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Even if you’re now convinced of the importance of the knowledge loop and attention scarcity in the digital age, and persuaded by my suggestions for increasing economic, informational and psychological freedom, that still leaves a huge question: can it be done?
You may think my proposals to change everything from how money is created to who controls computation are too extreme. You may dismiss them as utopian and argue that we cannot change everything about how we live. And yet to do so ignores the fact that we have already changed everything twice. Each of our two prior shifts in scarcity—from food in the Forager Age to land in the Agrarian Age, and from land to capital in the Industrial Age—was accompanied by extraordinary transformations.
When we transitioned from the Forager Age to the Agrarian Age, we went from nomadic to sedentary, from egalitarian to hierarchical, from promiscuous to monogamous and from animistic to theistic religions. When we went from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age, we moved from the countryside to cities, from large extended families to nuclear ones, from commons to private property, and from great-chain-of-being theologies to the Protestant work ethic. Though the first of these transitions took place over millennia and the second one over centuries, they still show that a shift in the binding scarcity comes with profound changes in how we live.
With scarcity shifting once more, from capital to attention, we will again have to change everything—no matter how daunting that may seem. What follows is a series of ideas for how each of us can contribute to that change. There are many different projects to be tackled—my list is far from exhaustive, and should be regarded as inspiration for how we can take responsibility.
One action we should all take is the development of a mindfulness practice. The word ‘mindfulness’ is used a lot and is easy to dismiss, but for the reasons discussed in the section on psychological freedom, without such a practice it will be difficult to participate fully in the other actions discussed below. We each need to find out what works for us, whether it’s meditation, yoga, running or something else entirely. I do a conscious breathing exercise every day, first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. I started doing this about five years ago and the change in my life has been profound.
It is also important that we help and inspire other people to do the same. There have been discussions on whether or not math should be mandatory in school, but there has been no such debate around mindfulness. It is entirely possible to go through school and college or university without developing a practice of one’s own. Every one of us would be better off with more mindfulness—the same cannot be said about algebra.
Another way to contribute to the spread of mindfulness is through research and entrepreneurship. Much remains to be understood about how different techniques, or drugs such as psilocybin, influence our brains. There is plenty of room for services such as individualized coaching, and for more apps that help with meditation and conscious breathing.
As I have previously described, most developed countries have large central governments with a high degree of centralized decision-making. That is complemented by a high degree of concentration in the economy, with a few firms dominating most industries. Both of these things are bad for the knowledge loop, as they inhibit experimentation. A recent example of this was illustrated by the response to COVID-19. In the US, testing was largely federally controlled, making it difficult to execute a differentiated state-level response. Even a state the size of California, which on a standalone basis would be the world’s sixth largest economy, was unable to approve rapid tests developed by California-based startups (Haverstock, 2020).
We can take many actions to help foster a return to decentralization. For example, where it is permitted, parents can choose to home school their children with other parents, forming experimental education pods. More importantly, we can participate in the burgeoning field of blockchain technologies. The best known blockchain is Bitcoin, a digital alternative to gold.
Blockchains are decentralized networks that can nonetheless achieve consensus, such as on how many Bitcoin are controlled by which address on the network. This matters because as we saw earlier, much of the power of companies such as Facebook, Google or Amazon comes from network effects. Government power is also derived from a network effect that arises from the ability to issue currency and regulate banking. Building decentralized alternatives to these systems using blockchain technology is a way of removing power from government and large corporations.
As it turns out, when blockchains work properly they are uncensorable. Unless a government or corporation can take over a large percentage of the nodes on a blockchain network, the information maintained by the network will continue to be propagated correctly, even when some nodes are trying to purge or manipulate the contents. The only option governments face is to cut their population off from accessing the networks, and this requires a high degree of control over all Internet traffic (as has been achieved, for example, by China). This is why fighting against national ‘firewalls’ is so important.
While any one new blockchain system has a high likelihood of failing, the large number of current experiments will produce systems that have the potential to be transformative on a global scale. One of the most exciting possibilities is that we may end up with UBI built outside of existing government budgets as part of a cryptocurrency. A variety of projects are currently attempting this, including Circles and the $UBI token.
To be clear, decentralization and blockchains do not represent a panacea. Some problems require centralization to be solved (for instance, water and sewage are centrally controlled for a reason). And decentralization can bring its own problems, such as the potential aggravation of the ‘Cyber-Balkans’ problem that we encountered earlier. But at a time of excessive centralization, it is crucial that we foster decentralization to act as a counterweight.
The climate crisis is the single biggest collective problem facing humanity. If we fail to direct attention and resources to fighting it, the climate crisis will make the transition from the Industrial Age worse than the transition into it, which involved two world wars. This may sound hyperbolic, but the climate crisis represents an existential risk for humanity.
Every day, unimaginable amounts of energy hit the Earth in the form of sunlight. Much of this energy is radiated back into space, but greenhouse gases reduce the Earth’s ability to shed heat and instead keep it trapped inside the atmosphere. To get a sense of how much heat we are talking about, we can express it in terms of Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. Compared to pre-industrial times, how much more heat would you guess the Earth is retaining? The equivalent of one nuclear bomb per year? Per month? Per week? Per day? The reality is that the extra heat being trapped amounts to four nuclear bombs per second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Imagine for a moment that alien spaceships were dropping four nuclear bombs into our atmosphere every second. What would we do? We would drop everything else to fight them. This is, of course, roughly the plot of the movie Independence Day. Except with the climate crisis it’s not aliens, it’s ourselves, and it’s not bright explosions, it’s all the molecules in the atmosphere and in the oceans wiggling a bit harder (that’s what it means for something to heat up).
There are many ways to fight the climate crisis. They include making personal changes such as switching to electric heating, voting for politicians who are committed to tackling the problem, and becoming active in movements such as Extinction Rebellion. As with mindfulness, research and entrepreneurship provide crucial avenues for action. For instance, there are many questions in how to make nuclear fusion work (which would provide a clean source of abundant electricity) or how to most effectively draw down greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. There are companies to be founded that will further the adoption of solar power, not just here in the U.S. but in the developing world.
Learning is the hardest step in the knowledge loop. How many of us say something like “I wish I could play the guitar,” but either never do anything about it or give up after a short period? Learning is hard, and we should try to make it easier, more fun and more social. There has been plenty of recent progress here: for example, Duolingo has made language learning more accessible by breaking it down into small units that are customized to each learner.
I am personally excited about helping to create two particular projects. One is an integrated platform for learning math, programming, engineering and science. These areas of knowledge are closely related, yet the way we teach them is often oddly disconnected. The other project is a compendium of the principles of knowledge. We have so much knowledge that it seems impossible to know more than a tiny fraction of it all, but this is partly an illusion because much of it is a variation or an application of a much smaller set of underlying principles. Collecting and explaining these will make knowledge more accessible and help to unify areas that seem unrelated.
While the COVID-19 crisis has come at a terrible cost, it has also accelerated innovation in learning. Many parents are discovering that home schooling their children, whether individually or in small groups, may be a viable option. There are many ways to encourage learning that is based on fostering our innate curiosity, from simply learning something new oneself to inventing and building new systems.
What is the political process by which we should achieve the profound changes that are required? We are seeing some leaders emerge in this period of transition who provide simplistic, populist answers to difficult questions, advocating a return to the past. There is a danger around the world, including here in the United States, that we will slide into dictatorship and other forms of autocratic government.
Democracy is the only system of government in which the knowledge loop can function to its full potential. Democracy allows new policies to be tested, with a peaceful transition to another set of policies if they don’t work. As tempting as a quick autocratic fix might seem, we need to figure out what it takes to have a working democracy. Some things seem obvious, such as limiting the influence of money in politics.
Because attention is scarce, it can be bought, either by raising and spending a lot of money, or by doing or saying outrageous things. Neither is good for democracy: the former because it makes candidates beholden to the interests of their backers, and the latter because it results in polarization rather than critical debate.
Going forward, we should experiment with new forms of democracy. Given the complexity of the modern world, I am in favor of specialization and delegated voting. We should explore forms of democracy in which I can delegate my vote to people I trust on specific issues, such as energy policy. These delegates, in turn, would elect a leader for the energy agency based on their proposed policies.
A more extreme version of this, which is worth exploring in the context of the climate crisis, is a so-called ‘citizens’ assembly.’ Citizens would be selected at random from the population to form an assembly and given access to experts in the field. With the experts’ help, they would come up with a plan that is then either implemented right away or put to a vote. This idea recalls Athenian democracy, which relied on the random selection of citizens for various government functions. The advantage of such an approach is that it would shortcut long electoral cycles and allow for policies to be chosen that might not be popular with any one party. For example, Ireland recently successfully used a citizens’ assembly to develop an abortion policy.
These are just two of many possible variations of how democracy can work. With digital technologies, we have options that were not previously feasible. Take, for example, the town of Jun in Spain, which uses Twitter as the primary communication channel between citizens and local government officials (Powers & Roy, 2018). We should start to explore more of these possibilities, and part of that means revisiting the geographic units we use for decision-making. The key principle here is that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level. We need to make some decisions globally, such as limiting greenhouse gases, but how we achieve that should be decided at lower levels.
Making decisions at the lowest possible level, a principle known as ‘subsidiarity,’ is especially important during a time of great change. For instance, what is possible in education is changing rapidly due to digital technology, so we should allow experimentation at a local level. By running many small experiments, we can more rapidly figure what works well.
Most of all, we need to reject attempts at dictatorship and autocracy. These effectively disable the knowledge loop because they cannot tolerate freedom of expression—their power is based on suppressing criticism. This is especially dangerous in a time of transition that requires debating and implementing new ideas. There are many ways of defending democracy, starting with the obvious one of voting against would-be dictators. Of course, speaking out against them once they are in power is also crucial, even if it comes at high personal cost. Finally, building and participating in systems that support uncensorable, anonymous or pseudonymous expression is a crucial action to help undermine dictatorships.
Given the limits of capitalism that we explored earlier, we might find socialism or even some form of Marxism tempting. That too, however, represents a return to a populist past rather than an invention of the future. The alternatives that people commonly propose are also Industrial Age thinking, rooted in the scarcity of capital. As should be clear by now, my proposals are effectively about shrinking capitalism, much as we previously shrunk agriculture, to make room for participation in the knowledge loop.
Central to this project is the promotion of humanism and the policies associated with it, such as the adoption of UBI. Everyone can take action on this, from contributing to UBI trials to creating content under a Creative Commons license.
We can also promote humanism by applying humanist values to our everyday decision-making. The starting point for this is to see ourselves as human first, with nationality, faith, gender and race all a distant second. I realize that this is easier for me as a white male living in the United States, but that removes nothing from the underlying values of humanism. I described some of these in the earlier chapter on humanism, but here is a more complete list.
Solidarity: There are nearly 8 billion people living on a planet that does not easily support human life, in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. We need to support each other above all else, irrespective of such differences as gender, race or nationality. The big problems that humanity faces, such as the climate crisis, will impact all of us and require our combined effort.
Diversity: We are all unique, and we should celebrate these differences. They are beautiful and a part of our humanity.
Responsibility: Only humans have the power of knowledge, so we are responsible for other species. For example, we are responsible for whales rather than the other way round.
Non-violence: Mental or bodily harm reduces or removes our ability to contribute to humanity. We must avoid it wherever possible.
Mindfulness: Our brain is capable of a broad range of emotions, but when they hijack us we lose our capacity to think rationally. Mindfulness is the ability to experience our emotions while retaining our ability to analyze issues and come up with creative solutions.
Joyfulness: While we are capable of many emotions, moments of joy are what makes life worth living.
Criticism: When we see something that could be improved, we need to have the ability to express that. Individuals, companies and societies that do not allow criticism become stagnant and ultimately fail.
Innovation: Beyond criticism, the major mode for improvement is to create new ideas, products and art. Without innovation, systems become stagnant and start to decay.
Optimism: We need to believe that problems can be solved. Without optimism we will stop trying, and problems like the climate crisis will become bigger, until they threaten human extinction.
These values can help us think through the moral problems we face as we enter the Knowledge Age. That will make a good subject for a separate book, so here is just one example: should we kill animals to feed ourselves? One answer is that we stop eating meat and become vegetarian or vegan; another is that we work out how to grow meat in a lab. Both are valid answers under the humanist approach. Continuing to eat animals without working on alternatives—standing still with the status quo, in which we do not live up to our responsibility—is not.