Appearance
Techvolution: A New Philosophy - Act Three
Evolution Yea or Nea
Act three is the nail bitter. The time when a good writer rewards the audience with the final duel and the discovery of who's going to win. Noble Jedis or Evil Sith, the Ministry of Magic or the Thugs of Voldemort, Open-Source Heroes, or Darth Blockbuster Antagonists.
But this isn't a movie Stargazer. Life is a real-life game. So you decide the winner.
Today, we've upgraded to the Internet Age with our technology. But not our culture.
Thus, act three is a simple question; do you believe in Techvolution? Do you think Left/Right extremists must stop running our politics? Do you hate antagonism even more than racism and communism? Do you see why the era of mass-production must be replaced by the era of mass-collaboration?
Even more important, do you want to hold the levers of power in your society instead of complaining, protesting, and hoping for change? Do you think our rulebook of regulations, codes, and laws should be easy to access, use, and understand?
Do you want to live a happy life?
Open up Instagram, YouTube, or WhatsApp. So majical.
Now, when you look at tax-codes, city by-laws, insurance rules, employment agreements. Do you see the advertisements and slogans around these products as dark majic designed to hold back upgrades and keep us in the Industrial Age forever?
You should, because Darth Blockbuster is the hero of a selfish story. He never wants his time in the Sun to end.
This final battle has an even more straightforward question. Do you appreciate your importance to life on Earth? Do you realize you must solve your problems with modern tools? Do you know it's your natural right to have a happy life?
If you don't, we're stuck using a cyborgology as out of place as camels trying to swim in the Amazon. Burning coal in the Sunshine State. Driving to work in Boston blizzards. Forcing people to call into call-centers after a car crash. Depending on doctor writing to record our medical histories.
All that's old technology. If we keep using it, we'll lose the game. This shouldn't sound dramatic. I'm not trying to scare you. But seriously, if we stop playing evolution, what do you think happens?
Play Civilization 6 until the Industrial Age, and stop upgrading your society. How long do you think you'll last?
Society has no magic button. No divine player who'll evolve for us. Your retirement fund, college education, and the money in your bank are all creations of our civilization. The extras and antagonists inside the Soviet Union, the Kingdom of France, the Roman Empire all had pieces of paper making them protected or rich.
When the player gods of these civilizations lost their games, all that paper money, social status, and retirement funds meant nothing. Nothing at all! You might say good riddance, and I'd like to agree with you, but complete failure is never the best way to play the game.
You are on the frontline. You are the one in the game that's supposed to keep doing the hard work and update society bit by bit to the new age with the majic of new tools.
I think you do understand all this. So, act three comes down to a straightforward question. Do you want to be a modern-day player god?
That's a choice you have to make. It's a choice as big as any you're ever going to make. If we don't upgrade to a new philosophy now, it only means your kids and grandkids will live even unhappier lives. The burden of transforming our culture will only fall on their shoulders.
Heck, there's a chance your kids will have to start a new game of civilization from scratch. Because this COVID-19 pandemic and resulting worldwide panic might be too severe and expensive to bounce back from. Left and Right might snap and start actually fighting each other.
The choice is yours. Player god or extra?
Here are two stories to help you decide.
Option 1 - Extra
Remember the Thirty Years War? It's when Main Street was inside the Science Age, but tearing itself apart in the name of Protestant and Catholic kings. Well, adding to that anarchy was King Charles. His nasty, brutish, and short reign is what extras think they want to sit back and watch today.
So let's watch it.
Charles ruled England as a proud protestant. His father King James taught him from birth the "nobles right to rule" was a matter of responsibility and Faith, not self-interest. It was King James who commissioned the "King James Version" Holy Bible that's still used today. One of the big reasons James had it written was to help regular people understand why kings are their natural leaders.
Remember this was before Rousseau. So, there were no alternatives to holy kings.
Although England had many versions of Christianity, all believed in a king's right to rule. However, England did have an elected Parliament. But in King Charle's eyes, it was only supposed to advise the king. Which its elected representatives did, even if most advice was ignored. However, much to Charles' chagrin, Parliament held one big lever of power. After some revolts in the Middle Ages, the English Parliament had the authority to approve or reject new taxes.
Like most kings, Charles and his father lived large; jewelry, palaces, banquets and balls never come cheap. With the Thirty Years War raging, it wasn't long before England went broke.
Holy King Charles needed a bailout.
Parliament, filling up with idealistic Christians (especially Puritans, the people who fled to America and started Thanksgiving) wouldn't say yes until they got more political powers. In turn, Charles refused to talk to them. In fact, the king sent Parliament home and ruled by himself for over 10 years. The king got his money by using the ancient feudal rulebook filled with tithes and hidden fees. One example, he fined men who didn't come to his royal coronation.
And here is the moment we all should fear. The government was broke. The struggle between King and Parliament was very simple; who should pick up the bill?
England wasn't destitute. It was relatively wealthy. Both the Crown and Parliament could pay the debt by sacrificing for the good of the country.
But both sides thought it was the other side's responsibility.
Sadly for Charles, the people were no longer weak. After all, they were in the middle of the Science Age and enjoying all the benefits of better cyborgology like double ledger accounting, navigation equipment, and, most importantly, gunpowder.
The people were playing the game of civilization and wanted to keep going.
It was precisely because the English people were empowered by new levers of power, that they could stand up to the king. The sword of the "divine king" meant little against muskets. As a famous saying goes, "God made us, but the gun made us all equal."
However, without Rousseau's new philosophy to explain themselves, the unhappy people were left asking for change from a king who thought he was a god.
Parliament eventually got sick of being ignored. So they raised a modern army, Charles did the same, and the two sides fought the English Civil War (1642–1646). The Parliamentary Army was local Protestants devoted to democracy on their way to becoming player gods. They chose their own leaders by merit and suspected Charles was a closet Catholic.
Charles's Royalist Army was mostly nobles who hired foreign mercenaries and suspected the Parliamentarians had gone mad.
After four years of gruesome battles and bloodshed, Charles lost. He was held under arrest while rules for a less powerful "constitutional monarchy" were being made by the victors. Charles then escaped, hired a new army, and fought the Second English Civil War (1648–1649).
Charles lost again.
The Parliamentarians were now enraged.
The people and their Parliamentary leaders forgot about making a constitutional monarchy, and instead signed a warrant charging Charles for crimes against the English people. These newly minted player gods wanted all the levers of power.
Charles didn't budge. The ruling philosophy said he was king. The Bible—his father's Bible!, the ultimate rulebook!—said so in plain English. So, Charles refused to speak to the court; a father doesn't answer to his children.
Soon, Darth King Charles was put on trial. And what happened next tells us why being an extra today is a terrible idea.
Charles Speaks His Antagonism
Public speaking is hard for most everyone; for Charles, it was near impossible. Charles had a speech impediment. Often called a stammer or stutter. No one then, or even now, understands what causes it. For a stutterer, talking is like playing guitar with music notes written on the spot by a gremlin. Some words are easy to say, some are impossible, and some decide which at the last mil-mili-mili-second.
But a stutter isn't just about pauses, repetitions, or missing words. A stutter is like having a mini-seizure. Your body flexes. Your neck tenses. You stop breathing. It's horrible.
I should know because I suffer from the same affliction as Charles did.
The physical pain isn't even the worst. Getting that look from people is. The "what is wrong with you?" look.
"Hello, my name I'm Charles. I wa-want can want to help discuss, the situation with the, Parliament House of Parliament or the-the-the people inside, theee Commons..."
Actually, the worst part is the irony. All you want to do is talk to someone about your problem.
That's why the speech impediment forces a person to be quiet, shy, passive, and eager to please. It's very frustrating because one doesn't stutter when alone, swearing, yelling, singing, talking to a dog (Charles had two), or sometimes when speaking through a "character."
But for some damn reason, in everyday conversation, the gremlin forces erratic speaking, random silence, binge drinking, and watching life pass you by. It's possible Charles' relationship with Parliament was so bad because he simply didn't want to face the gremlin.
I mean, should a king have one?
My speech impediment was why I got a job in a car insurance claim department. After a vice-president at an old company secretly told my supervisor I wasn't allowed to talk to customers—for fear of embarrassing the company—I was like shit, I guess I don't have this damn gremlin under control.
Of course I was hurt, but I never told anyone I had the impediment, so, despite very helpful therapy as a kid, it was obviously still an issue.
Fuck it. I decided to jump in the ocean and sink or swim in the scary waters of a call-center.
The water was a virtual horror show of gremlins. It was a daily workout of all-day phone calls, angry drivers, and giving out bad news. The worst part was having no "outs" like swear words, drinking games, or wonky behavior to hide behind. I stayed with it like that desert fox learning to swim, motivating myself by saying, "I'm getting better!"
And it was far worse than I thought possible.
The insurance company wanted adjusters to answer ever more phone calls. To incentive us, they'd ring a monotone "bell" because… I don't know. They never said why (probably because they're filled with eight different bosses, all sleeping at the wheel inside the Industrial Age's love of micromanagement). We employees learned to question "the bell" was a bad idea.
Management used it as punishment; "answer more phone calls, or we'll make the bell faster and louder!"
I'm serious. Adjusters were often more stressed than the person who just had a car crash. Whatever the reason, DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-DING almost all day. This damn bell gave people who weren't stutterers tremendous anxiety, breakdowns, and stress leaves.
Super-shock speech therapy!
After about a year, I didn't have to massage my jaws at night to release it from all the teeth shattering jaw-clenches I did to divert vocal stuttering. I killed that fucking gremlin! And that's what it took for me to greatly improve my fluency.
Like an ocean fox, I walked around a new, happier person.
Yet, Charles never had this lesson. In fact, he didn't have any lessons. No speech therapy to learn "turtle talk." No field trips to practice ordering a pizza with professional guidance. No fourth-grade teacher to give him winks to remember to breathe.
Charles' gremlin didn't even have a name like "speech impediment." After all, in his day, doctors prescribed blood-sucking leeches as medicine. Like everyone else in his time, Charles was all alone trying to make sense of Nature's gremlins of diseases, infections, viruses, and speech impediments.
Charles adapted as anyone would. He was famously shy, quiet, and antisocial his whole life. I feel for him when I see a young king watching the party from afar, too afraid to join in. You can watch The King's Speech to see all this in a movie.
Sadly, Charles didn't just have to give a speech. He (told himself) he had to be the absolute ruler of a nation. Yet, even when fighting for 16 years to defend his ruling philosophy, Charles still probably had to massage his strained jaws every night.
And now, Charles, God's King, was accused of being "a Tyrant, A Traitor, Murderer, and a public enemy to the Commonwealth of England."
This was a watershed moment in modern human history. For the first time, the people weren't replacing one king for another. They were killing the king and replacing him with themselves. The people would control all the levers of people and be their own player god!
Charles was totally shocked by this idea. It would be like us watching the laws of physics being broken. It simply makes no sense that a king isn't the player god. There was no rule to reference, no justification to make the king earn his spot as the leader in the sky. The ruling philosophy is the Matrix, and the Matrix is supposed to keep everyone happy. But all of a sudden, some people were waking up and calling the Matrix a lie.
A noble lie perhaps, but still a lie. Charles simply couldn't make any sense of the people's complaints.
To us, Charles was a selfish leader who wanted his time in the Sun to never end. But to himself, he was not. He was devoted to his father, his Faith, and his conscience. Being a king was his responsibility. He didn't care that the Vikings and Vandals were long gone. He didn't care to notice civilization had returned to the Roman province of Britiania. Charles felt very obligated to defend the holy rulebook and the country from everyone, even the people.
So at his trial, Charles only asked by what rule was he being tried? That's all Charles wanted to know.
The judge said, "the people," and dropped his gavel.
Charles was astounded, shocked, and bewildered.
The king's next chance to talk sense into these misguided madmen would be at his own chopping block.
Charles Speaks
Charles' last chance to justify himself, was standing on a scaffold next to his executioner.
Forget about the ringing bell of a claims department. Imagine the stress of a stutterer minutes from execution, having to say something to defend his throne, his family's place in history, and his kingdom.
I can't explain how anxious he would have been. I know he feared the emotional pain of silence, far more than death.
And with all this running through his head, gremlin and all, Charles said this:
Truly I desire their (the people's) liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a ruler are clear different things... therefore I tell you that I am the Martyr of the people. I die a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England, as I found it left me by my father... I have a good Cause and I have a gracious God... I go from a corruptable to an incorruptable crown where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.
Charles spoke his words so eloquently everyone was impressed. He was rarely so clear and passionate.
Charles died happy. He knew the angels around his shoulders killed his gremlin for him, before lifting him up to Heaven to be with his holy father. I must say I'm happy for him. It is heavenly to say what's on your mind.
But in truth, there were no angles and no gremlins. Stuttering is an anxiety disorder. So what really happened is amazing.
What should have been extremely stressful, the crowds, the soldiers, his lost royalty, and his chopping block; were Charles' freedom. He was 100 percent positive nobles had the divine right to rule; until the end of time.
Everyone who said otherwise had gone mad, and why should anyone be anxious around madmen who've already committed to murdering you? Why be anxious around people who'll never get it? Without any interaction possible, there can be no anxiety. Charles' last words were him basically talking to himself, or to one of his dogs.
We do our best to understand history with songs, books, and images. But we can't time travel. Nor can go into Julius Caesar's or Cleopatra's minds and fully understand their motives.
But, by luck or good fortune, I can go into Charles' mind at this historic moment. And one of history's most evil Antagonist Kings was a completely moral man. He had no hate in his heart, no deception to hide. In fact, it was his genuine morality that killed the gremlin.
It's the only way he could have spoken a word on that scaffold.
Charles was a victim. A regular person told he was king. When he was told to throw that away, it was like being asked to wake up from the Matrix with no experience with frontline pain to prompt the awakening.
Could you, me, or anyone do any better?
Only a few leaders ever have. Often called "philosopher kings," they have the wisdom and kindness to empathize with frontline pain. Like good army generals, they use their power to help win the war on the frontline.
But philosopher kings are very rare. In times of general peace, most everyone in a hierarchy gets detached from the game of civilization. This detachment from life breeds ignorance, shortsightedness, hubris, and therefore, antagonism.
Few people are genuinely evil. Antagonists are almost always victims of human Nature.
This happened to Charles. He never felt frontline pain, not even in the battles he caused. And that's the point. It's not the job of detached leaders, whether "eight different bosses", Darth King, or Darth Blockbuster, to decide when to upgrade civilization. Why would they want to?
The truth has always been, and will always be, that evolution happens on the frontline. The people in power aren't there.
You are.
Option 2 - Player God
You, me, everyone you else on Main Street can easily become player gods of the Internet Age. Using open-source technologies, we can fund and use our own apps and electronics to improve our world today.
And it's all thanks to Internet Age protagonists.
Paul Baran (1926-2011) is one of the big ones. A true Jedi. This one guy took it upon himself to prevent a nuclear holocaust (talk about stepping up). When the Soviets tested a hydrogen bomb in 1955, Baran realized only an updated, robust, and reliable communications network would ease American and Soviet trigger fingers during tense standoffs.
Baran worked all alone for years. By 1960 he came up with his new network's two core ideas; fully distributed data networks and packet communication. The first eliminated central hubs and hierarchy, the second ensured no information would be lost during any and all transmissions.
With many pages of technical specifications on hand, he ventured out into the world, to give his work away. Sadly, the Defense Department surrounded him with red-tape. And AT&T, very protective of its a monopoly over America's old-school telephone network, repeatedly said his ideas were impossible.
These antagonists in Big Business and Big Government shut Baran down. Years later, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) saw the brilliance and built Baran's distributed communications network.
By late 1969, as the world was watching Woodstock, Vietnam, and the Moon landing, ARPAnet, the first version of Baran's network, what we now call the internet, went online. Reliable communication with no central hubs was born. For the first time in history, all individuals could communicate with no middlemen to control their information or message.
In the last days of the Industrial Age, almost no one understood how their world, way of life, and philosophy, had been replaced.
The Internet Age was here.
Think of that when you browse the web. The internet was created to survive a nuclear holocaust. Realize how powerful it must be, and therefore realize how powerful you are when using it.
The internet is your New World. A place of eternal equality because no one can control you. No professor, executive, president, or king can shut you down. BitTorrents, Netflix, and Wikipedia all beat Darth Blockbuster simply because you used them.
You never even have to talk to Darth Blockbuster to win the game of civilization.
All you must do is what's best for you and your family and use many more open-source levers of power.
Now think of the rest of your technology. Those high-flying drones, sensor filled smartwatches, 20-megapixel cameras, and super-computer gaming systems. These tools are your Internet Age cyborgology. If you had those at Woodstock in 1969, not even those drugged-up hippies would believe your mutant powers.
You are a unique lifeform on Earth.
For all we know, you're the most advanced lifeform ever to exist.
As Gordon Moore said in 1973, "We are really the revolutionaries in the world today—not the kids with long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago."
Gordon Moore was part of the "Traitorous Eight," a group of young inventors who founded Silicon Valley. They each had a pivotal hand in creating technology like the integrated circuit, microprocessor, and personal computer. Intel, AMD, Amelco, Eugene Kleiner Perkins, and dozens of other historic companies were started by their hands.
More than that, the Traitorous Eight bucked the rigid corporate hierarchies of the day and treated every employee as a member.
Because they started companies based on mass-collaboration.
And the Traitorous Eight broke the rules to do it all. When they started business in the late '50s, the era of mass-production was still in full swing. Everyone was treated like a line worker—a cog in the wheel of machinery. The company gave you a dress code, told you who to socialize with, and what furniture your office was allowed to have. The company owned its employees and wrote itself the rulebook to prove it.
These eight guys said to heck with all that.
Computers changed how we live. But not how we govern ourselves.
Moreover, listen to the words the Industrial Age used to describe the Internet Age and mass-collaboration. "Traitors. Troublemakers. Shameful act." All the while, the Traitorous Eight were promoting equality over hierarchy, invention over the tried and true, and most of all innovation
Look at your home assistant, smartphone, or laptop, the morals from a classic story invented your cyborgology. Don't take it for granted. From the oppressive Soviet Union to high-strung East Coast American corporations, other cultures were investing billions into research and development back in 1969 and could never upgrade themselves, or their cultures, to the Internet Age.
They lost the game of civilization.
Paul Baran, the Traitorous Eight, and their followers are heroes because they went beyond inventing technology. They merged new technology with a new culture of collaboration to kickstart the Internet Age. They started a classic story about problem-solving.
Now it's your turn.
When we hold our medical records, work portfolios, and other levers of powers in our hands, we'll finish what the Traitorous Eight started, and fully upgrade ourselves to the Internet Age.
All we need to reach the future is the click of a new set of ideals of right and wrong, good and bad, in science, art, morals, politics, and economics. Only a modern ruling philosophy will unite Main Street to see the big picture.
Rogan is talking about Darth Blockbuster, Darth Insurance, Darth Taxman. Like Darth King Charles, these antagonists weren't bad guys until history passed them over, and they wanted to say in power.
Our new politics must overcome this unfortunate side of humanity.
Precisely how is a topic for a future article. But in short, we could lessen the blow of changing careers. We could give people who step down from old technology a huge thank you like we do when Presidents step down from office. We could realize that rich people should be leaders who control the resources needed to overcome a frontline problem.
Musk isn't a billionaire, he's a hero with the means to upgrade our cars to electricity, our homes to solar panels, our internet to satellites, and put humanity on Mars. Hogwarts School of Majic and the Jedi needed lots of money too. Our true leaders are no different.
But before we discuss the details of the Internet Age, we need to first take the plunge.
We have to realize, antagonism is our mutual enemy. Digital mass-collaboration is our future. And, Techvolution is the new philosophy of the Internet Age player god.
The world will never be perfect. But it'll be a lot better when using modern technology to solve today's frontline problems.
The future is already here.
If you believe in yourself.
Extras Die-Off
Making camels live in the Amazon won't get any cheaper. Our debt will keep rising. No Conservative or Progressive ideologue will sacrifice their platform, projects, and politics to pay for the 1969 lifestyle.
Instead, both extremists camps will rally around the call for the "other side" to be the one to sacrifice.
If you stay an extra of the Industrial Age, watching these two Industrial Age philosophies fight is your fate. Because you'll limit your politics to only see Progressivism or Conservatism. You'll slowly become radicalized, and end up chasing phantoms in the news, rallies, and demonstrations. You'll argue with antagonists at work but get nowhere. You'll get so frustrated you'll march and scream for change. Eventually, after another financial crisis, debt crisis, migrant crisis, pandemic, disputed election, constitutional amendment; some disaster or another, the West will reach the end of kicking the can down the road, and live through a new version of the Thirty Years War or English Civil War.
That's not supposed to sound alarmist. It's a diagnosis using our history.
Remember this quote from the Thirty Years War?, "A warning of the dangers of entrusting power to those who feel summoned by God to war, or feel that their sense of justice and order is the only one valid." How much longer do you think before Red/Left politics completely breaks down?
Look at Left/Right followers raging at each other, do you want to let them decide your fate?
Look Up
Look up. Wherever you are, look up. Do you see the "mythical player god"? No, you don't, and you never will. You are that player; you're choices determine what happens in the game.
You're in the game right now.
If you eat a salad, do push-ups, take a cold shower, or read a book, use a new open-source app, then these things happen in the real-life game of civilization.
Darth Blockbuster will never, ever, "see the light" and play the game for you.
It's not his job.
The fate of civilization is entirely on your shoulders. Your job is to do what's best for yourself, and help society prosper. Looking up for guidance, you see two options.
Open-source Jedi, who have never stopped struggling, innovating, and filling the world we majic. And the self-importance, shortsightedness of Darth Blockbuster. The fallen hero of the Industrial Age who uses the Matrix of dark majic and an old rulebook to keep himself in power.
Our act three is thus a rather simple question.
Who's your hero, Stargazer? Who do you want to control the player god in your society?
What's Your Conclusion, Stargazer
I wanted to write Black Mirror stories about cyborgologists, Techvolutionaries, majicians (whatever you call them), rejecting the easy money of Industrial Age society because they'd dead-set on building a new and better world.
I'd love to show how the new economy is where everyone lives a compelling story worthy of a Netflix series. When ordinary people believe in Techvolution, old rivalries between race and religions die off, because everyone is the hero of their own story.
And that gives us all a new definition of good guys and bad guys. Simple put, whoever helps you live a better, happier, more free life is a protagonist, and whoever gets in your way is an antagonist.
I want to write all these stories, but I haven't. This book has been informative enough. At the start, I asked, "are you happy?" Now you have to ask yourself, "Am I going to do something about it?"
If the Industrial Age, Left/Right politics, and economics of mass-production don't end with you, then when do they end?
The fate of your life, your kids, and your society rests on the simple question. Are you on a mission to replace the player god in the sky? Will COVID-19 be what finally makes us update our culture to all the fantastic possibilities of modern technology?
You, me, everyone can defeat Darth Blockbuster. All we must do is evolve humanity's cyborgology with new open-source tools:
Renting DVDsCalling a taxi-cabWriting directions on napkins- Pandemic plans
- Work from home software
- Simple government regulations
- Confusing mortgage contracts
- Car crashes
Do you demand these majical levers of power?
If you do, we win.
If you don't, we lose.