Continuations

Given the ongoing decay of our institutions and their utter failure to address the climate crisis it is not far fetched to ask whether we are headed for some kind of societal collapse. A highly relevant book is Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, published in 1988. I had two key takeaways from reading it. First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. I was of course familiar with the collapse of the Roman Empire and was also aware of M...

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

On this last day of the 2010s here is a recap with a single theme: we are fighting the battles of the past instead of inventing the future. We are doing that at a time when humanity is facing an extinction level threat in the climate crisis that also represents our single biggest opportunity for transformation. The ongoing debate about capitalism versus socialism is fundamentally caught up in the industrial age. It assumes that ownership and control of physical capital are paramount at a time...

We have had all these innovations and have always found new things for people to work on. This is the Lump of Labor fallacy all over again. You are a Luddite! What makes you think this time is different?This is the rhetoric aimed at people like myself who argue that we need to fundamentally rethink how the economy and society work because digital technologies changing the world. I have taken to replying “you are correct, but you are looking at the wrong time frame.” What all of the above obje...

Francis Fukuyama’s book “The End of History and the Last Man” identifies liberal democracy in combination with capitalism as the winning way to organize society. Fukuyama wrote in 1992 at a time when the data seemed to support that conclusion. The book also presents a historical framework based largely on Hegel to argue why this has to be so and why it represents an end state. All of this now looks like a premature victory march. For reasons that will become clearer in future posts, I will re...

One of the reasons I get a fair bit of reading done is that I avoid watching lots of television. On a flight to Germany last week though, I got sucked into watching Babylon Berlin. The series is set in Berlin in the 1920s and is incredibly atmospheric with a rich historical background that is worth learning about. The song and dance scene above is set at the Moka Efti club, which actually existed, as did many of the historical figures in the series. Of course the plot of the show itself is fi...

I haven’t been posting much the last couple of weeks. There are a variety of reasons for that including spending extra time reading and learning new things but the main reason is that I am trying to understand better where we are today. What do I mean by that? I have been making the argument that we are facing a transition as big as the one from agrarian society to industrial society (and from hunter gatherer to agrarian before that). Are we near the beginning of this transition or somewhere ...

Last week’s posting of a video to Youtube that resulted in violence and killings presents an interesting challenge for the open Internet. The whole incident illustrates that the design and capabilities of the Internet are fundamentally at odds with many existing social and cultural structures, such as the nation state and different religious sensibilities. This is not the first time though that we have encountered such a situation as print previously played a similar role. In fact, it almost ...

As I have been preparing for my talk in Edinburgh in August, I have been collecting examples of disruption. One that I am particularly fond of because so much has happened in the last 15 years are classified ads. Here is a brief history. Classified ads in the offline world were enormously profitable. They accounted for a significant portion of newspaper revenues and also supported some large standalone classified businesses, most notably a company called Trader that was a roll-up of paid and ...