Orthogonal Approaches of Balaji Srinivasan

Balaji Srinivasan is an accomplished inventor and investor who saw the COVID-19 pandemics very early and was tweeting about it fulltime since February 2020. He also received for it some backlash from media, such as Vox/Recode for being too alarmist in a clickbait article from 13 February 2020 titled “No handshakes, please”: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus”. He debunked that article thoroughly and shred it to bits.

I like his particular ways of thinking, and I think they are relevant for the broader discussion around Game B, existential risks and a broken information ecology, as Daniel Schmachtenberger would put it. Therefore, I want to describe some of his approaches and ideas.

According to Bonnita Roy, there are at least six different ways how to go meta, or how to play the metagame. I summarized them here. One way is to use orthogonal approaches — to create kind of new metaphysics by tweaking some aspects of reality. For example, to view people as processes, and not as objects or instruments. Bonnita Roy gives an example of “coffee moves millions of people each day”.

Citizen journalists versus corporate journalists

Balaji Srinivasan tries to create a z-axis, to create a third orthogonal view. In Central Europe we have this saying: “Where two are fighting, the third wins”. For example, he reframed the debate around legacy media and internet upstarts as a corporate journalism versus citizen journalists. Before the narrative focused on legacy media fighting conspiracy media. Balaji finds the commonalities of those x and y — they both employ corporate journalists — and suggests a z-axis: citizen journalists.

He draws a parallel between professional army and a conscription-based citizen army. The professional army is more of a monocrop and a monoculture of similar people from similar class, that is more prone to groupthink and can be manipulated or infiltrated. As in the case of German professional army and recent worries of far-right infiltration.

Similarly, the corporate media seem to be more prone to group think and manipulation by online lynch mobs often composed of their own peers. This contributes to an auto-catalytic process of polarization. One could frame the problem, together with Peter Thiel, in Girardian terms as a problem of too much competition and resulting scapegoating mechanism that follows the mimetic conflict among peers — corporate journalists.

Balaji Srinivasan blames the decline of media also on a new digital tech frontier opening in the last 20 years that attracted a lot of talent. The result is falling readership and revenues and heightened competition among journalists and a need to create more clickbait to chase after the same advertisers as social media that are expanding.

The same auto-catalytic process explained differently: Former craftspeople with a professional honor are turning slowly or rather quickly into missionaries for various AI-sects or autocults.

I see an opposition between people interested in (psycho)technological progress with advanced collaboration across subcultures, and people interested in online lynch mobs and getting their daily dopamine hit. Here, my inspiration is Alexander Bard and his division between netocrats and consumtariat as two classes of the digital empire of internet.

Alexander Bard sees a clear difference between people who spend most of their days in deep study or deep work, some part in effective communication and collaboration between peers in closed groups and only a fraction of day in online narcistic cocktail parties of self-promotion on social media. And people who do the exact opposite and are addicted to social media and constantly distracted.

I see it as a healthy information food pyramid where there is a deep study at the base and only a fraction of social media on the top, with a mid-layer of good faith and deep conversation between peers in closed groups, where one can engage in antagonistic cooperation. The unhealthy information food pyramid would be the reverse.

I illustrate this healthy pyramid as: “From edge work to online saunas to cocktail parties”.

Balaji Srinivasan tries to provide ways how to slowly exit Twitter and prepare for a more decentralized crypto future with better information ecology. Where a narrative will be a wrapper around verified and immutable facts. Balaji is also interested in art and sees a need for (not just crypto and tech) companies to move from “learn to code” into “learn to write”, and “learn to create videos and direct films”.

Here again Alexander Bard would see a distinction between pathos, mythos and logos. Pathos is art and intrusion of creative daemon, mythos is a shared narrative, and logos is an objective technology and science of what verifiably works (as in hunting and war). According to Bard, mythos is a combination of pathos and logos. As a metaphor, where half brain of warm art and half brain of cold science create a proper narrative balance.

I use Forrest Landry’s three modalities of first-person, second-person and third-person views. And also see a cyclic process of starting in pathos or art, moving into mythos or narrative and later to factual logos and back to pathos, in a OODA loop or a Wardley Map. From a chaotic innovative creation in the genesis stage, to a complex custom-built product, then later to a scaled complicated product and finally to an obvious commodity.

As in the Cynefin Framework with chaotic, complex, complicated and obvious domains of order. And then repeat the cycle of pathos-mythos-logos back to pathos to build an ever higher stack of (psycho)technologies and monopolize other sectors or industries. It is important to note that to be in chaos is energetically expensive and only temporary.

Social vs technical diligence

Balaji Srinivasan sees the problem with current information ecology also in the fact that most people can only do social (due) diligence and only few people can do technical (due) diligence. This means most people rely only on recommendations and sensemaking of their friends. And if they over-rely on social diligence they may fall into groupthink.

To do technical diligence better, would mean regularly getting into deep studies to grog some phenomena and parse various views and opinions deeply, and thus get closer to the ground truth.

Nationalism vs Rationality — Tribal rationality

Balaji Srinivasan uses this model to describe behavior of e.g. Apple fans versus some rational model person. He says that it is important to keep balance between what he calls nationalism and rationality — because too much nationalism and fandom and you are stuck with inferior or overpriced products, and not really critical of your heroes.

But too much rationality and you are too open to a takeover. You need both a strong community, but also a strong focus on rationality. I would reframe this balance as tribal rationality. So, combining both the good parts of tribalism and rationality.

Tribal rationality would mean combining the good parts of both believing in your team or subculture, and then also accepting objective facts of rationality.

This would reconcile belief with facts in a similar manner as George Soros does in his theory of reflexivity. It is also connected to the idea of projected time by Jean Pierre Dupuy. Or what he calls bootstrapping the desired future from a fixed point in the future. By projecting that future to our current present time.

A similar notion is Peter Thiel’s positive and definite future of the moonshot era of 1960s that we need to get back to, as I wrote in my recent article The Talebian and Thielian Moment.

Experiencing both sides of the trade

I am not sure if Balaji Srinivasan uses this exact words, but the idea is that one shall ideally have an experience of both: a patient and a doctor, an entrepreneur and a regulator, a startup founder and a venture capital investor, a seller and a client… to see both perspectives and have a more nuanced, humble and balanced view.

Meiji Restoration, Moonshots and Estonia

We need leaders and citizens who are more like Deng Xiaoping and less like Mao Zedong. This maps to Jordan Hall’s idea of increasing personal sovereignty and bouncing off after hitting rock bottom. But here the idea is that it is rare and hard to do a turnaround of a big company and even harder to do a turnaround of a country. Balaji states a few examples, such as Meiji Restoration, Deng Xiaoping after Mao, and Estonia after the fall of Soviet Union.

He says that it is patriotic to be both critical and practical. And to see clearly that our company or country has fallen behind and to have some bold and definite vision to turn around and improve.

I would also maybe add another layer of subculture restoration or local community restoration, after the corporate turnaround and before the national restoration. Also I would like to connect the restoration to the idea of reflexivity as defined by George Soros, or the idea of bootstrapping the desired future as elaborated by Jean Pierre Dupuy. Or by Peter Thiel, when he says that we used to have a positive and definite vision of the future in the US in the 1960s when we had a moonshot vision of getting to the Moon.

I could call the need for a communal or national restoration a sunshot, as opposed to moonshot. First one needs a dose of sunlight and transparency to look at their real and sad state, and then aim for a moonshot — a big bold vision of a turnaround.

Networked state

Balaji Srinivasan calls a networked state the idea that companies are becoming more like states as they can issue their own currencies, and states are becoming more like decentralized social networks. Thanks to exponential digital tech. And thanks to the dynamical interplay between consensus and dissent on social networks as John Robb would say it. Balaji also points out that Twitter can now censor the US President, and also can censor legacy media.

So, Twitter is actually upstream of both media and politics. Therefore, Balaji has a project to help others to exit gradually Twitter and create a network of decentralized pseudo-anonymous citizen journalists aided by blockchain.

This idea seems rather obvious and not that exceptional at first, but I like the framing of the networked state, because it is more technical and bypasses some baggage associated with culture wars and concepts such as The Cathedral, Blue Church, and Deep State.

I recently brainstormed terms like “decentralized power pyramid” (Game A) versus “decentralized creativity pyramid” (Game B). Also, I came up with “dissentful consensus” as a playful name for the John Robb’s idea of interplay between consensus and dissent on social media as a current decision and governance mechanism.

Green Zones vs. Red Zones — focus on robo, bio, agro, astro, crypto, and VR

Balaji Srinivasan came up pretty early with now common distinction between Green Zones and Red Zones amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Green Zones are (fractally local) places where commons are not tragic and people don’t need to wear masks all the time and can visit e.g. bars or each other, because the territory managed to put out the novel corona virus fire.

Red Zones are all other places where commons are still tragic and the COVID-19 fire is not yet put out and seems to be getting stronger.

Balaji Srinivasan believes that Green Zones will attract FDI and skilled migrants, and the Red Zones will experience the opposite.

He thinks that companies will get more geographically distributed with a workforce based also in rural areas, but with a good VR rooms. He believes that these industries will prosper: robo, bio, agro, astro, crypto, and VR.

Balaji talks about the need to invent new business models. That we are not experiencing an economic crisis, but it is metaphorically similar to an invasion — by a biological agent. And thus if commons are tragic and unsafe, people will change their behavior and businesses need to become digital-first businesses. So e.g. a brick and mortar restaurant needs to become a cloud kitchen.

I would add also a need to make clean meat and plant-based meat and their combination available and accessible to everyone maybe through digital fabrication and cloud kitchens for small households.

I see also a need for Game B to come up with similar big ideas, as planting trees with drones and AI (BioCarbon Engineering), or what another subculture — Effective Altruism promotes with plant-based meat that tastes like meat (Impossible Burger and others).

Bitcoin as the leader of the free world

The US perceived itself as the leader of the free world and the №1 country. Also we in Europe, and especially in Central and Eastern Europe, perceived US as the guarantor of our freedom and security and economic prosperity.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the need for a return to a moonshot era, where the future is both positive and definite, — a need for a Meiji Restoration of the US to catch up with China and other countries that managed to become and stay Green Zones.

Meanwhile the absence of US on the world stage is felt and sensed. And Balaji Srinivasan proposes that bitcoin has replaced the US and has become the leader of the free world. If China is focused on AI governance and represents an authoritarian and centralized alternative, the digital empire of internet and cryptoeconomics provides a democratic and decentralized alternative.

I see Balaji Srinivasan as an eclectic thinker that is able to hold various perspectives from different subcultures. He is also active in culture wars 2.0 and proposes decentralized alternatives to twitter. Well worth following.

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