In reaction to my morning dose of negativity from [blogger's name redacted], I am compelled to share some contrarian optimism:
I see a decent chance of significant improvements to the human condition in the near future due to breakthroughs in social technology. The historical precedent that comes to mind is the widespread adoption of insurance some hundreds of years ago. (Disclaimer: I skimmed the wikipedia article on insurance a while back and don’t really remember it all that well. Corrections welcome.) Prior to insurance contracts, your only option for hedging against catastrophes was to build up social capital with family & neighbors. Maybe people could expect more automatic community support back then, but this was at a time of drastically lower social and geographic mobility. I’m really glad that I live in a world with markets for explicit insurance policies (even if those policies and markets could be a lot better).
So I have to wonder if at least one of {dominant assurance contracts, quadratic funding, prediction markets, ring signatures, attention auctions, retroactive public goods funding, demand offsets, smart contracts in general, the Prósperan legal system} might catch on and be as much of a game changer as formalized insurance contracts have been.
Sometimes I read someone and think “Well no wonder you’re always so pessimistic & sarcastic...for you, the phrase 'new technology' only evokes smartphone addiction, so you keep hanging all your hopes for the future on the vagaries of national politics.”
I'm motivated to say all this because I recently read a blog post about the collapse of legacy journalism (a hot topic in my echo chamber). The writer said that journalism has devolved into a monoculture of low-paid cultural elites, who are bound by reality very much less than they are bound by their social cliques. He's not wrong, but...he said it all with a such heavy note of despair in his voice. Meanwhile, I personally can’t help but imagine what crazy, cool, more incentive-aligned media model might rise from the ashes of the current system.
It's great to be optimistic, but its hard to look at the state of the neglected parts of the country and not be completely shocked and appalled at the state of reality for millions of other people living in the same country. I recommend a drive along the Ohio River sometime, the state of things there share a lot more with post-Soviet collapse in Russia. The anger is justified, there a few generations of neglect and loss of hope / purpose among the locals. Its no surprise opioids have devastated these areas. Its not just there either, its many parts of the country, many inner cities are also totally devastated and there has to be massive investments in education but even then, we've let several generations already lapse and that has to be dealt with head on. No amount of technology is going to quickly alleviate the justified populism coming from the decay and transgressions many millions of Americans have been living under for past several decades. The elites & the American oligarchs seem intent on continuing to virtue signal and sell fear. The politics of division, particularly from the media elite, has to end before Americans will turn optimistic.
It may not happen either, if the American Empire is crashing the same way Rome did, well, we may be sometime in or after the Crisis of the 3rd Century now and there is a decent chance there is a long drawn out dark ages era of feudal order, just like in Medieval Europe, for the next couple generations. Florida already seems like its becoming a version of the Eastern Roman Empire, attracting a lot of big money & fully embracing Bitcoin. Perhaps this also leads to the rise of American City-States at some stage after things normalize.