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Notes -
What comes next?
Tl;dr - Assuming Fukuyama is wrong and it isn’t American-flavored liberal democracy until the heat death of the universe. What comes next, either probabilistically or from a perspective of the ‘next’ thing?
If you’ll let me indulge in some whig history and half-baked, poorly-researched ideas, I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts. Say that modern liberal democratic states represent some form of linear progress over the monarchies of the middle ages, the city states of antiquity and hunter-gatherer tribes that came before that. I will say that they at least represent progress along the axes of complexity and ability to project power; I’d rather sidestep the question of whether they represent true ‘progress’ at the risk of getting bogged down in discussions about what the purpose of human existence is. I’m also more interested in speculating on what the political system/civilization of the future looks like than AI doomerism or ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ style takes, but if you truly believe that’s what’s in the cards for us, I suppose I can’t begrudge you your pessimism.
I confess that my knowledge of history is severely deficient so I’d welcome any corrections here, but essentially: modern elections couldn’t be run without at least writing and widespread literacy, nor could the modern nation-state. It was much harder for London to project power to America in the 18th century when communication involved a round-trip on a sailing vessel than it is for Washington to project power over San Francisco with instantaneous telecom in the 21st. In this vein, I’d contend that western liberal democracies are software written for the hardware of the 18th century. Sea changes of the last two centuries include:
Huge increase in the amount of data available
Massive decrease in the amount of time required to transmit information, and the barriers to doing so given the universality of internet access and smartphones
Significant increases in education levels
AI
Insert your thoughts here, not trying to make an exhaustive list
All that preamble to ask, what is the next ‘step’ in the evolution of the political tradition and/or civilization? Sooner or later, some country will develop a system leveraging the above much more effectively than us and we’ll be outcompeted.
For example, if we wanted to, we could relatively easily hold a referendum for every major political decision for truly radical democracy - just have some kind of app on your smartphone connected to your SSN (fraud avoidance strategy TBD), vote on the questions of the day over breakfast. Maybe the mob becomes the fourth branch of congress and new legislation requires a majority vote. Perhaps (and I shudder to think of the logistics or reception this would receive in the current climate) issues are categorized by topic and people are sorted by expertise, but policy is still decided by a much broader group than congress.
The nation-state itself could become obsolete. Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa. How can the nation-state survive man having more camaraderie for his tribal in-group over his fellow countrymen? The hive system outlined in Too like the Lightning seems interesting if the logistics could ever be worked out.
Contrary to what some think, I don’t have a self-referential fetish for democracy. Maybe the Culture mythos predicted the future and competitive nations in the future will turn all import decisions over to AIs, or else get wrecked by their neighbors. Maybe all the technological progress I’ve discussed is orthogonal to politics, and we could just as easily have a liberal democracy as a Yarvinesque monarcho-corporatism as an authoritarian regime exploit AI/big data and outcompete the rest of us independently of how enfranchised the populace is.
What do you all think?
I think the concept of government is, like, melting. It used to be oriented around war, but wars are getting rarer and governments are getting disoriented now that they've lost their original reason to exist. Now they're just power for power's sake, unmoored from anything, floundering for a purpose and settling on something between welfare state and propaganda state.
They're not going to evolve into anything concrete because evolution relies on evolutionary pressure, of which there is none. Modern governments don't die they just change hands to whoever is crazy enough to accept unlimited responsibility in exchange for very little power. They'll just flail around forever, accomplishing nothing, sustained by the free energy in the political environment.
And safetyist state. As humanity ages and becomes more neurotic and/or risk averse, I expect governments to have a greater role, as agencies for (a) extracting resources from working-age people and distributing them towards larger, older cohorts, and (b) protecting people against ever smaller risks and discomforts.
Since neurotic risk-assessment is often incoherent and irrational, role (b) could end up looking very weird. A random example: a state interior minister in Germany said, in reaction to the 2015-2016 mass rapes of German women by immigrants:
This man, who had power regarding the security of a large German state, literally said that unwholesome speech is as awful as sexual assault (maybe worse). And from a policing perspective, cracking down on people saying unwholesome things Twitter and Discord is a lot easier than solving rape, theft, or murder cases. The future could look very weird, because neuroticism is very weird, and rising neuroticism is the best explanation I have of safetyism. The safetyist state, like the welfare state, is rising out of democratic tendencies, but will change democracy into something unrecognisable to those who lived before it, and due to public choice reasons it may be as hard (for the forseeable future, impossible) to remove as the welfare state.
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