Redefining Progress

Many in my generation, myself included, grew up watching Star Trek. That show’s utopian vision for the future informed the moral foundations of my youth, but my Pollyanna-ish ideas were soon tempered by harsh realities. It turns out that even the most basic of technologies that promised to reshape the future have failed to live up to their potential. We’ve learned that, due to simple thermodynamics, we will probably never colonize space, cybernetic limbs require invasive and life threatening procedures, and computers aren’t outthinking us; we’ve engineered them into drugs for our dopamine-addicted brains. The future is here and instead of inheriting the exponential improvement of our parents’ generation, we’ve settled into a logarithmic arc; each year brings smaller innovations and smaller revolutions. To add to that, our unsustainable resource extraction methods are destroying the planetary conditions which led to our evolutionary success. Rising oceans, unpredictable weather cycles and wild food stock die-offs are going to absolutely wreck us as a species. We as a nation, as a species, as a planet, need to imagine a new model for the future. We need to discard the high-technology and luxury we were promised as children for a grounded, sustainable, equitable, but still technology-enabled future that we can still be optimistic about. This will require fundamental changes in our values, and how we interact with the world.

One of my favorite pastimes is learning about history. Stories of the past allow me to imagine myself into the shoes of someone who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. What is taught as American history in this country is a tale of heroes conquering the untamed landscapes of North America with nothing but their wits, horse, and trusty gun. I hated American history as a subject, at least initially, because the simplistic portrayal of Manifest Destiny didn’t go deep enough. I love learning about morally complicated people who tried to make sense of a world that defies reason. Reading about history that isn't white-washed American mythology is an exercise in finding the good in a sea of bad, and recognizing that "good guys" and "bad guys" don't exist outside of children's stories. When I finally was able to engage with REAL American history, my world started coming into focus. 500 years of white supremacy made a lot more sense than founding fathers who nobly stood for freedom and liberty but accidentally forgot to extend those rights to non-white people, poor people, or women. Oops! Reading about the labor movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries shaped my opinions about corporate power as it relates to the average person. I realized that you could tell history from any perspective and have a consistent narrative. Then I realized that I had been taught SO MUCH history from the perspective of rich white men and rich white men alone. Is the story of American the story of presidents and capitalists doing great deeds and enriching themselves? Or is the story of America the story of exploitation of the poor and enslaved peoples? Or is it the story of women trying to gain the least bit of respect and autonomy from their paternalistic abusive husbands? Or is it the story for the fight for racial equality? Or is it the story of food production? Or of the genocide of Native Americans? Or are all these stories true at the same time? When summed and weighed, the sheer moral gravity of our nation's sins is enough to outweigh even the greatest of deeds. Even then, it's not like America is alone in its moral failings; all of the nations of Earth and all of humanity must come to grips with their own sins.

So, the future we were promised is dead. The mythos of our past is unraveling. Our present is a mixed bag of good intentions and corrupt institutions that serve a world economy that we cannot morally support. The past contains no heroes and the future shows no promise. What the FUCK do we do? There is a whole subset of Generation-Z who we call “Doomers.” They see these factors and conclude that the future will be bleak and miserable. But FUCK that shit. I want to find happiness, goddamnit! There must be a way forward… Right?

A Century of Ideologies

Ideologies were a dominant feature of the 20th century. Big Ideas waged total war against other Big Ideas. Communism, Fascism, Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Conservatism, Neo-Conservatism. All are simple ideas that gained followers and spread like wildfire, until they clashed against other ideas. But, as much as I appreciate (some of) the great ideas of the past, they’re all fucking garbage. I’m serious. They are all based on a VERY specific perspective of humanity.

“Well, if all humans are rational actors”

or “Well, if the workers simply seize the means of production”

or “Well, if the master race was allowed to reach its full potential”

or “Well, what if we can just export all the shitty jobs somewhere else?”

or “Well, the real problem is the lazy poor!”

None of these work. We’ve tried them all. All favor some populations at the expense of others. And now, whenever anyone argues against one of them, the common response is “YOU MUST BE IN FAVOR OF THE OPPOSITE IDEA! AAAAHHHHHH!!!”

These ideas are garbage. Ideologies are simple, and that’s why we must move on.

The Way Forward

Humans are capable of so much imagination. We can create entire worlds in our own minds, and act to bring them into reality. One person can accomplish so much with a singular vision, and a group of people with a singular vision can accomplish exponentially more. Shared visions are some of the most powerful tools in the human arsenal. When a society recognizes what it CAN accomplish, the actual journey to realizing those goals is short. I believe that it may be possible to create a shared, extremely complex vision for the future that solves all of our problems and settles us in for the slow decline that our future promises us.

Right now, in June 2020, the streets resound with chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police.” This is a broad cultural moment where the status quo of Policing is being challenged and may be broken permanently. But “Defund the Police” is not a declaration of anger, it’s a memetic complex of ideas about an alternative structure of public safety on a local level. Gone would be the “Warrior Cop” and in its place would be a collection of smaller, lesser armed departments. In the same way that we don’t pay police to fight fires, we would have a specialized group of professionals on call to deal with mental health emergencies, minor traffic violations, community safety, drug addiction recovery, etc etc. This is replacing one blunt instrument with several more specialized instruments that deal with problems in an intelligent way.

So why am I bringing this up? Because this approach can be applied to a lot of different problems in our society. If we’re able to let go of the status quo and imagine new ways forward, we can reorganize our society in a much more ethical way. And instead of one overarching ideology that dictates how every system should work, each system in our society can have its own theories of being that people can discuss intelligently. Basically, unbundle the political parties.

The USA is never going to be wholly united in purpose or values, and regional differences are the basis of a LOT of political divides. I propose that we stop viewing the federal government as the battleground where our ideological wars are fought. That is not to say stop caring about national issues. Moreso, we should realize that local issues are more important than national ones. The police report to your city council and your mayor. Your elections are controlled by your state government. Your social safety net can be local too. People across the country are donating their money and labor to mutual aid groups. This is the single most efficient resource distribution method known to our species. A local, personal, dynamic social safety net. What would it take to start paying full time volunteers to run these orgs permanently? What would it take to start hooking up real sources of funding to these taps? How can we orchestrate wealth transfer from rich communities to poor communities through mutual aid? These are questions that we can answer if we try.

The way forward that I envision is built from the mistakes of all of our previous attempts at utopia. The Communists were too far from the local to be efficient. The Capitalists’ great free market failed on its promise to raise all boats and instead built a golden water tower. The Christian Church, which used to be a source of community social safety, became subsumed by an unquenchable hunger for exclusionary dogma.

Now, obviously I don’t have a magic book with the solutions to all the world’s problems, but I do have a litmus test for recognizing workable ideas and dismissing impractical ones.

Good ideas should:

• Protect individual autonomy and safety of life and body
• Favor decentralization over centralization
• Dismantle economies of scale wherever possible
• Foster understanding between people with different experiences
• Foster social justice and resource equality
• Channel profits to communities instead of shareholders
• Be anti-racist in every aspect

Wait, what?

Is probably what you're thinking after reading that we should dismantle economies of scale. Isn't that what has enabled the comfort and broad base of wealth in the modern era? Well, yes and no. With every economy of scale comes hidden, negative externalities.

Take agriculture. We've bred plants that produce more food than ever before. We have gigantic fields of mono-crops that are much easier to harvest than more sustainable rotating crops. What are the costs? Well, we rely on the fossil fuel industry to make fertilizer, which is necessary EVERY season because the soil is never naturally replenished with nutrients. At the same time, the crops we've bred produce large and appetizing fruit/grain/vegetables, but their individual nutritional value is diminished. Remember that red delicious apples used to be the ONLY apples you could buy at the grocery store. Those pretty, but tough skinned and mealy apples were the end result of decades of selection for food that was large and pretty to look at. It wasn't until people realized that apples could actually taste GOOD that other varieties started becoming popular. If this could happen to the flavor of apples, what is happening to the nutritional value of the food we eat that still tastes okay? Hidden externalities.

Well, what about manufacturing? We can create iPhones and cars and TVs and avocado slicers for cheap! Yes, but WHO is creating those items? Aren't we just exporting shitty jobs overseas? Are the externalities of those foreign factories even known? We heard about the suicide nets at that Foxconn plant years ago, but did that stop being an issue or did we simply stop hearing about it? What about inhaled fumes from soldering? We know that China has no qualms about using slave (prison) labor for their exported goods. In fact, in manufacturing, it becomes easier and easier to create worse products and treat your employees worse as you scale up. This is almost a universal truth.

"What about wind farms?" you may ask. "That's an example of a good economy of scale, right?" Is it though? Take a look at the electrical grid, and you'll see that there's no big glowing light in the center of the map. It's already decentralized, because electricity doesn't benefit from economies of scale. We're already in the process of marketing and building out decentralized grid technologies. We have wall batteries, we have solar panels that you can attach to your roof. A real economy of scale would look like a giant nuclear plant the size of a small city in the center of the country. We’re way more aware of the negative externalities of power production than we are for other industries.

What would this look like in practice?

I work in the software industry, and one of the fundamental building blocks of modern web infrastructure is cloud services infrastructure. The big players here are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (and now Walmart is looking to make a big play in this arena). Notice how these are already gigantic tech titans even without their cloud infrastructure offerings. The externalities of these massive data centers are only partially known, but they consume a ton of resources, are not remotely close to being carbon neutral, and serve to bolster already gigantic monopolies. With the technology we have, why can't we create other solutions? Imagine what a decentralized cloud would look like. What if I could run a server rack in my basement and use a carbon-neutral cooling system? What if I could install a software package on it and sell my server time on a unified cloud services market? What if we could make accessing carbon-neutral infrastructure as simple as setting a flag to true when you push your code? What does this idea accomplish? It:

• Favors decentralization
• Dismantles an economy of scale
• Puts money into the pockets of community members

Now, before you techies complain, I know that security is a major concern here. But, if blockchain is a valid corporate strategy, this can be too. It's simply a technology problem.

A Revolution in Personal Values

Cultural values are hard to change. If everyone was able to conform perfectly to cultural norms, we probably wouldn't change at all. This is as true in evolution as it is in human culture. Difference prompts change, and change is not only inevitable, it is necessary. Evolutionary stagnation in the natural world only works for a select few predator species that have tapped very specific and stable niches. For species that depend on lots of other species and environmental factors to survive, adaptation is necessary for survival. Crocodiles can always count on animals needing water, and it waits for whatever may take a sip. As long as the tropics don't freeze over, crocodiles will always find something to eat. Humans are lucky to be a species with an extreme talent for behavioral adaptability. We are fundamentally the same species that lived in caves 100,000 years ago. If you could take a baby from that time and bring it forward in time, you could raise it to be a modern functioning adult. Literally everything we consider true about ourselves and our world is our own creation.

Unlearning

Here are some of the messages that I absorbed and internalized as a child that I have since needed to unlearn:

"Happiness comes when you get married, have kids and own a house."

"Trespassing outside the boundaries of defined gender roles is disgusting, ridiculous, and sad."

"Same-sex attraction is disgusting."

"The only way to exist in a romantic relationship is strict monogamy."

"The pursuit of wealth will bring happiness."

"Without a personal relationship with God, your life will be marked by sadness, evil, and tragedy."

"The righteous must defeat the evildoers."

"The right to personal property is paramount above all other concerns."

"Mental illness is scary and should be hidden."

"Being nice is more important than justice."

"Other races would have an easier time if they acted more like white people."

"It's too hard to accommodate disabled people's needs."

I needed to unlearn these ideas because they prescribe ways of life that are not true and helpful for all people, including myself. Simple axioms are rarely applicable to everyone, and adopting these axioms for the majority end up marginalizing anyone who is, for whatever reason, not able to live in accordance with these rules. These rules, in effect, create a hierarchy of those who can follow over those who cannot follow.

The process of unlearning looks a lot like what you would learn in therapy. First, practice noticing when you're having an unwanted thought. With the noticing may come guilt, but getting caught in a guilt spiral is extremely unproductive, so learn how to be kind to yourself during this process. Next, identify and recite the antithesis message corresponding to each negative message. If I catch myself thinking "that person of color could try being nicer" then I counter with "niceness intentionally excludes people who actually give a shit, and the only reason it works for white people is because they rarely do." Lastly, when you hear these antiquated messages being repeated by your friends, family, and neighbors, say the antithesis out loud to that person. Make it uncomfortable. Make it as uncomfortable as it would be if they said that thing in front of the person who would be most hurt by those words.

Praxis

Get involved in local politics. Become your mayor's least favorite citizen. Show up at committee meetings. Demand action. Write policy proposals. Make noise. Make old white dudes uncomfortable. Find, befriend, and support people of color in your community. Use your influence to amplify the voices of people with less privilege than you. Join your local mutual aid group. Donate money to local anti-racist causes. Stop arguing with your racist uncle (yes, I'm in this picture and I DO NOT like it). Build bridges with people of all political leanings in your local community.

If you want a world you can grow old in, this is the only retirement plan that isn't going to evaporate when we start losing major cities to the climate monster.