All right, so welcome to this is the open session here of Outer Edges with Nick Land. We're recording this for some of the students who might have missed this and for the people who are just maybe on the outer edges of joining the course and have any kind of questions. The official course will start next Sunday, June 12th. And the time will be 10 or 10.30, we'll discuss which one's better for you, Nick. Sure. I'm pretty flexible now, actually, on this. Okay.
I think then 10.30 to 1 o'clock will be the time. That's the better time for me. And I'll go for it a little bit later for some global people. And yeah, so without that, I'll pass it on to Nick and you can start. And Anders, I'll already post the syllabus. You can access it if you need to learn. So Nick? Right. Okay, well, I might need a bit of hand-holding just initially about what is the best thing to do with this open session. I'm assuming the goal of it is to just give people a chance to talk about what the course might consist of to see whether they would be interested
in pursuing it. Yeah, so I think the best thing for it is to give it an overview since it's sort of, in a way, a little bit, it's still a little cryptic from the syllabus, so getting a perspective of your research interests, why you're... So maybe a little personal statement on why you're proposing it, and where you'd like to go with it. And then we can go over briefly the readings and then have a question answered. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think there's two... There's two sides to the course. There's one that is occulted by the fact that it's kind of implicit.
I can imagine us ending up spending most of our time talking about it, but it's not really represented on the syllabus. It's taken as a kind of assumption, which is, if I was going to, as I have done in preparation for this, put a little label on that, it would be catabolic geopolitics, geopolitics, which is say an assumption that part of what is the interesting times that we now live in is that we've crossed a threshold where the basic global trend is disintegrative. And there's a vast amount that could be said about this.
I'm assuming pro and contra. So it's the hypothesis that is assumed, of course. But I'm extremely open to the fact that people might want to challenge it, and I think those challenges would be interesting. I've got a little quote that I think might be relevant to this. This is from a text that's over 20 years old by Robert Kaplan, which people might know, called The Coming Anarchy. It was published as a book and also as an essay in the Atlantic magazine in February of 1994. He starts this, it's done as an essay journalistically, so it's dramatic, so he wants it to be vivid
and concrete. And he starts off talking about what's happening in West Africa at that time, where, if people remember, was extremely chaotic and there was war in Sierra Leone and in a lot of these small West African countries. And to quote him now, he says, West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress in which criminal anarchy emerges as a real strategic danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migration, the increasing erosion of nation states and international borders and the empowerment of private armies, security firms and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated
through a West African prison. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the often extremely unpleasant to discuss that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence, as I intend to do in this article, I find I must begin with West Africa." So I think that this text is extremely prophetic. I think I'll just give people the link actually since I've got it right here.
And I think there's at least a case that this is the trend to be watched. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of people who aren't persuaded that this is basically what we're seeing, that there is a kind of, has been a, we've crossed some threshold and we're now in a post-Westphalian order where the basic dynamics that were towards the consolidation of states are now working in the other direction. There's a list of people that I can put on for reading of this. Two who immediately come to mind is Martin Van Creffelt. I'll give a specific link for that later.
He's just a name right for me now. William S. Lind, who I can give an interesting little video link for, where he's very explicit about talking about it in terms of the end of the Westphalian order. I think there's definite reasons for this. It's not just some random thing that's happened. It's tied up with complicated processes that we will inevitably be talking about to do with technology, to do with media, to do with economics, massively to do with the Internet.
And so this I take was going to be the kind of undertow of the course. I think if a majority of people firmly believe that there was absolutely nothing to this notion that we were now in a catabolic phase of geopolitical history, then the course would go in a direction I'm not anticipating, but I hope I'll be flexible enough to adjust to that eventuality was it to happen. The other half, which is the half I'm sort of seeing as the explicit content of the course, There's a list of thinkers and their ideas that the fundamental idea at stake there is
about space as an alternative to dialectical process. to say, rather than in a situation where person A has a particular first order political objective and person B has another contradictory first order political objective, rather than them slugging it out, reaching a conclusion, reaching a reconciliation and that then being implemented politically that space is used in order for both of those alternatives simultaneously to be developed in spatial separation.
And this has a long history to it. It's been suggested that this is a basic trend of sort of Anglophone political culture. you know, sorry, I'm trying to remember his first name, the Anglophone challenge guy, Bennett, basically draws a distinction between what he sees as an Anglophone and a continental political tradition, where the continental tradition is dialectical, like, you know, you have a political collision, it's resolved by a political reformation in place, you change the state, the model obviously is the French Revolution. You've got one position, another position, the solution to that, the historical resolution
is a transformation of the political order that takes, that occurs in time as a political revolution. And Bennett says that the Anglophone tradition tends instead to seek a resolution in space through separation. And the great model of that, of course, is the American Revolution as opposed to the French Revolution. Rather than the American Revolution is trying to transform the structuralist in time from a model that they were dissatisfied with to one that they were satisfied with, instead they separated. They had a war of independence rather than a political revolution.
And America is born in this spatial solution rather than the dialectical solution to a political problem. So I think this is a very sort of deep and fundamental historical option that is at stake in this thing. It's not anything particularly new. This arguably has a very strong cultural affinity with the Anglophone political tradition and with because it has an affinity with the origin of America as a war of separation or independence, it obviously its impact on the global order is huge and not at all a marginal one.
So the reading list that I have for this side of the course is more contemporary thinkers, but ones that I think are definitely within this lineage. And the first session of the course was going to be dedicated to what I think is a very, extremely interesting but quite restrained exploration of this topic by Scott Alexander, which he calls this model archipelago, and talks about what is in fact a utopian society, or a utopian order, I should say, not a utopian society, a utopian order that is based precisely
on this principle of separation and spatial antipolitics, anti-dialectics. I'm going to let people jump in, so I'm not going to do a massive ramble, but I'll just say, I'll just try and justify the various elements within this, within the title. So why do I say metapolitics? Southern politics because rather than seeking a resolution between two first order political preferences, what's at stake in this discussion is a framework in which either or both of those first order political options could be evolved independently.
So say in contemporary terms one has a first order political preference of great popularity at the moment, or topicality for obvious reasons, which is a notion of a universal basic income. Now the notion of a universal basic income is a political objective, it's not a meta-political objective. A meta-political objective would be to say what framework would be required such that those interested in exploring the possibilities concretely, realistically, effectively executing a universal basic income, were able to do that in a social environment that was comparatively free of interference and aligned intrinsically sympathetic to that objective.
Now I think that this kind of thinking is intrinsically not very complex, I mean it's a fairly straightforward move to make, but it seems to me deeply unrepresented in the debates presently taking place. People are extremely attached to first order political objectives. They're extremely attached to a dialectical slanging match between we should do A or we should do B rather than the meta-political alternative which is if you want to do A and I want to do B what kind of arrangement will allow those two possibilities to be simultaneously explored.
And simultaneously here is obviously immediately a reference to spatiality. We don't need a revolution in this context, we need a war of independence, we need independence processes that will allow these various first order preferences to be investigated separately. Now I'm not at all pretending that there aren't very serious objections to this type of thinking and I think that those objections also are a core part of the course. I hope by the end of it we would have exhausted and in some detail entertained the reasons,
the definite reasons rather than mere negligence, why people would have problems with this type of thinking. And I think very early on that would be one of the principal topics of discussion, like Why is this spatial, metapolitic stance so apparently unattractive, so underdeveloped and under-supported relative to these first-order political concerns? And then, final thing for me now, there's a massive set of discussions in all the literature about the concrete problems attending this, like separation in space, independence, the
pursuit of disparate political regimes and political objectives is not a straightforward thing. There are huge obstacles and complexities involved in that. And that obviously too is a staple discussion topic for the course. Our starting point in some ways is Robert Nozick's discussion of this in very abstract philosophical terms in his Anarchy State Utopia. And he already is attending very specifically to the kind of obstructions and obstacles that this thinking is going to face.
And I think this quickly gets into some extremely interesting territory and also clicks onto important trends. Like I think the kind of obstacles that are faced are not static obstacles, they're highly dynamic and dependent on particular historical opportunities. And we're living in a time where those opportunities are not fixed or predictable or straightforward. And so that too I think is a key thread of discussion that I would expect to be taking place here. So maybe I should sort of pass it back in case anyone has some response to this before
anything further about it. I don't think so, I think that seems pretty clear, straightforward, if you can say straightforward straightforward about that. But my questions are much more about the practicalities, the timings. I thought this seminar had already started once. Is it slightly delayed in starting?
So it's just a kind of pragmatic... Yeah, I think that honestly you should get onto my boss Tony about that. I'm a peon in terms of the actual structure of this thing. But is it still a two-part? This is what you just said? What's kind of part one? We haven't started yet. We haven't started. If it runs forward, it will start next Sunday, I think, is the plan. Okay. But as I say, yeah. It's still the two-module structure is still the intention, is that? Yes. Yes, but this is an NCRMP structure.
They work in these modules. They're nice actually, like a four-week module. It's a nice building block. And so it's just in conformity with that structure. But you haven't said anything about the second block. Is that like a... Well, in some respects, in so far as I'm able to hang fire on that, it's useful to know where people's interests lie and what is working and what isn't working. It's certainly possible, and there's obviously people want to know what the second module would be. But my experience so far with these seminars is that they're very dynamic in terms
of being student driven to a large extent. I'm often very surprised and interested by where they end up. And so it's nice to have a bit of flexibility to be able to respond to the sort of lines that are opening up in terms of the discussions we're having. Yes. I've got a little comment from Joshua here saying resource allocation, not all space I mean, for 100% we would be talking about all that stuff.
It's getting onto very concrete questions about this, and it's perhaps better to start with the concrete problems in some way. It's a philosophical vice to start purely with the abstract philosophical structure of these problems and pretend that the concrete issues are just to be cleaned up as detail at the end, so I'm very receptive to these kinds of things. And certainly I'm receptive to the notion that the obstacles are huge. So there's a very big gulf, which again, I expect to be a really open topic for us in
this course, between the historical reality of the fact that we are entering a catabolic geopolitical phase and the kind of neat philosophical and ideological schemas that would try to exploit that to do something so philosophically satisfying that it gets called a utopia. I mean, it's an interesting thing that Nozick's final chapter, he himself calls it utopia. And I have to say that makes my hackles rise. I see that as intrinsically critical, an intrinsically critical judgment.
And so anything that is oriented towards causing problems for that I think is utterly respectable in terms of a realistic analysis and a realistic intervention on the discussion for sure. Sorry, so the kind of minimal state, is that the utopia that you're... Well, the utopia for Nozick is a society that is completely voluntary in the fact that the
Only people who are inhabiting that society have chosen to inhabit the society as the society that they could conceivably... He actually uses the best of all possible worlds. So there is no imaginable society they could inhabit that would be preferable to them to the society that they actually do inhabit. Because the ideological sorting system is working so smoothly and cleanly in this massively distributed fragmented order that everyone chooses to inhabit the society that fulfills their preferences and so the response to any complaints they might have about that society
is to say well why are you living in this society? Because you don't have to. So he's doing it as philosophy, so it's highly abstracted, and he's not pretending that this is corresponding to the concrete geopolitical reality. But as an abstraction, it's intriguing, and it's not that it doesn't connect onto things that people have tried to do. But I think you'd have to say that the balance between this working out and this coming across certain massive roadblocks, the roadblocks hugely predominate.
So part of the question is what are those roadblocks? Why do they predominate? How do they work? And what's the dynamic of those roadblocks? Is it that they just simply are inevitable structures of human society that aren't going to go away? Or are they actually in some ways historically mutable conditions that can be worked at in various ways? Can I ask a question? Of course. But so you just kind of said the word voluntary. This idea that you have these individual particles
who have choice to choose whatever society suits them. But what are we talking about when we talk about these things that are attributed with choice or some kind of voluntary intentionality here? Right. because of the bits and pieces that I've read on this talk about this individual. And I think that's the kind of general go-to construct that we think of, talking about this in a concrete register. But I feel like, I don't know, this needs to be and probably will be pushed into a little bit more. But maybe we can talk about what that individual who has a choice
is or is going to be. Yes, I mean I think that's obviously huge in lots of different ways and some are kind of quite awkward dimensions that we get into quite quickly with that. I'll just bracket that for a minute. But the first thing to say I think is that what is the agent that is involved in political complaint. Because I think whatever the agent capable of exit or free submission to ideological sorting, movement according to their political preferences, is the same agent, however compromised
they may be, that is the agent of protest, of dialectical antagonism, of complaint against a regime. So if you're going to dismantle one of them, one side of that, it seems to me you have to dismantle the other side. I mean, if you think that there is some agency of protest, then how can you deny also that there is an agency of flight, exit, shopping, shopping, regime shopping, you know, it seems you have to take that as a package. So you can go into some kind of extreme sort of anti-humanist dissolution of the political
subject which of course is an entirely philosophically respectable direction to take and highly encouraged. But if you do that you have to do it reciprocally, you know, you can't leave a subject of protest unimpaired and while dismantling into minute incoherent pieces the subject of flight, it seems to me those two things, it's the same problem. Cool. Joshua, for some reason, is silent but producing these giant screeds down the side of the screen
that are a little bit… I'm not sure whether I should break off and read this huge essay that he's just put down about Ian Banks and such like. They should do that later unless everything goes very quiet here. Or he could be nudged to actually say something. I don't know whether that's possible. If you can hear me, Joshua, why don't you actually make a pronouncement in audio space? Joshua Manning Well, sorry, yeah, I just stepped away for a moment to refill my coffee, so I missed half of what you were saying. Yeah, I'm just saying that there's this huge essay now appearing down the side of the screen, but it might be better to get the audio version of that,
and you would then command people's attention more straightforwardly, I think. Oh, yeah, well, I'm sorry, I'm also working on some deadlines right now, so I'm doing the multitasking thing at the moment. Can you not speak one thing and write something else at the same time? I was just thinking about Ian M. Banks' novels, obviously his work is kind of, they're set in a broadly sort of liberal frame at least in so far as a kind of social liberalism is concerned if not necessarily economic liberalism. And obviously that's provided by having a sort of unlimited base of economic and material
gain that's largely coordinated by artificial intelligence and of course this sort of spatial politics maybe that you're discussing in which they can basically expand anywhere in interstellar space to gain new resources. So they aren't limited by – in the same way like we are, I guess, by the metabolism of a single planet or anything like that. So they can effectively mine unlimited spatial geography. But I mean the major drama of the novels really comes from the fact when they interface with other cultures that don't share their same sort of like social values or their sort of like meta-political values. So I mean if you think about this I guess maybe related to another science fiction order
like Star Trek, you know, when they come to the Borg, that believes that everybody should be part of this same singular entity and any sort of, like, difference is no longer tolerated. So you kind of have these sort of different competing, you know, politics that disagree with some of the very basics of the metapolitical or either because people are not able to comprehend from their personal cultures is the sort of reason why this metapolitical order operates. So if you have an anachronistic feudalist society, for instance, that believes you are working under limited resource assumptions or something, you have to grab as much territory as possible, then they're going to basically not be able to accept the premises
upon which your metapolitical order is grounded. Yeah. I think that's deeply germane to this. And I think that Scott Alexander is in a way halfway between Ian Banks and some of the more dark and crunchy versions of this kind of thinking. I mean, it's very interesting that the culture is completely homogenous. I mean, there are these differences, like if you're a real pervert, really, in bank systems and you want more excitement than is provided by the culture, you get into this
special circumstances thing and these forms of hard interaction with other societies. But generally speaking, the whole of the culture has this unchallenged, utterly homogenous, coherent, universal vision of the good life, of how to order a society. There are no… there's no politics in the culture at all, is there? And space isn't really used in the terms that we'll be talking about in this course. It's not used to resolve disputes because there are no disputes. Like you say, the only disputes are with alien, weird, perverted aliens who are almost always
deeply regressive, aren't they? All Banks' interesting, i.e. troublesome aliens are always attached to quite explicitly these very, very reactionary social models taken from terrestrial history. So I sort of feel that Ian Banks cheats a bit in this way. Is it really plausible that you could have a kind of galactic civilization with no cultural heterogeneity at all? Is he so convinced of the perfect attractiveness of the culture that no one anywhere would
want to go Amish or in some other way depart from this homogenous cultural consensus? That seems to me sort of strange and it's just by building that assumption into it, obviously the culture doesn't have any of the kind of problems that I think need to be assumed, problems that are being faced and will be faced and any robust social order needs to deal with, for Banks just don't even figure, he just writes them out of the script from the start. Well, but doesn't the sort of archipelago theory also do this by kind of basically arguing that everybody is going to agree to a certain sort of, you know, schema of a basic non-interference resource allocation and then free travel.
So, I mean, you kind of, there are sort of, you know, uniform agreement to some very basic principles. And I mean, this also happens in the culture, but, you know, I mean, people basically in the culture are allowed to live under any type of body type, gender, you know, reorganization, which they wish to, or social structure, so long as it doesn't basically interfere with other people's freedom of choice. Yeah. Culture. I would say he's definitely intermediate, Scott Alexander, because the archipelago consists of societies with very different norms. And I think, I mean, one of the things I would hope to do on this is maybe expand our range of imagination in terms of what these norms might be, because like in Banks, Scott Alexander's
only imaginative range is between more or less reactionary social models. So he's got this San Francisco polyamorous hyper-liberalism at one end of the spectrum, and it just then goes back in what is basically a diachronic series of more and more conservative and reactionary models. But they're all given space, at least, in the archipelago. So it's no coincidence I use the Amish. I think the Amish is the model that is at the front of people's imagination when they think about these sort of things. And Scott Alexander has Amish-type societies in the archipelago.
It's a kind of generalization from contemporary American culture wars, and the archipelago is meant to give hyper-blue-staters and hyper-red-staters their own space. Well, but it seems like it assumes a sort of separation between material concerns and maybe more soft social concerns, and then just putting one thing into one category and these become the decisions of the meta-political order. Sorry, can I just take you back one second? It, you mean, are we talking Scott Alexander now or Ian Banks? Scott Alexander and I guess Dan Banks both kind of assume that there's these hard material concerns that once those are resolved, then people can shuffle whatever sort of soft social,
political, emotional concerns. But it's making a hard separation between these things and these things aren't always – they're often intertwined. There's not like an easy, you know, where one can just sort of cut a line down the middle of it and say, okay, these become the metapolitical problems and now these become, you know, our sort of social problems. I mean, sorry, I think that this is like totally germane, but for some reason I'm just getting lost slightly on this usage of the meta-political in this terms. Because I guess I'm seeing in Banks' model has no meta-political problem at all.
You know, like you say, everyone just buys into this homogenous set of cultural assumptions, this total material abundance. There is no antagonism between first-order political preferences at all, as I can see in the culture. That's not based on a minutely close reading, so maybe they could be detected, but if so, they're extremely hard to detect. Scott Alexander at least sees that they are there and that they can be largely dealt with by separation, but then the reason that I'm putting his model in this intermediate role is he does assume a very thick fabric of institutional coordination between these different micro-societies.
I would say we'll do this, we'll look at this text definitely more carefully, But I think to a very evasive degree, he assumes that a lot of what I would see as first-order political preferences can be built into the meta-political fabric. So, for instance, he has a whole thing about, he says, the big question is what about the children? So you have some nightmarish reactionary society that is doing things to its kids that are considered deeply objectionable, whatever it would be, some kind of brainwashing or arranged
marriages, I'm sure everyone can imagine those type of things. And he thinks that those things can actually be resolved in this institutional fabric. So that makes the whole thing a bit banksish, it makes it all a bit soft in my opinion. It's a bit of an easy way out for this because, you know, well this is my starting point that people are going to have to drag me up from step by step with extreme resistance at every level is Hobbesian anarchy, which is the stage, which is the baseline of international relations theory. That's the starting point of this course, taking the world as it is, that there
is no credible international moral political fabric of the world. What little fabric there is coming to pieces and the hard cases, the North Koreas, people can put their own examples, they have to totally be on the table. They're not on the table for banks, they're not on the table even for Scott Alexander, they need to be on the table and a disintegrated social order that cannot deal with those kind of hard cases, of people that seem to be determined collectively to do something utterly obnoxious, perhaps threatening, without any respect for the global order of any kind whatsoever.
If those cases are not on the table, I think accusations of utopia are entirely justified. So I constantly want there to be, as a background to this, this baseline level, IRT, Hobbesian level where it's all based on balance of power, deterrence, game theory, hard diplomacy in a context of absolute non-agreement between disparate social formations that do not share any common values. If they share common values they have to be shown to emerge out of this anarchic substructure.
And I don't think Scott Alexander does that and I absolutely don't think Ian Banks does that. But I think it can be done. I think that international relations theory, whatever its faults and its different things, It deals with the real world and it deals with a world in which there is not agreement on fundamentals at all. And it deals without relying heavily on the credibility of supposed international authorities. So I think we can do at least as well as that.
I'll say out loud what I wrote. I haven't read the culture series, but I've read Asimov's foundation series, and in that there's the first foundation, which is technoscience, and then the second foundation, which is psychoanalysis and microgestures, mind control, and then the, and then it spoilers everyone, but the third foundation swoops in at the end, and it's Gaia, and it's everything is already alive and becoming more and more harmonious over time. time faster than predicted by the second foundation. And I think those types of emergent logics that are self-describing and they kind of – it's not transcendent exactly, but it's coalescent – might be a way for people who
are – or ideologies that are not in communication with each other to become in communication despite being opposites or despite being in conflict. Well, this is very like Robert Wright's Non-Zero. I don't know whether you know that book. It's interesting. It's based on game theory, and he basically sees this kind of teleological trend on the planet towards increasing compliance with non-Zero-sum games. So rather than tribe A and tribe B saying, you know, my win is your loss and vice versa, You know, the trend as he sees it is towards these cooperative forms of social amalgamation. But the only thing I'd say about that is that it's so tempting.
I mean, I strongly believe that there are these emergent dynamics. It's not like I think there's something wrong fundamentally with the philosophical idea here. But it's so tempting to make those nice and comforting and cuddly that I just think it It behooves us intellectually to try to cause problems for that and to really concentrate on the hard cases and the worst cases and not try and induce some invisible hand to just bail us out of these difficult problems. So I think it's part of the agenda, this, but I'm going to be obnoxious about it consistently.
So, how neutral is this second-order metapolitical structure, though? Does it not, and maybe I think Joshua was kind of getting at this too, sort of disguise some other norm that there will be societies that flourish within its dictates, within this particular kind of pessimistic framework about and a kind of supposition of conflict
as a basic governing level of how things happen. Is it not something that's neutral at all and it's kind of disingenuous to talk about it as a sort of, I don't know, empty neutral form that then kind of brings everything else into some kind of other order. So yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, to say just totally that is a huge discussion to be had. I would love to catalyze that discussion in this course and I hope it can do that because
I think exactly that argument is implicit in the current ideological structure of the world. The interesting bits of it, they're all, no hang on I'll take it a step back because Because there are lots of other interesting but, I would say, more awkward parts of the ideological array at the moment. But that particular argument, I think, has got the greatest philosophical and ideological gravity of anything that could be talked about at the moment. And I think it defines, maybe I'm going to make trouble for myself in saying this, but
I think it almost defines really what left and right as interesting categories could mean. Because I think there is, you know, there's obviously an intrinsic, telic consciousness about the desirability of global, universal, human coordination within a world state or some similar thing and that anything other than that is from that point of view, you
know, to be deeply resisted, deeply resisted because it will lead to unnecessary suffering, it will lead to discrimination, it will lead to all kinds of bad political things and I I think there's no doubt on the other side that the notion of spatial meta-politics is a particular, I would want to say ultimately the dominant yet still latent intrinsic lineage of liberalism. It's a much more problematic configuration of liberalism than anything we've yet seen, And it's certainly nothing like liberalism as it has evolved as a sign within the American
world. But I think that ultimately it finds its greatest affinity in this particular current. And of course, liberalism is subject to leftist ideological critique of an extremely rigorous, deeply grounded kind. And it would be an absolute travesty not to explore that. And so, in some ways, without wanting to sort of at all denigrate what you're saying here, I think it's like there's a deep inevitability about that criticism. I think it's like it of course has to happen. The only reason it couldn't happen is if the left, as it has been constructed over the
course of the last two centuries, had totally deactivated itself and refused to engage in political discussion at all. Now Scott Alexander is an interesting person in this respect because he's pushing this quite hard. So he's, I would say, it's deeply compromised from a more cynical, Hobbesian point of view, but still he's gone 70% of the way in this respect. And he will defend, he will systematically defend ideological tendencies that work towards this kind of meta-political sorting.
So for instance, recently and in other times he said that he just doesn't understand leftist abuse against the notion of seasteading. He says why are they doing this, you know, like these seasteaders, okay they might all die at sea, they might whatever, you know, but why should that upset the left, like let them go and die at sea, why the hostility, why the abuse? And I don't know whether that's disingenuous, I don't think it is, I don't think he's He's a disingenuous person, but who cares at psychology. But it's because he, even in this American framework, he's still a liberal of a deep kind, you know, in that he really thinks that there's this fundamental right for people
to follow their own paths collectively or individually, and that that should be just acknowledged as a basic thing. And of course there is a leftist objection to that. And I don't think it's unrealistic. I don't think it's an unrealistic objection in the sense that I think that most of the things that the left has worked for would find this an extremely challenging environment. And we get back to Joshua's thing about resource constraints and economic fundamentals and all of this kind of thing. I mean, if there are societies that can systematically poach economic competence out of other societies
at will, if there are societies that are engaged in various kinds of unrestrained economic process that can make deals with other fragments of this totality to their own interest or whatever. All of these things are going to be deep problems for leftist political ideals, absolutely, 100%. So, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things that can be said about them. One of them is how inevitable is this? Is there a serious leftist agenda that could be persuasively globalizing under current
conditions? So that's one thing. Is this just some deep problem built into the structure of history that the left has to try and accommodate itself to, however uncomfortably? That's one option. Because I'm assuming that a critique that is just, ends up saying this is really not nice is not somewhere you want to end up. Does this distinction then, this very, very deep distinction that you can draw between the left and the right, come down to just a basic philosophical presupposition about what humans are, what they do, that they will never ever bleed the conflict out of their
ways of being socially, and also about what the universe does. And maybe this particular more pessimistic point of view is taking a comparably small amount of terrestrial history as its sample. And then, I mean, there could be, this is like, you know, this is not really a very good argument against it, but some kind of tendency towards a change in that basic structure that leads to something like what Anders was kind of saying, that there's some sort of evolutionary twist that, you know, somehow fundamentally changes
the way people or whatever work together to create something that's much more harmonious naturally rather than this kind of conflict based model being forever and always applicable in future cosmic history Is that the level that we're on? I think that is definitely profoundly connected to the level that we're on conflict is a complicated category here because I don't, I think that the game theoretical position on this, it's not that people obviously are seeking to maximize conflict generally.
I mean, I say generally because anything that sounds like a concession to utopian hope is something I immediately want to scrub out of this. I think there will always be people who just want to cause trouble. There will always be the worst possible case, or you should always assume it. And the sort of international relations theory position, I deeply respect, which is that you always judge potential adversaries by their capabilities, not their intentions, which is to say, it's not that you want to fight them, But your assumption is always, if they were to fight us, what would happen?
You know, could we deal with that? And I see that all of these fragments in a whole universe are facing that situation. Like, they would have to be... When I say they have to be, okay, that may be building too much. it. My assumption would be those of them that take security concerns seriously would have much greater survival potential than those that didn't. But the implication of spatial metapolitics is that you can go anywhere you want on that spectrum. You can go to the extreme way you will assume I'm going to straw man and as this thing, I'm not saying he's saying
this but just a straw man version, extreme straw man version, where literally the hand of God is working through the world and bringing everything into harmony and so you could build a micro society on that basis that would say look, we need nothing except a minimal domestic police force, even that will be unnecessary ten years down the road. We're all going to end up loving each other and people wasting money on security or wasting mental power on security are just simply squandering resources. That is an option. Of course, meta-politically, there's no way you can exclude that from consideration.
I would only say that my money is going to be invested in fragments that do take security seriously, that assume trustlessness rather than trust and see trust as something that has to be built, that exclude all optimistic utopian teleologies from their geopolitical thinking and try to make these things work even when you're dealing with Kim Il-Joon or whatever his name is now and various psychopathic lunatics rather than friendly, rational, cooperative agents.
So yes, in a nutshell, I think that is the big distinction. I think the big distinction is whether you think the Hobbesian starting point is to be respected for its realism or to be denounced for its gratuitous, pessimistic assumptions about the nature of humanity, history and nature in general. I'm speaking for myself here, but it would be really cool in this course if you could give us some materials that clarify what you're saying is the telos of liberalism, just so
I can get my head around it. That would be cool. Well, I think it's on us to produce those materials, honestly. I mean, I think that this way we are on, it's called Out Edges because I think we are on this ragged edge of this process and there's a bunch, you know, we'll be talking about a lot of interesting people, but I think that that, the notion of what liberalism is becoming across the threshold of the world, in the catabolic phase of global history, what liberalism looks like. I think this is unexplored territory. That's my driving motivation for this course.
I think that we've had this whole, and we'll talk about this I think quite explicitly early on, we've had this neoliberal, stroked, neoconservative constellation which belongs to a certain epoch. And I think everyone can see that it is now in profound crisis. It's just, I know I have my own sort of bubble on this, but I just see this, I'm bombarded by news of every kind. It's just telling me that what we're used to as this kind of fundamental set of assumptions about political aspiration and the norms of sound government,
both domestically and internationally, are really entering a crisis period. And I think it's for us to try and push beyond that and look beyond it and get some sense of where the actual trends are taking these things. because what liberalism has meant is definitely something that is flaking apart extremely rapidly.
I mean, 20 years or so ago, the syllabus couldn't, I guess, couldn't not have included something like the TAS. Right. which is also highly relevant definitely, yeah, still right, so we are so we're still talking about enclaves then yes, we're talking about enclaves but I think we can add a lot more
I mean, the thing about a TAS the temporary aspect of it, I think there's a lot of nonsense in certain circles of the right, of the new right, to do with basically thinking that the criticism they have with existing systems is that they're not durable and that they can provide a model for some permanent social order that can just engrave itself eternally on the cosmos. I mean, I find that utterly nonsensical. So in that respect, this temporary is to be appreciated, of course. But I think it's extreme in Hackenbeil.
He's really saying, look, we've got this world order that doesn't accept the sort of things we want to do. Some of them, if one was going to become... I think lots of people might have problems with some of the things Hackenbeil wants to do, but leave that aside. And because of that, temporary means almost like a rave, you know what I mean? It's like you get six hours where you can just do your thing, and then you scram before the police turn up. Now, I think we can move things on considerably beyond that. I think we're talking about state structures
that have deterrence capability of some credibility, that can maintain their independence, that can claim to a durability that is at least comparable to the other social structures that surround them. At least, you know, the concrete ones, the very durable, deep ones, like whatever, patriarchy with as many, inverted commas around that, or something like that, might be on another the temporal order, but the state systems that are surrounding it. So I don't think we're talking about temporary autonomous zones in that hacking-based sense. I think that's too unambitious.
I think that's too unambitious. For the sort of catabolic period that we're entering into, I think we're talking about something much more solid than that. So that's the basic way that I think this has moved on from this. I don't think it's a kind of anarchistic gesture, I think it's political economy. And it's something that can be realistically entertained at this point. I have a question.
Where are you coming at all of this from? Nick, are you just studying it kind of detached or do you have some kind of goal or idea of how you want to influence the situation? Is it pure theory or is there something else involved? Well, honestly, I think the more that we can stick to pure theory personally, the better. You know, because there's obviously an anthropomorphic, structural anthropomorphic delusion to over-inflate agency in my opinion. So you know, I'm not saying there is no agency. But it's just given the scale of the kind of things we're talking about, agency even
of comparatively sizeable collectives are pretty small. And I just think we're on sounder ground if we're trying to remain as cold and analytical as possible about it. So, you know, in order, my agenda is definitely, what is happening? Tyler Cohen, in fact I'll give you another link now because I've got it here and I wanted to just pass it on. It's slightly off the topic, slightly off the topic, but the question is fantastic, where he just says, he's got a post that just says, what the hell is going on? That's kind of also what this course is about.
What the hell is going on? And so the deepest level is just what is happening on this planet, whatever you want to see. like from you name it, any kind of spectrum from fully automated luxury communism from the nastiest most Hobbesian nightmare that you can imagine, the full thing, irrespective of that, what actually is happening, what are the trends, what is the environment and the milieu in which these things have to be worked out. And the second level from that is, so what can we expect in terms of debates? So rather than like, can we win this argument or that argument, it's more what are going
to be the enduring structures of discussion that happened during this period? And I think actually both, just to pick on two of you at random, I think both you and Amy in your points are capturing I think these structures of enduring political dispute that we could try and say let's thrash this out and one of us will win by the end of this module. That to me is like really not the point. The point is to try and get an understanding of going forward over the next decade what What are going to be the basic structures of these deep political arguments that are
going to be had, and how are they going to differ from what we've seen up to this point? So still on the level of cold analytical, it's kind of ethnography of ideology in that sense. And obviously beyond that, people are very free to propose their own madcap schemes for changing the world. I'm entirely open to the possibility that particular individuals can hit butterfly effect singularities and turn the whole thing on its ass. Surprisingly, that's not something I'd rule out of court. But I think I'd put it in last place in terms of this order of cold analytical discussion.
Well, I mean, in terms of something like Nick Sharanachek and Alex Williams' Inventing the Future book, I mean, it seems like they also perhaps attempt to arrive at some sort of, I mean, within the sphere of the left anyway, some sort of minimal conditions of agreement. And I guess what you're also proposing is some sort of minimal conditions of agreement that can endure a number of other sort of differences and that sort of thing. But I guess I have on some level a hard time reconciling this sort of ultimate Hobbesian worldview where people are constantly, not just people, but I suppose even some minimal
social collectives or group orders are constantly slugging it out all against all. because if you're accepting that as a sort of fundamental condition, I have a hard time seeing anybody ever agreeing to the very minimal conditions, even the spatial division. This is a key moment to really do some clarification, for sure, because I don't think that what this is about is minimal conditions of agreement in at all the same sense as the Snernick and Williams thing. That is a left project, it's dialectical, it's aiming to actually win over the political totality to a certain set of first order political preferences.
What I'm talking about is spatial meta-politics, that's to say finding conditions where they can do their thing in a way that I can absolutely not be involved in or subjected to. Well, but I mean... And what that means, sorry, just one mistake. And what that means is the only agreement that I'm interested in are game theoretic levels of agreement to do with deterrence, to do with independence, to do with actual ability to sustain credible independence against anyone. People are a lot nastier than Sternick and Williams, against the North Koreans, against anyone who actually says,
that I'm just going to force you to do what I want. So it's about international relations theory, it's about deterrence, it's about threat, it's about actual hard security in a world of hypocrisy and anarchy. So the only agreement that is required is agreement that I could unleash hell on you if you mess with me. That's the level of agreement that I'm talking about. It's not agreement that we share certain first order political preferences and, you know, can work together on that basis. Yeah, but I guess I can't help but see, like, I mean, given, I mean, with this not being in some sort of abstract space where all sort of territories are uniform and people
have access to precisely the same sort of materials and possibilities, I can't help but see how this sort of like meta-political agreement you're discussing won't collapse again into a sort of first order disagreement. Which is what though? Like say we have independent microstates in some kind of proximity to each other, say you have lots of resources, I have not so many resources, whatever, I sort of see this as a bit of a red herring because I think that the kind of resources that matter are not the kind that are geographically maldistributed. How do you see what you're saying playing out? We have disagreement in terms of diplomatic relations, you have an ambassador maybe in
my patch and I have your ambassador in mind. What do you think this conversation is going to be about? Well, I mean, I guess for instance, let's say like your country has, you know, access to a significant amount of pure water, and because my country has followed, you know, the dictates that, you know, we don't need any sort of environmental laws or anything like that, now we've completely destroyed all of our access to, you know, pure water or something like that. we're going to want the water, if you just simply refuse to give it to us, I don't see how that's not going to resolve
in some sort of large-scale conflict that will provide us with non-interference. Two things, I mean, who's saying, that's why deterrence is the basis of this. I mean, you know, I'm totally, I think anything that didn't assume that people would just want to steal stuff from other people is just not even getting started on the realism stakes, of course. So, I mean, if I can't credibly deter you from aggression against me, then, you know, I don't have a good outcome, as far as I can see. But, I mean, I'll sell you some water, probably. I mean, it's like a commercial opportunity. So all I have to do is make the price I'm charging for water more attractive than the
cost to you of military aggression against me. I mean that's the realistic calculus, isn't it? Yeah, but I mean one could then also bind that sort of cost of water with certain sort of policy dictates that we feel that your nation has to follow as well. But I mean obviously we tell you to just… …break down the sort of order of independence in our kind of political regimes. Well, it would only break down the level of independence if I was at all interested in what you were saying about the domestic political arrangements in my microstate. I mean, this is the fundamental point of meta-politics is that you just don't have a say in the first sort of politics of anything outside your own domain.
I mean I just can't see how in some sort of, again if you're coming from Hobbesian assumptions how I could possibly avoid ever having, you know, for instance if my interest was in controlling the most amount of territory possible regardless of whether or not it was useful to me or anything like that, then I can't see how you can continue to make this sort of abstract separation or these sort of like… Well, this is the world we live in, and have lived in a world of territorial, avaricious states in a condition of global anarchy. I mean, it's not like this is some kind of new hypothetical problem. This is the world order.
What do you think is happening? What do you think all of this stuff to do with China and the South China Sea and all of this? I mean, this is the world. It's not some hypothetical. And the thing that stops other people's territorial ambitions is credible to tarant capability. It's that the cost to them of aggression is greater than the advantages that they expect to gain from that. So I'm just not seeing why this is some new kind of problem. I mean, if this is a problem, then the world is already in this problem. This is just absolutely standard international relations theory, isn't it?
I mean, I think I would argue that deterrence is not the only reason why people – I mean, I guess I just don't believe in a fundamental Hobbesian order. So I guess I would argue that deterrence is not the only reason why people don't just go in and steal things from other people. But what do you believe about it? How does that matter, really? Of course, you see, there's one whole level of things here which is to say, look, can't you be a bit sunnier about the whole thing and just assume a whole, let's ratchet it up three levels in terms of human benevolence and basic human altruism and all of these.
It seems to me, no, the task of realism is the opposite of that. It's to constantly try to be more cynical, more pessimistic, push it right down to the fundamental bedrock of raw game theory because if you're not doing that, you can be disappointed. You're not dealing with the problem, you're just simply wishing it away. So it's fine to me if you think that, this is kind of tied up with Anders' point too, if you think that people basically are much nicer than I'm assuming them to be, that's great. Then everything will work out much better than I'm thinking it's going to work out. I hope you're right. But I don't think you can analyse a disintegrated, lawless, anarchic global order on the basis
of wishful thinking about the fundamental altruistic characteristic of human nature. That seems to me like you're just not bothering to deal with the real problem. Someone else will do that and they'll end up with a much more hardcore IRT than you have and that's the one that people inevitably migrate to and certainly policy makers of any seriousness will migrate to that because they will think that those people are being serious and people who think that let's assume some pretty substantial base level of human altruism are just not being serious about the problems we're trying to think about.
You know, I mean, concretely, let's take North Korea. You surely can't be saying that the problem with the way people think about North Korea is they're just not allowing that the North Korean machine is actually a lot more altruistic than people are assuming. And if we were just... I mean, maybe I should stop myself there because I'm sure there are people who think exactly that. I mean, you know, and yeah, you know, give them a microstate, seriously. I'm not at all trying to rule anything out of court here. I'm just saying that the fundamental bedrock of the global massive, in inverted commas, order is anarchic in the most hard-edged way possible.
If you are building any altruistic assumptions into that notion of altruism, you're not dealing with the problem. You're hoping for an easier problem. Can I ask a question about
what seems to be the driving solution to the easier problem especially in some of the terms that Sarnic Williams talk about it is epistemology and there's this kind of idea that there is a way to increase knowledge which will somehow retain heterogeneity but within some kind of larger structure that can put it to particular uses, which are ultimately beneficial. What I wanted to ask about, though, is because we're kind of just, like you mentioned it really briefly before, how does...
What's my question? How does... Hang on. this notion of singularity and epistemology is what I want to talk about I guess and any kind of system that accounts for a singularity of any kind has to put epistemology on a less valuable level than it does whatever could create some sort singularity that epistemology obviously can't grasp. And so is that part of this set of assumptions as well, that there is some problem with epistemology as a driving factor of organisation
that will always be trumped by some possibility of a singularity? And two, if we're talking about a teleology of liberalism here, how does that also accommodate the idea of a singularity, which could be the singularity that Anders is talking about, that somehow flips everything onto a kind of harmonious trajectory of evolution? That's a really jumbled question. Is it a fear to try and break it into two parts or do you see them as totally integrated at some occult level?
I think it's a question about knowledge I suppose. I guess my mind just keeps going back to how to talk about this fundamental distinction between assumptions about human nature and cosmic order. And the thought that came to my mind when you guys were talking before was this idea that there are different values attributed to reason. There's the kind of reason that you have in game theoretical encounters. Yeah. And then the reason that is sort of presupposed in this maybe evolutionary idea that there's a fundamental capacity that all human agents have that can somehow be evolutionarily directed towards a harmonious
or benevolent outcome. Right. And I guess, I don't know, maybe it's like 500 questions all over one. Yeah. It is very interesting. I mean, if I'm not totally missing the point here, I would orient this towards the question of agreement. Because what I'm constantly trying to do here is take the bedrock down to an absolute zero degree presupposition of agreement. And it seems to me that the epistemology that you're talking about would inevitably assume that some minimal and perhaps some quite high level of agreement is actually to be expected
if only things are done in the right way, at the right speed, with the right politics, whatever that means in this context. So there is... It's the assumption of agreement there that makes it still dialectical. It's maybe not an assumption of agreement, but that there is a capacity for reason that is latent and needs to perhaps be developed. and is primed for development on the kind of cusp of this age of artificial intelligence that we find ourselves on. And then it can be, I mean... But you mean by that something very different
to just game-theoretic cunning? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So, I mean, obviously, there's no disagreement here about that. there's reason in terms of people who play these games well and win or lose, get eliminated, have bad things happen to them or survive. So there's that, of course, everyone agrees that's there. But you want something more than that, which is a kind of reason that can bring about a level of harmony that allows us to shelve some of this deep cynicism about the types of interactions that are going to be involved in this.
Maybe harmony is, you know, that's just going way too far. I was trying to bring in the previous example as a limit, but that there is some kind of equivalent capacity that's latent, that needs to be actualized in a way that moves beyond game theoretical employment of rationality into something else, and we just haven't exploited it yet, not necessarily in a political, theological way, But just getting back to these fundamental assumptions about what humans do, what human societies are and what's possible.
But is it the sort of thing that given… Yeah, that's as far as I'm going to go. If it was given a really nice, generous socio-political space in which to do its thing, and to broadcast itself to the rest of the world, I'm sure there could be some obstructions to that, but I don't think they would be very imposing. Would it then, would that be sufficient to guarantee? Because I mean, I think that that, of course, should be granted on meta-political grounds without a moment's hesitation. But unless the meta-political structure privileges game theoretical reason, which it seems to.
So it's sort of… I don't think it… It doesn't… Only insofar as game theoretical reason falls out as a default of completely anarchic multiplicity. I mean, you know, the metapolitical structure I'm talking about is so completely vacant, it's so hollowed out and utterly eroded of any positive content that it can't privilege anything unless that thing being privileged is so attuned to the absence of agreement that it is privileged automatically. I mean the reason that game theory comes out well is that game theory makes minimal assumptions about agreement. So it just assumes that agent A, agent B, neither of them has any altruistic concern
for the other whatsoever, and what kinds of cooperation can emerge in that context. So it's like utterly anarchic. So sure, game theory is being privileged in the sense that we're not assuming something more substantial, but there's no positive privilege of game theory at all. It's just that privilege is better at living in the wild than the kind of thing, still a little hazy to me, I must admit, that is being contrasted with her. Yeah, I still feel like there's, I think the thing that I'm trying to get to is that there's an implicit set of norms in this norm-free idea about what reality does.
And maybe the only way to find out what they are is to... Negative norms. I mean, I don't see any positive norms at all. Maybe I'm being blind to that. But if there are any positive norms, I want to hunt them down and kill them. I mean, they're not helpful. So insofar as the systematic refusal of any substantial normativity is a problem, then yeah, of course, big problems. But insofar as you're simply wanting to say, I can see some positive assumption here that you're making, then I will agree with you immediately and take out the kind of poison
gas and hunt it down. Right. I'll try and reformulate my other questions about epistemology later in a clearer way. I mean, I get this thing a lot from a zone of the political spectrum that I won't even upset people by mentioning with, who criticise, let me make sure I'm getting their name right, liberal anthropology. where the liberal anthropology is the notion that there are not sort of substantial social
bonds existing that you're assuming between any set of agents, this absolutely minimum condition of where any agreement, any association has to be built up from a kind of totally desolate foundation. So this is not... I mean, the words left and right are absolutely fascinating to me because they go all over the place. But in the kind of colloquial sense of left and right, this is not a left or right issue because the people making this accusation are so far out on what they consider to be the right that they are invisible to all sane human beings. So, you know, I think this is a really, it's an issue that is important and is being discussed
and it's going to definitely come up and it comes up in all kinds of strange places. And there's a notion where is there something deeply problematic about stripping out too much assumption? If you really just tear stuff right down to the bedrock, is that gesture already deeply problematic? And as I say, I think it is problematic from a whole series of different political orientations. In fact, I would say it's probably problematic from any political orientation except one that is so hyper-liberal it would not even be recognised as liberalism by any already
consolidated body of ideological thinking. I don't know even whether it has a name in that respect. I think it's what liberalism inevitably has to become, or liberalism will be killed by its own naivety. It seems that talking about meta-politics starts to bring in a need for maybe metaphysics, because if epistemology, if people's worldviews can differ so extremely then you start to get into the whole world becomes a lab of these different competing realities that different
people are experiencing. So then you get into the almost like physical or metaphysical viability of those realities. Exactly, totally, yeah. Don't you think that's what's happening though? I mean don't you think that is a massive trend that we're seeing? I mean that is this, that's the bubble isn't it? everyone says about social media, everyone retreats into bubbles, that there's just reality options are becoming available to people. But anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Oh no, I had finished talking and you were answering. Yeah. No, I just totally think that is the trend. I think that's right, completely.
And then again we get to this thing about what is the bedrock of this? I mean, I put it to something harsh, which I think you're already implying, that certain constructions of reality are just going to crash and burn. And it's a question then of, you know, I'm not sure I'm using left and right consistently, but I just use them as kind of a navigational tool, so I would use them again. Now, in that situation, the left impulse is that solidarity should be important, deployed to soften the blow and then use some, you know, help people from the sort of minimise the tragic consequences of their own delusions and help to educate them into something more
realistic. And the right assumption is separate yourself from this madness and perhaps even take some educational satisfaction from its disaster and broadcast that disaster as widely as possible so people can see what happens when certain types of reality constructs are pursued. But the fundamental difference there is again a dialectical and anti-dialectical position. Like are you in some sort of indissoluble confederation with people engaging in ever more increasingly psychotic thought processes or are you in an extremely diffuse, mutually
secured fragmentary system in which bits are just going to hell all around you and your fundamental security task is to offer alternatives to people fleeing in pain, burning from these disasters or whatever. I think that's the key thing. I think that what the internet, you know, we're post-Gutenberg. The Gutenberg era is about producing consensus opinion. The post-Gutenberg era is about bubbles. like it's totally but fragmentary collapse of any kind of consensus reality system, and
then the question is, well, what happens to the consequences of these various reality constructions? Are they pooled? Can they be pooled? Or are they subject to some kind of brutal Darwinian selection process? Yeah, I actually wrote an essay about that, and it was leaning towards the solidarity side of things in the solution I offered, which was when China...you're in China, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. So I said when the Great Firewall comes down, eventually you're going to see the final,
you know, growth of a global hegemonic culture as we develop a global Chinese-English pigeon over so many years and all of that. So I said we need to find a way to maintain difference and still speak across that difference. But that still leans towards the solidarity side. I think this is a really interesting question about the information space. Because I tend to assume that the internet makes informational isolation almost impossible. I don't think, realistically I very much doubt that even people in North Korea, I'm sorry to keep turning this up but I think it's an extreme case which is why you said it, I
don't think people even in North Korea are actually screened from that much information if they really want to. And I know here in China, you find, I mean look I'm in China right now okay, I'm behind the Great Firewall. We are communicating across the Great Firewall. In theory, I am having the world screened out for me, according to something. But absolutely that's not the case. If you have any kind of VPN, the world internet is available to you. I don't think the Chinese government wants it to be any different to that. I think they just want some level of baffling that you have to take some trouble, that you
have to maybe indicate some level of kind of social competence in order to be sort of subjected to the full onslaught of unfiltered planetary info babble. But it's incredibly easy. I seriously don't think anything that's happening anywhere is blocked from me here in Shanghai right now at this moment. So, but yeah, some people, of course, there's a huge thing here that if someone said, this
is coming in the opposite line of criticism to what everyone's been dealing with, so I'm just doing devil's advocate here, but someone could say to what I'm saying, well, if you really want these independent patches, shouldn't they have epistemological independence, which Which means shouldn't they be completely screened? Shouldn't they be able to choose to screen themselves totally from any information circulating in the world that they don't favour? I mean, no one's putting this objection to me because you're all on the other side of the screen. But there is a case there. I don't know how you would categorize it politically.
But it would be one that would be saying, you know, whatever the problems with the North Korean regime, they're basically sound in thinking that a sovereign society has the right to decide what information is being pumped into it by the rest of the world. Yeah, sorry, I don't know what I'm saying to that, but just like structurally it is an objection that I think should be expected to be made. And I don't really, I don't see it as a plausible thing. I think the Internet is just, it's like resisting the printing press. It's just not going to happen. Everything is being, is immersed in the Internet.
If you're not serious about that, you're not dealing with reality, I would say. And interestingly, this Chinese periodical called Global Times, which is an interesting publication because it completely toes the government line but with a slight suggestion of independence that allows it to be more sort of pulpy and aggressive. a kind of tabloid version of the official Chinese position. And they had an editorial saying that the Chinese Internet should open itself to a whole
bunch of things that are currently screened, Google Scholar, all of these kind of resources, and very strongly said that it's ridiculous to think that a modern society can filter out this kind of information. So I think that these things, China is certainly not going to fight the internet. It just slows it down, filters it a bit selectively, but it's not fighting. It's impossible to fight. I think nevertheless this is a really poignant criticism to it though. And it's like it's the potato children problem, right? Right. You could have this intense censorship.
Like for example, at the moment with new institution of metadata laws in Australia, we buy our VPN using anonymous gift cards because there's still this possibility that even using a VPN, and there have been a lot of just ridiculous prosecution of people for torrenting and stuff here out of the blue without a kind of warning system like they have in Germany, for example, that that information could eventually be used by a totalitarian state to prosecute or just to drive its citizens into fearful suspicion, not accessing this information.
And I think information flows is a really, really key part of what this system relies on. And I don't think you can rule that out. And it's cool to say, well, yeah, that society will probably wither and die. That's part of the whole thing. But I still think it's maybe going too far to say, well, the Internet will overcome all barriers. I think that's still plausible. Like maybe 20 years ago you could say that about the Internet. But I feel like we're on a different track right now. I would not build anything on this. I mean, I'm just simply proclaiming randomly that I think the Internet is unstoppable. But I would totally concede that if you're trying to build that into the structure of the metapolitical framework,
that it's a questionable assumption. So I'll utterly concede that immediately. And it would honestly be neater from my point of view if you could cut it out. You know, certainly it's not like I think it's healthy to depend upon it. It just seems as a fact to me that the notion of informational quarantine is so immediately dysfunctional that it just leads to social crash really fast. So then how can regions of difference be maintained without some type of informational
filter or threshold? Maybe not a quarantine, but it seems like there must be a filter. Well, I don't know, because if I can just go right out the other side to the utopian extreme, the Nozick zone here, and say you've got a really frictionless system of ideological sorting. So that these kind of classic things, you know, go to Russia or I don't know what the right-wing alternative, go to Singapore or something attractive like that, where people simply are geographically distributed according to their political preferences. If you had that system, and so no one lived in a society that didn't have the broad ideological
tenor that they were satisfied with, would a perfect global infosphere be any kind of destabilizing factor on that? I don't think so. I think that we already see in our sort of hegemonic westernized global infosphere exactly that. Like, you know, people bubble themselves ideologically. There's a huge leftist and a huge rightist and all the various kind of complexions of those things, zones of the internet, where people are ensconced. I mean, they talk across those lines to some extent, but not actually hugely often.
They think it's quite abnormal for people to engage in massive cross-tribal communication in this system. And yet there's nothing about it that's not there. I mean, you know, it's completely open if people want that stuff. So it seems to me we can already see that that utterly open infosphere is utterly, is totally compatible with ideological tribalization, bubbling, segregation, separation, however you want to put it. And if that was geographically instantiated, it surely would be only more secure.
I mean, anyone, say you were in fully automated luxury communism, utopia, and you came across some nasty right-wing internet site and you were persuaded by that, then you could just leave. You could just leave. I mean, what would be the motivation for you to try and subvert your society and persuade other people around you that they were doing the wrong thing and they should be, you could just go. I mean, you just say, hey, I don't want to be in this side. I'd much rather be torched in the clean flame of social Darwinism than spending my UBI in
the headshot. That really puts a point on your, one of your earlier themes of how a competitive society could outcompete a cooperative society. Yeah. Yeah. Ray, do you want to say more about that? Well, if some people actually do prefer vicious competition and all of the things we associate
with say corporate America and what that does to people's minds, if some people actually like that and try to deepen their experience of that, they might continue to do what is already happening, which is the vicious domination of others because those people are so vicious. But I assume only that their vicious domination would be inhibited by the fact that they would not have access to people except through certain channels, wouldn't they? People sharing their society would already have bought into that ideology and would be cooperating with them in that structure of vicious domination. And people in overseas, in other jurisdictions, would have to be brought into that system
of vicious domination by some kind of contract or formal agreement. I just don't see how a system of social Darwinism and vicious neutral domination and all of that could not eventually produce a society that wanted to attack other societies and dominate them as well. How could you have both the meta-political meta-agreement and the... The meta-political agreement... No, I don't think the meta-political agreement depends upon people not wanting to attack, dominate, whatever. If it depends on any good stuff and any altruistic stratum, minimal altruistic stratum of human
behaviour, then it's doomed. It's just fantasy. It's grounded in independence based on balance of power, deterrence, all the things that support independence in a realist international relations theory. So the fact that people are bad and imperialistic and militaristic, aggressive, territorial expansive, that's built into the cake. You're assuming that. You're assuming the worst possible thing that you can assume. I think maybe, just maybe you're not assuming that people are suicidally and perversely
malevolent so that they would actually destroy their own society gratuitously just in order to hurt your society. Maybe you're assuming that because I think it would be hard, game theoretically, to even begin to work out how you could do rational diplomacy in that world. I think you have to assume that there's a point of just pathological viciousness where something becomes so dysfunctional it edits itself out of the system. But still I would want my, I mean, you know, think of you're on the board of directors of your little microstate and you're appointing your security director.
I mean, you'd want the guy to have nightmares, wouldn't you, surely? I mean, you'd really want him to think the worst imaginable thing that could happen and be ready for that if it was at all possible. I'm assuming. I'm assuming that's what realist IRT means. When it comes down to an HR decision about your security executives, you want them to be absolute hardcore Hobbsians. And if you think that they've been talking to you or Amy, you would immediately not consider them for the job.
I had started on spielts and I had this idea, but it was like, if your deterrence is dependent upon the means of deterrence, would that itself be the primary point of political struggle? I mean, if you don't have any nuclear materials and your neighbor has nuclear materials, aren't they basically going to have control over what you can do politically? I mean, you can't even enter this sort of neutral state of game, like balance if you don't have the means by which to... Totally. If you've got no deterrence capability, you're not seriously in the game. You just have to hope you've got good friends. I mean, you can play that. People are playing that. I mean, Singapore has very limited deterrence capabilities, is except against very local neighbors. So it plays international balance of power games, this kind of stuff.
And it's hard to know how stable that kind of thing is. But I think if you're going to be hardcore Hobbesian about it, if you can't deter aggression, then you have to expect aggression. I mean, doesn't this create the problem of collapsing your, again, your sort of meta-political order which is based on this sort of like Hobbesian thing into a sort of primary political order. Why is it a primary political order? I mean because I'm going to be doing, I guess my major question, the major question for me becomes not one about maintaining a sort of, you know, rational stasis with everybody else but one of, you know, getting whatever sort of materials needs that I have to satisfy
in order to be able to arrive at a sort of meta-political stasis. No, I don't see any problem there. I think that's exactly what is necessary. I think that the competition between microstates is exactly that they are materially competent. They are competent to achieve their own security, they are economically competent, they are competent to feed people, their competencies are what allow them to survive. Any incompetent state that isn't edited out of the system is a failure of the system to operate rationally. So I mean, I can see the room for confusion here and I think it's massively there in Scott
Alexander's piece and I think it comes in because there's a big gap between promotional agendas and actual agendas here. But the point of a meta-political order is to actually operate as an arena for free flow of deep Darwinian dynamics. It selects functional social arrangements and edits out dysfunctional social arrangements. And the test for that are these basic things. Can you protect yourself? Can you feed yourself? Can you run an economy that works? If you can't do those things, you're a psychotic, you're deluded, you're incompetent, and you're just wasting resources that could be…
I mean, but you're adding it back in all of the sort of political values that you're attempting to kind of exclude by your initial minimal conditions, it seems. No, what are those political values? Everyone thinks they can do those things. The left accelerations think they can do all those things, don't they? They think they can secure their societies, they can feed people, they can do economic advance, they can do all this stuff. Is there any ideology that doesn't think it can achieve that stuff? If there is, I would have to say it's got a very dismal future for sure. It's obviously got a dismal future.
You know, I mean seriously, like an ideology that said, okay, we've got these beautiful ideas, it's completely, they're completely inconsistent with a functional society, you know, we cannot, we will not be able to protect ourselves, we will not be able to feed ourselves, we will not be able to do science or technology, our economy will be shit, but we want a bit of space in order to do this stuff. I mean, who's going to say that? If you think that, you know, really it's some kind of weird religion, it's not something that any international relations theory is going to have space for.
So I think we are, we have to say that all the ideologies that are relevant are ones that at least can make a case for being consistent with the functional perpetuation of a microstate. If they can't do that, then... Well, I mean, I don't think I'm disagreeing with you that you need to have certain sort of basic functional abilities in order to run a state, but I think once you begin to move everything to the degree zero that you're talking about, of purely being based on a sort of game theoretic security state, in a way you're kind of saying, yeah,
but all this stuff, it sort of exists as some sort of given or externality, when actually it's really quite primary to the overall equation. And what exists only as some kind of given or externality? Well, I mean, I guess being able to provide basics like shelter, food, water, health care, stuff like that, they all become sort of externalities to this sort of security situation, but they are actually kind of some of the primary problems of the state itself. I'm not really quite following you at this point.
I mean, like if these things are, are they functional for the survival of society or not? You know, if they're functional for the survival of society, then they should get reinforced by the real process, and if they're not, they won't be reinforced. So that doesn't seem at all to me be introducing any kind of arbitrary primary political, there's all kinds of primary political sort of objectives people might have. Whether or not that they're functional in this, I can see whole ensembles of them could at least make a claim to it, and the fact that we do have some, we do have some ideological
diversity on this planet at the moment is a suggestion that at least there is some heterogeneity in these choices, although I will accept that that's an interestingly controversial claim to make. But I'm not sure I'm seeing the alternatives. This is what we've got now, it's what we're going to have in the future, it's what we're always going to have, isn't it? If any political order that is so incompetent it cannot survive will not survive. I'm not adding anything new here. This is just reality as it has always been and will always be at set of art.
So I think I'm starting to see the importance of reading the relevant theory and looking into the history of liberalism, because you're saying, if I'm getting this right, that you can already describe the situation as a meta-politics or as meta-political, and so what has meta-politics been doing, and what is it going to do next? To anthropomorphize it. Yes, that's interesting. I'd have to think about it a little bit. I mean, on one level, meta-politics is just reality. Like, it will edit out... Our ideological preferences do not decide what survives and what does not survive,
what exists and what does not exist. The fact that people at a certain point in the collapse of the Roman Empire really loved the Roman Empire, thought it was a great idea, and had good arguments for it, is neither here nor there. So there's a criterion of existence that is outside our ideological preferences, and that for sure can be described as metapolitical. And any metapolitics that doesn't ground itself in that ultimately is probably hopelessly utopian.
So there's a whole massively complicated discussion happening in this sidebar. I should try and avoid getting too sucked into that right now. I think Tony's going to let me see it later. Yeah.
I don't know who Tal is. Can I just, is there any chance that Tal could say something just so that it becomes more than a… Maybe that's hoping too much. I don't know.
Where are we now? We're in deep silence. Have we reached some terminal equilibrium or are we just ready for the next surge of control? I don't know what happens to Tony. He kind of turns his video off. Is he still there in the background, or has he just gone off to the pub and he'll be back later or something? Now he's still there.
Doing something. I keep trying to turn off my audio, but it's not working on that account. So can you hear me now? I was saying that Tal is from Israel. He's in Paris. He lives in Paris now. I don't know. He pops in and out. He is a student of the course, so he might just be... I don't know if he has something he's doing today. But I think this is a good point to break. I think the conversation was good. I think a lot of the questions that we want to explore in the seminar will be... I've been outlined and we've generated new questions. So I would say this is a good time to cut off for .
Thank you. Goodbye, thank you. Have a good week, whatever. I obviously hope to see you again soon, but regardless of that, thanks for this. And thanks Tony for organizing it. You're welcome. See you. Okay. Thank you. Good night.