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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've always been a little confused by this. I'm American and I would be pretty upset if the values that I think the American elite hold are replaced by those of the elite of other countries. To emphasize the differences, I'm going to exaggerate this a lot and focus entirely why they seem bad from an American perspective: European elites feel too far in the direction of stuffy old-money terrified of change, Chinese elites too far in the direction of stereotypical spoiled rich heirs, and Indian elites too far in the direction of clannish religious fundamentalists (for example).
I therefore think the more dynamic, meritocratic American elites would have more values in common with the average American. Maybe I'm not elite enough to know true elite values, but I think people that claim there is truly some global elite class should travel more. I also think people sometimes confuse either an anglophone elite class or a global subcultural community (e.g. a particular academic field or readers of a particular blog) with a global elite class. Even with the second example, while I definitely have more in common with a random European mathematician than a random American lay-person, I feel more of a culture-clash talking with the average (non-UK) European-born mathematician working in Europe than with the average conservative American mathematician.
Even if people are more talking about the particular values of the liberal, American elite being particularly good at spreading and taking over parts of the elite of other countries, I'm not sure the process has gone nearly as far as needed to reasonably claim that elites everywhere are homogenized (as much as I would like this to be true).
I think that's true for regular elites and all elites in the past, but things are becoming a bit different now with very extreme levels of wealth and ease of travel. The very richest billionaires are more easily able to meet up from around the world in exclusive venues, instead of American billionaires mingling with American millionaires because there aren't enough other American billionaires to make an entire social group with.
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