Sidebar: Why Capitalize the E in Establishment?

In my previous post (The Adversary and the Goal), I speak of my inferring the existence of a force or some dynamic in the System of the World which defines narrative, shapes the dominant ideas in the informational flow, and molds the zeitgeist. Because this exerts such massive influence on the global political conversation, and politics structures how humans interact with the physical world, the impact of this system dynamic is immense. It is fundamental.

And only in certain moments do we get a glimpse of what it’s like to exist outside of its warm, comfortable embrace. If you are reading this blog post — written by a geek, posted on a hip blogging platform — then you are almost certainly captured within its fabric of influence. (The half of humanity that is stuck soldering together smartphones or sucking down shitty beer while glued to a TV screen is also affected by this system dynamic, but, sadly, their miseries are treated as an externality in its system of values.)

I recognize that this may seem like I’ve gone off some deep end into weird conspiracy theories. I haven’t. Just to be absolutely clear:

• The Establishment, as I conceive it, is a dynamic or pattern within the complex system of communication, commerce, and conflict that exists in our world.
• I do not think there is some small, powerful cabal sitting around in a secret chamber, pulling the levers of the world. Those who walk the halls of power are just as trapped in the dynamic as we are.
• The Establishment does consistently seem to enrich and empower some minority of individuals in the world, but they do not control it in any real sense of the world. They just happen to reap its benefits as a result of the joint actions of everyone.
• The populist anti-mega-global-capitalism energy does struggle against this Establishment dynamic at the lower levels, but as their energy and influence coalesce into focal points or organizations that might effect major change, those things seem to “put on a suit” and play nice at the higher levels. They learn to fit within the Overton window. That’s not to say that they never effect real change, nor is it to cynically suggest that all powerful people at Davos are part of a global conspiracy to drink fancy wine while stoking populist outrage.
  
  Rather, my discontent can be articulated as the feeling that a global, interlocked political system which manifests a single Overton window, does not give rise to sufficient collective intelligence to allow us to progress as a species. It forces a filtering, a compression of reality into extremely low-information-density narratives that can survive the cognitive bottlenecks of countless politicians, journalists, diplomats, and the like.

To make it concrete: I’m fairly confident that I can find a Frenchman and an American who would both be equally, genuinely outraged if their politicians didn’t accept the Paris climate change accords, and yet neither of whom could explain even 10% of its policy implications. The modern system of politics and information dissemination which gives these individuals the sense of knowledge and representation without actual information or control — that’s the Establishment system dynamic which I designate as the Adversary.

And yes, I think there is something about it we can fix; it’s not enough to fatalistically chalk it up to “people are just dumb and lazy”.

Two metaphors fit here.

Metaphor 1: To some extent, you can think of me as a neuron that realized, during a fit of epilepsy, just how structured its normal pattern of electrical firings are, and it’s trying to figure out how best to connect with a few other neurons that also have developed a weird sense of awareness about the body they’re in. The Establishment is the normal pattern of neuronal firings; unfortunately, to many of us, it seems that this pattern of firings led to us punching ourselves in the face, and we’d like to figure out how to get smarter as a network.

The Adversary of my previous post is the status quo configuration of the network, that not only helped elect an under-qualified demagogue into a seat of power equipped with nuclear warheads, but also utterly failed to see that it was doing so. The Adversary is not any individual other neuron or specific set of neurons.

Metaphor 2: Alternatively, we can think of ourselves as frogs in a pot of water on a stove. Through our own bumbling, we all jumped into the pot and some other idiot frog managed to turn on the stove. (Or maybe the stove was always on, and we knocked away the water faucet that had been filling the pot with cold water?) I’m interested in thoughtful study of the thermodynamics of the soon-to-be-boiling water around us; I see that water and even the kitchen itself as the Adversary. The Adversary is not the mean chef that’s cooking us. There is no chef (at least according to any application of Occam’s razor). The phenomenon of Donald Trump’s election (and not Trump himself!) is just a random ice cube that fell onto my back and made me realize just how hot the water had gotten.

Technologists try really really hard to pretend that the things they build are value-neutral, and are merely tools. It’s absolutely true most American companies and the geeks therein do not intend to build technologies that can be intentionally used for centralized control and manipulation of a population of humans. But it’s also quite clear to me, and it should now be clear to everyone, that this is self-serving rationalization at best, and at worst, a cynical lie.

The emergent result of multiple pieces of our modern technology infrastructure is that we are actually much more trapped in a local maximum. And worse, my intuition — both as a physicist and as a technologist — is that the cliff walls around our local maximum are getting steeper, even as the water is rising around us. Those steep walls are the Establishment of which I speak. It is the active, systemic inertia in the face of imminent systemic collapse. It necessarily includes the information networks and all aspects of cognitive engineering that are an active part of our modern world.

Now, all that being said, I am a pragmatic communicator and if you know a better word for this concept, I am all ears.