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Techvolution: A New Philosophy - Intermission
Intermission
Intermissions are an excellent time to stretch our legs, buy a snack, and also ask some questions about the story so far. Here, I want to go more in-depth on some terms and characters. I especially want to emphasize why funding, making, and using open-source Internet Age levers of power will make the middle-class happy again.
Recap
The game of civilization never stops. It goes on forever because it's the game of life; evolve or die. Thus, we're always that person on Main Street trying to figure out what's right for ourselves while trying to help our civilization prosper. I think we all try our best. We try to educate ourselves, eat well, use green products, and join movements like sustainable agriculture and renewable energy.
Although we try our best, we have a huge problem—we're running out of time. Canada, Britain, France, America, and the rest of Western Civilization peaked in the Industrial Age, and we still haven't updated our ruling philosophy to the Internet Age.
Still obsessed with the era of mass-production, we've been digitizing our society using ideas designed to industrialize it. Although we're in the Internet Age, we measure our success by Industrial Age stats like GDP growth, college graduation rates, and Dow Jones Industrial Average.
But, why not directly monitor what these statistics are supposed to judge? Why not track personal savings levels, how well bridges are maintained, how much time in traffic we spend every day? Why not test the effectual truth of our policies on the frontline? Testing frontline pain doesn't make assumptions and will let us steer our society to more dependable prosperity.
The Internet Age empowers us to better measure our daily lives, and, therefore, our civilization's health. But to start defining our society's success or failure, we must click a new philosophy. One that says antagonism is evil, and improving our lives with digital technology is everyone's right and duty.
COVID-19 Shows We Can Still Evolve
Like many people, especially office workers, I love the idea of remote work. I telecommuted for a year while going to night classes at university, and it was so helpful. Yet in university transportation classes, several workplaces, and in society as a whole, driving into work and school was always defended.
Pointing out that most people don't work on production lines anymore didn't matter. Neither did facts, figures, and books to explain why driving through gridlock helps no one. I was always told telecommuting doesn't work because "managers don't like it."
Now with the coronavirus, within a few weeks, managers inside universities, workplaces, and bureaucracies are scrambling to distribute their workers with home offices. This scramble is mainly to make customers and workers not notice managers are often not needed. Although it's sad it took a pandemic to make it happen, it's nice to see how easily our civilization can adapt when neccesity forces us to. (Although I wonder about the battle to come when managers try to return work cultures back to "normal").
This doesn't mean any, and all work can be done from home. But, it does mean many of us stuck in traffic for decades didn't need to be.
Funny to note, by my back of the envelope math, this pandemic is actually improving long-held problems. Road congestion is gone, air pollution is improved, car crashes are far lower. The question is, how did a few managers and executives stop these upgrades from our society?
Because we let them control the rulebook.
The Rulebook
The rulebook is what governs everyday life. Since entering the Internet Age, our rulebook has kept growing. Government regulations have shot up, political correctness is spreading, workers often study for years to get absurd certifications that don't help them service customers better.
Think of this, business lobbyists didn't even exist during the Industrial Age, now many people think special interests run our governments.
Our rulebook is enormous, and you're probably used to it being over your head. We've all signed loan contracts, terms of service, credit card agreements without reading them. We live under many by-laws, regulations, and laws no one knows how many. We buy products filled with so many copyrights, trademarks, patents that it's hard to understand how much of our stuff we own. We live under the jurisdiction of a massive rulebook. But big isn't always bad.
It is when the size is used against us.
The Death Star
A big rulebook makes rules convoluted. This is bad when rules become so open to interpretation, they need interpreters. Today, we keep many lawyers busy arguing what the rules "really mean." Having the right lawyers gives someone the power to win a disagreement.
But a big rulebook is still not automatically a Death Star.
It became one when Industrial Age powers wanted to keep themselves in power. Far removed from the original industrialists, they relied on controlling existing levers of power, instead of inventing new ones. This scene from Mad Men shows it well.
Modern technology and medicine showed people the dark side of cigarettes. Big Tobacco responded with mass-advertising to distract people from the truth.
As our civilization ventured further away from the era of mass-production, this same situation happened at car, clothing, appliance, entertainment, cosmetic businesses. These once-on-a-time, cutting-edge Industrial Age companies didn't know how to evolve to modern times.
When people saw gas-guzzling cars and thought climate change, the industry fought back with slicker advertisements. When people saw sports shoes and thought Chinese sweatshops, the sector increased sponsorships to celebrity athletes. The "Mad Men" made the veils to pretend the era of mass-production didn't need to evolve.
However, because the "juniors" of the Industrial Age didn't know their core product, they didn't know how to exist in the Internet Age. I mean, did you need to see a WhatsApp advertisement to install the app? Or did making your life easier sell itself? Tesla has no commercials and is doing just fine.
As customers kept buying new technology like electric cars, home streaming, a large, confusing, and ever-growing rulebook became a superweapon to defend Industrial Age gates against further adoption of new technology.
Only established Big Business and Big Government had the money to buy the lawyers who could interpret the rulebook in their favor. Henceforth, the massive rulebook of society became a Death Star to Main Street.
Here's one example. There are millions more.
Polar Bears in the Amazon
The era of mass-production is over. But our society used dark majic to make people happy with living the stereotypical suburban 1969 lifestyle. Thus, to look like we're improving education, we put up more prestigious colleges. To deal with traffic-jammed and decaying roads, we sold more luxury cars. To make generic fries and burgers taste better, we added more sugar. To make people "happy," we built more generic suburban homes.
Can you guess where these pictures were taken? You can't because mass-production brought extreme mass-uniformity. Living the same lifestyle across regions is very unusual in our history, and in Nature.
If you'd see a camel drinking from the Great Lakes, eagles flying inside a cave system, or polar bears swimming in the Amazon, you'd stop and wonder, "why are these biologies here?"
Likewise, when we see the same modes of transportation, working hours, and houses in Boston and Phoenix, we should see something is out of place.
In Nature, different geographies, demographics, and weather give unique problems and thus force custom biologies. The human world's many differences across regions, climates, and cultures should create different cyborgologies for the same reason.
If you're asking how humanity should evolve, I don't know. That's your choice. It's up to free lifeforms to adapt. But, I do know our cyborgology has none of the splendid diversity of biology we've all watched on BBC Earth.
The Western world's mass uniformity is why we're unhappy. We're forced to live in a generic world of mass-production. Our lives have few adaptions to make life easier. Empowering the middle-class lifestyle depends on adapting our cyborgology with custom-designed housing, work schedules, transportation methods, food supply, power generation, etc. to our local environment.
But because we're stuck in the Industrial Age's and its mass uniformity of 9-5, Monday to Friday, eight different bosses, we're as unhappy as a camel forced to live in the Amazon.
Unsurprisingly, our society is bleeding money.
Because can you imagine all the cash a polar bear would owe trying to live in the Sahara? Or a camel in the Amazon?
You don't have to, just look down.
Ideologues Don't Care About Evolution
In the Industrial Age, when regular people thought of politics, they first had to think of ideologies. This was because government policy was society's biggest lever of power. To have any say in what that lever did, Main Street could only support Right or Left political parties.
The Internet Age changes the power dynamic. Now when you think of politics Stargazer, you should not think of nightly news broadcasts or what Left/Right commentators believe. You must think of apps, websites, and electronics. These are the new levers of power, and you can control these yourself.
Progressive and Conservative extremists won't go away easy. These ideologues don't know—or care to know—about upgrading to the Interner Age. Even now, they're fighting evolution to stay alive.
These fights get very serious. Extremists set Europe's flame in the Thirty Years War between Protestantism and Catholicism. And now we have enraged Progressives and Conservatives blaming each other for our society's growing problems.
The result is fighting over trigger words, tea-party marches, woke culture, and "convince me I'm wrong" trolling.
The small section of our community that is prone to extremism will keep raising tensions until the rest of us click a new philosophy.
Made In America
Nature rewards adaptation. But if that's true, how did Darth Blockbuster stay in business by re-selling the same mass-products from the 1950's until today?
He lowered his labor costs by exporting our factories (which happened twice for me) and called it profitability.
There are endless pages of economic theory that justify exporting America's industry. All of its bullshit. If lowering customer costs was the reason for sending production away, why aren't trademarks, registered trademarks, copyrights, or patents filed in markets with cheap lawyers? Why aren't executives or marketing departments (nevermind pundits and columnists) outsourced?
Where would you rather save money, on marketing campaigns, or the person making your brake lines, or N95 mask?
In 1945 America held the world's largest and best manufacturing base. It had just finished the "Victory" production program that did so much to win World War II. Even though Germany, Japan, and Italy prepared their economy for years, the American worker was twice as productive as a German, and four times more than a Japanese. The Ford Motor Company alone made more war equipment than all of Italy. General Motors did the same, with the help of 16,000 suppliers, all in America.
This marvel of manufacturing is what made America a superpower.
Within a generation, America's manufacturing base was almsot all sold by the "juniors" of the Industrial Age. China was especially seen as the promised land. A country so populated it could seemingly supply the cheap labor and agrarian market needed to keep the era of mass-production alive forever.
Left and Right agreed. Their philosophy was unable to use the tools of mass-production to evolve to the era of mass-collaboration. They didn't mass-production was meant to seed the Internet Age technology, such as electric cars, wind turbines, and digital textbooks. Instead, Left/Right tried to use cheap labor to sustain the 1969 suburban lifestyle that kept them well-paid.
And when Main Street was outsourced, they wrote shaky economic theory to justify their actions.
But, no matter how cheap anyone makes Industrial Age living, it's still outdated. Nature demands constant adaptation, not replication. That's why there's never been a time where the society of marketers, managers, and economists, defeated a nation of engineers, designers, and technicians.
The lesson is, we lost our manufacturing base and a robust local supply chain for no good reason at all. But we'll get them back. Once we start buying things, "Made In America." Frontliner workers buying each other's products is a great sign we're controlling the levers of power and upgrading ourselves to the Internet Age.
I smile, thinking of all those bakers, tailors, designers, craftsmen, welders, and repairmen happily working on a new empowered Main Street.
I Want to Work at Blockbuster, I Want to Use Netflix
Stargazer, never let anyone call you an employee, consumer, or taxpayer. Those are all different names for a non-playing character. There's no achievement or responsibility required to be them.
Player gods call themselves workers, owners, and citizens. These are the roles where people seek out solutions that upgrade themselves and their society.
With that in mind, let's think about our future.
Everyone knows the world is changing. We hear a lot of the computerization of work and the end of the "one job for life" mentality. What doesn't exist is the self-realization that your job is changing. There are still lots of Blockbusters in the world today. These workplaces sustain themselves on hidden fees, confusing sales contracts, and high mark-ups. Unfortunately, the people inside often think they'll be there forever, even though they watch Netflix every night.
This doesn't mean you'll lose your job tomorrow. But eventually, you'll have to adapt because society will get just as sick paying for your Blockbuster as it did the original one.
You can't work at Blockbuster and use Netflix forever. Don't worry, they'll be lots of patriots running around, teaching you how to make a great living with modern tech.
Modern Patriots
When I worked at the insurance call-center, my customers often had a paper invoice or report. When I told them I needed to see it, they'd usually ask themselves where they could get a scanner or fax machine.
I'd remind them their smartphone has a great camera, so they could just snap a photo and email me. This always sparked a eureka moment; "that's right, I can do that, thanks!"
We know about scanning and faxing, but there's still no word for snapping a photo of paperwork. Because this new ability of our cyborgology is still evolving.
Cool huh?
That's another example of cyborgology and majic. When a new tool is in our hands, it gives us a unique ability and therefore increases our cyborgology. But we need to be taught how to use it. We can learn this majic ourselves, or a majician can teach us.
To overcome things like climate change and government debt, we'll need lots of these majic lessons.
Because someone needs to teach Main Street all the possibilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3D printing, and whatever else the protagonist wizards invent.
You know how Home Depot workers give "Do It Yourself" advice? Well, who does a plumber ask to find out which 3D printer makes the best custom water pipes? How does a roofer find out which drone and camera best inspect weather damage? How can a physiotherapist use machine learning to help her client's sprained knee? Who can help a farmer repair his computerized tractor?
While tech companies keep making and marketing excellent products, someone has to know all the options to help the frontline connect with the majic of modern technology.
Linus Tech Tips is an example of someone already doing this. There's a big job for someone doing this all day; modern patriots who like bumblebees "cross-pollinate" products on Main Street during the era of mass-collaboration.
Does The World Need to Know
Internet Age player gods should be celebrating stuff like #madeinamerica, #staycation, #mainstreet.
That can be hard. Darth Blockbuster heads a hierarchy, so there are lots of underlings inside. Dealing with these BMW drivers, junior execs, or sales agents is sometimes rough. They define success as rising up the ranks and buying dark majic consumer products. If you're "beneath" them, they assume they're better than you and act like it.
If they ever intimidate you, just press the button below.
It randomly selects a Wikipedia article. With three taps, I got:
- Lorenz Nieberl, a German bobsledder.
- Sandamías, a village in northern Spain with 67 residents.
- Aartsenia arctica, a sea snail.
Anyone can make a Wikipedia article, yet no one has ever thought "the worlds need to know" about your personal Darth Blockbuster. You haven't, have you?
Ignore arrogant pricks and focus on the game.
Celebrities
Internet technology put two-way radios in all our hands. Like a person in a life raft, we're a new person because we have a voice in our fates.
An example of this freedom is celebrities. In the Industrial Age society, our stars were often decided for us. The era of mass-production only let a few people make movies, release albums, or get their names in "the papers."
Internet Age celebrities are different. While we can make fun of Instagram models, silly YouTubers, Twitter trolls, and obscure podcasts, but at least we can follow who we want. Which also means we celebrate who we wish to.
Heck, with no gates to overcome, anyone can be a musician, artist, comedian, thinker, reviewer, or "celebrity." One of the things that kept me motivating while writing this book was realizing how many other people are out there are hustling to build the Main Street economy.
And they're all using social media, websites, and other "two-way radios" to do it.
Food trucks are making new and exciting food. Singer-songwriters are creating a new culture for us to enjoy. People are looking up Kickstarter campaigns to see which products deserve a boost in our society. Podcasters are interviewing experts about interesting stuff we should know about. Makers are creating tools and knives we'd never throw away like a mass-produced item.
These and other awesome workers are using Internet Age technology to make an honest living doing what they love. They might not realize it, but they're building the era of mass-collaboration throughout North America Main Streets.
They're the ones turning the single worldwide ecosystem of the Industrial Age economy, into a diversified, robust, and "antifragile" local economy.
To empower all these great people even more, we need a new and improved rulebook.
The Era of Mass-Collaboration Is Only Waiting for a New Rulebook
The happier we are, the healthier our society. As shown above, we're making progress with new websites and apps. But, we'll be the happiest once we click a modern philosophy and evolve to the Internet Age. Because as player gods, we can install a modern rulebook. What I call the Life Star.
I'll show you an example of it.
When we buy a new house, we can't wait to move in, bring in our furniture, and start renovations. Soon enough, everyone's putting in decks, pools, fences, sheds, and whatever else we dream up.
Take a second and watch this clip of a player building backyards in the city-builder Cities: Skylines.
Evolution needs us to buy solar-power roofs, install a Hydroloop water reuser, start a 3D printing business in the garage. These are the new technologies that upgrade civilization.
But there's a roadblock; do you know if your home insurance policy covers hail damage to newly installed solar panels? Do you even know where to find out if it does? Do you where to get your local business by-laws, building codes, tax laws?
Even without antagonists, our society's rulebook is so vast and dense, we all live under the threat of "not reading the fine print." At any time, we could be hit by a code violation, claim denial, warranty rejection, liability lawsuit, or tax audit.
And what if antagonists want to attack us? It's so easy for anyone with the resources to find "a problem" and use their Death Star to start a lawsuit, find a violation, or lobby government against you.
Technologically speaking, there's absolutely no reason for this. How is it that Linux software is worth billions of dollars, operates every Android phone, runs most of the internet's servers, and you can download it by pressing this button.
Instantly Download Billion Dollar Software
But to access our health insurance policy, we do what? What does it take to get the blueprints to our home? How many people understand how their mortgage works? By what crazy regulation can a city by-law officer tell a small business to take down their car lifts after nine years in operation?
The rules, regulations, contracts, and laws that govern our lives are a complete mystery to most of Main Street. And that makes us dependent on the bureaucratic creep of Big Business and Big Government inside city-halls, mortgage companies, and law offices.
The truth is, regular people and small businesses can work as freely as the Cities: Skylines clip above. With open-source software, GPS, smartphones, high-speed internet, AES security protocols, cloud computing, MySQL databases, the middle-class can literally put the power to read, understand, use, and question the rules in our own hands!
Once we hold Internet Age levers of power, we'll make a friendly and reasonable rulebook. We will understand what we should be doing, be able to ask informed questions when they arise, and of course, fight back if we think something is wrong.
Most vitally, with digital records of communication, everyone will be held accountable for their actions.
However, this new rulebook will only be a happy reality once Main Street uses Techvolution as our shield and motivation. Only then will we end antagonism and bring-on the era of mass-collaboration.
That's why we'll make the modern rulebook in the next chapter Techvolution II: Building the Life Star.
We Can Forget How to Win the Game
The game of civilization never stops. Ancient Greece, the Persian Empire, the British Empire all played the game very well. Likewise, we've had a great run. But civilizations rise with protagonists and player gods and decline with antagonists and extras. And we've been the latter for decades now.
Most people know about ancient Rome. We've all seen the Roman baths, palaces, bridges, aqueducts, and especially the Coliseum. Most of that was made between 100 BC to 180 AD when the Roman civilization ruled over a third of the world's population. This era of "Roman Peace" was a time of great prosperity not seen again until about 1700. Most outsiders dreamed about becoming Roman citizens and flooded into its borders to prove it.
Rome's civilization won the Classical Age hands down. We still learn from their legal system, military organization, and civil engineering projects.
And the Romans did all this with only several hundred state bureaucrats.
No kidding. Not a direct comparison because our times are much different, but that should make you think. Meeting a Roman bureaucrat was like us meeting a physicist. They're out there when needed, but aren't relied upon up to live a daily life.
The rest of society was busy building things. Early Rome was mostly farmers, shipwrights, cobblers, coopers, stonemasons, and engineers.
Rome's military conquered the known world, and it didn't even have a professional school. Like most everyone else in society, people learned on the job and did just fine.
Yet, Rome fell.
And you can see the decline in its infrastructure. You can't visit many Roman amphitheaters or mausoleums built after 250, because Rome stopped making new things. They stopped evolving. Romans even went backward. Roman homes had tiled roofs for centuries, but by 400, most were thatched. No surprise by the time Rome fell in 476, Rome had over 30,000 bureaucrats and barely any builders.
Antagonists and extras replaced protagonists and player gods.
And the same thing is happening to us.
As one professor of civil engineering at Princeton said to economist Paul Volcker in 2009, "I was up at Yale the other day and they've given up teaching civil engineering. There are just two old geezers like me up at Harvard, and once they're gone that'll be it. There's hardly an elite university in the United States that pays attention to civil engineering. What's the result? We hardly know how to build bridges; they tend to fall down."
We have many lawyers, bureaucrats, and other people who work to control mortgage rates or insurance contracts. Yet, when they vacation, they visit places like the Coliseum or the Pantheon. That speaks volumes to what really makes a civilization great.
Today, we have far too few people who build things.
This is horrible because we've only started the Internet Age, and should be transforming society from top to bottom with modern technologies. But, the farther we get from the heyday of American manufacturing, the harder it gets to remember how to use a hammer, draft table, or build a bridge.
Literally, if we don't hurry up, we'll literally be unable to build the Internet Age.
Click the Netflix Momemt
Do evolve again, we need to erase the Death Star, and click a new philosophy.
What makes something click in a person's mind? If only we knew. Sadly, we can't decide to cry, scream, or love. We all must wait for a connection.
Today Americans and Canadians are bored. The ladder to the Internet Age is hidden with consumer advertisements or blocked by Deathstar rules in dense employment and product contractors. Going around in circles, we have nothing to do, no story to live. We're extras told to be consumers and employees with no goal to achieve, no glory to earn.
We're waiting to re-connect with a fun, challenging, happy life.
Nobody knows for sure how or why something clicks. However, we do fully understand when it does; when we can't go back. And could you ever drop Netflix and rent DVDs again? What about flipping through a phone book? Do you ever miss calling a taxi-cab and wondering when it'll arrive?
Of course not, and that's a good sign you're already a believer in the Internet Age. Using modern technology proves we want to be player gods.
Our civilization has fought many battles to liberate extras. The first was the fight against kings and their despotism. Then it was the fight against racism and sexism. At each stage, more people fought for the levers of power like books, telescopes, guns, and voting. Empowering more people created more player gods.
Liberating people works so well because, just like in Nature, the more lifeforms play the game, the more adaptations we evolve to frontline problems.
Now, as we upgrade to the Internet Age, we have another "ism" in our way; antagonism. Despotism, racial prejudice, and gender oppression will always need to be kept at bay. But, Darth Blockbuster's ideology is, by far, Main Street's most significant problem today.
Look at what antagonism has forced upon us during this pandemic. Limited medical supplies. A fragile supply chain. Getting informed via infotainment. Almost zero contact with medical professionals. A rush to work or study from home. An extremely bureaucratic healthcare system. Shaky information on who is sick and who should worry most.
Antagonism is why we're camels trying to cope in the Amazon during this crisis.
The good news is, we already have Internet Age technology. You already love it; it clicks in our minds. This book is merely asking you to increase your cyborgology with more modern tools using a philosophy you already believe in.
So, let's return to our mission. I want you to drop the era of mass-production and Left/Right politics for Techvolution. A new philosophy that gives you the right and duty to upgrade our civilization to the Internet Age and the era of mass-collaboration.
At the end of this book, I'd love it if you'd tell a claims adjuster one day, "Just to let you know, like you, I'm recording this conversation. I also already have a copy of the policy and know what section I'm claiming under. I look forward to collaborating with you."
Because that's what player gods say after a new philosophy clicks, and they've taken control of the levers of power.