Outer Edges (Session 2)

That certainly has been my position. I'm more uncertain, to be honest, at the moment. All right, so, yeah, should we start the session at any point in time now? I guess we're the second session of outer edges. Yes. Yeah, so we're kind of halfway went in, so. Okay, well, I'm going to repeat a link that is the... I think it's kind of clearly on the syllabus, so this hopefully is redundant, but I'll link it anyway. This is Patrick Friedman's essay on Beyond Folk Activism.

So I'm going to use that as the kind of bedrock of the discussion at this time, and in particular, it introduces the notion of experimental government, which I'm seeing as a theme this week. There's a lot on it. It's, I think, actually a really excellent essay, so I'll be interested to see what people think about it. I find it very suggestive, and if this was to be a vehicle for the themes of the course as a whole, I would be happy about that. I think it covers the kind of things I'm hoping we're going to talk about, at least among other things.

So it's not long, but I think it's... he's an interesting guy, Patrick Friedman, in terms of writing. Lots of people get very frustrated with him. He finds it easier to think than to write, and his archive is a total mess, as I've probably said in some of these things here. So you get these short little pieces, but this one is, I think, extremely dense and lots and lots of thought-provoking material in it. And even though we've only just started, I think a lot of it will already be familiar to people and hopefully ring certain bells.

The money paragraph is probably this, where he says, because we have no a priori knowledge of the best form of government, the search for good societies requires experimentation as well as theory, trying many new institutions to see how they work in practice. This requires institutions to be embedded within a system which allows for their easy creation, testing and comparison. A governing industry, I'll get back to that, with a low barrier to entry and easier switching of providers would allow for this constant small-scale experimentation. And if I can just test people's patience a little bit, he then goes into a five-point

list and that seems so germane to the kind of topics that I think are at the heart of this that if I can just quote this in full, he says, this system, so we'll get to quite what that means in a minute, would offer a host of benefits and then he's got five points. All of them seem to me really interesting. First of all, he says, it creates specific real world examples to point to when debating the merits of various systems. How many millions of words of academic papers about the benefits of free markets does it take to add up to the two words, Hong Kong? So the first thing is you actually get real examples rather than these hypothetical political

economical models. Then number two, prospective customers of the new system would actually experience it physically emotionally rather than as a mental abstraction, which is far more powerful for changing minds. For citizens of the USSR, a single visit to the West could outweigh years of Soviet propaganda. I think this is obviously closely connected to the former, maybe a little bit more intense. Thirdly, it enables proponents and alternative system brackets like libertarianism to live their dream much sooner because they only need to get a small group together to experiment with a new society rather than convince an entirely existing nation which may never happen.

So this is obviously connected with this whole question, there's a departure from the fundamental model of political dialectics in the direction of actually some kind of spatial fragmentation. Fourthly, it supports an ongoing evolutionary process where societies learn over time and change with the world. And this then connects with this question about moving from a priori political theorising towards experimentation, which I'm hoping is going to be the main theme this week. Finally, which again we've talked about a lot already I think, it doesn't assume there

is one best society for everyone. can attempt to live their ideals without having to impose them on others, not only does it embrace multiple variants of libertarianism, but other goals and methods for creating a good society. So I'm not going to necessarily defend the logical structure of those five points on pedantic philosophical grounds, but I think as covering our topics, they really are excellent. So I'm going to start, and I won't go on for long, I'll do the usual thing of trying to get discussion started and going back if things fall silent.

I think there's one point, it could be considered quite trivial, but I think it's sort of deep actually and maybe of special interest to people here, which is the fact that this title, The title of this paper, Beyond Folk Activism, is obviously deeply reminiscent to people involved in the left accelerationist debate. I mean, the Schnurneck and Williams book also defines itself as a departure from folk politics. And it seems now it's a delicate thing because I should probably be reluctant to describe this Friedman essay as a right accelerationist piece of work, although I guess it's inevitable

that ultimately I have to try and do that. But if you accept the hesitations about that, there does seem to be a definition of accelerationism across the whole spectrum as a refusal of folk politics. That seems to me deeply symptomatic of something. I think the fact that there's this massively full-spectrum ideological shift taking place, Friedman gets there first, it has to be said, that defines itself by this rejection of folk

politics. I don't think that that's a coincidence. I think there's something serious going on there. I think it's symptomatic of something important. And it's obviously locked into this structure of mutual frustration. I mean, the Schnurneger and Williams book and the Friedman piece, the things that they want to do are absolutely 180 degrees in opposition to each other. I think probably everyone would agree with that. And so there's something, therefore, interestingly abstract about this notion of folk politics that it kind of is seized upon by both sides as expressing their frustrations,

and their frustrations being that there's too much representation of the other side. Patrick Friedman obviously thinks there's everything he wants to see happen is being frustrated by socialist ideas. I'm sure the Schnurneck and Williams thing would think that everything they want to do is being frustrated by libertarian ideas. And the consensual, the implicit consensual, uncoordinated outcome is this rejection of folk politics, almost certainly in two different directions. So that might be something to come back to. I think it's also very important to point out that Friedman's argument explicitly organized

itself in terms of what he calls levels of political abstraction. That's a tendency to go meta on this problem. I'll quote him exactly. He says, Consider these three levels of political abstraction. policies, specific sets of laws, institutions, an entire country and its legal and political systems, three, ecosystem, all nations and the environment in which they compete and evolve. Folk activism treats policies and institutions as a result of specific human intent, but policies are in large part an emergent behaviour of institutions and institutions are an emergent behaviour of the global political ecosystem. So the momentum behind Friedman's essay is basically to move up this series of meta-level envelopments.

We spent a lot of time last week talking about moving from first order to these higher order considerations. So rather than concentrating on specific policies that you'd like to see enacted, you move towards some larger framework in which you can imagine these policies being implemented or not. And Friedman is, I think, on the same wavelength as this, with this, in his case, three-level system. And he's trying to push the discussion up to these higher meta-levels. his real concern is with this ecosystem level where he thinks the kind of results that are going to fall out

of particular systems are going to be the result of these higher level structures it's the ecosystem that is ultimately going to decide what kind of institutions you end up with and institutions are going to decide what kind of policies you end up with So if you're locked at this low level of ideological options and argument about particular ideological options, you're missing the fact that there are these structural constraints and opportunities that are actually going to advance, promote or retard certain specific policy options. options.

I think something else that is kind of implicit, it's not that it's at all hidden, but he doesn't make it an explicit point, but I think we have to make it an explicit point. And it's hugely important because the criticism of this type of thinking, I think, is going to rest on this, is that Friedman described government as an industry run by firms. There's a business model. I'm assuming this is a classic case of what Mark Fisher calls business ontology. He says government is just another industry where countries offer services to citizens. And he says, given that, it has definite problems relative to actual businesses.

And this again I think is going to be something that's a major topic of discussion I hope this session. Taking these criticisms he says, this is all quotes from him, it's a geographically segmented monopoly and since all land is taken the industry has enormous barrier to entry and enormous barrier to entry. To start a new government you have to beat an old one which means winning a war, an election or a revolution. So experimentation is inhibited by these obstacles. He then says it has very high customer lock-in so exit is massively obstructed by the current system and he says these characteristics result in a horribly uncompetitive industry.

So it is no surprise that existing firms tend to exploit customers instead of innovating to attract them. We need more competition in government not more academic papers or mind share. Now, I'm assuming a lot of this is controversial, potentially, and I'm relying on you guys a lot to bring that controversy onto the table. I think, far from wanting to say that the only reason he wants to treat government as a business is what I'm now going to say.

to say I can see absolutely that this is just a huge controversial step, but I think it's also, there's a huge historical inevitability to it. It's massive and it crosses a whole range of different thinkers more or less explicitly. And the reason that this is so impressive to people as a thought, or so compelling to them, needs to be sort of looked at carefully. And the criterion of experimental government I think is a really good place to start with

this. I'm going to make a few moves here, and all of them I want to put a kind of off-ramp sign at that people can argue with it, because they're all controversial and problematic. The first one of these is, I think, that what Friedman is suggesting here is a kind of political, economic Darwinism. He's basically saying it's in a cultural tradition that I think is largely Anglophone. We can see that it's empirical rather than rationalistic. That's why he says we have no a priori knowledge of the best form of government. You have to experiment. This is a particular cultural expression that's coming from him.

And because of that, the way you learn in political economy like anywhere else is trial and error. Now this is a huge claim, clearly. Like a lot is decided. If you were to just nod along to that and accept it, I think you've already accepted a lot, maybe more than you'd be happy on reflection having accepted. And let's just say that you follow this road, then clearly the two criteria that you need for this learning process, for actually therefore a discovery process of good government once you accept this framework, is you need widespread innovation, you need multiple comparatively

unconstrained experiment with different possibilities of government systems and you need a comparatively ruthless selection mechanism. You have to be, because it's a trial and error system, you'll make lots of mistakes. How are you going to clear the deck of those mistakes? You know, you cannot wear... At some point, maybe we can mobilize the multiverse to just allow the endless proliferation of dysfunctional, mistaken government systems. But given reigning finitude, you have to be able to, neatly as possible, clean failures off the deck.

And I think that those two, that's everything. You know, that is your Darwinism. that is your experimental government, that is your program here, is being able to realize both of those criteria. That you want a fragmented political system that can try a lot of things, and you want some kind of mechanism that will close down failed experiments with the minimum pain or disorder to the system as a whole. And this is what he's trying to think. I think this is the whole of what dynamic geography, spatial metapolitics is about.

And I think that's why people end up talking about businesses. because businesses far more successfully than states have been able to successfully implement those two criteria together. There are much more businesses than there are nation states. Their barriers to entry to starting a business are much lower to starting a government. They can try different things much more easily. and when businesses fail, they can be closed down, dissolved, eaten by vulture funds far more easily than states. Closing down a state, state failure is almost, I mean I can't say almost impossible because

state failure clearly happens but it is so messy, it is such a disaster when you have to close down a state that it's treated by, I think, sort of political theory as something that's almost unimaginably horrible. Whereas obviously within the business context, the failure of a business is understood as something that is actually ecologically healthy. That of course it happens, of course you're accepted and you can have more or less effective institutions for managing the failure of a business, closing it down, redistributing its resources to some other business that can do better. So I think that this is what is being said in this argument or modeling of a government

on a business. It's already polemical. It's already making an argument that governments should be able to try out a lot more things than they can at the moment, and they should be able to be shut down a lot more easily than they can at the moment. And I think it's quite fair to say this is what Friedman's project is about. Everything he's trying to do is about that. But he poses it in the language of libertarianism. We can argue about how persuasive that is. I mean, there's obviously something there that's important, but that's where he's coming from. That's his own formation. I'm not sure this is simply a libertarian project.

I think it might be something much wider than that. So if we then refer this back to the two, the sort of comparatively occulted side and the comparatively explicit side of this course, that's to say, first of all, catabolic geopolitics. I think that what's being said here is an analysis of why the present Westphalian order is entering into this fragmentary crisis state. To put it just totally explicitly, it's because states are not sufficiently operating like businesses and therefore they accumulate entropy, their failures cannot be discharged,

they just gather and become septic and cancerous and you can't actually clear out geopolitical failure from the system, so it leads to this gathering disorder and it leads to this increasing sense that businesses work much better than governments. There's something about the actual mechanics of the business world that is just far more functional than that we see in the political regime. And on the other hand, in spatial meta-politics, the explicit topic of the course here, the spatial meta-political program I think is basically taken from Friedman and it's expressing

what Friedman's trying to do and we're just simply re-describing his project here. I think it's totally fair to say that spatial politics, metapolitics, is trying to set up a framework, an ecology in Friedman's terms, in which government can be subjected to a level of business pressure that at the moment it isn't. And I think we need to clarify at this point, by business pressure we don't mean that corporations can pressurize governments. That may or may not be part of it, but that's missing the point. The crucial part is not that. The crucial point is that governments can fail in the same way that businesses can fail

within the system. That defines the system. It's one in which government failure is a tolerated functional ecological component of the system and not some horrific disaster that is going to mobilize infinite geopolitical resources to avoid. And I think we can really see the recent era of global geopolitics in the context of this problem. I think, you know, I'm not wanting to pick on neoconservatism here because it's so easy to pick on and people pick on it so much, but if at least provisionally I can just use

that label to meet what has been the reigning geopolitical mentality that has been at work over the last few decades, it makes a lot of sense to me to understand that as a... a fundamental aversion to the possibility of state failure. A sense, you know, an attempt to make state failure into some absolute negative criterion of geopolitical action so that you do whatever is necessary to stop states failing. Because that possibility of state failure as being something that's manageable and functional

just doesn't enter the radar of it. And so there is no limit to the resources and the amount of military capability that you will put into these efforts to stop states failing on the basis of some, in Friedman's and I think highly rationalistic, aprioristic sense of what is a functional state, a kind of an ideological model of good government that you're then applying to these other things and saying that's not one and it's going over the cliff and we have to do anything possible to stop it going over the cliff. And so Pachi Friedman's model would be totally different.

What he's looking at is a world in which you would expect large scale state failure to be a constant metabolic function of the world order and it would be arranged in such a way that that could happen comparatively neatly. And it would happen so that people could try out risky, adventurous, complex, experimental, political schemes and see whether they work. And when you do that you're going to get a lot of failure by necessity. So the two things go together. You cannot have experimental government without a tolerance for state failure. And so if you're going to refuse to tolerate state failure you're saying that you're not going to permit experimental government.

I think I should probably now, I'm going to open this up if people think that's a reasonable thing to do at this point. I'll jump in. Great. One thing that is I find interesting and also difficult to sort of grapple with is when you talk about the sort of the failure mode and I think you said it's arranged in such a way that that can happen is exactly how that's to be constituted. Because it sounds to me as if you need some kind of supranational or structure or some kind of super sovereign

who stands at a level above your experimental nano-states or whatever you want to call them that can step in as the insolvency practitioner when it all goes down. I thought it was interesting to contrast Scott Alexander's piece with Pat Trees, because with Scott Alexander's it was fairly clear from his thought experiment that the little states, the little islands, they weren't sovereign. And that there was some kind of structure, almost like a supranational law. And there was one passage in particular where I think

he said that if someone wanted to leave one of these states and migrate to another, and the government tried to stop them by force, that this supranational, the wizard I think it was would come in and I think he said it would salt their fields and burn their cities or whatever it was. It's because Patry appeals to the idea of the frontier, but to me the frontier is this idea of a complete absence of any kind of structures whatsoever. Yes. So there's an absence of a super legal or whatever you want to call it.

And I also thought it tied in interestingly with something you mentioned last week which was the possibility of with the advances in military technology, being able to, the idea that corporations and other legal structures other than states would have the ability to enforce property rights by themselves, sort of sovereign property. Right. And whether that, I don't know. Because you can either go the full hog and say, right, these nanostates are going to be sovereign. Yeah. And then they can get up to what they like and come what may and we'll see what happens and perhaps there are good reasons why you wouldn't have too many North Koreas or whatever.

But it's whether you need that supranational structure, whether it's something you envision happening or whether you think that the oncoming financial crisis will mean or an oncoming financial crisis will mean that simply the current order can't be sustained and that will present the opportunity for, I don't know. I mean, I think this is absolutely spot on, everything you're saying. And the default assumption of this course is to try and think this through in the absence of any authoritative supernatural, sorry, supranational structure. You know, so as you say, Patrick Friedman, we're there. Scott Alexander, we definitely aren't there with that.

So we're now with Patrick Friedman, and Patrick Friedman, as far as I'm concerned, is on the wavelength of this course more strongly than Scott Alexander is, which then obviously, for the reasons you say, then raises all these questions. You know, how do you, how is a state liquidation managed in the absence of a supranational authority? Now, some of that is simply done by pure fragmentation. You know, if you've got 10,000 microstates, then some of it, you can just say, look, some of them die. You know, this is just an ecology. People will leave. It will just collapse.

it will be horrible there locally, but I mean locally doesn't mean as much when you're talking nano states as when you're talking big states, and shit happens, you know, it will happen in that case, end of story, whatever. So I think pure distribution does some of the work there. But I think in talking about business, you're already suggesting something more than that, because that isn't the way things work in the business world. You know, there are mechanisms of liquidation. And I don't think, but again, this is something that I would like to hold open for controversy, but I don't think it's right to say that those liquidation mechanisms

are totally based upon these superordinate institutional structures. You know, if you have something, for instance, like a vulture fund, that can just simply buy out is ready for a business to collapse will just buy it out value its assets realistically pay off stakeholders in a way that they think is realistic and redistribute those assets I don't think in any strong way that that is dependent upon a superordinate level of organisation you can make a case that certain norms about property protections and all of those things are implicit in that but I don't think it's I don't think it's very strong I think it's missing I think it's missing

a point I think the crucial point is that the stakeholders in the failed regime are actually operating on the mode of sovereign property preservation and are are now willing within that system to sell out of a failed enterprise at terms that they consider real estate. And so I think we can then go to these hard cases which I think we always have to look at like North Korea. And what would North Korea look like in a more Patrick Friedman type world rather than the world we're looking at at the moment?

In the world we're looking at at the moment, the failure of North Korea is like an ideological disaster coming from the fact that they've made bad choices on this level, that is highly moralized, and they deserve to be punished. Probably the natural outcome of that is when that regime comes down, you round up all the ringleaders and if you don't execute them, the basic model is that they're punished having made these bad ideological choices and finding the nemesis has arrived. Whereas on a more business model, the question is like, can you persuade them that what they're doing is not working and that their stakes in that enterprise can be bought out at a

a realistic level, minimal moralistic involvement at that point, the people who actually run that regime are just made an offer, it's not working, take the money, you can retire comfortably on the French Riviera and someone else can make a better job with these assets than the disastrous chaos that you've done with them. It seems to me the second model doesn't really require much in terms of authoritative system-level coordination. It just requires this switch of the kind of basic framework in which you're employing to make sense of what's happening in the same case, actually.

Like, I mean, what if Patrick Friedman gathered together a bunch of people to buy North Korea? You know, that's not something on the table at the moment, but it seems like it, I'm not saying he has that capacity, but people could probably. I don't know what the actual, what the kind of value of North Korea considered a sovereign property is, but it's a fairly finite sum. It's a finite sum on the two sides. On one side, people could raise that amount of money, probably, if they had a good idea for how to run North Korea. And they could do a Kickstarter for it or something. And on the other side, you pay off the people who, at the moment,

are saying, look, if this comes down in flames, we're going to end up hanging from lampposts. And in the sense, say, look, just face it. What you're doing is working. you've still got some assets here, just sell them out to someone who can use them realistically. Now you might be onto some complex primate psychology thing here where of course they pride or various things, various emotional structures of human social organization would stop them even considering what they're doing in those terms but I think at least abstractly one can consider that. I think that didn't the prince of, was it Liechtenstein, threaten to sell it to Microsoft

if they didn't pass his constitutional amendment that he wanted a few years ago? Right. To bring him more powers. Yeah, that's interesting. And I think the French do this a lot, ironically, given I'm saying this is a very anglophone mode of analysis. I mean I think that they have a problematic dictator in South African quasi-colonial state and they just say to them, look, you could have a great life on the French Riviera, you know, just take the money and let us try and sort out this horrible mess that is happening in this place. And I think often they do get that to, they get that accepted. There's a money problem, isn't there, a bit, because with bankruptcy of a company, the

accounting is all done in currency issued by the state. And so, whereas the state, presumably, unless we're going to have your near state, I don't know, uses Bitcoin or something, if it's like a current state, it'll have its own currency that it can debase, to keep meeting its strict obligations. And that's, I think, part of how, isn't it, part of how the circus goes on now and the can is able to be kicked down the road and that sort of thing. Sure, sure. But then it's a question of appealing to people's realism, isn't it? Like the regime operatives, the people who actually are managing and running that society and can be considered to be the sovereign stakeholders

in that society, they themselves realize that hyperinflating a currency is a scam. So even if on the level of populist politics, they have to pretend to believe in certain asset values that are completely absurd, if they're being talked to in a smoke-filled room by something in the role of a vulture fund, that's saying, look, let's be realistic. We're not going to evaluate the value of the Venezuelan petroleum industry in Bolivar. Let's put some realistic pricing on these assets. Wouldn't the regime personnel in that context be susceptible to realism?

I'm not sure how much they fall victim to the structural hallucination that these collapsing fiat currencies actually produce. It seems to be they're for the masses, not for the people who are actually running the printing prayer. So I'm just slightly always distracted by the sidebar. Everyone gets the sidebar discussion simultaneously, don't they? parallel processing is the same for everyone.

Isn't Syria an example of they actually tried more or less that model to buy off Assad? I think, at least I've read speculation to that effect. You know, Russia trying to get him to come to Russia and live out his life as a former dictator on the banks of whatever river. and the CIA's sort of a similar and maybe more realistic version would be his subordinates. I mean, in North Korea, Syria, a lot of places, I mean, the CIA, this is one of their basic MOs, is to try to turn or buy off subordinate or military leaders and use those to undermine a dictator and install a more friendly regime, if not necessarily one that follows our sort of non-military commercial ideal model.

and the reasons that that doesn't work for Assad and for others I think would be applicable across the board where precisely because of the involvement of the structures that lead you to hang of militaries, of arsenals and so forth and of internal relations between these the extreme loyalty of the Syrian military to the Assads may be kind of atypical but that involvement is precisely what makes this only patchily realistic. So even if you can do this for a handful of places, in some instances you're just going to promote internal conflict and in most it's not going to be possible at all. So it doesn't really obviate the issue of an on-face need for a supranational entity.

And Syria is a really interesting case of that in general to the extent that you see state failure in Syria becoming contagious leading to refugee flows that this sort of, even if all the states around them are commercial, that doesn't, at least unless I'm missing something, doesn't on face deal with the problem of human flows due to failed states across a region where preventing those flows completely is just not possible and in which they carry military issues with them. I mean, you see that in North Korea too. They have the world's largest biochem arsenal and 19 million people worth of refugees. that would leave if there was internal state collapse, which is why they're China's, they're above all China's problem, not South Korea's or the United States.

I don't know, is there something I'm missing in terms of the ability of the model? No, I'm tempted to try and segment these examples and try taking them one at a time. I mean, there's obviously this one big problem that cuts across both, is that we live in a certain ideological world at the moment. And even though people can say, you know, we've learned the lesson of neoconservative failure and we just aren't there anymore, I mean, I think people are still there. I mean, that's the world we live in. People have, there's certain kinds of holiness, holiness, political holiness that are attributed to these issues.

And the deep economic cynicism that is involved in a sort of thorough going Patrick Friedman type analysis is not an easy sell for people. To say, look, there's a kind of cash value we can put on a lot of this stuff. immediately are going to resist that, you know, and there's kind of nationalism and religion and these deep sort of tribal anthropomorphic sort of structures of emotion are deeply resistant to trying to just formalize these things in some kind of economic calculus. So I think that's going to be true in both of these cases.

It seems to me, of the two, particularly problematic in the Syrian example. Like if you say, look, Syria is a badly formalized business. It's not working at the moment. It could be bought up and it could work better. What are the problems? One of the problems is, is it something that could be made to work better? I mean, given its kind of demographic complexity, given this problem, which is the same one with Iraq, that has been sort of noted, I think is very compelling, is that there are these certain types of regimes where the minority rules

through a kind of extremely strenuous military dictatorship, because if the majority rules, then you have collapse and genocide and all of these kind of problems. So the Sunnis in Iraq and the Alawites who are kind of crypto-Shia in Syria have these reciprocal problems. And the regimes were reciprocal. You have Saddam Hussein ruling a Shia majority with this hard, sunny state. You have Assad running a sunny majority state with his hard, crypto-Shia security apparatus.

And if you turn it around in terms of the neocon logic towards democracy rules and the majority political community should rule these countries, then the local context of that is just genocidal threat. You know, the Iraqi Sunnis or the Alawites in Syria just think they're going to be killed. Now, when you've got that calculus, how much money do you have to put on the table to start moving minds around? You know, you're talking something that's so fundamental that basically, just to stick with the Syria example, or all of Assad security establishment thinks, if they let go of the reins, they are all going to end up being killed.

So, you know, for them, it's an absolute existential necessity to hold on to something like the status quo political situation in Syria. And even if a friendly power like Russia comes along and says, look, maybe we can adjust this a little bit, The level of paranoia and tribal terror that is involved is absolutely inhibitory in this situation. So I think that's obviously a huge problem there. You're not dealing with Dubai, you're not dealing with people who basically have a kind of business-friendly model of what they're doing in their society. You're dealing with people who think that they are threatened with extermination if

if they lose a grip on their society. So sorry, I'm not at all saying I've answered your problem there. It's more that I've just reinforced your skepticism. Yeah, I think that makes sense, just sort of specifies that even if it's not something that states are particularly set up for right now, if that changes over time in parallel, you see more formalization in states, more forced cooperation hand in hand with financial markets that over time it becomes a more viable strategy. I think a country that involves profound intrinsic demographic conflict is an extremely

bad business model. And I would expect that, putting it extremely crudely, anyone with a kind of vulture fun mentality in that situation is just saying, look, we've got to cut this thing up. It just doesn't work. It's just like you would say with a business that is trying to produce gardening tools, software and microwave food items. You just say, why is this stuff together in one company? No way does it make any sense. Let's chop the thing to pieces and then see what it's worth. And I think that's the same in these cases. I mean, they just do not make any sort of sense as viable political units. And that completely gets in the way of any attempt to solve the problem.

Kind of an interesting example of this, kind of binding the ethnic and commercial aspects of states and kind of the neoreactionary, or what I gather is the neoreactionary trend. If you're looking at colonial, post-colonial republics that have these three tribes arbitrarily drawn together method and if it's that you fractured them together and incorporated, you know, Tutsi territory incorporated, Hutu territory incorporated as a solution model. I have a hard time visioning that scenario that was actually working, but it's not. It doesn't seem like it's the typical usage of the notion in the discourse thus far.

No, I mean, I think those... I'm trying to think whether anything has specifically been said, like, for instance, about Rwanda or Burundi like this. They are both, I mean, just on where we were, like Syria and Iraq, Rwanda and Burundi are exactly the same kind of demographic set up, you know, where you have a minority, reciprocal minority tribe. I mean, it's actually fascinating how exactly they parallel each other, you know. And so you've got a sort of minority Tutsi regime over a majority Burundi, a Hutu population,

and a minority Burundi, sorry, I'm going off because that's not true in Burundi. There's still a minority Tutsi population there. But you can see in Rwanda the same extreme level of ethnic intensity about it. And I don't think the colonial state model gets involved there very smoothly, to say the least. They're obviously super complicated cases. You know, you look at the sort of examples that always come up on these post-colonial, in the right-wing states,

which is Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai, and they're all marked by a pretty extreme lack of existential ethnic tension. You know, Singapore is obviously a multicultural society, but it's got a large Chinese majority, so it's got a clear hand, sort of ethnic hegemony in that society, there's not a big hostile majority threatening to take over with that, and so it's much easier to kind of get people to take a business logic of the way that society is working. But transporting that into Mesopotamia or transporting it into the most complex African

states is going to be a real challenge, obviously. I was going to say, Singapore is a bit more interesting than that, isn't it? Because he didn't, despite the Chinese majority, he didn't, you know, the institutions and the courts and everything is all in English and was imitating British institutions and he obviously had a fondness for that sort of, you know, common law and that sort of thing. And managed to sort of bind together everyone around that despite the fact that probably with the ethnic Chinese majority there was always the possibility of the sort of ethnic

impulse overtaking that and I suppose the fact that it's been so successful is probably how he's got away with it and I suppose that's a bit the Patrick Friedman's thing it seems as if what he wants is the chance for the libertarians to do their own thing somewhere else, basically, from you. He's saying to the people who are in charge now, just let us do our thing somewhere else and we'll show you how excellent it is and you'll all come flocking and you'll all start to imitate us. But yes, Singapore is surely the closest model. I don't know.

But would you not say about Hong Kong, though? I mean, Hong Kong also just totally accepted the basic governance model that it inherited from British colonialism, which was done. I mean, maybe people would argue with this, but I would have thought if you're looking for excellence in colonial government, you're not going to do better than Hong Kong and Singapore. And in both cases, they just accepted the basic framework without any strong sense of revolutionary agitation against them. You know, there's some sort of rhetorical level of that in Singapore, but as you say, it doesn't go beyond that. I would say even less in Hong Kong.

You know, that Hong Kong has just wanted to stick to those same traditions of minimal government, laissez-faire capitalism without any serious disruption through this extremely complicated recent history. Yeah. Malaysia, I think, actually gives quite a good example of a state where there's an ethnic mix, but it's not in such a dire state as the others that have been mentioned. No, it's not in such a direct state. But you do have a minority, well, I think they're a minority in Kuala Lumpur, but I

think they're a majority in the country, the Malays. But still, they managed to hold it together. Just about. Just about. But it's a much more tortured ethnic situation than Singapore, for sure. And that's why I think they're quite envious of Singapore. And that's why they say it's boring. Yes. I mean, I think in Singapore, there's this... If you don't have a convergence between your ethnic hegemony and your dominant business class, you have frictions. So Singapore doesn't have that huge problem.

It's like Chinese are the commanding heights of the economy and the commanding heights of the culture and the majority of the country. So it's all anyone kicking against that is kicking against the whole system. Whereas obviously in Malaysia it has a Chinese dominated economy and Malay dominated politics And the frictions that come from that are predictable. But as you say, it could be vastly worse. I mean, it's being managed relatively calmly, given the intrinsic frictions there. But, I mean, I'm sort of drifting off a little bit in this issue, and it's because, you know,

obviously in this course there's the ghost of Mencius Moldbug sort of rattling his chains just behind my chair and whatever. And the reason it's hard to kind of dispel that ghost is because the problem that he sets up in terms of this thing about sovereign property, I think it's so hard to avoid in this respect. And his analysis where you get these problems is the fact that you have badly formalized sovereign property. So the Malay case is quite interesting. Because there is no, it's not acceptable for interesting reasons to formalize sovereign property. critical, highly controversial, sort of provocative suggestion that you do that.

And we've already started doing it in this discussion up to this point. But obviously if the Malays in Malaysia said, look, politically we own this place, you know what I mean? It's done through a sort of formal democratic mechanism, but what we say ultimately goes. And if we want to just take all the money off the Chinese minority, we can do that. That's like within our political capabilities or whatever, there might be moral objections, there certainly are prudential political objections to us doing that, we haven't done it for those reasons, but we could do it. We can put a Malay party in power of whatever level of ethnic chauvinism suits our tastes

and there's nothing within the kind of formal political mechanism in that society to stop us just expropriating the wealth of any group that we decide to subject to that process. Now, so that's an immense potential power there that cannot be formalized, it cannot be stated in those terms. the most just maniac street level provocateur is not going to put it as I've just put it there. Everything that you own is just our sufferance, because this is a democracy, we can command the majority, if we want to take away everything you've got there's nothing that you can do to stop us doing that.

And so that immense power cannot be formalised, it cannot be put into an equation with economic power. And when that happens, when you have that situation where you have this extreme implicit sovereign property, people who can just control a society, who can just decide whether or not property rights are going to be respected or not. And on the other hand, you've got a highly formalised property system which is favourable to another group. In a Malaysian case, the ethnic Chinese community just own the Malaysian economy, there's no

question about it. So you have this massive tension between the formalised and unformalised system of property in that country, which leads, it's intrinsically politically fractious to do that. And so it seems to me part of what this whole thing about treating a government as a business is about inevitably is having a coherent system of formalisation of property. If you don't have that, you can't make political power offers that are realistic or attractive to it or whatever. If we can't say to Assad, look, what your position in hard terms represents is a command

of this extent of the business that is Syria, and we can put some kind of price tag on that. If we're not allowed to say that, then all our negotiations with him are going to happen in some weird code and with euphemisms and it's all going to be the dealing that you can do there is going to be profoundly inhibited because you cannot be realistic about what he owns. It's the same with Kim Jong-un. He's dishonest about what he owns. He's like just some, whatever, representative of the will of the Korean people or something like that. No way is he saying on North Korean public media, I own this place, you know, and my guys will do what I say and it's mine.

And if I want to take something off you, I will take it off you. He's not going to say that. You know, it's all been translated into some weird Rousseauistic ideological code that means it's impossible for him to be honest about his power in economic terms. And no one else wants to be honest about it. The Americans aren't saying, hey, let's face it, Kim Jong-un owns the place, and we'd have to offer him roughly this amount of money if we were going to get him to sell out and pass it over to someone more competent. That reciprocally is impossible. So because you can't formalize sovereign property, you end up with these extremely hazy, messy,

dishonest political controversies that cannot be settled in the terms that a business would expect these problems to be solved. But sorry, I'm drifting a little bit away from this. But I think it is implicit in this experimental government. Because what we're talking about is the terms of liquidation. If you cannot liquidate, if you cannot economically liquidate a state rationally, honestly and formally, then it's going to be a total mess.

So we can do better than we do now just by fragmenting the whole situation and so we can just live with a catastrophe that comes with state failure. But down the road there's a much more attractive option, which is that you actually can dissolve a failed state in a way that is comparable to the way in which you liquidate a failed business. People do not generally die or starve or kill each other in those processes because they are formalized, because you can put realistic price tags on it, because you know the sort or deals that are going to make sense to people in that situation.

Adam brought up Singapore in terms of its business structure, its heavy dependence on public housing, compulsory draft to the military, and then also I brought up their healthcare system is very formalized and was centralized in that formalization from the start and has been, across its history, it's been defined by very slow introduction of newer private components, punctual rollouts of higher level, more expensive medical technology and that sort of thing. Does that contradict the commercial model that we're looking at?

Does it suggest that it might make a difference? Well, I don't know. I think we'd have to dig into that. I mean, look, you can start with the Friedman's thing in two different directions, and I'm definitely sort of just gravitating towards one end of the spectrum on that, which I think he would think was the libertarian, anarcho-capitalist end of that spectrum. But as we've already seen him quoting, where he says, sorry, that was here, where he says, it doesn't assume there is one best society for everyone. People can attempt to live their ideals without having to impose them on others. Not only does it embrace multiple variants of libertarianism, but other goals and methods for creating a good society.

so if people wanted as historically of course they have done I mean it goes with the grain of human nature to a large extent your ideal study where they don't have money it deforms everything everything is done on these kind of communalistic purposes and you get utopian communities I don't think they have a very good life span these things. Personally, my sense of the evidence is that they are not successful experiments, but I'm not wanting to be dogmatic about it. And I think the sort of things being brought up about Singapore are on that side of the equation. This experiment that is Singapore

requires these various factors, you know, national service, you know, certain kinds of buying into these forms of public provision, all of this kind of thing. Singaporean citizenship requires these things. They get it to work extraordinarily well. I mean, no one who's been to Singapore, people often hate the place, you know, when they write it and all of this kind of thing, but no one has ever said it does not work frighteningly well. So I'm certainly not going to be the first to say that, even though it has all of these factors in it. So I don't think that you can say these things are. These can be an argument against going up to the anarcho-capitalist wing of this particular

spectrum but they're not an argument against the basic notion of decentralized experimental government because decentralized experimental government is completely agnostic about any of these innovations or structures of public life that you might want to install in that area and if people don't like it or it doesn't work they leave. Yeah, no, and I actually completely agree with that. I think I sort of misarticulated a little bit. Not so much the ideological issue. I meant contradict not logically so much, but in terms of does it imply necessary traits of a business model that's going to succeed coming out of a pre-formalized context?

What does it imply? If we're taking these successful business models, are we always going to have to end public housing to transition the population or buy off the democratic population to make it? Does it imply that these smaller states, in order to maintain stability, are going to need business models that imply mass provision? I mean, the same way that employers give health insurance across the board, that sort of thing. I mean I would be very tempted to bring in a sort of anti-universalistic point here and note that East Asian businesses would not be surprised by this at all.

I mean the amount of kind of collective tribal activity in a Japanese company would be to the average Westerner completely unimaginable. You know, that you engage in these various types of group rituals and the degree to which your life is tied up with the identity of the company and these various forms of deep identitarian involvement in the nature of the company. All of these things are not at all comparable to the Silicon Valley. It's all a network of contracts, highly formalized, rational, interested individuals thing that you would get in Silicon Valley. I mean, not at all. So, I mean, I think if we took a big Japanese company

and compared it to Singapore, the contrast is not necessarily huge. I mean, just here in China, you know, you go down the street in the morning and the whole workforce of the company is out on the streets doing some kind of weird formation dancing and singing the company's song. I mean, all of these kind of things that in the West you just couldn't imagine in terms of a level of a demand for corporate loyalty are just taken completely for granted. So I think that this is a cultural issue that is not a difference between business culture

and political culture. It's a kind of question of culture in general that cuts across both the business and political world. And I think the fact that the national service, for instance, is extremely hard to sell in the West now. And that's a kind of ethnic issue to a large extent, I think. And I think, well, having a plurality doesn't mean that everyone will settle on exactly the same model. So like you said, you get the Japanese company that owns a sumo team or whatever, a Western company would think that's nuts and why would we do that. They can both be profitable, they can both be well run, just in the same way you can

have two states, one where all the roads are privatized, whatever, and you pay tolls for all of them, and then one where they're all state owned. But if we've moved to a world where the sort of business pressures operate on both of them, they can both be sufficiently well run that they're there as alternatives and neither is going to fail because everyone's going to leave because they think it's such a big deal or whatever. Yeah, totally, totally. And I think one of the interesting things about the Singapore-Hong Kong examples is that on what I think normally they're treated almost as if they're kind of equivalent to each other. You know, they're in the same part of the world, they're both highly Chinese, they're small,

they've got comparable populations, they're both very open economies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But they also have a lot of contrasts. You know, like Singapore is much more, as a state corporatist, It requires a much higher level of national loyalty. You know, the mentality of the Singapore state as opposed to the Chinese, the Hong Kong now subsidiary government, and already with a colonial government, is absolutely vast. You know, the Hong Kong government never asked for any particular loyalty from Hong Kong. It's all completely spontaneously emergent.

government, whether it's the Brits or the post-British government, they just said, look, we're not going to get in your way that much, you know, just do global trade and get on with it. I mean, and that is not the Singapore mentality at all. I mean, the Singapore mentality has a really strong sense of national identity. The crucial point, as you say, is there's no reason to think both those things can't work as they in fact do both work and track each other to a large extent. The historic growth curves of Hong Kong and Singapore would look almost like they were

twins but you do not have the same basic model at all it seems that the question of transfer is a particularly Anglo one which is to say that

Anglos have been concerned with just property transfer for quite some time but transfer doesn't seem to be the first issue that you might want to deal with in a seasteading future, rather the initial creation seems to be the difficulty. Right. So… That's the start-up economics of it. Right. Right. You don't think that's also a transfer issue? I mean obviously in the business world now those things are totally integrated aren't they? Well, the transfer can't rely upon, I don't think, upon

the formalization of existing power structures. Right. We can't expect a cryptographically formalized United States of America to just emerge and then offer us opportunities to buy out a state. Right. It seems as though a purely formal state would need to start from nothing. Well, I mean, it does need to, it starts from nothing in the same way a startup starts from nothing, doesn't it? And a startup starts from nothing but in fact needs sufficient capital to launch.

So now where's that capital going to come from? That capital is going to come from, it must already exist. So the sources of that capital, I'm not really disagreeing with you, but I'm saying it's like it can't be an ex nihilo thing. I mean, if you're going to raise enough money to launch a new state, then you have to be able to divert those resources from their previous instantiation and direct them towards this new project. So I think you're dependent upon some kind of ecological system which allows for the massive redirection of economic resources towards this new opportunity.

which again we're used to seeing in the business world like the financial system when it's working well in the right phase of the business cycle will redirect economic resources and put them in the hands of startup entrepreneurs and you're asking for something similar in this geopolitical context where you can actually extract on a large scale resources from existing state economies and put them into this new experimental geopolitical venture.

Like I think we can put, you know, the seasteading thing we've not really got on to yet, but I think when we look at that, and of course people here might have looked at it in great detail already, but you can start putting a price tag, you know, despite all the scepticism about it, and the last thing I want to do is to press that scepticism, but there is an emerging seastead industrial structure coming into being, you know, where people, Actually, I put up a post on this that I think I need to find. You can buy something that is basically… Sorry, one second.

Yeah. Here I'll give you a link. Okay, look at this thing. This is a movable man-made private island. It has a price tag on it, which I don't remember. I'm assuming it's included in the price.

I can't see it. It says that there's a $40,000 fee. Yeah. This is just a $40,000 fee for a private island in Maine. Now this particular thing, sorry, have I got some horrible sound effect on this? Yeah, I have. Sorry, you're listening to the music of the man-made island commercial. I better shut it down. But all I'm trying to say here is that, you know, ideological and every kind of skepticism aside,

this stuff is happening inevitably. Like, you know, people are thinking, like, people are going to want to do, kind of buy private islands and stuff that's equivalent to private islands. and I'm pretty sure this damn thing, this Mikulu, Kokomo Island thing did not, or nothing like it existed a few years ago. So we can start putting a price tag on this and I'm sure the Patrick Friedman crowd is doing that. They've got some sense of what's the minimal amount of infrastructure you need for one of these things. They can say we need whatever. I don't know whether it requires a billion dollars. I'll look it up by next week to have a sense of that.

And until someone tries it, it's like that Biosphere 2 thing. How much space do you need to produce an artificial self-contained biosphere? I don't think anyone knows that yet. So no one knows how much infrastructure you need for a self-sustaining microstate yet. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that. unknown territory still. But we're getting there in terms of people are thinking about it, people are producing kind of this infrastructural material for that and at the end of the day what's going to raise that money? You know, you're raising money within some existing state based capital market that you're saying that we want this money because we're going to start a new state.

It's not going to come from nowhere. And this is why this – I mean I like the frontier model, and we're going to talk about the frontier model, and the last thing I'm trying to do is point to the relevance of that, but the danger of the frontier model is it gives the sense of someone that they just simply have a wagon and they head off into the wilderness and they build the whole damn thing themselves. I don't think Patrick Friedman's world is like that. You do not set out in a dinghy into the Atlantic Ocean and build yourself, you know, seastead yourself a kind of microstate in that way. I mean, I'd be seriously impressed if someone or group of people did that. Instead you have to kind of divert a massive chunk of capital out of its current incarnation

within the state system and put it out into this new project. So that's why I think it's very hard to disengage the Patrick Friedman model from this question about economic formalization and formalization of sovereign property and these kind of economic questions. It's hard to do that because it's going to cost money. And realistically, money comes from somewhere. And where it comes from, it's precoded within our geopolitical structure. And it needs to be led out of there. And I think, to a degree, that is what is going to give it, inevitably, an anglophone

bias. I think we're the only people talking about this stuff are anglophone writers. And it's because Anglophone capital markets are massively de-territorialized compared to other places. Its big cities, its big financial centers are global to do with all kinds of cultural and historical factors that are very complicated. And that's where this money's going to come from. It's not going to be in Deutschmarks, I'm pretty sure. But yeah.

I'm sorry, Joshua. I can imagine that I sort of took this off slightly at an angle from the point that you were wanting to make about that. Because of it. JOHN MUELLER Well, I think it sort of got me thinking just by... I don't want to say his name again, but just by mentioning... Yeah, the evil one. You can just say the evil one. One of the sort of constructs that he uses is the formalization of military force, like the cryptographic formalization of force. and it seems like that is the way out of a world where warfare is the default mode of transfer of state assets.

Yeah. but getting there initially the bootstrapping the kickstarting seems to be more difficult because you have to proceed from a place of informal power structures you have to create the formality out of nothing that formality can't come from well I suppose in a way it could come from the recognition of the existing underlying structures and sort of handing the keys to the people who already run the show. But if you're interested in a new state,

then at some level you do have to formalize or it would be desirable at least to seek the formalization of power absent any other force or influence, literally out of nothing. Well, I think you would definitely use corporate structure, wouldn't you? I mean, if you were serious about it. You know, there's all kinds of romantic models for this that would go on various historical examples and think of it like the Mormons or something, you know, like Joseph Smith leading his chosen people to the new land and all of that. There's a lot of that about it. And for sure, you know, perhaps that kind of thing will happen. But it seems to me that if you're really wanting to take something off the shelf

that works for this, you will use some kind of corporate model for that. You know, where you will... As Nick Schabo and other people say, you know, it's not like this is something new. And the colonial structure was set up in this way. You know, these corporations. so all of these particular early, before the kind of imperialistic phase of amalgamation and ideological consolidation of these European imperial structures, in a substructure of that, was very corporate, you know you set up a corporation you give them a charter, they set off to whatever part of the world it is

you know, not only the big examples like the East India Company and all of these, but just on a small smaller level, this was the basic model where you had to engage in a massive level of institutional innovation. You give people a charter and corporatise it and that's the thing that you launch. And it seems to me that that would be the obvious way to do that. Like certainly if you're doing something that's going to be hugely expensive, without prejudging this, let's just say the seasteading model is the neatest way to set up a new state, it's going to cost you a hell of a lot of money unless you just randomly can group together a bunch of kind of true believers who happen to have those kind of assets, then you're

going to want to use corporate mechanisms for fundraising purposes. And the people investing are going to want to see what I'm investing in and so you'll want some kind of formal charter of that kind. So I just think that that template is going to come from the business world. And in many senses that's pre-existing to historical forms of frontierism, or even the British East India Company, for example. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, I mean you're asking people to invest and again like there's lots of romantic

ways to describe investment and are you prepared to kind of put your life on the line to head out into the frontier and all that but there's a level of investment that's just easily formalized. How seriously did you get this? Do you think it's going to work? What's the risks? Calculate, what's it worth? And you're asking for that level of investment. And I think that highly formalized level of investment is the one that's going to move things forward into the level of reality rather than excited dreaming.

I was hoping we could discuss the folk activism aspect as well. We haven't really touched on that yet. No, I was hoping that I would get some kind of enthusiastic left accelerationist who also has a big thing about folk activism to neatly tie it together, but maybe that's a bit optimistic. So I don't know. For me it obviously all goes into these dark territories quite quickly. Oh yeah, good. There you go. Yes. Well, I was interested maybe in talking about the criticism from both the

neurotic accelerationism of the agential structure of activism. they both go in different directions. This is just a comment, I suppose, and maybe an invitation to talk more about the philosophical premises underlying this rejection of activism. The thing I kind of like in Nick and Alex's book is where they kind of connect folk politics or folk activism to the kind of structure that underlies conspiracy theorising. This need to reduce an incredibly complex set of dynamics to a single actor, and that leads to this reduction of political action to these kinds of... or even, I mean, maybe from the

more pessimistic point of view, to action itself. But obviously they kind of see it as more of an admixture with a kind of intentional and non-intentional component, with the latter being the privileged aspect. And then this kind of goes into all of these problematic territories of trying to build of left hegemony, which involves a hell of a lot of organisation and cooperation and probably one of the sort of greatest acts of intentionality you can propose.

And I think the interesting part of this is that it's subtended by this idea of a constructed universal, which they get sort of from Zellameer and Peirce and stuff. But it is kind of proposing economic planning and hegemony and all these things that come back basically to a particular construction of agency. Whereas the Reidmans kind of proposing, I think is much more pessimistic and much more interesting because of that. Because it doesn't go towards the universe, it precisely goes towards this pluralistic, horizontal kind of structure.

I had a couple of questions related to that, but maybe I can leave them till I can articulate them without them being a giant bundle of every single question I would ever want to pose on this. To do with maybe, no I'll just stop there. Oh okay, but what kind of time period are you talking about for this delay of these two questions? I should just write it down so I can sort of harass you about it later. It's fine, but I'm not wanting them to slide into the question. Well, I guess the question that directly relates to what I was just saying is how fundamental

is this and to what extent is this rejection of agency part of this whole political economic theory that we're kind of elaborating. How deep does it go? And then the questions maybe that I would want to look at later. One of them probably shoots off in a direction that's not really relevant tonight. But the first one is this idea of entropy, framing the whole kind of discussion. And the second one is about creativity. So one thing that I've been thinking about is the notion of sovereignty and the role

of the artist or whatever you want to call them, the creative person in a say an experimental microstate. As someone who following the kind of models that I've seen thrown around this idea of in order to be an asset to your micro-state, you have to produce something for it. A lot of the modes that foster creativity are sovereign in Bataille's sense. It's a kind of space that is completely separated from any need to be productive or produce value. So you would ultimately be a non-asset in a state constructed upon these principles.

But does that then mean that the question of the human artist is moot and the actual creative actor is the third level structure itself, which means techno-commercialism or like whatever you want to call it, the thing that's actually arranging all of these experiments. and that's where you locate your artistic agency. But that question perhaps is taking us somewhere away. Yeah, it's huge, but I was going in the same way as you on that, in the sense obviously the nanostate as such is a creation,

and is it productive or not? I mean, it might be horribly unproductive. I mean, it's a wild experiment, and built into it is the whole fact it can fail. So there is a very different mode for the political experiment, the government experiment, and regular productive and governmental activity within such a political unit. So, yeah, I totally agree with that. Now, whether you want something more over the edge even of that, maybe it's kind of compromised in its kind of glorious solar Bataille kind of characteristics by the fact

that you kind of want this nanostate to survive rather than to just blaze out in the glory of political failure. Maybe that's already a compromise that is a problem. I don't know. Maybe we should, that's kind of meta-system level. And the entropy one I think we should add to our agenda, because I think to a degree this is coming from me, but I think I'm right in saying that Patrick Friedman has kind of been persuaded by this. Just one second, because I think he wrote a piece which buys totally into this language,

which would be a good reference. I think we should kick it up the road. Here we go. Look. I'll put the list. Now, this gets us into, again, bad think or whatever, because he's sort of talking about nearer action here. But this is the heat death of humanity, progressivism is a second law of the American. So Friedman is in that discussion, I think we can say for this point. And maybe if it's okay with you, I could make a commitment that we'll say something more definite about this whole NGP language next. I mean, I think it comes in kind of inevitably

because of the fact that we're moving into this, I would say, Darwinian framework. And the fact that once you accept a certain set of principles that I think are deep structure, anglophone, cultural commitments, And it is this empiricist, trial and error model. And I think almost immediately, it's no coincidence that Darwin is an English writer, and it's no coincidence that much later he's tied up with a lot of other things, because the framework in which Darwinism, also by Wallace, not only by Darwin, Wallace too is like in the same intellectual grid

that the fundamental question that has been grappled with by evolution is entropy dissipation. You know, what does Darwinism explain? What it explains is how something swims against entropy, and it swims against entropy by trial and error and elimination of failed experiments. So I think it's a very tight conceptual, meta-scientific grid. The fact that you get from Marx to Nietzsche to everyone talking about Darwin is because they can see that it's not just a specific scientific theory, but it has this big philosophical

own ideological implications about it. And when these kind of majestic scale ideologists introduce Darwin, it's because they think he's talking on their level at a certain extent, and he's saying something that is relevant to their theorizing. So yeah, I think we're totally entitled to it, and perhaps inevitably have to raise this entropy thing. So final thing, going back to your first point, which you had before the sort of solar economics and the entropy thing, you had a prior relatively manageable point that you were making, is

that not right? Sorry, I'm losing the sentence. No, I was just asking about... Like everything. Everything. But how fundamental is the... How do I put this? If activism... So, I mean, you can kind of roughly equate activism... I mean, you can totally equate activism to voice as a sort of pragmatic, negantropic experimental system with exit. How fundamental is a particular construction or a philosophical notion of human social

agency or its lack thereof to this rejection of folk politics, of folk activism? Like, where exactly does it meet with a premise about the reality? Can I ask, as a counter question to this, are you inclined to think that this folk politics, this rejection of folk politics is a coherent thought that cuts across both of these tendencies? Or do you think it's just a kind of semiotic glitch that is just misleading and there's no common element? Let me say, if I was to put forward as a speculative hypothesis that it's almost impossible to

find a kind of anchor point between left and right accelerations, but maybe this fundamental rejection of folk politics is a common point of departure that would ultimately have to define something as accelerationism in general before it gets any further sort of ideological qualification. Do you think that that's credible or is your basic inclination to be suspicious about that? No, I think it's absolutely credible. I think that's exactly what it is. I think there's a question about it, actually. And that's one of the reasons why left acceleration also kind of was met with such a massive backlash, I think, ultimately,

because it was saying something at the bottom about human agency and political agency. But it then takes it in a completely opposite direction, to do politics at all. Because the question is, for example, for the right, it's like, we don't have any efficacy attached to this notion of agency anymore, so let's just get rid of it. Let's get rid of politics, actually. With the left, it's like, we need to keep politics on the table. So in reaction to this idea that folk politics doesn't do anything anymore, we need to replace notions of politics or scale them up to a universal project and do these things like

a kind of joint technological sort of volunteeristic economic planning and we also need to construct ideological hegemony to bring it about. So it kind of, they both start from the same premise but then take it in completely different directions. Right. But I think this kind of, I guess what I was wondering is what's this rejection of folk activism saying about human purchase on forces of entropy? I mean I'm still tied up with this, yes exactly, what is the common, if I was going

to put it in its most general form, like Friedman obviously thinks it's tied up with, I think I'm fair in saying this, that it's tied up with an attachment to first order political preferences. And somehow I think he thinks as soon as you reject folk politics, folk activism in his terms, you're already climbing up onto this meta-level, you're scaling up on this meta-level system. And the language he uses is distinctively libertarian, I think, in terms of incentives.

He thinks you're immediately talking about incentives. There's no point, so just paraphrase this argument, which you can all just look at, there's no point expecting that you're going to get people to change their first order political preferences unless you can actually restructure the system of incentives that is guiding that path. So for instance, coming out of his own narrow concerns, narrow only in a – I mean they're not intrinsically narrow – narrow in our terms now when we're looking at this vast ideological spectrum, that politicians are always going to have certain predilections

in the policy world because as he says they need to be able to offer voters something. So policies that don't sort of comply with that criterion of being able to say here's some goodies that you can have if you support us, that don't offer them democratic political incentives are just not going to be taken seriously irrespective of their intrinsic merits. If someone says, you know, this would be a great thing to do but it would mean that politicians have less money to splash around on promises and election campaigns, then that's off the table. It's just that the actual context, the mechanism, the incentive structure is just pushing those

things off the table irrespective of their intrinsic qualities. Now I suspect again that even if you go right over to the left and to the, I'm going to start calling them Alex and Nick because surnames are more complicated. If you, when you get into their world, I think there's something in common about that. They would have, it's through the mirror, but they probably still think that there's a system of incentives that are skewing and prematurely selecting the kind of policy options that are available to people. And that the system itself is somehow prejudging the policy cocktail that is possible from

that thing. not good enough at what's called the ideological Turing test to do this very convincingly, so I'm going to leave it at that. But I suspect there is some common ground there. I mean, I don't know – sorry, one last thing, because this is also getting into difficult territory, but I think it's inescapable, which is the whole thing about democracy. Which now, Friedman's extremely straightforward in this piece about his rejection of democracy as a sort of realistic option for libertarian policymaking. He just says it's totally screwed.

People don't like libertarianism, it can't possibly be popular, and in addition to that, The actual system itself is systematically anti-libertarian, for the reasons that I've just outlined. It's based upon a form of political bribery that is intrinsically anti-libertarian. And so politicians will always compete to offer people more stuff. And the libertarian on the sidelines saying, stop offering them share, is just so basically go against the incentives of the structure that it's laughable. And this anti-democracy dimension of it I think is a huge trend. I mean, I think that, you know, I think libertarianism and democracy cannot hold themselves together.

You know, and libertarianism is just classical liberalism. So I think you're saying that the fundamental political tradition, certainly of the Anglophone world, and perhaps more generally, has an extremely unstable temporary synthesis between its democratic and liberal dimensions, and that we see that completely falling apart all over the place. And Patrick Friedman is one place where we see that falling apart, utterly explicitly. You just have your fork, it's a fork, it's not something that is any kind of marriage

at all. Now I'm introducing that at this point just to say, well how does that tie up with what's going on on the left? I mean, is the left, when the right rejects folk activism, it's also, I think, intrinsically rejecting democracy. It's a package. It's saying the sort of things that you're hoping for from folk activism are the sort of things that you're hoping for from democracy. They're delusions. You're not going to get them. So forget it, go somewhere else. Now, does that apply? is that a cross-spectrum ideological tendency? Is it also the case that there is a skepticism of democracy involved in the left accelerationist projection of folk politics?

Or is that a point of radical differentiation between that? This is my reading of it, and I'm not an authority in any sense. and political economy is where I'm in completely new territory for me. So I don't want to put any words into their mouth, but yeah, I think so. I think this is what they mean when they talk about bringing back the vertical. They talk about hierarchy, this kind of idea that they're no longer this democratic populist space of politics. It all happens in this path between local demands and some kind of, through a system of invariances, construction of a muscle from the bottom up.

But they do retain, and this is like kind of, you know, Reza's project at the moment, this idea that there is a fundamental space of communication and discussion, which is like hybrid. hybrid. It's a hybrid between technological and human agency, which is also why there's this kind of drive to the philosophy of artificial intelligence that also takes or kind of is modeled on a convergence between human deployment of reasons and how that works in machining space, which, you know, possibly a complete

migration of this into a sort of machinic space. That option is completely held open, and I think that's also why they have such a problem, or more so before they released their recent book, selling this. But I think the critique of democracy is built into it as well, absolutely. Right. Yeah. I think to talk about the difference is maybe more just a difference between, correct me if I'm wrong, but Patrick Friedman's kind of construction of it is very much horizontal milieu, whereas they're working towards this alternative, this kind of bringing back the modernist grand narrative as a sort of constructed, a universal that learns the lessons of postmodernism.

There's a really cool paper by Zeller where he describes how this might play out. I'll find the link and stick it up. Yeah, that would be cool. Yes, I mean, I don't want to get too lost in the Byzantine scholastic side of this, but it's very tempting, actually, because the ideological grid, I mean, people do all weird ideological grid structures and this one is really complicated because Patrick Friedman's model which is very pure is that you know the crisis of democracy is a crisis of collectivity and the result is that you've just stopped trying to amalgamate constituencies

beyond a reasonable scale and find someone to flee down these lines of escape because that political collectivity is always going to screw you over for him. But obviously this isn't an easy left-right thing. If you don't do that, you're faced with a question of rule. You've got these two choices, that you flee, or you find some structure of non-democratic rule, more or less explicit. And obviously for large chunks of the right they have no problems with it, they just say okay, you know, democracy is screwed, we're not libertarians, we're not trying to find

some line of flight and trying to do some separate thing, we're just simply going to harden ourselves to ruling over people who need ruling over without democratic structures doing that. Now I sort of think interestingly the left is in a very similar position to that because they equally are unable to reject their whole, I think the defining feature is they're not rejecting the political collectivity. And if they're not rejecting the political collectivity and they're also facing a crisis of democracy, then they too are faced with this, I think, only alternative, which is

forms of non-democratic authority, hierarchical structures of rule. It seems to me if you're not going to, if that's not what you, you've only got a There's a limited set of options on the table. You can have the democratic model, you can say, no one gets ruled non-democratically, that's what democracy means, the peoples, whatever. I find it harder and harder to find a cogent defence of ideological democracy, but lots of people can still do that.

If you face that it has gone into crisis and you're not going to take the patriar freedom of the route, then you are talking about these systems of hierarchical authority. Left or right doesn't matter. If you're going to maintain the collectivity and you no longer see a serious, honest, democratic legitimation for that, then you're talking about how do you rule people. And I don't see how the left escapes that problem. I think it has to be saying that, okay, I'll definitely look at this.

I think this is the most interesting part of their argument, and it's also the most underdeveloped. And I don't pretend to be able to grasp half of it because it goes through all this like category theory stuff. But it's the one part of their program that I see as an... like you said, there's only several options on the table once you get to this point and I agree with you totally. But this is the one aspect program that I've never seen anyone on the right, one, acknowledge or two, criticise or even interrogate. And this is partly because, as I said, it's completely underdeveloped and the places where it is developed, it's completely abstract. There's no way, we try and do it a little bit in the

Sorry, when you say it, you mean the stuff in this article that you've just linked to us, yeah? The it is this floating… Yeah, this notion of the universal. Right. Sorry, this notion of the universal that comes out of Zalamea's Transmodernity. This is the one kind of part that I've never seen anyone from the right kind of criticise. it's not particularly well developed and it's not discussed in a critical way. So the problems that I have with it and with xenofeminism as well, still trying to figure out how to talk about concrete instantiations of this structure.

But yeah, I think it's worth taking account of as another possible option on the table. When you say concrete instantiation, is it grossly premature and crude of me to say that the implicit concrete instantiation of that is global government? Is that right or not? It certainly comes across that way in Nick and Alex's book, and I think it is for some people but I think it also has a few I mean I think this again my interpretation I think rather is currently working on a more complex we articulated I'll

yes but he's still home I don't maybe you can ask him about it it right now I'm up to that out actually actually a bad I people from there actually it's around so he's gonna jump in pretty soon to talk about this, if you want to discuss the left-right thing from his perspective as well. If you want to keep the conversation going on this. Sorry, you're saying who's jumping in? I can... Peter Wolfen. No, Peter Wolfen, no, I can't get rid of him. Peter's... he can jump in about a few minutes, maybe. This is like Dr. Phil. We've got Pete Wilfrio behind the curtain. Yeah.

I'm just trying to say it, just in case, you know, I don't know if the dialogue is dead or not, or if you want to keep going, because he will be ready soon. I just shared with him the link. And, I mean, I don't know, is Pete Wolfendale in tune with this Salome thing? Is this something that he would also be endorsing, or not? It's some kind of weird angle to that. Not as much as I'm sure he's aware of this text. I also mentioned it to him, but he hasn't responded to that yet. Because I'm taking it, if we get to the roots of this thing, I mean, we're at a very high level of philosophical abstraction on this now.

But the comment from Friedman that obviously I expect to be hugely controversial is where he says we need more competition in government he takes that as completely on the basis of what he's already said like totally straightforward and I don't think there's any jump from that to then treating the rejection of global governance as basically axiomatic You know, I think if you're coming from the left and saying, well, what is this libertarian right assumption that we're totally unhappy about?

I think it would be, and they were going to put it in the most dogmatic possible form, I think it would be fair to say that it is a rejection of the principle of global government. Precisely because that's an obstruction to competition. government competition. So if I'm on the basis of nothing, I mean, I haven't read this article Amy's linked to yet, but if it's true that the implication of that is global government and the concrete instantiation of this universe or this global government, then of course we have our contention, straight clearly. but

yeah, I mean, hi Pete we're discussing this extremely ignorantly because Amy's read it and linked it but I don't think, it's not been on our agenda and I don't know about anyone else I haven't yet read this I haven't either I can I can see the basic logical structure of the debate I think and it's interesting to kind of view it in terms of parallels between theoretical and practical reasons, and how unification sits across the two. For instance, if we weren't talking about competition between government, between conceptions of government, but truly what we're really talking about

is implementations of those conceptions, but if we weren't talking about that kind of competition and the practical domain, but we switched this into the theoretical domain and wanted to talk about competition between conceptions of reality, say between quantum loop gravity and string theory, for instance. This would give us some useful ways of thinking about what are the conditions under which that condition, that competition, is possible? And what actually is the aim of that competition? Like, what is the thing that that competition is supposed to be realizing, right? In the theoretical domain, I think it's fairly transparent, right?

is what we want is we want some kind of unified picture which gives an appropriate description of all of the phenomenon that both models do well, right? And the question of the conditions and possibility of doing that, it's something like being able to navigate between the two models such that you can see, so you need some kind of like minimal conception of what the two models agree on in order to see and how it's possible for them to even have a reasonable disagreement there needs to be some identification of commonality

that only, some of these problems only come in from that site like obviously from the site that we've been working from to do with geopolitical fragmentation and competition it looks a little bit different like if we to go to your second stage here about what are we trying to do in this competition we're trying to select and therefore eliminate the dysfunctional model and find a criteria that is completely nonpartisan between these models that will act as a criterion of selection and eliminate the bad model and preserve the good model. I think that's precisely what's at stake. The reason I try and kind of like project this over into the theoretical domain

is that in the theoretical domain it's fairly obvious or at least I think it's fairly obvious that the conditions for doing this thing you want to do, like selecting the best thing, right I'm getting rid of error right right yeah I'm involved some kind of on shared methodological framework right some some actual kind of BS level agreement the neighbors on disagreement on that ultimately integration right and then selection of an appropriate mall right on Well it's agreement only once you've done the translation of the theoretical isn't it? Yeah but...

There's a level of competition which is pre-theoretical and that you retrospectively try to understand well what is it, why did this work and why did this not, but that's retrospective on the fact that competition has actually done its work and eliminated the bad model and preserved the good model. This is where the fundamental disagreement lies is I think there are much more complicated conditions of the sorts of political competition you're talking about. Just as I think that there are these complicated conditions of possibility in the theoretical domain, I'd say they're there in the practical domain as well. and that any sort of notion of just straight-out primacy of competition,

geopolitical fragmentation, essentially ignores them. It just kind of pushes them off to one side and reifies competition in order to justify some... No, it does do that because it doesn't think we can agree. The whole point is that we can't agree. If we could agree, we wouldn't have the problem. So we have geographical fragmentation because we can't agree, so it substitutes for the whole question about agreement and disagreement. The deeper question is what the fuck is agreement in the first place, right? That's a theoretical question like you say, but it's actually when you say deeper... Right? It's a question about what's the structure of the practical domain.

Yeah, from a certain philosophical point of view it's deeper. It's not deeper from a practical point of view, is it? Well it is. From the practical point of view it might be intractable. No, right? This is the thing, right? We're talking political philosophy here, right? So we've got to be willing to answer the kinds of questions that political philosophy is. I think it's already an interesting question. I think it's true, it's within the genre of political philosophy, but it might be that by deconstructing it as political philosophy, one is already dogmatically presupposing certain structures that aren't actually

can't be rigorously presupposed. And in particular I mean the structure of theoretical agreement or disagreement has been primary over spatial separation. But the alternative is you might also be dismissing structures that have to be presupposed. There's a flip side to this. But when you say have to be presupposed, what do you mean by have to there? In order for the very notion that we're discussing, this idea of competition over something like a form of government to even make sense. But how fundamental is it making sense, Stephen? fundamental thing is that you can either separate and defend your sovereignty or

not you know whether or not that makes philosophical sense is surely then the secondary issue from a realistic point of view over the fact that you have actually effective independence look if you want to get out of this debate about political philosophy and go away and just just act right fair enough but in so far as we are talking about what political action is, right, you can't just get out of that question, right. You're saying, well, I'm advocating a certain kind of political norm, right. Well, when you're advocating that, right, you're under a certain kind of obligation to make it make sense, and I'm going to hold you to that obligation.

To enough people to make it realistic. I mean this is something that, you know, we're obviously looking at this Patrick Friedman essay, I don't know if you know it, it's in the site I hear, where he's called Beyond Folk Activism, and it's his argument for this kind of thing. And his whole point is that you can't, in the public domain, the universalised public domain, this stuff is hopeless, this is his starting point, it's not going to work. So all that you can try and do is have a project and a constituency that is realistic proportions and just persuade those people that you need to persuade in order to actually start this

experiment. As we were saying earlier, it's an empirical thing, it's not rationalistic. He says explicitly there's no a priori rational construction that can possibly manage these things. You can always be surprised by it. And so what he's trying to do is just scale it down, de-universalize it to the point where you can have a realistic party of escape and try something. The thing is there is an a priori thing in the vicinity here. It's not what he's attacking, but it is here, which is computational tractability. If you push this all the way down in the practical domain,

just as you push it in the theoretical domain, it ends up being, look, if we do things this way, if we try and process the relevant information and engage and work through our desires and work towards some sort of solution this way, it's intractable given the resources you've got, the space, the time, this stuff. We can talk about this stuff in any prioristic terms. What that tells us is, fundamentally, we just need some heuristics. We need, we need, we need, we are just going to have to make certain, certain decisions about how we do things. And they're not going to be perfect and we're just going to have to. But, right, when we're talking about what those kinds of decisions are, right,

we are doing this thing of talking about the conditions governing the process of agreeing and disagreeing either in the theoretical or the practical right so I'm happy to sort of recognize that we're confronted with a certain sort of irreducible practicality right there's a certain kind of at some point you've got to stop talking and just do right but when it comes to trying to talk about

what kind of political structures we should have there are different options the configuring how you go about handling these questions of tractability. Right, so I don't know if I'm making more sense here to people, but basically if one of the things that is sort of implicit in this kind of discussion is well look, is it possible to make democracy work? Right, well I'm sort of saying well That ends up being a question about implementation. And that's a question about sort of computational fractability

of designing an actual democratic system capable of handling. But I think that one thing I'm not sure where you're on on this, Pete, is Friedman's thing is we want lots of things to be tried and a lot of them will fail. We're not looking for a single global, universal consensual rationalistically justified system and we'll be confident that will work. We're just absolutely not, we're going in the opposite direction of that. We're looking to try a whole bunch of different things. Some of them are highly reckless, probably almost certainly going to fail but maybe could just turn out doing amazingly. Whatever we do, we want a lot of it, and built into that is a lot of it is going to fail.

So it's like plurality is fundamental. So if this heuristic of agreement, we can agree, I mean I'm sure Friedman too would like to agree that we're going to do this. We'll agree nominally that we're all going to do different stuff. But if agreement is stronger than that, and agreement is supposed to be, agreement actually begins to inhibit experimentation, then obviously he sees that as the problem rather than any part of the solution. Because you're now not doing stuff, you're not trying stuff, you're missing out on possible lessons, you're missing out on a discovery process because of the fact that you have set this precondition that there should be some large scale agreement about what you're trying to do. And that's the opposite of what he's trying to recommend.

Yes, but, I mean, there's sort of two things. One, like I say, we're arguing normative political philosophy here, right? So you're trying, we're trying to make the case for something we should do together, even if, right, that thing is... All that is is split. split right now my personal way of going about this and this is where it obviously is this big split between left and right here is that it just turns out that there's more implicit in the very demand you're making there like this there's more agreement more required agreement in there than you want you want the great you want that agreement to be as absolutely as minimal as possible and you can't have it right but put that

to one side for now, right? Let's keep on with this analogy with theoretical and practical because precisely that's the analogy which is actually active here in the notion of experiment. And the idea that, well, we just want lots of experiments. We've got as many different things that can be done. Why? Because the idea is that some of these things can be fed back to us. Like if one group do something really good, everybody else can do that if they want, right? Well, I'm not disagreeing that that is a spin-off benefit, but that by far is nowhere near a sort of fundamental condition of the legitimacy of these things. I mean, if it's just, you could equally say one of them might work and everything else

go to shit, I mean, that's also fine, you know, I mean, it's not, as far as I'm concerned, there's no axiomatic condition that it serves the geopolitical collectivity at all. But it's certainly interesting. Why are we interested in success and failure at all? Why is there any rhetoric of success and failure involved in this? Well, because it's just on Darwinian grounds that something that doesn't succeed dies. And so, I mean, it edits itself out of reality. So anything wants to succeed, if it wants to lead to anything else... Why is this a norm? Why is this something that we're saying we should have as much of this as possible? That should be more normatively obvious to a human being, I think, than anything that

you've discussed so far. If you're asking why humans should exist, then you're already lost. No, no, I'm not asking why humans should exist, right? I'm asking... Why should there be more of them? Why should there be more societies? No, no, no. Why should, right, the norm that we're interested in, right, be brute Darwinianism? It's inescapable. You can't... There's no... There is no alternative. That's what it is. No, brute Darwinianism is the way things are. It's not the way things should be, right? It's not actually normative at the end of the day. It's just a brute existential fact. If you're interpreting that... Well, that's what normativity is. Not at all, absolutely, and like, screw the naturalistic fallacy in all of its forms.

Um, like, uh, but, but, okay, let's, a slightly different perspective, right? Um, I mean, I'm quite serious about this, like, like, whenever you just appeal to Darwinianism as just a brute normative given from which political philosophy must start, right? You're admitting you don't have an argument, right? No, I think that's right, because an argument implies agreement, and we've given up on agreement. I mean, that's what Friedman's whole thing is. Agreement isn't going to... If you're waiting for agreement, you're waiting for the messianic kingdom. It presumes that...

Agreement, yeah, sorry. It presumes that agreement is even a rational possibility. And there's nothing about democratic states that makes me suspect that they're capable of reaching any kind of rational decision about anything. If anything, it seems more obvious that they're controlled by emotions and psychology and whatever else. so if you want to construct if you're a constructionist about this and want to arrive at the correct system of society you're probably not going to get there democratically fine but that's a side question as soon as you're talking about stuff like the correct system of society you're outside of Darwinianism you're talking about no I don't think that's necessarily true

there's a Darwinian translation of that which is just a functional, adaptive system of governance that will survive in a fragmented environment without overriving. Ah, brilliant. Now we've got something slightly more substantive, right? But why is this not just Darwinism, though, which I thought was the problem? Well, OK, look. The stuff comes in when you start talking about system of government, right? what is it that survives? Oh, the system of government. So what we want is the best, most successful, most adaptive system of government. What's a system of government? If what survives is

the ruins of human civilization, but it survives for a very, very long time, then obviously that's not what we're interested in. I'm not really quite following. What is meant by the ruins of human civilization? The human species would survive or not in this model, because that's actually already quite a serious task. Is the problem here that, like, Pete, you're arguing that this assumption of a Darwinian fundamental bedrock upon which the organisation of governmental structures is kind of founded is an unavowed norm. a norm and it's completely unavowed. Whereas, it's kind of saying this is just the structure

of the universe and anything that is pretending that this is not in play is a political fantasy land. Is that the problem? Yeah, basically. Because the skip is between all the normative content is contained in the idea of surviving well in what survives put it that way right what I'm sort of saying is if what you're specifying in any case is the survival of an adaptive system of government or let's put it very very minimally in terms that Nick I think would agree with right intelligence in some sense right what we want is

If just at absolute minimum and basic we're talking about the survival of intelligence, right, and I'd want to say something slightly more than that, but let's just say that, right, then that's where the normative content has been introduced into your framework, right. We might agree that, okay, yeah, then what we want is maximal experimentation in order that we get the most survivable forms of intelligence. Fine, right. but all the kind of normative content of that is in what you're using to survive. But I've got a problem with the way you're using normative, which I'm assuming is within this big sort of value distinction, all of this Western structure, which I think is deeply problematic.

I mean, if it wasn't that intelligence is demonstrably adaptive, then I don't think there would be any defense of intelligence worth adapt. if it was the fact that every society that ever had intelligence had paid a huge price for it, any species that had intelligence had been driven quickly to the edge of extinction, if it wasn't that descriptively, it was demonstrably adaptive, then it would just be a bullshit, arbitrary, normative element, and I would totally agree why the hell would we agree with that. It doesn't belong there. So the only reason intelligence plays this role is the fact that it's not on one side of the fact value distinction. If you're intelligence optimisation is not a normative decision any more than it is a

descriptive evaluation of what is successful in an absolutely stripped down Darwinian environment. So I just don't think the fact value distinction has the kind of purchase on this that you're wanting to give it. Let's put it as simple as possible. Seeing that we should redesign our society, if that redesign just means split, that's still a design decision. We should redesign our society in order to optimize for the adaptivity of intelligent

systems. That is a normal... I think you could just say to optimize intelligence production. I think any definition of intelligence that isn't already doing that is not worth having. I'm not interested in definition of intelligence that makes it some kind of luxury feature of extravagant, whatever. It's like it's either intrinsically, essentially adaptive, or it's not an interesting thing. Yes, yes, but there's a difference between saying that intelligence is essentially adaptive and saying that what we should do is act in order to maximize this. That's your normative claim, right? But is there a difference there? Is that recommendation not only to exactly synonymous with saying we should aim for adaptive success?

We should aim to survive. No, it absolutely isn't the same thing because there are alternatives. Because what? There are, there are, there are, there descriptively, right, are alternative paths other than the optimal, right? We're saying we should actively intervene to, to, to produce some optimal state, at least on, on your position, right? And obviously I, I, I have my own claim about what I think is, is optimal and what I think we should be doing, right? Yeah, but is, are you also making the claim that it is intrinsically adaptive or not? You're saying we should do this irrespective of its adaptive consequences. No, I just have a very different conception of what... I have a very different conception of intelligence and adaptation,

but also the point of doing any of this stuff, right? The thing I'm just trying to kind of get at is, like, Kit, we could collectively as the human race, and we all recognize this, we could do things in such a way that we don't end up at the optimal state. That we end up wiping ourselves out and any nascent artificial superintelligence, and there you go, right? We're seeing that we shouldn't do that. We should do things such that we reach some optimal state. But that's a substantive claim. You can't get to that claim simply from defining intelligence as adaptability.

You can't get there from here. That's the naturalistic fallacy. That's the hard line. Yes, I mean, I reject the whole notion of the naturalistic fallacy. I think it's an occidental philosophical illusion based on having taken a very wrong path. and so say that doesn't really any like with me what's the core of it but the thing is is that it doesn't have any weight with you it you you end up in an eachian position which is you end up on the one hand claiming that you don't care what anybody else thinks and not you are just going to do what you do because that's the fundamental level all all then gauging with the world on the other hand

endlessly trying to persuade everybody else to see things from your perspective. In order to... No, but it's not everyone else though, is it? I mean, on this Patrick Freeman thing, the starting point of his thing is it's completely pointless to think that you're going to persuade everyone else of anything. That's the absolute axiom that you're basing this on. You just want to persuade a realistic number of people to do what a particular program you know scale the program down to that size what he he's under no illusions he that there's no universal political program he thinks is realizable that he would find attractive well let me retreat and because I recognize bringing in this is all stuff is not getting us anywhere

right but so let me retreat on to the terms of what is the best system for producing adaptive intelligence, for optimizing adaptive intelligence, right? Because that's the standard which is governing this idea of fragmentation. And maybe you're right on that front, but there are some reasons to think that you might not be right on that front. And this is why bringing in the parallel between theoretical and practical reason and unification in the sciences is worthwhile, right? Which is, there's a reason that the sciences in the theoretical sphere are not radically fragmented, right?

Like, all of the computational resources that are given to the sciences, and by that I don't just mean pieces of computing systems, I mean the brains, the people, the books, all the stuff that's doing all the computation of processing information about the world and building some kind of or rather a patchwork of various models to describe what the world is if all of those computational resources were isolated from one another if you got all the scientists and you just put them on their own and made them work in isolation you wouldn't have what you have it would be completely impossible because the pooling of computational resources in

order to get that, right? But none of these microstates we're talking about are all Tarkic, are they? I mean Hong Kong and Singapore and all these places are massively, they're the most open societies in the world. So I don't think anyone is arguing that fragmentation means informational isolation, quite the opposite. isolation is much easier in another type of ecological system. Yes, but this is precisely where the question of these finessing, like when you get pushed on this stuff and you start saying well actually no, there are going to be overarching relations of this type or that type of the other, even simply describing it in terms of like things

will be open to information communication and transition. No, I think that you're being ridiculous at this point. This is coming out of a libertarian lineage. You're not seriously suggesting that libertarians make it as some kind of weird concession that they would have an open commercial system. I mean that's the essence of the libertarian tradition. You know, it's like they're the only people who have ever consistently and relentlessly held to that notion. So this isn't something that's been forced to. I'm not arguing against you, and I'm arguing against… But I'm just coming out of this tradition. I mean, we're talking about Friedman's... I'm sorry that I haven't read the Friedman piece. But the point is that there are unacknowledged consequences

to radicalizing libertarianism in this direction. Right? And the whole thing that I'm trying to push is that you end up having to acknowledge some kind of minimally transversal structures connecting the things that are being fragmented, right, and you need to do that even on your own terms, on your terms of optimizing of intelligence, right on those terms, right, in order to actually have optimality you need some kind of structure But I think that you're putting it a bit upside down. I mean, game theory is a theory of coordination from units that have not got any kind of

authoritative, overarching structure about them. They're radically fragmented, absolutely fragmented units of whatever scale, states, individuals, works at all levels. And of course, the whole result of this This is how you establish, in your terms, transversal relations, coordination, networks, all of this stuff. This is the philosophy of those systems. But it's just the difference, rather than assuming that you've got some authoritative, centralised, universal structure, you actually generate that stuff out of the dynamics of a fragmented distributed system. So to say that networks are somehow on your side of this rather than my side of this,

I think is just not at all the case. All network theory is much more on my side of this. I completely disagree. Because I think the comment about game theory actually sort of like deals it to some extent in so far as actually no, no game theory isn't radically open. Game theory is about games and specific game settings, right? The rules are set in advance. Game theory is not about the negotiation of those rules within which you play. You can use game theory to model situations, but only given certain very specific assumptions. They're not very specific assumptions. If you want a simple model, you have a simple model. But the game theoretical stance is based upon the elimination of presupposed

relations between elements, so that those relations have to be constructed strategically out of the interaction of those elements. It's an elimination of presupposed relations, and this is why it's scandalous to people. No, no, no, no. Because it's not making assumptions to do with solidarity and universal agreement and all of this kind of stuff that people feel comfortable with. This is where the formalism actually tells against you, right? Which is one important thing that is fixed in any game description, right? Any specific game description, for sure. But that's the mathematical formalisation of a game.

Game theory is not just described to the set of all mathematical descriptions of a specific game. It's a method for formalizing the emergence of strategic relations between distributed populations. Yes. And it's an open domain, there's an infinite number of increasingly complicated games that can be modeled, they will all be game-thetmetical. I mean it's just like the basic principles of computation, you know, anything can be modelled by Turing machine and it will be extremely complicated and all of those things have not yet been modelled by it but it's still computation. The theory of computation still holds just like the matrix of game theory still holds

on games that are intractably complicated to our current capabilities for modelling. Okay, right, but so we're on the level of formalism and we're happy with that to some extent, right? The thing that game theory can't effectively deal with is arbitrary revisability of motivation. Right? As soon as you can say anything, the fact that you think you've got a level of formalism available to you in linguistic communication that is not available to game theory, I think is an illusion. If you can say it, game theory can do it. You're formalizing it and saying it to us. If you can say those words, arbitrary revisability of motivation and that means something if that's not just white noise that you're just sharing with us if that has meaning

then it is accessible to game theory as it is to the linguistic processor. Very quickly why I am denying your claims about the formalization here which is I spent quite a long time studying Jean-Yves Girard's Ludics which is an attempt to provide a game sort of a game approach, right, to this issue of what's possible to even start seeing something, what's presupposed in even the possibility of articulating something, right? Ludics, by the way, is an alternative way to frame computation, right, because you can describe computational systems in terms of the interactive behavior in it.

Now what's most interesting about Linux, what's most interesting about it from a formal perspective, is that it is not game theory. It looks like game theory. right in fact what he what what Girard successfully manages to do is to find within the geometric structure at proof theory, sequence calculus, a kind of interactivity like he shows basically how you can turn proof trees in a something like strategies like choice trees right and show how these interact right the The really fascinating and deep insight in this is that what is not fixed, although the spaces of possible action are fixed, what is not fixed is the motivation, which is the other aspect of game theory.

game theory crucially deals with not simply interactive spaces in the sense of the spaces of possible action you can both deal with but rather the the tendencies governing how you will both act given your different motivations and your knowledge of one another's motivations right this is why I'm like there are there are specific formal reasons um... for rejecting flippant claims about the universalization of game theory there are formalisms that are deeper and these are in fact formalisms that describe the process through which the possibility of disagreement emerges from prior agreement

niche competition and in Girard's ludics, niche competition is precisely terminating computation right neat competition terminating computation emerges out of a prior messy kind of collaboration interaction which is not well typed and not well structured so like I should stop at this point but like there are there are very very specific reasons in the formalism to reject Well, I mean, look, I'm not going to push you too far, but you can see why that would engender scepticism. I mean, like, you know, either you can formalise those problems, or in which case they're formal

problems and in which case they're tractable to game theory, or you can't formalise them, in which case why should anyone pretend that we can even understand what is being said? I mean, I don't, you seem to be wanting to have your cake and eat it here and saying that there's like these limits to formalization that we can formally demonstrate exist. That's absolutely not what I said, right? What I said is a particular assumption of game theory that you were leaning on, right? Which is what? The fixity of motivation. No, why don't I say anything about the fixity of motivation? I mean, you know, if you think that the variation of motivation is an important factor, there's nothing that's going to stop that being built into a theory of games about it.

At all. You're just putting it into a metagame where there's changes in incentive structures of part of the game. I mean, you know, if you can formalize it, game theory can deal with it. I'm trying to just impose some arbitrary limit on what game theory can do. No, no, no. I just... It's not an arbitrary limit, right? In fact, it's precisely the kind of formal limit you're accusing me of. Like, look... Wow. Okay, so here's the issue, right? When you're talking about the transition between game and metagame, right? At each point that you want to start talking about changes in motivation, which aren't necessarily the same as changes in the space of possible action, right?

you have to retreat to some broader but equally fixed conception of what the more of of of what the space of motivation and action are right well that's just to say it has to be formalized and it has to be formalized just to be communicated meaningfully it's not the game theory accepts it like any formal theory accepts it just because it wants to communicate sense rather than nonsense doesn't it? It wants to produce a computable, rigorously computable model. If it was happy to just have blurry informal suggestions, then of course it wouldn't have this problem. It's not about informality, right? It's about how you formally think about these

transitions, right? How do you... So, what you have is, I've got one fixed model, and I go, that's inadequate, and you go, it's fine, I've pulled another model out of a hat, right, which is broader, right? There is a formal question about how that hat pulling happens, right? And that hat pulling and the formal study of it is something which is deeper than the specifics of the game theory that you're... And there's an actual crucial upshot of this, right? There's a really crucial and important upshot of this, which is what game theory can't deal with, and this is where we get back into normal political theorising, what it can't deal with is the importance of the

fact that often we don't know what we want. Right? And what I mean by that quite specifically is we have some idea, right, but not a complete idea of... But that's informality again, isn't it? You're saying that the system that aims to formalise strategic thinking cannot deal with fuzzy, confused, non-formal strategic orientations. Well of course. Well no, not of course. No one's communicating about that. All you're saying is just like it's fuzzy and complicated. No, no, no, absolutely wrong because you can formalise what you're calling the fuzziness. Right? formal questions deeper formal questions of the formalism you're putting forward

just thinking about I need to throw this is a bit we've possibly gone off on a and a weird time I think yeah there's a kind of worms opening we're gonna get we're getting because this one probably never end this debate is going on yeah yeah it's interesting but I am sort of probably torturing everyone here a little bit no I think everybody's very interested in this really in this debate or maybe it's just me, but I just want to kind of like bracket this and maybe we can do this again. Fair enough. But it's like 1.30 for Nick. I want to make sure that students can have a wrap-up with the class that they're in. Thank you, Pete, for being here. Yeah, sorry for taking things off in a bizarre formal direction.

No, no, I think it's actually really relevant, everything you've said, to the issues that we've been trying to talk about. It was good. For not knowing what we were talking about coming in, it was good. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Have a nice movie night. I'll leave and I'll let everything wrap up naturally. Okay, thanks. Thanks. Thank you very much. It was just not, yeah, it was probably going to keep going, so. Yeah.

Maybe we could do a last round of comment and then wrap up. Is that happy with people? Is that satisfaction? Because I think in the sidebar, there's a lot. I mean, Andrews has a lot of things. I don't know if he wants to come in and say some things. He's saying a lot in the sidebar. Yeah. I could just kind of restate. Yeah, I'm starting to see what you're getting at with this class a lot more clearly, I think. Amy's comments were really helpful. And I've had these thoughts before, but it's so hard to remember them about how agency can be factored out.

And then it's not, I was calling it Patrovision because I had a talk with Amy about that, but this kind of overview where there's no agency and no centeredness. But she's something that's not an overview that looks like its own type of centered position. and I think that might have been what Pete was kind of critiquing just now. But from that decent position, it looks truly decentered. So then it gets into, like, what are we even talking about? How are we defining who's controlling what happens next at which level? I was saying, who's steering this boat? I mean obviously the collective pronoun becomes stressed doesn't it?

Like if you allow certain kind of we's then you're already presupposing a lot. You know, Patrick Freeman's whole thing on one level is a certain abandonment of a collective program isn't it? Just to say that we aren't going to do anything so let's scale it down to a much more. a much more restrictive sense of collectivity than we've been dealing with at this point. If we is us here, then it's a lot easier, I think, for sure. I look through.

I can see you've been very busy in the sidebar, so I'll... I was just trying to restate my understanding to see if it was matching up with what other people were thinking, and thinking that what we were talking about... Like this idea, is it possible for things to be other than they are? If there's already de facto Darwinianism, who can make a decision different in that situation? I think the Darwinian thing is interesting. I think everything Pete was talking about was interesting. And one of them is this thing about how substantive is this Darwinian thing. For me, it's interesting because it is minimally substantive.

It's like just what you end up with when you strip a whole bunch of other things out. You know, rather than, you know, there's a construction of it, a critical construction where you say, oh, you've got this kind of fixation on Darwinism being a great thing and you're pushing that hard. And I would put it the other way around, that it's just like, if you really don't think that there are these structures of plausible agreement, if you're going to get right down to basics, you know, what are you left with after you've torn out everything that you've been tearing out, then that's the thing that deserves to be called Darwinism. You know, experimentation and selection. If you want to give that another name, you can, but it seems to me pointless given that's

surely what Darwinism means. But I think that's a huge, that's a really huge thing. And I think the fact it's important to Pete shows that. I mean, it's like, you know, there's no way someone can grant what I'm saying about the state of Darwinism without giving away much more than they probably feel happy with. you've most of this whole most of what's going on this whole course you get for free once you accept that when you tear things down to the baseline you've got this kind of structure competitive selective mechanism.

I'm wondering if I could ask a brief question. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so to the normativity point, I kind of hopped in slightly late, but I'm wondering if it follows a distinction of deontology versus consequentialism, like the ends in themselves versus means in ethics or moral theory. The relationship between that distinction and the whole question about normativity I think is complicated because I think both consequentialism as best represented by various forms of utilitarianism and deontology are both systematically western in the fact that

they're very comfortable with the fact value distinction. or Fogonor structures. And my level of interrogation would really want to point beyond that. Like, you know, as a utilitarian or as a Kantian moral theorist, you could still be equally happy about criticizing the naturalistic fallacy as people. I simply do not think there is such a thing as the naturalistic fallacy. I think the naturalistic fallacy is not a fallacy. I think Western philosophical tradition has gone deeply wrong in thinking there is such a thing as the naturalistic fallacy. And that the, you know, we've been talking about this in previous weeks in terms of diagonal

critical thinking. Like between facts and values there is a diagonal not more formal relationship. I don't think this can become huge because it's not a trivial claim that it is made. Yes, so with regard to the absence of the fallacy of naturalism, there's an aspect of power, social Darwinism almost, and a practicality I guess, that's more in the East than in the West, some parts of the East. Well, that would be my inclination. You know, again, it's not a trivial claim,

but I think that the Chinese philosophical tradition is far less susceptible to orthogonal argument than the Western tradition. And if you have a notion like self-cultivation as a basic moral principle, is that on the fact side or the value side? Clearly, it doesn't work. It's diagonal. you know, in talking about something as a process of self-cultivation you're describing it naturalistically and you're also affirming it normatively and neither of those registers is obviously primary over the other, I think it's essentially diagonal ethical dimension isn't it?

okay thank you and so I hope everyone's kinda obviously be her eccentricly structured structured event this week and I hope that's cool with everyone and I've very much enjoyed all your participation there's still a few minutes if anyone wants to say anything now otherwise I would optimistically

say that I will talk to you again next week and thanks a lot for your involvement Nick, could I just briefly ask, can you hear me? Yeah, sure. Yeah, just have you, it wasn't on the reading list, but it was a name that kept popping up when I was trying to read into it, Spencer Heath. Spencer Heath. Yeah. I'm not sure that's ringing a bell, actually. It was in an article by Arnold Kling on competitive government versus democratic government. Oh, okay, yeah, I remember that piece. In 2008. And he referred to it as, I think he said it was the earliest sort of time he found the

idea cropped up. Okay. At least in a sort of modern, 1936, a self-published monograph called Politics. versus proprietorship, cited in Nelson 2005, among other places. I will take that. I was just wondering whether, because I couldn't find the monograph, but I could find a later book of his called Citadel and the Market. Citadel and Market and Alter, Emerging Society, which I'm assured his grandson or someone says contains the same ideas and develops them. Okay. It might prove to be a total dead end. Okay, that's great. But I was just wondering, no. Yeah, no, but I will definitely,

if I haven't followed this up by next week, then I will deserve forest banking. Anyway, thank you very much. Yeah, that's good. Let's look at Spencer Heath. Thanks. So I don't know where everyone is. I'd just like to chime in on a practical thing. Yeah, yeah. Of the class. Those of you who do not have the classroom, just message me or email, register, any of the messages, I'll get it. And I'll get you set up with the classroom page so you can blog and add links and everything.

So I think for the last two courses, is I use the same address for the classroom. I haven't, I confess, looked at it this time. Is it practical to just carry on with the same one? Because maybe that's the easiest. It's always a different one. It's just always the same link, classroom.google.com. When you're logged in to the NewsCenter account, it will automatically bring up the class. I've already invited you to the class, so you'll be able to just accept it. Right. But we have many students who haven't gotten in. So if you need help getting in, just get a hold of me. Contact me. OK, cool. Great. OK.

Are we done, guys? Yeah. I'm sorry. I was attempting not to shoot her off in some other direction, which is what happened. But, yeah, thanks anyway. Yeah, thank you all. That's really good. Okay, have a good week then. See you all. Yeah, bye. Thanks.