Max Borders - The Social Singularity: A Decentralist Manifesto

The
Social
Singularity

The
Social
Singularity

A Decentralist Manifesto

Max Borders

For more information, visit
http://social-evolution.com

2018 by Max Borders

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Social Evolution

3405 Harpers Ferry Lane

Austin, TX 78745

To
Justin
and Jessica
Arman

because they believe

Contents

Detailed Contents

Introduction

For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator . The road kept descending and branching off, through meadows misty in the twilight.

Jorge Luis Borges

We have always tried to know tomorrow. In our attempts, we end up shaping it.

Our ancestors went to seers who read tea leaves, auras, or entrails. To best an enemy or win a lover, rulers consulted oracles for messages from the gods. Oracles in antiquity were thought to be divinely inspired, so false predictions were blamed on bad interpretation.

Modern oracles are decidedly more fallible. Were also more accountable. So we look for patterns in the world beyond the guts, and we channel the god of trend lines. Still, we make predictions we hope will come true, which is often why we make them to start with.

Today they call us futurists. But to be a futurist still takes a little mysticism. Its not the vagueness of Nostradamus or the Magick of Aleister Crowley but the spark of the science-fiction writer who plants ideas in the minds of innovators.

Futurists know that in every prediction there is a potential act of creation. After all people who believe our predictions are more likely to change. And if enough people change, the world might just get better. In The Social Singularity , Ill show that the worlds power centers are breaking up and that this process can liberate people from poverty, end acrimonious politics, and help humanity avoid the robot apocalypse. I realize thats a tall order. But thats just how much potential there is in decentralization.

Decentralization?

This is the kind of big, abstract idea editors warn could mean the death of your book sales. Write about a person or tell a story , theyll say, chomping on the end of a spent cigar. I cant sell a book about an abstraction! Well, weve got to try. The future depends on it.

In this volume, I suggest that if we reorganize ourselves and our systems of collective intelligence, we will be better as a species. The social singularity is a point beyond which humanity will have reoriented itself. Well operate more like a hive mind.

A lot of people are afraid of whats to come. But to live in fear of the future is to underestimate ourselves. So this book is also about shedding fear.

Still, its not your basic airplane read. Its designed to challenge you. To break conventions. To reframe our thinking a little so as to disrupt the habits of mind that are keeping all of us from reaching our full potential. You see, our march toward the social singularity will be largely positive.

Yes, there will be a great economic churn thanks to artificial intelligence and automation. Of course, there is always the risk of future shock, But technology is helping us to become far more collaborative, and there is more ordering power in that force than in any demagogue with a standing army.

Im not a passive chronicler of events. Behind this book lies a deeper purposea mission that is the wellspring of my thinking. If youre comfortable with all these caveats, I invite you to join me in exploring a new set of forking paths into the future. For as soon as we take those first steps on any path, were engaging in acts of creation, for better or for worse.

Chapter One

The End of Politics

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Guy Debord

If youre reading this, chances are you own some sort of mobile computing device. Maybe you havent given up paper books entirely, but youre surely tethered. I suspect you check your device at least twice a day, if not twice an hour. And Id bet you have at least fifty apps.

Now imagine you wake up one morning, turn on your device, and realize everything has changed. Where before there were fifty or more applications, there are now only two: a red app and a blue app. It seems the apps compete for processing power so now the device runs more slowly and less efficiently. And on this operating systemcall it DOS, or Democratic Operating Systemonly the red app and the blue app run. Though the device advertises compatibility with other apps, everybody finds DOS only seems to work with the red one and the blue one.

You are understandably frustrated with your device, especially as you remember a time when it ran much better, had far more options, and allowed you to customize it according to your needs and preferences.

This thought experiment is meant to help us reflect on our sociopolitical status quo. Not on whos in charge, not on the next election, but rather upon the system itself. Why? Because there seems to be a collective illusion that a democratic republic is as good as it gets. After all, we havent yet really tried anything beyond DOS. And there seems to be a near-universal failure of imagination with respect to how we could do better.

In a 1947 speech, Winston Churchill made his now-famous assessment:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

This is the sort of fatalism most people accept. In fact, almost no one tries to imagine another social operating system. The most creative and ambitious ideas for social change almost always happen within DOS: We should pass law X or adopt policy Y. Very few are trying to figure out how to develop something entirely new that circumvents politics entirely or, at least, fundamentally changes it.

It should be clear by now that Im not interested in preserving the status quo. We can do betterand we must, because DOSs days are numbered.

For a lot of people, this will be unsettling.

Some readers will scoff. Others will worry Im trying to rock a boat thats keeping billions of people afloat. Still others will say Im an anarchist, a utopian, or a dreamer. And we should no doubt treat with great respect the system that took us from bullets to ballots. The democratic republic has become the most prosperous and arguably peaceful way to organize society the world has seen. So its no wonder smart people like Francis Fukuyama have argued that the democratic republic was the form on which most of the countries of the world would eventually settle. There is a lot to recommend about this form, particularly when considered in the arc of history.

But there is a lot wrong with DOS. And whatever happens after DOS should be a welcome upgrade that addresses what doesnt work about this particular social operating system, all while introducing new functions, new features, and a new paradigm of human social interaction.