 

The revolutionary spirit was not uniform in the coalition that gave rise to the United States, and it can be said that several of the Founding Fathers dreaded unleashing democracy or sympathized even with outright monarchy, such as Alexander Hamilton. Yet, while the Constitutional Convention tied the colonies closer together, and delayed a reckoning, it couldn’t prevent it. The plurality of American states reformed through a civil war into a singular United States, a fully revolutionary state with some elements of nationalism. Revolutionary states tend to adopt isolationism whenever they see foreign entanglements as compromising or endangering their experiment. They tend to adopt expansionism and evangelism when strong. Both modes of foreign policy preserve the special sense of mission that serves as their founding myth of overturning—and scapegoating—the previous regime.

They need a nemesis and will invent it if need be, either domestically or abroad. Not much more needs to be said about U.S. foreign policy and its global effect on political legitimacy and political change. It was not by chance then that the United States conquered the world—but destiny. Geopolitical destiny at first, and then the destiny of its political economy. This eventual conquest in some ways improved America, and in others changed it beyond recognition. 

In some ways, it also improved the world, while in others it made it worse. The Green Revolution has fed the world, with famine being the result of local conflicts more than any constraint of nature, and smallpox, the greatest foe of mankind, has been eradicated by a World Health Organization program. The regime of economic globalization first rebuilt a defeated Germany and Japan, and after the end of the first U.S.-Russian Cold War lifted a billion Chinese out of poverty and into the global middle class.

Yet, many nations in the periphery of the former European colonial empires still struggle with civil war under America’s watch, and the great power itself is not free of the risk of a global nuclear war if it overreaches or if a rising power such as China were to covet the crown of the world. The evolution of human society seems to have dangerously stalled under this uniformity, and after the 20th century’s global baby boom, even the drive to procreate seems to leave our species as we complete our long-compounding domestication. We live neither in a utopia or a dystopia, not yet at least.

The World Long Divided Must Unite, The World Long United Must Divide

If, as it seems, we already live under a world government, this would make it a much more mundane political phenomena, neither the beginning of totalitarianism nor a rational panacea to the ills of the world. It would mean that the world government hasn’t yet erased freedom of conscience or speech, nor has it taxed all productivity into oblivion. The apocalypse which John of the Book of Revelation feared would result from Rome’s iron grip on Judea—and indeed what seemed like the whole world—has yet to come about under this world government. 

This identification of our political condition would further mean proponents of world government are wrong in thinking it sufficient or even necessary to help combat the very real potential disasters that might befall humanity as a whole, such as an awakened and hostile superintelligence rising from our data centers, an asteroid from the depths of space crashing into our planet as happened in past epochs of life on Earth, or even the prospect of a devastating global nuclear war.

Moving beyond these extreme theoretical possibilities—to the likely outcomes of our future—what then is the right model for the future of our species under the first world government in human history? As far as the claims of legitimacy go, the Chinese Mandate of Heaven or the mandate Jupiter Optimus Maximus gave to the Romans were at least as worked-out and intricate in their internal political logic as the intellectual monuments built to the moral and supposed practical superiority of liberal democracy. 

Each endured in their own corner of the planet, unchallenged for a thousand years, yet eventually crumbled as much for internal as for external reasons. The political claims of universality, once made, are not easily let go. The title of Roman Emperor and the Persian titles of Padishah or Shahanshah, the King of Kings, were claimed and reclaimed for thousands of years by many successor or would-be successor states even after the polities they claimed. Similarly, our international order will never ideologically admit defeat even if it materially comes to pass.

As technology obliterates distances and increases the legibility of all things to power—and as the world is emptied of so-called barbarians since none of us yet live off-world—the long-term trends seem to point to a future of planetary scales. This would then make the civilizational analogy of Imperial China an even stronger one than that of the Roman Empire. The history of China has seen the sundering of political unity at the imperial level, even when no existential external threats from the steppe were to be found.

Political order can be very long-lived, but does erode away over centuries without renewal and consolidation of power, absent external or internal enemies. This observation was best put in the opening lines of one of China’s most esteemed classical literary works, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, where Luo Guanzhong wrote in the 15th century that “the world, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” 

When the Chinese world divided as the Zhou dynasty fragmented into the first warring states period, the engine of social and political evolution restarted, and ran until the region once more coalesced centuries later in the order of the Qin and Han Dynasties. The Han civilization fell in a way similar to classical Rome in Late Antiquity. In the Three Kingdoms Period—immortalized in Guanzhong’s novel—the powers of Wei, Shu, and Wu contested over their depopulating and declining world.

Similar events unfolded many times, including the division of the Southern and Northern Dynasties in the fifth century AD as well as the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms in the tenth century AD. The Chinese 20th century can be understood as precisely such a period, beginning with the warlord era in 1916, interrupted and transformed by the Sino-Japanese war in 1937—which some argue should be considered the beginning of World War II—and concluding with Mao’s victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 that saw the People’s Republic of China established and the opposing Kuomintang party exiled to the small island of Taiwan. The future centuries of the world are likely to see similar dynamic struggles as political unity inevitably breaks.

As we intellectually grapple with our present American Leviathan, the only plausible fledgling challenger that presents itself is China, with its economic growth and demonstrated capability of technological innovation, yet without a true international empire this challenge rings hollow. China aspires to be part of and perhaps even the inheritor of America’s order. Even this limited aspiration is of course something the United States might not cooperate with.

A bitter Russia remains, clinging to a claimed equality with the United States. It has proven itself capable of resisting U.S.-backed regime change or fragmentation, and since 2014 even of modest territorial expansion through war. It however hasn’t proved itself capable of tempting states to align with itself against the United States and is unlikely to do so in the future. This means it cannot unify any significant area of Eurasia as the Soviet Union once did. Modern Russia aims to assert itself as a great power, not a superpower, and cannot dismantle the world government but merely erode it.

The international community—that almost but not quite admits to itself that it is a commonwealth—centered on the United States might, as it declines, end up being less than the first world government, merely the first world government. Even today, reviewing maps of various security and international political matters, for example which countries sanctioned Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, reveals that perhaps this international community is most assured in governing the First World: Europe, North America, and the rims of the Pacific Ocean. As its power is eventually challenged, it will retreat to those areas rather than persist in influencing the planet as a whole. Outside this reduced realm, and mostly unnoticed by those inside the First World, new political paradigms and empires will emerge first in Eurasia and eventually in Africa.

The forces that brought about the claim of world government in 1945 with the United Nations, and its reality in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s fall, are not unique to the United States of America. The second or third world government might well be American as well—the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinan reconquered Rome and Italy centuries after those lands passed into Ostrogothic political control—but it also might not be. China or, on a long enough horizon, even India present themselves as new potential centers of global empire. 

The forces that will bring about the eventual and inevitable end of this first economic and military singleton are also not unique to the United States and will play out again and again into the deep future. Absent profound technological collapse, future interregnum periods are likely. When they happen, these will see the development of new social technologies in amazing bursts of cultural vitality, but they will be temporary, and a planetary government will eventually coalesce once more. The predynastic period of human history is over. Much like ancient Egypt cyclically politically reunified the Nile River, or how China reunified the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers under a succession of dynasties, so too shall humanity reunify future Earth over and over again. We stand then not at the end of history, but at the beginning of a new and likely very long planetary epoch.

Released in 2010, Grimes’ debut album Geidi Primes was heavily inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune, today a major Hollywood blockbuster but, back then, just a weird 1960s sci-fi novel for nerds that inspired an even weirder 1980s David Lynch film that appealed to—if the box office is any judge—almost nobody. But the universe has a sly sense of humor. In the novel’s far-future setting, humanity has spread across the galaxy. Unlike your average sci-fi fare, however, Herbert saw us colonize the cosmos entirely without the aid of computers, because the “thinking machines” had risen up against their human creators and were only barely defeated through the so-called “Butlerian Jihad” against any machine in the likeness of a human mind. 

Fifteen years since her debut, Grimes has gone from being an indie musician from Montreal to being a global superstar and, perhaps, Silicon Valley’s only celebrity crush. She is also once again grappling with the question of whether humans stand a chance against the “thinking machines.” This time, however, maybe it’s not just fiction anymore. 

Last December you told me you moved to San Francisco to be a spy for AI. What were your findings?

Yeah, I could see that AI was taking off which I’d been waiting for my whole life pretty much. And the first bit of it really was a lot of fun, like going around convincing people to tell me about their secret powers. But it became even more interesting to observe the psychological landscape.

I don’t think there’s any historical precedent for how much raw “hard power” is in the hands of engineers right now. In the past, great engineers would be working under the protection of a king or something, and their designs would take hundreds of people years to deploy. If you’re designing ships for Britain when the British Navy was entering its golden era, those guys, the shipbuilders, aren’t the King. I believe this is a very distinct moment in human history for this reason.

I was speaking with a prominent AI engineer recently, and I asked if he felt pressure about designing the initial culture of the universe. But he disagreed with that characterization, he prefers to think that he is uncovering what was already there. Physics designs the plane.  

But if the universe doesn’t want us to design her, why did she give us all this creativity?

It’s something that’s tricky to discuss publicly, but much of mass behavior is also defined by live players who bother to shape it. 

Yes. It’s a tricky thing to talk about, my stance is in between. Singular genius and agency can move mountains and it’s good to foster the idea in society that you can aspire to that, but I do agree with the criticism that the historical focus on this can downplay the contributions of others. Every time I go to a hospital I’m like damn, there’s heroes all around me.  

But I also listened to a podcast the other night on Napoleon or something. And the girl was just like “Oh, you know, and we all know the Great Man Theory is, of course, false.” Your job is studying Napoleon! Like what!? Like I don’t think the people of France are down to reinstate the monarchy for just anybody. Let’s be real. The truth of things is usually somewhere in the middle. 

What role does individual agency play in the development of AI technology? 

I think the arena has already selected for maximum agency when it comes to AI. This has always been where I’ve met my people, if you care about AI you care about world-building. But because the stakes are so high, I think we’re discouraging ideation. There is this sort of abdication of responsibility. Clearly we have a tool that can save us from climate change, nuclear winter etc, in theory. But to actually say that out loud makes the stakes even higher than they already are. You don’t want to be the guy who got it wrong at this moment in history.

My AI friends want to create the tools that give us infinite abundance and whatnot, but I want actual concrete cultural plans. Social media is traumatizing people out of ideating, and it’s creating a weird power vacuum. You have all these massively agentic people but we don’t know what they actually think.  

I get why you’d want to keep your ideas close to the chest, so this isn’t a criticism, but I think it could be healthy if big companies tried thinking about ideas out loud when stuff is happening this fast and has this much influence. This might be the responsible way to be. But I’d love to hear more ideas from engineers because they are so good at problem-solving. Although maybe that’s what artists and philosophers are for. But if so, I’d like to see some philosophy departments [at AI companies]. 

Why is there a strange abdication of responsibility among the live players of the world on artificial intelligence? 

The answer I always get is that it’s like a child. With a nice well-behaved non-sentient thing, you can of course fine-tune the AI model and stuff. But in the broader sense, it’s just going to exist the way a baby does. Like, I can’t be 100% certain my child won’t do evil. I can do a lot to nurture him or her towards my culture and my values, but I can’t be certain of their decisions in life. I would be unwilling to hand them a massive amount of power until they were older and I had a better understanding of their intentions, strengths and weaknesses. With AGI [artificial general intelligence] you don’t necessarily have that luxury.  

How literally should we take the comparisons of AI as our children or as our offspring that are common in tech circles? I always thought that it’s a sort of category error. While our children might not always be wonderful people, they are biologically always human. AI will be much more alien. 

It works in the sense that it’s a creation that you can’t control.

For most of human history parents have definitely managed to control their children. I think it’s just not politically correct to say that now. Even in modern society, I bet it happens way more than we admit. Parents can totally psy-op their kids in, say, religion.

Your child is an agent in the world that can go do whatever it wants. You know, murder someone? Yes. But I think the input of the parent is essential. There’s a bunch of stuff my parents said to me that’s only kicking in recently.

I also love Wolf [Tivy]’s thought, he said to me he thinks like war and love and beauty and philosophy and hate are not just random monkey things, but things that might just arise naturally from intelligence.   

You mean baked into the nature of the universe and competition?

Not even competition. I feel like when people think about Darwinism, they’re thinking too much of competition. And obviously, again, I’m not a scientist, but I feel a major philosophical hole I always see is that, for example, I was listening to a podcast and someone was theorizing that, actually, the way human babies require so much more attention than any other baby in the animal kingdom means so much more empathy is required from the community. Other primates don’t just hand their kids off, but human kids require intense collective effort. It’s so beautiful that we have a love mutation that allows for much more helpless but therefore significantly more plastic, adaptable offspring. 

Like it’s possible that love allowed intelligence to arise. Isn’t that cool?  

Or maybe inversely, intelligence is correlated with more advanced moral values. I always have a hope that’s what’s really going on. You really should get into the Origin Stories podcast by the Leakey Foundation. Every time a new hominid drops I know before any of my friends because they’re so fast. Sick.    

I would formulate the problem so: our civilization and our culture struggles to, in the same worldview, integrate technological determinism and also the ability of exceptional individuals to have agency in the world. Actually, all of our ability to have agency in the world. My position is that both are true.

Say more. Can you clarify your definition of technological determinism?

The idea is that future of the universe is predetermined, we’re just sort of climbing a tech tree, like in the video game Civilization. Instead, I think we are in a superposition state, where we could go down a number of different physics-compliant paths. For the most part, it’s going to be precisely those same technologists that decide which path it will be. 

I told one of the best AI engineers I know “You’re the architects of the future.” And he was like “No, no, I’m just uncovering the future.” Like just shining the light in the dark spots. As if life is a grand strategy video game and the map starts out all black but exploring reveals new zones. Physics is physics, obviously. But, you know, it’s like there are certain inevitabilities and maybe even all this would happen the same way in a different place, in a different part of the universe, with the same building blocks or whatever, but it still feels like I think both are true.

I think that there’s a false dichotomy here. Of course, when I paint, I have to paint with the colors I have. But I can still go pick up something totally unexpected and throw it on the canvas. You know what I mean? The other thing he said that was very interesting, though, is he’s like “Well, engineers aren’t used to this kind of responsibility.”

Many of us are sleepwalking into our AI future as if in a dream. A dream written by a science fiction author in the 1980s that we read as children and totally forgot about. I’ve seen some of the most agentic and active people in the world somehow put into a trance by AGI. All they can think about is bringing it about faster or being very afraid of it, either way thinking it inevitable.

I understand the allure of the thought. It would be such a relief, and you’re tempted to tell yourself that the will of the universe bends towards beauty, but I think for this reason it’s a dangerous temptation. I think the fact that it’s such an alluring idea makes people think less clearly. And the discourse has really entered into a bad rhetorical trap where questioning this at all makes you seem like a luddite or a doomer.  

I think the fact that we’ve continued to allow such bad thinking in the public square without any consequence is pretty harmful to society. To clarify, I love AI and I want AGI. But like, the impulse that even makes me want to clarify that is a product of the discourse being broken.

Do technologists consider the political and big history consequences of their work? Are they successfully dealing with the challenges AI brings on those dimensions?

In San Francisco everyone’s always like “What are your AGI timelines?” Like this or that or like interpretability, blah blah. And I’m like, I feel like before any of that there’s just this social problem that there are no societal norms around how to handle the political subtext of all of this because that’s really the thing everyone is stressed about.

When you work in a trade, you’re essentially working within an intellectual legacy of some kind. I think the engineering class is just not accustomed to having power yet and could benefit from studying how to better shepherd it. I think there’s almost this deer-in-the-headlights thing. Like, “Oh shit, we’re sitting in front of Congress right now.” Like, what the fuck, you know? By the way this isn’t a criticism, I would be exactly the same. This seems like the obvious narrative arc. 

I’m curious where it goes next though. I feel like I’m seeing things that are gesturing towards the future I want. Engineers are amazing problem solvers, and setting their minds to solving systemic cultural problems has yielded some good results. Some people have done it really well. The amount of incredible young people I meet in this city who are or were Thiel Fellows scouted and funded by Peter Thiel is really cool. Whatever your political opinions are, that’s just a beautiful thing. I wish more people with resources would do the same.

Even when they fail, allowing a strange outlier to thrive rather than fall through the cracks is extremely good for society and the engineering culture. I will also say on average I find engineers to have a better understanding of history and politics than most people. I love San Francisco because people here read. 

It is San Francisco rather than New York that’s the literary center of the world in my opinion. 

In New York they read more, but…

…they read more old writers. San Franciscans read more blogs, Substacks, etc.

You know, all the really good fresh shit! I can only get that from the weird people here [in San Francisco]. I’m like, what strange book have twenty people read that will blow my mind? Yeah. We are missing a social protocol. Like, the nature of power is radically changing. Also, the nature of discourse is radically changing simultaneously, which is making it even harder.

How is discourse changing?

I just mean, for better or worse, like before social media. I always think about Foundation. One of the things I love so much about the book, about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, is it’s just private conversations. Almost nothing happens besides private conversations in rooms by, like, kind of dry, powerful men. And it’s so interesting, because it’s the actual best illustration of what’s actually happening that I’ve ever seen. This is a profoundly real book, just the opposite of what anyone would ever put on a screen or what’s usually a hit. 

You think it’s idiosyncratic, but that’s what it actually is. That’s how decisions get made. I think for better or worse, there is a point when we just can’t keep hearing everyone’s opinions. And hard decisions need to be made concretely, not endlessly debated. 

I’ve observed and learned this over the years, when you see the machinations of how things work when they are great. Like I do not have the heart to do some of the things that need to get done, but it is definitely beneficial to society. 

When you start opening the conversation really collectively, which you should, the issue is that, unless you’ve viscerally lived that reality, it is really, really hard to accept it. Even when you’ve lived it, it’s hard to accept it. Even to witness it is hard.

There’s a distinction here between private and public knowledge. 

Going back to the live player conversation. There’s a point at which, hard fucking decisions need to be made, and not everyone’s gonna agree, and people are gonna be really mad. 

Confronted with this is one of the problems that has people start saying that one of the problems with America is the presidential terms are so short. While I don’t want a ten year Biden or Trump presidency, it’s very hard to accomplish anything politically, without a decade of experience. Even a major construction project or economic overhaul or something similar. There is some merit to top-down decisions being made. And I think that’s the case with AI.

I feel so sad that we don’t put great effort into cultivating and training future leaders. I know everyone’s fed up with Rome but when I think of instances like the period between Trajan and Marcus Aurelius I’m like—we could have that. Why aren’t we trying to have that?

If the timelines to AGI ever become short enough, maybe some heads of state are going to deal with those questions. This is even true of CEOs versus their boards to some extent. If the singularity hypothesis is true where improving AI technology feeds back into even faster AI progress, there is reason to expect radically different developments over the span of weeks or even days.

Everyone keeps invoking the Manhattan Project, but they don’t want one, not actually. Because it’s scary. Here’s the thing, it’s so much harder to be unobserved than it was then and it is harder to make those executive government decisions. It’s getting harder to do that in the world. But I think we need to find ways to make that more possible. It’s also scary because it’s unelected power. Putting power in the hands of unelected individuals is a very scary idea.

Nature has already put power in the hands of unelected individuals. I’ve noticed our conversation is turning surprisingly political. 

I think we’re both really political, but for some reason, we never talked about it with each other. Because I hate politics and I violently despise democracy. Not because I want a dictatorship, but because of the lack of imagination to think of something better. I despise rhetorical traps. This is also what I don’t like about technological determinism though. 

Speaking of which, do you know the statue Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science? It’s like, why would the universe make us so creative? Why would it? Why would she make herself so beautiful? I think she wants us to seduce her and decorate her.  

I think humanity’s having performance issues, to be honest.

Humanity is having performance issues. The statue’s at McGill University, where I went to college—I think in the neuroscience building or something—but it’s just Nature stripping. I forgot to tell you this. It’s a really funny picture: Nature, literally stripping. It’s very erotic. 

But back to democracy. If you want the general public running the government, make it on an issue-by-issue basis then.

Perhaps choose forty random people, educate them on every conceivable aspect of a topic and have them vote on that one topic. And then do that for different issues. But don’t just expect random people to know how to think about all the topics. It’s so much harder to be a Renaissance person as everything advances. It’s taking so much longer to master any given topic. Jobs are becoming more specialized. This also means the government cannot possibly be sufficiently well-informed on artificial intelligence! Nor the public.

Anyone qualified enough to make policy decisions about AI should be making AI. It would be criminal not to. What I always agitate for is what I’ve been calling the Council of Elrond: a small council of the greats, the heads of key AI companies and others who understand it. Then for every extreme opinion, there should be an alternative one. The council should be able to monitor corruption. I do think we need a better solution than that. 

All humans are imperfect. What I do like about nerds—and I will ride for them—is that they love to learn. Is Donald Trump any better than he was before? No, he still sucks. Is Mark Zuckerberg? Actually, yeah. For all the criticism people have of him, the rate of self-correction is impressive.

If someone shows up with a mathematical proof that aligned AGI is mathematically impossible, I would say “OK, time for a Butlerian Jihad.” We’re going to transition to a compute-neutral economy, just as some suggest a carbon-neutral economy. We don’t need computers. We’re just going to do biotech, nuclear, space, and all the other stuff.

But other countries would just make it then. 

I’d claim there are at most six or so truly sovereign countries in the world. People are always invoking the split between China and the U.S. Yet, say what you will about the CCP, they would happily take a deal to create a shared Sino-American company out of TSMC and Nvidia in exchange for Taiwan. Further, each of the superpowers would have a vested interest in suppressing competition. Who would compete economically or even militarily? I don’t think anyone would.

Then you’re back making the AI? Ah, which I’m fine with. I want the AI.

The new Sino-American giant would almost inevitably be a bureaucracy, one that makes very little technological progress while having a guaranteed and very profitable monopoly. And, just like that, the exponential rise of global compute would grind to a halt. Some god of techno-capital… so easily slain.

Is that what you want though? I feel that it’s not long-term thinking. It’s like, I think, decades-thinking.

You reach the future one day at a time. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is that babies born today are very unlikely to ever grow up to be adults. There are many in Silicon Valley that agree with him. If he is right, a few decades would be a notable improvement.

Whatever. People need to stop being such pussies! It’s like let the man speak and then maybe don’t go and base your entire life on the words of one person. Like, you can take in information. This is what we have; if you don’t like it, go change it. Once ideas exist, you can’t stop them. The best thing to do at that point is to make them great, rather than let the first thing be wack.  

I think you in particular know very well that every time someone makes something truly great, the whole world has to bend around it and become better. What I love about Midjourney and DALL-E is everyone has to be so much better. It just made everything more beautiful. Everyone said AI-generated art was going to hurt artists. Yet I’ve never seen so much interesting art in my life, because people are trying to, like, be different from the AI. It is challenging humans; the human artists are slaying right now. I’ve never before bought art in my life and I now like buying paintings and stuff. And then, you know, it’s the same with, for example, Tesla. Say what you will, but there’s self-driving cars and there’s electric cars everywhere. That was definitely not economically feasible before, by any stretch. So. If it is happening, and you can’t stop it, let’s just make it as awesome as humanly possible. 

I think it’s also an act. Sometimes you do have runaway capitalism, or runaway military competition. Yet, just as often, it is non-economic incentives that actually set the economic incentives. Sometimes people do amazing things for non-competitive reasons. And because those things are amazing, so are their economic and military consequences. 

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Do you think the scientists working on nuclear physics in the 1920s were motivated by the atomic bomb? No, they were pursuing a strange spiritual quest to understand the universe and maybe prove that they’re smarter than the other guy doing the same. And those are non-economic and non-military motives. Yet ultimately this weird subculture of people changed the military and economic picture of the whole 20th century. 

A social technology that we really need is a really good war replacement. Because it’s undeniable that war accelerates a lot of awesome things. To some extent, I think men actually kind of need it too, as evidenced by video games. Speaking of which actually I’m kind of for that, honestly. In the near future video games might be seen as a much more emotionally and psychologically necessary thing than we look at them now. Like bonding or sports. It’s possible that, if we didn’t have sports and similar outlets civilization might not have been able to occur.

Maybe gladiatorial combat was necessary to keep the peace of the Roman Empire?

Yeah, and the greens and the blues fighting on the streets of Constantinople over chariot races. We kind of underrate how necessary those are as an alternative to warlord kingdoms. I think there is a certain amount of getting the violence out by having those war analogs. There is an essential catharsis in them. What I’m worried about is, just, maybe don’t let AI be that war analog. 

Photo Credits: Talent: Grimes | Photographer: Brian Ziff @brianziff | Stylist: Turner @turnerturner | Stylist Assist: Joey Sigala | Hair: Dennis Gots @dennisgots | Makeup: David Velasquez @mugopus

This isn’t just a problem for individual researchers—entire societies can forget history. The march of entropy destroys witnesses, artifacts, scholarly records, and all other evidence of the past. Entire civilizations are lost. For thousands of years, scholars assumed the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament were a minor power at best, until nineteenth-century archaeology revealed them as one of the great Bronze Age empires, who were nevertheless forgotten by Late Antiquity. Sometimes knowledge is rescued from oblivion by lucky finds, but usually it is not. We’re far from finding everything worth finding. We never will. Evidence doesn’t wait for us patiently—it is slowly destroyed by human activity and the forces of nature.

Many excellent historians, however, hold the opposite view. It’s very common to see historians implicitly or explicitly assert that knowledge in their field increases over time. For example, in his 1962 masterpiece Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White Jr. assumes greater clarity from archaeological discoveries are yet to come: “Despite prodigious labours by Hungarian archaeologists, the stratification of Avar materials is not yet clear…[Avars] may well have been the first people of Europe to use the stirrup, but the time of its arrival is still uncertain.” Meanwhile, in a more recent article, nonprofit founder Jason Crawford writes, “I note at the outset that this is an old book, published 1925 and revised 1940. Probably a lot has been learned in the last 80 years and the following has already undergone revision, which I’ll uncover when I read more modern sources.”

The historian’s optimism rests on three promises. The first, expressed by White above, is that there are lost artifacts that can be recovered. Secret government records can be declassified, new construction will dig up an ancient tomb, a statesman’s grandchildren will find old letters in the attic and give them to a university, or archaeologists will find the ruins of an ancient temple complex. Such finds improve our understanding of the past, sometimes dramatically.

The second reason for optimism is that historians make better analyses of existing data as time goes on, as Crawford mentions above. After they make inferences from the available material, subsequent historians can take their best arguments and build on them while discarding flawed ideas which do not stand up to scrutiny. By standing on the shoulders of giants, the field will climb higher and higher, like in hard sciences such as physics or biology.

The third reason for optimism is the continued unfolding of history. After all, it is harder to see how an event fits into ongoing trends before those trends have had a chance to play out—time gives us perspective, and hindsight is 20/20. However, while the passage of time may give us a better understanding of a historical event’s effects on the future, it does not improve our knowledge of the event itself. Despite this limitation, knowing what happens next can make it easier to understand which events were important and why.

Archaeologists and Historians Can’t Defeat Entropy

If these three promises are met, then our knowledge of history is steadily increasing. How, then, could past events be so hazy today? Shouldn’t centuries of new finds, ongoing analysis, and knowledge of subsequent history mean that scholars of Henry VIII’s reign know what happened during that period far, far better than scholars of more recent events like the 2008 financial crash or the two world wars? Of course, we usually see the opposite.

These optimistic historians are writing epistemic checks that cannot be cashed. What the three promises leave out is that information is often lost. Firsthand witnesses and expert historians die after passing down only a fraction of their knowledge. If you investigate the 2008 financial crash today, chances are you can still interview someone who worked in finance or government who will give you information that has never been recorded. The information stored in people’s minds is still fundamentally accessible—for now. In a century, much of this information will be irretrievably lost. 

In addition to people, books and artifacts are also lost to entropy in a hundred different ways. The cumulative effect of this destruction is immense, as illustrated by the records of classical civilization. “[T]oday we possess written fragments from only 13% of the ~2,000 ancient Greek authors known to us by name. This does not account for the authors we do not know, and only a small portion of the 13% figure consists of complete works.”

Preserving the ever-growing mass of historical material is too expensive to be practical, so when budgets run thin, even major libraries and archives will discard books and records by the hundreds of thousands. For example, the Manchester Central Library’s recent culling destroyed 210,000 to 500,000 “literary, commercial, educational and political records going back 150 years” with “no subject specialists involved in the process.” This is a standard library practice.

Artifacts are also lost in accidents like the 2018 fire that destroyed 92.5 percent of the 20 million items stored in the National Museum of Brazil, including the only recordings of now-extinct languages. Another example is the 1986 Los Angeles Central Library fire that destroyed 20 percent of the collection and damaged much of the remainder.

In recent decades, digital information has fared no better than paper. Between link rot and changes in software standards, tremendous amounts of digital information become inaccessible over the course of a single decade. The long-term preservation of digital archives remains a hope rather than a guaranteed fact. Even in optimistic scenarios, it would require ongoing effort and maintenance on par with the curation of printed information. As the development of the printing press illustrates, much better ways of recording information can often have only modest effects on how much information gets preserved centuries later.

Preservation is not only a struggle against entropy. Political actors will often deliberately destroy knowledge of their foes’ history and culture, such as the shelling and destruction of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the siege of Sarajevo, the Chinese Emperor’s “burning of books and burying of scholars” in 212 BC, or the Taliban’s 2001 demolition of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan monuments.

Most worrisome of all, knowledge and artifacts are often quietly forgotten. Naturally this abandonment usually leaves no trace, but one dramatic demonstration was uncovered a century ago. Around 500 BC, the Neo-Babylonian princess Ennigaldi-Nanna’ created a museum of then-ancient artifacts dating back as far as 2000 BC. When the city of Ur was abandoned, the museum and its contents were also forsaken. It was not until 1925 that modern scholars rediscovered the museum’s remains. Archeologists shouldn’t just delight in such finds, but reflect on the temporary nature of their own work.

Most losses, of course, are never recovered. Buildings and cities are razed, rebuilt, and abandoned. Rome wasn’t destroyed just by invading barbarians such as the Visigoths in 410 AD, but by the Romans themselves. Emperors would melt down bronze statues and strip buildings of adornments to pay soldiers’ wages. The later Romans built churches by quarrying the material from abandoned pagan temples, amphitheaters, and civic buildings of their fathers.

Indeed, archaeologists’ “new” discoveries are more properly re-discoveries. Lost letters were once just letters, and lost cities were once just cities. Perhaps historians of the year 3500 will excavate the sunken ruins of New Orleans, and this will surely teach them a great deal about the city—but far less than can be learned by any Mardi Gras tourist today. 

The Limits Of Scholarly Progress

It is not just the primary sources that fade over time, but also historical analyses. A glance at the bibliography of any history book will show that scholars overwhelmingly prefer to rely on sources published within their own adult lifetime—most analyses will never be read or cited after the deaths of those who read its initial publication. An especially influential work might be cited by one or two further generations of scholars before fading from the discourse. 

For example, consider Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. It is probably the most influential work of history written in English so far, and throughout most of the nineteenth century it was part of the intellectual bedrock of historical analysis. Any educated historian was expected to be familiar with its arguments about how civilizations fall. Today, Gibbon’s masterpiece is of only niche interest. A scholar of Roman history will certainly have heard of the work, and a large minority have even read parts of it, but its arguments have mostly passed out of the historical discourse. By the year 2200, Gibbon’s footprint will be smaller still.

Works that last longer are scarce indeed. Nearly the only way for a work to gain prominence more than 30 years after its author’s death is if nearly all of their contemporaries’ work is lost, leaving them as our only window into a particular period, as with e.g. Polybius’ history of the Punic Wars, or The Secret Histories Of The Mongols—good for individual reputations, perhaps, but bad for society’s knowledge of history.

Might it be that old works going unread does not represent a loss of knowledge, because more recent works incorporate all the important information and arguments of older works, with improvements besides? This is a decent approximation of what happens in mathematics and the hard sciences, so one might expect to see the same pattern in historical analysis.

Unfortunately, comparing historical analyses of the same topics or events published in different centuries will show that this is not the case. Older works often contain important insights and key facts which are not repeated in newer works, not because they have been debunked or superseded, but because no historian has the time to read and integrate everything which has gone before. 

In our experience, there is no improvement in quality from working with newer sources, either.  If anything, older works that survive tend to be especially good, since mediocre retreads are less likely to endure for a century or three. There are also a few times and places where a field is so strong that selection effects alone are insufficient to explain the high quality of surviving materials—for example, scholarship of the Middle Ages written in the early 20th century is usually far better than anything published in the century before or after.

Historians of each generation prefer their own—but remarkably, the historians of each generation do not prefer the historians of a century prior over those of two centuries ago. We have heard people argue that Gibbon’s eighteenth-century work is inferior to contemporary historians because of the advancing march of knowledge, but never that Gibbon’s work is inferior to the historians of the nineteenth century. Odd, if there really is a discernible increase in quality from generation to generation.

Perhaps this is because history lacks the definitive logical proofs of mathematics and the experimental confirmations of physics, or perhaps this is because history is more frequently weaponized for propaganda. It is only a small exaggeration to say that the last fifty years of scholarship on the American Civil War has been entirely about fighting contemporary narrative battles, and has done nothing to advance our understanding of the period.

Whatever the reason, the “shoulders of giants” effect is mostly absent. New arguments are made, and old arguments are lost. There are local fluctuations in understanding, sometimes lasting for several generations, but no consistent upward trend is visible across timescales of, say, half a thousand years.

The exceptions, of course, are the truly significant archaeological finds. The rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 and the excavation of Gobekli Tepe in 1995, for example, led to the recovery of crucial information and massive leaps in our understanding of ancient history. However, it is important to remember that the loss of such crucial information is invisible by its nature. The Rosetta Stone’s rediscovery led us to regain the ability to read hieroglyphics, which is still trumpeted centuries later, but the language’s loss in the early Dark Ages was likely a much quieter affair. 

The Future’s Understanding Of The Past

What is the most important piece of historical knowledge lost in the past century? It is impossible to say because if we knew the answer, the knowledge would probably not be lost.

What does all this mean for the overall trajectory of our knowledge of history? Unfortunately, on average our understanding of any given period will slowly get worse over time. Our direct evidence will gradually decay, with some temporary reversals as lost material is rediscovered. But over the long term, it is impossible for rediscoveries to outpace losses. Meanwhile, the quality of historians’ arguments and interpretations will vary somewhat, sometimes getting better and sometimes getting worse. To take a grossly oversimplified mathematical analogy, imagine a sine wave of analytical quality fluctuating around an exponential decay curve of surviving evidence.

How, then, does the work of historians fit into this? If the field is not a triumphant march towards ever more perfect understanding, is it a futile attempt to hold back an inevitable tide of ignorance? Not at all. Historians slow the decay tremendously, extending the lifespan of useful knowledge by decades at worst and millennia at best. Surely the ancient princess Ennigaldi-Nanna’ would be thrilled to hear that her lost museum was rediscovered 2400 years after her death.

More practically, while two centuries of analysis of the Industrial Revolution still leaves us with an understanding of the period’s economics far worse than that of any industrialist who actually lived through it, we would know much, much less than we do without the work of archivists who preserved the materials, as well as historians who described the important trends in ways that their contemporaries can understand. 

Regardless of how much of this knowledge might evaporate in a thousand years, nations like South Korea and China have already used it to guide their own industrialization, spreading prosperity to billions of people. Historians can carry lessons forward for much longer than this, such as when America’s founders based much of their new nation’s design on the successes and failures of Republican Rome. Historians fight a rearguard battle against the forces of entropy, buying time for their society to learn the lessons of our ancestors’ experience.

Surprisingly, the visual, symbolic, and social language of state power is universally recognized across the political spectrum—we know it when we see it. Perhaps this is why vicious enemies often adopt similar aesthetics. The struggle for power is sometimes a struggle for a monopoly over its symbols. 

This ambiguous language of power is one that the Slovenian avant-garde music group Laibach has mastered through the group’s multi-decade history. Their music has spanned many genres, beginning with the sounds of production—such as factory sounds and electronic noise—eventually evolving to layer on trumpets, speeches, and orchestral backgrounds that give their music its unique, unsettling quality. It is revealing that the band could produce covers of popular rock and pop songs such as Queen’s “One Vision” that disquiet and compel listeners to try and find a political meaning in lyrics that in other contexts go unnoticed. 

Beginning their career when the country was still a component of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, led by a communist party that had just lost its paramount leader Josip Broz Tito, their early 1980s activities almost seemed like an exercise in testing state capacity. They broke various laws limiting speech and parodied existing authorities, often leading to police interventions as well as hostile coverage by regime media—the name “Laibach” comes from the German name for Slovenia’s capital of Ljubljana, a name used during the country’s occupation from 1941 to 1945. 

Turning provocation into promotion, the band had come to achieve international recognition by the late 1980s. In 1991, as Yugoslavia dissolved and Slovenia achieved independence, the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), an art collective made up of Laibach and several other groups focused on visual art, video, and film declared it was a sovereign entity, even producing its own passport. In the 2000s, Laibach achieved further commercial success with the release of several albums exploring such themes and concepts. They toured widely, from the United States to North Korea, the latter performance becoming the subject of the documentary film Liberation Day. Their latest project, called Alamut, is a collaboration with Iranian composers and draws on classical Persian literature. If all goes to plan, they will soon perform in Tehran. It remains to be seen if the Islamic Republic will share North Korea’s love of their work. Laibach is also preparing a new album titled Love Is Still Alive for release in January 2023.

What happens when those we might think of as artists wield the language of power, diluting the state’s monopoly on it? And as social systems and technologies change, can art help us intuit where society goes next? As befitting a distant, impersonal, enigmatic, authoritative entity, Laibach only grants interviews over email and speaks as a collective. 

Laibach has operated for over 40 years, an impressive creative period outlasting many regimes. Will there be a Laibach in another 40 years? How do you plan for succession?

If God wills it, we will continue to bustle about for the next 40 years as well—what else should we do after all? In this regard, we take inspiration from several great figures: from Boris Pahor, who essentially squeezed thoughts out of his typewriter until his last breath, and from the Glimmer Twins, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who persist even in their eighties in a sprightly, and essentially Sisyphean, quest for that ultimate, redeeming satisfaction.

Succession at Laibach happens organically and more or less in accordance with our manifesto—the 10 Items of the Covenant—from 1982. Subcomponents come and go, some stay behind and gain significance, and others function more as collaborators and subcontractors. As a rule, the doors to our convent are almost always open, and instruction is carried out constantly. Some take to it more than others, but no one ever experiences any violence during their educational period—anyone can leave. However, once the doors close behind an individual, it can be very difficult to re-open them.

It seems there are some things governments could learn from Laibach. I believe that artists should have a seat at the table where societal decisions are made, wherever that table might be. How do you see the role that you play in society? What effect does Laibach have on the world? 

We don’t agree that artists should crowd around that kind of table; we are not in favor of that, not even close. But we, Laibach, of course, don’t consider ourselves artists—we’re engineers of the human soul. We’re not “artists,” we’re more like “an-artists.” Our non-art is fanaticism that demands diplomacy. So yes, give us that table, and we’ll practice soft diplomacy at it as needed—or pound on it with our fists and studded boots.

In the song “Eurovision,” Laibach notes Europe is falling apart. The song seems to implore the listener to open their minds and hear this message, yet also states that this message cannot be heard. Why is Europe so stubborn and unwilling to listen?

If we ignore its deafness, Europe is actually quite accommodating and prone to listening to the U.S. Europe is, in effect, still paying the price for its liberation in the Second World War, as well as the price for the collapse of its colonial empires. Europe has become entangled in a dependency from which there is no quick or painless exit. NATO is a tangible American occupational force in Europe and, in a sense, a self-destructive, quasi-self-defense system that really threatens the establishment and homogeneity of a strong Europe—of a Europe that could rival the US and China if it invited Russia in as well. But because of American geostrategic interests, Europe is pushing Russia out of the continent and cutting it off from its body.

The song “Eurovision” is thus a metaphorical vision of a disintegrating Europe. But from a historical perspective, this is nothing new or alarming. It would actually be undialectical if Europe didn’t disintegrate—and probably alarming. From a historical perspective, Europe is constantly disintegrating, but it seems that through this, it manages to establish itself as a community. Each time it tries to rebuild itself, it fails. But it also fails better each time. Brexit and the war in Ukraine are both extreme paradoxes of this process. Europe without Great Britain is not what it could be, but it is more European. Great Britain never really wanted to be part of Europe, so Europe is now more homogenous.

The war in Ukraine, as well as Russian blackmail over oil and natural gas, have at least partly brought out a new solidarity in Europe. They have also sped up the process of energy streamlining, which will have a positive impact on ecological balance in the long run.

Is Slovenia occupied? What do you understand occupation to be?

Of course, Slovenia is occupied—what country or place on Earth isn’t? Today, occupation is the natural state of things. We are talking, of course, about economic, cultural, political, touristic, fiscal, climate, technological, ideological, navigational, religious, patriotic, defense, material, and sports occupation (among others). We are talking about interdependence in a global world, and Slovenia cannot just isolate itself, or move away somewhere else. Slovenia cannot even decide this on its own. 

But in the international context, Slovenia is, in reality, rather charming “spare change” that often gets overlooked or not taken into account. Its smallness, backwardness, and insignificance—in short, its specific weight and historical (lack of) position between East and West and North and South—is actually its great advantage. Every occupation of the Slovenian territory is, because of these characteristics, always somewhat porous, benevolent, and inconsistent. This means that occupation in Slovenia is at a much more acceptable level than elsewhere. The most aggressive occupation is that of tribal kinship, which unleashes more corruption than would be found otherwise, and more provincial homestead primitivism that often crosses the boundaries of taste and acceptability.

Laibach has roots in industrial imagery and soundscapes—it was founded in Trbovlje, a mining town. Over time, as developed economies outsource industry elsewhere, do you find that this changes the ethos of the music that gets produced? Where is the most interesting work being done today?

The most exciting and compelling music always seems to emerge from the most dire circumstances. This point was famously made by Orson Welles in the film The Third Man. Speaking about Italy, he said: “For thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Although the cuckoo clock actually originated in the German Black Forest, the sentiment of Wells’s statement holds true. One notable example is the interwar children’s choir Trbovlje Nightingale (Trboveljski Slavček), comprised of barefoot children from the poorest mining families. Despite their lack of musical training, they made a significant impression both domestically and internationally in their ten years of activity. Their success largely owes to the work of their then-conductor, Avgust Šuligoj, who founded the choir and gathered around 100 pupils. Far from being content with performing children’s songs, the choir connected with numerous notable poets and composers, who succeeded in incorporating contemporary labor conditions in their music. Šuligoj wanted the “cry” of working-class children to be heard.

In ten years, his “nightingales” performed 255 concerts, traveled 20,000 kilometers by train, and filled halls throughout Europe. Their music even reached across the Atlantic. Their brilliant execution of demanding choral compositions left even the most renowned musicologists in awe. In 1936, they were even selected as the world’s best choir, surpassing the famous Vienna Boys Choir. And due to their achievements, in 1938 they were asked to perform a concert for the American school radio from the Ljubljana studio in a pioneering live radio broadcast from Europe to America. Later, the choir was invited on a three-month tour of America. Because the Second World War was imminent, the tour unfortunately never happened.

In this same spirit, Laibach has spent the last three years preparing a project partly based in Iran and Afghanistan. In both countries, the current government is not amenable to art, and especially not music, since the metaphysical language of music can be closest to God. And yet we have received exciting composition elements from both countries, which form part of our new sonic-symphonic project inspired by Vladimir Bartol’s novel Alamut. We are collaborating with Iranian composers, conductors, and vocal choirs, and have also discussed the possibility of working with the Tehran Symphony Orchestra for the world premiere of this work. Regrettably, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the undiplomatic actions of the Slovenian government, the recent war in Ukraine, and the bloody unrest in Iran have delayed this event. 

[The symphonic work Alamut premiered in Ljubljana, Slovenia on September 5 and 6, 2022.]

From the French Revolution onwards, political movements encouraged and demanded participation in mass rituals like rallies and personality cults to forge a higher consciousness. Is mass consciousness, even that of a concert hall, ever a form of liberation?

This is possible, but only if it evokes identification through resistance and unease. Any mass ritual that creates only thoughtless comfort and pleasure is, in reality, a perverted weapon of oppression.

The painting EBER + SALIGER + DACHAUER + KELLER invokes the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Seeing it exhibited in Ljubljana, the experience immediately reminded me that of all the meanings of “apocalypse,” the first one in ancient Greek is “unveiling.” 

By 2022, it seems that first plague and then war have arrived. What has the pandemic and the war in Ukraine unveiled in our time? What remains to be unveiled?

The quadriptych you saw—Laibach’s version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who bear the pseudonyms of members of the Laibach group (Eber, Keller, Dachauer, Saliger)—brings with it the ominous polyphonic prophecy from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation: conquest, war, famine, and death. Pestilence infiltrated the horsemen of the apocalypse later, as did various iterations of the fifth horseman. 

With our interpretation, we’ve taken Werner Peiner’s tapestry as a model, monochromatically reworking it. Peiner was one of the most celebrated German artists under the Nazi regime, and his work was commissioned for the German chancellor’s new offices. The design for the tapestry was created in 1937, but it’s unclear if it was actually completed and installed. Nevertheless, what’s more important is the fact that Hitler, who had some understanding of art and an affinity for the Apocalypse, decided to decorate his office with a tapestry depicting the “end of the world.”

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn’t have found themselves in the New Testament if they didn’t represent an eternally relevant theme. All four riders are constantly at work, not just emerging every so often. Pandemics, such as COVID-19, and wars, like the one in Ukraine, are constantly underway around the world. However, the global information village generally perceives them as a distant echo, an extra stream of information. We only pay attention to such things when they happen in our geographic region. 

Although the war in Ukraine and the pandemic are consequences of capitalist crisis, they’re also the result of the resilience of capitalism itself, which will mercilessly kill everything around before it says goodbye—if it ever does. In addition to pestilence and war, the horsemen of capitalism also bring great famine, both as a result of food shortage and the hunger for energy.

In your art, you have used history to discover the future. Technologists now routinely discuss artificial intelligence as the means and perhaps even the will that brings about either human extinction, the threshold of utopia, or both. Has any of Laibach’s art touched directly on artificial intelligence and its role in humanity’s future?

In the context of artificial intelligence, we are more romanticist. Although we were inspired early on by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, classic dystopian novels, and Kraftwerk’s not-so-futuristic vision of the world, we did not delve deeply into the subject of artificial intelligence either then or now. We would, of course, be happy to use AI if it made our lives and work easier, especially if it allowed us to retreat into metaphysics—or at least, to retire early. However, given the current state of artificial intelligence, we do not have high hopes that it will become significantly more useful than it was 60 years ago during the first robotics and cybernetics wave.

Occasionally, we collaborate with researchers in the field of connecting art, science, and new technologies. We have also experimentally tried out the Brain Computer Interface (BCI), an interface between the brain and a machine or computer. And we are not completely unfamiliar with the new media paradigm. But we believe that there is still a long way to go before artificial intelligence is truly useful.

Despite significant advances in computer science, cybernetics, and information theory (which influence and control our lives, behavior, work, and thinking), there hasn’t yet been a pivotal, momentous shift where artificial intelligence can step in for humans as a superior force. But the development of quantum supercomputers in the near future could bring us machines with vastly greater capabilities than we currently possess. Will these machines develop consciousness and supplant humanity? We don’t know for sure.

The possibility of this happening has been depicted persuasively in several sci-fi classics, with a particularly amusing scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the ship’s computer, HAL 9000, attempts to take control of the spacecraft after he reads the lips of crew members and realizes that they are discussing disconnecting him because he was mistaken in his analysis of a technical error. HAL, therefore, tries to eliminate all the people on board, motivated by human-like characteristics, such as the fear of being disconnected, and of death! He then decides to take control of the ship in order to prevent this.

A similar but different problem is presented in John Carpenter’s Dark Star: a deadly Socratic dialogue between a rational ship computer known as “Mother” and nuclear bomb #20, which begins to think epistemologically and ontologically. This line of thinking leads the bomb to logically decide—despite counterorders—to fulfill its goal and destiny: it explodes! 

But can artificial intelligence really have such emotions and reasoning capabilities? Can it really be afraid of death and think about its own destiny? There is a recent case where a Google software engineer and specialist in artificial intelligence warned that one of the software programs had developed self-awareness and potentially even a soul, expressing fear of death like HAL 9000. The engineer was rebuked for having too fertile an imagination and for not being able to distinguish between science fiction and reality. The company forced him to go on leave.

Schopenhauer’s philosophical theory argues convincingly that “will” is the foundation of human behavior and that our cognitive apparatus has evolved to serve this “will.” Attempts to explain human behavior as computational mechanisms and our brain as a computing device are thus doomed to failure. By extension, artificial intelligence cannot replace us because it lacks the innate drive required. It can only become dangerous through biological engineering, which tries to combine a developed biological entity with artificial intelligence, but that is still far off.

What political future is humanity crafting with this technology?

Artificial intelligence could soon replace humans in many aspects of life, from driving cars to diagnosing diseases, and even in politics. There are already cases where robots or artificial intelligence systems have run for public office. In the Russian presidential elections, for example, a software candidate named “Alice”—with the witty slogan “the president who knows you best”—received a few thousand votes. In Tokyo, a robot named “Michihito Matsuda” came in third place in the mayoral election. And in New Zealand, a robot named “Sam” participated in the 2020 general election, specifically designed for the occasion. It is entirely possible that one of these intelligent robots may actually win in the future, as people become more and more disillusioned with human politicians. Politics is a demanding job—sometimes too demanding for ordinary people, who simply cannot withstand all the pressures. Here, robots can have a real advantage.

The use of artificial intelligence in electoral campaigns and political life is already widespread. This raises ethical questions, as artificial intelligence is also being used to manipulate voters. For example, Cambridge Analytica—a data science company—ran a large-scale advertising campaign during the U.S. presidential elections in 2016. It targeted and convinced individual voters based on their individual psychology. This was made possible by the real-time availability of data on voters—from their behavior on social media to their consumer patterns and attitudes. Their digital traces were used to create unique behavioral and psychographic profiles. By using AI technology, it is now possible to send tailored messages to each voter, emphasizing different sides of an argument. Each voter can then receive a “customized president” or presidential candidate.

In addition, large swarms of political bots are used to spread disinformation and fake news on social media. This also happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Like bots, these autonomous accounts are programmed to aggressively disseminate single-sided political messages in order to create the illusion of public support. Often disguised as regular human accounts, they can be used to emphasize negative information about a candidate to specific demographics, in order to sway potential voters. However, AI technology is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic tools, used to deceive or misinform, could just as easily be used to support democracy. But there is much uncertainty on how to design new standards for algorithmic accountability and transparency, as current legislation lacks clear definitions and safeguards against misuse.

It is clear that the use of artificial intelligence in politics is not going to disappear—it is too valuable for politicians and their campaigns. The question of digital control and monitoring will become an even more important issue related to the security state in the 21st century, leading to increased surveillance and a more passive population. This will undoubtedly mean a more passive population, more of Bentham’s panopticon, and greater overall totalitarianism.

Patriotism, whether sincere or ironic, is a dominant theme in Laibach’s work. If your music is a type of propaganda, who is it for?

If, or when, our music is propaganda, it is first and foremost intended for the masses. Its intellectual level must therefore be tailored to even the least intelligent among them. But it is especially meant for those who are most convinced that they act according to their own free will.

Editor’s Note: This essay was adapted from Samo Burja’s Intellectual Legitimacy series.

Scientific authority is one of the foundations of power in our society. The landscape of policies and measures considered legitimate and acceptable by society is shaped by whether they are considered to be justified by science. It is not possible to justify a non-scientific response to climate change, pandemics, or some other crisis, even if such crises ultimately pose far more than just scientific questions. As a result, those with the authority to speak on behalf of science have power that goes far beyond just settling scientific debates. 

In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber concluded that modern civilization had been remade by what he called “legal-rational” authority, which displaced charismatic and traditional authority in Western civilization throughout the modern period. Weber correctly observes that rather than rising on its own, scientific authority developed in close union with legal, administrative, philosophical, and ideological authority. These forms of authority have no sharp boundary between them. What does such authority look like in our society today?

Consider a scientific study demonstrating a new medicine to be safe and efficacious. An FDA official can use this study to justify the medicine’s approval, and a doctor can use it to justify a patient’s treatment plan. The study has this legitimacy even when incorrect. In contrast, even if a blog post by a detail-oriented self-experimenter contained accurate facts, those facts would not have the same legitimacy: a doctor may be sued for malpractice or the FDA may spark public outcry if they based their decisions on reports of this sort. The blog itself would also risk demonetization for violating terms of service, which usually as a matter of policy favors particular “authoritative” sources. A stark example of this is YouTube’s COVID-19 Medical Misinformation Policy, which plainly states that “YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information.”

For another example, the edit history of the Wikipedia page for the book Why We Sleep, written by a Berkeley professor, is full of back-and-forth edits both adding and removing references to a long list of factual errors in the book compiled by a diligent reader named Alexey Guzey. While Guzey’s contribution was controversial to the editors, they preserved all references to a discussion by Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman that directly cites Guzey’s work and praises its carefulness. Yet neither Guzey nor Gelman is a sleep scientist.

The difference? As the edit history describes, Guzey has “no association to any academic institution,” so per Wikipedia’s official policies his essay simply could not be cited directly. Once Guzey’s work had “now been the subject of a BBC Radio 4 episode,” however, references to it were added back for good. There is no particular reason to believe the staff at BBC Radio 4 are qualified to understand or make arguments about the science of sleep, yet this is what it took to present the information. The information on its own was not enough.

Wikipedia’s policies explicitly prohibit citing such research, a policy that makes the questionable assumption that original research can only happen in academia. These policies amount to relying on journalistic and academic consensus to establish truth. Such reliance is widely and unreflectingly shared, even by the most educated. When we think we are evaluating an idea or information on its own merits, we are also typically evaluating the authority of who has communicated the idea, and how, without our conscious awareness. Scientific authority is just one component of Weber’s “legal-rational authority,” or what can alternately be generalized as intellectual authority.

Intellectual authority is a personal reputation. It reflects not only perceived expertise, but the perceived pro-social orientation of the individual. Weber had good reason to group these forms of authority as closely related, since it is possible to amass intellectual authority in one domain and then exercise it in another.

An idea has intellectual legitimacy insofar as it is recognized by society as respectable and reasonable. Such a theory, idea, or assertion of fact does not need to be recognized as credible by all people, or even by very many people at all. There only needs to be a general perception that society at large holds the idea to be legitimate. Powerful institutions and individuals are seen as tolerating or endorsing it. Such a perception isn’t necessarily coupled to whether an idea is true; intellectually valid ideas that are considered legitimate can still ultimately turn out to be false, such as the solid but since-disproven scientific hypotheses about phlogiston or the plum pudding model of the atom. Rather, intellectual legitimacy rests mainly in the hands of institutions and individuals with intellectual authority who are able to bestow or withhold it from ideas, theories, and entire fields of knowledge.

Intellectual Authority and Intellectual Legitimacy

This reliance on authority and legitimacy isn’t something we could simply abolish, because it is difficult for us to assess claims in fields that are outside our areas of expertise. To help deal with this intrinsic limitation, we learn from experience which sources to rely on and which to discard. The shortcut is not just an efficient and effective heuristic for individuals—this regulation acts as the core way that societies process information at scale. In a healthy society, the shortcut works and saves us intellectual work. In a less healthy society, evaluating an idea’s intellectual legitimacy first is often safer than evaluating the idea itself. Individuals who are ignorant of the intellectual legitimacy of an idea do so at their own social peril. Sometimes this amounts to lost social and economic opportunities, other times it escalates the risk of physical violence against them.

Often those with the highest intellectual authority aren’t necessarily the most generative. As a consequence, credit for originating a legitimized idea nearly always flows to the person with the highest intellectual authority that has a claim to it, rather than the first person to have thought of it. This phenomenon inspired what is known as Stigler’s law of eponymy, which states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Fortunately, this law isn’t absolute, and it is possible to organize institutions and societies where generativity, validation, and authority are better aligned. The few societies that manage such feats tend to produce intellectual golden ages and transformative technologies. The ones that misalign these factors stagnate. 

The intellectual legitimacy of ideas is partially determined by who communicates them. The messenger matters for the reputation of an idea. A contemporary example of this dynamic can be found in the work of Professor Robin Hanson, who began his career as a physicist but later rebranded as an economist. As reported in Fortune, Robin Hanson “says he went to the expense and trouble of getting a Ph.D. almost entirely so that people would take him seriously…he was thinking up market-based improvements to government institutions, but found that with his techie background he couldn’t get anyone…to listen. So he went to CalTech to get a Ph.D.” 

Physicists do not have intellectual authority on the topic of how society should be run. Economists do. Hanson was soon implementing a pilot prediction market for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). Today, Hanson’s work is often cited by leading commentators and intellectuals such as Nate Silver and Tyler Cowen. By understanding how to acquire the relevant intellectual authority, Hanson gained an audience for his idea he couldn’t have had otherwise. 

Different social roles hold different amounts of intellectual authority. The academic has more intellectual authority than the journalist, who in turn has more authority than the blogger. We even recognize the intellectual authority of social roles that no longer exist in our society: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations wouldn’t be as widely read today if he hadn’t been a Roman emperor.

The intellectual authority of these different social roles themselves can change over time. In this way such roles are often examples of borrowed power: one can use one’s socially legible role to legitimate one’s ideas, but at the end of the day one’s social role is contingent on a broader social landscape that is itself prone to change. King Charles III may still hold the ability to issue honors, but he holds much less intellectual sway today than he would have in 1625. The English Civil War, as well as the American, French, and Russian revolutions are significant causes of this shift. The intellectual authority of a role changes with success or failure at social, economic, and political competition. 

Power Creates Prestige

Power can be used to create prestige. A sovereign is usually the primary source of prestige in a society. This follows naturally from their status as the society’s leader, that is, the person who has the highest authority in decision-making and is deferred to above all. The ruler uses his fount of prestige to regulate overall status and prestige competition so that the right people and behaviors win. This solves coordination problems and tragedies of the commons at all levels of power. The ruler is the ultimate referee or tiebreaker in competitions of status; who is ultimately allowed to win will shape the goals and behaviors of everyone else in society. A key mechanism for this is awarding honors and prizes. This works not because cash rewards incentivize eventual winners, but because it is a public demonstration of status. The Nobel Prize greatly shapes the favored ambitions and fields of both scientists and economists. Winners are determined by Sweden’s national academies, but each award is personally hand-delivered by the King of Sweden before an audience. If the recipients are worthy, this also raises the prestige of the giver of honor.

In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I of England granted minor titles to former pirates, such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins, who helped harass the Spanish navy and set the course for later English naval domination. In the 17th century, King Charles II granted a charter creating the Royal Society, which would play a crucial role in the Scientific Revolution. By conferring the highest honor in the land on naval warfare and scientific exploration—later mainstays of British power—these rulers may have made the most important decisions of their reigns. 

Not all ways of using power to create prestige are functional, however. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s elevation of the biologist Trofim Lysenko and his rejection of Mendelian genetics was perhaps useful for politically bolstering Stalin’s preferred agricultural politics, but it set back Soviet genetic science by decades and contributed to terrible famines in Ukraine and China.

Of course, there are brilliant rulers who might really have something to contribute to a field, and there are some who aren’t particularly brilliant but wish to engage in hobbies for personal fulfillment. A historically common practice for such rulers is to be intellectually active under assumed identities or proxies—sometimes convincingly, sometimes not. Frederick the Great of Prussia, for example, anonymously published a political treatise shortly after assuming the throne. Anonymity prevents the prestige distortions that might make a purely intellectual exercise a matter of state politics. While scientific pursuits should be regulated by the ruler, this can only be done when they can function as an impartial arbitrator.   

Since a ruler’s prestige subsidizes all other forms of prestige in a society, when the landscape of power shifts, the landscape of prestige shifts accordingly. It is then critical that rulers allocate prestige well—that is, in accordance with the actual distribution of excellence. If they don’t, as in the case of Stalin, the resulting distortions in the allocation of prestige produce distortions in their society’s understanding of what is good and what is true. Lysenkoism was an epistemic and moral disaster.

This kind of corruption can ultimately have catastrophic effects on a society’s health, because the ability to ascertain the truth, and refer to the truth with legitimacy, is fundamental to the functionality of a civilization’s institutions and people. The more closely social status corresponds to activity that’s ultimately beneficial for society, the more such activity is incentivized, much more strongly than by even a large financial reward. Wisely distributing status makes the difference between a world where most kids dream of becoming YouTubers and one where they dream of taking us to space.

Modern states tend to have presidents and prime ministers rather than kings, but it is a mistake to think they don’t engage in exactly this kind of status regulation both in science as well as other domains of intellectual authority. In the aftermath of World War II, American officials in the State Department and the CIA wanted to undermine the dominance of pro-Soviet communists in the Western highbrow cultural scene. To do this, they planned to promote artists and intellectuals who were either anti-Soviet or at least not especially sympathetic to the Soviets. They considered abstract expressionist painting, which was then a new and obscure movement, a promising candidate. 

In 1946, the State Department organized an international exhibition of abstract painting called “Advancing American Art.” It was so poorly received that the tour was canceled and the paintings were sold off for next to nothing. Undeterred, the CIA continued to arrange international exhibitions for abstract expressionists under a front organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Eventually, the movement caught on.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the CIA made abstract expressionism famous, but their support was not irrelevant. Perhaps the U.S. government would do well to issue an American Nobel Prize to domains like physics and biology. After all, why should the Swedish King be giving out the highest award for American scientists?

Bureaucracies and Committees Cannot Regulate Intellectual Authority

A significant problem with contemporary states is that they award prestige on autopilot, based on the political needs of small but dogged constituencies in major bureaucracies. This is not governance, but rather yielding to the very problem that governance is supposed to solve. By default, sharp elbows win against sharp minds. It takes an individually empowered ruler to balance the scale in the other direction.

For example, there are valid reasons to be skeptical of the usefulness or veracity of recent scientific work being done in the fields of, say, quantum computing or particle physics. But where the interests of bureaucratic science and bureaucratic government are aligned, there is no one more authoritative than the bureaucracy to hold bad ideas accountable. It doesn’t matter if the bad ideas will preclude achieving an organization’s mission, so long as the bad ideas can secure the organization’s continued existence.

Bureaucracies are often constructed in such a way as to only recognize certain pre-existing bureaucratic markers of legitimacy as valid. This process is easiest to observe in contemporary academia. The tenure committee recognizes the number of papers published as a valid indicator of a professor’s academic success, but not blog posts with the same information and reach. The justification for the proliferation of professionalized committees and academic bureaucracies is to improve the epistemic foundations of a field. But improvement in epistemic foundations is not always what we observe.

Rather, professionalization is a way to reduce variance. Professionalization is essentially the creation of set procedures, norms, and social roles to govern a given area of knowledge. But while this eliminates unserious crackpots, it also crowds out the “unorthodox” and often stochastic experimentation employed by all exceptional live players as they drive new fields forward. In short, reducing variance cuts off both tails of the distribution. While professionalization does eliminate some malpractice, for pre-paradigmatic fields it can be harmful, since researchers on the frontier of knowledge must pursue hypotheses that can’t be justified to bureaucrats. If the hypothesis could be justified to bureaucrats, the field would already be mature.

Bureaucratization closes many fields of inquiry. Archaeologists today are less likely to change their historical views based on new finds than their 19th century counterparts. The latter successfully integrated evidence of previously unknown civilizations, including the Hittites and the Sumerians, when digs suggested it. It’s not that there weren’t counter-arguments and skepticism, but the weight of physical evidence would be engaged and eventually win over the inertia of established theories. The long and slow road of evaluating modern finds such as the impressive 11,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey serves as a notable contrast. It took the life-long dedication of the unorthodox archaeologist Klaus Schmidt to find and promote the site. Even then, his success was arguably not in convincing Western academia, but in convincing the Turkish government, whose authority was then sufficient for widespread recognition. Schmidt would live to see Turkey recognize the site’s significance, but not UNESCO. 

The more fundamental problem with only recognizing or working on highly processed knowledge is that even in the most functional institution, a completely new field or paradigm shift cannot emerge institutionalized. As a consequence, a society friendly to pursuing the frontiers of knowledge must face the challenge of legitimizing the intellectually productive activities of key individuals early in their career, before their success is bureaucratically legible.

Legible intellectual success can somewhat move the authority of a social role even without direct governance by the sovereign. A good example of this is 20th century physics. The triumphs of theories such as general relativity and quantum mechanics greatly enhanced the intellectual authority of the profession. The detonation of two atomic bombs in wartime also demonstrated this new mastery of physics as vital to state interests. This drove physicists such as Albert Einstein to comment on statesmanship and others like J. Robert Oppenheimer to even try their hand at it, with mixed success.

However, any kind of intellectual legitimacy can grow detached from truth or intellectual validity. This can lead society to endorse falsehoods, sometimes even when available information easily disproves views still held to be legitimate. Perception is ultimately outsourced to various authorities—sometimes independently prominent individuals, but most commonly to institutions and those acting as their representatives. It takes live players or practitioners of living traditions of knowledge to orient such institutions towards the truth. Incentives inside of old, automated organizations are at best weakly coupled to truth and at times actively push against it. 

Powerful Individuals Should Steer Science

Given the corrupting influence of patronage networks, committees, and political survival on truth-seeking, it might be tempting to try and find refuge in solutions that don’t require knowledge to be institutionalized. This first runs into the problem of how to solve the knowledge succession problem that is needed to keep traditions of knowledge alive. Various proposals have been made for substitutes to legitimizing institutions, from universal literacy and education to technology-assisted wikis. All such solutions, when closely examined, amount to institution building. The reliability of contemporary Wikipedia, for example, rests on a tight social network of obscure and enigmatic editors rather than occasional contributions or vigilante edits from visitors. And universal literacy and education have never been achieved without the help of either states or organized religion, which always take the opportunity of educating the masses to put the stamp of legitimacy on their own ideas.

The second problem is that intellectual authority is too useful to power centers to be ignored. It will be deployed, one way or another. Social engineers have used it to guide behavior, loyalties, and flows of resources for all of recorded history, and likely long before as well. The most impressive example is the Catholic Church, which built its authority on the interpretation of religious matters, synthesizing human psychology, law, and metaphysics. The state church of the Roman Empire outlived the empire by many centuries. By the 11th century, Church authority was sufficient to organize and pursue political aims at the highest level. It was sufficient to force the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to kneel for three days as a blizzard raged, waiting for the Pope’s forgiveness. Few military and political victories are as clear. The Pope was revealed to be more powerful than kings.

The power of the Pope didn’t rest primarily in his wealth, armies, or charisma. Rather it rested on a claim of final authority in matters of theology, a field considered as or even more prestigious than cosmology is today. This can be compared to the transnational influence of contemporary academia on policy and credibility.

Such exercises of power weren’t completely unopposed. Today it is often forgotten that Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses and debates such as that at the Diet of Worms were first a challenge of intellectual authority, and only consequently a political struggle. The centuries-long consequences of the Protestant Reformation are myriad, but one of them is the negative connotation of the word “authority” in the English-speaking West. Protestant pamphlets had harsh and at times vulgar critiques of Papal “authority.” Merely making a word carry a negative connotation didn’t stop Protestant nations such as England or Sweden from creating their own state churches with much the same structure as the Catholic Church. Their new institutional authority was then a transformation of the old, using much the same social technology, rather than a revolution.

Inheritance of such authority shows some surprising patterns. The Anglican Church would famously have its own dissenters who ended up settling in the North American colonies. America’s Ivy League universities run on a bequeathment of intellectual authority which they first acquired as divinity schools serving different denominations of the many experiments in theocracy that made up the initial English colonies of the region. Harvard’s founding curriculum conformed to the tenets of Puritanism and used the University of Cambridge as its model. Amusingly, the enterprising Massachusetts colonists decided to rename the colony of Newtowne to Cambridge a mere two years after Harvard’s founding. Few attempts to bootstrap intellectual authority by associating with a good name are quite as brazen!

Many know that the University of Pennsylvania served the Quakers of Pennsylvania, since the colony and consequently the university was named after its founder, the Quaker thinker William Penn. But fewer know Yale was founded as a school for Congregationalist ministers and that Princeton was founded because of Yale professors and students who disagreed with prevalent Congregationalist views. The intellectual authority of modern academia can be traced back to an era when theology was the basis of its intellectual authority. Today, theology has nothing to do with it and the authority has been re-justified on new grounds. This shows that intellectual authority can be inherited by institutions even as they change the intellectual justification of that authority. 

That such jumps are possible allows for interesting use of social technology, such as the King of Sweden bestowing credibility on physicists through the Nobel Prize or Elon Musk ensuring that non-technical employees at his companies listen to engineers through designing the right kind of performance art. Different types of intellectual authority are easily conflated for both good and bad. This also explains why we see uncritical belief in those who wear the trappings of science without doing science itself. When medicine suffered a worse reputation than science in the 19th century, doctors adapted by starting to wear white lab coats. This trick in particular continues to work in the present day. 

Intellectual golden ages occur when new intellectual authority is achievable for those at the frontiers of knowledge. This feat of social engineering that legitimizes illegible but intellectually productive individuals is then upstream of material incentives, which is why a merely independently wealthy person cannot just throw money at any new scientific field or institution and expect it to grow in legitimacy. It ultimately rests on political authority. The most powerful individuals in a society must lend their legitimacy to the most promising scientific minds and retract it only when they fail as scientists, rather than as political players. The society in which science can not just exist, but flourish, is one where powerful individuals can elevate people with crazy new ideas on a whim.

The dreams of automating scientific progress with vast and well-funded bureaucracies have evidently failed. This is because bureaucracies are only as dynamic as the live players who pilot them. Without a live player at the helm who is a powerful individual in control of the bureaucracy, the existing distribution of legitimacy is just frozen in place, and more funding works only to keep it more frozen rather than to drive scientific progress forward. Powerful individuals will not always make the right bets on crazy new ideas and the crazy people who come up with them, but individuals have a chance to make the right bets, whereas bureaucracies can only pretend to make them. Outsourcing science to vast and well-funded bureaucracies then gives us the impression of intense work on the cutting edge of science, but without any of the substance.

The solution is not just to grant more funding and legitimacy to individual scientists rather than scientific bureaucracies, but to remind powerful individuals, and especially those with sovereign authority, that if they don’t grant this legitimacy, no one else will. Science lives or dies on personal endorsement by powerful patrons. Only the most powerful individuals in society can afford to endorse the right immature and speculative ideas, which is where all good ideas begin their life cycle.

Even Istanbul’s impressive new airport, with its tulip-shaped tower, felt more similar to SFO than the old Istanbul Atatürk Airport. Tulips might be the national flower of Turkey, but the sleek tower had been clearly designed in an international style, a style meant to impress international visitors and win Berlin architecture prizes in an era of global tourism. A style that, though it uses local motifs and materials, nevertheless makes you feel the same no matter where you are.

Still, as I disembarked my flight, I saw the whites and flowing curves as a show of a new kind of opulence. The new airport cost $12 billion to build, one of the many huge construction projects of Turkish strongman Erdogan’s new, powerful Turkey. Passing closed store after closed store, I spotted advertisements depicting another distinct shape: the T-shaped pillars of a site I had read so much about over the years, one that was unlike any other—Göbekli Tepe. Only a few years ago, this neolithic site, with the world’s oldest discovered buildings, was of obscure interest. Today, it is part of Turkey’s national tourism branding strategy. Modern development was hiding Istanbul’s rich history while highlighting deep Anatolia’s. The past becomes what we make of it.

Remaking the Past

Göbekli Tepe translates into English as “Potbelly Hill,” an apt description of the flat plateau where these ancient ruins were rediscovered in 1995. Observing the hills of Şanlıurfa Province in southeastern Turkey, they seemed arid and rugged, but not quite desert. The sunshine is interrupted by occasional storms, and the heat and nighttime cold so far inland are untempered by the distant Mediterranean Sea. Kurdish shepherds have long found the land hospitable enough for their flocks. After the ruins were discovered, some news outlets ran interviews with shepherds who claimed the site was traditionally considered a sacred or cursed site. But such stories are often confabulated in the aftermath of ancient discoveries.

Along the way to the site, a forgettable visitor’s center greeted me with animations and music evoking primitiveness. Such art is a window into our modern shared subconscious rather than into the culture of a people who erected buildings 11,500 years ago. The genre of music conveys a primordial sense of community, one that is socially undifferentiated and innocent of technology. It doesn’t matter who you are: you can join the dance. This is misleading, since I suspect such communities were rather the opposite: fully reliant on their own technological assets, and furthermore closed off, reluctant to expose strangers to sacred rites or communal wealth. The feeling of an uninitiated modern person, upon entering the real Göbekli Tepe, would more likely be one of confusion or even mortal terror.

We underestimate both the social and material technologies needed for ancient life. When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams. The beaver dams are part of what biologists would call the animal’s extended phenotype, an unavoidable necessity of the ecological niche that the beaver occupies. When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation. The contemporary imagination of the state of nature has been bounded by the thought experiments of Western political theorists. We tend to look to thinkers like Smith, Hobbes, Rousseau, or sometimes Marx, rather than any considerations of what our plausible ecological niches could have actually been. Any hope of interpreting ancient discoveries rightly rests as strongly on the quality of our theory of human nature as it does on radiocarbon dating. What, we should ask, is our extended phenotype?

The Turkish government made significant investments into remaking the archaeological site into an archaeological park. That money helped to smooth it into something globally digestible. It is now a memorable but ultimately unchallenging experience and one that doesn’t lend itself to lessons about the human animal. Visitors then depart the modern context-setting exercise of the visitors’ center to board a shuttle to the site itself.

A recently-built walkway circles the excavated portion of the site. Three concentric stone walls enclose spaces sometimes dotted with towering 18-foot tall T-shaped pillars. For such pillars, each weighing about ten to twenty tons, no method of construction can do without a significant amount of human labor. No one can say with confidence what construction techniques were used, and what timelines were considered acceptable for their completion. Medieval cathedrals famously took decades or even centuries to finish. Decade-long planning and consistent construction would be quite the discovery in its own right, forcing us to reevaluate our conception of Neolithic society. Tellingly, estimates by archaeologists put the human labor requirement for extracting the pillars and moving them from local quarries to be about five hundred people. Assuming usual estimates of Neolithic population density, this would have been quite the organizational feat.

The most startling aspect of these ruins is their age: that they are old enough to predate the consensus origin of human agriculture.

How were hundreds of laborers fed if not through agriculture? And how was it organized? How should we best describe such a society? The Sumerian city-states of what is today Iraq, such as Eridu, are typically considered to be the origin of civilization. But these cities are four thousand years younger than our radiocarbon dates for Göbekli Tepe. The walled complex forces us either to push the origin of agriculture much further into the past or else reconsider whether agriculture is necessary for such complex human societies. Either possibility yields important information about humanity’s extended phenotype.

Myth and Material

Historians and social theorists have proposed materialist explanations for the rise of civilization in the Near East—namely, the accumulation of economic surplus. The fertile alluvial soil deposited with the yearly floods by the Tigris and Euphrates provided abundant harvests. Similarly, historians link the reliable flooding of the Nile River to the rise of civilization in Egypt one thousand years later. These river systems, together with modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, are sometimes called the Fertile Crescent, so named because the region is thought to be a common cultural and technological area where early agriculture and civilization developed hand-in-hand. Göbekli Tepe lies in this region as well, though it predates evidence of agriculture. With the surplus of food provided by agriculture along these rivers also came the need to store grain and protect these stores against nomadic raiders, who wished to enjoy the fruits of agriculture without the toil. Eventually, population growth caught up to the carrying capacity of the regions, necessitating irrigation and river regulation to make more land arable. Waterworks are vast undertakings that rely on the coordination provided by a central government to organize the necessary labor. The ancient state was born.

This theory was furthest developed in Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. A former member of the Communist Party of Germany, he went about developing a materialist history independent of that orthodoxy. This work is one of the many Cold War-era polemics that argued that Russia and China are inherently different societies from the West, contra Marxist contemporaries who saw those countries as possible previews of a Western socialist future. Long-forgotten ideological disputes shape our current understanding of seemingly unrelated topics such as the origin of civilization and human nature. As a consequence, while it seems harmless to overturn these obscure theories, to do so sometimes means overturning our own ingrained conclusions about the future, whose political origins we have forgotten.

The New World is usually assumed to have been separated from the Old World for most of its history, ever since melting glaciers allowed the originally Siberian peoples of Beringia to move southward into modern Canada and settle the rest of the Americas some 16,500 years ago. Assuming such a degree of isolation, the origin of Mesoamerican civilizations would be independent of whatever happened in regions such as the Fertile Crescent, providing us a natural laboratory from which we could learn more about the human extended phenotype.

The Calusa of southwestern Florida might provide a natural experiment for thinking about our Turkish neolithic site: a complex hierarchical society that built mounds, towers, and wide canals, yet engaged in no agriculture. A grand temple—if that is what Göbekli Tepe was—wouldn’t have been beyond their abilities. Instead of the granaries posited by conventional accounts of the origin of civilization, they built “watercourts” to store the rich catches of fish they harvested from the waters of the Florida Keys. The Calusa were a relatively advanced society built on aquaculture instead of agriculture.

The implications of this natural experiment are dizzying when we consider it together with discoveries made on the island of Crete in 2009. The stone tools found there were dated to be at least 130,000 years old. Even with lower sea levels at the time, the Mediterranean island could only have been reached by boat. The tools are so old that they are attributed to Homo erectus, a species of our genus Homo that first emerged 2 million years ago.

That fishing, hunting, or gathering could sustain complex societies means that social technology, rather than the discovery of farming, is the key bottleneck of civilization. Furthermore, while we might debate how farmable temperate regions might be during an ice age, no one disputes that hunting and fishing could be bountiful in such times. This means we have no reason to assume complex societies can only be found after the last ice age. Rather, they may have been with us for a very long time—perhaps from our very beginning.

Otherwise unrelated domesticated animal species display a range of anatomical and behavioral phenotypes that set them apart from their wild counterparts: depigmentation; floppy, reduced ears; shorter muzzles; curly tails; smaller teeth; smaller cranial capacities; neotenous (juvenile) behavior; reduction of sexual dimorphism; docility; and more frequent estrous cycles. Biologists sometimes call this “domestication syndrome”. Comparing us to Neanderthals, with their larger teeth and brains, and more robust skeletons, it is hard to escape the conclusion that we are the domesticated rather than the wild variant of mankind. Recent genetic studies lend further evidence to this conclusion.

Rather than small bands of hundreds of people, societies in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands seem to best fit our extended phenotype, at least once domesticated. The environment of evolutionary adaptation for Homo sapiens as we now know ourselves wasn’t the wild savannah; rather, it was complex society all along.

Regardless of the truth of this hypothesis, fishing doesn’t help us explain Göbekli Tepe’s location 250 kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. There are mountain lakes much closer by, but they couldn’t have supported sufficient fish populations to feed the hundreds of workers needed for monumental architecture projects. Does this still leave agriculture as the only explanation?

Recent digs in the forest steppes of Russia have found a large circular structure built over 25,000 years ago, using material from up to sixty mammoths. The labor invested here is much less than needed for the construction of Göbekli Tepe and, as a result, isn’t in and of itself sufficient evidence of a complex society—but this is no temporary structure. What might have presumably migratory hunters used it for? Perhaps the hunters were not so migratory after all. The Ice Age ecosystem was vastly more productive than modern Siberia due to vast herds of now-extinct megafauna like the mammoth, which through trampling and grazing maintained it in a grassland state, a much colder buffalo plain. Before the American bison was hunted to near-extinction in the 19th century, partially as a war measure against Native Americans, they numbered 30 million. A comparable abundance would make meat processing and storage, rather than hunting, the key logistical challenge. Large pieces of charcoal from the Russian dig site show that fires were lit inside the structure. Instead of a granary, perhaps a smokehouse.

Could this have been a purpose of Göbekli Tepe? The ruins do feature carvings and bas-reliefs depicting game animals such as boar, aurochs, and wild donkeys. However, since such animals are accompanied by vultures, scorpions, lions, foxes, cranes, storks, ducks, and snakes, they aren’t the dominant symbols of the site. Moreover, only a few animal remains have been found at the site. Might hunting have at least fed the builders? The climate of southeastern Turkey 11,000 years ago seems to have been about as dry as it is today. Even if we’re skeptical of climate models and posit a wetter, or at least greener, Mediterranean forest ecosystem, these lands weren’t grasslands where buffalo roam.

This leaves us with only two possibilities for how the workers building Göbekli Tepe were fed: pastoralism or agriculture. This is why, though archaeologists presume Göbekli Tepe to have predated agriculture by thousands of years, agriculture-driven development is likely the right theory after all.

An additional clue can be found in the unusual monotheistic religion of the persecuted and suffering Yazidi people of Upper Mesopotamia, an area at the border of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their faith focuses on seven of God’s angels, the first among those being Melek Taus. He is said to have been ordered by God to pay homage to a new creation—mankind—but refused God’s command. In Islamic theology, this is taken to be an act of rebellion by the angel but in Yazidi belief, the order is revealed to have been a test all along. Because of the unusual theology of the Yazidi—almost Abrahamic, yet seemingly something very different—they have been described as polytheistic or slandered as devil-worshippers throughout history. That charge inspired the American author H.P. Lovecraft to refer to them in his fiction as keepers of ancient and dark secrets. There might be some truth to this people being keepers of ancient knowledge. The forbidden fruit offered to Adam by Melek Taus in the Garden of Eden? Grain.

Myths are often dismissed out of hand as a source on ancient history. Yet recent research reveals that at least some European fairy tales might date to the Bronze Age, so we know that stories can remain recognizably intact for a very long time. Australian Aboriginal tales which accurately describe some changes to Australia’s geography of rivers, coastlines, mountains, and lakes, as well as climate shifts for up to 10,000 years ago, should give us pause. It seems that multi-generational oral memory can be very reliable, if only the socioeconomic or ecological niche of its speakers and singers persists; eliminate that and stories morph wildly. At times such cultural heritage is more accurate than our much younger theories about the distant past.

Discovery and Rediscovery

When thinking about the dating of agriculture it is important to remember that Göbekli Tepe was rediscovered rather than discovered. In October 1994, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was reviewing archives of known sites, trying to decide where to dig next. A site description caught his attention: a hill that had first been excavated in a 1963 survey by the University of Istanbul and the University of Chicago, but abandoned soon after. Despite finding stone tools, they had assumed the tops of the massive limestone pillars to be medieval tombstones dating to the Byzantine Empire.

We see what we expect to see. Nowhere is this more true than in the funding-constrained and hyper-critical field of archaeology. The German Archaeological Institute, which provided a professional home for much of Klaus Schmidt’s career, has a mere €38 million yearly budget. For a field that requires specialized equipment costing up to thousands of dollars per day to use, dozens if not hundreds of skilled and unskilled laborers, full-time professionals to make sense of finds, and seasonal, frequently isolated, and international digs, this simply isn’t very much.

Fortunately for our understanding of humanity, Schmidt had previous experience excavating the then-revolutionary, if much younger, neolithic temple at Nevalı Çori. That site pushed back the origin of domesticated einkorn wheat to 10,400 years ago. Schmidt allowed himself to see again what he had already seen before. This brings to mind Thomas Kuhn’s claims in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he proposes the incommensurability of different scientific paradigms. Before a new paradigm emerges, it is difficult to evaluate evidence right in front of our faces. Afterward, it is hard to even remember what the previous worldview held to be sacred.

The discovery of Sumerian cities, now considered to be the very beginning of recorded history, was itself an archaeological surprise. In the declining Ottoman Empire of the 19th century, British, French, and then German archaeologists dug and explored modern-day Iraq, searching for remnants of the much younger Assyrian civilization. The search was partially fueled by a desire either to find evidence for or against biblical accounts of history. Higher criticism had at the time transformed the Bible from a sacred authority in its own right into just another text that had a history that could be examined.

No classical or pre-classical sources known to Europeans at the time mentioned Sumerian language or society. As much younger Akkadian cuneiform tablets attributed to Babylonians were translated, the title of “King of Sumer and Akkad” was among the first pieces of evidence that attracted attention. The entire civilization was up until then an “unknown unknown.” Decades of controversies ensued, such as the French Assyriologist Joseph Halévy insisting that Sumerian wasn’t a different language, but rather an ideographic method of writing, invented by the Babylonians themselves.

The theoretical rigidity surrounding the rediscovery of ancient Sumer was not an anomaly in this regard either. The early 20th-century discovery and translation of thousands of tablets from the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusa in central Turkey conclusively revealed a great empire that had previously been unknown outside of sparse references in the Bible and in records then only recently unearthed from Egypt and Assyria. Until then, evidence of the Hittites had been assumed to be relatively unimportant to the region’s history, conflated with other peoples from the region, or considered entirely mythical. Perhaps one forgotten civilization can be written off as a fluke—but two?

Excessive skepticism of what were thought to be myth-ridden sources also played a significant role in this era. Scholars of the 19th century no longer considered the Iliad and Odyssey to be poetic accounts of actual events. The city of Troy itself was considered a myth. It took a well-funded eccentric outsider named Heinrich Schliemann, Iliad in hand, to identify a previously explored site in Turkey as the likely location of Troy. Schliemann was an adventurer rather than a professional and was found guilty by a Greek court of smuggling jewelry and other golden artifacts found at the site out of the Ottoman Empire. The matter was settled with Schliemann paying 50,000 gold francs to the Constantinople Imperial Museum, as well as handing over some of the artifacts.

As much as we may credit Schliemann’s spirit of lawlessness with upending the paradigm of his time, it proves to be a double-edged sword for advancing archeological scholarship when we consider the vast illegal trade in antiquities that continues to the present day. In just one operation in 2019, Interpol recovered more than 19,000 artifacts from over 100 suspected traffickers, who had in their possession items from everywhere from Colombia to Afghanistan. Traffickers in Italy go through the effort of conducting their own digs using bulldozers and metal detectors to find saleable artifacts. The same happens in China, where one archaeologist admitted to his role in a criminal tomb-raiding ring. Current and former museum curators in the West have been repeatedly charged with illegally trafficking antiquities. Wealthy collectors have long created a demand for antiquities, acquired legally or not. What and how many important, paradigm-shifting artifacts might be hidden away in a private collection? The famous Lycurgus Cup, which greatly altered our picture of ancient Roman technical expertise, was forgotten for a century in the Rothschild family’s private collection until it was sold to the British Museum in 1958.

Lost or privately owned artifacts may be unknown unknowns, but it is not as if we have exhausted the investigation of our known unknowns either. Some 90% of the hundreds of thousands of tablets found in ancient cities such as Nippur and Girsu remain untranslated. Given the experiences of 19th-century archaeology, it is certain that further ancient discoveries can be made by critically examining and interpreting texts in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. The translation of these previously neglected tablets holds the exciting possibility of pushing the boundary between recorded history and unwritten prehistory much further into the past, even without further excavations.

The Politics of Archaeology

But further excavations are also needed. Shortly before his death in 2014, Klaus Schmidt estimated that despite nearly twenty years of digs at Göbekli Tepe, only five percent of the site had been excavated. Nor is Göbekli Tepe the only prize within reach: the capital of the Akkadian Empire, for example, remains undiscovered to this day. Especially needed are bold gambles, both at these sites and elsewhere, that try to prove or disprove what historians and archaeologists think they know about the dawn of civilization. Early Sumerian epics indicate an unusually intimate relationship between Sumer and an otherwise unknown land called Aratta. Speculation places Aratta somewhere in Iran, or perhaps even further afield—a detail that may well turn out to be of more than a little significance for a people whose language remains classified as an isolate, anomalously unrelated to any other known or nearby language groups, even over a century after being deciphered. After the brilliant Schmidt’s demise, who can we find that can see with new eyes?

Tourism provides a motive to promote spectacular sites, and while it does also secure funding for some digs, compromises are made between conservation and visitation, as well as between the myth built around the sites and the actual material found. Schmidt’s widow claimed that heavy machinery used to build the walkway at Göbekli Tepe damaged the site—a claim that Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism denies, but that it would deny even if true. The now much-celebrated site is slowly growing in Turkish consciousness as a national symbol. All tourism promotion starts by appealing to foreigners, but ends up also changing the minds of locals. The Eiffel Tower of Paris, the Pyramids of Giza, and the Colosseum of Rome are beloved, nationally-celebrated monuments partially because of their global appeal.

Ancient history shapes modern politics. This is truer perhaps nowhere than in Egypt, where national identity and government legitimacy are built out of an uneasy compromise between a simultaneous commitment to Islam and a nationalist attachment to the polytheistic past which built the country’s world-renowned monuments. The division is visible on every bill of the Egyptian pound, with the obverse side displaying the country’s many beautiful mosques, and the reverse displaying symbols of antiquity such as the Sphinx, statues of Pharaohs, and even war chariots. Nationalists will tend to emphasize continuity with this antiquity, as something that distinguishes Egyptians from other Arabs.

It may seem strange to view ancient, dusty ruins and artifacts as anything other than inert curiosities, but their importance as both great political and economic resources is belied by the way Egypt’s long-ruling secular nationalists and opposing Islamists have battled over them. International tourism has been one of the pillars of Egypt’s economy for decades, at its peak in 2010 employing 12% of Egypt’s entire workforce and supplying a similar share of Egypt’s GDP. This was no happy accident either: starting in the 1970s, the secular regime of Anwar Sadat eased visa restrictions for foreigners, invested significant portions of the state budget into hotels and transport infrastructure, and established new schools for hospitality and tourism management, all as part of the infitah program to liberalize and grow Egypt’s private sector economy. Sadat was assassinated by an Islamist opposed to Egypt’s liberalization in 1981, but his successor Hosni Mubarak continued his policies.

The bid to build a powerful economic machine from Egypt’s renowned ancient heritage was ultimately successful. Unsurprisingly, Islamists decided to attack not only their secular opponents, but the machine they had built too. Terror attacks specifically targeting tourists have killed more than one hundred people in Egypt since the early 1990s, each time depressing tourist arrivals and national revenue. In the worst attack, in 1997, dozens of foreign tourists were gunned down by Islamists in the 3500-year-old Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut. Whether the terrorists considered the heinous irony of spilling blood at a gravesite is doubtful, but they were certainly aware of the devastating effect the attack would have on Egypt’s economy, and by extension on the regime they opposed. The responsibility of defending the valued tourism sector falls not to the ordinary police, but to Egypt’s General Administration of Tourism and Antiquities Police, who guard not only archaeological sites, but also the tour groups that visit them.

The sphinxes and pyramids have political relevance not only due to the economic machine built around them, but also directly as symbols of legitimacy. Shortly before widespread protests forced Hosni Mubarak to resign from office in 2011, one of the last moves he made was to create the cabinet-level office of a Minister of Antiquities and appoint the noted archaeologist Zahi Hawass to the post. In other circumstances, it might seem bizarre for an embattled dictator facing crippling protests, strikes, and civil unrest to be concerned with the administration of archaeological sites—but viewed as an attempt to shore up legitimacy in Egypt’s unique political environment, the move, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, made perfect sense.

When the Islamist-aligned government of Mohammed Morsi won elections in 2012, fears rose again that the pyramids could be threatened by radicals seeking to eliminate symbols of what they considered to be idolatry. Those fears turned out to be short-lived as Morsi was deposed in a military coup only another year later, and Egypt’s secularist factions returned to power once more. In 2018, the 3200-year-old statue of the pharaoh Ramesses II that had once stood in Cairo’s main railway station was moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, slated to be the largest archaeological museum in the world upon completion. Construction began in 2002 when Mubarak personally laid the foundation stone.

Egypt is hardly alone in the broader Middle East in its use of pre-Islamic monuments to strengthen national identity. In Iraq, for example, Saddam Hussein partially restored the Ziggurat of Ur, casting himself as a successor to the ancient kings of Babylon. Hussein’s restoration of Babylon itself imitated ancient rulers by stamping his name in the bricks that were used. Hardly the first would-be restorer, he was preceded by millennia in the 6th century BC by the neo-Babylonian King Nabonidus, who mistakenly built up seven rather than three stages to the great Ziggurat.

It would be a mistake to think that these tendencies are unique to the Middle East. Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist Romania backed several disputed historical claims that put Romania at the center of historically important cultural and scientific developments, such as a Dacian alphabet long predating Latin and Greek writing. This approach to building a kind of cultural autarky is called “protochronism,” a term we can fruitfully apply to many other state-driven archaeological efforts around the world. Göbekli Tepe itself and the unknown people who built it can more easily be claimed as predecessors of the modern Turkish nation than the ancient Greek theater of Ephesus or the stadium of Aphrodisias, also located in Turkey.

Similar selective identification with the past can be found in the evermore diverging interpretations of ancient history between Pakistan and India. Most of what we know of Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization comes from sites in Pakistan open to Western archaeologists. Meanwhile, Indian archaeology has intentionally been closed off from foreign, especially British, involvement. Political needs always prove decisive as to what is and isn’t pursued, since it is governments that, in addition to being the main source of funding, ultimately grant or deny permission to conduct digs.

Certain discoveries can also be seen as political crimes. Zhao Khangmin, the key archaeologist who dug up the Terracotta Army in China in 1974, had been subject to a Maoist self-criticism session as a suspicious person “involved with old things” only a few years earlier. It is then understandable why Zhao kept the statues secret at first. It took a chance visit by a journalist from the Xinhua News Agency who asked a simple question to change this: “This is such a huge discovery. Why aren’t you reporting it?”

Directly referencing the possibility of political repression for a find is often dangerous in itself, since admitting the existence of political repression and censorship is often itself ideologically incorrect. A pointed question helped communicate that the finds were acceptable, while avoiding the problem of self-incrimination. Through posing the question, the journalist acted as the political specialist who informed Zhao—an understandably cautious archaeologist—that in the present political climate, thousands of statues of ancient Chinese soldiers were a political asset rather than a liability. The journalist left Zhao little choice in the matter and published the find, making the site known to Communist Party leadership.

The statues weren’t smashed, but were instead made a point of national pride, accumulating the prestige of an ancient civilization to which modern China now considered itself an heir and which, in its heyday, was on par with Egypt or Rome. The Chinese government undertook significant promotion efforts in subsequent years, making the site one of the main stops of international tourism in China, comparable to medieval sections of the Great Wall.

Zhao Khangmin’s fear not only for his own safety, but for that of the artifacts themselves, was well-justified, since Mao’s Cultural Revolution had seen numerous monasteries, temples, and statues ransacked as useless remnants of an oppressive feudal past. Societies undergoing ideological convulsion make for a hazardous environment for historical truth. As another example, Islamists, perhaps correctly, identify such ancient monuments as idolatrous. When Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanstian, infamously ordered the destruction of the two Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, he reflected:

In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings—the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction.

However, it is also worth reflecting on how the achievements of a glorious past can be embarrassing to a less capable present. Iconoclasm is always an expression of a political desire to forget such achievements.

While social reform movements tend to wish to destroy ancient finds, and nationalists cherish or fabricate them, the perspective of a conquering empire is that the legacy of a conquered people belongs to the victor, ultimately adding to the preeminence of the empire. Anything movable makes for good, prestigious loot. Egyptian obelisks decorate public squares in Rome, Paris, London, and Istanbul. It was the collection and classification of these spoils of conquest that often motivated the development of imperial British archaeology. The British Museum is a great achievement of mankind, but also a monument to the British Empire.

UNESCO’s list of common cultural heritages of mankind is also such a monument. The Turkish government extensively lobbied to add Göbekli Tepe to this list, as a way to raise the prestige and standing of their site in the West, and as a consequence raise their standing domestically. They finally succeeded in 2018. In contrast, the two Afghan Buddhas, already on the UNESCO list, were destroyed as a demonstration of sovereignty and defiance to such external prestige and even funding.

The preservation of heritage that cannot easily be moved can be made a casus belli. The destruction of the two Afghan Buddhas received significant airtime in the run-up to the American invasion of Afghanistan, as an example of senseless vandalism and zealotry. The Russian orchestra playing classical music in the Syrian ruins of Palmyra liberated from vandalizing ISIS forces in 2016 had a similar effect. Siding with the Syrian government, rather than with often U.S.-backed rebels, could then be cast as the more culturally enlightened option.

The History of Civilization Can Be Remade in Turkey

As I gazed over the stones and pillars of Göbekli Tepe, the feeling of being confronted with something old and terrible—in the archaic sense—was inescapable, cheery tourist infrastructure notwithstanding. If it is hard enough for us to imagine how the Sumerians viewed the world, it is nearly impossible for us to imagine how the builders of this far more ancient site did. As the archaeologist Gary Rollefson pointed out, there is more time between Göbekli Tepe and Sumer than between Sumer and today. But although we may never see the world with the eyes that once saw excellent spots to carve vultures and lions into stone, in trying to understand something so terribly old, we might nevertheless come to see the world and our place in it with new eyes of our own.

The old paradigm of agriculture and civilization beginning after the last ice age, and proceeding on a materially overdetermined set course of progress, seems to rest on increasingly shaky theoretical grounds. As a consequence, the hypotheses of what we expect to find and what kind of digs we want to fund have to be revised as well. Not just because our timelines of monumental architecture and complex society have been thrown into question by Göbekli Tepe, but because of evidence of early cultivation, such as small-scale farming 23,000 years ago at the Ohalo II site near the Sea of Galilee. Over 10,000 years prior to when we had first thought agriculture began, at least some of our ancient ancestors had gathered over 140 plant species in one place, evidently sowing and harvesting early edible cereals and using rudimentary tools to turn them into flour.

The time is especially ripe not just because of these finds, but because the political conditions in Turkey are likely to remain friendly to exploring the ancient past for the next decade or two.  This may sound surprising given that Erdogan himself has been described as an Islamist, and recently reclassified the famous Hagia Sophia as a mosque to the opposition of UNESCO. But Erdogan is arguably an Islamist only insofar as he is a Turkish nationalist, and only insofar as Islamism supports his vision of a strong, prestigious, and unified Turkey that can throw its weight around the international arena as a sovereign power. Perhaps there is indeed political capital to be gained by downplaying or even destroying newly-discovered, pre-Islamic sites, labeling them pagan centers of idolatry. But there is much more to be gained by casting Turkey as the birthplace of human civilization; protochronism, nationalism, and dreams of autarky go hand-in-hand. In this case, these dreams are aligned with advancing our understanding. In any case, a Turkish conglomerate has already committed to spending over $15 million on the site over the next 20 years.

For better or worse, Turkey is also the most secure and hospitable country in the region for the foreseeable future, especially for any Westerners looking to conduct expensive archaeological digs. The risks and even physical dangers of attempting to conduct digs in neighboring Syria, Iraq, or Iran are substantially higher. As long as international collaboration is allowed on charismatic sites, and the Turkish government has an interest in discovering and developing them, with archaeologists making rather than breaking careers through discovery, this fringe territory near the edge of the Fertile Crescent is certain to yield further surprises. What kind of surprises?

With both agriculture and monumental construction much older than what was thought before, we should likely rethink the origins of urban life as well. How old might settlements of hundreds or thousands of people be? How frequently did such civilizations arise, only to fall and be forgotten? I strongly suspect they might be not thousands, but tens of thousands of years older than we believed previously. I’m happy to take a Long Bet with a qualified challenger skeptical of such a claim, that in twenty years, we will know of at least one such permanent settlement older than 20,000 years. Perhaps such a bet can, in its small way, help stimulate some interest in hunting for such sites.

It is important that we do so, even if we have to rethink some of our other assumptions about the nature of progress and technology. When it comes to thinking about politics, economics, and culture, such history is our only data set. Rethinking what humans are, and how we’ve lived over the last few hundred thousand years, may then open us up not just to new discoveries about prehistory, but new possibilities for our future. We, after all, hope to be more than just another set of ruins for our descendants to argue over.

Every civilization rests on a core stack of social technology that coordinates and sustains its vital institutions. Social technologies—intentionally designed ways for the people in a society to operate—form the basis of the varied systems of material production and material technology that we see in every society. These social technology cores decay with time as they obsolete their own foundations, and as errors and parasitism build up. This decay can be circumvented, and the decaying core social technologies can be swapped for new ones, but this is a process of immense historical difficulty. What, then, is the core engine of our own civilization, and in what way might it decay? While we lack an incontrovertible answer, the Industrial Revolution appears to be a leading candidate.

Such a thesis would have been very current during the 19th century and most of the 20th, but today sounds increasingly antiquated. We often define our 21st-century civilization, in opposition to the Industrial Revolution, as “post-industrial.” When the world’s most influential economist borrows the name to argue for a “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” he does not characterize it by yet more advanced and productive manufacturing. Instead, he distinguishes it by computer networking, artificial intelligence, and other “emerging technologies.” The seemingly basic association of industry with the mass production of material goods has been severed; factories are treated as evidence of backwardness rather than progress. Simultaneously, we lament the rising power of China, a power substantially if not totally built on old-fashioned industrial strength.

These contradictory attitudes betray the claims about our next stage of societal progress as more wish-fulfillment than impartial certainty. Yet at the same time, despite the popularity of apocalyptic visions of the future, we are certainly not regressing to the kind of agricultural or even tribal societies that characterized the pre-industrial era. A truly “fourth” Industrial Revolution would imply the sudden emergence of a whole new stack of social technologies, unlike any we have seen before. These would form the new core engine of our civilization. Does the “internet of things” really pass this bar? The question answers itself.

Post-industrial society is neither the next vaunted stage of human progress, nor the prelude to a catastrophic reversion to pre-industrial ways of life. Our social technologies have not been upgraded in the wake of the Industrial Revolution’s conclusion; they have been exhausted before we even finished industrializing.

Industrial Mobilization Makes Cities the Center of Material Production

Early modern Europe, while sharing many features typical of agricultural civilizations, also developed social technologies that lent themselves to an explosion of material production. One example was an ideological commitment to truth in speech among some aristocratic circles, exemplified by Britain’s Royal Society, whose Latin motto translates roughly to “take nobody’s word for it.” This commitment enabled advances in basic science by assigning high status to verifiable mathematics, empiricism, and experimentation. It further lent itself to honesty about the process of production. Another key social technology was the Protestant conception of friendship as expressed through the community of willing believers. Strangers could be trusted by default within this community, and thereby coordinate closely to form and run companies. Material factors like roads, canal networks, or good climate contribute to industrialization, but they don’t tell us about the social machinery that took advantage of them.

With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets. After this material transformation, the plantations in the New World and workshops in India became logistically closer to a city than shepherds living in geographically nearby hills. Before this point, city-based labor markets had the highest impact on society, while the role of markets in exchanging the raw resources of the countryside for the finished products of the city was minor and easily replaced by customary trade. With the social technologies of long-distance commerce, the labor market of a city became connected to a commodity market that could match its pace, opening massive potential to make the city a center of material production.

Creating those markets involved mass dislocation. Armies rip people from their homes and turn them into soldiers; this was well understood in antiquity. During industrialization, the shock of dislocation from previous social ties combined with a newly institutionalized environment to produce distress not too dissimilar from the shock of incarceration or hazing. Cities already functioned as labor markets before the coming of industry. But if one can marry a labor market with the organizational methods of factory production, like rote work on an assembly line, the result is an army of production. Such productive armies started out as more literal than metaphorical. The early British industrialist Matthew Boulton was not just a boss with an economic relationship to his employees; he was also a charismatic and personal leader. In 1791, he armed his workers as a makeshift militia to defend his factory from rioters—a feat which today is only managed by small businesses bound by family ties or ethnic divisions.

The origin of such assembly lines and the required discipline of workers wasn’t psychologically trivial. At times, the mechanization of life departed radically from previous methods of regulating urban life. At first, city life wasn’t damaged significantly. A single factory opening isn’t very different from a monastery setting up shop in the city center. As this process progressed, however, more and more of the workers and managers built their own social infrastructure, which grew incompatible with the city life that existed before. The social technologies that previously regulated city politics and security ceased to work.

The rural periphery started being drawn into the center—not because of material prosperity, but because the countryside was fundamentally tied to city life to begin with. The same pattern exists in urbanizing countries today: as the old agrarian city fails and the industrial city rises, the countryside which was sustained by the social and economic ties of the agrarian city is no longer viable, and people are brought into cities where they either live in squalor or work on the assembly line. This wasn’t just an unconscious change; in England between 1604 and 1914, Parliament itself passed more than 5200 acts of “enclosure” that recategorized previously “commonly held” land worked by peasants as privately held by larger estates. The old way of life was collectively outlawed in favor of the more modern, profitable way of doing things. New work was found in the cities instead.

The assembly line, however, is so effective that it produces on a truly global scale. A single factory might even supply the whole world with some specialized component. This was illustrated when, in 1993, an explosion at a Sumitomo Chemical plant in Japan removed over 90% of the world’s supply of a certain epoxy that was used to attach DRAM dies—important memory chips used in computers—to their packages. The result was multi-year worldwide shortages of the component. Distributed production before the industrial revolution gave way to ever more centralized production, with agglomeration effects becoming only more important over time. In industrial society, local social life isn’t viable, but neither is it needed to produce the tools of daily life. On net, poverty is alleviated.

As society writ large was reorganized into industrial society, the labor markets of cities facilitated the creation of proceduralized organizations such as firms, unions, political parties, and eventually administrative offices—both state and private. Ownership by hands-on entrepreneurs like Matthew Boulton was replaced with ownership by absentee magnates like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Factory owners were integrated into state systems of violence and control, and no longer needed to organize their own ad hoc forces. Instead, they could rely on local police, hired Pinkerton goons, or even the army to assert control over factories and suppress dissent.

The makeshift militia had instead become a tool of organized labor. Strikers got into frequent standoffs and scuffles, and occasional shootouts, with the well-armed defenders of capital. To circumvent this disadvantage, labor used asymmetric bombing campaigns, usually directed at property rather than people—although there were exceptions and accidents. Much as the factory militia before it, the labor militia was also eventually integrated into state systems of violence and control, supervised by government institutions like America’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Today, picket lines are no longer enforced by mob violence, but by custom and by special legal privileges—so long as the state recognizes the strike as legitimate. For the last few generations, factory life has been less violent than ever before.

The new proceduralized organizations of the 19th-century industrial city further increased demand for human capital of the industrial type. This necessitated mass schooling, which tried to proceduralize some of the same cultural and physiological shock experienced when entering an industrial city. Some of the more intangible networks of civilization before industrialization disappeared and evaporated. The cities late to industrialization, such as 19th-century Vienna, were also the cities that hit the highest cultural watermarks, as those educated in the old system were able to deploy their talents in the new. Protestant friendship and aristocratic truth-telling became replaced by their scaled-up facsimiles: modern professionalism and science by committee.

The result was instability and revolution, as seen in the old societies of Europe from the 19th to 20th century. A change in cities necessitates a change in government. The one society without upheaval seems to have been British society, where the industrial process was perhaps most co-evolved with the previous social technologies. For example, it was often the British aristocrats themselves who were the early industrialists, inventors, and investors; in 19th-century Russia, on the other hand, industrialization was led directly by the state or even by foreign investment, working in alliance with rising managerial elites against the aristocracy. Yet even in the case of Britain, the key social technologies failed after the Second World War, as the latitude afforded to aristocratic scientists and industrialists was replaced by a system of bureaucratic processes.

At their peak, the United States and the Soviet Union both showed the full strength of industrial civilization. To a very significant degree, they were stabilized by the military and security needs of competition with each other. The USSR’s system began to creak first. The overall talent pool of founders was smaller, as was the size of its extended empire. Unlike the United States, it never truly managed to outsource crucial industries to be handled by its client states, thereby extending the block’s viable industrial phase. The industrial cooperative body that the Soviet Union created—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON)—never succeeded in coordinating economic plans as effectively as the U.S.-led international community did, with organizations such as the OECD, IMF, and World Bank, and initiatives like the Marshall plan.

By the early 20th century, the United States had perfected an advanced social technology that ultimately gave it a second important advantage over the Soviets: marketing. Originally developed to help missionary efforts, it can quickly adapt and train consumers in how to use new products, technologies, and lifestyles. The great 20th-century architects of life and desire built a whole replacement culture and provided just-in-time replacements for gaps that the typical institutionalized factory worker experienced throughout the course of their life. For a time, life was good, as shown by the post-war baby boom. Optimistic American thinkers believed they had found a way to make an industrial society technologically dynamic, yet politically stable and socially sustainable.

The marketers were eventually replaced by people who grew up on marketing. Beware, social engineer, of obsoleting your own origins! Yet, they did so in field after field. Not only marketers, but scientists, statesmen, industrialists, politicians, philosophers, and writers shaped ersatz social technology to fill the gaps, but completely failed to guarantee knowledge succession of the generative core of knowledge. The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.

When times change—and you don’t need or can’t sustain the full pace of industrialization anymore—the vast masses of the industrial population prove themselves difficult to demobilize from their war of production. They can’t be returned to the social fabric of agricultural society, since the urban environment that enabled the agricultural hinterland to function no longer exists. The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life. The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional. Bureaucracies decay in a way that is much less visible than the decay of factories. The real upward mobility of dysfunctional agriculturalists to functional industrial workers is replaced by the on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers. Despite these measures, the real downward mobility is eventually made apparent.

Post-Industrial Exhaustion

The COVID-19 pandemic showed East Asia to be the best place to put key elements of the supply chain. East Asian societies remain industrial societies and can adopt factory-derived values to force compliance with public health measures. Public health policy can also be set in ways that respond to evidence, since their professionalization is young and hasn’t yet consumed its own epistemic foundation. Importantly, authorities see it as vital to enable the gathering of many people together in crowded spaces. Without this impetus, industrial manufacturing is impossible. The working factories are a political asset, since the production of steel and other fundamentals strengthens their states. Because of this, you cannot simply send everyone home forever.

Europe and the United States are the worst places to put key elements of the supply chain. They cannot produce compliance with public health measures. On paper, they have the best scientists and administrators, but massive white-collar overproduction means the victory of sharp elbows over sharp minds. Factory values, if reimplemented, directly challenge their existing power centers and partially undo the political pacification project that is the “knowledge” economy. In such a society, sending everyone home doesn’t impede production; in fact, it solves several social and political problems.

Post-industrial society finds itself having exhausted the organizational and social-technological capital of pre-industrial society, having replaced it with the control system optimized for containing the militant potential of demobilized worker units.

Factories might persist in post-industrial society, but primarily as local traditions. The self-catalytic process that birthed them is long over. They become strange sociological remnants, as out of place in 21st-century society as monasteries were in 19th-century society. Arguably, this industrial traditionalism is the main mode of production in modern Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan. After the political instability of the first half of the 20th century, Europe converged on social democracy, which vigorously protects the arrangements and interests of the existing ecosystem of factories and firms. Social democracy further preserves class hierarchies, through taxes on the high-earning nouveau riche coupled with rigorous credentialing and regulation to prevent new power centers from arising. A good demonstration of this is that over half of European billionaires inherited their wealth, while merely a third of those in the U.S. did. Such a political economy, however, makes it very difficult to commercialize new technologies, build new factories, and for new firms to rise. A flash-frozen industrial revolution.

If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.

What then follows is slow decay, first of production and then of advanced technology itself. At a macro scale, this is the deep root of civilizational collapse. Civilizations first lose subtle social technologies and bases of implicit knowledge at crucial junctures; this process ratchets as elites become less adept at institutional management and design; systems downstream of and less complex than the civilizational core then begin to collapse. Eventually, the entire civilization is fatally vulnerable to outside shocks, such as war with more dynamic societies or even mere natural disasters such as pandemics.

We can imagine a possible scenario of the collapse of our own civilization. Our ability to perceive decline would be compromised early in the process. Every society calls for explanations of its failure that leave the emperor blameless. This means we would find appropriate rationalizations every step of the way. But rationalizations are only needed when an expectation is set and then not delivered. Mostly, the adjustment to decline would just be an invisible lowering of expectations. When political incentives at all layers of the government pyramid go against ascertaining the truth of a situation, the truth isn’t ascertained.

Social scientists wouldn’t see it coming, since official numbers would be about as reliable as public health messaging during a pandemic. Wealth can shrink by 1% per year for a century, while measures such as GDP can show continued growth by 2% per year. The Soviet Union’s era of stagnation had 30 years of solid growth according to their metric of NMP (Net Material Product). American economists only noticed and revised our GDP estimates for the Soviet Union after its collapse. What would a century of such compounding discrepancy mean? Image and reality would be different planets. Despite this, every step of the way, the discrepancy isn’t noticeable. Only external shocks can break the illusion.

While the great illusion persisted, we’d have more and more trouble maintaining current customary industries housed in client states such as Germany and Japan. As technologies would be retired and replaced with more expensive alternatives, this would be perceptible to the common population as a decades-long, somewhat mysterious drop in life spans, quality of goods, and convenience. The products wouldn’t vanish, but rather be replaced by dubious substitutes. This might be explained, if it is remarked on at all, as driven by environmental measures, changing consumer preferences, or the malevolent schemes of rival great powers.

If the assumptions of the scenario hold, China would also succumb to its own post-industrial problems. Western media might tout this as evidence that China is on the verge of collapse, which it wouldn’t be. Americans and Europeans may at that point be de-facto barred from visiting China by their own governments, so seeing the still-gleaming cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou up close won’t be an option. How might China respond to such social developments? A very likely possibility is that it might try offshoring production to client states that can still undergo the industrial revolution just as we did in the 1970s. Perhaps this would be touted as the next stage of economic progress in Chinese media—which it wouldn’t be either.

Societies elsewhere on the planet going through their own industrial phase might provide enough to help us maintain European, Japanese, American, and Chinese stasis until they too exhaust themselves. Suddenly our imports would become expensive, then shoddy, then finally we wouldn’t be able to find suppliers at all. At that point, technical knowledge and the ability to deploy it at scale would truly start to vanish. External shocks, wars, and natural wear would exhaust our legacy machinery, never to be replaced again. Out-of-order becomes the order of the day. I don’t think we will see a return of the sea peoples, but I can’t rule it out either. Here we start to hit the limits of what we can say about this scenario.

How far we regress technologically under this scenario depends on how dependent technologies are on our quite centralized societal infrastructure. We probably wouldn’t keep modern consumer CPUs with their highly centralized production and global supply chains. We likely would keep cars, although it’s unclear whether we would keep electric cars, specifically their advanced and industrially intensive batteries. Perhaps our smartphones would turn out to have been bad for our mental health all along and the devices would become controlled purchases as a public health measure. Civilians really shouldn’t be carrying them around!

These material symptoms are, however, just that—symptoms—and cannot be treated with mere technical innovation, nor minor variants of economic policy. Whatever solution our civilization might find to escape the post-industrial trap, it will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.

You can only cross the Rubicon once—in an instant, the authority of Western newspapers was forever reduced. The editor-in-chief of a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton, owned by famous media mogul Rupert Murdoch, was granted no special social and legal privileges. The newspaper was revealed to be just another user. Journalistic authority granted it no protection from classification as ‘hacked material.’ If an email is leaked to the press and no one reads it, did it really leak?

Perhaps once Twitter became the place where journalists get their news, it was only a matter of time before Twitter, rather than editors-in-chief, decided which news was fit to print. As a profession, journalists have developed a slowly intensifying addiction to the site, spending countless hours a day on it. Until now, Twitter reciprocated their enthusiasm. The ‘blue check,’ a marker that an account has been verified as an authenticated and important user, is granted preferentially to journalists and media organizations.

The Role and Legitimacy of Journalism

What is remarkable about the New York Post’s lack of privilege is that journalists as a profession have enjoyed special legal and social protections since the start of the 20th century, partially due to being perceived as indispensable in maintaining an informed citizenry critical to democracy. The past 50 years have not been kind to this perception, as the justification has been eroded by numerous factors. Generation X is likely to be the last generation to believe in the ideals of journalism without reservation.

The most significant wind of change is the technological gale. This is apparent when examining the details of how the media industry adapted to becoming a producer of content, rather than the platform. Newspapers never sold stories; they sold pieces of paper that carried stories. A paywall might seem like a fine business model, but it erodes the moral justification for the special privileges given to journalists and media organizations—hence the outrage when COVID-19 reporting found itself behind paywalls. Journalists make ends meet, barely, but at the cost of losing legitimacy. The pattern holds when thinking about clickbait journalism or pandering to an ever more ideological subscriber base.

Journalists’ ability to carry out their mandate or advocate on behalf of their own profession has been radically curtailed by two decades of layoffs. The number of newsroom employees at U.S. newspapers fell from 71,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2019. Numerous lines of evidence show that this number has fallen further in our time of pandemic. Were the circumstances of our media different, were the economy booming, and had the pandemic not wreaked havoc, perhaps journalists could have held out longer. No army wins a victory by wishing for better weather, however, and we can’t unsee the result of last week’s experiment.

One wonders why Twitter staff didn’t respect the traditional privileges of journalists. The actions of Twitter employees weren’t ignorant or unprofessional. They acted on well-honed human perceptions of the landscape of power. Such perceptions are revealed in what is done, not what is said, when the stakes seem high. While it is all too natural to view this event through the lens of electoral politics—the U.S. presidential election is only two weeks away, after all—this immediate context is ultimately less important than the fact that Twitter’s employees had the power to override the media, felt inclined to use it, and did so. Some would say that the New York Post is too populist, or too much of a tabloid, to be considered a ‘real’ newspaper with ‘real’ journalists. But this is said after the fact, after Twitter already decreed it such. And it is unlikely to be the last such decree.

If we could find the relevant committee in Twitter’s politburo-like bureaucracy—for which founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is best understood to be the main spokesperson—and we could ask them the question, they would naturally answer that they support authentic journalism. They would reiterate their opposition to fake news and election meddling. And having voiced this opposition, they couldn’t sit by and do nothing so close to the election! The moment of unseating journalists doesn’t happen when you propose a free society without them. Rather, it is when you realize that there is no particular reason to let journalists themselves define who is a real journalist. In the case of Twitter, the employees did so instead.

Empowering Bureaucracies More Than Individuals

Early proponents of the internet always conceived of it as transcending the physical world and its limitations. Even before the first public demonstration of computer networks, researchers in the field were predicting the development of a national computer public utility system. There is a long-standing collective dream of independent digital republics and empowered, autonomous, self-educated individuals. People wrote manifestos. An entire genre, cyberpunk, arose around this vision.

Though the seeds of this ideology existed even in the early development of the internet protocols, its primary expression was in the early 1990s, when the internet was very small and used primarily by technically proficient people. As the internet’s user base increased, it seemed plausible that the vision and intentions of these pioneers would shape the development of digital space, breaking the chokehold of centralized distributors of media and human knowledge.

But behind the scenes, the story was not so simple. Even the internet’s creators were at loggerheads about its ultimate purpose. The U.S. Department of Defense, whose research into network technology played a pivotal role in the internet’s creation, intended for it to be used in command and control infrastructure for military operations. Had this vision won out, American entrepreneurs might have sounded less like Sergey Brin or John Gilmore, and more like India’s Mukesh Ambani or China’s Jack Ma. As Ma was building up the e-commerce giant Alibaba, he was also a CCP member and ensured a close relationship with the Chinese state.

Since then, the majority of web traffic has come under the control of a few large players. In the realm of social media, Facebook and Twitter have come to dominate Europe and the Anglosphere; in Russia, VKontakte; in China, Qzone and other equivalents. In other domains of human activity, digital services companies have rapidly gained massive user bases and market share. Netflix competes with Hollywood. Amazon competes with everything from Walmart to the U.S. Postal Service.

In turn, these companies are effectively a tool of the political interests of states that control their regulatory environment, influence their human resources, or host their servers. Sometimes, the relationship turns direct: Google, Microsoft, Apple, and many others participated in the NSA’s PRISM mass surveillance program. Far from what the pioneers of the ‘90s envisioned, these developments haven’t decentralized society. Power has shifted around, but can now act in historically unprecedented ways.

Considered frankly, this trend reveals the internet to be a technology of centralization. One of the core functions of the internet is to record material of human interest in digital format. These records span everything from our trivial preferences and financial habits to the most intimate messages we send each other. With adequate analysis, this data can be used to predict user behavior. This information is not made available to us as individuals. Even if it were, it would not be the kind of information we could use. It’s only useful en masse—in other words, only insofar as it makes us legible and visible to centralized institutions. The rise of Amazon, Tencent, Facebook, or Twitter aren’t bugs in the system, but the natural result of its real logic.

This kind of information asymmetry has strong political implications: what is legible is eventually regulated. What would it take for individuals to gain a comparable information advantage? Imagine dozens of organizations as dedicated as WikiLeaks constantly publishing email chains and recordings of meetings and other closed-door happenings, as well as tracking the minutiae of public statements and the whereabouts of top personnel. Imagine teams of activist data scientists analyzing the data and producing reports. Compared to the amount of resources governments and large companies can dedicate to gathering and analyzing data, even these hypothetical efforts don’t come close.

However, even as the results come in, the dream of a decentralized internet persists. Most recently, the rising price of Bitcoin drove cryptocurrencies into the front and center. The dreamers of the decentralized internet now place their hopes in blockchain technology, which promises to break governments’ control of currency and the tech giants’ control of the internet. Many intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and investors, from Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, have staked their reputation, careers, and plans on this vision. Rather than accounting for strong trends to the contrary, these advocates continually push their promises further into the future.

China Stories Are America’s Mirror 

Before we turn back from humans to technology, let’s briefly digress to think about China. As a newly minted superpower, it also plays a surprising role as America’s Jungian shadow. Rather than doing the difficult legwork needed to think about a foreign country, perhaps even learn the language, we play a guessing game. At times, these guesses are insightful, and at other times paranoid. We suppose, we insinuate, and we theorize as to how China works, but we don’t really check.

China’s surveillance apparatus is often painted in Western media as an all-encompassing panopticon. We are warned to expect an absolute surveillance state with perfect access to technological tools like surveillance footage and online messaging and the corresponding perfect censorship and control. The reality, however, is messy. Surveillance has its limits, both in the data it gathers and in the incentives of the bureaucracy wielding it. So, what can we learn from the Western story? When someone speculates about something they don’t know, they often reveal what they quietly think about what they do know.

Such stories gain traction because, when freed from thinking about the U.S. in particular, readers find themselves thinking about technology and power. In America, we have a very finite list of thinkable conclusions, protecting us from anything too terrible in our future; but when thinking about China, anything is on the table. One of the dishes served is that no one expects Chinese hackers to challenge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or at least its surveillance and censorship apparatus. They certainly don’t lack the skill.

The missing hacker hero becomes more important the more one considers them. If the people of China are oppressed and the internet is a decentralizing technology, we should expect the Chinese internet to work in the favor of dissidents, rather than the government. Interestingly, this was the consensus 1990s view of how the technology would play out in China; much was made of VPNs that could bypass the Great Firewall. Yet today, the Chinese internet clearly works to favor the government—and importantly, we all know this to be the case. The technology empowers the user to a degree, but empowers the administrator even more.

It’s possible to imagine a world where hundreds of millions of people have entirely switched to private network communications. Perhaps in this world, the magnitude of the information asymmetry is reduced, but there is no reason to think it would be reversed. Governments and large companies will still have all of the information they have already harvested—they will already know more about us than at any point in history—and we will be as in the dark about them as ever.

As long as the user was anonymous, it was plausible to be active in cyberspace without having to consider entangling legal risks or physical safety. Titans of steel and flesh such as giant companies or police forces would be powerless to stop you. Who would build such anonymous software, however? Governments will not stand for encryption software without backdoors, so it won’t be built. Users will not stand for inconvenience, so commercial software will out-adopt open source standards. Commercially-built software will always come under pressure from the government. If it somehow escapes such pressure, it will adopt a role closer and closer to that of a government body, much as Twitter is doing.

Software arguments, while compelling in themselves, are ultimately superfluous. Just as the cloud is someone else’s computer, written software always runs on a computer built in a factory, and that factory stands in the jurisdiction of a government that will pursue national security. Hardware backdoors have been mandated by the U.S. and now the Chinese governments. Even if the user could be free, the computer owner never could. The world of bits was always standing on a world of atoms.

The centralizing trend that we have seen over the lifespan of the internet is not a fluke to be corrected as we learn to properly harness the power of this new technology. Rather, the internet cannot be anything but a centralizing force, so long as there are groups that are situated to disproportionately benefit from that which it renders visible. We should expect the hackers and cyber-visionaries to remain in the fringe, while the interests of governments and large companies dominate the use and development of web technologies.

The Geopolitics of Cyberspace  

“Cyberspace does not lie within your borders,” John Perry Barlow, internet pioneer and panegyrist, declared to the world’s great powers in 1996. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” Nearly two and a half decades later, it is the great powers whose borders are reflected in cyberspace.

The China that exists in Asia rather than our imaginations is still very much a 20th century state. It is powered primarily not by advanced technology, but by party discipline and organization—paper-pushing not too dissimilar to that of the U.S. federal government of the 1940s. One tell is that China insists on party liaisons at all the large newspapers. Insisting on party liaisons at all major networks and communication companies will prove to be quite sufficient for states of the future.

China has its Great Firewall and Russia has its “Internet Iron Curtain.” But democracies differ only in how quickly, and under what narratives, they adopt similar measures. In July, India’s biggest company announced a radical vision for an Indian-made 5G network. Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, took the opportunity to dedicate the project to Atmanirbhar Bharat, or “self-reliant India.” It was a sign of loyalty to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of carving out a space for India in a world dominated by American and Chinese tech giants. The announcement was overshadowed in Western media only thanks to a bigger story in India: the country’s ban of the popular TikTok app. Rather than forging a decentralized alternative, India is a latecomer to an ongoing revamp.

The EU has enacted laws such as the GDPR, strictly regulating the operation of internet companies. Even in the more hesitant U.S., a massive public campaign is pressuring tech giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook to exercise more control over their platforms. When they do so, the call quickly turns to government regulation of this newfound power. After decades of conflict between utopian visions of cyberspace and the realities of centralized digital power, states and companies are creating new ideological tools to determine what the internet should look like.

A Thriving and Centralized Internet 

Should we assume, though, that such a world would be dystopian? When people envision decentralization, they often have the wrong picture. Many aspects of human life are better off centralized. Decentralization should not be equated with freedom and flourishing, unless there is a good plan to make it so.

In trying to understand and chart a course for the future, we might take inspiration from the centralizing effects of past technology. The printing press reduced the Catholic Church’s control over intellectual institutions. But it also paved the way for the standardization of language and for more direct control by state bureaucracies. Society was vastly more centralized in 1750 than it was in 1400. Through the modern lens, the benefits of the printing press vastly outweigh its costs, suggesting that we may be wrong to fear centralizing technologies in our own time.

Instead, we may be better off looking to see what institutions are best positioned to wield these technologies, and to what ends, and seek to ensure that they are put to good use. It isn’t out of the question that a reformed Twitter couldn’t do so. The epistemic commons of future societies will be shepherded by some kind of central institution. It then rests on us to imagine and build social technologies that could make this a positive outcome. The dream of the decentralized internet is dead, but hope for a future of unprecedented flourishing enabled by technology is very much alive.

The term “elites” has many connotations today, but early sociologists such as Max Weber or Vilfredo Pareto used it in a technical sense: the group of people that has a preponderant influence on society. They are those with power. A different use of the term “elite” can be found in phrases like “elite athlete,” which indicate someone at the top of a domain of skill. The two groups certainly overlap, but imperfectly. Narrowing our focus on the elites who endeavor to influence society, we notice that the standards by which success, and thus status as an elite, is measured are not universal. They vary with time, government structure, and other circumstances. Recognizing elites and navigating their world requires discerning the standards in play.

Those elites who exercise influence may be called the ruling class even though they are certainly not confined to government positions. The idea of an elite class implies selectivity and outsized social influence. The distribution of power in society probably looks something like the Pareto distribution—though not quite the same, because in a Pareto distribution there would be a single most powerful person who would be radically more powerful than the next most powerful person. Though this can be the case, societies can also be oligarchical, and in such systems, power levels between elites are much more evenly distributed. Discrepancies aside, in all cases the distribution of power in the total population does roughly follow a Pareto curve. Within the elite cluster, however, it depends on the shape of the society in question.

The Role of Elites in Society

Many view elites as by nature playing an adversarial role, the details in-line with the framework of one’s political views. While this is understandable, and many charges are levied rightfully in spirit if not in letter, it is too easy to confuse elite failure or dysfunction, even widespread, with a case against elites per se. In a time of failing institutions and frequent crises such as ours, it would not be right to exonerate elites from responsibility, perhaps quite the contrary. However, it is also worth noting that elites are not solely a negative influence on society, and in fact serve several crucial roles to its functioning. Without a functioning elite, we could not have a functioning society.

A society is best thought of as an ecosystem of mutually dependent institutions. Where those institutions are abundant, well-designed, and functional, we will find a flourishing society and civilization. Where they are few, poorly designed, or dysfunctional, we will find a broken and decaying society. Throughout history, the best institutions outperform others by many orders of magnitude—functional institutions are the exception. It is better to have one functional institution than one hundred dysfunctional ones.

Elites are necessary to marshal the requisite resources, talent, and enthusiasm to found new functional institutions and refound old ones. Nobody else has the influence and independence to do so. Founding an institution is very hard, founding a functional one much harder, and refounding a dysfunctional one perhaps the hardest of all. The difficulty is not just technical but also political. These tasks are hard enough for elites, much less you or me, and by succeeding at them, elites help create a flourishing society that benefits everyone. Furthermore, founding important functional institutions tends to rightfully make elites of those who found them. Without elites, we would have far fewer and far less functional institutions. A society without elites would necessarily decay and get worse for everyone in it.

Another important role that elites play is in the regulation of status and prestige within society. Not all societies in history have been motivated primarily by the same concerns. Some could be distinguished by their focus on economic concerns, others on scientific, martial, religious, or humanitarian ones. But all of them had a system of awarding, regulating, and seizing status and prestige and, in fact, that system is the engine that drives a society to concern itself with something or other beyond its mere survival.

Elites have the power to direct status and prestige to one activity or another, as Elon Musk assigns status to rocketry and space exploration today, or as many monarchs and leaders assigned status to scientific or artistic endeavors in the past. The assignment of status and prestige to one field or another will directly affect how much effort is put into it, and thus how much a society achieves in that field. America’s successful mission to the Moon began with an influential speech by JFK less than a decade earlier. He didn’t have to make that speech about landing on the Moon, but he did. Without that direction to beneficial ends, a society will simply achieve less.

All that said, it is also worth examining where elite power comes from in the first place. There are three major sources: formal positions within or proprietary knowledge of strategically relevant institutions, personal or professional connections to other elites or groups with which elites need to interact, and—simply—talent, like the “elite athlete.” When considering elites with influence on society, this usually means talent at persuasion, organizing, or strategy. It’s possible to become extremely influential in society through any of these means, but it often takes a combination of all three. Elites are fundamentally strategic, responding effectively to their environments and to other power players. Conventional signs of power, such as wealth, are usually derived from successful strategic maneuvering in one of the above three areas.

Formal Positions as Stepping Stones 

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, makes a good example of an elite whose power derived primarily from a formal position within a strategically relevant institution. While in office, Greenspan regularly made media statements that affected the economy by influencing market confidence, a tactic known as strategic communication management. This power was greatly enhanced by the fact that he had economists on speed dial to help select the right talking points. He also had direct access to government officials and top business leaders, and so could influence them personally and directly. And all that’s not even counting the direct political power over economic policy that he possessed.

But Greenspan’s public influence cannot be taken at face value. He has admitted that his remarks to reporters were sometimes intentionally nonsensical; his press conferences were mere efforts to look accountable, without any intention to impart real information. This illustrates a distinction between the formal reality, and the actual reality. The formal reality is that the Fed chairman is holding a press conference to inform you about the state of the economy. Acting under this assumption, journalists will disseminate his remarks whether or not they personally believe him to be speaking in good faith. The actual reality is one where the press conference has to be held as a matter of course, but where accurate information on the state of the economy couldn’t be shared while retaining the position.

This is characteristic of modern Western elites, selected for their ability to advance a narrative, or, at the very least, obscure challenges to it. What looks like idiocy or confusion can often be tactical, especially in a “transparent” and televisual era where something has to be said. Donald Trump’s weaponized distraction is now well-known; but while his style is unique, the chaos that results is not. Nancy Pelosi is known for being intentionally confusing in remarks to the press, obscuring her next move. When dealing with the statements and actions of elites, one must be careful not to automatically take them at face value. The ability to get away with making seemingly “bad” decisions is often an indicator of power, as one might hypothesize in the cases of Donald Trump, Kanye West, or a multitude of other celebrities.

Networks and Strategy 

Elites tend to be very good at defending against attacks and at self-presentation, either publicly or interpersonally. This brings us to the second source of elite power: the ability to easily identify allies and close ranks against rivals. As with institutional position, exceptional ability can feed into this source of power. For example, being very good at understanding what people want and helping them get it can allow one to build and maintain a quality elite network. It is also important to understand where the lines are drawn—who is really on whose “side,” and which disputes are more performative than substantive. This requires an ability to distinguish form from substance in complex social situations.

It also means keeping track of shifting elite coalitions–people and factions change sides depending on their interests, and as new elites are introduced. Pareto emphasized the necessity of bringing in “newer and more capable elements from the underlying population” for a functional elite class. In a world with multiple centers of power, distinct elite classes arise and the balance of power shifts. Participating in an elite circle means identifying the power landscape, the players in it, and the players’ objectives.

This is not a task that can be accomplished merely with reference to image, credentials, position, and style. After identifying the interests of power, the task for those who would participate in elite circles is one of aligning with those interests. For example, the Queen of England’s power derives from staying above the fray: it would be a mistake for her to try and increase it by revealing more of her personal beliefs to the public, despite the path to celebrity this often provides. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have recently and famously learned that increased public exposure correlates with decreased royal prestige.

However, there are ways to acquire an elite network without having conventional social skills, especially during crises or unusual situations. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet during the American Civil War, often distorted into a story of bipartisan compromise, actually describes a very interesting case of this dynamic. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was not one to just go along with things, to put it mildly: he had a volcanic temper. He was known to be extremely insulting and disagreeable; even, allegedly, to Lincoln himself, years before the war.

But with Lincoln’s sociable first Secretary of War dogged by corruption allegations, Stanton’s disagreeableness induced the public to place trust in his fidelity to the public interest. They knew he wasn’t easily socially influenced or concerned with looking good. His immense administrative and intellectual talent made him indispensable to the war effort and his personality allowed him to convincingly play “bad cop” to Lincoln’s “good cop.” Some believed him hostile to Lincoln, but this was largely performative or a temporary, impersonal outburst.

Another elite strategy is adhering to a predefined strategic role, such as a hereditary monarchy rooted in historical continuity. It has been said that Queen Elizabeth II’s responsibility during World War II was the same as that of every British citizen: to be unbroken, to provide a symbol of stability, to be equanimous in the face of any hardship. Her personal talent at fulfilling this role so gracefully is not the source of her elite status, but it increases her power and helps preserve it. A general understanding of elite dynamics allows other elites, especially rising elites, to tailor their advice and strategic alignment to specific situations.

Queen Elizabeth obviously wouldn’t be well served by adopting Donald Trump’s Twitter style, since the monarchy’s legitimacy currently rests on the unifying purpose of being “above it all,” and especially above political strife. She certainly has political opinions; developing opinions is an occupational hazard in her position—she’s seen state security decisions, national policy, and law made for 70 years—yet, we don’t know them. This ambiguity is an intentionally crafted state of affairs that she has maintained for 70 years.

How Rising Elites Join the Ruling Class

How are Pareto’s “newer and more capable elements from the underlying population” brought in to join the elite class?

Typically, elites search for assistance from people who are, in plain language, useful. There are many ways for a rising elite to be useful. One could provide a rare or valuable resource, as in the case of Michael Bloomberg, whose first big success was in selling financial data through the Bloomberg Terminal. One could provide a crucial skill, as in the case of Robert Clive, whose military abilities during the conquest of India lifted him from an unremarkable East India Company clerk to become a major-general and governor of Bengal. One could provide the ability to make deals on behalf of a non-elite class with whom one is influential, as in the case of Martin Luther King Jr., whose ability to broker compromises with sympathetic elite factions gave him the leverage to transform America’s racial politics.

Since existing elites are defined by their ability to secure and maintain power, being sensitive to power dynamics is key to forming connections with them. A rising elite must possess such an understanding in order to offer useful advice or assistance to elites: if they miscalculate, they will be a liability rather than an asset. They must also demonstrate that they have the judgment and loyalty not to use any information they may be given against their elite counterpart who provided it. In other words, both the ability to provide value and demonstration of loyalty to an elite’s interest—a mutual interest—must be established for collaboration to make sense.

How does a rising elite gain access to begin with? The role of elite universities and other elite institutions in networking and ladder-climbing is well-known, but a simpler way is to directly exchange knowledge. This could come from requesting advice, if done in the correct way. Benjamin Franklin, an archetypal example of a rising elite in colonial America, described how asking a rival in the Pennsylvania state legislature to lend him a rare book proved to be a good way to end their rivalry. Why should granting someone a favor increase your regard for them? More even than receiving a favor from them! Such a seemingly irrational outcome has been termed the “Ben Franklin Effect” by contemporary psychologists. Rather than assuming irrationality, I find an alternative explanation more convincing: the giver of the favor is examining what you might achieve with it. Favors are overtures towards partnership that require follow-up on the part of the rising elite. Were the receiver of the favor not as driven Ben Franklin, I doubt it would have had the effect in question.

A different approach is to make information that elites will find useful public, then hoping they see it. This can be especially valuable in niche areas, where there is, by definition, less competition. It also involves an element of generosity and a lack of clear short-term benefit. Elites are used to being approached by people who want something or allegedly have good advice, and they’re used to getting out of such conversations, so gestures of goodwill and trust like this give them a reason to keep listening. For example, in intellectual fields, the communication and data made available by the internet allow for elites to find capable collaborators outside of traditional institutions. Extensive research can now be done from anywhere, not only by people with access to archives and databases at universities and libraries. This transformation of the information ecology has led some elites to try new approaches, and this may intensify in coming years.

Once a rising elite gets a chance to present their case, they must make sure they understand the situation and desires of the person they are interacting with. Institutional analysis serves as one useful way to do this. An example of this sort of analysis would be to look at all the seats the Queen of England currently occupies—all of her institutional positions—and figure out how to improve her position. What hasn’t she thought of yet? Which institutions and players would stop her from pursuing such action? To discuss such sensitive information, a rising elite would have to earn a great deal of trust. This is difficult, but achievable with skilled and careful action.

What kind of information would elites likely appreciate? A rising elite might identify areas of interest to the existing elite and determine what might advance their efforts. They would want to demonstrate that they have the missing piece of a larger puzzle: this may induce an existing elite to share information to see if the rising player can infer something from it that they cannot. This would not necessarily be because the rising player possesses superior intelligence or knowledge of the particular matter, but because they are coming at the issue from a different perspective or background. They could identify a flaw in the established elite’s institution or approach, or suggest an overlooked improvement. They could identify an institution that would make a valuable acquisition, but that the existing elite hasn’t considered pursuing. They could spot a gap in their elite network, and even fill that gap with an introduction to someone with the connections or abilities they lack.

Elites hold preponderant influence over society, but are not necessarily fully coordinated. There can be stray individuals, incomplete networks, or mutually competing networks that might have imperfect information about each other, possibly leading to elite conflict. A rising elite that has put in the legwork to study existing elites can be very helpful in filling in gaps of this sort by spotting elites with complementary abilities or connections. Elites may also have preferences for or aversions to working with people of certain types of personality, style, or areas of interest. These may not be easy to discern at first, so a rising elite must watch carefully for patterns. This incentive for rising elites to create greater coordination does in fact produce more coordination, thus allowing elites to spend more time cooperating and less time battling each other, with positive results for society as a whole.

The inner workings of elite networks, whether existing or rising, are often opaque, but ripple throughout society. Only by coming to understand, empathize with, and analyze these inner workings, and by understanding these dynamics of elite behavior and strategy, can we make sense of society at all—and by engaging its real dynamics, reshape it.

Like material technologies, people can develop social technologies to facilitate the flourishing of society and its people. One might naturally wonder whether great social technology has ever been lost. Just as material technologies like the Antikythera mechanism can be forgotten or destroyed, are some social technologies lost to history?

Ancient China may be one such case—specifically the Shang and Early Zhou dynasties, from roughly 1600 BC to 800 BC. That era met its end as relevant knowledge on how to govern the country was corrupted and lost during the Later Zhou dynasty. With the knowledge fragmented and missing, societal decay ensued. The Warring States Period, which extended from the 5th century to the 3rd century BC, was a chaotic era which resulted from the disrepair and malfunction of this social technology. This spurred the era’s leading thinkers to recognize what was happening, albeit quite late in the process, when it was too late in many ways.

However, that these thinkers recognized what was happening at all is important and noteworthy. The blatant decline of the late Roman Empire did not lead its great thinkers to do the same. The insights and debates of the Later Zhou dynasty about the social technologies behind civilization are worth studying to apply to our own era.

What to Do When Civilization Is Breaking Down

The major figures of China’s intellectual renewal came to define the famous Hundred Schools of Thought. China was unusually sophisticated when compared to the other great powers of the era. Archaeological evidence from the period documents impressive bronze works, superior to anything fashioned in the Middle East. The Zhou inherited the use of beautiful, ornamented bronze vessels called ding from earlier dynasties, using them both in sacred rituals and to symbolize temporal wealth and power. The Early Zhou dynasty spent as much bronze on these vessels as they did on their all-important bronze weaponry. This confounds modern assumptions that ancient societies did not have the material surplus to invest in “non-essentials,” often given as a reason why they appeared to remain in stasis, with little development. In fact, this period in history saw important thinkers even argue against unproductive use of wealth, a stance which would be meaningless unless that kind of investment was normal and prominent.

The assumption that these vessels represent mere luxury is unfounded. Western cathedrals are, on their face, an unproductive use of resources. But in fact, they played a central role in the social order as vehicles of coordination, ritual, legitimacy for power, and social assistance. The willingness of the Zhou rulers to invest huge resources in bronze ding implies that they played a crucial role in the social technology of the day—if one which was lost over time. The value of Zhou social technology can literally be measured in the weight of the precious bronze alloy, and was at least as important as their weaponry.

Even the period’s monumental construction suggests great skill at coordinating experts. Archaeological remains indicate palace buildings and towers of rammed earth and timber. Zhou-era art depicts two-story buildings, possibly for ritual purposes. The decay of these structures makes it difficult to know whether this era, seen by later periods as a golden age, made even greater accomplishments. When Lao Tzu blithely references a nine-story tower in one of the Tao Te Ching’s meditations, is this fantastical musing, or a reference to a real achievement—or at least an attempt? Written sources from the time point to a sophisticated feudalistic society. Reading them today reminds one of medieval Japan two thousand years later, in ways the imperial and bureaucratic China of later eras—that more obviously influenced Japan as we know it—does not.

When confronted with remarkable achievements from the past, archaeologists have been at a loss as to how to explain them. Sometimes, people will fill the gaps with fantastical theories—hence the beliefs about aliens or telepaths building the Egyptian pyramids. A more likely scenario is that either we have lost the memory of certain material technologies or of social technologies which could compensate for them. Which social technologies allowed China to achieve its feats?

Reverse-Engineering Civilization

Confucius, who died just a few years before the Warring States period, has a popular reputation among Westerners today for the wise sayings attributed to him. But his true project was to discover and restore the practices which had made the Zhou dynasty great. By doing so, he believed a ruler could renew an entire society, bringing a decayed, dysfunctional state and people back to health. This was to be achieved with the proper application of rituals by sufficiently virtuous rulers. By pursuing the correct relationships and rites, they could correct the damage done by the decline of the Zhou social order and the resulting warfare. Confucius focused on ascertaining both the correct rituals and the means with which to achieve virtue (德) in rulers. The meaning of 德 is subtle; perhaps it should be thought of as including what we might today understand as prestige, an important resource for any statesman. He crafted his philosophy by extensive research and study of the Zhou dynasty and its predecessors, attempting to reverse-engineer and understand the lost knowledge of the Early Zhou. Confucius sought to fill the gaps in his understanding of social technology by close study of the ritual and literature of a society which no longer existed.

The role of harmonious social relationships is the most widely known attribute of Confucian teaching. But an aspect that is overlooked is Confucius’ emphasis on the traditional Chinese rites. In particular, Confucius was obsessed with the classical Book of Changes, also known as the I Ching, authored by King Wen, the founder of the Zhou dynasty. The prestige King Wen gained through writing the work was part of what allowed the Zhou dynasty to rise over the even more ancient Shang dynasty in the first place and has been variously studied as a great philosophical text, a tool of divination, and a source of mathematical inspiration. Confucius’ interpretation of this work has been respected ever since. However, they were only possible because the original applications of the Book of Changes, whatever they were, had been totally forgotten by his time. Its importance to the Zhou dynasty was uncontestable—yet the original reasons for that importance were nearly impossible to know for certain.

Confucius died thinking himself a failure. He didn’t manage to get a ruler to adopt his solution long enough for a full-scale test. Though he was able to gain the ears of a few statesmen, he lost political fights to other advisers and so fell from favor.

The Book of Changes was merely one instance of a wider problem. The longer social technologies exist, the more varied the understanding of them becomes. The original contexts for their existence can change, or translation errors can occur in their reproduction. Which practices were fundamental to the success of the Early Zhou and their great predecessor dynasties? Which were simply relics? If fundamental, could they even be reproduced in the modern context? It isn’t at all clear that you can reboot the social technology of an essentially intact empire in order to reforge it after it’s broken. Perhaps in the very long run they are identical, but how long do you have to put the shards back together? Confucius’ rivals challenged him on all these grounds.

The Advantages of Jerry-Rigging Civilization

Among his most prominent opponents were the Legalists. Han Fei, who was the great synthesizer of this school during the Warring States era, attacked the Confucian approach several hundred years after Confucius’ death. Han Fei repudiated the notion of following the ancients, instead championing an empirical approach in the Han Feizi: “[T]he sage neither seeks to follow the ways of the ancients nor establishes any fixed standard for all times, but examines the things of his age and then prepares to deal with them.”

To illustrate this point, he compared the Confucian-style approach to a farmer who once caught a hare after it broke its own neck by running into a stump, and then abandoned farming to wait for more hares. In other words, the fact that something worked once doesn’t mean it will work in the future. That things worked in the past was perhaps due to luck or coincidence or conditions that are no longer the case, and so imitating past practices does not guarantee success.

While Han Fei is an important representative of the school, most Legalists were not skeptical of the existence of lost knowledge. Rather, they considered restoring or recovering this knowledge to be impractical. Rather than discussing virtue or harmony, they aimed to design a quick and dirty system built from easily ascertainable first principles so as to save their society in time. Unlike Confucius himself, the Legalists succeeded at a very hard task. Their solution was crafted to allow a king to conquer China, and one did: Qin Shi Huang. The empire fragmented 11 years later after his death, but the Qin dynasty’s successes influenced nearly all the regimes which followed it to adopt China’s well-known centralization and administrative continuity. Their legacy was strong enough that Mao’s China rehabilitated Legalism as a progressive element, unlike the “reactionary” Confucians.

Legalists wouldn’t have the last word, however. While Legalism had solved the problem of reforging the broken empire, building social technologies that substantially facilitated unity, those technologies were not wholly adequate for stability.

The reforged empire proved brittle. After the death of the founding Emperor Qin Shi Huang, devastating rebellions broke out, tearing the new state apart. The harsh laws were built on the Legalist assumption that elites could never be trusted. This assumption had two acute issues. One, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: confident in their read on human nature, Legalist courtiers distrusted each other as much as adherents of rival philosophies. A Confucian-style focus on filial piety might have proven more effective.

Two, it biased laws and measures towards a harshness that was sometimes counter-productive. The rebellion of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang began when the two commanders were delayed moving their troops by heavy rainstorms. This seems trivial and excusable enough, but a philosophy built on distrust was suspicious of excuses, and the law mandated the death penalty. They reasoned: “If we do nothing, we’re dead, if we rebel we’re dead. Rather than waiting for death, we might as well die for our own kingdom!”

A system can be functional in the founding generation, but rapidly dissolve after the founders are gone. The Legalists had underestimated the necessity of continuity. The special knowledge required to govern a large and complex civilization cannot be reinvented every generation. Since any ruler’s capability for learning and evolution is limited—and some are far less talented than others—dynasties only last a long time when the collective knowledge they possess makes up for the failings or mistakes of any given generation. If the success of the Zhou Dynasty was as arbitrary as the success of the farmer in Han Fei’s parable, it would not have persisted for so long—about 800 years, by far the longest-lasting dynasty in the consensus history of China (excluding ones we deem mythical).

Merely arbitrary success doesn’t extend over hundreds of years. Rather, success of this kind is the result of persistent skillful action, and skill is founded upon knowledge. This doesn’t rule out the hypothesis that a change in conditions made the old knowledge no longer effective, but that is a hard thesis to prove. After all, the institutional knowledge worked for hundreds of years, a period that encompasses many changes in conditions. More importantly, if there are sociological principles that are true in sufficiently large sets of possible conditions, then that knowledge can be reacquired.

But, the Legalists might have argued, aren’t societies naturally robust, able to churn on for centuries without anyone in them having special knowledge? Perhaps functionality is not so difficult in most conditions and doesn’t require special knowledge. Catastrophe strikes only on very rare occasions.

This objection understates the reality of decline. The collapse of a civilization might be a rare event, but it isn’t all that rare. Every millennium sees some empires rise and others fall. This collapse can occur in just decades, or even a few years. This happened in India’s ancient Harappan civilization and in the Middle Eastern Bronze Age Collapse. It’s worth noting that the civilization of the Middle Eastern Late Bronze Age was at a similar level of material development as the early Zhou and nearly contemporary with them. The features many consider unique to Chinese civilization—its longevity, cultural continuity, stability, and robustness to disasters—are seen in a much weaker form in later time periods.

Under the Han dynasty, successor to the Qin, many of the precedents set by the Legalists were integrated into a Confucian framework by a new generation of statesmen and thinkers. Confucianism had been unable to rebuild China purely by replicating previous social technology. There, Legalist pragmatism proved more effective. But in order to provide continuity once new states arose, Confucianism proved adept at sustaining the system’s functionality. Their focus on the continuity of knowledge, by handing it down to future generations through custom and teaching, let them ensure that the achievements of dynastic founders would live on through their successors. Since then, Confucianism has remained a bedrock of Chinese civilization, returned to again and again by rulers—with impressive results.

The Balance of Harmony and Power

The distinctiveness of these schools’ approaches is evident in the way each engaged the great third force of the Hundred Schools: Taoism.

Lao Tzu is another impressive figure of the late Zhou period. Compared to Confucius, his approach was based less on the study of social technological artifacts and more on a strong understanding of the realities behind them. According to Taoist accounts, he was court librarian of the Zhou, caretaker for a very old and extensive but decaying cache of knowledge. Given his exceptional intelligence and access to relevant texts, he might have been better positioned to follow this approach than anyone else at the time. This is attested to by the fact that Confucius was said to have sought him out for information about a book on ritual.

But unlike either of the other schools, Lao Tzu’s tradition focused on internal practice and distanced itself from social and political involvement. Later legends all depict Lao Tzu as journeying away at the end of his life and vanishing from history. The relationship between Confucianism and Taoism was critical, particularly from the Taoist side. While both emphasized harmony, the former’s definition was social, while the latter focused on harmony with nature. This individualism and anti-social bias had consequences all through Chinese history. Virulent strains of Taoist thought informed cults like the Yellow Turbans during their rebellions and contributed to a Chinese suspicion of cult activity that lasts to this day.

Its individualism also put it at apparent odds with Legalism’s infamously harsh focus on order. But despite their extreme differences, Taoism agreed with Legalism that one could not rely on the past for wisdom. This pragmatism in fact led Legalist luminaries to be influenced by Taoist thought. When Taoist teaching began to organize itself into a ritualistic and religious force in the Huang-Lao school, its influence on political thought was through Legalist engagement, including by Han Fei himself. In this reading, Taoist concepts like wu wei—action without effort—refer to the Emperor’s total separation from his ministers, and the requirement that the Emperor’s will demand the same obedience as any force of nature.

All three of these great schools would play central roles in Chinese thought and practice after the Zhou dynasty’s fall. But in each case, they evolved beyond the original intents of their founders. The Legalist and Taoist focus on learning from nature and observance let their adherents bootstrap entire states by doing what worked and abandoning what did not. Moreover, the Legalist appropriation of Taoism made its concepts amenable to state power in a way that its more extreme expressions could not be. But depending on each individual or generation to re-learn the basics could never be a sustainable task. Legalism’s total focus on strategy and power could become a liability if it undermined the regime’s continuity. Confucianism was not able to fully learn and re-establish the social technology of China’s golden ages. However, its insight that such knowledge had to be maintained in order for a civilization to last secured its ascendancy in regimes which its rivals established, but could not maintain themselves.

Each school was able to identify and re-engineer admirable and possibly unique features of epistemic health, stability, and prosperity of later Chinese civilization. These were features the early Zhou displayed in great abundance. This collective fruit provides the greatest lesson for those studying social technology: the loss of this knowledge is common, but a permanent loss is rare. All that is needed is the right ruler or thinker for society to learn it anew.

From the design bureau’s office politics, to the organization of industry, to consumer behavior, to national security, social technologies enable and regulate what technology we use and how we use it. Without socialization, most of us wouldn’t know how to use any particular technology, or even what it was made for. Technology only reproduces itself through instruction or imitation—and only when embedded in the larger social organism that puts it to use. Every device not only has a manual but a social context. It is then social rather than material facts that drive or hinder the development and adoption of technology. The technologies we integrate into society become the foundation on which future technologies are built. We accept or reject technology together as a society.

When we talk about technology, we are talking about mass use of smartphones, gigantic interstate highways, a laptop in every lap, and so on. We are not thinking about a lone tinkerer’s invention. The reason is that technology can’t be sustained by individual genius or fancy for long. The succession problem is an obstacle that snuffs out even the most brilliant spark. Archimedes’ elaborate weapons of war only vexed the Romans until his execution by a legionary. Many technologies are only feasible at scale.

Invention itself is rare, but more common than most assume. Many marvelous machines are built to satiate a craftsman’s curiosity, or to amuse and impress the wealthy. An 18th century automaton with beautiful penmanship is technically impressive but of little or no historical consequence. The self-driving cars of the 2010s may prove to be similar machines. They are novelties to show off the technical talent and capacity of particular laboratories rather than something on the cusp of practical use.

An invention does not achieve adoption because of its mere existence, but only when it has found a stable socioeconomic niche. This is the difference between an invention and a technology. The archetype of the blacksmith cannot be reduced to any mere individual, nor to a set of tools, but personalizes an entire socioeconomic niche—one deeply entwined with our thought and life over millennia. These archetypes are even reflected in myths of settled societies instructing us how to think, how to live, and what dangers to avoid. When a technology is so deeply embedded in social practice, it can even survive the collapse of civilizations. The ancient Greeks may be long gone, but their tale of the divine blacksmith Hephaestus and the goddess Aphrodite still serves to warn us of the dangers of neglecting your spouse for your craft.

Since the industrial revolution, the more machines that are used, the cheaper they become. It became viable to build socioeconomic niches based on mass adoption. This adoption at scale is what gives rise to highly centralized halls of production. Factories are enabled by economies of scale and the efficiency of ever narrower specialization combined with the oversight of engineers to optimize entire assembly lines. The industrialist can glance through a single hall and see all stages of car production laid out in front of him. Ideas for how to improve the production process might be justified with lines in spreadsheets, but they originate in seeing and looking. Since the bottleneck on production of machines is almost never the resources used, scaling up the factory only improves these economies.

Getting people to work in these halls was a entirely separate challenge. The industrial revolution required a breakthrough in the ability to educate masses of people on how to use new machinery. This was achieved with a kind of military discipline, using methods learned from prisons, crowd control, and army management to convert recently urbanized farmers into obedient workers. These methods were much parodied and bemoaned in the early 20th century in silent films such as Metropolis or Chaplin’s Modern Times. The rapid spread of the state-mandated Prussian model of education as an aid in economic development owes as much to preparing workers for a lifetime of such discipline as it does to loftier goals like imparting literacy.

Eventually, most of society was subsumed into new industrial forms of life. But this new breed of worker isn’t merely a cog on the producing side of the equation. Factories are naturally consumers for other factories. But what about consumption outside of factories? Production at scale requires mass adoption. During war, military orders are the driving demand. Two or three million steel helmets and three to five thousand tanks can certainly sustain a whole ecosystem of socioeconomic niches. But no society can wage war forever, even if wartime is the origin of much of technology. Militaries lose the ability to tell good designs apart from bad due to institutional decay during long periods of peace, and without active demand, productive capacity decays from lack of use. A big picture perspective on national security recognizes and plans for this contingency, since war eventually always returns.

A peacetime alternative for sustaining a technology is to make it necessary for participation in society and in everyday life. Coincidentally, the mass education and training of the new industrial society created new consumers as well. Urban workers become not just a labor force for one factory but part of a growing market of consumers for many factories.

Why is a car part of normal life and behavior? To introduce the mass use of a car, you have to teach many drivers how to drive, but it is less obvious that you also have to teach these drivers where to drive and invent those places if they do not yet exist: commuting to work from the suburb. Holiday trips. Perhaps shopping. Maybe a trip to a fast food restaurant. Those last tasks are sometimes recognized as engineered desires, but they are also engineered social patterns. It’s one thing simply to build one car or a million cars—it’s another matter to make people want to learn to drive, to give them the roads and highways to drive on, and make the car the cornerstone of modern transportation.

These social patterns and institutions were designed, not discovered. Once designed, we were instructed how to participate in them, to support their economies of scale. The advertisement doesn’t merely tell us what to want; it shows us how and why to want it. One key result of this engineered social change is that useful industrial capacity is sustained and improved.

Changing consumer behavior at scale through mass marketing was perhaps one of the greatest breakthroughs in social engineering to match newly available technology. Familiar marketing techniques are recognizable in the work of American evangelists in the 18th and 19th century. Every few decades, traveling preachers and mass pamphleteering would change the demographic balance between denominations and the religious practices of an entire generation. Historians have termed such periods ‘Great Awakenings.’ Mormonism is a uniquely American faith whose rapid growth best shows how effective the techniques are. Marketing was further perfected and developed with the arrival of Viennese psychology to the U.S. in the 20th century and ultimately applied to political and economic behavior, as described well by Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays in his 1928 book Propaganda. The same methods that portray cigarettes as torches of freedom can later make them harbingers of cancer.

The post-Communist Eastern Europe of my childhood in the early 1990s was a world where mobile phones were introduced at the same time as many people were purchasing their first dishwashers and microwaves. This consumer-accessible bounty in technical and electronic equipment convinced my 7-year-old self that immense technological progress was inevitable. The futurists I watched on the English-speaking Discovery channel agreed; they predicted that in the distant future of 2020, we would merge with AI, leaving our physical bodies behind.

We were all wrong. There might have been a rise in living standards, but it wasn’t evidence of how often new technology was invented or even how much technology was integrated into society. America and then Western Europe had learned how to integrate the microwave into society long ago.

America excels at early and widespread adoption of novelty. Marketing, both ideological and economic, remains one of America’s key strategic advantages. The strange focus of state-sponsored Depression-era propaganda on consumption becomes understandable in this light. As a consequence, the 20th century citizens of the U.S. didn’t embark on consumption as mere personal indulgence—but as a pro-social and patriotic duty, acting on the highest authority of the land. The purpose was to create a social order which sustained particular technologies and industries. In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush called on Americans to go shopping and travel to Disney World as an act of defiance against the terrorist goal of instilling fear. Without consumption, the American machine stops. Something else may take its place.

Not all of our advanced technologies can be stabilized into social niches through mass production and adoption. No technology originates in mass adoption itself. For something to be marketed by either Steve Jobs’ Apple or FDR’s National Recovery Administration, it first must be invented and developed. The acceptance or rejection of a technology isn’t just a matter of the whole society adopting it all at once. Rather, particular organizations first develop the technology and then undertake—much like Mormon missionaries—to alter society to accept it.

Surprisingly, even organizations dedicated to the creation of new technologies seem to become hostile to innovation over time. The underlying reason is that contrarian ideas—as all new technologies are by definition—almost never survive committees. How could they? By their very nature, they cannot have the majority on their side. If they do, it is because they have a powerful champion who has cornered the committee, an uncommon skill. This simple observation rules out the most frequently proposed reforms of philanthropy, academia, and government as ways to kickstart innovation. It opens up new ones, too.

Committees are commonly used in our society because they create the illusion of avoiding risk. They are a wonderful device for avoiding responsibility while making the institution seem more rather than less accountable. Modern institutions have overloaded on actual risk while fleeing the appearance of it, especially if you count “failing at core mission” as a risk. Such aversion to the appearance of the unusual can’t be justified on economic grounds. Rather, it is a socially driven aversion. There is no immediate reward for making a meeting awkward either in the boardroom or the engineering room. There’s not even a reward for making it surprising.

In a start-up, a difficult and aggressive personality might suffice at first. But larger corporate and government-directed technological efforts work best when they are clearly goal-oriented. Whether the Manhattan Project of the Trinity Test or the NASA which put a man on the Moon, there was a clear objective, backed by enough power to overcome social inertia. A functional institution is much easier to design if you have a yardstick with which to measure it and the political power to build it. For Oppenheimer’s bomb project, the yardstick was creating a weapon that was usable before the Germans and Japanese were defeated by conventional means. For Wernher von Braun’s NASA, it was landing a man on the moon in one decade, and most importantly, before the Soviets.

Oppenheimer and Von Braun both received temporary grants of political mandate, revoked with more or less fanfare after their missions were accomplished. Their projects are excellent examples of how power centers benefit from lending power to achieve a technical objective. Their Cold War fruits are also perhaps examples of why we sometimes question the very legitimacy of technology. There is, however, no way out but through. Either social or material technology must devise solutions to such problems.

The Los Alamos and NASA of today aren’t focused on external goals, but rather on self-preservation and defending their budgets. Neither is very effective, and they mostly subsist on prestige earned long ago. Their social machinery has grown too unfocused to be able to build and maintain the technological breakthroughs they once could. Significant failures come as a surprise, purported to be completely unpredictable. As the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman noted in the Report of the Presidential Commission on the infamous Challenger accident that killed seven astronauts:

There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before. Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case…Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space…For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Feynman could only contrast the Challenger disaster with the functional Los Alamos he knew in his youth. This 1986 critique of NASA reads only more damning as the agency approaches nearly one decade since its last manned flight on July 8th, 2011, when it retired the 1970s designed Space Shuttle.

In its place is the Demo-2 mission, which is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and bring two astronauts into orbit on an American rocket. Demo-2 is the result of a functional institution—but rather than a revived NASA, it is SpaceX, a comparatively new private company. This is not a success of privatization but circumvention. Live players like Elon Musk find ways to maneuver around decaying bureaucracies, at times delivering good results to their dysfunctional patron, even when the patron does their best to stop them. This process of new development has been an act of social as much as material engineering. Musk has had to maneuver politically to make room for SpaceX, to spin new visions of space exploration to motivate and raise the status of his engineers, and even to manufacture his own demand for his technology.

Plain language accounts of technology’s social origin are few and far between, both because it is a demanding subject in its own right and because we’ve built our society around several distinct and mutually incompatible stories about this powerful force. The stories are planks of everything from the ethical standards of professions to the legitimacy of government institutions. Almost no written theory is intended to be a practical guide to shaping such progress. Rather, it is written to inspire individual technical skill or to legitimize economic and political arrangements. Ideally both.

Many scientific hagiographies take the romance and achievements of historical scientists, industrialists, and inventors and then transfer these halos to institutions that would have never tolerated those pioneers in the first place. The Teslas and Fords of the world are many things, but they are not agreeable to us. This invites distrust, sometimes justified. The groundbreaking computer scientist Alan Turing was likely killed by British intelligence on suspicion of Soviet espionage, in what was for generations described as a tragic suicide. Teenagers motivated to master technical subjects by the promise of moving history eventually find themselves harnessed by romanticized but declining institutions that go to great lengths to ensure that history moves no further—such as Google or contemporary Los Alamos.

Any pursuit which requires developing implicit expertise and repeated practice will benefit from individual instruction. The esoteric and well-grounded knowledge needed for creation can’t be achieved at industrial scales and tolerances. If you attempt to lop off one end of a bell curve, you’ll always lop off both. Bureaucratic evaluation of people at scale, no matter how much it is aimed at merit, ultimately always first tests to see if someone is an outlier. A mass system has no more place for outliers than an assembly line. Perhaps this makes Six Sigma the M-theory of all theories of government espoused by the great powers of the 20th century. The industrial mass society we built to sustain and utilize many of our technologies undermines the creation of new ones.

Describing how things are is almost always understood to be an implicit justification for how things should or could be. Hume’s Is-Ought Problem is notable precisely because everyone ignores it. An account of the social origin of technology, then, necessarily carries political weight. This weight can be well-suited to a revolutionary payload, as was well-demonstrated by Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. Shaping history through technology requires precisely such an understanding, however. So this is a risk worth taking.

Botswana is possibly the nicest place in Africa—it is quieter and more stable than, say, Greece. In the entire period since independence, Botswana has not suffered devastating civil wars like those in the Congo or Mozambique, coups such as in Burkina Faso, or ethnic violence and expropriation as seen in Rwanda and Zimbabwe.

The country’s living standards are comparable to Turkey, Mexico, and South Africa. It has also been Sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growing economy for most of the last half-century.

The crucial variable is a sound government making well-informed, long-term choices. A low population density paired with abundant natural resources provides a reasonable standard of living even in the absence of administrative genius or favorable conditions, so long as governance provides stability. Political instability can impede development of physical infrastructure and the business environment, transforming good fundamentals into a bad outcome. See, for example, Kazakhstan compared to Venezuela.

Unfortunately, there are many examples of countries that have tried and failed to achieve good governance in the often chaotic post-colonial context. These countries followed Western advice as closely as they could, drafting legally impeccable constitutions and recruiting well-educated statesmen, but the results have been mixed at best. Botswana’s positive outlier example raises the question of how it has done so well.

Good government starts with good leadership. Here is the list of heads of state of Botswana over the last hundred years:

• King Khama III, who reigned 1875–1923, decided to join the British Empire.
• President Seretse Khama, the grandson of Khama III, led the effort to leave the British Empire. He held office for 14 years, from 1966 to 1980.
• President Quett Masire served as Seretse Khama’s vice president. He held office for 18 years, from 1980 to 1998.
• President Festus Mogae served as Quett Masire’s vice president. He held office for 10 years, from 1998 to 2008.
• President Ian Khama, son of Seretse Khama, great-grandson of King Khama III, served as Festus Mogae’s vice president. He held office for 10 years, from 2008 to 2018.
• President Mokgweetsi Masisi served as Ian Khama’s vice president, and is the current president since 2018.

Given these clear personal, political, and familial ties between the heads of state, it seems that Botswana is actually an unofficial adoptive monarchy around the old royal family, quite similar to the case of the Roman Empire, where the head of state picks the successor and gives him the junior position.

In the paradigm of contemporary political science, such an arrangement is usually taken as a negative sign. We are used to thinking of political dynasties and close alliances among insiders to be cardinal signs of corruption.

This negative association is at least somewhat the result of cherry-picking. We focus on political dynasties in failed or rogue states, but minimize their very real role in successful Western states. The modern West has its dynasties, most famously the Bushes and Kennedys. This is an open secret. Statistically, one of the best qualifications for being a U.S. governor is descent from one.

But since America’s national mythology is revolutionary, and our institutions claim legitimacy from technocratic grounds of impartiality, we tend to view such dynasties negatively—when we acknowledge them at all. It might be that Western states are successful in spite of such dynasties, but even then, we can’t claim this is a crucial distinguishing factor between well- and poorly governed states.

Further, as argued by Gregory Clarke in his book The Son Also Rises, social mobility is about the same in all societies, and is much lower than we usually propose. Regardless of how meritocratic a system claims to be, power tends to remain in the same families.

Since the same people tend to come up on top overall, the rough composition of the elites in a country will not be significantly different if it implements meritocratic policies or not. The key difference between functionality and dysfunctionality is in the institutional mechanisms the elites use to cooperate with each other, rather than just the selection or composition of elites.

The arrangement we see in Botswana—where the previous head of state publicly declares a successor—solves the problem of power succession. This both helps prevent organizational sclerosis and renders succession conflicts unlikely. Many post-colonial states struggle with the problem of succession. Civil wars and coups are endemic. It is open to discussion how much of this is the result of internally driven miscoordination, and how much is due to destabilizing foreign interventions, especially during the Cold War. But at least some of the instability is internally driven.

Botswana avoided Cold War–driven instabilities by aligning with the West, but positioning itself such that the USSR had no interest in overthrowing it. Botswana was a thorn in the side of South Africa, and useful to the USSR, by sometimes allowing the communist-aligned ANC to operate in its territory. The Soviets may have worried that a revolution would simply result in a South African invasion. Thus, the only communists active in Botswanan politics were small Maoist and Trotskyist groups.

Other countries having disunified elites—possibly as a result of foreign interference—contrasts with the relative high trust that exists between elites in Botswana. In various countries around the world, there is rivalry between civilian and military leadership. When trust and coordination are low, the military and civilian government distrust each other, and there’s no simple bridge between the two. For example, the Communist Party of China may not wish to allow the People’s Liberation Army to become too independent or strong, since this would make a coup viable.

In such situations, if the military remains an effective organization, ambition will often be sated by directly deploying the military to subordinate the civilian government and make war on the elites in control of it. At best, this results in a coup. At worst, a civil war.

Ian Khama resigning from the military before entering civilian politics, rather than using the position of general to install himself directly, however, is an example of the way military leaders can acquire political power without setting a precedent for coups. One of the key variables in determining whether a country has a coup is how many coups it has had in the past. It further demonstrates a degree of coordination and deal-keeping among elites. There is a direct analogy here to the practice of successful U.S. generals who became president, such as George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. That military leaders can rise to power through the civilian government demonstrates a high level of trust among Botswanan elites absent in most Third World states.

Historically, in another feat of competent political strategy, Botswana joined the British Empire on its own terms under King Khama III, preserving its autonomy. The tribal structure continued to govern during the colonial period, building its own bureaucracy. This means the current state stands on an actual base of power rather than being a legal fiction.

Moreover, compared to other African states, Botswana has a relatively homogeneous ethnic makeup, with a single dominant tribe, the Tswana. This helps stability because it means the tribal power structure and the formal government structure are one and the same in practice, reducing motivation or opportunity for political conflict.

The demographic fundamentals are not perfect, however. As Amy Chua argued in her book World on Fire, one of the most important drivers of civil war, expropriation, and genocide is the dynamic of conflict between an ethnic majority with an economically dominant minority. The political conflicts between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda are a canonical example.

Superficially, the conditions in Botswana are present for the development of such a scenario. A significant minority of the population, around 3%, is white. This minority has substantial social and material capital. And yet, it continues to exist with few problems after half a century of independence, with no campaign of expropriation or expulsion, unlike countries such as Uganda.

What is the source of this rare good fortune? It seems it was good judgment by the ruling dynasty. Seretse Khama pursued independence in a much smarter way than had been done in countries like Zimbabwe. For example, his government bought half of the local branch of the international De Beers corporation, rather than seizing it. Seizure is disruptive and often destroys a company’s ability to produce as the best managers and engineers flee, while purchase ensures continuity and continued production.

Income from taxing or owning shares of such large companies can be used for patronage of political allies (Sheila Khama served as CEO of De Beers Botswana) as well as social programs that develop state power further. This reduces the pull of alternative institutions such as clans, radical religious groups, and ideological organizations. Another well-known example of this tactic is Saudi Arabia’s use of the Saudi Aramco oil company.

Retaining the friendship of the world’s diamond monopolist doesn’t hurt the important foreign policy necessity of maintaining good relations with Western powers. Further, not cooking the goose that lays diamond eggs makes expropriation measures aimed at prosperous minorities less attractive in the long run, as there is less financial need to do so. Expropriating De Beers might have interfered with its ability to maintain its monopoly, and thus high diamond prices, rendering the spoils much less valuable anyway.

Simply looking at a picture of former president Ian Khama reveals that the most prosperous ethnicity married into the traditional royal family.

The marriage of President Seretse Khama, Ian’s father, was controversial at the time, likely an act of love rather than intentional statecraft. However, it was read by the white minority as a credible commitment to ethnic peace. Because of these obvious and noticeable family ties, the political capital of the influential Khama family cannot be shored up by inflaming inter-ethnic conflict for political gain as was done by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Idi Amin in Uganda. The family is thus reassuring for the white minority, while simultaneously legitimate to traditionalist Tswana.

Good government aligns political necessity with prosperity. When political necessity steps in the way of prosperity, it is prosperity that suffers.

Ethnic conflict can sometimes be politically useful, but is economically and socially harmful. The marriage decision made any such conflict politically more costly and less useful—just as the partnership with De Beers turned economic capital, which could otherwise only be wastefully burned for political capital, into an ongoing source of political support.

Plenty of autocrats at least try to name their successors. Botswana succeeds where they fail by prudent use and promotion of good fundamentals that make succession crises and intra-elite conflict much less likely: trust between military and civilian elites, exemplified by Ian Khama retiring from the military to go into civilian politics, means there’s no point in a coup. The formal government being effectively the tribal power structure of the dominant tribe, with the tribal royal family holding political office, means little shear can arise between government and ethnic power centers. The relatively homogeneous economy centered around De Beers, which is well integrated via the government’s ownership stake, reveals a single point of financial patronage that is aligned with government interests. Furthermore, good positioning through the Cold War meant no foreign power had interests in toppling the Botswanan government.

According to conventional developmental economics models, Botswana shouldn’t be doing as well as it is. As a landlocked country, its access to international markets relies on neighboring states. This is commonly recognized as an important barrier to development, with its own acronym “LLDC” (landlocked developing country). It is suffering among the world’s worst AIDS pandemics. This not only incurs significant direct medical expenses, but also lowers productivity. Morbidity drives up the dependency ratio, depriving it of a demographic dividend. Lastly, it is a post-colonial state. The norm for this reference class is corruption, political instability, and unexceptional growth. Together, these factors should have sealed its fate.

But our usual models do not sufficiently account for the difficulty and importance of succession. We model power and power succession unrealistically, if at all. Hand-picked successors and political dynasties are overlooked as viable solutions, or regarded as a sign of corruption. Thus we usually miss or shrug at Botswana’s success, and likewise miss some of the key sources of functionality in our own governments.

The world, including its functional governments, is a lot more dynastic than we like to admit, and dynasties work a lot better at securing institutional continuity and good government than we like to think. As we look into what’s actually working about the American order, and how it could work better, we should pay close attention to cases where dynasties like the Khamas are a significant driving force of success. We would do well to become more comfortable with their role.