Open Data in a zero-sum society
On Trump, violence and why I think Open Data shows us the way.
And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!” Rev 6: 5–6
I identify as a girardian. I think human desire is mimetic. This mimetic desire is powerful and has allowed our species to develop more than any others. It allowed humanity to learn in an exponential way. But it leads to conflict since you desire the things your model desires. It leads to violence. René Girard explains that the usual ways humans— from small human groups to huge societies like the Aztecs or the Greeks — have survived that violence is through the scapegoat mechanism. In a situation of crisis, when there is too much violence in the group, that violence is directed at one individual who is murdered. That murder calms down the group for a moment and the victim is deified for he has brought back some peace. Obviously that whole mechanism is never conscious. And obviously it is an explosive trend: the more you scapegoat, the less effective it is in bringing back peace and the more you will use scapegoating in the future.
Though, this mechanism has been broken down by Christianity when the Gospel described a scapegoating , but, contrary to every other myths, from the point of view of the victim. Humanity has lost its most basic way to evacuate violence. We all deeply feel what’s at stake when we witness a scapegoating and we now naturally side with the victim(s). I won’t develop this further here, but Girard’s Battling to the End describes how it has led to a mimetic trend to extreme violence, from XIX French - Prussian wars to XX carnages and to today’s global succession of terrorism, so called surgical strikes and mass killings.
This is an apocalyptic vision of the world, it is depressing to read but it finally gives the kind of hope you get when you find the hole in the sinking ship.
Zero-sum society
Once you are aware about the mimetism of your desire, and your cruel inclination to search for scapegoat to evacuate your own violence you start to rethink your world and your reality. There is no easy path to respond to that violence.
One way to think about the trends our societies have followed in the last two hundreds years is to consider that they have fought against zero-sum societies. A zero-sum game — basically a society without growth, no matter how you define growth — is a game where for every winner there is a loser. Hence it is a society where mimetic conflicts increase drastically. Our countries, by focusing on creating economic growth and redistributing it to everybody, were, in fact, fighting mimetic desire.
We’ve founded our entire model on economic growth. Our one and only tactic for two centuries has been to make the pie bigger and to allow more and more people to taste it. I wouldn’t dare say it has been easy to build, most of it is the result of power balance and fights, and its evolution is anything but linear. Nevertheless, the resulting improvements in the quality of life made the Western World the model of the rest of the world’s mimetic desire.
That system is broken.
The progress of technology has plateaued, leading us to a Great Stagnation (Tyler Cowen). This is a blind spot for a lot of people, especially in tech, especially here on Medium. There are almost only two economic areas that have seen real innovations in the last forty years: finance and information technologies.
We are now 17 years after the explosion of the internet bubble, almost 10 years after Lehman’s bankruptcy, and the only major initiatives trying to apply the new paradigm to new sectors are all linked to one name: Elon Musk. He is the tree that hides a forest of bankrupted Ivy League graduates developing fake AI to show you cheap advertisements.
“The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A couple of years of stagnation is enough to totally break down our paradigm. Deep down you know how it works. When there is no growth to share, politicians are lost. When a politician is lost he goes to war. Making his state even more indebted and powerless. It doesn’t take too long before every group of people in a society looks for its own scapegoat. And the violence keeps growing to some unknown extremes. Every pause in the escalation only makes the resentment grow a little bit more.
Publius Decius Mus’ piece The Flight 93 Election, one of the most enlightening ‘why Trump’ article by one of his supporter, is extremely clear on that point: “It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice — only to ensure that it and eight of the other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the same four industries and 200 families”. Zero-sum issues are key.
Obviously Trump himself and most of his fellows are looking for scapegoats (be they Mexicans, mainstream media or Muslims-as-a-whole-except-business-partners). Obviously as a lefty-intellectual on Medium you can easily see that this is scapegoating. You feel it. But life is full of specks of sawdust and planks. If you run with the pack you are part of a scapegoating mechanism. If you can’t stand your gay friend not being liberal, if you loved when Obama rejected thousands of Mexicans and droned people but think Trump is a Nazi, if you wanted Thiel out of YC because of his choice to support a candidate in an election, I’m sorry to tell you that you are in a mimetic reaction with the people you hate. Hence you are becoming like them. You are part of that surge in violence in our society.
“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.” Hunter S Thompson
Hunter S Thompson has seen everything first. He never managed to write his great book on the end of the American dream. But his lifework is exactly that. How the system became more and more crooked. How the bad guys took the power. How the mimetic violence kept rising. How the middle classes lost their hopes.
The huge blind spot of most of the world’s elite is the rise of the Elephant Chart. It shows the winners and losers of the globalization. It shows how western countries delayed the consequences of the zero-sum-ization of the society by outsourcing their activities to cheaper places.
Peak Globalization
The first decade of the 21st century appears to me as the peak of globalization. The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics may have looked like the moment when the globalization process was unstoppable. But France’s vote No to European Constitution in 2005 was a first huge warning. I don’t think the process is over and I really don’t believe every company will bring back their jobs. But I’ve got the feeling that the Brexit or Trump have put an end to the belief that globalization was the obvious linear path to follow.
Now I think there are two paths in front of us:
- Go all-in XIX century in a global zero-sum world. Keep going the same way and just add hard borders and custom taxes. This leads quite obviously to a mimetic competition among those with nukes. Doesn’t look very fun to me…
- Stop focusing on the 1-to-n phase, the replication phase of every business which is the globalization process itself and start working on the 0-to-1 phase. Make the world a positive-sum game.
That second path does not mean stoping globalization, it just means switching the focus and starting to attack the real issues of our societies. It also means trying to bring back some antifragility on our systems. Developing global infrastructure is not easy. Some are really robust like the internet network, some are even antifragile like the Bitcoin but most of them are really fragile. Every time a European politician talks to a citizen, Europe itself is a little bit more fragile. Europe’s peak was during the Renaissance and a couple centuries later when it was basically a bunch of city-states. We can imagine some kind of meta-structure at the continent level for some questions (a program like Erasmus allowing most European students to study abroad for a while, basic rules outlining terms of justice) but please let the politic and economy be the most local possible.
There Won’t Be Blood…
If you come back to Carlota Perez’ framework exposed above, detailing the several phases in the lifetime of a Techno-Economic paradigm, some great cycles appear.
The 4th cycle, the one of Mass Production between ~1908 and ~1974 was fueled by cheap energy, basically cheap oil. Our Age of Information and Telecommunication is fueled by cheap bandwidth and cheap data.
It has led a lot of people to make the analogy and calling the data the new oil.
The analogy is quite easy and has allowed thousands of well-dressed consultants to start their first slides with a reassuring message: we know how things works, here’s how you’ll become the Standard Oil of the new digital world!
But it wasn’t true. There is a huge difference. You can’t burn the same oil twice.
And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children. Mt 14: 19-21
You can’t burn data. There is no limit in the usage of data. Thousands of people can use simultaneously the same piece of data. Data, especially when made open to everyone, is the absolute non-mimetic asset.
In addition, opening data in every sectors, from gov and transportation to energy, and probably sooner than expected, heavy industry, insurance or retail, will foster the innovation in a much broader spectrum of sectors. This is key if we want to get out of this zero-sum game. By making data move more and more — circulate between formerly closed actors, we are enhancing a breeding-ground for every entrepreneur, every researcher and every citizen. And by design any new initiative does not deprive the previous one. It precisely the opposite since data quality can be improved and data enriched by much more new datasets. Open Data is antifragile.
Just to be clear, I’m not that naive in thinking that Open Data is the absolute solution. There are so many old school regulations imposed by all-powerful lobbies. There is so much mimetism in the way people choose what they want to do with their skills. There is the simple fact that the problems that matter are hard and take time and capital. I wouldn’t dare say that I’m changing the world or anything. I’m just an Open Data determinate-optimist. I believe Open Data is finally an interesting contrarian solution in today tense climate. Voltaire told us to “cultivate our garden”, I work in cultivating a common garden of disposable data, for any quantity, for any usage, for anyone…
