I am not a close relative of Yoon Suk Yeol, the thirteenth president of the Republic of Korea. But we are in the same clan, the Papyeong Yoons. So of course I noticed that he received a life sentence last week for his failed coup d’état of December 2024, even though as an American, I’m not intimately familiar with Korean politics. 

However, I am intimately familiar with my family history, which goes as far back in Korea as former President Yoon’s, all the way back to the same roots in Koryo history. So when I saw his life sentence, I thought about the death sentence imposed upon my direct ancestor Yoon Pilsang, who was the first Papyeong Yoon to hold the highest civilian position in Korean government, early in the second century of the Joseon dynasty, which followed Koryo.

In April of 1504, King Yeonsangun ordered Yoon Pilsang to be put to death by poison, the traditional method of execution for crimes against the king. But Pilsang was as bullheaded as any Papyeong Yoon, so when the executioner arrived, he took his own poison which he had prepared in advance, presumptuously telling the executioner, “I knew this was coming.” After a little while the poison wasn’t working fast enough, so Yoon Pilsang again disdained the king’s poison and instead made a noose with his own silk cloth and hung himself to death.

The king took great offense at Yoon’s presumptions, and ordered that his corpse be methodically dismembered and his head displayed in the marketplace. Yoon Pilsang had a great deal of property, and the king confiscated it all, as well as all the property of his four sons, who the king also had beaten and sent into exile. After a few months, the king decided mere exile wasn’t enough, and had three of the sons beheaded. He then ordered various nonlethal punishments for the six grandsons. The general goal here was to extinguish this troublesome line of the Papyeong Yoons.

And then the next year, still thinking these particular Yoons needed some more salt, King Yeonsangun had the bodies of Yoon Pilsang’s grandfather, uncle, and nephew dug up from their graves for posthumous dismemberment. Finally, he had Yoon Pilsang’s bones dug up and burned to ashes, then scattered into the winds over the sea, declaring that heaven could not allow this man’s ashes to give substance to trees that might take root.

You might be wondering at this point exactly what Yoon Pilsang did to deserve all this. Well, it’s complicated, but in short: When Yeongsangun was a small child, his father the king ordered his mother to be put to death by poison. Yoon Pilsang was the highest advisor to the king even then, and he did nothing to stop this, and was very likely involved in the palace intrigue that led to her death. Yeongsangun was raised by another of the king’s wives, believing she was his mother. After he became the king, he learned the truth of his parentage and the poisoning, and he took his revenge.

At this point, you might be developing some sympathy for the little prince, but Yeonsangun is known as the worst tyrant in Korean history. His revenge wasn’t limited to my ancestors, not at all. He beat several of his concubines and staff to death with his bare hands. He headbutted the Queen Mother, causing her death. Over two hundred court officials were executed, exiled, or dismissed, many of them having their properties confiscated and their wives sent to slavery. And even beyond and before and certainly after all of these events, his selfishness, perversions, and cruelty were well known throughout the kingdom.

So only two years after Yoon Pilsang’s death, Yeongsangun was overthrown in yet another palace coup, and King Jungjong restored lands and titles to my family, including the burial grounds where, over five hundred years later, I scattered my father’s ashes under a strong and beautiful tree.

Is there a lesson in all this for my distant cousin Yoon Suk Yeol, who may contemplate questions for the rest of his life in prison? It’s not for me to say; I don’t know him, I don’t know Korean politics, I don’t live in Korea. But surely, he has contemplated the life and times of my great-times-eighteen grandfather.

Yoon Pilsang died believing that his family line would disappear into the sands of time, ground into dust by a vengeful and insane king. Half a millennium later, I survive in time to watch history rhyme, again and again and again. It can feel wonderful to be in a family that remembers all of its history. And perhaps at times it’s a horrifying weight to know that your family will remember your record for as long as history is recorded. 

Love

What do I know about love? Less than any good 3-minute hit song on the topic, I assure you. I’m not being modest, it is what it is: I definitely can’t do better than a song about love that millions of people love.

But I know what I know about love, and I do think that I’ve learned something recently. I’ve had many decades of failure – generations, in fact – followed by solid success. I’ve learned something that may be helpful to other people, so now I feel like I’m obligated to write it down ….

Ok, now I’ve judo’d myself into feeling like this is a good thing, instead of being embarrassed about trying.

So here goes: for me, the key to love is that when I don’t have the love I need, my coping behavior is to think about it. I’m not saying I always come up with a solution – that is verifiably untrue! I’m saying that obsessive thinking is the brick that remains in my wall of cope, even today.

Over a very long and difficult period of struggle, I’ve eliminated the self-destructive copes I had, and they were a-plenty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no California hippie, I’m not gonna tell you how to namaste and stuff, not gonna sell you yoni balls. If you know, you know. I just mean that if you have self-destructive copes, you know what I mean already. Nobody and nothing can help you get rid of the self-destructive copes but you, so I don’t know what to tell you about those. I truly wish you luck and hope you conquer your demons.

So for me, thinking is my cope – for reasons that aren’t relevant here. What matters is that people use a “cope” to avoid feelings. Now that I’ve gotten rid of my self-destructive copes: the bridges I burn can light my way, baby! Back in the day, I was setting fires just because. Now I burn the forest to see the trees.

That’s a metaphor, take it easy. I know, it’s not easy being green. Sorry, I love dad jokes

Anyway, when I don’t have the love I need, I can’t stop thinking about it. But thinking about it doesn’t mean I can do anything about it.

I’m just gonna think about it, and since my self-destructive copes are gone, all she has to be is the person who can accept the things about myself that I cannot change. The things I can’t change are just my own human failures, no biggie. They’re not that hard to accept without the self-destructive copes that used to come with the package.

And on my end, all I have to do is think about the things she cannot change, and understand that these are human parts of the human I love. Easy peasy.

Yeah, I know that’s what’s meant by the advice “Find the lock that fits your key.” I’m a fast thinker, but sometimes a slow learner.

Politics

I ran for California State Senate in 2022, in a district that spans a million people across the west side of Northern California. I loved doing it, and I lost by a lot. After the experience, I realized I could never be a political actor again.

I didn’t mind losing as much as I thought I would, but I vowed: never again. I puzzled about this for a long time, and only recently did I understand that it was all about love.

I love trying to fight for what’s right. I love meeting people and understanding their concerns, and then trying to fix their problems. I don’t love public speaking, but I really enjoy it as performance. I thought that I would love politics, and that I’d keep trying to win a seat through many elections, no matter how many losses I had to pile up first. I was expecting to lose, and thought that I’d try for decades if that’s what it took.

But when I lost, I quit forever, and I couldn’t figure out exactly why.

Now I know. The problem is, I love to share my thoughts for the very specific reason of developing a conversation. Politics, whatever else it is, is a job of directing the conversation. And to me, that’s actually a job of destroying the conversation.

I don’t love that. That’s the opposite of what I love. That’s why I had to quit politics forever. 

I talk with people so that I can think together with them, not to tell them what to think. To me, that’s giving them love, and that feels good. Politics feels very, very bad

Technology

I’ve been working in technology for over 25 years now, so once in a while some bright young tech person asks an old guy like me to speak to some future thinkers who want to hear about what I think the past means for the future. I think I’m too old to understand the present, but I’m young enough to see the future.

Just recently, I thought I gave a really good short presentation about the future of technology. And then afterwards, I tried to record the presentation and realized that it sucked without the audience, no matter how well I delivered the performance or what I said in the recording.

No audience, no joy. 

And now I’ve realized that I’m going to quit giving recorded tech presentations.

Yeah, that’s weird, right? I mean it’s obvious that I couldn’t reproduce the joy without the audience, but why does that mean I’m never going to record tech discussions again? I love talking about technology with technologists in public, do I really want to lose that?

No audience, no joy. What exactly does that mean? In my particular case, it meant that most of the presentation was about getting the audience to like me, so that we could have a good conversation. The convo was great, the liking part was necessary for a lot of normal human reasons – but also substantively superfluous to the slide presentation.

There was only one slide of any substantive interest in that whole preso, and here it is:

I think that if you’re the kind of technologist who would enjoy a conversation with me, you already basically know what is meant by this slide.

In any case, if you like me already, for whatever other reason, including liking what you’ve read above or liking what you see in the slide, and you love thinking about technology – then feel free to reach out to me …

Just remember, as a technologist, that if we record the conversation, even if we simply write about it: we will lose information! This isn’t quantum physics, but it’s as sure as Schrödinger that a conversation has indeterminate meaning until it’s observed. Consequently, an observed conversation has a different meaning than an unobserved conversation. This cannot be solved by LLMs.

Scotch Plains, New Jersey, was the perfect American town. I’m sure that some of you feel that you grew up in the best small town in America, and if you’re lucky enough to feel that way, I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong. I’m just saying, I feel the same way.

Obviously, I’m reminiscing here rather than convincing. But especially when I think about growing up, I talk and often think like a guy from Jersey, so maybe some of this will sound like an argument. Or maybe I can say, Cali-style where I live now, that I’m just stating my personal inner truth: The 1970s were the perfect time to grow up in America, because it was then that you had the best chance of realizing the American dream.

A hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, just past the transformative Civil Rights Era, heading into decades of American peace and domination. If you were an American child in the Seventies, came of age in the Eighties, started your career in the Nineties, boomed with the internet in the Aughts – you at least had a chance of a rising tide lifting your boat, if you were lucky enough to be born in the right place at the right time. I don’t care what kind of crappy boat we’re talking about here: Even your little dinghy, rusty and full of holes, tattered sail and busted motor and all, even that sad water jalopy could take you somewhere worth the time at sea.

Just 25 miles from New York City, Scotch Plains was a perfect suburban repository of the immigration influx of the late 19th Century that came through Ellis Island. The first couple of generations clawed out a new life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By the third generation, people who cared more about assimilating went to Long Island or, as a reach, to Connecticut. But if you embraced your ethnic roots, you went to New Jersey. So to me, Scotch Plains, NJ was the perfect melting pot, a stew of Irish Catholics, Italians, Jews and Poles, Blacks and Puerto Ricans, and a few Orientals. (The term “Asian American” wasn’t a thing back then.) Everyone could be proud of who we were, but everyone still had to figure out how to live together despite how different we were.

No one in my town knew what Korea was, not really, including me. But by six years old, I could not avoid an education on what America was, or wanted to be. All of us in town that age learned our first five-syllable word: Bicentennial. In July, it would be the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I remember how hot it was that summer, but at least it was sandwiched between the two oil crises of that decade, and we could afford to run air conditioning in our split level ranch through the worst of the sweltering summer.

The red, white, and blue was everywhere leading up to that July. Bunting draped all over the downtown main streets, flags flapping from every other house, men with lapel pins and women with ribbons of old glory. A six year old can’t distinguish between genuine pride and community conformity, but the unavoidable displays of patriotism worked on my malleable little mind. I didn’t have to wonder whether America was exceptional, I knew it must be true because everyone in town was telling me so.

And I said it to my father, while taking refuge one brutally humid afternoon of the summer of 1976, sitting in my parents bedroom, the window air conditioner barely able to keep up with the modest demands of the little room. I sat on the bed while my father puttered around the dressing table, and I asked him: Isn’t it great? Isn’t it great that we live here, in the strongest, proudest, best country in the history of all the world? Isn’t it amazing what we’ve achieved in 200 years?

He said:

Well, it’s a good start, maybe.

I couldn’t believe my ears. What did this fresh of the boat Korean know about the Great United States of America?

He answered as best as he could. I’m not gonna pretend that I remember his explanation word for word; he spoke for a long time that afternoon. He spoke in broken English and never used memorable words. But I remember everything. Because he communicated all of his meaning and his intent through his broken language, through his pauses, elisions and silences, and through his face and his body. I remember exactly what he communicated to me, not word for word, but in his full meaning, in his intent, and in his insistence on the lesson:

Yeah, it’s a good start. The people you now call “Korean” have a four thousand year history. And that recently included two consecutive 500-year dynasties. It’s always the same pattern: around half a century of figuring out how the nation works, a century or so of rising to the good times, maybe a century of actual great times, and then a troubled period of decades where the infighting allows the outside in to destroy your nation. But it’s a long slow decline, could be another century or two. The first of those 500-year Korean dynasties ended in dominance by the Mongols, the second in dominance by Japan. In both cases, the same pattern.

Roughly: 50 years of construction, 100 years of rise, 100 years of good times, 50 years of infighting, and then 200 years to the end. In each period, give or take a few decades.

I thought the old man was batty. In the 1970’s in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, nobody knew anything about Korea, not really, not like my father did. But he didn’t have a clue about America. Surely this fresh off the boat Korean knew nothing about the future of my birthland, the United States of America.

Well …

That was coming on fifty years ago, I’m over a decade older now than my father was that summer afternoon, I’ve lived a whole lotta life and I’ve seen some things. I’ve even absorbed a little history, something I shoulda soaked up more from the pride of my paisanos back in Jersey: Rome had a 500 year Republic followed by a 500 year Empire. And both followed the pattern. If you know only last century’s history, the phrase “a thousand year dynasty” might sound a little chilling to you. But that was only recent history. In the really long run, perhaps it’s not so terrible to imagine two consecutive 500 year dynasties. There is a thousand years of glory in such a history even existing, no matter the ups and downs.

The 250th anniversary of July 4, 1976 is within our sight, as is the current state of our nation, laid bare for anyone to interpret. I leave the details of math and pattern matching as an exercise for the reader and for X. Just a closing thought: I think people these days worry a lot about American decline. But nobody gets good times forever. You can have good times and bad times and still last a long time; rise and fall and recovery and try again. It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen a lot of times in history. But it does happen, in the exceptional cases.

“Valar Morghulis” means “All Men Must Die” in High Valerian. Valerian is not a real language, it’s from the fictional world of Game of Thrones – but perhaps the phrase is now better known than its original Latin counterpart, “Memento Mori.” Remember Death – the sentiment is the same: we are all mortal, and reflecting on this truth helps us live better in our short time of existence.

The death of Susan Wojcicki stands as yet another reminder of this eternal truth, as if we needed another. She is the fifth close working colleague of mine to die during my career, though I cannot claim to have been truly close to her. I was perhaps the shortest tenured member of her various teams, having lasted only six months before she decided, quite correctly, that I was not a good fit for her as a direct report. I was never a good fit for Google, despite lasting there for five years, and it was a kindness for her to allow me to simply keep the same responsibilities with another boss.

So this post is not about Susan, because the many who knew her better are already posting in great volume about her kindness, her humanity, her towering achievements. My passing familiarity with her is really meaningless in comparison.

Instead, here I would like to reflect on how “Valar Morghulis” might inform the life of a company. Perhaps this seems absurd, or even inhuman, as corporations aren’t people, regardless of some bizarre legal interpretations of corporate personhood. But it’s undeniable that great corporations affect a great many human lives, and sometimes do so for longer than the lifespan of any one human life. And yet, just as with every human, all corporations must die.

I’ll indulge in just one vignette from my time working with Susan. This was early in my time at Google, after I’d spent a dozen years in the startup trenches – I’d never intended to end up at such a large company, over 40,000 employees at the time. I was insufferably snotty about the joys of working in startups, and what I saw as the relative torpor of the burgeoning tech giant I found myself within.

As I sat next to Susan at lunch, I mouthed off about the joyful urgency of startups, the adrenaline of work fueled by the ever-present fear of death. I told her that Google had lost that urgency, so its best days were behind it. 

Susan replied, “No. I still fear it. I still fear for our existence, for our future, just as I did in the earliest days.” And as I looked in her eyes, I knew she meant it. Because what I saw there wasn’t just a manager managing an impudent new employee. What I saw and felt from her truly was fear, honest and palpable as any that I knew in my startup days.

She wasn’t wrong. At that very moment, Google was grappling with the consumer transition from desktop to mobile, and Susan was responsible for the Ads business, the lifeblood of the company. The vast majority of our revenue came from desktop search results, and our early attempts at mobile monetization looked as if they would be swamped by a sea change in the industry, led by Apple. Another year or two of this kind of trend, and mighty Google would take its place in the graveyard of forgotten tech companies.

All companies must die. But that was merely a brush with mortality for Google, which in the following two years changed the landscape with Android, and successfully climbed the mountain of work required to make our mobile monetization just as powerful as desktop. Susan’s fear came at a time when Google’s revenue stood at around $50B. Today the company is close to $250B. All companies must die, but not Google, not then.

Of course, “Remember Death” is not a rallying cry to preserve a corporate growth rate. It is certainly not a call to establish success and glory on this earthly plane – it’s the opposite, it’s a reminder that all our earthly accomplishments will one day fade to dust. Google will one day stand in the hall of forgotten heroes, along with Kodak, DEC, Xerox, and countless others. So in the time between that day and this, what should “Valar Morghulis” mean to all those who lead companies great and small?

Perhaps we can find inspiration in the other inscription of that Faceless coin, “Valar Dohaeris.” All Men Must Serve. In the stories, this phrase is said most urgently by those who serve the God of Death, so they interpret their service as assassination, helping others to meet their god. I like the phrase, but not that interpretation, especially not for companies. We have plenty of companies serving the God of Death, and perhaps some of them are necessary, but this cannot be the most common interpretation if we are to continue as a species.

I’m not here to recommend a particular interpretation, but just to suggest that company leaders should remember both sides of the coin. All Companies Must Die. All Companies Must Serve. 

I dislike the legal interpretation of corporations as “persons” due the same rights of human people. But as companies are composed of people, and affect human lives with the power of all of those people working together, the world would be well served by company leaders remembering both sides of the coin.

In the stories, Arya Stark recited the names for her vengeance every night before she slept. Polliver. Ilyn Payne. Joffrey. Cersei Lannister. The Hound. Some of these died by her own hand, some of these were killed by others, and at least one became a sort of friend. I’ll adopt and adapt the practice, remembering those who I worked with, each of whom left a great mark on me with their lives, their work, and their deaths.

Craig Johnson. Joe Miller. Dan Fredinberg. Bijan Dhanani. Susan Wojcicki. May they all Rest In Peace.

Corporate Morghulis.

Corporate Dohaeris.

There’s a difference between having a plan and changing it, and never having one at all.

6th Uncle

I was twenty-one years old when my uncle said that to me in Minnesota, and I’m still thinking about it now, more than three decades later. When he laid these supposed pearls of wisdom on me, I’d been driving aimlessly around the country right after graduating from college. Understandably, my father must have been concerned about whether I knew what I was doing, so I knew I’d have to hear a whole lot of something even before the visit with my uncle, who happened to be traveling through Minneapolis on business while I was there to visit a friend and pay homage to Dylan. 

I enjoyed that wandering burst of my youth, but the only thing that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since is what the heck my uncle was really trying to say. For the purposes of this brief post, I’m going to skip three decades of contemplation, and just write down what I hope it means:

Early in my career, I heard about the four levels of competence – listed here from worst (1) to best (4):

1. Unconscious Incompetence
2. Conscious Incompetence
3. Conscious Competence
4. Unconscious Competence

I’m not going to describe these levels here, there’s plenty of material elsewhere that explains these levels better than I could. To me, when I heard about those levels, and for a long time afterwards, I simply could not believe in that fourth level. I thought it was just something that old people pretended to exist, because they couldn’t remember how things worked. How is it possible to be unconsciously competent? 

Now, however, I simply know that this level exists, because I understand the simplicity of the insight: if one has consciously ingrained competent practices and corresponding ethical behavior into one’s habits, the result will be as competent as both those practices and adherence to those ethics. You’ll be pleased with your competence, and no one else’s opinion really matters as much. That’s you plural: your teammates all need to be on the same page regarding your practices and ethics too, or the result will eventually become extremely unpleasant unless you just happen to be lucky enough to never need the awesome power that comes from Unconscious Competence.

I mean, there’s probably a better way to say all that, but I’m trying to be precise about it, rather than saying it more briefly. It took me too long to understand that this is what is meant by “Unconscious Competence,” and it would take too long for me to try to say this all more clearly.

But … I think we could come at this from another angle …

This kind of navel-gazing was invented, for the Western world, by our old friends So-crates and Plato.

Socrates is perhaps the most famous name in Western philosophy, and famously never bothered to set pen to paper when it came to his philosophy – he wasn’t illiterate, he simply believed that deep human meaning could not be transcribed. The only way to transmit any truly valuable human meaning was directly from one human being to another, without anything in between to mix the message, without any mediation. And that includes: without any mass media, not even our first mass media, writing.

Plato, on the other hand, was a helluva writer and a smart guy with his own thoughts to add to those of his most famous colleague. And there you have it: two of the biggest names in Western philosophy, fundamentally divided by an extremely important and current philosophical question about whether human meaning can be conveyed through mass media without losing everything important about being human.

I never really had a dog in that fight, but these days I’m leaning towards So-crates, insofar as how I’d ideally live my life. Sure I’m writing on this here personal mass media blog, but I’ve thought for years and years that writing’s not for me, other than as a tool to think. Now we can all see that truthful writing has lost so much of its power in today’s mass media, and Socrates had a great point about the importance of communicating truth from human to human.

Because of the internet and all it hath wrought? Well, yes – but don’t get me wrong, I still think technology can turn around its recent trend, and begin to work for humans again. I know it’s a good thing that Plato decided to write.

But in my personal musings, I’m with So-crates just because Unconscious Competence is something I’ve observed from time to time in others, if not often enough in myself. (I mean, sure I’d like to see it more in myself and others, but that seems unreasonable given that there are, after all, four levels.) And when I see it, when I see someone succeed just because of consciously designed practices and corresponding ethical behavior that become habits – it’s really funny to watch what happens next: Those people get asked, “How did you become such a success?”

And really, the person just can’t give an answer that seems to make sense to a lot of people, because the truth is that a whole lot of what they did was just Unconscious Competence, and there’s no good way to explain that. They just live it, and someone else writes it down if they happened to notice – but that someone else always adds their own humanity, and that’s a good thing too. Maybe we can all be Socrates and Plato; certainly neither could have become who they were without the other.

Be Excellent.

It helps me to try to give people advice, because it reminds me to continually relearn the same lessons I still need today, to keep doing the very same things that people want advice about. The process of giving advice is never one way: I always learn and relearn lessons in the conversation from the other person.

Startups are great because every one is a new experience no matter how much experience you have. I can help someone else just by reminiscing about what I’ve already done, and at the same time, help myself to charge up those very same hills that I see in their experiences. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve done it, we’re still both at the bottom of the hill today.

I’m always worried though, that anyone might remember the words that I’m saying, rather than the fact of what we did together during the mentoring. See, the value of the mentoring isn’t in any words that were said. Instead, the value was created because two human beings tried to learn meaningful lessons from each other based on their own direct experiences in life. There is no small set of words that will capture all of the things of value that truly occurred in this human interaction. I might even go so far as to argue that trying to remember any small set of words puts you at risk at forgetting the whole value of the interaction. Human interaction is irreducibly complex, and incommensurately valuable.

Now, you probably think I’m making a point about artificial intelligence. And sure, but I think that point is obvious, so I’m not going to say it.

Instead the point I’m trying to make here is about advice. There are almost no words of advice that are brief enough to easily remember, while also being universally applicable. These are my favorite:

There’s more than one way to say these words. My friend and I were discussing this video while on vacation, and he made this T-shirt about it.

As far as I know, this advice is truly universal to all people, and is applicable in all situations that might cause worry. Of course, the key is in applying the central question: “Can you do anything about it?“

For example, unless there is something more directly useful to talk about in my mentoring sessions, I often just walk through that question:

CAN

What is possible in the world that you see?

YOU

Who are you? What are you capable of? What do you want?

DO

What would be the best outcome? What is the best way for you to serve that outcome?

ANYTHING

What exactly are you going to do, and when are you going to do it?

ABOUT IT?

Oops remind me: Exactly what is the problem we are trying to address here?

And don’t worry, because there’s nothing to worry about now.

Yeah so anyway, I bought a couple hundred of those T-shirts. If you see me in person and want one, just let me know your size and you can have it if there are any left. I think it’s truly universal advice, and I like to be helpful – I’m fairly certain that if you wear this shirt, someone will benefit from it.

“Don’t Be Evil.” 

If you recognize this as Google’s former corporate motto, you probably regard it as a broken promise. But arriving too quickly at this judgment misses the lesson of the journey. It may be true that we now live in a tech dystopia created at least in part by those who once proclaimed, “Don’t Be Evil.” But in the beginning, that motto contained a magnetic True North that once meant something, that still means something, something that is awaiting our rediscovery. 

So before memorializing “Don’t Be Evil” as a broken promise, we must remember what it once meant.

We have to remember the time before the first widespread criticism of this mantra, before the semantic noodlers complained that it is impossible to define what “evil” means. See, the thing is, before this criticism was widely shared, it wasn’t relevant. It wasn’t relevant because the real audience for “Don’t Be Evil” already knew what the phrase was supposed to mean.

The real audience was undoubtedly the employees of Google at the turn of the millennium, when either Buchheit or Patel (depending on the storyteller) first proposed this as the company’s motto. Google had fewer than 250 employees at the time. “Don’t Be Evil” was a phrase that was easily understood by not only those 250 employees, but also by all of the company’s potential employee base. Yep, I’m claiming that every person who had the qualifications to be hireable by Google at that time (1999-2001) would easily understand the basic meaning of Don’t Be Evil.

See, if you knew enough about computing in those days to be employable at Google, then you grew up in technology watching IBM lose to Microsoft, then watching Microsoft crush Apple, and then watching the government strangle Microsoft. And then you got to enjoy watching Google beat the crap out of Microsoft. It’s just human nature to watch all this and make it into a morality play, with extremely domain-specific notions of “good” and “evil.”

When the government hampered Microsoft in the ’90s, that was a fair comeuppance for an abusive player, just as had happened to IBM in the ’80s when Microsoft was coming up. Small new companies innovate into the spaces left by the decrepitude of large old companies. The cycle of life applies to all of us, businesses too. In business, as in life, that cycle plays out in predictable patterns. And as humans, we love telling ourselves a story about our patterns. And to be compelling, our stories must have good guys and bad guys, good and evil. “Don’t Be Evil” is a morality play, and it is just a fiction, but still, these notions of good and evil move us – especially when we’re deciding where to work and how to win competitive battles.

So IBM vs Microsoft, Microsoft vs Apple, Microsoft vs Google – that was the drama that played out in information technology at the time, and our notions of “good” and “evil” were aligned with the prevailing morality play that everyone knew as orthodoxy, even if they disagreed with it: Microsoft was the bad guy, Apple was awesome and cool before MSFT used monopolistic advantages to crush them (this was before the Second Coming of Jobs). Microsoft was Evil. Google was Good.

So in this morality play, “evil” means, basically: using “business techniques” instead of superior technology to win. Don’t Be Evil simply means: win with technology, not with business techniques. 

“Business techniques” include perfectly legitimate and absolutely necessary decisions and deals around pricing, packaging, and distribution. But that’s just the bare minimum. The expanded world of business techniques gets pretty gray pretty fast, and eventually you end up where we are today: dark patterns that manipulate users, platform rent-seeking, externalization of business costs into the community, lobbying and other political manipulation. I don’t really like calling these things “evil,” but it’s fair to say that these are the tactics and methods of mature businesses, and they are not what successful startups do.

I worry that the tech world has been so dominated by the usual BigTech suspects for so long now that entrepreneurs have forgotten the difference between Good and Evil. But no matter: the world doesn’t need to remember because the truth will out: for the first time in a long time, nearly all the BigTech companies are grappling with disruptive technologies that they do not understand. When there is this much disruption in the air, fancy business techniques become less valuable, and a True North for product development becomes far more valuable. For the first time in a long time, opportunity is everywhere, all incumbents are vulnerable, and all startups have this one incontestable upper hand: Don’t Be Evil is a winning strategy, not an empty corporate motto.

“Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”

When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, all I ever wanted was to get out, across the river to the bright lights big city. I assumed that New Yawk City was the place that moves the world, because what else would a Jersey kid think amirite? And I loved everything about living there: I loved the hard work and the harder play, the high stakes and the almost tangible power and raw human energy that buzzed through the canyons between the skyscrapers. But after starting my career in “high” finance, I was disappointed in the financial engineering that passed as “creation” in that industry, and by 1999 it was obvious that the future was really being created across the country, in Silicon Valley.

So I headed West, searching for an industry that builds levers to move the world, searching for my place to stand. About a decade in, people began to tell me that my career path looked a little weird. From leveraged buyout lawyer in NYC to startup counsel in Silicon Valley to Korean venture capitalist to Fortune 100 corporate deal maker. And then it just kept getting weirder: international marketing, developer relations, enterprise product development, startup founder, BigTech product manager, startup sales manager and more. Not content with the variety of roles, I also wandered across sectors and products: enterprise hardware, metaverse consumer software, adtech, content moderation systems, maps, devops SaaS ….

Oh, and then I got sick of tech and ran for political office … now that was a weird move. But not to me, still just trying to understand what, if anything, moves the world in a better direction. Campaigning was a deeply moving experience for me, as I’m sure it is for any child of immigrants. I learned a lot, but the long and the short of it here is just that the political industry isn’t a place I can stand.

When I look back on it all, I feel lucky to have started my career in tech during that first decade from 1999-2008, before the global financial crisis, before BigTech was a thing … and maybe the last time we could have avoided the consequences we’re living out today. The dreams were big, the schemes were fun, and the common ambition was to put a dent in the universe with technology so good it seems like magic. The “why” behind this sparkling ambition was often unspoken, but I never thought it was about the money. Most of my friends in tech thought it was wonderful to see explosions of wealth of course, but we weren’t in technology to play the lottery, we were in it because we loved technology. 

We were mostly dorky kids who were lucky enough to have access to an Apple ][ or Commodore 64 in middle school or high school, we played Atari and Intellivision, we wrote our first programs in BASIC and we fell in love with the future. And though we might have loved technology for different reasons, I think the common thread was that we loved what technology could do for humanity. We loved the spirit of innovation for its delight, not the dollars. We loved the fun that tech could add to our lives.

So the place where I stood in the best years of my first decade in tech was in San Francisco, at a company called Linden Lab, and we tried to move the world with Second Life. Enough has been written about Second Life, I don’t like to add to the noise. But I can’t say enough about the company we “Lindens” called “the Lab,” especially now that people are recognizing Second Life as an OG when they talk about “the metaverse” today … 

Of course the product innovation was fascinating, but even more than that, I appreciate the workplace innovations we implemented at the Lab. Many of these are lost already in the sands of time, and frankly not all of our innovations were good ideas, but we had an authentic commitment to transparency, openness, and trying new ways to enable emergent bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down command-and-control management. We had open floor offices because it flattened hierarchy, not to save costs on real estate. We had snacks and games because we genuinely liked to have fun with each other, not as a nefarious scheme to keep overgrown adolescents at work. We had peer bonuses as a bonding experience, not as a competition for brownie points in the next performance review. We experimented in democratic decisionmaking, as messy as any experiment in democracy. We had remote offices, work from home, chat and video collaboration before any of these things were regarded as rational costs for a startup.

The Lab was also fearless with new business models, defining and implementing product lines in a way that felt like feeling around in the dark back then, but now seem prescient. “Freemium” as an acquisition strategy, the power of subscription metrics, data-driven decisions, SaaS-like pricing and practices before SaaS was a thing, defining product management roles before the internet industry had standardized skills for the role. We didn’t invent any of these by ourselves, but they were all relatively new business practices in our context.

So we endlessly experimented and adopted internal management and business practices on the fly while also attempting a product so ridiculously difficult that the largest technology companies in the world continue to fail today in their modern attempts to replicate the possibilities we demonstrated fifteen years ago. Maybe the only way we were old-school was that we built a profitable business, even though many companies had already amply demonstrated that tech investors prefer a fanciful growth story to the reality of profitable results.

[I’m leaving out the best part about the Lab: I could write a book about the people, but to even begin that here would be to raise uncontrollable emotions that are not at all the point here. Suffice to say that to this day I feel a bond with every Linden, past and present.]

What I realize now was that rather than being ahead of its time, the Lab was at the end of an era, before technology became Big Tech. The people that first populated Silicon Valley with technology workers were geeky idealists. Many of them, especially those who entered the scene from San Francisco, descended from a local cultural heritage of hackers and pranksters, the kind of Merry Pranksters that gave rise to the Cacophony Club and Burning Man – a culture of anti-authoritarianism, a community of individualists, a spirit of creativity and freedom and fun.

After the global financial crisis, for a variety of reasons, that culture gave way to people who … well, let me not judge any person, because we all live in glass houses, but looking at where we are today … the legacy of my last decade or so in technology is not about any of that spirit from my first decade. Too many technologists began to insist that technology could lead humanity, going so far as to believe in the inevitability of technological progress as if it were some natural force more powerful than the needs of humanity. And so we got surveillance capitalism, walled gardens, dark patterns, monopolistic rent-seeking, more and more exploitative and community-destroying business models and practices, and ever bigger and bolder next-gen Ponzi plays. None of those are technology; they are instead the social and economic results of favoring technology over humanity.

I’m an old man now, perhaps just yelling at the clouds. Sure, sure, I understand that some kind souls will object that I’m not that old, that there’s plenty of life ahead, plenty to do, plenty to dream. But see, I don’t think there’s anything to object to, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being old. There are a lot of things that I see and understand now that I simply could not have understood with less experience in life. That experience – not just the technology and business experience, but ALL of the experience of living – is the lever that I’ve sought all my life.

And now I’d like to share the leverage of experience with as many people as I can who might use it to move the world in the right direction.

And the place to stand? Well, it has to be San Francisco. There are places in the world that I love more, but there is no other place that I know with that particular spirit of love for humanity over technology. That spirit has been dominated of late, it has been beaten, it has been bruised … but it is not gone – I just know it because I have been around long enough to know it. San Francisco is currently in the worst shape that I’ve seen in my quarter-century in California, so bad that it almost reminds me of New York City in the ’70s and ’80s … a place that we Jersey kids regarded as a bankrupt disaster, only later to realize that we should have spent way more time trying to get into CBGB. What I’m saying here is that we’ll later remember now as the time when San Francisco was authentically cool.

So – this is all my way of saying that I’m going to be spending my time in San Francisco working on technology startups in generative AI, virtual currencies, and metaverse technologies. I have the idealism of my first decade in tech, the experience of my second decade, and the determination to put humanity over technology. Most importantly, I have a few like-minded friends figuring out how to work together, and we have room for more.

If you are looking for a lever and a place to stand, let’s talk A ping on LinkedIn is best if you don’t already have other contact info.

But all those lessons started to feel overwhelming (to read, not to write), so I recently began to think that I should concentrate on the one most important lesson. And that would be about the one most important topic, which is of course love.

Someday I’ll write about that, but this isn’t the day for it, this isn’t the time for it. This is 2020, and a half-century in, I can finally see that despite anyone’s fondest dreams, the cynics and the bruised romantics were always right: Love is not enough.

My home is on fire. We are like bacteria in a bottle, blindly exhausting all the available resources in our ecosystem. More and more people believe that the end is nigh. And that’s just the obvious future. In the terrible present, we are battered black and blue by our failure to bring about a just society. Amoral tech leaders fail over and over again to actually build socially beneficial products that are worthy of their position of power. The ruin of the fourth estate has led to idiocracy. What is the lesson that I should try to deliver when my half-century on the planet has me wondering if any eventual grandchild of mine could reasonably hope to see the same age?

The lesson is this: You can be at peace while still fighting.

I am stunned to discover that I’m at peace in a way that I never believed was possible for me, or for anyone. I am not confused about my place in the world. I’m not angry all the time; no grievances torture my heart. I know what I want to make of the remaining time that I have. I know how to give and receive love, I know the power of kindness.

It remains true that I react in anger with some frequency. I’m not as kind as I’d like to be. I do still have a low opinion of people who I believe to have wronged me, and I’m quite sure that there are people with a similarly low opinion of me – and I agree with that assessment at times. I don’t know exactly whether or how I will accomplish the things I dream of today.

But still, I find that my dreams are bigger than they’ve ever been. I know that I’m going to have to fight for what I believe in, and I love that because I’ll never stop fighting.

Your mileage may vary, but the road is there if you want to take it. True peace in your heart is available for anyone. But the fight for a world worth living in will always be everyone’s to fight. I worried that peace and serenity in my heart would mean less fire in my belly, but now I realize that the fire doesn’t come from me.

I somehow just stumbled across a years-old interview with the actor John Cho, who, like me, is of Korean ethnic background. The Korean soccer team slogan, made famous in their run in the World Cup a while back, was “Fighting!” Somehow that came up during the interview, and John Cho explained:

This is our condition. Fighting.

Every once in a while, I idly consider getting a tattoo, but it never gets very far, because I can’t think of anything I’d want permanently imprinted on my body, other than a well-placed battle scar. But now I know that if I ever go through with it, I’m going to inscribe “This is Our Condition: Fighting!”

Now, I’m not some kind of Korean studies major – I’m as far from that as I could be. I don’t speak Korean, though I’m sure if I did I’d be aware of the subtleties lost in translation into the simple term “Fighting!” I wouldn’t be surprised if those subtleties are most of what I’m trying to explain here. I don’t even remember specifically being taught any of this. And yet still, I’m writing entirely from memory, I’m not going to look up any of it. That’s why there’s no dates or numbers: my memory’s really not that good.

But I’ve always loved to fight, and I still do, even though I may not have what it takes anymore. I’ve been asked many times over the years what this is all about. For most of the time, I’ve really been unable to explain, mostly because I was too angry to explain. But for some reason, John Cho’s explanation was like a koan that opened up the doors of enlightenment as I pondered its meaning. (By the way, it’s not like I’m some sort of besotted fan. I mean, he seems plenty talented, but I haven’t really seen him in enough things. Yes, I’m aware that there’s a meme where he’s in movie posters for movies that no one will cast him in. I think I liked him in the first Harold & Kumar movie, but I never seem to finish it because I keep wandering off to grab something to eat, you know?)

So anyway, first I’ll explain “Fighting!” very quickly, then I’ll break it down. Here’s the quick version (just speed read it for now – it’s deliberately dense, we’ll come back to it later):

Yes, of course I love to fight, it’s part of my core, and there’s no foreign mystery to this at all, no false stereotype. It’s a natural outcome, as follows: my mother, burdened by PTSD and bipolar disorder, made her poor attempts to find shelter in her rigidly sexist world by instilling an absolutely indomitable ego in her only son, which ironically is exactly what the patriarchy insists upon. A child’s ego is thoroughly reinforced by its use as a shield against the relentless onslaught of physical and emotional rage from father to son, as father had inherited from his father before him, in a ruined landscape of the battlefields of actual and proxy wars among superpowers on the Korean peninsula. That sense of fighting spirit – fighting as not only necessary but tantamount to survival – it never goes away, not with age nor wisdom, so that any satiation is temporary and the fight is everlasting.

Now … that might sound like a uniquely specific and melodramatic personal story, but there’s hardly anything unusual in it for generations of Koreans. You may be vaguely aware of the history. I’ll keep the pace up through this breezy recital, since these are all things you probably heard about in bits and pieces before:

After decades of imperial rule under Japanese occupation, in which the Japanese routinely pursued policies of cultural eradication, the Koreans were briefly liberated with the Allied victory in World War II. This liberation was incomplete when the Korean War promptly broke out, greatly inflamed as a proxy war between the United States and China, with the looming specter of the Soviet Union in the background. (This actually was only the first of a series of bloody proxy wars against Communism which continued through Vietnam and much of Southeast Asia, and even today continues in the Middle East and Africa.) Korean families were divided and impoverished by war, such that it became very common to experience the early deaths of immediate family members, including an especially high proportion of children. Korea is a relatively small country for superpowers to stomp around on – the war affected everyone.

Of course, as this happened way back in the middle of the twentieth century, there was hardly any therapeutic understanding of the mental trauma involved in all of this; at least, not in the terms we would discuss for same conditions today. The prevalence of PTSD was undoubtedly very high, and bipolar disorder could be expected to be no less than it would be at any time in any other place – though with even light cases highly likely to be exacerbated by the conditions of survival in the war-torn land.

Go back up to the short version, and see if it makes more sense now.

I’m not saying that every single Korean has experience with all of the implications of the description here, nor that all Koreans would agree with all of the implications of this description. And of course some of the effects of these common events are dissipated in time as well as diaspora, although some may be intensified by the common immigrant experience of dislocation, isolation, and racism.

I’m also not even going to attempt to explain whether or not any of this is related to a progress within three generations from a country that looks like background footage in M*A*S*H to a country that makes among the best consumer electronics in the world while also producing entertainment that somehow has not only reached the heights of world mass culture, but also accrued international social media clout with actual political impact in the United States of America. I mean …

I’m just saying, I think I know what John Cho was talking about, and I just wanted to share it with you. Put him in some more goddamn movies.

ETA Jan 2023: This seems the right place to note my succinct definition of han: A deep-seated sense of injustice, which fuels a never-ending thirst for revenge.

“Silence is compliance” is a phrase that many people toss off without thinking through how it works. People who use the phrase earnestly think that it’s obvious that silence in the face of injustice is equivalent to complicity in that injustice. But apparently, it’s not so obvious, because many people quote the phrase with a sense of irony, as though it is some kind of slogan for Orwellian thought control.

I have never seen the logic of “silence is compliance” thoroughly explained, so I’m going to attempt that here, just for kicks. I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I’d find a reasonably similar explanation, but the logic is straightforward enough that it’s probably easier to write it from scratch than it is to find an explanation as painfully dull as the one I’m going to give here.

First off, it’s important to discern that the phrase is only really meaningful in political contexts. People do sometimes use the phrase in other decisionmaking contexts, but in those it’s usually meant as a dumb joke. Somehow that dumbness is transferred through osmosis when some people see the phrase in political contexts. For example, when someone says, “Hey how about burritos for lunch? Silence is compliance!” – it’s obvious that this means nothing more than, “If you don’t say anything, I’ll move forward!” (And when you think about it, what even is illogical about that statement?) This is a completely different kind of claim than “Speak up about injustice! Silence is compliance!”

In a political context, it’s a reasonable moral claim, and deserves to be treated as such regardless of which side of the politics you’re on. We can demonstrate exactly why with an example of a controversial political issue … Hmmmm, so many to pick from, what to do, what to do … Well, though I’m tempted to go with old statues, or Confederate flags, or kneeling at anthems, virus names and nicknames, or “violent” protests, but no – these topics may be too hot right now, they could inflame consideration of the simple logic being offered. So I’m going to have to take down the temperature to … Islam vs the West. Truly extraordinary times we are in, that this qualifies as de-escalation!

Let’s start with a controversial statement about Islam, like “Islamic culture supports honor killings.” A “progressive” reaction to this might be something like, “that’s a horribly racist stereotype that is factually untrue.” A “conservative” reaction might be “we lose everything of value if we cannot acknowledge the truth of the harm done in the name of Islam.”

For comparison’s sake, let’s also present the caricatured responses from the land of social media:

“Social Justice Warrior“: Your harmful words deny our reality as a people! Until you come to terms with the racism in your soul, you will never know the truth of your injustice! You must bow down in fear to our coercive power to silence your reasonable objections to our moral superiority!

“Intellectual Dark Web“: You’ve lost sight of the true meaning of liberalism, for you lack the courage to grasp the freedom that is clearly within your reach. You can never outlast the real truth that you are too weak to see. Intellect über alles!

Now, neither of these responses have anything to do with Islam or Western culture, and no one worth your attention ever says exactly these words. Nevertheless, the entire discussion proceeds in social media as if only the other side had said the words of their own caricature. It’s quite an amazing phenomenon.

Back here in the safe ol’ blogosphere, we have the space and the luxury of constructing arguments from steel rather than straw, and insisting that the only welcome comments are fires that temper the steel rather than burn the straw. Or something like that.

So, initial steelmen in this “Islam vs the West” example would be something like:

The “scholarly” view: An attentive reading of the Quran shows that honor killings are to be condemned, as an innocent life is lost and the perpetrators of this crime do not set a good example for society. Of course there are radicals; people with abhorrent beliefs and actions, but it is not fair to taint Islam with their distorted beliefs, just as it is not fair to taint all Christians with the beliefs and actions of the Crusades and many other wars and acts of genocide carried out in the name of a Christian God. It is unjust to impugn all of Islam by association with the horror of honor killings.

The “cultural” view: You can’t claim that a religion is just the words in a book. A religion is how people live it, and how it manifests in the world through the people who claim it, whatever the merits of their claim. I do absolutely condemn all of the wars and genocides of the Christian God, I do also agree that a Christian culture led to those evil outcomes, for the same reasons I cite regarding Islam. So when I say that Islamic culture supports honor killings, I am only stating a fair interpretation of facts and a cultural understanding applied equally across all cultures.

These may have weaknesses, but they are not strawmen, and they can both be much improved. It might even be possible to improve both of these positions to the point that they are not in factual conflict, while they still remain in support of their political positions – but that would be a difficult discussion. It would be lengthy, it would be nuanced, it would be challenging and at times frustrating and possibly emotionally exhausting.

The fact is, all serious political controversies have steelman arguments (including any controversy over whether I should be saying “steelwomxn” instead). But it’s much easier to burn down the strawmen than do the hard work of discussion.

And further, it could be a reasonable moral choice to decline to do the work. In general, you are not obligated to provide anyone your intellectual or emotional labor, and you don’t even need to have a reason to decline, not even privately for yourself. You only have an obligation to engage with people that you’re already in a relationship with, like your partner, or your kids, or your neighbors, or your town, or your country … hey waitaminute …

Politics, of course, is an endeavor among people living in the same society, even if some of those people wish some of the others would leave. Any belief in a political solution raises the obligation of informed discourse. Maybe you don’t have to discuss every little political issue that the neighbors want to gossip about on Nextdoor. But you most certainly do have an obligation to participate in discussions of justice in your society, because if you are willingly living in an unjust society, then one way or another, you will eventually suffer the consequences if you aren’t already.

When a political issue raises questions of injustice, understanding that you have this basic civic obligation to participate is only the first step for making silence into compliance with the injustice, but let’s be clear: you can’t skip that step. To say, “I don’t owe anybody anything!” is simply to withdraw from political participation entirely. That may be your right in some circumstances, but if the current situation is indeed unjust, and you decline to consider yourself in the society at all – when it is in fact true that you are in the society – then your objection is based on a lie, and your silence is willing compliance with injustice.

But what if you do recognize the obvious fact that you’re in the society, but you just don’t want to say your opinion because you know that other people won’t like it? In this case, you are even worse, morally speaking, than in the prior case. There is a claim of injustice in your society, and you will not speak on it because you are afraid of what others will say? How is that a defense of your silence? What if you’re wrong, and your opponents are right about the claim – don’t you want to support justice even if you’re wrong? And even worse, what if you’re right, and your opponents are wrong about this claim of injustice – wouldn’t true justice be better served if you spoke up, regardless of what anyone says in response? In this case, silence is not only compliance, it is cowardly.

And what if pure intellectual freedom favors one outcome, while the demands of social justice favor another? Again: if either of these things actually matter to your society, and you remain silent, then you are compliant regarding the claim of injustice. Ok, one last shot: What if intellectual freedom allows anyone to favor either outcome, but only one of the outcomes supports injustice? Isn’t individual freedom the highest freedom of all? “I still want to pick the outcome that supports injustice, and the inviolable freedom of my mind gives me that right!” So … you’re saying that you could choose to believe either, and you consciously chose to believe the one that favors injustice, just because … you like it better? At this point, there is only one word for you, and I’m too polite to use it, motherfucker.

These intellectual gymnastics are unnecessary. Simply note that all claims of injustice perpetrated by the state are claims that the powerful committed injustice against the powerless. So the default outcome to a true claim of injustice by the state, if nothing is done, is for the injustice to continue. If the claim is false, and you don’t speak up about it, then you are contributing to the decline of a just state. Either way, the worst thing you can do is remain silent.

My point isn’t whether any of the stereotypes, caricatures, steelmen, strawmen, or painfully obvious statements above are bulletproof. My point is only that there is a reasonable and straightforward argument for why silence is compliance, and those who only view the statement mockingly are making a careless mistake. I’m not saying that everyone who utters the phrase has exactly this logic in mind, with this kind of specificity – good people usually don’t have to think it through in that much detail, because it doesn’t occur to them that anyone doesn’t see the clear logic: silence in the face of injustice is morally equivalent to compliance with that injustice.

In the future, the police as we know it today will not exist.

This is not a political statement, it’s simply a technological fact. Now, it’s essential to remember that all technological facts are endlessly contingent. For example, it’s a technological fact that if you click on a link, another webpage will open. But that’s contingent, usually on some very complicated and impressive infrastructure operating without fault (or rather, with sufficient fault-tolerance whose few exceptions did not affect the expected outcome, this time).

If you click a link, it will only do what technologists expect if you’re using a browser that doesn’t have the wrong kind of malicious software. And you have to be using a computing device that doesn’t have some other hardware or software flaw that will prevent expected actions. And you have to be connected to a network that has sufficient range and capacity. And then an entirely different set of computing devices needs to be connected and operating as expected. And then all of that has to work correctly, walking backwards, in high heels. During this entire time, every device involved needs to have electric power in the right amount and at the right time. That is a lot of contingencies.

But still: if you click on a link, a webpage will open (even if it’s not the one you expected). And with just as much certainty: in the future, the job of police will not exist as we understand it today. That is a technological fact, and it requires very little understanding of technology to see that. It merely requires obvious extrapolation from technologies you see around you every day.

Most people, including most police officers, may think the job of police is to stop crime. But all police officers know that it’s more an exception than a rule that they make an arrest on any given day. This is not an indictment or a criticism in any way, it is simply a pure accounting of time. Cops probably spend 50% of any given day in travel time, going from place to place. Maybe another 20% of the day is talking to people: talking to each other, to dispatchers, to citizens with a question or complaint, to witnesses, to victims, to prosecutors and lawyers and judges and juries. Then 30% of the day is administrative: paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, court time, occasionally some training. As a proportion of time spent, there is almost no time spent on a usual day in the active act of stopping crime. Stopping crime might be the reason for police, but that’s not how they spend their time on the job.

Of course, there are occasions where crime is discovered during travel time noted above, and during the talking time above. That happens a lot more on TV than in real life. More often, crime is discovered through other means: an alarm, a call to 911, while carrying out a search warrant, perhaps during a stakeout, or a successful search for a suspect. Police action in each one of these cases is planned beforehand, it doesn’t happen extemporaneously. There is forewarning, and police are specifically sent to a location where the crime may be discovered. None of this is the result of random discovery during the usual day at work.

Technologists hate inefficiency, and can’t help but think about designing for a more efficient police force. A perfect police force would do nothing but fight crime: they would only conduct the very few activities that are a result of planned actions expecting to find crime. The other activities would be done by people who were not police: all that traveling around, talking to people, filling out paperwork – people who are not police officers can do all those things. That is not to diminish the importance of any of those things, and many of them are essential to stopping crime – they are just not themselves the active act of stopping crime that requires the most prepared police action.

In a perfect world, anyone who might ever be involved in actively stopping crime would spend all their free time preparing for the most dangerous police actions, and they would have exactly the resources they need to stop the most deadly opposition that they are likely to encounter – no more and no less. Because some crimes are so inherently dangerous, perfect police would spend all their time on training when they weren’t actively in the act of stopping crime. And in a perfect world, their training would be perfect, so they would follow the best possible tactics to avoid escalation and the use of deadly force, including the elimination of any kind of bias whatsoever.

Obviously, we do not live in a perfect world. There are many, many social reasons why we cannot today operate a perfect police force. Many. But there are also many technological reasons: we cannot predict where crime will happen, we can’t be everywhere at once, we can’t travel fast enough or efficiently enough or safely enough. We might not have the data we need to identify everything that we need in order to make good use of technology, including data relevant to both crime and to training.

The thing about technology is, though, that all of the technological problems will be solved, so long as social barriers don’t prevent that from happening. To be clear: this is NOT an argument for the moral supremacy of technology. Morality is only to be found in society, not in technology – and there may be times when the development of a certain technology may be itself immoral. However, in the absence of social barriers (including moral barriers that we should respect), technology problems will be solved, because that’s the definition of technology: applied knowledge that solves problems. If a problem can’t be solved through technology, it’s not a technology problem: it’s a physics problem.

So in the future, cops will do absolutely nothing other than attempt to stop crime, and train to do that in the best possible way – unless social barriers prevent it.

Unless social barriers prevent it, predictive technology will show where crime is likely to occur, with very high accuracy. Some people might think that there’s no social barrier that should prevent such an obviously worthy goal. Some people will be more concerned about social harms that might come from errors and bias. Some people will be equally concerned, if not more, about the surveillance required to enable predictions. And yet some others believe that citizen surveillance could be a safer alternative to state-operated surveillance – or maybe that some combination of the two, formally or informally, would work optimally. But in any case, if it becomes known that a crime may be stopped, regardless of how it might be known, the police should be sent to stop that crime. Few people could possibly disagree that this would not be what we want from a perfect police force, which don’t forget, is perfectly trained.

As for the people who do all of the other things that police do today – some might argue that these are still police officers, that they are still as essential and honorable, if not even more so. And indeed, it is irrelevant whether or not they are called by the word “police” and irrelevant whether they wear a uniform and irrelevant where their paycheck comes from, from a technology point of view. Social factors determine whether they are called “police” or social workers, whether they are public or private or nonprofit. Those kinds of things have nothing to do with technology – although technology could certainly help determine which social choice is most likely to be optimal.

Social factors also determine whether those other “police” (whether or not so named) are allowed to carry weapons of any kind. None of these people are performing any tasks that are particularly likely to discover a crime in progress, so they clearly don’t need a weapon most of the time. Crucial exception: tasks that routinely involve interactions with victims, actual or potential, will of course discover crimes in progress. But as this is discovered from a victim, no weapon is needed unless for some reason the perpetrator is nearby, as is usually the case with domestic violence. Even in this case, it is clear that the task of ensuring safety is different from the task of preventing ongoing violence, so these are obviously separate jobs, only one of which is likely to need a weapon.

Social factors determine whether or not people who spend so much time doing social work should be able to carry any particular kind of weapon. Whether a “police officer” actually needs to carry a weapon is a social question. For example: maybe a political reason requires all the people doing all this driving around, talking to people, and filling out paperwork to be called “police.” And maybe other social factors require all people that are called “police” to carry weapons that they don’t need, for example for recruiting purposes (assuming that some people join the police at least in part due to their affinity for weapons). As a counter-example: maybe for political reasons, only the people who are actually trained to stop crime will be called police, and all of the other people will be some category of social worker (whether public or private). In that case, it seems unlikely that anyone would want the social workers to carry weapons. But it’s very clear from a technology perspective that only some types of work that we call police work today requires any kind of weapon.

So, in the future, the police as we know it will not exist, as a matter of technological fact – though this is endlessly contingent on social factors. In a perfect world, most people that we call “police” today would be doing the exact same thing that they do today, in terms of time, but they wouldn’t carry guns. Any rational person wouldn’t even want them, at least not for work, as they would know that they are unlikely to ever need to use them. (This is completely independent of any 2nd Amendment argument for or against carrying guns, as those arguments apply to all citizens, not just particularly to police.)

Like all technological predictions, the inevitable end of police as we know it is highly contingent on the expected operation of an extraordinarily complex and interrelated system of infrastructure and endpoints – but this is dependence on social infrastructure and people, not technology. Nevertheless, any good technologist should understand all relevant contingencies.

It’s very easy to imagine an attempt to reach this perfect world that inadvertently turns into a totalitarian police state enabled by technology – we’ve all seen those movies and shows many times now. It’s very tempting to imagine that enough social problems can be addressed so that technology has the social basis it needs to be successful – but there isn’t really much data that should give anyone optimism. So good technologists should spend most of their time finding data and implementing solutions that address the social infrastructure that is required for success.

I didn’t intend to include any moral suasion in this very dry essay, but I can’t help but end with it. Technologists: stop building weapons (anything that enables the police state), and do the social work (data and tools to solve the social problems that prevent us from working on more useful technology).

ETA: Someone suggested the perfect slogan for techies who want to reboot the police: CTRL-ALT-POLICE.

The first scientific mnemonic I can remember is King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. That was a long time ago, and biological classification now seems very different (as far as I can tell from Wikipedia), though it’s unclear to me whether cladistics wasn’t the standard back then, or whether it wasn’t taught in the introductory material that came over with King Philip. Still, it remains true that binomial nomenclature is the standard for the most basic unit of biological classification: species.

When you are learning the basics, you usually don’t stop to question them, at least not very deeply, because if you don’t start by accepting most of what you hear, you won’t ever learn enough to really question everything you’re told. But even back then, the idea that Homo sapiens stood uniquely alone in the classification of all living things seemed very questionable. Humans are considered a monotypic species, which means that the species is the sole member of the rank above it, the genus. I remember thinking that it made sense to group together a lion (Panthera leo), tiger (Panthera tigris), jaguar (Panthera onca), and leopard (Panthera pardus). But why was Homo sapiens all alone? Does that really seem likely to be true, now and forever?

There are other monotypic species; some are even singular through multiple ranks. The aardvark (Orycteropus afer) is the only member of its genus, which is the only genus in its family, making it the loneliest mammal on the planet. There’s a monotypic species of fish (Ozichthys albimaculosus) and butterfly (Eucheira socialis), and several monotypic plants. The hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) was once thought to be monotypic, until a compatriot (Anodorhynchus leari) was correctly identified over a hundred years after it was discovered and originally misclassified. In all of these cases, it’s easy to understand the isolation of the species as a function of either specific adaptations to an available habitat, or as isolation imposed by a habitat that has become unavailable. That is, the aardvark’s habitat is not rare, but its evolutionary adaptations are so specific that its singularity doesn’t seem strange – what’s strange is eating termites, but termites can be found in a lot of places. On the other hand, the Madrone butterfly exists only where madrone trees exist, in high elevations in Mexico – the geographic specificity of the habitat explains the singularity of the species.

The singularity of Homo sapiens is much harder to accept. Human adaptation is so generally applicable that we can thrive in any habitat. As we’ve expanded across the Earth, no isolation of habitat has yet cut us off from further access to evolutionary development; indeed, the opposite is true: we’ve expanded into every habitat and we live in increasingly interconnected ways. There’s no obvious explanation for the absence of other human species. The idea that we stand alone seems like a category error.

Prior to the modern understanding of evolution, biologists theorized that a missing link existed between humans and apes. At one time, humans were thought to be the only “hominids,” and all other apes were called “pongids” – many people sought a missing link between the two, but it was never found because we had misclassified the relationship between hominids and pongids. In the modern understanding, humans and apes are in the same family – turns out, we’re all hominids. So the search for a missing link is now thought to be a fool’s errand.

In this essay, I am that fool. I speculate that the links that are missing aren’t between humans and other apes, but among humans themselves. I propose that Homo sapiens has already evolved into separate species, and possibly we were never a monotypic species for very long.

This is a claim so outlandish that I can only compare it to Copernicus, who examined the complicated orbits of Ptolemaic star charts and realized the absurdity of putting humans in the center of the picture. If you insist that the Sun revolves around the Earth, you need ungainly mathematical gymnastics to work out the orbits of the other planets. It’s a lot more simple to adopt a frame of reference where the Earth revolves around the Sun.

That simple shift in framing was the beginning of a scientific revolution that defines how we live to this day. What I can outline today lacks such impact only because of my inability to specify all that is required in a single essay. However, I aim to provide notes that might inspire a modern-day Aristarchus of Samos, who theorized that the Earth revolves around the Sun, while being utterly without the knowledge or data to prove it.

Aristarchus lived more than three centuries before Ptolemy, and Copernicus lived another millennium and a half after that. We’re only a century and a half after Darwin, but knowledge moves faster these days. Have we properly applied what we’ve learned about evolution to the case of Homo sapiens? A frame of reference that makes us apparently above the laws of evolution must be regarded as inherently suspect.

Are Humans Above Evolution?

One way to ease into this inquiry is to ask whether human evolution has stopped. We don’t have to ask this question, and it seems outlandish to bother to try, but let’s ask anyway. The average duration of a species is 1.2 million years, as far as we can tell from the geological record, and Homo sapiens has been around for only about 200 thousand years, or maybe half a million at most. Isn’t it several hundred thousand years too early to consider this question?

We only estimate the lifespan of species that leave a geological record, some trace of their time on Earth buried deep within its layers. We have no way of knowing about the existence of species that left no record. The shorter the lifespan of a species, the less likely it is that there was enough time and development to leave a geological record. So it’s entirely possible that the average lifespan of species is much shorter than we have been able to measure. Nevertheless, we can sharpen this question by saying that humans now are nearly certain to leave a geological record that will be readable far into the future. Maybe we can assume that the average duration of any species that leaves a readable geological record is over a million years, so therefore we can assume that our species will last a lot longer than we have so far.

But this math-based objection probably isn’t why many of us believe that human evolution isn’t occurring. A stronger reason is just that we find it difficult to conceive of our evolution, because we have dominated the Earth. Other species evolve due to changes in habitat and environment, but our species is defined by its mastery over habitat. We might not survive changes to our environment, but if we do, it will be through either mastery over the environment itself, or due to human-developed adaptations to environmental change. If the planet warms, the ice melts, the oceans rise, and the atmosphere allows in unprecedented radiation – in any scenario where we don’t all die, some will adapt. Will that adaptation be considered human speciation? If some of us learn to live underground, and subsequently develop improved ability to see in the dark, will that be speciation? If some of us are enhanced with bionic lungs, artificial gills, and metallic skin thick enough to repel radiation, will that be speciation?

The traditional definition of species is that members of a common species can generally produce fertile offspring through sexual reproduction. There may be exceptions within the group, but these exceptions are not popular characteristics of the group. For the sake of brevity, I’ll use the term “can mate” to mean “can generally produce fertile offspring through sexual reproduction.” The term mating is inexact and arguably overbroad, but it’s better than typing four times the number of words necessary every time. So: members of the same species can mate. If different types of animals cannot mate, then they are not of the same species.

Consider again a scenario where the environment has changed so much that some humans choose to live underground, others remain above ground. Assume that after a very long period of time passes, the underground-dwellers can see much better in the dark than the aboveground folk. Are these two groups of humans now different species? The usual analysis would conclude that as long as members of the two groups could still mate, we should say no.

What about a situation where one set of humans develop a revolutionary treatment that inserts rare elements into their skin, at a molecular level involving genetic editing, so that no amount of sunlight will harm them? Are they still human? We might still say no, assuming they can still mate with people who don’t get the molecular treatment, but the editing of genetic material will give many of us pause. Is an integration of non-organic technology with human life enough to create a new species?

In either situation, we probably are inclined to wait before rendering judgment. The longer we wait after the change (i.e. living underground, artificial skin), the likelier it is that morphological changes will evolve that absolutely preclude the possibility of mating. In fact, the usual practice of professional taxonomists is to only identify a species after such changes have occurred and can be mapped to phylogenetic markers. The state of the art of biological classification today demands that we be able to see the boundaries between species in their DNA sequences.

Remember though, that today’s state of the art is tomorrow’s obsolete mistake. In the case of humans, stopping the analysis at DNA sequences is a very strange thing to do, since we do not currently know the relationship between patterns of mind and any genetic marker, and yet many scientists suspect a relationship will eventually be proven. Why should we let our own ignorance be the boundary to speciation? How can we analyze differentiation within a species without looking at the most critical features that actually distinguish them as a unique species? It’s like trying to distinguish fish without looking at their gills.

What defines Homo sapiens as a unique species is the product of our minds. We can argue about exactly which products are crucial from an evolutionary standpoint – language or emotion or consciousness or whatever – but there is no question that the evolutionary prospects of our species have always been entirely dependent on the products of our minds. Once we have acknowledged this completely uncontroversial fact, why would we insist that human speciation must be defined by features that are entirely unrelated to the features that make us human? Human speciation must be defined by something that is happening in our minds.

It may seem unscientific to suggest that mere mental activity can be a boundary for species. Genetic material, whether or not you’ve ever seen a strand of DNA, seems more real than thoughts. We’ve seen pictures and diagrams, we know this is an actual object of science. Who has ever laid eyes on a thought? But remember how we got here: DNA sequencing replaced rougher methods of measurement as the preferred tool for biological classification; we updated our techniques because the science advanced. In earlier days, biologists made many mistakes in classification by relying only on visual features – in humans, this has had disastrous results in eugenics and racism. Phylogenetic analysis, for which DNA sequences are the key texts, is vastly superior to prior methods. But it’s not the end of the story.

Most biologists reject mind-body dualism, which is the idea that the sense of self constructed in the mind occurs entirely separate from all material aspects of the body. Almost no scientist believes that a human can have a thought without some observable activity in the brain. Broadly speaking, all of neuroscience is devoted to identifying the biological properties of mental activities. We aren’t very close to being able to match habitual patterns of thinking to heritable genetic markers, but closing that gap seems like a very realistic possibility. As we understand more about how the processes of the mind manifest in matter, we may end up discarding DNA sequencing altogether, just as we abandoned Darwin’s mistaken theory of pangenesis. Or we might better understand what the genetic markers tell us as we learn more about how patterns of thoughts are observable in biology.

Assume that one day, we will find the biological markers of thought patterns, and that these markers are heritable (i.e. transmissible from one generation to the next). The real question here is whether differences in minds are so profound that they can prevent mating, with such prevention being meaningful enough to describe separate species.

The Veil of Limited Perfection

Let’s consider this question with a thought experiment, where we consider the world as viewed through a “Veil of Limited Perfection” – assume all of the people in the thought experiment are exactly the same people as in our world, except that all problems of safety, health, and economics are solved. (Make no assumptions about how the problems were solved! This world is no more likely to be dominated by socialism than capitalism, for example.) No other problems are solved; in particular, sexual reproduction is still the only way for humans to procreate, and our mating rituals and characteristics remain largely the same. No one ever experiences unwanted fear, no one ever dies an unnatural death, and everyone has as much financial resource as they want – but you still have to figure out who to date. In such a world, can different species of humans ever evolve?

Would every single human being be capable of mating with any other? You could say “Yes, in theory.” You have to say “in theory” to account for the fact that you know that no human would happily mate with a completely random selection of any other human on the planet, even though in this thought experiment, that would not affect their safety, health, or wealth. Every single human would continue to have mating preferences, and these preferences would of course not be formed entirely on physical features. Instead, preferences would be largely if not entirely about the products of minds of prospective mates. Are they happy, kind, generous? Are they courageous, resilient, or honest? Do they like the same music, movies, books? Do they like sex the way you like it? All of these questions, and their answers, exist in the minds of prospective mates. Beyond the Veil of Limited Perfection, it’s clear that survival of the fittest is a process determined entirely by products of our minds.

Note also that this world would not be more perfect if we could wish away our preferences. That would mean removing all differences in opinion, temperament, and intellect. It would mean a world without variation in art, or music, or drama or comedy. People do not enjoy all expressions of these equally, and we tend to enjoy other people who enjoy things that are complementary to what we enjoy.

So beyond the Veil of Limited Perfection, each person has a set of people that they would willingly mate with. Looking at the preferences of all people, you can construct sets that include only people who would all be willing to mate with any member of the same set. You could call that a “mutual intra-mating preference group” – but this is a cumbersome name, so for now let’s use “phyloculture” instead. This term risks considerable confusion, since it implies that culture evolves through evolutionary processes, and it’s not yet clear that culture is what we’re talking about here. But if we need a term to describe what is shared between people who enjoy a related set of opinions, temperament, art and music – what better term is there than culture?

Since a phyloculture is defined as “mutual intra-mating preference group,” can we say that different phylocultures are in fact different species? Why not, if by definition no human would choose to mate outside their own phyloculture?

A simple objection is: “But people can still choose to mate outside their phyloculture, can’t they?” No: if they are willing to mate with each other, then by definition they are in the same phyloculture.

The harder form of this objection asks how consent can possibly be considered a barrier in whether animals can generally produce fertile offspring through sexual reproduction. But this objection has already been addressed: in humans, we must look for speciation in the features that define us as humans; as these features are within our minds, we must look at the products of our minds to identify the distinguishing barriers between species (since we do not yet have the capability of genetically identifying the material processes within our minds). The reason that we do not consider consent as a question in the mating of animals is not that consent is irrelevant, but that animals are not capable of consent. (Of course, some argue that animals are capable of consent, but that has no bearing on whether humans have speciated.)

Now, take off the Veil of Limited Perfection. Do you have a set of people that you would willingly mate with? Of course you do. If you knew the same kind of information about everyone on the planet that you know about your set, would your set include everyone? Of course not. The fact is, you already have a mutual intra-mating preference group. You just can’t see it, because it’s distorted by considerations of safety, health, and wealth.

Phylocultures exist today, but they are hidden by social phenomena. Remarkably, many of those phenomena have decreasing importance to species survival over time. In the early days of Homo sapiens, the species could not survive simple threats to safety or health. As we developed increasingly sophisticated social structures, economic considerations also greatly affected human survival. But nearly all humans alive today have considerably better prospects for matters of basic survival than humans of a thousand years ago. Another way of saying this is: Human speciation has already occurred, you just didn’t notice because it was hidden by earlier survival needs.

Finally, I can reveal that I decided to use the term “culture” despite possible confusion because I’m adding a dubious corollary to this theory of human speciation: As cultures evolve, they will tend to evolve into phylocultures, or they will disappear. In the future, there will be no cultures other than phylocultures.

Cultural Evolution in an Interconnected World

Cultural evolution is a field with an ugly history of controversy, as it is closely aligned with repugnant ideas about race and nationalism, and eugenics and genocide. We should take seriously the possibility that the ideas here can similarly be distorted by supporters of repugnant ideologies. These matters may deserve a separate follow up essay to address all concerns in detail, but for now, suffice to say that I categorically reject racism, nationalism, eugenics, and genocide. I’m a crazy amateur political philosopher, but I’m not a monster; just because the latter overlaps significantly with the former, that obviously doesn’t mean that the former all sympathize with the latter.

The study of cultural evolution routinely assumes that culture is transmitted through social means. The newer subfield of biocultural evolution posits that an interplay of genetic and social factors result in the evolution of cultures. One of the more common objections to the idea of cultural evolution is the assertion that evolution only acts on an individual level, sometimes even going so far as to say that only genes evolve, not people. Biocultural evolution has a great answer to this: individual genetic evolution has emergent properties that are only interpretable at a group level. As an over-simplified example: if some set of genes contributes to musical talent, and if a particular culture values musical talent (including in mating), then cultural reinforcement of the value of music will favor the continued advantage of those genes in a virtuous cycle.

There are of course cultural traits that have value between groups, not just within them. Put a warlike culture next to one that is not, in circumstances where war is common and resources are scarce, and the warlike culture has a group advantage that has evolutionary impact on the other group. However, cultural advantages rise and fall much more rapidly than natural habitats. If warlike culture were always an advantage, presumably we would all be Spartans.

And this is the first key to understanding how cultures will evolve into more visible phylocultures. When considering the advantages of traits that are expressed by the body, the background timetable is provided by changes in habitat, which occur over epochs. For advantages of traits expressed by the mind, the background timetable is provided by changes in culture, which evolve much faster than habitat, and faster still as time goes on. As far as we can tell, the culture of every type of early human was relatively static for millennia. In the Common Era, cultural change usually occurred over centuries. But in the last century, cultures changed by the decade, and in this decade, many of us have experienced cultural change just in the past year. So human speciation, properly understood, is happening faster than ever. That doesn’t mean the acceleration will continue, but it does mean that there might be more to analyze about human speciation from the last few decades than there has been in all the human history prior to that.

In prehistoric times, Homo sapiens coexisted with other hominins (including interbreeding, by the way, and yet we still view these as separate species). We may have had similar cultures, but we had very separate geographies. Then as the human population grew to cover the Earth, and finally we developed the technology for a very high degree of interconnection, there was a point in the 20th Century where we talked about a “monoculture” because we were so many and so connected that it seemed like a concentration of media power would drive a single dominant culture.

And then the Internet happened. In the glory days after the turn of the millennium, we crowed about the disaggregation of media and the disintermediation of corporate gatekeepers. Microcontent and microtargeting at first seemed to mean thousands of different cultures were possible. But that was an illusion. The reality is, concentration of media power has reassembled, in only a slightly different configuration. You can see it if you look for it: reconfiguration and consolidation of online cultures is happening now, very rapidly. And online culture increasingly forms and reflects offline culture. The importance of geography, nationality, race, and even religion in forming cultural boundaries has diminished. People are more united now by thoughts, opinions, and tastes that are relatively free of those old boundaries, and getting more free all the time. As this process continues, the observable features of phylocultures will become more and more prominent.

Where Does This End?

It never ends. Evolution never ends … or does it? (Or were you just asking, when is this incredibly long essay going to end?)

I don’t know. I have a theory, and since that theory builds upon this one, it is even crazier than the notions here. But I’ve already obliquely revealed the beginnings of an outline in a prior essay, which is actually my first statement of three phylocultures that I believe exist today. I believe that properly structured research would show credible material supporting the existence of at least three human species today. It would take a lot of work over many years to properly design and conduct this research, and frankly I’m not qualified for the task. However, as a closing note and a stake in the ground, I’ll assert the first proposed binomial nomenclature for these ostensible species: Homo fidelus (The Culture of Belief), Homo humanitas (The Culture of Humanity), Homo cognitio (The Culture of Knowledge).

I’m no Linnaeus, I’m certainly no Copernicus, and I only hope to inspire an Aristarchus. But if you think I’m crazy, you’re probably a different species than I am.

This recent “Mundia & Modia” essay reads as a distillation of The Two Cultures, giving the name “Mundia” to the culture that reasons from immutable facts about the world, and “Modia” to the culture that centers on relationships between people. The message is so similar to that of The Two Cultures that I can almost recommend this short essay as a replacement for the longer lecture. The essay lacks the evocative detail of the lecture, but it is also free of the lecture’s jargon, less bound to a particular place in time, and unburdened by mid-century nationalistic baggage, which was nearly unavoidable in Snow’s time. I like the descriptions of Mundia and Modia because the boundaries are formed by how members of a culture make meaning about life. Your culture isn’t where you live or where you’re from, it’s not what you wear or eat, it’s not who you admire or hate. Culture is how you make sense of your place in the world.

Snow’s world was in the precious context of intellectual elites, and was distorted by fashionable stereotypes. But he does muse about another culture that seems outside of both Mundia and Modia. For lack of a better term, he calls it a culture of “technology.” This was near the dawn of the Information Age, at a time when the transistor had recently been invented and hardly commercialized. Yet he was prescient in identifying a culture that seemed based in something more than immutable facts about the natural world, and something beyond the relationships between humans. A generation ago, a futurist organization described its view of this third culture, but that came only one generation after the Snow lecture – another entire generation has passed since then. We have much more information that allows us to clearly understand and define the boundaries between cultures.

Belief, Humanity, and Knowledge – these are all highly loaded terms, and prefixes like “pro-” and “anti-” are bullets in our rhetorical guns. The very first thing to understand about this Three Cultures Thesis is that none of the cultures is superior to the others. Instead, we recognize that each culture is certain of its own superiority, while completely unable to demonstrate that superiority across cultural boundaries because of the way each of them reasons against or with the others.

In each culture, there is a first value (“pro-“) that is at the center of all reasoning within the culture, and there is a second value (“anti-“) that is the most important challenge to that first value. Although the term “anti-” denotes that second value, this doesn’t mean that the culture is always against the second value – only (and always) when the second value comes in conflict with the first. The triangle is completed by noting that the rationale for the first value is always rooted in a third value (“rationale”), which is the way a culture justifies its first value.

Each culture is interlocked with the other two cultures in relationships that are at once antagonistic and attractive. It’s tragic, really: Your biggest enemies want to be friends with you, while you want to be friends with others whose central motivation is inimical to yours.

THE CULTURE OF BELIEF

Culture of Belief: pro-belief

The Culture of Belief includes all people whose central reasoning is based on believing in something above all else. God and Country are obvious examples, but there are many other subcultures of belief that are not about religion or nationalism. People can believe in capitalism with similar fervor, or socialism, or art, or love or sex. Some of the greatest accomplishments in human history have been achieved from Belief subcultures, as well as some of the greatest atrocities. Nothing is stronger than belief, in that it really cannot be defeated until the believer stops believing, and nothing can stop a true believer from believing.

Culture of Belief: anti-knowledge

The most important challenges to Belief come from knowledge. But knowledge is ultimately irrelevant to belief: When you believe in something, you know it is true in a way that requires no further proof, in part because knowledge is inherently unreliable and limited. Anything that is honestly presented as fact must also be open to re-examination, because an openness to new information is a hallmark of knowledge. The few facts that can be established as immutable and universal can easily be dismissed as limited, since the only way to achieve an unchanging, universal fact is to define the universe in a static and bounded way. If you believe that the universe is infinite and that everything changes, you know that no knowledge can endure forever. Beliefs, however, have endured as long as humanity, and always will.

Culture of Belief: human rationale

Why should anyone bother believing in anything? Most adherents to any belief will insist that their devotion serves the dual purpose of advancing the belief as well as the prospects for humanity. People don’t kill in the name of God – or capitalism, or communism, or any ideology – because they hate people. Instead, adherents to a Belief culture will insist that the belief is in the best interests of humanity. They believe that humanity cannot prosper without Belief, so anyone who would be human must adopt this belief. Conversely, anyone who doesn’t adopt the belief is missing what it takes to fully achieve the best of humanity. When push comes to shove, Believers will choose the eternal interests of the Belief over the short-term interests of humans – because those interests must necessarily only be short term if they are not in service of the Belief.

THE CULTURE OF HUMANITY

Culture of Humanity – pro-human

The Culture of Humanity is centered in the common interests of all humanity. Humans by their own definition are the source of compassion, kindness, and really all of the things that are truly worthy, which is to say worthy of being human. That either sounds lovely to you or comes across as fatuous tautology, which is a fancy way of calling hippie-dippie bullshit. Again, the Culture of Humanity is no guarantee of good works or bad. Some our greatest leaders have been centered in humanity, and some who espouse human values have become terrorists in the eyes of the world. As is the case with Belief, no one is always right or always wrong just from the fact of membership in Humanity.

Culture of Humanity – anti-belief

No matter how much any Belief appears to be grounded in a rationale to benefit humanity, Believers must always make a dividing line between themselves and non-believers. And non-believers are, by definition in the eyes of Believers, not fully realizing their humanity. It’s a very short step from there to regarding non-believers as less human, and less worthy. In this way, Belief is the most important challenge to Humanity, which recognizes no boundaries between humans that can justify differing valuations of essential human worth. Humanity sees Belief as inevitably leading to bloodshed because Belief fails to put humanity first.

Culture of Humanity – knowledge rationale

Isn’t the Culture of Humanity merely a belief that humans are the most important value? No, because Humanists reason from knowledge to arrive at their culture. (The term “humanist” has been used in various ways for centuries. In that tradition, I’m using “Humanist” here in a way that aligns with some but not all of the history of the word.) Knowledge is impermanent and limited, except for this one fact: we are all humans. That fact is irrefutable, though the chain of reasoning from there to require that we all be treated as humans has many weak links. Nevertheless, Humanists use the techniques of Knowledge, not Belief, to make the case for compassion, kindness, and mindfulness.

THE CULTURE OF KNOWLEDGE

Culture of Knowledge – pro-knowledge

The greatest accomplishments of our species have come through the accumulation, examination, curation, distribution, and application of knowledge. The Culture of Knowledge values knowledge above all other values because without knowledge, we would be little more than vulnerable and rather pathetic animals. So knowledge is not just instrumental to our flourishing, it is itself the most important thing to flourish. Everything else is ephemeral or retrograde. Beliefs become superstition and ignorance. Humanity is largely violent, brutal, and selfish. Knowledge is the path to a better life.

Culture of Knowledge – anti-human

Knowledge is the highest value in part because it’s the greatest expression of human ability. Knowledge rises above the temporary concerns of humans in their current form. Given a choice to advance humanity or advance knowledge, there can be no acceptable choice other than to pick knowledge, because what makes us human is our knowledge, so advancing knowledge is advancing the best of our humanity. If other aspects of humanity must be shed in order to continue to advance knowledge, then that’s a small price to pay for the prize of keeping the best of what being human is about. Beliefs that oppose knowledge are not a true threat to knowledge. Only a definition of “human” that doesn’t put knowledge first is a threat – in this way, Knowledge is anti-human.

Culture of Knowledge – belief rationale

Ultimately, choosing Knowledge as the highest of all values is a kind of belief, though it is not within the culture of Belief. In a sense, the value of Humanity is a belief, and of course so is any Belief. But Knowledge is the most demonstrably powerful belief because by definition, applied knowledge always has observable results in the physical world. Proof of the existence of Knowledge is evident everywhere; proof of the existence of God is not only lacking, but unnecessary according to the very belief in God. Belief in the value of Knowledge does not require faith, as the rules of evidence are stated within the belief. This makes Knowledge stand outside of all other beliefs, but nevertheless the choice of Knowledge as the highest value is rooted in belief.

CONSEQUENCES AND CONTEXT

This Three Cultures Thesis explains many otherwise curious contradictions: divisions in progressive politics, Austrian vs Keynesian economics, environmentalists vs ecofascists, American patriotism vs exceptionalism, and differing reactions to pandemic plans. These will have to be the subjects of other essays, which I may attempt depending on how long the current pandemic lasts.

At least one future essay will cover the context of these cultural divisions, as I believe that this thesis is important in a much larger context. In fact, the only reason I wrote this post is so that I could write a later post explaining why this all matters. All of the above is really just a prelude to pick up from the very last lines of Snow’s lecture:

“The danger is, we have been brought up to think as though we had all the time in the world. We have very little time. So little that I dare not guess at it.”

That was over sixty years ago. We have so little time left that we have no choice but to try to guess at it.

At one time or another in your life, you’ve probably gotten the advice to “live in the moment.” Maybe you’ve gone so far as to adopt this as a way of life; many people call this being “present.” Some people don’t like the way that sounds, but even if you dismiss this all as hippie mumbo-jumbo, you probably know that many people have had that great moment in life – usually looking in the eyes of another, sometimes just looking within yourself, and just really connecting to life. That is what being present feels like, even if you don’t want to call it that. So the annoying people giving that persistent advice are telling you to be present in the moment, because that is how you can experience the best of life.

But a very similar thing happens in your head in a very different kind of situation. For example, when I was a young teen in New Jersey, I was riding my bicycle alongside my friend, who was riding a moped. (It was Jersey in the ’80s, mopeds were very cool then.) I was dumb enough to hang on to his arm so we could go up the busy street at an unreasonable speed. We were going way too fast when my front wheel hit a rock and flinched into the curb, throwing me over the handlebars.

To this day, I can still remember every detail of being in the air, the thoughts racing through my head, the department store across the street appearing upside down, the texture of the sidewalk as my face approached it, and the cool wave of relief flooding my entire body as I floated inches above the concrete and into soft uncut grass, completely unharmed. Those two seconds felt like the longest day of my life. Because I was present.

I don’t want to label that event as traumatic, but only because it’s at the low end of the range of things that you might consider as trauma. But I can also remember time slowing to a crawl on a hiking trail, while watching a bear creep slowly towards my son. I can remember certain moments of eternity during my divorce. And I can recognize that at those times, I was very much present. Fortunately, I had good ways of relieving trauma – with great friends, absorbing work, the bonds of family. Unfortunately, I also had some bad ways to just take the shortcut of blotting out any sense of presence. That tended to make the next day really long, with a splitting headache.

So anyway …

We are all now at a time of global trauma. In each moment, our senses are ready for the next thing to happen. Our usual places and people of refuge are unavailable, or only available in an unfamiliar form. Too many of us are in a precarious situation, whether emotional or financial or physical. And so we are far more present than we want to be, for a situation we never wanted to be in. Even if you are lucky enough to have someone to turn to, that person is also experiencing the same trauma. We are all present together.

That. Is. Why. The. Days. Are. So. Long.

Nevertheless, it remains true that being present in the moment gives you the best chance to find those moments that make life worth living. You may have been forced to be present for every moment in these times, but you still have the choice to be present for yourself, for your loved ones, and for everyone you can. In the end, I am one of those annoying people who gives this advice persistently.

1. The most basic criticism of capitalism is that it is inexorably tied to growth.
   1. Capitalism is the most efficient way to allocate resources.
   2. Efficiency always favors scale.
   3. Scale favors inequality, because greater extraction of resources is enabled by more underclass, so resources are effectively allocated to create larger and larger underclass, with an elite class almost as byproduct. 
2. We are now at a scale where resource extraction of some form will break some kind of infrastructure required to maintain growth.
   1. The key types of infrastructure that enable large societies are: finance, energy, water, food, housing, military and policing, politics, and environment.
3. Of infrastructure types, finance is the most fragile and environment is the most vital. So finance will likely break first, and the environment will probably break last – reserving a healthy respect for the combined odds of an unlikely explosive event in any of the other types.
4. What we are seeing in 2020 is a large scale demonstration that money isn’t an undeniable law of the universe – it is a social convention that is strong enough to call fact, but weak enough to deny as real. In shorthand, we can label people who both see this and feel this as “radicalized.”
   1. We can call people who act on this as “extremist” – while acknowledging that there are many instances where what is now considered just was first considered extreme.
5. In the current demonstration of financial fragility, we can already see that the owners of the capitalist system will succeed in maintaining the most efficient allocation of resource to reward scale without destroying the system. 
   1. The underclass will receive the minimum concessions required to continue to reach greater scale for continued extraction of resources.
6. Scale is now at a level that enables the largest and fastest dissemination of information in all of recorded history. The percentage of radicalized people is a minority, but it is larger both in size and in proportion than it has ever been.
   1. There are many very cool things about the dissemination of information and associated technologies, but these are a side show.
7. Since information feeds radicalization, there is no way to stop the growth of radicalization other than increasing authoritarianism, which is the only way to decrease the flow of information at this point.
8. Capitalism will therefore allocate resources to authoritarianism because that maximizes the scale of the underclass required to extract maximum resources.
   1. The underclass will receive only the amount of goods and services required for them to accept the devil’s bargain of surviving for further exploitation under authoritarianism.
9. The size of the radicalized population is large enough to foretell a kind of civil war in the United States. Capitalism is efficient enough to allocate resources to preventing this war from becoming one of blood, though with a “blood and soil” culture as a potential byproduct of the authoritarianism required to slow radicalization.
10. The most peaceful outcome to hope for is a slow balkanization of the United States. It’s hard to see that trajectory ending in anything other than states not united – not culturally, politically, economically, or legally.
11. Hopefully a bloodless war is coming first, even if a bloody war might follow later. Since the financial system is the most fragile of infrastructures required to support capitalism, it should not be surprising to see it collapse first.
12. The collapse of our financial system has now been demonstrated in periodical financial system shocks going back almost four decades.
    1. This started with the initial petrodollar shock of the ’70s – finance is intertwined with energy extraction, which of course drives environmental exploitation.
13. The observable cracks in the financial system are so large now that it’s hard to believe that an even larger financial system could possibly survive the next crash, which would be due to come in about another decade.
14. The real limit is not the size of the cracks but that the efficient allocation of resource required for the masses to accept authoritarianism is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from what authoritarians want people to call socialism.
    1. In other words, the next blowup will only be repairable by allocating even more resources to the underclass, which increases the ability of the underclass to communicate and understand radicalism.
15. The capitalist system will stop short of allowing socialism to end capitalism. As a last gasp, it will empower authoritarians who would kill people if helpful to maintain capitalism.
    1. These people would be largely but not exclusively radicalized. There will be plenty of collateral damage.
    2. These people would be almost exclusively underclass.
16. The peaceful Hail Mary to hope for is the rapid advancement of technology that would replace human labor with robots and artificial intelligence.
    1. The excess humans would be placated with limitless entertainment, legalized drugs, and universal basic income.
17. Despite our best hopes, the most likely outcome is that the next financial shock will be the last, either through failure to scale or a war that necessarily includes the destruction of the financial system, which can theoretically be rebuilt under an authoritarian regime. 
18. There are really funny jokes about each and every one of the points and subpoints above.
    1. The ones about the subpoints are the funniest ones.
    2. A plurality of the jokes are about sex, which means they are the most obvious ones, but doesn’t mean they’re not the funniest ones.

FAQ

WTF is this?

A few months ago, I decided to radically increase my consumption of Twitter. Reading a constant stream of information, I never really took the time to try to assemble everything I’ve learned into a coherent narrative. Now that we are in Covid-19 shelter-in-place, the combination of a huge amount of free time and a rapid amplification and culmination of every message I’ve read previously compels me to write an outline of everything I’ve read recently.

Do you want to argue about this?

No. This is not an argument. This is an outline of everything I’ve absorbed on Twitter in 2020, in the order of a coherent narrative. I’m aware that there are arguments against every single point. I did not include any of them.

I’m aware that my sources are biased, both in my selection and in their content – that is how Twitter works. I’m aware that there are many omissions. I’m aware that some terminology is clumsy, or confusing, or potentially offensive. I’m aware that there are missing perspectives, and there’s a glaring lack of data or even citation. The lack of citation may seem particularly galling to many people. I’m not interested in arguing about any of this.

Are you aware that you’ve made an error? If I explain it to you, will you fix it?

No – if I was aware of an error, I wouldn’t have made it. If you try to explain something to me, I might listen, but I probably won’t go back and “fix” this outline because there is nothing to fix – it’s an accurate outline of what I’ve read on Twitter. Perhaps if there is another pandemic and that gives me free time instead of killing me, I will include your explanation in another outline. I don’t think I’ll want do do this again during this pandemic. I should probably get off of Twitter.

Are you aware that people smarter than you disagree with you?

Yes.

Do you think you’re original?

There is nothing original here. It is an outline of what I’ve read, which means that someone else said it.

Don’t you think you’re missing something?

No. This is an outline. By definition, it excludes the vast majority of content. It also excludes a huge number of relevant historical events, fascinating theories, and all sources not mentioned frequently in my Twitter feed, which necessarily favors time in recent living memory. 

Whatever it is you think I’m missing: If I’m aware of it, I left it out on purpose. If I’m unaware of it, then I didn’t find out about it or didn’t remember it for this outline anyway.

You don’t even mention the pandemic – don’t you think it’s relevant?

The pandemic is a proximate cause of many points in the outline, and gave me time to write the outline, but is not intrinsically important to the points of the outline. The exact same outline could have occurred in an event of an alien attack, assuming the aliens were defeated. In theory either the pandemic or the aliens would end up making this outline irrelevant, but I did not find that theory interesting enough to outline.

Whoa, you mean like how Adrian Veidt fabricated a fake alien octopus to attack the Earth in the hopes of uniting everyone in peace? Do you think that Elon Musk is like Veidt? Do you think the Chinese regime fabricated the novel coronovirus as a subtle act of war, or even as a devious act of peace, à la Veidt?

I too loved The Watchmen. Sorta, he wishes, and no.

What do you think about this technical solution?

This is an outline of what I’ve read on Twitter, it’s not a problem solving session. In any case, all relevant technical solutions are covered in 6.a., 16, and some of 16.a.

Aren’t 5.a and 8.a the same?

No. 5.a. refers to monetary concessions to the underclass in an attempt to repair a financial shock. Such a repair attempt was just passed by the U.S. Senate, and is a current example of point 5. 8.a. refers to goods and services produced by a capitalist system for the underclass, which even under the authoritarianism noted in point 8, can be relatively comfortable. That is why it’s called a “devil’s bargain.” 16.a. is the best case outcome of the devil’s bargain.

Why are there main points and subpoints?

It just seemed to me that some points were not truly necessary to a coherent narrative, but very helpful to understanding a related point. I put these in as subpoints but maybe could have made them main points or probably could have left them out entirely. 

Also, as mentioned in the outline, subpoints tend to inspire the best humor.

Your jokes aren’t funny. Also, there are many things I don’t like about you. I demand that you explain or prove anything you’ve written. I challenge you. You are worthy of neither attention nor admiration, only my unending scorn.

That is not a question. This is a FAQ, which means Frequently Asked Questions.

Do you believe anything you’re saying here? Does this outline align in any way with your personal beliefs or political positions?

Yes, some of it and somewhat.

So then is this your manifesto?

No. This is an outline of everything I’ve read on Twitter recently, assembled in the order of one coherent narrative. This is my manifesto.

Again, WTF is this?

Again: this is March 2020 and we’re under a shelter-in-place order. There’s not a lot to do.

I was wrong about why Warren would win the Presidency, bringing a merciful end to my brief non-career as a political prognosticator. (Though really, if a poor record ended dumb predictions, there would be no pundits at all.) I have a lot of the same thoughts that many other Warren supporters have; I don’t have much to add to these types of reflections on:

• Buyer’s remorse.
• Fervor for Warren was concentrated in a small class.
• I’m really sad.

Clearly my Warren pick was fueled by wishful thinking, so maybe the best use I can make of this space is to try to understand exactly what I was wishing for – this will help me determine whether it’s reasonable to continue wishing or whether I should adhere to a version of reality that doesn’t include those wishes.

Wish #1. I was wishing for an end to the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama line of power. This isn’t the place to push an excoriating critique of neoliberal economics, nor is this about wanting Boomers to just get out of the way. (Warren, after all, is a Boomer.) I simply believe that a small group of like-minded individuals has dominated our politics for far too long. Most people do not see the through-line from Reagan to Obama, but their donors do. There is a solid core of moneyed interests that naturally funds campaigns that protect their wealth. I think that it is their right to do so, but there is no countervailing collective force that could find a better balance of interests. As a result, elites are engaging in a real tragedy of the commons that appears unstoppable.

Wish #2. I was wishing that the media would break its usual pattern of reporting during this cycle. When I was in college (OMG that was 30 fucking years ago), my intro American Politics professor said that “horse race” election coverage was a critical weakness in our democracy that could lead to our demise as a nation. His thesis was that representative democracy depends on citizens making choices based on information about the candidates’ positions. Horse race coverage makes politics into a game show rather than a process, totally obscuring substantive positions. I took that as received wisdom and thought that surely we’d eventually break that cycle. I thought that the media distortions of 2016 were so pernicious and so obvious that we couldn’t possibly continue down this path. I was not just wrong, but incredibly naive as well.

In retrospect, this wishful thinking was completely nonsensical. I was wishing for a reversal of clear trends that have been flourishing for my entire adult life. It’s ok to believe that change is possible, but it’s stupid to believe that it’s probable when looking at powerful long-term trends. The most likely case is for powerful trends to continue until they collapse from their own weight. In fact, the more perverse a trend seems, the more likely it is to continue because in going against all reasonable desires, the trend must be fueled by something more powerful than any of those desires.

So what does “collapse from their own weight” look like? My wishes were overcome by truths – let’s look at what those truths would turn into as they continue on current trend:

Truth #1: Powerful interests retain their hold on power until they are destroyed by their own overreach.

Truth #2: Media coverage will always push for engagement (views, clicks, outrage) over any other goals, until there is no distinction whatsoever between news and entertainment.

In my previous wishful thinking, what were the hopes underlying the wishes? I was hoping that the election of Trump was kind of an aberration, or rather the last dying gasp of several bad ideas. I was hoping that there were enough people in power that wanted to share the wealth with people out of power. I was hoping that this country wouldn’t become the worst version of itself.

All of those wishes seem childish now. What they really all amount to is a wish for peace. Peace between different ways of life. Peace between different kinds of people. Peace between different levels of advantage and disadvantage.

If you believe, as I do, that this country has never been at peace – that there has always been the violence of oppression, bigotry, and inequality – then it is wishful thinking to believe that there ever will be peace. The trends that have led to our current situation have always been there, and they seem much likelier to intensify than dissipate naturally.

Peace by definition disappears with violence. We are not at peace now, because the violence has occurred and is ongoing. The suppression of differing people, ideologies, and backgrounds has been accomplished by long histories of varied violence, whether physical, political, or economic. Once peace has been disturbed by violence, it rarely returns without violence. I wish this weren’t true, but wishful thinking doesn’t do anything but hide the ugly truths.

In short: Things are bad, and they aren’t getting better. They only way they will get better is by getting a lot worse, which isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. But my wishes are irrelevant.

I named this blog “ginsudo” in 2007, saying that it means “the way of ginsu.” That was a lazy evasion, as the natural follow-up question should be “Sure, but what exactly is your way?” And I had no answer.

Sure, I had theories. I always have a theory. A good friend called me out on this, fifteen years into our friendship. I was regaling him with some forgettable tale about personal growth, and he listened with patience and bemusement as I concluded with the immodest judgment that I’d changed so much that I must be unrecognizable as the person he met a decade and a half ago. He replied, “Well, there’s one thing about you that hasn’t changed, that was clear from the day I met you, that is perhaps your defining characteristic: You always have a theory. And you express your theories with a visceral passion. A few years later, you might have a completely different, possibly even mutually exclusive, theory. But you’ll have a theory, and you’ll believe it with all your heart.”

I can’t decide if that’s a sparkling insight or an acerbic insult, and I can’t deny its truth. I sat with that truth for another five years before I realized: “Hey waitaminute. I’d rather always have a theory, and always change it, than always be in a perpetual state of confusion. In either case, there’s no real answer, so I might as well be excited about the illusions along the way.”

That’s the background to this momentous event: I’m changing the tagline of this blog from “the way of ginsu” to the shortest statement that I can make of what has really become my way, after all these years of searching. I may have believed a lot of things over the last dozen or so years, but I didn’t believe any of them strongly enough to make it the meaning of ginsudo. I like to think that underneath all of the other theories I have ever had about life, this statement is the purely distilled expression of the true meaning of them all. So here is the latest, and greatest, expression of my way:

At the base of every argument is the irrefutable fact that there is only one thing that everyone agrees upon.

Now, I don’t mean to be coy about what that one thing is: “I think that I am thinking, right now.“ Everyone agrees that this is a thought that must be in your head as you think anything else. A few people would say that this is the only thing that everyone must acknowledge is true. Whether or not it’s the only thing, it is certainly irrefutable.

There are only two ways to object, and both of them are inadequate to the task.

One objection comes from the land of science fiction, or perhaps from sciences so far advanced that they seem like fiction. This objection says that it’s likely we’re not at all what we think we are, that the odds are likely that we’re simply living in a simulation. Perhaps nothing is real at all. This objection is irrelevant. Even if it is true, the simulation creates in you the thought that “I think I’m thinking, right now” – you could say that’s actually the test of a successful simulation.

The other objection comes from either sophistry or deep insight – as diametric as these are, it’s often difficult to tell the difference. But in either case, the objection is simply, “So what? It’s a trivial observation.” The deep expression of this objection goes on to say that the sense of self is an illusion, consciousness is a human construct, all outcomes are deterministic (or “fated”), so thoughts are merely distractions from a more important truth. But I never said that “I think I’m thinking” is the most important truth, even if it is the only one that everyone agrees upon. In fact, I’m saying that this truth is the gateway to many deeper truths, which is perfectly in accord with this line of putative objection.

So the interesting claim of ginsudo is not the actual fact that everyone must agree upon. It’s the idea that this fact is at the base of every argument. In the most grandiose statement of my way, I’m claiming that I’ve found the bottom turtle.

This comes from the apocryphal tale of a famous scientist explaining cosmology to an audience. After the lecture, one elderly lady approaches the scientist and says, “Your lecture was hogwash – how can anyone believe that the earth simply exists in the universe without any support beyond your mystical claims?”

The scientist asks, “Well then, what do you suppose supports the earth?”

She says, “The planet rests on the back of a giant turtle.”

The scientist responds, “Alright then, what supports the turtle?”

“An even larger, more grand turtle.”

At this point, the scientist is sure she’s trapped: “And then? What’s beneath that grand turtle?”

She exclaims triumphantly, “You silly goose, it’s turtles all the way down!”

In stating my way, I’m revealing many things about myself, but there’s one thing that people who know me already know too well: I’ve been in a lot of arguments. I’ve been in arguments with people who love me, people who hate me, people smarter than me, people with an exasperating inability to understand even the most basic tenets of argumentation. I’ve been in arguments with my bosses, my employees, my peers, my friends, my lovers, my children, and way too many people on Twitter.

What I’ve learned from all these arguments is that most people in arguments aren’t trying to win the argument. They’re trying to say something about themselves, say something about the other person, say something about the world or about life or about the universe and god and everything. But if you are trying in good faith to get to the truth in any argument, there is always one technique that you will try, and that is to seek a place of common agreement that precedes the argument. Almost always, this means that you try to find the nearest place where you agree.

That means, for example, that if you and I are arguing about who to vote for in the next election, we might argue about economics or immigration or globalism or socialism – and we might find that we’re making no progress. If we want to make progress, we seek the nearest place where we have a common goal, usually something like: “We want the best outcome for this country.” But maybe we find out that isn’t our common goal. Maybe one of us says, “What do you mean, ‘our country’? I want the best outcome for humanity first, our country only a distant second and only to the extent that our country can affect the future of humanity.” It’s interesting to find a place like that, where you thought you must have a common point in your argument, but actually, there’s a deeper foundational point that you must discuss first.

What I’m saying here is that it’s not enough to start from the nearest foundational point. The foundation under all foundations, the last turtle in the entire stack, is in not the nearest but rather the deepest point: that there is only one thing that everyone agrees on. The idea that “I think that I am thinking, right now” is the only thing that you must agree on is both freeing and compassionate. It frees you from every assumption you were making about what the other person must agree upon. It forces you to understand that you diverge from your counterpart in this argument somewhere after this base agreement, and there is absolutely no rule that requires that the divergence take place in any particular place above that bottom turtle.

This truth gives you enormous power, which you will probably never choose to use. If you had the time, you would build up from this base, instead of simply finding the nearest point of agreement. A stable bridge cannot be built simply as a quick connection between the nearest shores across the water. Instead it must be anchored deep in the foundation not only of both shores but deep underneath the waters. So in arguing with someone, if you really want to understand your disagreement, you would start from the foundation that the only thing that you must agree upon is that each of you is thinking, “I’m thinking, right now” – and you would try to draw a line from that thought to each other, finding where you disagree along the way.

For all practical purposes, you would have neither the time nor inclination to do this with every person you would want to argue with. But simply knowing that this is the base, that you would have to work up from this base if you really and truly want to resolve your argument – that knowledge would curtail a lot of your desire to argue in the first place. 

That is my way, if not in practice, always in theory.

When I first started getting glum about the future, I thought that maybe I was just getting old and grumpy. But now I’ve noticed that an increasing number of people are concerned about the direction we’re all heading. In fact, it seems that the younger you are, the more likely you are to have some pessimism about the planet, at least to a point. And that point depends on your understanding of basic ideas from biology and sociology. This understanding doesn’t have to be so great: a little knowledge is a sufficiently dangerous thing, as I will surely demonstrate here. It’s not climate science that’s depressing – it’s the science of people.

This book review recounts an analogy that provides a good starting point: Imagine a bottle containing a population of bacteria that doubles every minute. The population growth starts at 11am, and the bottle is filled to capacity with bacteria by noon.

First question: What time was the bottle half full?

The math is not hard on this one. Since the population doubles every minute, the bottle was half full at 11:59am. In the next minute, the bottle was totally full, and without another bottle to expand into, all the bacteria died soon after noon, as the bottle was a constrained and exhausted resource. Even if another bottle miraculously became available, that bottle would be full in one minute, and two more bottles would be required just to survive the following minute.

Next question: Assuming the bacteria were as smart as humans, what time did they all realize that the bottle was going to fill to capacity?

No matter how highly you rate human intelligence, it would be a stretch to think that they would realize the overcrowding before the last 10 minutes, at earliest. With 10 doublings to go, the bottle still has 99.9% of its space available. Even with only 3 minutes left, the bottle still has 87.5% of its space remaining.

Next question: Do you see the obvious analogy?

This analogy purports to explain climate change denial, and as far as it goes, it’s not terrible. It’s often noted that 200,000 years passed from the beginnings of humanity to a population of 1 billion people, and only another 200 years to reach 7 billion. To me, it’s striking that there’s been a doubling in my lifetime – when I was born, there were barely 4 billion people on the planet. Now the world population is almost 8 billion. Whatever room there is left in this bottle is going to disappear very fast.

I’d like to extend the analogy with another question, which speaks to the structure of our society today and in the future. There’s no math in this question, but there’s a lot of underlying sociobiology, which is a word that I don’t really even understand – I had to look it up a second ago just to feel confident enough to use it here. It seems like the right word for someone who’s flinging analogies about social structure and natural selection.

New question: What if there’s more than one type of bacteria?

Let’s assume that Population A consists of bacteria that are, with respect to their relationship with each other and the bottle, a kind of ideal that many of us aspire to as humans with respect to each other and our planet. They are peaceful, cooperative, inclined towards equality, and harmonious with the natural resources they consume within the bottle. They’re never going to fill the bottle – they trend towards an equilibrium where they don’t compete with each other, and they tend to move on to a different section of the bottle when they’ve lightly used the resources in the place they were in.

Population B are bacteria that are highly competitive, to the point you would call them warlike if they were people. But they are also organized, disciplined, communicative, and inclined towards freedom. These bacteria might be kinda assholes, but they’re not going to fill the bottle either. When their population grows past a certain point, they tend to split into groups so they can maximize freedom for each member of the groups, which then go to war against each other. This trends towards population equilibrium as well.

Now imagine a Population C as a nightmare evolution with the worst characteristics of A and B. They are highly competitive and organized, they’ll grant equality only to their own kind, and they express their freedom through the exploitation of others, which both enables and requires the use of continually more resources. They’ll subjugate A and use the resulting superior resources to defeat B. These are the assholes that end up doubling the population every second.

I am stretching this analogy to its breaking point, but this is basically the story told in books like Sapiens and Against the Grain. The earliest organized human societies lived as hunter-gatherers, roaming wherever they wanted to explore the gifts of nature, working only as much as they needed to eat, which was about half their daylight hours, and playing around all the rest of the day. When humans ended up settling down in agrarian societies, they didn’t do so because they were tired of all the travel and leisure, they did so because of the inexorable logic of exploitation and population growth. Farms were more successful with more children, and eventually more scalable with trade, finance, serfdom and slavery. Agrarian societies could leverage their advantages through exploitation – underpaid labor and outright slavery allowed a smaller and smaller proportion of the population to reap more and more gains. Eventually Population C (agrarian society) absorbs Population A (hunter-gatherers) and kills Population B (let’s say Neanderthals).

The Agrarian Era gave way to the Industrial Age which then gave way to our current Information Economy. But these all enable and require the same social structure – they are a continual evolution that naturally entails a smaller and smaller proportion of society having more and more of the wealth, while at the same time crowding out any possible other form of social structure. Now that human society has reached global scale, it’s laughably egotistical for us to think that we ever had a choice to organize our global society any other way. Exploitation of the masses by the elite isn’t a choice, but an evolutionary outcome from which there is no escape. Not until the bottle explodes. Or until the elites replace the masses with robots. I would say “pick your poison” but you’re not really going to have a choice.

Speaking of ego, this fantastical conjecture would also explain one of the enduring mysteries of humanity: the existence of consciousness. So far, we have no conclusive explanation for why humans are conscious of their own experience in a way that no other animal seems to be. Even if we could explain exactly how it works (we can’t yet), we don’t know exactly why it exists. I believe that consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation – not for any individual human, but for the propagation of ever larger human societies. Without a sense of ego, which requires consciousness, no human would be able to live in a vastly exploitative society.

Humans aren’t like ants or bees, living in societies where the masses can mindlessly support the evolutionary imperatives of a single queen. Humans have the intelligence and tools to live a life of freedom. On an individual level, there’s no reason for any of us to accept a social structure where we’re not all equals. It’s only the fact of ego allows people to conceive of themselves as members of a great society, and the disorienting thing is that ego doesn’t necessarily mean you think a lot of yourself. The ego of a very few might compel them to strive for status among the elites. But that effect of the ego is far less important than its much more pervasive opposite effect, the ego that convinces people that there’s a reason to go on living under conditions of outrageous and inescapable exploitation. There would be no oppression without consciousness, and there would be no global scale without oppression. We were always doomed by our egos to fill the bottle to bursting.

If in recent times, you’ve found yourself struggling with the creeping feeling that there’s something about our species that means everything will only get worse until the end of our time, which doesn’t seem very far away … well, at least you can congratulate yourself on your instinctive awareness of sociobiology. If nothing else, it’ll help your ego.

Resurrecting an old idea at the right time looks like genius. In 1993, Apple introduced a personal handheld device that would be your constant companion, storing all sorts of your useful information and contacts so that you could always carry your digital world with you. When Steve Jobs returned as CEO of Apple in 1997, he killed the project. In 2007 he introduced the iPhone and changed the world. Steve Jobs wasn’t a better visionary than John Sculley; he just had better timing.

So really what you want to be is slightly ahead of the times. What does that look like? You’d know it when you see it, and then see it again. See, you can only be sure that you’ve seen a prescient idea after you have looked at it at least twice. The first time you look at it, it looks like the work of a lunatic. The last time you look at it, it seems utterly sensible, though you may still have your doubts.

Yesterday I came across The Easiest Person To Fool, but realized that I’d come across him years ago – and at that time, I’d dismissed him as a nutter. Irv Mills may describe himself as a “collapsenik” rather than a prepper or a survivalist, the latter terms sometimes having the tinge of overzealousness to them – I don’t think that the distinction between any of those terms is important for my purposes, as the mental image for all of them is basically the same to the uninitiated. The point is, when I read Irv’s website a few years ago, he sounded a bit crazy to me. He seemed to be living an isolated life in the woods, obsessively preparing for a disaster that might never come.

But yesterday I took a closer look at his autobiographical notes. He’s just a normal guy, nothing nutty about him. He worked in the energy industry for years, developing a detailed understanding of the limits and consequences of carbon-based fuel sources. As he aged into retirement from his first career, he noticed the fragility of our financial system and the precarious consequences for his children, and he thought longer and harder about the state of the world. By 2006, he concluded that it makes sense to start preparing for the collapse of civilization. That sounds dramatic, but when he lays out his thoughts on “business as usual” and hippies and magical thinking, he comes across as a very deliberate and rational thinker. He comes across as almost trendy, actually.

Apocalyptic thinking is very much on trend now. The world seems to be on the verge of a breaking point. Climate change, structural economic instability, tech disruption, authoritarian politics, trade wars, shadow digital wars, real “hot” wars … we seem to be in a constant bath of troubles that’s about to boil the frog. Apocalypse, zombies, and dystopia are such common features of our mainstream entertainment that they’re beyond cliche now. People who once seemed like hermetic nutjobs now seem … entirely rational?

In politics, the mainstream viability of an idea exists in the “Overton window” of formally supported policies, popular behavior, and sensible choices. The range of acceptable political discussion moves with the times, ascending through various degrees of public acceptance. Here’s an example on the topic of human sexuality.

1965:

• Policy: heterosexual marriage
• Popular: premarital sex
• Sensible: premarital cohabitation
• Acceptable: contraception
• Radical: abortion
• Unthinkable: same-sex marriage

To be clear, the Overton window is just a description of what is currently considered sensible (and above) in mainstream political discourse; it’s not a value judgment on whether that sensibility is right or wrong. Even with that caveat, your mileage may vary depending on where you live and who you associate with. I would roughly say the window on these issues moved like this:

1975:

• Policy: premarital sex
• Popular: premarital cohabitation
• Sensible: contraception
• Acceptable: abortion
• Radical: same-sex marriage

1995:

• Policy: premarital cohabitation
• Popular: contraception
• Sensible: abortion
• Acceptable: same-sex marriage

2015:

• Policy: contraception
• Popular: abortion
• Sensible: same-sex marriage

Moving from sex back to the end times: Now, everyone should have some degree of preparation for disaster, but there’s sort of an Overton window for disaster prep as well. If you live in a stable society with no special history of natural disaster, maybe your Overton window for prepping for disasters looks like this:

• Policy: fire alarm
• Popular: fire extinguisher
• Sensible: earthquake kit
• Acceptable: power generator for a day or two
• Radical: a year’s supply of food and water
• Unthinkable: bomb-proof shelter

It’s possible that I’ve inadvertently joined the Tinfoil Hat Of The Month Club, but I’ve come to believe that there’s almost nothing outside of the Overton window for the collapse of civilization. At most, we could have a discussion about what’s on either side of the border between sensible and acceptable. Are you prepared to go a week without power from the grid? That’s totally sensible in most places, and it should be popular where I live in California. Have you stockpiled weapons because you’re concerned about the breakdown of civil order including the law enforcement response to that breakdown? That seems acceptable to me. Do you have a detailed escape plan covering you and your loved ones? Sensible. Growing food in a kitchen garden? Canning? Keeping backyard livestock? Popular. Put your life savings in Bitcoin? I mean … I still think that’s stupid, but it’s nevertheless totally acceptable.

You might think I’m crazy, or you might think you’ve been smelling what I’m cooking for a while now. Either way, it makes sense for you to consider the gifts of the collapseniks. After spending some time with Irv, I followed some links from his blog to Albert Bates, who charts other collapseniks, and Dave Pollard, who offers a map you can easily find yourself on and a great reading list. Go ahead and click around a bit. You might think I’m crazy, but I think that with the road we’re on, I’ll keep this going ’til the sun goes down forever.

What does it mean for one candidate to be more “electable” than another? Some people object to even posing this question, arguing that “electability” is just a cover for maintaining the status quo, generally favoring dominant class, race, and gender patterns. In other words, by “electability” many people just mean that they want a candidate that most resembles prior successful candidates, and since the vast majority of prior successful candidates were older, white, male, and centrist – to be electable often just means to be an old white man from the political center.

But when we talk about electability, we’re not just talking about the qualities of the current candidates. We’re really talking about what happened in the last election. We want someone that’s not prone to the same dynamics that lost the last election. That’s really challenging today, because over three years after the last Presidential election, there isn’t broad agreement about what happened. The three prevailing theories are:

1. Bigotry. This theory says that Trump supporters are fundamentally motivated by racism and sexism.
2. Economic despair. This theory says that the hollowing out of the middle class has led to sentiment against immigration, free trade and rapid modernization.
3. Media dysfunction. This theory says that both intended (by Russia) and unintended (by BigTech) consequences of modern media distorted the election results.

The easiest opinion to hold is “It’s a combination of all of the above!” But most people who claim to hold this opinion secretly believe that only one of the three is the truly critical reason for the result of the last election. Often this is a secret even to themselves, but the truth is revealed by your opinion on who is really the most electable candidate.

If you think Biden is the most electable candidate, then you think that bigotry was the critical factor in the last election. Biden is the old white man from the center, and despite his high approval among black voters, he also was a main proponent of harsh criminal laws that disproportionately harmed black people, so he looks safe enough to many bigots. This is the right profile to sway bigoted swing voters. You tell yourself, “He’ll win if he can just avoid shooting himself in the foot.”

If you think Bernie is the most electable, then you think that economic despair was the critical factor last time. All those poor hollowed out voters they keep interviewing in diners should love the economic message that Bernie has been consistently espousing for decades. Doesn’t hurt that Bernie is old, white, and male – but if you thought that does the trick, then you would go with Biden. You go with Bernie instead because he’s got the loudest, clearest message about fundamental economic change. You say, “He’ll win if he can just avoid being tagged as a socialist.”

If you think Warren is the most electable, then you think that media dysfunction is what really drove the last election. She’s the smartest, the most accomplished in both pre-politics career and national legislation, and a member of the largest identity group (women). This time around, the Russians will still be a factor, but if we can only police the mainstream media enough to get them to concentrate on substantive policy positions, then Warren’s policy and legislative record should win the day. “She’ll win if only she’s portrayed fairly.”

By the way, if you think Buttigieg is the most electable … keep thinking. Maybe he’s the candidate for those who really do think the last election was the outcome of a perfect balance of the three reasons. You think that bigotry won’t hurt him too much, since he’s white and male, and even though he’s gay you think the country’s sentiment has changed enough so that it’s a non-factor for bigots. You think he can navigate the discussion of economic despair by simply smooth-talking the issues without troubling his biggest donors. You think the media loves him, and will continue to treat him with kid gloves. These are delusional thoughts. The reality is that Buttigieg is vulnerable for all three of the reasons in the prior election: Bigots really are bigoted, including against gay people. Buttigieg is clearly a proponent of the economic status quo, anyone in economic despair will see right through him. And the media will turn against Buttigieg, in part because that’s just want they do, but ultimately it’s because there’s no there there. He was the mayor of a small city, with zero national exposure. That’s even less qualification for national office than a reality television star. Trump would destroy Buttigieg in a landslide.

As a reward for reading this post, let me remind you of what we talk about when we talk about love. It’s a good read, somehow both hopeful and disheartening, and strangely resonant to peruse after pondering our current politics.

In 2007, Facebook sent a couple of strategists to Linden Lab to ask us about virtual currency. Of course they would ask us – at the time, we were the world’s leading experts in managing a virtual economy, heading towards a billion dollars of L$ transactions. Yes, that’s a billion real US dollars – unique among all virtual currencies at the time, we supported the exchange of L$ to real US$, so our virtual currency had real world value.

When we heard that they wanted to meet, my colleagues huddled in a room to decide how much we should tell them. We decided to emphasize the difficulties of managing a virtual currency: complexity of implementation, responsibility for users’ financial transactions, intrusive governmental inquiry and oversight, competitive dynamics with banks and payment partners. We went into the meeting and told them this story about how terrible it all was, and how they’d be better off simply issuing credits paid for with real money.

We never heard from them again, but in 2010 they launched Facebook Credits. I laughed at the thought that it seemed our little misdirection had worked – they went down a path that was entirely uninteresting and ultimately untenable, just as we’d hoped. Yeah, I know: that was kinda evil. But at the time, I was just a little evil, trying to stay ahead of bigger evils.

Why didn’t we want Facebook to work on virtual currency? Because I believed that the Linden Dollar was the greatest innovation created by the Lab. Sure, the 3D virtual world was mind-bending – all the avatars and the world building and the art and the boob physics – but for me, the virtual currency was the one element of Second Life that had the opportunity to break out of SL and into prominence in the whole wide world. Facebook had only 50 million users in 2007, and I didn’t want them to get their virtual currency right, so early in the game.

Well, it’s a dozen years later, and blockchain inspired a Facebook exec to figure it out. Facebook has launched Libra, a new cryptocurrency. It is a brilliant implementation: meticulously researched, expertly engineered, broadly partnered, poised for global domination. There’s only two problems: it’s too late, and they’re doing it wrong.

The right time for Facebook to launch a virtual currency would have been, oh, around 2007. That’s right: I’m saying you can thank me and Chris Collins for talking them out of it at the time. As I’ve written previously, a cryptocurrency can only succeed as a medium of exchange if it is a core currency of a powerful platform. Don’t even get me started on Bitcoin. What I didn’t call out in those posts is that the platform must implement currency strategy early in its growth. This is because when you are messing around with payments, you are in a field of giants – global banks and entire nations that have a vested interest in preventing your success. You have to implement your new currency while your platform is still small enough to ignore, or at least dismiss as “merely a game.” Then when you reach enormous scale, it’s too late to do anything about the economy that’s been baked in since the early days.

When a platform already has billions of people, it’s not going to fly under the radar. Facebook is already seeing immediate regulatory interest in Libra. Even with less than a million users, Second Life had to deal with aggressive regulatory interest from Congress and international bodies. I like to think that we talked our way out if it with my silver tongue, but the truth is that we were too small for sustained inquiry. Facebook is far, far, far past that point. Libra will be hounded by regulators until the cost outweighs the benefits.

The part that Libra has wrong is its reserve policy. This is getting into the weeds of managing virtual currency, but to vastly oversimplify: the reserve is a guarantee of currency redemption. If you buy Libra with real currency, you can sell it back to the Libra consortium for a relatively stable amount of real currency. Libra has launched this way in the hopes that a stable currency value will engender trust. The amusing mistake here is that only in the insular world of technocracy could someone believe that Facebook has consumer trust problems that can be cured by a stable rate of exchange on their cryptocurrency. The more serious mistake is that requiring a full reserve limits the utility of the currency.

All major world currencies are fiat currencies, which means that they can be issued at the will of the governing authority. They are not backed by gold or any other asset – though nearly all of them started out backed by a guarantee of redemption in gold. But there is a reason that all of them have moved off of the gold standard: fiat provides the maximum flexibility to manage the currency and its related economy. While it’s true that fiat currencies are more susceptible to hyperinflation, that is only a consequence of bad management. If the manager (i.e. the government, or in this case, Facebook) can be trusted to make good economic decisions, inflation is a limited risk.

Perhaps Facebook is aware of all this, and their plan is to launch with a full reserve, but later evolve into a fiat currency, after some history has demonstrated their trustworthy stewardship. After all, this is actually how all the major world currencies developed: first on the gold standard, then eventually declaring a switch to fiat currency. So if the launch with reserve is a bit of knowing subterfuge, kudos to them.

At this point, I could launch into an extended discussion about the relationship between virtual currencies and MMT. But I’ll leave that exercise for another day. In the meantime, for Linden historians who have stayed with me this long through the discussion, I’ll give you a little blast from the past: a record of posts from Linden Lab as we decided how to think about our currency, and whether to implement fiat sales of L$ into existing exchanges. Enjoy!

The Democratic nomination will come down to Sanders or Warren. But first, let me give the two-sentence dismissal of all the other nominees:

1. Biden: He’s the last bastion of the Democratic establishment. But the machine is crumbling, and he has too much history to overcome.
2. Buttigieg: He’s the flavor du jour, but lacks substance. Personality can win against substance, as we’ve seen time and time again, but his personality isn’t actually strong enough.
3. Booker: America isn’t ready for its second black President. And if it were, Booker’s “love” campaign isn’t the right tenor this cycle.
4. Harris: A black woman president is two bridges too far for most of this country. And she’s hindered by her record as a prosecutor.
5. O’Rourke: Beto has already flamed out. If you’re running the Kennedy playbook, you need to actually be a Kennedy.
6. Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Klobuchar, Messam, Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Williamson, Yang: No. Too far behind, nothing distinctive enough for them to catch up.

Let me be clear: I don’t want any of the above to be true. I’m just saying I think it is true, and mere wishes otherwise aren’t going to win this horserace.

Sanders and Warren might seem similar. They’re both old, white, and progressive. But they have one starkly obvious difference – no, not that one is a man and the other is a woman – one is a socialist and the other is a capitalist.

Sanders is a democratic socialist, and proud of that label – and deserving of both the label and the pride. A lot of the country has come around to positions that he has been espousing for his entire professional life. Warren wouldn’t label herself this way, but she’s a democratic capitalist – she believes in market mechanisms to address many social problems, but believes the market must be firmly guided by the best interests of a democracy.

At the end of the day, as much recent fervor as there’s been for socialist policies, this country isn’t going to elect an avowed socialist as president, at least not yet. Warren’s policies and her effectiveness in getting them into the discussion will win both the media and the electorate to her side. She won’t be hindered like Hillary was by either her past or by forces she doesn’t control. The distortions of the prior Presidential election can be summarized as: sexism and Russia. Both will continue to have an effect, but that effect will be much smaller than the prior election, due to countervailing forces that have arisen in the meantime.

Once Warren wins the Democratic nomination, she’ll crush Trump in a landslide. I’ll go over the rationale for this … in about eleven months. By Super Tuesday, if this post has any legs, it’ll be worth writing the follow up. And if it’s wrong, well, pride is a sin anyway; I shall repent.

This week’s first-ever picture of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, which is named after the critical boundary around the black hole. Once an object crosses the event horizon into the black hole, it will never be seen again by any observer on this side of the horizon.

The pictured black hole is fifty-five million years away, and that’s only by traveling at the speed of light. We seem to be much closer to another border beyond which there is no return, one that deserves the melodramatic name of The Apocalypse Horizon.

The world will end someday. There is no serious dispute about this fact, only a question of when. And that question seems unimportant for nearly all of us, as the end is at least several billions of years away. The Sun will expand until it engulfs the Earth, consuming whatever is left on the planet in a giant mass of red fire. No student of the universe disagrees with this, other than the few who believe that the end is even further away, with the Earth remaining just outside of the swelling Sun, surviving only to eventually collide with the Moon and then spin out to a cold death in the infinite cosmos. If that happens, it would be about a billion billion years from now. Those aren’t the only two stories: there are a few radicals who believe that instead of spinning away into the infinite, the dead husk of the Earth would eventually collapse back into the cold remnants of the dying Sun, which would take about a hundred times longer than a billion billion years.

No one can really fathom that amount of time, none of us have to worry about that end. So the fact that the world will end isn’t particularly compelling – but our lack of interest is only partially because the distant outcomes are so far beyond our capacity to envision. The disinterest is really driven by over-repetition: we’ve lived with stories of the end for about as long as we’ve had stories. There is always someone raving about the end of the world.

As a child I saw the modern ur-form of this storyteller with my own eyes, the lunatic in Times Square, disheveled in a stained trench coat and torn denim jeans, holding high a hand-lettered sign with the classic message: “THE END IS NIGH.” Even as a child I knew that he had nothing interesting to say about the end of the world. Urgency is always combined with a call to action, but the message is really about the desired action, and the story of urgency is provided only to give reason to take the action immediately. “REPENT!” The meaning and path to salvation was the story this prophet really wanted to tell; the cries of apocalypse were just a ploy to get anyone to listen.

What was the first story ever told – and why was it told? This must have been at least tens of thousands of years ago, around the time we first became capable of abstract thought. Some of those first stories must have been about food or shelter or sex. But I feel certain that on the day after the first person looked up into the sun and recalled that the sun also rose yesterday, there was some other person there to tell a story about why there would be no sun tomorrow nor any day afterwards. And that storyteller was telling the apocalyptic story to get the audience to do something. The story of the end was never really about the end, but about what the storyteller wants the audience to do now.

That is how it has been throughout all of human history, and that is why the savvy listener disregards apocalyptic tales today. The end isn’t coming unless it’s the one that’s too far away to matter. That’s the way it has always been. Anyone who tells you any different wants something from you.

But that will only be true until the day that it isn’t. The inevitable end of the Earth may be in the unreachable cosmological distance, and all of the old stories may have been diversions – but we now live in an age where humans have planetary impact of a scale that inarguably includes the ability to end all of humanity. In the simplest apocalyptic story of our times, the collective nuclear arsenal we’ve built is more than sufficient to make the planet uninhabitable. That wouldn’t be the end of all life, and the planet itself would continue on its many-billion year journey without us, but the end of humanity deserves a name, and the best one we have is Apocalypse. The term may be dramatic and it may be stained by thousands of years of misuse, but we have no better word for describing not the end of the planet, but the event that ends our time on it.

I don’t ask you to believe in any particular form of the Apocalypse. There are plentiful stories for whatever belief system you ascribe to – you can pick and choose among nuclear holocaust, environmental collapse, killer robots, infectious superbugs, or even good old fashioned Wrath of God. The point is that for the first time in human history, some of these apocalyptic stories might actually be true. And although most of the people telling you these stories probably want you to do something in reaction, unlike all previous times, the real story isn’t the desired action, but is actually the question of whether or not this particular story of the end is a true story.

All of the stories with a scientific basis have a point of no return well before the actual end, even though that point may be impossible to identify with current science. There is a point at which fissile material and nuclear technology will be so broadly available that avoiding disaster becomes improbable. There is a point at which the oceans will rise so high that areas now populated by millions will be underwater. There is a point at which the intelligence of machines will allow them to create more intelligent machines. Once those points are past, there is no going back. Those points of no return form our modern Apocalypse Horizon: the point past which we cannot prevent the end of all of our stories.

If you believe in science, you must believe that we will eventually cross the Apocalypse Horizon, and it’s possible that we have already done so. In our modern apocalyptic stories, the time between the point of no return and the storied end is about three generations. This span of parent to child to grandchild is crucial: If we are near the horizon, that means that people who are in their reproductive years today can feel confident that they and their children can live a long life before the Apocalypse occurs – but they’ll have to tell their children that their grandchildren are not likely to live out their natural lives. Or they’ll need to make up stories that are the opposite in substance but similar in purpose to the apocalyptic tales of the past: falsehoods designed to lull a doomed generation into acceptance of their unchangeable fate.

Are we the generation that lives just prior to crossing the Apocalypse Horizon? Even the possibility means that people with children in their lives might think differently than any generation before about how to discuss the future. All prior generations could simply ignore the stories of the end, as it had always been rational to do so in the past. All future generations will be past the point of no return, so will be beyond the point where choices about future generations matter. Only the generation that crosses the Apocalypse Horizon really has a decision to make about what to tell their children.

This is no entreaty to repent, I have no story of salvation to sell. This week we saw something that has never been seen before in human history, though it existed fifty-five million years ago; it is an apt time to reflect on our existence in the universe. The stories that have never been true before must now be taken seriously, for ignoring them no longer serves the truth, but furthers a lie. The Apocalypse Horizon is near enough to see, and in a sense it hardly makes any difference whether it is just in front of us or just behind us.

I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day.

When you live alone in a feudal mansion, with gardens spuming the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate, how do you mask the inescapable stink of loneliness? What pulsating energy could pierce the hardened cocoon of disaffection to warm a heart made cold with mysterious wealth?

There’s no better distraction than the whirling carnival of people crashing a party where everyone and no one really belongs. Let the folly of others be a movie for which you’ll gladly douse your illumination in favor of sitting in the dark with your attention devoted to anyone else’s story, anyone at all so long as it isn’t you. If the others are just interesting enough, perhaps they can be elevated to a celebrity that attracts the curiosity of those who can be fulfilled by nothing more than being hopelessly curious about a celebrity. Then you can be alone with many birds of a feather, packed together in a frenzy of distance, locked in a solemn vow never to connect. It’s best that way for everyone involved.

Gatsby couldn’t be sure that Daisy would be interested in him. He hardly knew what he was himself, consisting of no substance other than blindered ambition. He had no sensical idea of what an interesting person could be, other than to accept the judgment of others conferring the crown of celebrity. So he filled his house with interesting people, celebrated people, all gathered to have the time of their lives, or at least avoid the fear of missing out.