How do we govern the future?

A new project for 2022

I thought I’d kick off the new year with a new project — a weekly blog to explore how we govern the future.

For now I’m going to call the blog End State because a lot of the material will build on my book of the same name, and because, well, I lack imagination.

If you’ve read my essay, Goodbye social democracy. Hello [X], you can think of the new project as a year-long quest to find [X].

The TL;DR version is that social democracy was custom-built as an institutional settlement to govern capitalism in its 20th century form, reflecting 20th century technological conditions.

This raises the question I’ll explore in the blog: what institutional settlement will we need to make a success of 21st century digital capitalism?

Learning from history. One question for the blog will be: how did we adapt to new forms of capitalism in the past?

It feels pretty clear that this is a top tier question and one that deserves our sustained attention.

I say this partly because the stakes are so high — governing digital capitalism feels like a genuinely existential challenge for western democracy — and because, at the moment, things aren’t going very well.

But I also think this question deserves attention because it’s just so damn complicated, and because it throws up so many other interesting questions.

• What even is digital capitalism? What is its defining logic and what are its dominant organisational forms? What social and economic problems does this new era give rise to? In what ways, specifically, does this leave our old settlement behind?
• What criteria can we use to judge whether or not a social settlement is proving successful? What does ‘good’ look like, now and in the future?
• What specifically do we mean by ‘institutional settlement’? How do institutions interact with/shape technological progress? And by what art/science can we create and change social institutions?

In the blog I’ll try to answer clarifying questions like these. But I also hope to go further and unpack some intellectual tools to help us answer the big exam question above.

I’m particularly interested, for example, in the concept of discontinuities in social or economic history. i.e. Points in time (like the one we’ve reached now) when technology seems to trigger a qualitative shift in the nature of capitalism, so that the logic of our economy and society starts to change.

I’m also interested in how these changes diffuse across our economy and society. Not least because this process of diffusion is really messy and slow, and because the nature of this messiness and slowness is apparently really consequential for our lives and societies.

Most of all, however, I’m fascinated by how we can influence these trends. How can we use social institutions — including, but not limited to, what we call ‘government’ — to shape and speed up this process of diffusion, and to steer/harness a new type of economy as it emerges?

Fortunately, there’s already a rich literature on all of these topics, much of it written at the time of previous technological transitions.

In fact, one of the points I want to land in the blog is that we should talk much more about the great technological transitions of the past, so that we can learn from our previous successes and mistakes.

Finally, a spoiler alert: I doubt we’ll find [X]. Not least because ‘find’ isn’t really the right verb when it comes to exploring a new policy/institutional settlement. A better word might be ‘invent’. Because, as other people have said before, you can’t really ‘predict’ the future — you have to create it.

Anyway, that’s it it for now. (My other new year’s resolution is stop all my blogs from turning into 7,000 word monsters.)

If you think any of this sounds interesting, you can read along for free on Medium by following me here and/or by clicking the link below this post to get emails whenever I publish.

Or if you’re feeling lovely and want to support the project, you can join the £3 a month club on Substack here.[1] (As a thank you, I’ll send the first 25 people who sign-up a paperback of End State when it’s published in May.[2])

Footnotes

1. Annoyingly, Substack sets a minimum monthly price of $5 so I’ve set a 20% discount which works out at $4 (just under £3).
2. Or, if you’ve already bought End State, and/or want to take a long punt, you can have a copy of my next hardback (as-yet-unwritten!)