Future State: Contents
This is a contents page for Future State, a blog exploring how we govern 21st century capitalism. The posts will run weekly throughout 2022.
To receive updates on new posts you can follow me on Medium or support the project for £3 a month on Substack. For the big story behind all of this, from Victorian sewers to digital dragons, buy my book End State.
REGULAR POSTS
Future State #1: How do we govern the future?
Introducing the project. “Social democracy was custom-built to govern 20th century capitalism. So what institutional settlement will we need in order to govern 21st century digital capitalism?”
Future State #2: Frontier Logic
Rebuilding the state is a big ask, so where do we start? The answer is at the frontier. “We should spend time getting under the skin of the most advanced practice of production, and test our ideas there.”
Future State #3: The Great Stink, 2020s-style
The contours of a future state are starting to emerge, so can we sketch it out? Let’s start with one of its clearer components: an entirely new policy regime to build, maintain, and regulate digital infrastructure.
Future State #4: The nature of technology
What exactly is technology? The answer might surprise us. It’s a picture teeming with life, at once exquisitely crystalline, intricate, and forking. The implications for institutions, markets, and politics are profound.
Future State #5: Crypto and decentraland
A pause for a few provocations. On crypto and techno-feudalism, an early mover in the metaverse, and an argument for the permissive treatment of intellectual property. “Shouldn’t all ideas default to the commons?”
Future State #6: Web3 and the paths not taken
Our technology choices change everything, irreversibly. The qwerty keyboard isn’t special; qwertyness is everywhere. “So what if the body of technology is a warped tree, branching ever more finely toward an off-centre light?”
Future State #7: Political iridescence
Why I’m optimistic, despite it all. Day by day, politics is grim. But if you zoom out, it shimmers with possibility. “Politics has a strange iridescence. It takes on a different hue depending on the angle you look at it from.”
Future State #8: Ukraine unpacked
A new war raises new issues and questions. Cyberwar isn’t just online war; it’s messier than that. What came before SWIFT? Where are Russia’s reserves? And can pigeons save us?
Future State #9: Trees over lines
A case for ditching the exponential line chart to replace it with a tree. A tree exhibits complexity; it’s a fractal, which is formally appropriate; and it gives us ideas. “A line stares at us blankly; a tree gives us something to work with.”
Future State #10: Technological change is soft, not hard
We understand that digital transformation is all about culture. But when it comes to transforming the state , we still act like change comes from the hard bones of technology, not the soft tendons of culture.
Future State #11: Future competition policy
The competition regime in 2050. It will be a cyberpunk mashup of past and future materials, it will function like a platform, and it will sit alongside the unthinkable: a collaboration regime. “We’d probably die if we saw it.”
Future State #12: Governing the data layer
Data is a vector along which a new economic and social logic spreads. So how do we govern it? First we need to abandon old ideas. “Maybe ownership itself is a red herring. A legacy concept that now only distracts and confuses.”
FOUNDATIONAL LONGREADS
Goodbye social democracy. Hello [X]
The era of social democracy is waning. So what comes next? “If the twentieth century policy paradigm was technocratic, cold, optimising, and hierarchical, the twenty-first century policy paradigm will be simple, flat, humble, and warm. And if you push me for one word, I’d say human.”
The Fable of the Bees, if the bees were on Facebook.
Bernard Mandeville’s 1714 poem, The Fable of the Bees, introduced a central idea in economics: that markets align the interests of producers of consumers. Now the digital revolution is undercutting that premise. So do markets still foster prosperity if the bees are all on Facebook? If not, what do we do then?
To receive updates on new posts you can follow me on Medium or support the project for £3 a month on Substack. For the big story behind all this, from Victorian sewers to digital dragons, buy my book End State.
NB: This contents page was last updated on 9 April. The posts will continue weekly through to the end of 2022.
