Earning Optimism in 2024, Part II

Reframing and reshaping politics in the Age of Misunderstanding

A new kind of governmental system has evolved over the last half-century or so: Anocracy. Often called semi-authoritarianism, anocracy works by preserving the appearance of democracy, as a kind of theatrical performance where elections happen, but the ruling party always wins. Countries that practice it include Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and Egypt. (China has multiple political parties, but it’s a fully authoritarian state because there’s no theatre here: these parties are explicit special-interest groups that are subservient to the Communist Party.) Countries that used to be anocracies but no longer are include Mexico and Taiwan, and possibly Poland.

Anocracy is what the MAGA movement wants to bring to the United States. There are proponents of it here in Canada, too, on both sides of the political aisle. Anocracies are reactionary by nature—in fact, countries where this kind of sham democracy rules are more violent, unstable, and disrespectful of human rights than all but a few outright autocracies. They’re characterized by a breakdown of societal trust, and in particular, a cynical distrust of public institutions.

Rebuilding public trust is job number one over the next years, in nearly every current democracy. For every case of consolidation of power in an elite, such as in Hungary, for example, there’s an example of grass-roots driven reform, and dangerous but sometimes positive political transformation; Chile’s public debate and referenda on a new constitution comes to mind, as well as Mexico’s increasing stability. But it won’t be easy, and the trend is down. Argentina’s election of Javier Milei and his current attempt to reform the country’s economy as a kind of Ayn Rand paradise is just one example; in America, there’s Trump, and even in Canada we have a rebellious, populist right-wing leader in Alberta and a national Consersative party that is pushing hard right.

I’ve been watching this trend for forty years now; it started in earnest with Reagan and Thatcher. It was clear when they were elected what was going to happen if they were given free reign. Surprise surprise! Exactly what I feared would happen, is happening. Fascism is on the march again, open and unafraid.

Blame Canada (or whoever you can)

This being Unapocalyptic, that’s not the end of the story. Unapocalyptic isn’t a typical blog, that is, just series of opinions by one guy on random events. I’m planning something else with this newsletter, and it has to do with design.

For this example, let’s look back at my post “Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy?” Here we talked about theories of change. What do you think causes change in the world? How does it come about? Remember that the first, and in many ways the most primitive theory of change that people use is agential: things happen because people (or gods, spirits, demons—persons of some kind) make them happen. This is the perspective of the child, who lives in a world where change is driven by parents, teachers or authority figures. It’s not the perspective of the adult, who knows the world is more complex than that.

When this perspective does become the primary way that adults view the world, then we have a problem. The negative or apocalyptic version of the perspective is blame. Blame can be weaponized, and the weaponization of blame is part of the fascist playbook. The easiest and most effective way to get your supporters to circle the wagons and listen only to you is to convince them that the bad things that have happened to them are the fault of an external enemy and an internal enemy. Someone is to blame for your unhappiness—this is the key fact that has to be driven home. Currently, in North America, the Right’s external enemy is immigrants, and its internal enemy is the Press, intellectual elites, gay and trans people and, apparently, pregnant women.

This is an easy analysis to make. Maybe it’s too easy. There is some value in it, though, if we suppose that maybe, just maybe, it isn’t the fascists themselves that are the problem, but rather the culture of blame that they are feeding on.

For forty years, I’ve been watching confidence and strength drain out of the political Center and Left. This has been incomprehensible; after all, leaving aside our ecological overshoot for the moment, the human world has never been richer, healthier, and better educated than it is today. And yet discontent is everywhere; as Yeats put it, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Why is this?

It might be simple. It might just be that over the past two generations, the language of “they did it” has become everyone’s default way of thinking about change. It’s not just the Right who have weaponized blame, after all—the very fact that Trump, Maga, populist politicians in general, corporations and techno-bros like Musk are the focus of fear and anger in the Center and Left should raise a big red flag here. Everybody’s blaming each other.

This gives us a way to frame the problem, and think about designing our way around it—because there are other theories of change we can deploy.

Reframing Blame

Suppose that gays, trans people, intellectual elites, climate change scientists, pro- and anti-vaxxers, oligarchs, neo-fascist militias, ruthless politicians, secret societies and religious bigots all exist, but are a symptom, not the reason for change in today’s world. Imagine them as actually powerless, a puppet-show that’s captured our mesmerized attention while the real pickpockets move through the crowd.

I could stop here, and probably should because this is already an incredibly important point. If the world has collectively backslid into an atavistic, ancient theory of change, to the point that it’s the main mode of thought across the entire political spectrum, then this is A) terrifying, but B) an opportunity to step back and reassess our situation. And maybe 2024 is the year that this has to be done, for our survival.

The reason it would be wise for me to leave it at that is that abandoning the theory of “they did it”—the theory of blame—is already going to be hard work. Shifting to another perspective, such as “the purpose of a system is what it does” or the Black Swan of radical contingency (Covid, anyone?) requires that we abandon an “us vs. them” attitude that has become almost instinctive. It’s going to be a struggle.

Supposing we could suspend the urge to blame for a moment, then what? Is there another theory of change we could apply to make better sense of our situation?

The Secret World of Constraints

In “Who Paints the Dew on the Daisy” I briefly mentioned the theory of constraint. I put that at the end of the article because I think it’s the highest, most fruitful theory of change we have. Almost nobody talks about it—although one of the most influential dynamical systems thinkers, Alicia Juarrero, does in a new book that I highly recommend, Context Changes Everything. For now, let’s just say that constraint is a key element of design thinking.

Looking at the world of 2024 as a designer, I see a set of constraints on what is possible. We have resource overshoot, ecosystem degradation, political paralysis, an overwhelming rich-poor divide, the rise of fascist populism, and a growing sense that the world is separating into distinct, mutually hostile camps. Okay; so without assigning blame for this situation to anyone, how do we design around it? We might not get very far this year, but one can imagine starting now, at least by abandoning blame and reframing our situation in some other way.

Technology as Constraint

Something like thirty years ago, I read an obscure book by Langdon Winner called Autonomous Technology. He proposed that every social system requires certain technologies for its realization. I went on to use this idea in my novel Lady of Mazes. That book is based on one simple premise:

Moving to a new technology is the equivalent of legislating some change in society; but we can’t know ahead of time exactly what that change will be.

Technology is not something we just use; it’s an active agent in shaping our culture and politics. It does this by changing the constraints we live by. Note that we all live under many other constraints—demographic, financial, geographical, cultural. Each one is a rich place to look for possible variables in the social contract that don’t reduce to “they did it” blame-mongering. But let’s push the technology angle a little further to see where that takes us.

Before the X-Files, it was possible to separate your heroes and get one into peril without the other knowing; but all that changed when Mulder and Scully got cell phones. Suddenly Scully could call Mulder from a dark basement in an abandoned house. The showrunners had to come up with ever-more creative ways to put these two into jeopardy, because just being alone on an empty road at night was no longer sufficient.

The smartphone made all of us into Mulder and Scully. Yet the possibility of always being in contact has somehow become the necessity of always being in contact. When I was a kid, it was normal that a seven-year-old would run out the front door at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning and not be seen again until supper time. Our parents had no idea where we were, and we ranged over miles, on foot or on bikes. Nobody worried about us and we didn’t worry about ourselves; come suppertime, we’d be home again. This culture doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Instead, we have what you might call surveillance parenting, in which the whereabouts of one’s child are always known. You could blame somebody for this change, but maybe it’s not a matter of blame; maybe it’s happened because smartphones have changed the constraints of social communication in our world, with unforeseen consequences in how we raise our kids.

Similarly, the Internet was supposed to be a fully decentralized system, democratic by design. Instead, it’s become a set of walled gardens overseen by the biggest corporate monopolies in history. Social media was supposed to build bridges and harmony between people; rather than doing that, it’s enabled a series of armed camps, a vast resentment factory fueled by algorithms that promote misunderstanding rather than cooperation. And despite billions of people joining Facebook and X, loneliness is on the rise.

Granted these outcomes, maybe it’s time we admitted that information technology has produced more negative unanticipated consequences than we expected. Maybe it’s the pickpocket, not the people creating and promoting it. In 2024, I anticipate a tsunami of fake news and deepfake images and videos as the Net becomes fully repurposed as a propaganda and manipulation machine. This is going to happen simply because it’s possible, not because any one human agency is going to push for it. The technology exists, and it will now legislate.

We don’t need the Internet as much as we think we do—more exactly, we don’t need Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, and TikTok. Very little would change in most people’s lives if they simply walked away from all Internet-based systems of surveillance and control that position themselves as intermediaries or brokers of some kind, which is what all the companies I listed above do. 2024 may well be the year that we become motivated to walk away, as it becomes clear that these platforms are enablers for anocracy, and not for true democracy. For that, we’ll need something else.

The End-Run

Luckily, the rise of renewables provides a model for successfully combating seemingly invincible foes. Fossil fuels are not going away because the governments of the world came to their senses and legislated them out of existence. They’re going away because new technologies did that legislating for them.

This all sounds great, but what would it look like in practice? Well, here’s an example of a single design/tech change we can make that directly addresses the problem of the surveillance-capitalist Internet intermediaries problem. It changes the constraints that govern our current dealings on the Net; and that changes everything.

Parallel to the rise of the ChatGPT and Bard Large Language Models has been the development of open-source alternatives. These LLMs can be tuned to have varying strengths and specializations. Crucially, LLM agents can be chained or ganged together to act more intelligently as a group than they do individually. You can already download and play with extremely powerful configurations of such agents, for free (you do need the technical skills, for now, to set them up).

Okay. So you use Google because it’s easier than hunting for web pages yourself. You buy through Amazon because they make it easier to discover products you might want, and to find the best price or availability. You use Facebook because managing email lists of everybody you know or want to keep in touch with and all the news outlets you’d like to hear from takes too much of your time. And you use X (or Mastodon, or Bluesky) because you don’t have the time to comb through the blogs and newsletters of all the people you’re interested in and summarize their current thoughts in a couple of pithy sentences.

But your agents have the time. Properly configured, a set of LLM agents can use DuckDuckGo or Kagi.com to search the web without your search data being used to fine-tune an online profile that you don’t control. It can constantly hunt for products you might be interested in and deal directly with the companies that make them. Your team of agents can browse the public sites of friends, celebrities, and business partners, and write haikus or sardonic comments about each in a feed that is entirely owned by and controlled by you, but violates nobody else’s privacy. It can remind you when their birthdays are, who you haven’t spoken with in a while, and who seems to be avoiding speaking to you. It does so without needing to through any intermediary that will take a cut of every interaction you have on the Internet (whether monetarily, or in the form of your PI). A system like this could be built today and live on today’s smartphones, or any laptop or desktop system. What it does, is make Google, Amazon, Facebook, and X redundant. Your interactions on the Internet are unmediated, and thus not subject to surveillance-capital exploitation by default.

The second thing this set of agents can do for you, is bootstrap a Web of Trust for you. Such a web is fundamentally based on personal contact: you trust your friend, who in turn trusts someone else, and in less than six degrees of separation you’re linked to nearly anybody in the world—except that a WOT doesn’t use intermediaries either. Such a web enables you to do things like speak to the truth of claims someone is making on the Internet by polling the sources most trusted by your most trusted connections. The WOT can help determine proof of personhood to filter malicious bots or deepfake engines out of your feed.

Of course if you’re a QAnon nut and only trust other Qs, your social network is going to be small and uninfluential—and this suggests how political leverage might operate in a world where powerful technological intermediaries hold less sway over the information we consume. In the Fediverse, where Mastodon lives, people of all political and religious persuasions can start their own servers, and make them private or public. There are fascist mastodon servers. Every server can make its own decision as to whether it wants to federate with (connect to) any other machine. This results in the fascists getting filtered out, which is why fifteen million people are now using Mastodon.

Let’s therefore imagine an open-source project to create a portable, nimble set of LLM agents, owned and controlled by their user, that serves that user and no one else. It disintermediates Amazon, Google, and all other Internet entities that want to act as brokers on your behalf. And it rates the quality of the information you get based on the web of trust you’ve developed over your life, perhaps like what Ground News does now. It lives as a service on your phone, similar to Siri, but you can actually trust it with your secrets. One of its ongoing tasks can be to establish commonalities with people who are not currently in your circle. If it’s trained with knowledge of methods such as Structured Dialogic Design, it can help you have difficult conversations with people you’re inclined to think are your enemies, and help you overcome your differences.

The current algorithms of commercial social media are engagement-driven, and nothing drives engagement like rage. This project, like the Fediverse, would not be profit-driven, so wouldn’t need to maximize engagement. It could maximize something else: fellowship, or the fraternity part of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. On both the economic and political levels, it could be one nudge away from anocracy, and back to a sane political and economic landscape.

Of Course It’s Just An Example

I don’t want you to think I’m a full-blown technocrat—that I believe technology is the answer to all our problems. I don’t; what I do believe is that we can’t afford to ignore technology as an independent force in our lives. Most of our struggle over the next few years is going to be down-and-dirty political; in a future post, I hope to do a backcasting exercise to uncover some starting points for doing that. However, we’re living in a state of technofeudalism largely because ordinary people discount the extent to which technology itself constrains how they live. It’s not just other people (the “they” in the “they did it” theory of change) who are dragging our society down.

Also, most importantly, the lens of constraints is just one alternative framing you can use to think about where we are and where we’re likely to go this year. Just like “they did it” has some usefulness, but limits, so does the idea of constraints. There are other agencies at play—raw cause and effect, culture and history, the design of the social, political and legal systems we live in. Even zoning is important, as I suggested in the last post. To find our opportunities, we’re going to have to swim in all of them.

My point with all of this is that we have tools at our disposal to reframe and redesign our world, but we can’t do that if we lock ourselves into single perspectives. In 2024, playing the blame game has become a losing proposition. Let’s commit to new approaches.

I’ll be outlining more of those approaches in the coming weeks.

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