The Disablers
The story of our times is not on the front page of newspapers, but it transpires in many major news stories. I have always wondered how large historical events might have been received from a layman point of view. I think I have an idea now. I have the feeling that we are in the midst of such a shift. The increasing inability of nation-states to *provide meaningfully* is progressively replaced by its new inclination to *restrain unnecessarily*. It is very hard to unsee once you have noticed it. Contemporary news offer many illustrations. Let's examine a few of them. But first things first: why is it happening?
A Brave New Society
Nation state was efficient as a provider during the industrial era. A lot of of capital, not just money, but also education and infrastructure, had to be concentrated to achieve massive scale economies. Think at the amount of work needed to achieve ubiquitous access to electricity, the quality of highways, and all what is needed for the expansion of cities. This goes in par with the development of industry that required large amount of population to manpower manufacturing plants. The society as a whole has been transformed alongside: from schools to armies, the industrial era produced large quantities of everything. Its nature became a mix of a top-down information flow together with an extreme division of labour. The result being what we call *modernity*. The digital revolution is acting on both of those fronts simultaneously.
The digital era does not limit its impacts on social media and mean tweets. Politics, and the theater of politics, have been totally transformed. Geopolitics is not handled the same way it was. Distribution (as in distributed computing) of information is dissolving historical hierarchies. They were based on geographic constraints, they are moving towards a new topological space. People align along values and ideas now that communication is ubiquitous and instantaneous.
A western democracy looks like the central scheme above. The depth of it depends on local peculiarities, but even today's Russia is closer to the decentralized version than to the centralized version. Maybe Switzerland is more *local* but it only means that the height of the decentralized tree of power is larger. What changes radically on the distributed version is that nodes have roughly the same importance with relation to the whole network. It is more symmetric by nature.
Is there a better illustration of the collision between those two kind of societies (decentralized vs distributed) than the recent controversies about Joe Rogan? Maybe but this case is exemplary at many levels of this clash. How come that the White house secretary is pushing for silencing a podcaster that is completely stoned in a non negligible fraction of his shows? It is as anti-first amendment as it can get. Well a part of the answer is that Joe Rogan provides a better service than mainstream media. You can spin it the way you prefer. If people are left to choose they will chose him against CNN multiple times over. It is a fact much more factual than anything you have been told by authorities about this covid crisis for now 2 years. It is starting to be noticed. As I said earlier: institutions are failing to provide efficiently. It is also true in this domain and it shows.
I could go on and talk about 3D printing (distributed manufacturing) or Bitcoin and crypto (distributed trust) etc. but I think you get the idea at this point. Some things (I just mentioned news/entertainment/public discussions in the case of Joe Rogan) that were only achievable via a hierarchical organisation and strict division of labour can now be done better in a distributed way.
The Afghan Rout
One of the hardest problem to solve in politics is how to translate ideas/principes into an enforceable reality? You can make very beautiful speeches about nice ideas but at the end of the day what happens when you encounter physical opposition? It is not by chance that statues embodying justice generally shares two attributes: a scale and a sword. As Pascal aptly put it:
La justice sans la force est impuissante, la force sans la justice est tyrannique.
(Justice without force is powerless, force without justice is tyrannical.)
Articulating ideas and reality has always been complex but at least words and swords were geographically in the same place. The striking example is how french “départements” (administrative subdivision of French state) were defined under Napoleon's ruling: it is the set of places that can be reached from the “chef-lieu” (main city) with less than 1 day by horse ride. Now that a tweet can be read instantaneously at the other part of the globe, we see that the “horse ride” condition makes little sense. Now a new question arises: how do you enforce a smart contract (very much an idea) in Kabul when it is overrun by Talibans?
The fall of Afghanistan was a total, unmitigated, disaster on the part of nation-states. The most powerful nation-state has failed to deliver its most fundamental product: security. Yet some distributed solutions have been employed here. I am thinking at the initiative led by Glenn Beck and the Nazarene fund he has founded. Basically the fund operated privately funded airlifts from Afghanistan before the Taliban's reached total control. The story in itself is edifying (a real spy story with geopolitics, safe houses etc.) but on top of it Beck complained that the State Department was actively hindering such operations: the epitome of what this essay is about. Is it transposable to everything ? I don't know, but I am sure that there are deeply right stuff about that. Faith and religion were the active parts in this story: shared beliefs are what make the world to work, tomorrow's world even more than yesterday's world.
Trucks for Freedom
There is an inherent elegance in the “freedom convoys” (in Canada, the US, France etc.) we are experiencing now. This movement unmasks the power that be in an unstoppable way. This movement forces politicians to denounce out loud their own previous decisions. Irony is not lost on anyone when hearing Canada's premier Trudeau explaining that hindering freedom of movement is detrimental to everyone. No kidding sunshine! Doesn't it remind you something? Even more ironic were the effort of various police forces to block convoys to avoid the convoys to block. You see there is blocking and blocking. There are good and bad blockers you know…
Fiat lux et facta es lux
The story of Lucifer is all too common. Lucifer’s etymology is clear: he is the one who brings light (it comes from latin “lux”, light, mixed with “ferre”, to bring). So much for enlightenment, Lucifer becomes damned from the moment where he starts to think that he is not only the one who brings light but he is the light himself. Sounds familiar?Administrations of the western democracies have forgotten that they derive authority because they protect freedom. They have started to think that they are freedom and that they can give it or take it on a whim. But those institutions are failing to deliver anything but restrictions. People are starting to notice.