Future State #5: Food for thought

Rather than write another long post this week, I thought I’d share some thought-provoking pieces that speak to the theme of this blog series: how we govern the future.

Here are three articles I’ve read in the last week that I found relevant and interesting:

• An interview with Yanis Varoufakis on crypto and techno-feudalism. I wince at parts of this, not least the flattery of China, but the comments on game-world marketplaces are genuinely interesting and a sign of things to come. (h/t The Syllabus)
• An introduction to Decentraland, one of the early movers in the metaverse. Worth reading if only for the admirably crisp definition of the metaverse as a “spatial internet” —“the internet, adapted to support fuller, dimensional experiences.” (h/t Exponential View)
• “Ideas want to be shared”— an essay from Kevin Kelly arguing for more permissive treatment of intellectual property. Kelly wants a “default stance … that intangibles should start in the commonwealth and return to it as soon as possible”. (h/t The Browser)

While I’m at it, here’s a reminder of the pieces I’ve written so far as part of my year-long series exploring how we govern the future.

• First up was Frontier Logic, looking at how we should approach policy work at time of exponential change. TL;DR it’s not much use looking at averages. You have to start by understanding what life is like at the technological frontier and work back from there.
• Second, I made a more specific prediction: “the state of 2050 will play a far bigger and more sophisticated role in digital infrastructure than the state does today.” And I tried to unpack what this could mean.
• Third, I asked a big question: What exactly is technology? This is a big picture post but it’s a good place to start since it speaks to a critical point: if we’re going to govern technology, we have to first get under its skin.

Finally, just to re-share the link to my earlier long read on The Fable of the Bees. In this piece I asked: what if the most important idea in economics no longer works? (Answer: the world will start to feel a bit like it does now.)

As ever, if you want to read along, you can follow me for free on Medium here. And if you’d like to support the project for the price of a coffee a month (and get a free book), you can subscribe on Substack here.

To read the big and optimistic story that sits behind all of this, buy my book, End State: 9 ways society is broken — and how we can fix it.