Governance
It is high time for a reformation of truth
Disclaimer: Much of this piece is built on proposals I have developed over the past 7 years, most pertinently during the time of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, in 2022. Many of the proposals contained in this piece have been reviewed by members and affiliates of the world’s largest tech companies - senior executives, board members, consultants, investors and the like. I have made investments into startups that would directly benefit from the proposals made here, and are in fact driving forces in themselves to make the proposals a reality. I have no contractual relationship (past or present) with any company mentioned here unless explicitly stated.
An update on Meritocracy: Since the last post in this series, Sifted’s Deputy Editor (and former Opinion Editor) appears to have departed the firm. The reason that “will become obvious in 2024” has since been announced. The arguments made, especially on mid-information in the venture space, have strengthened significantly. Some of the most ‘untethered’ critics of the Sifted piece have since pitched Simplify for funding - with no attempt to justify that critique.
Summary
Every person on Earth has the same job. Increase harmony, increase progress. Most of us do so most of the time. A small handful of us do the opposite with most of our time. These are terrorists. To do our job, we need coordination mechanisms. Systems that maximise the good and minimise the bad, at every resolution. The development and maintenance of coordination mechanisms is called governance. Some governance problems are well understood and seemingly intractable, like the Gaza conflict, and many governance problems are altogether unknown to people - because they do not see things like competition, truth, tax, money, and learning as coordination mechanisms. As populations become larger and sovereignty becomes more atomised, coordination mechanisms become harder to develop, yet more and more necessary. Governance needs an unlock so that it can meet the demands of the more than ten billion people who will live together on this planet in the near future, and all of the autonomous economic agents that will live amongst us. This will require us to reconcile all of our knowledge of nation-states, protocols, economic history, distributed computation, decentralised control, voting mechanisms, war history, demography, religion, theology, and even geometry.
I aim to understand what the governance problems are, how to solve them, and what the results are for the nation-state, social networks, search engines, and people. I do so by asking three foundational questions:
“What do you think we’re seeing?”
“The detritus of a coming war.”
Opening Thoughts
Society is in a time of foundational change. A time when energy, trade, information, and capital flows are changing simultaneously. This is, by definition, a reformation. Before the 16th century, the emergent memetic replicator was the gene, and the tone was coherent and singular - largely Catholic in Europe. We farmed and we fished, we prayed and we procreated. Life was relatively simple. The printing press changed this. In Europe in 1517, Martin Luther published the Ninety-five Theses which in turn triggered the Protestant Reformation. During this time, we transitioned from wood to coal, developed tokens for company ownership, evolved our means of transferring existing knowledge and developing new knowledge, and opened trade between Europe and the Americas. This ignited a whole new set of ‘protest’ religions and memetic behaviours. The sociological meme was, and still is, a faster memetic replicator than the biological gene. Societies were pluralist but still largely majorative. Today, this system has reached its limit, and we see signs of a new reformation. We appear to be transitioning from coal to nuclear fusion, generalising tokenisation and securitisation from homes to assets more broadly, opening up space as a new trade location, and are witnessing a new memetic replicator emerge, temes (i.e. technological memes), which spread even faster than the memes of the past five hundred years, by way of the new printing press. A mechanism that will allow for the ever-faster spread of content, propelled farther based on how true it is. This will result in a society that is both coherent, as everyone is still grounded in the same set of facts, and pluralist - as no one is forced to follow one philosophy versus another.
These changes coincide with our desire to make virtual spaces as large and as life-like as possible. We refer to each step-change improvement in our ability to simulate the real world at full scale as a 'metaverse':
Phase 1: 1992 - 2D static websites ‘metaverse’
Phase 2: 2022 - 3D augmented reality worlds ‘metaverse’
Phase 3: 2052 - 4D full ‘simulation theory’ metaverse
The ‘metaverse’ has now become so large that we are stepping inside it. While the phone is still an important part of the lives of many, we are clearly going through a process of device unbundling with watches, speakers, earphones, headsets, contact lenses, and the like taking a more prominent position in our technological lives. With our lives decentring from our phones comes the ditching of infinite scroll - the toxic element of social media applications - and the emergence of spatial computing. It also includes the ditching of the toxic discussion of the applications themselves. For example, the ‘moral argument’ for not using Twitter/X appears largely based on an individual’s choice to use it as a toxic feed rather than a healthy dashboard. In actual fact, X seems to be moving in the right direction (e.g. paid subscription for X Pro). The issue, especially at the beginning of the acquisition, was that they appeared to have been prioritising short-term speed, which had them exploring every dead end in the proverbial maze (e.g. paid-for verification), rather than prioritising long-term speed (i.e. smoothness) and passing through the maze successfully with one attempt. I am confident that the team will continue to ship useful features - auto-summarised replies for one. In fact, this goes well beyond X and into the rest of the social media landscape. Not even a perfect recommendation engine can remedy a missing product feature. I would do almost anything for the simple ability to be able to log off from YouTube without logging off from the entire Google product suite.
My point is that there is clearly a positive story to be told here - and much of the doom-and-gloom is in of itself driven by doom-scrolling and growing narcissistic cynicism, especially within the left who are the highest users of these platforms. This, to me, is underpinned by this quote from Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism:
“Private equity asset strips all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset stripping our brains from own our minds.”
While both visceral and poignant, the analogy is problematic. Writing allowed us to devolve information to external storage and learn more efficiently. It may have physically asset-stripped our brains. We wouldn’t cancel writing, so why are we trying to cancel AI? Now we can take the most complex and abstract reasoning, simplify it and change the tone almost entirely without loss of generality. We can entirely relieve ourselves of poor sources of information. AI is in and of itself accelerating our progress in writing, and as such - the transfer and development of the highest quality knowledge imaginable. Borrowing an analogy from the comedian James Acaster, each bag becomes weaker but the tea becomes so much stronger. The question is: what is the memetic replicator production machine that will create and power our technological memes with scale and truth? What is this reformation’s printing press?
“To repress these very sharp arguments of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies.”
- Martin Luther
What are the limits of our current approach?
Harmony and progress are best achieved in unison, and unison requires consensus. The problem is that consensus is hard and getting harder. The larger the number of people to build consensus between, the more decentralised the consensus mechanism must be. Otherwise, we breed tyranny and dominance. Here is how to think about this in the context of nation-states:
<1M: unitary system (one tier), no separation of powers - like Vatican City 🇻🇦
1M+: unitary system (one tier), partial separation of powers - like Singapore 🇸🇬
10M+: federated system (two tiers), partial separation of powers - like Germany 🇩🇪
100M+: federated system (two tiers), full separation of powers - like the US 🇺🇸
1B+: federated system (three tiers), full separation of powers - like India 🇮🇳
10B+: further federation and further separation of powers - to be determined 👀
We already have global governance mechanisms, but these are largely between nations - the United Nations, the European Union etc. We live in a peer-to-peer globalised world, but we haven’t solved peer-to-peer global governance. This is a big problem to solve, and a sensible way to address it is to address the most seemingly intractable governance problems in our existing system. Any new system must by default be able to solve these problems, or at least drive a step-change improvement from their current state.
United Kingdom 🇬🇧
European countries are fascinating from a governance perspective because they have spent hundreds of years invading each other and invading the rest of the world too. As a result, some unique structures have emerged. Most notably, the European Union (EU), a supranational non-sovereign entity composed of sovereign states with a membership structure loosely resembling a set of concentric circles: The Eurozone, Full EU Members, and Associated Members. One of those members used to be the United Kingdom, a nation composed of four nations. Three of those nations, England, Scotland, and Wales, sit on one contiguous island, and the other, Northern Ireland, sits on a separate island shared with its neighbour the Republic of Ireland, which is a member of the EU.
The United Kingdom voted to leave the EU in 2016 (Brexit), but broken down by nation it was only England that wanted to leave - Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all wanted to remain in the EU. Naturally, it is the UK that has sovereignty so only it could act on behalf of the country. The UK population is heavily centralised, with its 67.5 million population today split into 57 million in England, 3 million in Wales, 2 million in Northern Ireland, and 5.5 million as of mid-2022. This is simply too many people for one person to have direct control over. Further still, the population of London is approximately nine million people, greater than all countries in the UK apart from England.
What this means is that a referendum like the Brexit referendum which does not take these concentrations into account will split the country apart. Scotland still has a relatively strong independence movement, and Wales does have one too. While I do not think that a rushed move to independence makes sense, I do believe in decentralisation and autonomy, which the ‘devolution max’ (also known as ‘devomax’) agenda has developed. I would like to see the full freedom of movement for all people in the countries maintained, whereby each country has an equal vote in any referendum. In the case of Brexit, this would have meant one vote to leave (England), and three votes to remain (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). This would have been a signal to the EU that we need to reevaluate the arrangement, namely to fix immigration and the excess bureaucracy.
United States of America 🇺🇸
Across the pond lies the United States, a country five times larger than the UK by population. Countries tend to have a separation of powers: an executive branch, a judicial branch, and a legislative branch. Broadly speaking, the larger the population, the more separated these powers must be. European nations like the UK have relatively bound executive and legislative branches (Parliament and Government), where only the judiciary is really spun off and the Parliament is de facto unicameral (one unit - the House of Commons is much stronger versus the House of Lords). By comparison, the US has a fully separated set of powers and a fully bicameral legislative branch. If you want to have a bill passed into law through Congress, it has to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate. A higher threshold for a much larger population. While some may claim that this means that “nothing gets done”, what it actually means is that individual states have much more autonomy, the type of autonomy that I sense that Scotland would like in the UK. In fact, nine US states have populations larger than ten million, meaning that they have larger populations than many countries (including all the aforementioned non-sovereign ones). As such, each state has its own view and culture beyond the shared culture of the union - much like the sovereign states of the European Union. These cultures have views, and these views have their own votes, as part of the Electoral College.
We ought not to rid ourselves of systems simply because of some of the context within which they were built. The Electoral College system prevents a state-based tyranny of the majority which is objectively a good thing. While there are certainly efficiencies to be made in the system, namely it needs to be technologically driven in my view (mobile voting etc), I find that the system is neither overly nor underly decentralised for the size of the population that it serves. I believe that people’s frustrations with the system are broadly misplaced. It is not the governance structure that is the problem, it is the two-party system clogging it up that is the problem. Ultimately, every party has to solve the same economic and military challenges. One’s party simply indicates how these challenges are overcome. The issue is that the Democrats are consumed by left-wing wokeism, and the Republicans are consumed by right-wing wokeism. In flipping between these two parties, we are simply changing the coach (read: Taliban) without making fundamental improvements. The necessary problems to solve are largely in the two-party structure. Many people recognise this, but only a handful of people are able to break this system. I was originally sceptical of RFK Jr., largely due to his public persona. However, at the highest proof threshold available he is the best candidate and can provably win. He has requested an independent poll in October. Specifically, I would like this to be a multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) version of the ‘no spoiler’ analysis to increase the accuracy and precision of results in swing states. I would be very surprised if this disproved his campaign’s argument.
Israel 🇮🇱
October 7th was the worst terrorist attack on the West since 9/11, and the third worst since 1970. The history, context, and future of the conflict are deep, but at its heart the situation is simple. A terrorist death cult mounted a horrifying attack on a group of people that it would like to see exterminated. That cannot be allowed to happen. Ever. To expect Israel’s response to be anything less than total is naïve. To not mount the response to destroy Hamas at the risk of any civilian casualties would be akin to not dropping bombs on factories in Dresden, Germany during World War II or not dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the same war, when we knew that the Japanese had weaponised bubonic plague and aimed to spread it throughout the US, even at the risk of changing the dynamic from ‘Allies vs Axis’ to ‘humanity vs virus’.
What I think people are trying to say is that the status quo before the attack was unsustainable, and we need a new status quo after Hamas is destroyed. While the ‘pro-Palestinian’ movement might advocate for a two-state solution, and the ‘pro-Israel’ movement might advocate for a one-state solution, both miss context. First, no country would tolerate a state on its border who would be willing to elect an entity like Hamas - especially when they are actively attempting to exterminate you and your people. Second, the combined populations of Israel (7 million), Gaza (2 million), and the West Bank (3 million) sit above the 10 million threshold, and must be federated at a minimum. And third, these countries were born out of British-run Mandatory Palestine. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir explained, Palestine was a nation predominantly of Arabs and Jews, and she herself was a Palestinian. As we also know, the Palestinian Jewish population accepted the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine following British withdrawal at the end of World War II, whilst the Palestinian Arab population did not.
With that context, it is my present belief that we require a federated solution for the whole of modern-day Palestine. Palestine would be a sovereign state with its capital in Jerusalem, while Israel (equivalent to England), Gaza (equivalent to Northern Ireland), and the West Bank (equivalent to Wales) would have their capitals in Tel Aviv, Gaza City, and Ramallah respectively. The people of Palestine would have freedom of movement across all three countries, and referenda would be federated, with each country receiving one vote. The result would be a federated Western-style governance system and a multi-faith, multi-ethnic monocultural pluralist society with Gaza and the West Bank able to veto any radical referendum that would threaten their existence. With this set-up, and the implementation of policies like Asset-Derived Tax, Hamas would be permanently destroyed. Questions remain about how changing birth rates and populations might test the system but I believe that it would largely stand the test of time.
Global Governance 🌐
The nation-state is defined by its ability to control its borders. It is where absolute freedom of movement ends. Nation states can then negotiate with each other in institutions like the European Union and the United Nations. These institutions may operate at the scale at which we need them to operate, but their resolution is too low. We seek to develop a system that operates both on a greater scale than the UN and at a fully individualised level. We need this because this is the resolution at which people share data and value - money, information, and the like. Even within decentralised systems, we still require a high approval threshold for changes. A small country may be able to pass referenda with a 51% majority, but this does not hold true for larger systems. The best example is the Bitcoin blockchain, a global protocol with 219 million token owners. It has a 95% threshold for accepted changes (codebase ‘hard forks’), even though it is not sovereign. As such, any peer-to-peer global governance system will require an acceptance threshold larger than that of any individual sovereign state.
I believe that we are already seeing this manifest in the realm of biological sex. Biological sex affects each one of us and 98.3% of us fit neatly into the standard female-male binary. (Sidebar: this is about intersex people, not trans people.) I think these consensuses are under challenge because, in a population of 8.1 billion, 1.7% of the global population is 140 million people - about the population of Mexico, the 10th most populous country (129 million) or Russia, the 9th most populous country (144 million). While this is a small number in percentage terms, it is a huge number in absolute terms. As such, the process of developing these fully inclusive governance systems entails not abolishing our definitions but upgrading them in ways that are both appropriately backwards-compatible and meet our current consensus thresholds. Hence, while #socialjustice is correlated with the increase in population size over the last century - deep and rational thought using the full set of facts is the best approach. In other words, if you do not like the US governance structure, you will really not like the peer-to-peer global governance system, even though the system will be even smoother than Estonia’s.
“We will most surely sacrifice souls. Thus is the nature of war. It is bloody and soulless.”
- Falstaff, The King
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Governance does not exist in a vacuum. It is a mechanism that exists between people. Likewise, society is a mechanism that exists between people, and it is complex. There is no way to see and understand the whole thing, which means that people have different understandings of different topics, which makes governance hard. My observation is that there are at least three transitions in effect that people do not feel comfortable enough with yet: the transition to protocols, the transition to academic journals (coupled with ‘the metaverse’), and the transition to monoculturalism. We might broadly refer to this as ‘The Governance Protocol Thesis’.
Institution —> Protocol
We tend to think of governance in terms of big buildings and sprawling campuses. The White House, The Hague, Buckingham Palace, and the like. But where does Bitcoin fit into that? It is clearly powered by a block selector (the blockchain) and a consensus mechanism (Nakamoto Consensus) but it has no grand castle. It simply exists in the proverbial ether, and the entry point for most is an exchange - most often centralised entities. Bitcoin and the broader crypto space seek to recentre power from institutions to protocols. To be clear, this does not eliminate institutions, but it does move power away from where it does not belong. We can apply this logic to other parts of society.
The UK is renowned for its obsession with the National Health Service (NHS), an institution that is universal, affordable, and efficient - in theory. What I have learnt in recent years is that if the US is doing something that seems odd, look to Europe on that topic and understand what is wrong with their approach. That is probably why the US system looks so comparatively unusual. Most non-Americans chastise the US for its system, as I once did, but there were two things I misunderstood: 1) efficiency and productivity are different, and 2) health systems operate on a trilemma that is never absolute. What I mean by that is that the UK system has come under enormous strain (i.e. demand for access) in recent years, especially with Covid, and while keeping it affordable, it has become woefully inefficient. The backlogs have been extraordinary, staff pay is poor, and we have had huge numbers of strikes. This is unsustainable, even while maximising tech provisioning within the space. As a result, I strongly suspect that we will devolve the majority of the system to a protocol. By this I mean, that we will move from the current Beveridge system to an evolved version of the National Health Insurance model used in South Korea. Under an Asset-Derived Tax system, health insurance would be covered by a universal basic income. The health insurance then allows for everyone to receive world-class care delivered in a world-class way, and the NHS institution would continue to handle high-volume/low-margin and low-volume/high-margin medicines and processes to ensure that no one is left behind. That way, we maintain the system’s universality and affordability, with much higher efficiency. This is the type of system that I can imagine the UK, Europe and the US moving toward.
Higher education is another one of these institutions that requires fundamental reengineering. The system is supposed to enable “the transfer of acquired knowledge and the development of new knowledge”. We are a very long way from that. Where there is bloat, there is vociferous activism, and that bloat must be removed. David Kaiser made the point that political and ideological change agents used to train at Harvard, but at some point, Harvard started to become a political and ideological change agent itself - straying entirely away from its mission. But before any of that, there was dysfunction. The researchers hate teaching, and the great teachers are very poorly paid. We should expect to see the separation of research and teaching. Let each do what they do best, and be appropriately compensated for it. One of the best defences of the existing model is that we learn the things we learn to learn process, not necessarily for the content in of itself. This is a decent argument, but it leaves out engagement. The way to make education stick is to make it relevant, and a concentric version of the Ikigai model does this much better. Or, in other words, find what you are passionate about, within that find what you are good at, within that find what society needs, and within that find what pays - and regularly re-evaluate all of this. Most degrees are clearly not worth the £24,000+ ($30,500+) per annum the domestic UK fees are expected to rise to - in alignment with foreign student fees. I myself have learned almost everything I know through YouTube and movies (now powered by AI recommendation engines), and I am not alone in this. At school, I set myself the stretch goal of proving the Riemann Hypothesis due to abject boredom (which I failed), and at university, I had to set up a venture fund to keep myself sane. This all has ramifications on the role of the university campus - the in-person networking of the developers of new knowledge, and for those who wish to gain access to those developing new knowledge. Everyone else can learn remotely in a self-directed learning fashion through low or no-cost education and stabilise themselves while they journey toward finding their true place in society with a state pension in conjunction with co-living options like Flow. The institution focuses exclusively on in-person research synchronisations, a marked increase in its quality threshold, and every other aspect is devolved to the protocol.
One of the most contentious institutions around the world is of course the British Monarchy and the empire that it represents. It is hard to argue against the point that the British Commonwealth is British Empire 2.0, even after its inflection. My expectation is that the proverbial empire will transition through another inflection and recentre its focus on governance. Elizabeth II handled the transition from empire to commonwealth, King Charles will oversee the transition from commonwealth to (governance) alliance - but after that, it is harder to tell. The point is that while people think of the monarchy as an institution, it is predominantly a protocol. The role of the monarch is ultimately to safely transfer power from the crown to the people. As that process moves forward, the institution becomes more and more symbolic. To be clear, we need a symbolic branch of government. Jordan Peterson made the point that Trump was both a president and a king because the US does not have a fourth symbolic branch in its trias politica. Other European countries have separated these powers (e.g. France and Ireland), but no one has done it as successfully as the Brits - partly because that symbolic branch is monarchical, not presidential. The question is: for how long must the symbolic branch remain a monarchy? I suspect that the system will not have to be monarchical after Prince William’s reign and that his son Prince George will have to compete to be president through a supermajority vote of the Order of the Garter. He will win both as the most stable option and due to how few other people are qualified for the role. I can also see a scenario where separate nations emerge within England of about 10 million people. Something more akin to a map of Viking England while taking London’s size into account.
What I am ultimately trying to say here is that when we are under pressure, governance should be firm, and when we are not, it should be yielding. It ought to work in this way for all individuals and all core defined concentrations - nations, cities, constituencies, and the like. For example, universal basic income as a safety net when between jobs, and on a state level we use k-rate containment in the event of a pandemic - rather than simply locking people in their houses and reinforcing zombie infrastructure. There is a food that acts this way, custard. Here’s the original I watched in 2005 at the age of ten, and a newer version for Metaverse 2.0.
Bible —> Academic Journal
The ultimate institution is of course Western civilisation. What it has been able to achieve through democracy and capitalism is nothing short of stunning. This progress has largely been built on the foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and nothing encapsulates this tradition better than the Bible. The Bible is the fundamental precondition of truth, and no science has replaced it. He makes an argument about the axiomatic nature of facts in that it is impossible to know all the facts and to distil them into something like the Bible, not without prioritising them in any case. In actual fact, I think that we have all the pieces of technology that we need to make do so and that it is largely a coordination problem. “Too many” and “distillation” imply artificial intelligence and recommendation engines. This, combined with the expectation that we can keep all the useful lessons of the Bible without the Bible itself leads us to believe that the book will not be replaced by another book, but by a mechanism on which books can be written. I think this will be an academic journal that it is not controlled by any one person, that it is fully transparent, and that people are paid to maintain. In the same way that Software as a Service (SaaS) means software ‘on the cloud’, software that you can use from any device that you please, ‘for the metaverse’ means decentralised, open source, and tokenised. Hence, I believe that the Bible will be subsumed by an ‘academic journal for the metaverse’ - a ‘truth protocol’ on which our most important information services are built.
There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. While the Bible has served us well, I fear that the problems it causes are now as large as its benefits. While it acts as the basis of truth in many respects, it is ultimately a fictional book. Moses did not actually force the sea to split open with his bare hands. There is no beast coming to end humanity. What I think this has done is to lead to the idea of ‘individual truth’. Although the beast may not be my truth, it might still be yours. The truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as an individual truth, there is simply fact for the objective (mass-energy equivalence), and opinion for the subjective (“I liked this movie”). These are sometimes colloquialised to ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ respectively. Furthermore, I would argue that the Bible is relatively absolute in strength of opinion. One cannot hold one part of the Bible as ‘more true’ than any other part. However, what we actually need is a system where the strength of one’s opinion on a given subject must only be equal to one’s understanding of that subject. This may come under the purview of Epistemic Democracy. Finally, there is a clear need for empirical evidence so that society can function. This applies to everything from Twitter bots (proving whether or not they are run by people), elections (the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco), and the efficacy of Ivermectin (the Coronavirus pandemic). The Bible simply cannot offer this.
The public understanding of media has improved over time I think. The documentary Harry & Meghan was a media transparency documentary in the context of a unique family. The documentary paid particular attention to The Royal Rota, the media outlets that have access to the British royal family. They use a striking visualisation to demonstrate that all but one of those outlets, The Telegraph, are tabloids. It made me realise just how little I enjoy reading tabloid content, and how little I gain from them. After watching, I promptly relegated the tabloids from Apple News, and have since deleted Apple News altogether. Infinite scroll is a problem, plus most of my paid publications do not host their content there. I opt for an RSS reader instead. Recommendation engines built into social networks will pick up any relevant, engaging, and healthy content from these other outlets.
We can think of our individual relationships with media as a ‘distribution curve’. Here is a simplified version of my own:
40%: Paid Publications - FT, NYT, The Information, Bloomberg
30%: Paid News Aggregators - Nebula
20%: Paid Social Platforms - X, Youtube
10%: Unpaid Social Platforms - TikTok, Instagram, Facebook
The point is that under this model, the more true a piece of content is, the more attention it gets from the individual. We need to replicate that process at all concentrations in a way that works for every individual and for the platform as a whole. We also need to be able to replicate this for platforms that do not have truth (in an absolute sense) as their north star - but other north stars like comedic value for example. Elon Musk addressed this, in a different way, during his BBC interview. He explained that while institutions (here: media outlets) are ‘trusted’; if an expert on that topic reads it, they will say that it is only ‘half true’. Hence, we need a mechanism by which the articles are written or otherwise generated by the experts. We need a mechanism that can absorb the knowledge of the top people in their fields, without any form of credentialism, that is fully transparent and that no individual entity owns. This is a clear protocol governance problem. I expect that in the same way that media companies reengineered themselves around X as the peer-to-peer newswire, such reengineering will feed directly into the articles via Grok so that the content can be reviewed in real-time as it is published. Native publication or a ‘Grammarly for truth’ may entail fact-checking pre-publication. This changes the role of media to focus on finding ‘new facts’ (developing new knowledge) and customising presentation styles (transferring existing knowledge).
The benefits of this re-engineering are visualised by the story of ex-Google employee James Damore. In sum, in 2018 he said in the paper ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber’ that men and women usually aspire to different career goals. Specifically, men tend to prefer working with things and women tend to prefer working with people. He went on to say that this could be contributing to the gender disparities at Google, particularly in the lucrative engineering team. This is absolutely correct, as we know from Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, more recent analysis about women’s career choices by the degree of egalitarianism in their countries, and many other analyses. However, this is not what TechCrunch reported - and most people responded to the article as opposed to what he actually said, including myself.
Grok and other platforms will significantly curtail media spin and media outlets will broadly shape pieces without losing detail or changing the message. The result of this will be much less reactionary nonsense and clear messaging. In this case, “follow your interests all the way through”. TechCrunch and its employees have not stopped this, I refer to “the anti-blackness of anti-DEI”. This is now not just an issue of diversity of opinion, but an incompleteness of facts. Google fired James Damore simply because he told the full truth in a clear, complete, and supportive manner.
The main block to implementing this will be the fundamental misunderstanding of social media. The conversation around social media has become so toxic that people simply are not able to follow the scientific method. People do not understand that a social media platform is a set of hundreds of microservices - including feeds and recommendation engines. The problems of social media primarily derive from infinite scroll, not recommendation engines. There is no evidence that social media causes mental health problems. If we cancel the recommendation engines, we cancel our ability to seek the truth. This cannot happen.
Multiculturalism —> Monoculturalism
When I was growing up, my understanding of multiculturalism was essentially ‘an infusion of cultural influences within one place’. In fact, this is not multiculturalism, but Western cosmopolitanism. Multiculturalism means something much closer to the ‘pillarisation’ of the Netherlands which enjoyed strong levels of immigration but did not seek to integrate its people. They went so far as to have separate hospitals and schools for the different cultures. Multiculturalism means ‘each to their own’. This is unhealthy and fundamentally incompatible with democratic values.
In his latest book ‘Social Justice Fallacies’, Thomas Sowell stated that Democrats place too much emphasis on the Civil Rights Act (CRA) as a driver of positive social change. John McWhorter also stated that in 1966, two years after the CRA was implemented (by a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats) we moved from a culture of integration to a culture of separatism. I emphasised that in Meritocracy regarding Roosevelt. I strongly suspect that the reason for this is that people falsely believed that society would adjust like the national census at all centralisations and that their wealth and income would rise equally by way of reparations or a reparative equivalent. When this did not happen, minorities started to build their ‘own’ systems whilst curtailing the existing systems with DEI mandates, forcing mediocrity on a meritocratic society. While race was decentred in law, it was not decentred in the individual.
Ultimately, history is a tough business. Earlier this year, Bill Maher reiterated his point that the Democratic Party was the original US ‘slave party’ and so something ‘good’ can come out of something ‘bad’, and why he critiqued the critique of Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers’ of Italy party - which has historic fascist ties - when she first came to power. He argued that being derived from a fascist party does not make one fascist in the same way that the Democratic Party is no advocate of slavery. Even the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is more diluted than it used to be. While their core argument is still fundamentally wrong and very straightforward to disprove, it is striking that the KKK of 1982 appears to have been more tolerant than the Woke Left of 2024. In 1982 the KKK advocated for (black/white) segregation while offering an integration option for those who disagreed with them. This does not account for multi-racial people - and segregation is idiotic for many other reasons. On the other hand, the Woke Left Colleges of 2024 advocate for segregation during orientations without an integration option for those who disagree with them. While their approach is idiotic because they do not account for Jewish people and Asian American people (and many groups), they are less tolerant than the KKK because they do not offer an integrationist option.
Segregation is different from oppression. A more tightly segregated country is one where the rules of segregation are more absolute. A more oppressive country is one where some people are intentionally treated worse than others, either within or outside of that country. As such, the US apartheid was more segregationist than Nazi Germany, it had a lower threshold for the separation of people, but Nazi Germany was much more oppressive than the US apartheid, it treated Jewish and Roma people substantially worse than the US treated people of colour. After World War II, the US became much more integrationist - until Civil Rights were granted. At that point, the definition of discrimination was changed in some influential circles from those of equality of opportunity to equality of outcome. In other words, as soon as black people were granted equality of opportunity, they chose to change the definition to suit their needs rather than to eliminate discrimination against other people - especially Asian and Jewish Americans. I would go so far as to call this a ‘Black Supremacy of Victimhood’. While outcomes by race are generally worse for black people in the West, the discrimination against Jewish people is worse. Outcomes are not discrimination.
This is important to understand because a nation’s people cannot have a shared heritage under a separatist or ‘pillared’ system. Instead, the shared heritage of nations evolves with continued immigration. Nations are defined by a shared heritage but shared heritage changes as the composition of a nation’s people changes. I addressed this in the unreleased second part of my Sifted series in 2023:
As a London-born product of two second-generation citizens with parents from former British colonies, I’ve found myself outside the ‘European dream’ - until the Russian aggression against Ukraine. To be clear, I understand it completely, but it has not been a direct part of my story until now. It was not (directly) my family’s war to fight, yet we were made to fight in it anyway. My grandparents specifically chose to come to London, the capital of the motherland was the dream, a dream of individual betterment and impact. Couple that with a fundamental (and fully justified) lack of trust in institutions and a strong maths and economics (i.e. crypto) background, and you wind up with a nihilist and metamodernist who questions just about everything. I question the ‘European venture dream’, and think that state aid has made us blind to the realities of our situation.
We have been through this many times before. The national foods of Britain are pizza, ‘a Chinese’, and a curry. The national drink? Tea. None of these originated here. Hence, immigration and historical injustices mean that we have to constantly re-evaluate what we include and exclude from that shared heritage. We are moving from a post-war era to a pre-war era and we must hold ourselves and our institutions to an even higher standard than we did before if Western civilisation is to survive. Fortunately, the tide appears to be turning. The storyline is that the proletariat took something from the elites to force them to pay attention and solve their problems, and gave it back only when they solved that problem. A century ago it was alcohol and universal suffrage, now it’s the ‘n-word’ and a core upgrade to global tax, powered in turn by a governance upgrade.
To move forward, we must kill neo-confederacy. Interracial relationships used to be illegal, then a taboo, then normalised in the US. I fear that we have now made the black meritocrat and the white Jew the new relationship taboo. A taboo where in my personal experience, black meritocrats have become the new pawns of tokenism. We have reached the point where company brand safety protocols now directly contravene our right to be treated as whole human beings. The signs of frustration from minorities have never been clearer in the US. With 25% of black US voters planning to switch away from the Democrats in the upcoming election, it seems obvious that identity politics is losing its grip on the governance system. As John Burn-Murdoch said earlier this year, the UK often follows the US in its socio-political debates and so we may begin to see mass defection from the left to the right as a result of this. It is already no longer a social faux pas to call people out for being diversity hires - which is a good thing. Perhaps boomers should no longer feel so giddy about the American experiment (and the Western experiment at large) failing.
To be clear, I am not saying for a second that we should not study disparities as we move into our monocultural future. Coleman Hughes delineates between ‘malignant and benign disparities’. In other words, some disparities have an underlying broken and unhealthy driver and others do not. The disparities sit on a spectrum where they could all be improved but at different priority levels and methods. The more infrastructural the problem the higher it must be prioritised. Here are two examples:
Upgrading Global Tax: it is currently easier to build wealth through inheritance and marriage than it is through hard work and ingenuity when we need to flip that the other way around - which we can do with a new tax model
Improving Software Engineering: these roles currently prioritise coding over programming and working with people, which calls for a very specific type of person and can in turn increase unconscious bias - we can flip the prioritisation with co-pilot
These are both important actions, but it is foolish to think that reducing unconscious bias is more important than moving billions of people from one dollar per day in income to ten dollars per day. As it turns out, it is the ‘very liberal’ who are most likely to be online and make this claim, having obstructed smaller infrastructural improvements already. It is safe to assume that the most gender-skewed roles are the most likely to see automation (e.g. education, construction). To quote race figures without context or underlying causality is by definition race-baiting - which must end immediately.
Life in the multi-ethnic monoculture will be a life where race and ancestry are never at the centre of our identity, but rather our citizenship, our vocations, and our relationships with others. We are not born with race and ancestry at the centre, so it is absurd that we have to de-centre it. It seems that the only reason we have to is because our offline echo chambers are stronger than our online ones. Hence, our parents are centring identity elements in their children that they have to break out of later. Truth-maximising protocols are our greatest weapon to maximise our exposure to different experiences and peoples and to break out of these chambers. This only works when everyone does this at the same time, otherwise some will be left behind.
“Wokeness is Maoism with American characteristics.” - James Lindsay
What is the unlock and where does that leave us?
Media is the mechanism that re-engineered society. Direct-to-consumer news meant that one could be informed about topics outside of their immediate environment, giving us the chance to test ourselves beyond our existing limitations and to escape potential fatalities. Over time, we became more informed about more topics through formalised outlets that became more and more niche until we reached the indivisible unit. The person. In the same way that media re-engineered society, Twitter, a peer-to-peer newswire, changed the way we consume news and forced media to re-engineer itself. While this process was democratising and opened up information systems as widely as reasonably possible, most fail to use them well and simply do not have the skills and acumen to navigate this amount of information. Twitter (now X) and its ilk are now themselves being re-engineered, primarily focused on truth-seeking - isolating the signal from the noise. This is a harder process than most believe it is. We have to allow for free speech and the ability to dissent, the ability to exit platforms and control one’s own data, and to fact-check in real-time without any central authority. This is broadly unsolved, but borrowing from our existing ‘intractable’ governance problems, there is a way forward. Media institutions continue their process of devolution to the protocol. Twitter will be reengineered. We will become a truth-seeking species.
The Content Trias Politica
Montesquieu’s 1748 separation of powers outlines a full separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial arms of governance. We have already seen replications of this nation-state infrastructure in the digital world by way of the crypto trias politica, as explained by my former colleague Lawrence Lundy-Bryan. What I describe here is related, but separate. I am considering how each piece of content is produced, moderated, and recommended. I propose that each of these actions is driven by a separate ‘content protocol’, which together form a ‘content trias politica’, and each of these protocols is in actual fact a crypto trias politica. Such systems become more complex the more units there are and the more individualised those units are. We are seeking a governance system with a fully individualised, ‘self-sovereign’, identity with 10 billion people (or more) and a myriad of autonomous economic agents at any given time. As such, the system will be substantially more complex than that of American, European, or Indian governance. Far more decentralised.
The nation-state has three core branches to its trias politica:
The Legislature: Parliament (UK), Senate & Congress (US)
The Executive: Government
The Judiciary: Lower Courts, The Supreme Court, The International Criminal Court (ICC - the UK is a ratified member, but the US and Israel are not)
Similarly, there are three core branches to the crypto trias politica too:
The Legislature: The Foundation
The Executive: The Development Team
The Judiciary: The Miners (& Real World Legal Infrastructure)
Clearly, the judiciary is the most challenging branch to develop. The ICC is not fully ratified by all nation-states, notably the US constitution which prevents it from feeding into a higher-order court. Furthermore, no one has determined exactly how crypto protocols like the Bitcoin blockchain can plug into real-world legal infrastructure. Of course, there are off-chain pressure points - the government can put pressure on individuals and exchanges - but there is not necessarily a known neat solution yet, save perhaps the Ricardian Contract.
Point of Difference
The key difference between a crypto trias politica and a content trias politica is what is maintained. For the Bitcoin blockchain, miners maintain security. For this system, we maintain the truth. We do so through the process of isolating the component of new signals orthogonal to what our system is optimised for, the truth, and rewarding the contributor based on that. Less formally, the more the contribution improves the system, the better they are rewarded. This is very similar to how the hedge fund Numerai works.
Similarly, we can consider the three branches of the content trias politica:
The Legislature: Recommendation - Metagraph for the Metaverse
The Executive: Production - Platform-Agnostic Content Platform
The Judiciary: Moderation - Content Moderation by the Crowd
A judiciary without a legislature (here, a metagraph - an aggregate of all the social graphs that used to be held within each social network) would mean that we would have to vote on the prioritisation level of each piece of content. There is simply too much content to do this. Hence, we have a legislature which determines the laws, which in turn determines how each piece of content is prioritised. Truth is the most complex and difficult instantiation of recommendation because its corruption can cause the most damage. Further, it feeds into all other forms of recommendation. If we are to prioritise content based on its humour, we still need to know whether or not the content is true. As such, our core recommendation ‘truth protocol’ is overlaid by a recommendation ‘wrapper protocol’ customised for the types of services built on top of them. If you will, a more advanced version of the movie maturity rating analogy for censorship of the Twitter product.
Analogy: Harry Potter’s Platform Nine and Three-Quarters
If you’re a witch or wizard then you pass through, otherwise you bounce off
You can try and pass through as many times as you wish - but if you are a muggle (or late), you will not pass through
Twitter: you can tweet as much as you wish like, but your misinformation will not pass through
Question: how permeable should the gateway be? should this be under user control, or platform control?
Moderation is also extremely hard to solve because its infrastructure plugs into real-world infrastructure, and the consequences of the actions here are much greater. While recommendation only addresses the prioritisation of content, moderation can involve its removal. These decisions are impossible to avoid because we cannot describe the world with a finite set of axioms. There are always edge cases so there is always a need to interpret and reinterpret the law. In this context, there is always the opportunity for content removal - removal from general access by any means.
Example Dispute: Dave Chappelle’s ‘gender is a fact’ statement
This content would likely come with a ‘truth clarification’ that ‘gender exists’ and that we cannot determine whether or not he said ‘fact’ intentionally or unintentionally. This may lead to the content’s relative deprioritisation on some platforms, especially services with an empty recommendation wrapper, but the content would certainly not be removed, because it does not violate hate speech laws.
Given that each of these ‘branches’ are themselves crypto trias politicas, we can think of them as three ‘faces’ of the content trias politica:
The Legislature: Recommendation - Metagraph for the Metaverse
The Legislature of The Legislature: The Foundation
The Executive of The Legislature: The Development Team
The Judiciary of The Legislature: The Miners & Real World Legal Infrastructure
The Executive: Production - Platform-Agnostic Content Platform
The Legislature of The Executive: The Foundation
The Executive of The Executive: The Development Team
The Judiciary of The Executive: The Miners & Real World Legal Infrastructure
The Judiciary: Moderation - Content Moderation by the Crowd
The Legislature of The Judiciary: The Foundation
The Executive of The Judiciary: The Development Team
The Judiciary of The Judiciary: The Miners & Real World Legal Infrastructure
Next, we must consider what comes ‘above’ and ‘below’ the core of the system. Social media platforms are themselves supranational entities and are in the process of decentralising. The most notable example is the Facebook Oversight Board which acts as the ‘court’ of the company and in theory cannot be overruled. They also have an internal content moderation team which sets ‘laws’ that the board interprets. This is the beginning of a trias politica in of itself. Quite similarly, X is notorious for its freedom of speech policy and seeks to be the ultimate source of truth. This will invariably involve a protocol or set of protocols of some kind to help the core team focus on product development and to reduce voter fatigue on the development of the so-called ‘truth protocol’. This also appears to be a trias politica. Furthermore, the rise of VectorOps suggests that a generalised form of this trias politica may emerge where each social network, search engine, and academic journal can instantiate a customised version of a trias politica for its own purposes. Hence, we may have trias politicas building on top of our content trias politica of crypto trias politicas. ‘Below’ the core of the system, the judicial branches of each crypto trias politica will have to feed into a real-world entity, almost certainly the ICC.
As such, we have a full content trias politica. But questions remain. For this to work to its full potential, the US would likely have to recognise the ICC as superior to its own Supreme Court. While the rest of the West has largely transitioned from its position of dominance to a position of primacy, the US has not completed this transition yet. To do so, it would have to devolve its position as the ‘world’s police’, which it will only do if it is comfortable that the UN can take over. Given that the UN Security Council has failed to condemn Hamas and that the US, at the time of writing, strongly opposes the ICC decision to sanction current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, this seems very unlikely.
There are further questions. At present, Facebook’s Oversight Board acts as a joint legislative and judicial branch. Formal separation of powers splits these up, and our proposal would have the board act as the legislature - much like the Bitcoin Foundation or Ethereum Foundation. As such, the Oversight Board would only be able to write laws so that the executive is clear about what it can and cannot do, minimising the number of violations, and that the judiciary does not have to make every decision from first principles, reducing voter fatigue. There is also a question about the interaction between on-chain governance, recorded and validated on a blockchain, and off-chain governance, recorded and validated elsewhere, within the foundation. There is an implicit assumption here that the legislature writes all of its laws on-chain. This is non-trivial and will very likely require new software to achieve with human language and limited legal knowledge. We ought to note that there are many other microservices that can be devolved down and abstracted away - especially UI features of the executive branch.
There are some other features within our existing infrastructure which have a place in this new infrastructure. The type of cameral structure (unicameral versus bicameral) implemented must be decided on a foundation-by-foundation basis - the more people they serve, the more federated. Acceptance thresholds must be decided within every voting element, especially in the judicial branches. A partial solution is for new social and search companies to plug and play with the ‘legal systems’ of existing platforms. While the judiciary is (almost) fully on-chain, which is positive because the relevant appeals and charges could ascend to the higher judicial authorities much faster with minimal bogus cases, a similar point applies to the ICC. Someone will have to build the infrastructure for them to interact with the protocol.
Finally, although protocols cannot in of themselves be held liable for the content they process, circumventing the Section 230 debate, the off-chain pressure points could be intimidated into not using them, in theory. People could still be put under pressure to not engage with these entities even though they are built on government-resistant protocols. Beyond this, large-scale rights changes such as these force us to decide what we want to be ‘legal’ and what we don’t. The canonical example is that with increased privacy soon to come, we as a society must decide how we legislate and police the use of cannabis.
Building on the Content Trias Politica
We can think of X as a protocol (X Protocol), and a product (X Service). A Sybil-resistant protocol ‘for the metaverse’ that satisfies the blockchain trilemma (security, speed, scalability) for the production, recommendation, and moderation of content. A product operating on a subscription model without infinite scroll. The fixation point of the Twitter acquisition was network health, specifically bots. An account authentication problem. X Service couldn’t be valued properly because no one could empirically determine how many accounts were inauthentic. Under our system, we likely could have. If we assume that people have multiple social accounts and that bots do not, then Twitter could have allowed users to prove they have multiple social accounts. Assuming that replicating the same bot on many platforms requires so much effort that it is not worth doing (formally: has a sufficiently high ‘proof of work’), then people could self-authenticate on Twitter with their ‘defragmented identity’ accounts. That self-authentication platform would charge platforms a fixed monthly fee per user to sustain itself, resulting in a healthy and engaged Twitter operating on a freemium model. Over time, that self-authentication process would improve from ‘number of accounts’ to a true measure of ‘humanity’.
The reputation problem is critical to fix, and I think that a combination of open research (or DeSci) and VectorOps will provide the answer - building on existing solutions like Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch). In short, X purely focuses on content recommendation on a reputation-based model and builds X Protocol into the ‘academic journal for the metaverse’ - making it the place to find the most accurate information. X Service builds directly on top of this, and other products build on top of it via a ‘recommendation wrapper’ which changes the content prioritisation order based on relevance, while maintaining truth by fact-checking and contextualising content. Interestingly, the most frustrating factors about the current system make it the most viable to achieve the goal. For one, many more people read posts than post them, meaning that there is potential for people to listen more than they speak, and to listen to the right people. Second is the problem of what I call ‘self-assembling cyber troops’. For any given issue, tens of thousands of people swarm toward it - expert or not. With a reputation system, we would know who knows about what topics, and could match them toward a given piece of content - regardless of their academic pedigree.
The Peer Review Process
Initial Review: the draft paper is reviewed for basic errors and legitimacy by the given journal’s editor - the majority of papers are rejected here, for stupid reasons, and rejection is purely at the whim of the editor
Peer Review: the paper, initially reviewed, is reviewed by a set of peers who in theory are experts, and the piece goes back and forth for feedback - this is incredibly opaque and problematic
Final Decision: acceptance or rejection is made, again purely at the whim of the editor
Under X Protocol, content submission is free (the submitter is already paying for distribution), the reviewers assessing the content are paid directly by the protocol (in the same way that Bitcoin miners are paid to maintain the protocol’s security), assessment is double-blind, and final decisions are made without a single, corruptible, centralised authority. In fact, assessment is likely to be both real-time and all-the-time, where both content submitters and assessors are compensated based on how much they improve the system, and is likely to evolve into a ‘truth-seeking AI’ over time too. This process could change the distribution of content as the relative reputation of the content creator and the relative truthfullness of the content change. Alongside X Service, existing academic journals (institutions) reengineer themselves on the protocol. X Protocol tracks the review process within each journal and abstracts it into a meta-model. Every journal is built on the meta-model, so the review works better than any individual journal could do on its own. As a result, the review is open but relevantly coordinated. The most suitable peers are assessing the most suitable papers, and the papers are genuine contributions.
Under X Service, each person pays one cent per follower (likely over their first thousand followers) per month - charged to individual accounts. Each person then has the option to pay for a subscription for extra features (e.g. no ads), and extra tooling enables power users to generate revenue through newsletters, super-followers and the like. The beauty here is that paid accounts are actively incentivised to seek bot removal because no one wants to pay for bots to follow them. The service generates revenue to maintain and improve itself, the hardcore users have the means to use the service to its full potential, and everyone has the opportunity to read and write without limitation. The same logic applies to the other services that build on top of the recommendation wrapper. Under this setup, there is scope to change like and share functions to focus on endorsement instead of blind redistribution.
Life on the Content Trias Politica
There is a false perception about the tech industry that the giants depend on data and that is what keeps them all-powerful. This is a shorthand. The better the data, the better the insights. At present, people's identity (i.e. data) is fragmented across all of their social channels. This means that social platforms (even ones like Twitter and Facebook) only have partial data and subpar insights:
Platforms: Toxic + Disengaged = Societal Harm + Low Revenue + High Churn
Data: Locked in platform
People: Can't (easily) leave bad platforms due to data lock-in
The key is to increase the insights they can gain while removing the data (i.e. nuclear waste) from their systems. To do so, we aggregate the user graphs held by the social platforms and compensate them for this devolution with the same perpendicular orthogonal signal model as proposed for X Protocol, and put each person's aggregated data in their control, before tokenising, open-sourcing and decentralising the graph. The result: a better user graph than any company could ever build themselves. Then, social networks compete on product quality and usefulness, most likely on a freemium subscription model:
Platforms: Healthy + Engaged = Societal Harmony + High Revenue + Low Churn
Data: User-controlled and portable
People: Can move from platform to platform without the 'cold start problem'
For the people, this means that their data is under their control and that they proactively bring their data to the platforms they want to use. They are no longer the product. To bring this into effect, we start with the smallest social networks and build up from there - a snowball effect.
I anticipate three major changes to the landscape: unwinding acquisitions, day one global competition, and the reforging of the political spectrum. The reason why Instagram sold to Meta (then Facebook) was that the small team were stretched and could not compete with Meta on resources. Instagram had captured the young audience that Facebook wanted to hold on to, so it made sense for them to buy the upstart. A few years earlier, Yahoo tried to acquire Facebook for much the same reason, and now Instagram finds itself between the same rock and hard place. While they outperform on data compared to their successors, namely TikTok, they underperform on recommendation. If it evolves, it alienates its longest-serving users and likely loses revenue; if it does not evolve, it withers away as its competitors serve younger audiences better. Even ByteDance finds itself in the same position with its forced divestment or ban of TikTok, formed through the company’s acquisition of Musical.ly. It is time to break this cycle and have these services deliver the most amount of value to people, not advertisers. Under this healthy landscape, ByteDance would devolve its recommendation engine to the recommendation protocol it re-engineers itself around, and the service would operate even better than it did before and would run on a freemium model. The unwinding I am most excited about is YouTube, simply for the sake of being able to log out of it without logging out of G-Suite as a whole. In sum, these are much neater ways of setting the bird free.
The second side of this is new companies and new purposes. For years, Google has been viewed as impenetrable but now the cracks begin to show in even its armour. Before the Generative AI wave people could not quite see the point in paying for Google Search, but even then there was a use case. The question was: “Would I pay more for LinkedIn (and other platforms with search) if its search function was even better than Google’s?”. The answer is of course yes, but then what is the benefit to Google? This begged two more questions: 1) “Would I like Google’s search engine to be even better at no extra cost?”, and 2) “Would I like Google’s search engine to be even better and have no ads?”. The answer to these two questions is also a resounding yes. For the ad model, you get better search results, better ads, and better ad targeting. Meanwhile, the subscription model remains ad-free and increasingly privacy-first. With competition from ChatGPT and now others like Perplexity, the question is: “How much better would Google’s search engine be if all search engines were built on The Metagraph?” The answer? Much better. Given that people still find Google useful, I do not expect its purpose to change too much. However, the same cannot be said for Facebook, because the Facebook product is no longer useful - and is deeply susceptible to coercion. I suspect that Meta will split into a fully-resistant protocol, building GovTech for supranational entities, and a set of services built on top of it - ‘broken up’ and better. Genuinely useful, and closer to Zuckerberg’s original vision of ‘world domination’ - but one where he is the hero of the story.
The third face of this is the evolution of the political landscape. The two-party system clogs up the US governance infrastructure in particular, but the truth-seeking mechanism of the content trias politica in itself unclogs this infrastructure. Think of it as three phases - Collapse, Compress, and Calm:
Collapse: wrestling all the ideas back into the middle - like a power twister
Compress: upgrading the infrastructure we use to assess those ideas - and applying it
Calm: finding our new place in that political spectrum
“We can only let go of a negative story by taking hold of a better story.” - Philippa Stroud
Closing Thoughts
I love this quote from David Omand, Former Director of GCHQ: “Pick the explanation with the least evidence against it, not the explanation with the most evidence for it.” I might rephrase this: “Once falsifiable, seek the path of lowest disproof.” This, in a nutshell, is what our governance systems need to encourage. Today, we live in a world of neo-confederacy where if one cannot find evidence of discrimination then they simply did not look hard enough because it must be true - even though there is no reason why it must be. This is incompatible with a healthy society. Clearly, the best explanation in this case is that there is no racial discrimination. This is precisely what Roland Fryer demonstrated in 2017 about police homicides against armed individuals.
To make this happen, we will need to stop confusing decentralisation for fragmentation. When we talk about decentralisation in the context of Web3, we are talking about decentralised control - not market fragmentation. Power-separated, federated, and cryptoeconomically and cryptographically secure systems are stronger in the long term because they are anti-fragile. Many would simply have us remove one side from the political system and bask in short-term centralised happiness instead - before society falls into dystopia.
One of the other dynamics is how leadership roles change. We have long known that ‘builder and seller’ founders build the best companies, but the threshold here is even higher. We have to have a founder, operator, investor, and developer all in one person - a person who can take an entity from a one-person team all the way through the startup phase, scale-up phase, public event, and full separation of powers. Even with support from investors, advisors, and super-intelligence - this person is a rare specimen.
I have started to think that stress balances out over a lifetime. Generationally speaking, boomers had fairly relaxed childhoods without world wars and with very high prosperity, and so inevitably created stress later in life by way of DEI, cable news, helicopter parenting and the like. Conversely, because Zoomers had a very high-stress childhood (the aforementioned stressors), they will have a comparatively relaxed adulthood - World War Three notwithstanding.
What I am trying to say is that in pursuing the truth, we have demonstrated that healthy discourse emerges from free speech and that bottom-up governance interventions are now viable alternatives to our failed nation-building exercises of the past 25 years. This, amongst other things, means that it is technically possible to sanction a nation’s government without sanctioning a nation’s people - and that from there, healthy governance and leadership can emerge from the bottom up.
This is a strong foundation for discussion, and the foundation removes the worst ideas in our society, but some remain. Questions of origin, questions of complexity. Consciousness, abortion, intelligence and the like. This will be the focus of the next piece. Pursuing the truth leads to fairness and wonder - the ideal that underpins all other ideals. For now, I have found my purpose and rhythm and it is time to live.
“The most powerful form of energy is the manipulation of information: compute.”
- Scott Galloway