Omni-Culturalism
How do we escape the negative aspects of industrialism without having to go back to pastoralism?
Last week we discussed Seth Godin's claim that "industrialism" (the drive to make everything cheaper) is the main cause of modern misery, and in fact underlies our obsession with race, caste, and class. In particular, Seth calls on us to make industry subservient to culture, rather than cheapening our culture for the sake of industry.
This week Bruce builds on that to outline his vision of a "hackable and forkable" world, where everyone has the ability (at least in principle) to maintain and customize the essential systems they depend upon. Bruce adds that people should be free to outsource production to others, especially where scale matters, but only if we can preserve transparency and autonomy. The goal is to create a universal system of multi-dimensional reputation and reward that encourages cooperative, pro-social behavior.
Prabhakar describes this as abstracting away the mechanics of our systems, while still communicating the values. He then argues that, if you squint really hard, global financial capitalism did in fact create a crude version of that reality; especially after the 1970s, when consumer activism created pressure for companies to embrace safety and environmental sustainability as part of their "brand." This is not to excuse the many sins of capitalism, but to illustrate how humanity at scale requires compressive tools like "brand" and "price" to cope with information overload.
This highlighted a tension between enabling communities to become self-sustaining, without them becoming self-contained tyrannies. Prabhakar argued that required local ownership of critical infrastructure, but a global culture of shared learning. Bruce argued that the key to preventing tyranny was mobility, so people could easily leave or fork a community that was failing to achieve its stated goals. Prabhakar countered that high barriers to exit are essential to encourage people to build long-term reputations.
In the end, we agreed to table the discussion about loyalty versus mobility for next week. Hope you will join us then!
References
This week Bruce builds on that to outline his vision of a "hackable and forkable" world, where everyone has the ability (at least in principle) to maintain and customize the essential systems they depend upon. Bruce adds that people should be free to outsource production to others, especially where scale matters, but only if we can preserve transparency and autonomy. The goal is to create a universal system of multi-dimensional reputation and reward that encourages cooperative, pro-social behavior.
Prabhakar describes this as abstracting away the mechanics of our systems, while still communicating the values. He then argues that, if you squint really hard, global financial capitalism did in fact create a crude version of that reality; especially after the 1970s, when consumer activism created pressure for companies to embrace safety and environmental sustainability as part of their "brand." This is not to excuse the many sins of capitalism, but to illustrate how humanity at scale requires compressive tools like "brand" and "price" to cope with information overload.
This highlighted a tension between enabling communities to become self-sustaining, without them becoming self-contained tyrannies. Prabhakar argued that required local ownership of critical infrastructure, but a global culture of shared learning. Bruce argued that the key to preventing tyranny was mobility, so people could easily leave or fork a community that was failing to achieve its stated goals. Prabhakar countered that high barriers to exit are essential to encourage people to build long-term reputations.
In the end, we agreed to table the discussion about loyalty versus mobility for next week. Hope you will join us then!
References
- Automated Transcript (Google Sheet)
- Hydrogen Economy (Wikipedia)
- Toward Abundant Systems (Seth Godin)
- The Price System as a Mechanism for Using Knowledge (Friedrich von Hayek)
- Why Omniculturalism, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Solution (Psychology Today)