Techno-Feudalism & the Post-Collapse Network Empire
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about the future of the world economy, and why the technophilic states are going to be major players in the future economy. We also talk about what the future will look like in a post-technophilic world.
Transcript
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What makes it a network empire instead of a network state, and I think the core thing
00:00:05.140
that Balaji, when he came up with this concept and missed, is the insecurity of a future
00:00:10.180
world when we're dealing with wide-scale economic collapse.
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That is the world that we are heading into, where it is cheaper for the wealthy class
00:00:19.180
in our society to isolate themselves from everyone else than it is for them to ensure
00:00:30.960
Our audience doesn't know, but it's actually been like a week and a half since we did our
00:00:35.040
last recording, because we were at this ARC conference in the UK, which is supposed to
00:00:40.360
be, I don't know, like this new alternative to Davos sort of a thing, but I think it's
00:00:46.860
But one of the people who we met while we were there and we had a long conversation with
00:00:53.060
And in that conversation, I really helped me clarify some things that I think about what's
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And we may release that conversation because it was recorded at some time, but it was recorded
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in like a busiest restaurant with a Greek reporter interviewing us both together.
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So I can't believe that some random Greek newspaper, a monarchist newspaper, by the way, is getting
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the piece where it's me and you and Curtis Yarvin talking for like two hours.
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But we constantly get accused of being techno feudalists in the media.
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And this to me feels not just like an unfair accusation, but almost an insane accusation.
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It's a bit like if, you know, I have some friends who their family were, you know, left
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Germany early and they tried really hard to convince everyone the Holocaust was coming.
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And they were just basically told they were crazy.
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And so this family is actually descended from a guy who broke into his girlfriend's house
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at night, took the girl he was dating and ran away.
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Now they made the horrible mistake of running East to Russia instead of West.
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And so then they, for like a 10 year period, just constantly had to flee new places.
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But anyway, it would be like calling him a Holocaustian and people would be like, well,
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yeah, but even if he saw it coming, you know, they could have said, well, let's try to prevent
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And it's like, no, there was a certain point where he was like, look at Hitler, this guy
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He published this, like it's not vague what his plans are.
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And, you know, I feel a bit like that when I talk about techno feudalism, where I'm saying
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it is almost inevitable at this point that something like a techno feudalistic state is going to
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And we need to, those of us who do not want to be churned up by the system need to prepare
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Both in terms of our culture and our families and economically, because it's going to be absolutely
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Now, first I would say when we talk about techno feudalism, we do not mean, so there's this
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like Greek economist guy who keeps, he wrote like a book on quote unquote techno feudalism.
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And the way that he defines the term is vague and pointless.
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Basically what we already know, which is that we live in a world in which large tech companies
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That's not what we talk about when we talk about techno feudalism.
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We are talking about something that is much closer to literal feudalistic states.
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But before we go further, we need to talk a bit about where we think the overall economy
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is going before we can talk about the technophilic states, which are going to be major players
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So this actually was a point that Curtis made in the conversation.
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And after hearing it really clarified a lot of how I think about things, but it was in
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It just gave me more picture as to what the future is going to look like.
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And he said, the future of the future of the Western world, at least, and the future of
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the Eastern world is also going to be bleak, but the way it will collapse is going to look
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And we can get to that in different videos, but the future of the Western world is going
00:04:21.780
to look very similar to the current situation in South Africa.
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And this has nothing to do with race or even the politics of the country.
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What specifically we're talking about is the on the ground reality of what it feels like
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Yeah, well, it's what real collapse looks like from a, we'll say, a modern developed
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So what happens when the infrastructure has been built, when there's electricity, there's
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housing, there's communities, but then things start falling apart.
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And that's what collapse looks like in our world.
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Because I think what most people's evoked set is of collapse is a road warrior.
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Our starting point for collapse is quite different from what people typically expect in their
00:05:14.740
And I think a lot of people, the other thing they think of is they go, oh no, I'm being
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Yeah, but no, no, we're starting from a developed country.
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And the thing about developing countries is that they are going up from nothing.
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You know, they are building incrementally with every step of development, which is very
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Developed countries collapse and lead to very different cultural institutions than a struggling
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And the, the life on the ground of a developed country collapsing is astronomically worse than
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the life on the ground of an equivalent, of an economically equivalent developing country.
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One thing you see in South Africa right now is very frequent and rolling blackouts.
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In a developing country, you are less likely to see this.
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The reason you are less likely to see this in a developing country is, and you do still see
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it occasionally, but like the regions are known, like they make sure their major cities have
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electricity and then the outskirts, you know, because they're building new electrical stations
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to sort of push out their electrical power generating capacity instead of having a total net of
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electrical power generating capacity that is in the process of collapsing due to lack of
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maintenance, due to political infighting, et cetera.
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And what it means when you have things like electricity regularly going out in a district is it means
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that many of the things that you take for granted, like restaurants or grocery stores are going to
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Restaurants really rely on refrigeration systems.
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Grocery stores really rely on refrigeration systems.
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These types of industries become very, very difficult to operate without private generators,
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So that's one thing that, that, that, that just like an example of the type of thing that you may not
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have that you would think, oh, I would have this in a developing country where they develop
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different solutions for that sort of stuff, like icebox type of stuff and, and cuisines that are
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Whereas in a developing, a developed country collapsing, you're not going to have that.
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So things like restaurants disappear, things like food distribution begin to disappear.
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Another thing that is really interesting that you see in South Africa right now that I think is going
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to be very common around the world is sort of fortresses.
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Like in South Africa, there are many, what are called gated communities, which essentially are
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fortresses, but then each house itself is also fortified in a pretty significant manner.
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So you've basically got fortresses within fortresses.
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And then in between, of course, you have sort of more dangerous dead zones, but then you're sort of
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really looking at something that looks actually quite futile.
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This is, this is what, when you look at an old, like, you know, medieval or even earlier
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sort of fortified area, it looks like you have sort of an outer wall and sort of a slightly
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protected area and then an even more fortified and protected area within, right?
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And this is because I think what a lot of people think of a world with falling apart police forces
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or police forces that are bought by organized crime, what they imagine is a world was just more
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like regular crime, like the type of crime we see today.
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What you see is a large systemic organized crime and aggressive organized crime that will
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sometimes collude with corporations, that will sometimes collude with wealthy individuals,
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that will sometimes collude with the state and not so much.
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I mean, you will still see random crime and much more random crime, but there is a new
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type of crime and it's the type of crime we've had in the U.S. before.
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Like when we were developing, you know, Mobs of New York is the movie about back in the
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days when we had more organized crime or, you know, Boss Tweed or, you know, any of
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I mean, you know, we had the mob, we had the mafia, we had the, you know, we've had our
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We have some organized crime institutions, but they are mostly relegated to a really high
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level of prominence within lower income communities, whereas when a state is collapsing, they are
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part of everyone's everyday life to an extent and being able to defend against them or ally
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And this is where feudalism comes into play, is you are choosing your allies within the
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state because who you are allied with within the state matters a lot.
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But we haven't really gotten to why we call this techno-feudalism, and this is something
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we're going to elaborate more on in the next episode because there's a lot to talk about
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But when we look at fertility rates, the two dominant strategies right now, when I say
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dominant, I mean the strategies that have been very, very successful at maintaining
00:10:11.040
high fertility rates are to either culturally impose traditions which lower the income of
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members who practice that culture or traditions, which increases the fertility of that group.
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An example here might be Jehovah's Witnesses banning their kids from going to college.
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I mean, there's also practical reasons to do that because they get brainwashed and stuff
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But I'm saying it also helps with their fertility rates because it lowers their income.
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Another thing is to prohibit the engagement with technology.
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Now, both of these practices limit the technological reach of a cultural group.
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I'll say the, sorry, they limit the economic potential of a cultural group.
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Well, and sort of widespread influence you can have because it is those who develop tech that
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is then widely adopted that are going to have a lot of influence across groups in the future.
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So I guess I should elaborate this word because that's going to then define economic, but I
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really mean economic and cultural potential a group can have.
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You are severely economically and culturally limited as you make these restrictions.
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And the thing about these restrictions that's important to note is some religious organizations
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are like, oh, we'll just minorly restrict this stuff, right?
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Or we'll just make some minor things which lower the economic potential of our members.
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The problem is, is that if there are different fractions of your organization, which make
00:11:34.260
more extreme limitations of their members, they will out-compete yours.
00:11:39.220
Yeah, we've heard this, for example, with Mennonites, that the groups that are more permissive
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around technology also tend to see more social ills that undermine the integrity of that particular
00:11:53.440
So the moment you lean into this at all, intergenerationally, what will happen to your group as a cultural
00:12:00.340
strategy is you will essentially be wiped out by the most extreme Luddites.
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And I don't mean Luddites as like a derogatory term.
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I mean Luddites as people who disengage with technology.
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You would have heard it as like the most air-gapped subcultures.
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And it is because on a pretty linear, or I'd almost say logarithmic level from what I've seen
00:12:22.540
in the data, the more iterations of your tradition disengaged with technology, the higher their
00:12:28.820
So as soon as you lean into this as a strategy, the iterations of your culture that go all the
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way with it are the ones that will be represented in the future.
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And so then there's other groups that don't lean into this strategy at all.
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Like our group, you know, we might even lean in the other direction with this.
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And these are the groups that are going to really determine where our species is going.
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And this is where techno-feudalism comes from, because these groups will be far and in between
00:12:57.580
So we talk about the concept of like a network state, right?
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Like the, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of it.
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A network state is basically a fully digital community that may use similar currency, have
00:13:11.880
similar social mores or similar regulation, but there is no particular geographic concentration
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Simone, you had talked to me in one of your books about like time zone based.
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Cory Doctorow wrote a book called Eastern Standard Tribe a while ago that I think somewhat predicted
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the way that communities are going to sort out.
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And it sort of, it talked about a near future in which social groups correlated more by the
00:13:39.280
type of time zone that you kept, because that's when people were online at the same time you
00:13:43.980
were, and that's when you were all hanging out.
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And that's obviously where the title comes from.
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So network states remind me a lot of that kind of community rather than what we're really
00:13:52.500
describing, which has a strong geographical basis.
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So what we would call, what we're describing is a network empire.
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We actually went over a few names here and we're like, well, it's not really top down.
00:14:02.140
And I'm like, so it's more like the Holy Roman empire, but unlike the Holy Roman empire,
00:14:06.000
for people familiar with your history, the Holy Roman empire was a German empire made
00:14:11.260
up of a bunch of like feudal players that were often largely under the rule of a single
00:14:16.740
individual, but on the outskirts, they weren't.
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So like 80% would basically be under a hierarchical rule and 20% wouldn't be.
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What we suspect the network empire to look like is it's going to be about 10 to 15%, maybe
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even as high as 25% under a single rule, but most of it will be independently ruled.
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So it'll be much more like a fractured sort of Holy Roman empire.
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And what makes it a network empire instead of a network state.
00:14:43.780
And I think the core thing that Balaji, when he came up with this concept and missed is the
00:14:49.380
insecurity of a future world when we're dealing with wide-scale economic collapse.
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By the way, if you're wondering why we're so certain there's going to be wide-scale economic
00:14:57.600
collapse, you can look at any of the videos where we talk about what falling population
00:15:03.620
If we enter a stage in which the world's economy is shrinking on average, we are entering a
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stage in which most Western economies begin to collapse.
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Alternatively, if we enter a stage in which the world's economy is continuing to grow, but
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it's continuing to grow almost solely because of AI, then we enter a stage in which the bourgeoisie
00:15:29.400
And everyone under maybe like a standard deviation or two standard deviations from the mean in
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terms of IQ or who doesn't have connections is going to be frozen out of the economic system
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Like historically, when have ever the powerful been nice to people unless it was in their best
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And then you'll be like, oh, well, the people will rebel.
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And it's like, yes, there are, for example, wealthy people in South Africa.
00:16:00.260
OK, they just build better fortresses for themselves.
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That is the world that we are heading into where it is cheaper for the wealthy class in
00:16:09.640
our society to isolate themselves from everyone else than it is for them to ensure widespread
00:16:16.700
So either AI is great, it ends up solving the economic problem, the rich end up getting
00:16:22.600
even richer, but we still end up with this wide scale systems collapse, or we end up in
00:16:31.080
Like there may be a few countries like Sweden or Norway or something that through their like
00:16:34.820
national sovereign fund find a way out of this.
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It's going to happen in a lot of places, although it will probably happen to them due to,
00:16:45.820
But anyway, or we're just dealing with a global economic collapse because it turns out that
00:16:51.100
AI doesn't replace the fact that populations are collapsing and we end up with a shrinking
00:16:55.700
And due to all the debt and leverage that we've taken out at every layer of the economy, things
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Again, we've talked about this in other places.
00:17:01.220
So anyway, this is just likely going to be what happens is wide scale economic collapse.
00:17:07.240
Now, the reason why it matters so much that the winning strategies are these technophobic strategies
00:17:12.320
and the reason why Balaji's predictions aren't going to turn out the way he thought they
00:17:17.660
would is in a world in which security is a thing of scarcity, it makes sense for economically
00:17:30.380
Like if you're an economically productive group, you hang out with other economically
00:17:33.580
productive people, both for your kids and family safety and for cultural reasons and for
00:17:39.200
the purposes of more economic production, because you're going to be more economically
00:17:45.460
And so this will lead to small what we call havens, essentially communities where high
00:17:52.280
technology is produced, but that are otherwise defended, that likely have their own power generation
00:17:57.700
and everything like that, networked with other havens that exist around the world.
00:18:03.900
And that is what we mean by the network empire.
00:18:06.600
Each of these havens represents a city-state in sort of this network lattice of empire.
00:18:15.820
We do not think it is a great thing that things are headed in that direction.
00:18:19.420
We think it will be a, during the period, this is happening, a darker world than the world
00:18:25.140
But I do think that from this networked connection of havens, we can rebuild a better civilization
00:18:31.460
and one that is not likely to collapse in this cycle of civilizational rise and civilizational
00:18:36.680
We just need to go into building the next one very intentionally, using the lessons we
00:18:43.680
Well, it's very much carrying the torch of free markets through what could otherwise be
00:18:48.460
described as a dark age, because you have these different techno feuds and fiefdoms, essentially,
00:18:54.800
carrying forward different economic specializations, but in a way that's far more sophisticated
00:18:59.760
thanks to the existing technology into which we're entering this age.
00:19:04.120
So we're able to sort of carry the torch of what we have.
00:19:06.800
And then everyone is still able to accelerate, I think, a lot of development, maybe even in
00:19:12.180
ways that we haven't been able to in the past, because in a post-collapse world like this,
00:19:16.520
regulatory oversight is going to ease up a little bit.
00:19:20.880
There just won't be governmental resources sufficient to police people, which could actually
00:19:26.640
lead to a sort of weird dark age plus renaissance at the same time.
00:19:30.840
So it's a dark age everywhere you look, but when you go behind some highly fortified walls,
00:19:38.760
And that's why we're both doomy, but also optimistic.
00:19:48.200
I would also say that this prediction better explains why we are so interested in far north
00:19:55.540
So people have heard our ideas around charter cities before, and one of the queries that
00:19:59.540
it is in an inhospitable, easy to defend region, not adjacent to other population settlements.
00:20:05.260
Yeah, you don't want to be where everyone like raids to get supplies or agricultural land
00:20:11.960
If you build like a high technology settlement in the center of an area that has a large population,
00:20:17.940
that means large, well-armed gangs or governments that want what you have, which is technology
00:20:25.860
Alternatively, if you have one that is in the far north somewhere that a group would have
00:20:30.060
to travel a very hard time to both get to and get out of, especially one that was known
00:20:35.940
for extreme austerity outside of their technology, there would be no reason to ever raid it.
00:20:41.300
I mean, what are they going to get are axiotal tanks, as we were joking about with Razib.
00:20:45.900
They're unusable by most other cultural groups.
00:20:49.220
So that's another reason why it makes sense to, and some people will go the other route.
00:20:55.180
Some wealthy people will create sort of opulent gated areas where they try to let in only
00:21:02.360
the best and the brightest by their definition.
00:21:04.940
And these communities will, I think, flourish for a short time until people realize how unsafe
00:21:13.760
they are in terms of a long-term place to base yourself if you want anything other than
00:21:19.080
short-term hedonism and vanity, because they are incredibly difficult to fit.
00:21:26.280
Islands, you know, growing up before they lost everything, my family had an island in the
00:21:33.020
And, you know, now when I go back to it, it's all shot out by pirates and stuff like
00:21:35.960
And even when we were there, you know, we had to have guns and everything for pirates.
00:21:42.820
So, I mean, people do not realize islands are about the least defendable thing you could
00:21:50.920
It's the extreme weather, you know, it's climate change.
00:21:54.300
And we've spoken with people who are like, yeah, I'm going to build my, you know, city
00:21:58.980
And we're like, I don't know, like, what are you going to do about hurricanes?
00:22:00.940
And like, oh, we're just going to like raise everything on platforms.
00:22:04.760
And it's like, well, okay, what about the electricity?
00:22:08.920
You are, these are people who have, who are thinking very short term.
00:22:14.900
They haven't like spent a full year or a couple of years in the Caribbean, I'm guessing.
00:22:20.000
And I can tell you another thing about islands.
00:22:21.580
They are not a good place to do anything technological because everything corrodes.
00:22:25.340
You can't even have like a desktop PC for more than a couple of years.
00:22:31.140
Well, and not to mention like all your other supplies.
00:22:33.640
If we're talking about also a post-collapse world in which like, you know, getting more
00:22:44.020
When we lived in Peru, like right, right on the coast, which is kind of like any island
00:22:47.980
environment would be constantly, everything was covered in mold.
00:22:53.680
So like, imagine this, like it's a post-collapse world.
00:22:56.520
You can't easily get electronics, supplies, like clothing, fabrics, et cetera.
00:23:00.860
And then it's just everything like you're making the lifespan of all of your supplies
00:23:11.180
But alternatively, if you are in the far North, everything is artificially links in its
00:23:16.420
lifetime, which is, and you can do sorts of processing that may not be possible in other
00:23:24.140
Like, it's just so obviously the right choice if you are optimizing for literally anything
00:23:31.640
And what, honestly, what a lot of network states right now are optimizing for without
00:23:35.240
really admitting they're optimizing for is areas with a high level of government instability
00:23:39.340
because that's where they're able to make the deals.
00:23:41.680
And typically far North governments or far South governments are the most stable governments
00:23:46.360
and the governments in warmer regions are the less stable governments.
00:23:52.460
You know, yeah, they're going to say yeah now, but they're totally not going to say yes
00:23:55.700
You know, they'd be taken over by some other group.
00:23:58.280
You're actually better off setting up an illegal settlement in the area of a stable government
00:24:02.520
where you can predict their actions than setting up a legal settlement in an unstable
00:24:07.840
But anyway, I'm very excited to go further into this vision for the future.
00:24:13.220
And I think the next of these episodes, it'll be a bit of a two-parter, but also a bit
00:24:18.060
And Simone, I love talking with you about this.
00:24:27.600
We were on just pearly things recently and we were being sweet on each other.
00:24:32.340
And I think we made everyone deeply uncomfortable because this is not, you know.
00:24:35.380
Yeah, the guy was like, should I not be in between you?
00:24:39.420
They're like, we're choosing where everyone sits.
00:24:41.280
So more, if you're wondering why we sat apart on just pearly things, that was because we