(Posted as a Twitter thread, and on GETTR, Parler, and Gab, and probably worth adding to my archive here. If Twitter changes for the better, maybe I’ll let go of the need to maintain and cross-post to so many accounts…!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tremendous value of salutary feedback systems: how vitally important they are to human flourishing and to getting us out of bad situations where we’d otherwise become stuck.
A feedback mechanism is anything that course-corrects when inputs indicate something’s not right. Much of the sad state we’re in seems to be the result of inadequate or severed feedback loops. Unaccountable systems end in persistent failure.
Our neurobiology is built on feedback loops. Motor control circuits work like servo controllers – targeting a desired outcome, checking results, and adjusting motor control impulses, iteratively, in real time. The immune systems that keep us healthy are similarly feedback-based.
The scientific method, when its feedback systems are allowed to operate as they should, is able to converge on truth more reliably than most other claims to knowledge precisely because it is accountable to open scrutiny and the necessity of solid methods and reproducible results.
When the scientific practice’s essential feedback mechanisms are suppressed, science becomes becomes crippled and devolves to a garden-variety appeal to authority.
Businesses have to be accountable to their customers. The only sustainable way for them to succeed is to make those customers happy. Businesses that take insufficient interest in satisfying customers’ wants and needs, or that cheat or deceive, must either course-correct or fold.
Laws and enforcement thereof deter harmful criminal activity in people whose internal moral compasses didn’t head off or avoid such impulses at an earlier stage. Feedback systems can operate in layers, or in concert, to apply beneficial course corrections.
Democracy is a feedback mechanism that seeks to apply public accountability to the state and to those who hold office within it. To avoid pure democracy’s failure mode of mob rule, we declare certain foundational rights inalienable and codify immutable constraints on state power in a constitution.
For career politicians and immortal government programs, the name of the game is avoiding accountability at all costs. For too often, and by design, new programs and departments are created without sufficient accountability to the results they promise. Slow-to-boil public outrage rarely provides a sufficient restoring force to stop the insanity.
Major social media sites, like the legacy journalistic and media outlets that preceded them, have sought to stem political accountability and suppress the course-corrections that could result, by seeking to shape what we are allowed to know and discuss. The deception we long suspected is now being laid bare. Will this produce sufficient public outcry to force a return to less filtered and manipulated public square?
The existence of alternatives – from places we can spend our time in cyberspace to physical places we can go to live and be governed more reasonably – provides some course-correcting pressure on legacy institutions.
The “Network Effect” makes the hold of large social media incumbents hard to break, so we’re lucky to have a rogue outsider like @elonmusk come clean house at Twitter. There was otherwise no sufficiently strong feedback loop in place that would disrupt the manipulation going on behind the scenes.
The opening of new frontiers that I’ve been focused on for years offers hope of alternatives to legacy governance, both for those who go and for those whose governments may feel pressured into more competitive practices. Whether the mechanics are spacefaring, seasteading, taming untapped wilderness, building “network states”, or other, we will find and develop new places that open up new possibilities, and – I hope – build better, more robust salutary feedback systems along the way.
Just a loose collection of thoughts so far, on ideas I expect I’ll ponder further. I’m under no illusion that our very substantial political divide is fixable by anything other than people w/different values going separate ways, but this does seem to get at something deeper that may help us understand things better and navigate to where we each need to be w/greater clarity.
Building robust salutary feedback systems into everything seems like a worthy endeavor.
Another superb and timely short video from Academy of Ideas. The reference to Václav Havel’s ideas about building “parallel structures” takes me back to Bill Whittle’s 2012 “Where do we go now?” talk, and I wonder whether Bill was aware of an influenced by Havel’s writing on this subject.
One of many profound passages: (See here for the full transcript. It’s well worthwhile.)
Compliance is the food that feeds totalitarians. Compliance is not, and never will be, the path back to some form of normality. Rather non-compliance and civil disobedience are essential to counter the rise of totalitarian rule. But in addition to resistance, a forward escape into a reality absent the sickness of totalitarian rule requires the construction of a parallel society. A parallel society serves two main purposes: it offers pockets of freedom to those rejected by the totalitarian system, or who refuse to participate in it, and it forms the foundation for a new society that can grow out of the ashes of the destruction wrought by the totalitarians. Or as Václav Havel, a dissident under the communist rule of Czechoslovakia, explains in his book The Power of the Powerless:
“When those who have decided to live within the truth have been denied any direct influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the opportunity to participate in them, and when these people begin to create what I have called the independent life of society, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in a certain way.
“…[these] parallel structures do not grow . . .out of a theoretical vision of systemic change (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people.” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
There are innumerable ways to contribute to the construction of a parallel society. One can build technologies that promote freedom or agoristic economic institutions that further voluntary exchange. One can run a business that resists implementing unjust laws or mandates, or one can create media or educational institutions that counter the lies and propaganda of the state. Or one can create music, literature or artwork that counters the staleness of totalitarian culture. The parallel society is a decentralized and voluntary alternative to the centralized and coercive control of the totalitarian society and as Havel explains:
“One of the most important tasks the ‘dissident movements’ have set themselves is to support and develop [parallel social structures]. . . What else are those initial attempts at social self organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to . . . rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the [totalitarian] system?” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
I always am very uncomfortable with these sort of categories of … extreme optimism, extreme pessimism. I think those are somehow the wrong categories. … And I think they’re actually weirdly the same. Extreme optimism … says that you don’t need to do anything. The movie of the future will go on its own. It’s sort of automatic, accelerating progress and all you have to do is sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. And then extreme pessimism is that … nothing you can do will make a difference. And the truth is always, I think, somewhere in between, or at least it’s best for us to believe that it’s somewhere in between and that … instead of being in emotive denial (that everything’s great) or acceptance (that everything is awful) and both denial and acceptance are code words for laziness, for not doing anything, because there’s nothing you can do — nothing you need to do. It’s best to be somewhere in between and to think: It actually matters. Things are always up for debate … and we should be fighting, and we should be figuring out … how to continue to have this healthy and free country in which we live.
In a democracy, what 51% of the population believes is probably better, and there’s a certain bias towards majoritarianism, and if you have 70% of the population [that] believes something it’s even more true. But if you go from 51% to 70% to 99.9%, you’ve gone from a democracy to North Korea. And it’s this very important question that one needs to always needs to come back to. Where do we sort of go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds, and where’s that dividing line between majoritarian democracy and where do you get to the sort of totalitarianism of North Korea. And it’s hard to define where that line is, but I want to suggest that in all kinds of contexts we’re far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect.
We’ve had all these derangements of science, where … in the name of “science” we’ve done these rather unscientific things. And I often think that … when people use the word “science” it’s often a tell of the opposite … that the things that are actual science like physics and chemistry, you don’t need to call them “physical science” or “chemical science” because you don’t need to protest that much like, you know, Lady Macbeth. But when you call things “climate science” or “political science”, that’s sort of a tell that they’re not quite scientific.
…
I’ve come to think that one way to think of a healthy “science” is that it has to fight a two-front war against excessive skepticism, and against excessive dogmatism. So excessive skepticism is if you can’t believe in anything: I don’t believe I’m here, I don’t believe the audience is here, nothing is real, everything is imaginary. That’s probably not an attitude that’s conducive to science. And of course, excessive dogmatism, at the other end of the spectrum, is … the 17th century church telling you that the Aristotelian view of the universe was correct and therefore the Earth couldn’t possibly be moving. And that’s excessive dogmatism, and that’s also very bad for science.
Great podcast interview with Mark Moss (@1MarkMoss), that focuses on historic cycles and the hope that Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and decentralization in general offer for greater individual sovereignty and individual autonomy in the near future. This kind of stuff helps renew my optimism. There is much potential for a freer future, if we can just get our thinking out of the over-centralized box we’ve let ourselves get stuck in.
This is the latest episode in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency series (“BTC###” episodes) that drops every Wednesday on the We Study Billionaires podcast — highly recommended and one I make sure to listen to regularly.
Watch the episode with Mark on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts.
Contemplating the promised benefits of “seasteading” usually leaves me hung up on seemingly hard unsolved problems such as defense, but I have to admit the arguably outlandish idea offers more immediate practical potential for competitive governance and decentralization in support of individual sovereignty than colonizing much more hostile, distant, and hard- and expensive-to-reach worlds beyond Earth. This video makes an interesting pitch worth considering, that proposes development of seasteads as both a worthwhile end in itself and a potentially helpful equatorial stepping stone on our way to the heavens and colonizing [and perhaps eventually seasteading on] other worlds.
Seasteading does appear to offer a key advantage over territory-based governance: the potential for rapid reconfigurability. If you don’t like your land-based government, you can usually move elsewhere, but doing so is a high-inertia process that may involve selling your home, buying or renting another, possibly needing to apply to change citizenship, and moving your possessions a long distance. This inertia and the time and costs involved sets a high threshold for what people are willing to put up with, inhibiting salutary feedback loops and giving power to incrementalism. In theory at least, seasteaders can move and establish new voluntary associations at will and with much greater ease than people with land-based ties. There’s enough in that to make the idea worth giving further thought, and it will probably make a good topic to delve into in a future episode of The No Fear Pioneer. In seeking new frontiers to advance to, it certainly makes sense to consider as wide a variety of viable possibilities as we reasonably can.
With major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter showing an increasing enthusiasm for suppressing content and publishers they don’t like (whether by invisibly “shadow-banning” posts, silently culling follower lists, demanding post retractions, de-platforming users outright, or footnoting posts with disclaimers) we seem to be approaching the potential end of an era — or so many of us hope, at least. What the next era might look like, we’re still figuring out, but it sure feels like a good time for freedom of speech to be cherished and championed again.
Back in the day, we had the free frontier of the Internet and its very decentralized array of offerings — forums, websites, blogs, comment sections, and all that. We used tools like RSS/Atom feed aggregators to help wrangle it all into a firehose we could more comfortably drink from (the old-school version of “following” sites and authors). We still have those things, of course, but our focus has moved away from them and toward Big Social. Seduce by greater effectiveness at connecting with others and getting substantially more eyes on our posts, we went all in and moved from a largely decentralized world to one that entrusted our ability to publish to a small handful of companies. With their growth came power over our freedom of expression that we failed to be adequately concerned about, leading to where we find ourselves today — in many ways stifled, suppressed, and distrustful of “Big Social”, and wondering where to go next. It’s an important issue if you feel, as I do, that living under conditions where you aren’t free to speak your mind isn’t living.
In looking around for good alternatives, we find both centralized and decentralized alternatives to choose from, raising some interesting dilemmas. Sites such as Parler and Gab.com have promised to remain steadfast in support of free speech, and to the extent they can be trusted to do so may provide viable drop-in alternatives to Twitter. I’m reasonably optimistic about their commitment to freedom of expression, and have been trying both out (I’m @kulak on Parler, @kulak76 on Gab.com), but having seen the pitfalls of centralized social media, one can’t help but wonder whether sites such as these will eventually succumb to the same pressures to suppress and censor. (I hope not, and I give Parler and Gab much benefit of the doubt, but the concern is hard to escape.) Gab allows for setting up your own self-hosted alternatives to Gab.com, and in that sense doesn’t quite qualify as a “centralized” service, though in practice it will be interesting to see whether alternative Gab sites end up being widely used or even necessary. (If they prove largely unnecessary, that’s a good sign for Gab.com having kept its free-speech promise.)
We can also look to the publishing, reading, and communication tools that have served us in the past: self-hosted blogs like this one, and feed aggregator apps and sites (I used NetNewsWire for years and have been using Feedly lately). While ability to connect with large numbers of readers is likely to be no better than it was before (I’m very interested in ways we might be able to surpass those limits), hosting our own content at least gives us much greater control over our own publishing. If others really don’t like you, they can put pressure on your hosting provider, but if we get to the point where hosting providers are widely bullied into de-platforming customers the world will really be in trouble. As failsafe measures go, the ability to move your site to another host remains a pretty solid safeguard.
This isn’t necessarily an either-or proposition, of course. One can use social media sites together with self-publishing, leveraging posts on the former to help promote your work on the latter, for example. That’s been a key part of how I’ve used Twitter, Parler, and Gab, and I expect will continue to be. Publishing longer-form work here has intrinsic value to me because it’s helped me work through thoughts and develop ideas, so I’ll likely continue to do it regardless, but having my writing reach a more substantial number of people who find value in those ideas would certainly be an appreciated improvement.
Yet another set of alternatives exists in networking sites with focused purposes. BillWhittle.com is one example whose thriving I’ve been glad to be a part of. Ricochet is another that I’ve used in the past. These sites give users ways to publish to and communicate with one another, while firewalling member content to keep comment sections troll-free and enjoyable. They aren’t places to publish for broader public consumption, but they serve a related and very worthwhile purpose to those looking to publish and connect.
One thing I think we’d be wise to do, in weighing our options, is to refrain from underestimating the appeal of centralized social media sites. There are good reasons why the dynamics have worked out well for them, and our effectiveness at developing alternatives will rely on understanding, appreciating, and accounting for their attractiveness to large numbers of users. They include the value of familiarity and name recognition, the network effect, and the convenience of having a single (or a few) centralized service(s) for connecting with the people whose posts interest us. If we want to succeed in developing decentralized alternatives to Big Social, we’d be wise to find alternative ways to satisfy the same wants and needs. This is a subject that’s been very much on my mind, and I expect I’ll continue to think about it quite a bit. We have diverse options and numerous possibilities available to us (some perhaps as yet undreamt of), and it’s going to be an interesting challenge to figure out how to most effectively develop and make use of them.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
