How to win the 21st century
Lines have been drawn in the sand; the splintering has passed the point of no return. No matter how incessantly the Pinker, Haidt and Harris rationalists try to placate and orient the crazies with their ‘sensible’ 20th-century arguments, the battle for universal sanity is lost.
You have to ask yourself, why are ‘smart people’ still being drawn into trivial, falsely-grounded arguments about transgenderism, about the gender pay gap, about ‘white privilege’, about radical feminism, about ‘institutional racism’, and other such childish drivel?
If you’re still debating these issues you’re being mugged off either by people with an agenda trying to distract you from real social issues or by mercenary click-baiters. The sane among us, I hope by now, have settled on the reality of such topics to the deepest extent possible.
Where does that leave us? The direction of online discourse offers some hope, but we’re still very much in a fight against old institutions in bed with evil new ones, each scrambling to sow disarray, fear and hate in an attempt to claim back and solidify the ground they lost.
We’re entering a new battleground on which we must be farsighted and brave enough to win. This goes one of two ways: (1) Big Corporate gets its way, the internet is locked down and with it our hopes of grass roots organization and a noble revival are possibly dashed forever.
Or (2) we consciously build and support the technological world we want. This is at its core a battle for the future of the internet and the social paradigm it shapes. We’ve already seen it redefine the world several times over, and it’ll keep doing so in ways we can’t predict.
Silicon Valley blindsided everyone and got a head start in creating Web 2.0 in their moral/political image. Web 3.0 is a different beast entirely. This time people are awake to the ramifications of rapid change and they are angry. That anger must be channeled in the right way.
Keep your head down, keep picking the corporate cotton if it means feeding your family. Hold onto your belief that the old techno-corporate guard is in a state of unsalvageable decay. It might not seem like it is, and it might not even be true, but we must wish it into existence.
Only then will we have the confidence and drive to build the new world. It’s trendy to despise modern technology — I’m as big a Unabomber LARPer as the next man — but if we take control of the internet and technology and dare to choose how it shapes us and the world we will win.
Decentralization and digital autonomy means the power is increasingly falling into our hands, but we’re making the mistake of believing it’s still firmly in theirs. As long as enough people keep operating obediently within their frame they will naturally keep the upper hand.
Don’t let the grandiose skyscrapers and cheery Davos roundtables fool you — they are terrified of what we can do if we wake up. Their main topic of strategic discussion now is how to exploit data analytics and machine learning to further control, manipulate and disperse us.
MOOCs and web learning are a tsunami, a massive multiplication effect in education. Consider that these tools are being actively suppressed by desperate groups in redundant administrative university roles. They are working against your future and getting richer in the process!
I can barely comprehend how much smarter and more aware I am for being able to access virtually everything ever published for free online, and I have the genetics of a peasant simpleton. Imagine what groups of smart people can do if they fully shed the pretenses of the old guard.
Instead of reading Ted’s manifesto again read this essay by Dominic Cummings (the dude who engineered Brexit) about the Odyssean education model and the vision of a meritocratic technopolis. Think about future potential instead of sulking about anarcho-primitivism.
From Cummings’ essay: “How realistic is it to imagine a world in ~2050 in which a combination of science and market institutions enable nine-tenths of ~10 billion people to thrive in prosperous and peaceful nonzero-sum societies, fed by continued agricultural productivity growth (while reducing/reversing the impact of agriculture) and enjoying ubiquitous clean energy, clean water (extracted from the oceans), homes, healthcare, clean environments (fisheries and oceans recovering), and access to good education (via whatever the internet has become) as more of humans’ collective efforts and intelligence shift from survival problems to some of the fundamental problems sketched here and tapping the effectively infinite resources of space?”
Yes, that’s exactly how the globalists talk, and they will build a heavily tainted, oppressive version of that utopia if they go unchallenged, and our children will have no choice but to begrudgingly live in it. We are right now facing a fork in the road — we build it or they do.
The opportunity is there for the taking. While their numbers may be greater and their tactics more effective short term, our collective spirit wins the long term. This is a battle for the soul of the West. Who are we going to let win, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg? Good or evil?
Musk may want to put AI in our brains, but he’s on the side of good — if your moral compass is properly aligned that much should be obvious. Zuckerberg is on the side of evil. Don’t forget it. Good and evil exist in the religious sense, so get a grasp on them and act accordingly.
For many — the NPCs, if you will — supporting the creation of a ‘good’ new world is barely even an active process. Put money into Tesla instead of Facebook. Send $5 to that guy who made a YouTube video that taught you something or made you laugh. Don’t give money to Starbucks.
Lift weights, eat real food, educate yourself eclectically, disregard corporate news, be relentlessly positive even if it makes no sense. Meanwhile have faith that intelligence and technological productivity will lean to the side of good, and that the balance will tip further.
We know what we need to do. Our goals and our systems for achieving them are set in stone; we are antifragile and unbreakable. Don’t let them confuse you and trick you into taking your eye off the truth. That’s the only tactic they have left. Take that away and they have nothing.
Don’t argue with retards. Debate sensible people you happen to disagree with, if that’s your thing. Don’t call people names or ridicule them. Try to love people, try not to let anger get the better of you. Be defiantly honest, even if it hurts you, because that’s half the battle.
Don’t lose your sense of humour. Get your mind and body straight and then try to create beauty and value, not the other way round. Accept suffering and stop wilting to the temptation of dirty pleasures. Help yourself, your family, your community and then the world, in that order.
That’s how we win the 21st century.
Read my free novella Under-Toronto.
Twitter: @adamwinfield
Blog: Palimpsest
