Appearance
Politics
Donald Trump is the savior of Western Civilization. If that turns your emotions on, with tears or cheers, then you are missing the point of politics. Politics isn't about voting for a political party, advocating for a political cause, or screaming at a Twitter feed. The government is so big—with so many politicians, civil servants, companies, and interest groups fighting for control, it will never respond to your small voice.
Tears or cheers don't make a person powerful.
On the contrary, exercising, composting, teaching your kids mathematics does change the world. Good decisions change and improve your world—giving you freedom from dependency and power over your part of society. And, since power is to politics what money is to finance, your personal choices are always your most potent political weapon.
The question is, how do we increase your political power?
The answer, we'll find out in this book, is owning better technology, the self-awareness to use it to improve your life, and finding allies doing similar things. But this isn't a self-help book about making you "happy." It's about making you politically powerful so you can evolve humanity to the Internet Age and therefore earn your happiness.
To increase your political power you must realize there is a good reason no hero, from Harry Potter to Luke Skywalker, marched as a "activist" or "patriot" in their stories.
Potter owned his own wand for the same reason Luke Skywalker constructed his own lightsabre. The lesson is simple. Only when the middle-class holds modern levers of power will we get a happy society. But before we will reach out for new tools, we need to believe in and practice a new kind of politics.
New Tech, New Age, New Philosophy
Life on this Earth has never been easy. But better technology helps a whole lot. Deaths from disease, famine, and even war have all decreased as our technological power has gone up. We can even look at this pandemic and see how lucky we are.
Think of this, before 1880, doctors didn't even wash their hands before surgeries because nobody knew bacteria or viruses existed. Everyone thought disease was caused by "bad air". If hospital patients got sick, expert medical advice would be to open the windows.
And now, in 2020, we're all washing hands, isolating ourselves, and already working on a COVID-19 vaccine.
We still have many problems today, but our technology in medicine, agriculture, education has given us tools our ancestors would envy.
And now we have computers and the internet. They're game-changers. Laptops, digital cameras, tablets, drones, bio-sensors are all millions of times better than just 30 years ago. Modern technology greatly empowers us to keep fighting off pandemics, hunger, ignorance, and war.
But, only if we use new tools to stay ahead of our problems.
In Nature, lifeforms evolve in jumps called eras or epochs. Likewise, humanity develops new technology in leaps; what we call "ages." When a new age comes, its technology is so unique and powerful, it changes how society functions. Things were very different in the Stone Age in comparison to the Bronze Age, for example.
Today we're going from the Industrial Age (1760-1969) to the Internet Age (1970-). It can be hard to appreciate all the transformations. There's a lot to think about when civilization's entire way of life upgrades to new technology. I've been thinking about our technological evolution for years and only now have a grasp.
Improving our technology from one age to the next is hard work, but at least we understand how to do research and development. Upgrading politics to a new age isn't so straightforward. Evolving new cultures, policies, and philosophies usually happens with uprisings, civil wars, or revolutions.
For example, when a guy named "Friar Bruno (1548-1600)" tried to convince Renaissance Europe that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe (among many other far out ideas he had), Bruno was burned at the stake. When colonial Americans wanted their own country they had to fight a war agains a far away Empire. When black Americans wanted to be free and equal members, America had to fight a civil-war have a civil rights movement.
Evolving a new way of life to a new age often shows the worst parts of humanity. But, we don't have to join ancestors down these paths of evolution.
The critical point to for you to realize is that in 1970, personal computers and the internet were both seeded. Since then, computer geeks, hackers, and innovators have been growing an Internet Age society. All the while, the "eight different bosses" inside Industrial Age companies and government bureaucracies have been holding us back to keep their obsolete products and services alive and using Right/Left infotainment to prevent you from noticing.
Being forced to use outdated technology is why middle-class life can be so unhappy. It's why we work bullshit jobs, still use so much oil, can't understand the tax code, and now live in uncertainty during this pandemic. Middle-class life will only get better once we finish the Internet Age upgrade.
There's no shortcuts, cheats, or gimmicks. There's just you and your friends on the frontline who must do the work. Your job is no different than any other lifeform working to evolve itself to harvest resources to earn a spot on planet Earth.
Happily, since "we the people" already have amazingly powerful digital tools on store shelves. We only need to believe in a new philosophy to go out and guy them, and thereby upgrade our way of life to the Internet Age.
The first lesson in this modern philosophy is to look up.
Looking Up
There's a lot to realize when thinking about human evolution. I found it very helpful to "look up" and imagine what our community looks like from above. Looking up lets you "look down" and gain a proper perspective on me, you, and everyone else too.
I didn't just imagine this better view. Nor did I merely see it. I've played it. Play computer games like Age of Empires, Anno 1800, and Civilization, and you will too.
You'll be the "player god" of human civilization. Being a "god" who runs everything teaches lessons that last a lifetime. As a virtual divinity you'll know all and see all, and put your general will into action using an array of buttons, switches, and toggles. As you play the game, you'll use these levers of power to save up money, decide what to research, where to place buildings, and especially when to click "upgrade."
Pressing that most important upgrade button magically transforms every factory, hospital, house, and citizen, to the technology of the modern age. Look below, and you'll see a person being the player god in the game Anno 1800.
The above is a computer game, of course, but it represents reality pretty darn well. We're all in there somewhere right now, trying to figure out how to earn a living while the game plays around us.
That's why this book's cover page is a regular person standing on Main Street—a single guy or girl in civilization. Her job is to do what's best for themselves and help society prosper. Gazing up for guidance, the character sees heroes and villains. In the sky high above is the mythical "player god," whose ultimately the one making the decisions.
Will the player god pick the good or bad guys? Will he act to benefit society or himself?
In a computer game, all of civilization is the player's responsibility. That's why the player controls all the levers of power as they decide what to build, which culture to adopt, and what philosophy to use.
Player gods must think of the greater good. When they don't, the game is soon over.
In reality there is no player god. There's only us. And we improve society when we do yoga, save up for rainy days, check-up on our friends, re-seal a leaky window. Funny to think about, but our everyday choices is playing the game of civilization.
We're each player gods. You can see the power of a single person in this pandemic. Will enough of us decide to wash our hands and self-isolate to "slow the curve"?
It's an open question. Because we often don't think of ourselves as being "player gods." It's easy for regular people (especially us belittled employees and consumers) to forget how important we are. But that's the big picture, isn't it? It's all our individual choices that make up the player god in our real-life game of civilization.
The more individuals realize the big picture and act like their actions matter, the happier their society. And the job of inspiring individuals to bind together into a player god that wins the game is the job of philosophy.
It's a distinct philosophy that makes a group of people care about something bigger than themselves. Nationalism did it for Revolutionary France. Communism created the (impossible) dreams of the Soviet Union.
Think of America's Founding Fathers. They didn't merely force 13 colonies to come together and make a new country. It was the philosophy written in many pamphlets, newspapers, books, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution that made strangers realize the big picture. That to all prosper, they needed to become Americans who believed in:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
This new "Liberty Bell" philosophy formed the United States. This player god was so powerful that through the minds of men like Frederic Douglass it kept spreading to more persons. Gifted with individual freedom and responsibility, the American player god kept growing and kicked ass in the game of civilization during the Industrial Age. That's why the rest of Western Civilization, more or less, followed American democracy and free-market economy examples.
Contemporary Americans, Canadians, Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, Japanese, Koreans can learn from this lesson. If we ever want to be independent of the Industrial Age power brokers inside Big Government and Big Business, we'll need to bing together to make a Internet Age player god.
And, to do that, we need to follow the Internet Age protagonists and click a new philosophy. Only then will we able to look up and see ourselves as the player gods of our civilization again.
Good Politics Is a Moving Target Because You're the One Who's Moving
A common philosophy unites people with a shared understanding of right and wrong. Only when united with the same "ruling philosophy" does a community think of the same big picture and "play the game" together. There are always plenty of philosophies to choose from. The player god—we, collectively—must pick one that empowers its members to solve real-life problems using modern technology. Only then will society live a good life.
It's easy to see technology change. Installing a sewer, damming a river, building a road, is very obvious. But we can't see philosophy change so easily; because it's our minds that evolve to believe in a new way of thinking.
When you play a computer game, you'll see every ruling philosophy is temporary. You'll understand this because you'll experience first-hand that each civilization lasts many generations. Every person in the game, and therefore in real life, is always working to bring on the next era. Thus, just as a sailboat is a stepping stone to a steamship, every person's philosophical beliefs are a stepping stone to something better.
The video above shows a "tech tree" of new technologies, tools, civic, and philosophy upgrades. In the real world, just like improving our technology, we also upgrade our philosophy with a "click." Except this improvement happens when a new philosophy clicks in the minds of multiple people and unites them in a relationship so strong that it forms a new player god.
However, even with a general agreement, every member of the community interprets the ruling philosophy differently. This is why Left/Right politics has many different camps like Conservative or Progressive. Libertarian or Socialist. Republican or Democrat.
Still, even with ideologies to guide our philosophical opinions, understanding our political views is hard. We all look up at the same doctrines—we all try to "think of the big picture," yet we arrive at different answers. Our opinions are a by-product of our psychology, job, skillset, family, geography, culture, ethnicity, religion, time-period. Who can understand how all these factors intermix to make a political opinion? Why does one friend cry tears of sadness, the other of joy, on the same election night?
I can't explain it either. But I can help you understand politics today.
Because the dawn of every new age is always the same. Idealistic inventors create a flood of new technologies. And a wealthy establishment uses the rules of the old philosophy to persuade, or force, the people to keep them in power.
At first, the new tools, products, and services are more like toys. But as technology improves, it starts replacing the levers of power in society from education to power generation.
And here, a fork in the road of a civilization is created.
Because with two ways of life to choose from, old and new, everyone on Main Street makes the choice of a lifetime.
Does the regular person help the protagonists evolve civilization by using modern tools to upgrade how they live their lives? Or, does the average person let the antagonists hold back progress by following old lifestyles and rules?
If you stay out of the fight, you support the antagonists by keeping things the way they are. That makes you what computer games call a "non-playing character". You're a victim of conflicting sins, including power-seeking, love of money, risk-averseness, and desire for respectability—all of which issue from fear of being labelled different or a troublemaker.
By following the old society you're basically an extra watching your civilization as if it was a movie you can't be control.
However, if you rally behind the protagonists, and grab hold of the new levers of power, you're a player god, playing the game of civilization.
Extras follow the crowd; player gods challenge themselves to help their society evolve.
We hit the Internet Age in 1970. Since then, hackers, geniuses, and geeks have been fighting to give the incredible power of computers to Main Street. The middlemen who control Industrial Age technology are fighting them off with things like fancy marketing campaigns, copyright laws, and political lobbying.
And everyone on Main Street today makes a choice. Do they help the heroes take control of society's player god or not?
That's a choice you, the person reading this right now, has to make. It's a choice as big as any you're ever going to make. Because if we don't upgrade now, it only means your kids and your grandkids are destined to live even unhappier lives.
The burden of transforming society will only fall on their shoulders.
A bit heavy to pull on your parental heartstrings, but it's true. Life on Main Street will keep getting worse until we upgrade to the Internet Age. Truly evil things like debt and depression, hatred and hunger, wars and pandemics, only stay away if we keep evolving our technology and culture.
Don't worry. We can finish the Internet Age upgrade. Even now, during this pandemic, we can start to upgrade our way of life. People only need to believe in a new philosophy. One that teaches us how great the world will be, for everyone, when our civilization finally clicks "upgrade" on the Internet Age.
Only when hitting that most important button, will we all look up and see ourselves as happy players gods in the sky.
We Upgrade our Politics Now, or We Lose the Game
Politics is currently quite emotional. Actually, from the disputed elections of the American government to the radicalization of European politics, I think it's better to say Westerners across the world fucking hate each other. And many don't know why. They're just angry. And not in the "I stepped in the puddle" sort of way. Mad "because the other side is ruining everything!" kind of way.
Let's get some perspective. Today, regular people are increasingly unhappy. To cope, we often pick an ideology to help us. Conservatism and Progressivism are the big choices because both were the best at industrializing the world during the Industrial Age and the era of mass-production. Conservatives fight for free-markets to help society create more houses, cars, and consumer products, Progressives fight to redistribute this property to keep our community fair. This divide causes a tug of war over regulations, tax rates, subsidies, and other government policies.
However, digital property is automatically distributed and mass-produced. Even better, digital stuff such as ebooks, websites, and videos never spoil and can be accessed from anywhere. As our world becomes more virtual in the Internet Age, Industrial Age policies to mass-produce and redistribute, grow obsolete.
But rather than rethink hundreds of years of "Left vs. Right" politics, both sides turn extremist.
Old-school businessmen keep their Conservative troops loyal with constant stories of "fighting evil communists who are coming for your money!" De-regulation, tax-cuts, free-trade are among the right-wing rallying calls. In contrast, social justice warriors keep left-wing politics exciting by "fighting racist fascists who want to oppress you!" Their choir forms around demands for climate justice, diversity indoctrination, and making up pronouns.
In short, today, Left-wing partisans think politics is one long Woodstock activism march to fight against the selfishness of wealthy fascists. While their Right-wing adversaries believe politics is defending the idyllic Leave It to Beaver suburban life against lazy communists.
In our communities, nationwide fascism and communism (thankfully) died decades ago. Meaning few people in Western societies label themselves fascist or communist. Left and Right brand their enemies these names because neither understands digital technology helps individuals prosper (as Progressives dream) by forcing individuals to better themselves (as Conservatives demand). With their founding goals achieved in the Internet Age, Left and Right extremists stay alive by keeping their believers in the choir singing against "the other side."
Fighting phantoms distract Main Street with great television.
In fact, spectacular entertainment is their strategy. Both Left and Right ideologues don't want regular people to become player gods of the Internet Age. They want their supporters to stay extras in the Industrial Age. When Main Street complains about how much modern life sucks, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest put up "Breaking News! The Other Side Is Ruining Our Country!" to distract their believers from the fact both Left and Right are out of date.
Blockbuster movie sequels do the same thing. Without more special effects and sex scenes, all their viewers would too quickly notice how boring franchise movies are.
Left/Right are not antagonists. They are a distraction. Although the ideologues don't realize it, they're trying to get people to keep caring about Industrial Age politics. We need to move on from the past and upgrade our politics with a new philosophy, so Main Street sees their duty to establish the Internet Age.
Sadly, in history, upgrading our politics only happens when old doctrines kill each other off. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) is an all too good example. This horrible war between European kingdoms was fought during the Science Age. But politics hadn't upgraded yet. Europe was still run by a powerful nobility preaching the Medieval Age philosophy of "a nobles divine right to rule."
When Main Street demanded a better life, the "divine right to rule" ruling philosophy only gave them two options to choose from; Catholicism and Protestantism. Regular people picked a team and slaughtered "the other side" on behalf of "divine kings". Historian Peter H. Wilson summarized The Thirty Years War as "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."
The Thirty Years War was extremely brutal. One in five Europeans died from its pillaging, battles, and massacres. The carnage only stopped when both sides were exhausted. The worst part was when the horror ended, the people realized they were no better off, and their problem was, in fact, being ruled by any and all kings. That's why philosophers soon wrote an upgraded philosophy of Democracy. It wasn't long until it clicked between ordinary people, who therefore adopted modernized Democracy as their new ruling philosophy. As player gods, the people fought against divine kings in the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), and many more uprisings afterward.
The hatred between Catholics and Protestants should sound scarily familiar. Today's fights over presidential impeachments, border walls, and trigger words are a smokescreen. Left and Right hate each other because neither can see or admit they're both behind the times in our modern age.
The ray of sunshine is, most people today are moderate Progressives and Conservatives. While these reasonable people find motivation in Left or Right ideologies, they concentrate on real-world problem solving and not ideological purity. It's much easier for moderate citizens to discard ideology, compromise, and "reach across the aisle" to solve a problem, and then move on to the next issue on the list.
However, as we keep using more Internet Age technology, it gets harder to rationalize aging ideological beliefs. The result is Left/Right ideological loyalists devoutly watch the 24/7 media circus that's making our society hate itself. And moderate people keep abandoning politics.
The Internet Age Needs a New Philosophy
For Techvolution to be our new Internet Age philosophy, it must inspire everyone in the middle-class to see the big picture again. Left/Right pundits are whiners who'd you never select to start a new civilization, and so really should not be in control of our current one. Seeing the big-picture today means realizing our future is being built by the people at Tesla, SpaceX, Deno, Mozilla, OpenAI, and Blue Origin.
Everyone who wants to live in the Internet Age should be following these heroes' example.
Therefore, regular people should fund, make, and use modern levers of power. Examples are home solar panels to power an urban farm. A car maintenance app to know which cars and mechanic shops are best. And a website with openly available management performance reviews to help keep our companies honest.
Techvolution will work best if you're sick of contemporary infotainment politics but love checking-out what Elon is up to.
Because this new philosophy will empower the passion in your heart that wants to improve the world right now. After all, with digital technology, most of today's problems are quite simple engineering problems. We don't have to invent impossible technology like time-travel to solve road traffic, personal loneliness, or rising healthcare costs.
You'll really like this book if you know that unless we see ourselves in the video below, Evolution will find someone who does.
That's our ancestors in the video, and it should be all of us today too. So, if you despise your job, believe in conspiracy theories, worry about climate change, get intimidated by the uber-rich, are scared about COVID-19... fine, you've spotted a problem.
What are you going to do about it? Wait to cast a vote in an election, yell at a TV, or find, fund, and use a new tool to solve the problem?
What would Harry Potter do?
You have the power to stand up and evolve civilization past today's problems.
For all the negatives of this pandemic, I think there's one big positive. Most people are stepping up, staying home, self-isolating, and social distancing. A few weeks ago, these habits didn't even exist, and it's already taboo to flaunt them. Our society can still adapt when we realize we should.
That's really good because we have a lot of evolution ahead of us.
I wrote this book to get you dreaming about them all. It's written to be like New Atlantis, On Social Contract, and Common Sense. All books that helped start modern democracies by making unhappy people realize the big picture. That our choices are our most potent political weapon. That with advanced technology, our choices are, in fact, levers for change.
Today, if we don't step up to upgrade our politics, we'll keep suffering the unknowns of a degenerating Industrial Age society. We'll stay unhappy extras watching stories of phantom communists and fascists, instead of gazing up to a future as player gods of the Internet Age.
And if we stay non-playing characters, at least with this book, our kids can read what their parents could have done as they regret the choices of player gods who lost because they refused to play the game.
The Grand Mission of Techvolution
Writer David Mamet once said not trying to please a group of people, means empowering yourself to better see Nature. So, I embraced that idea when writing this book. Meaning, I didn't try to please any pundit, reporter, or professor. I'm a regular guy who wrote this for myself and my fellow people on Main Street so we can win the game together.
Saying that, Techvolution has several parts:
I. A New Philosophy: This part shows how to upgrade our philosophy to the Internet Age. Its purpose is to empower Main Street to see the big picture. That we're all player gods who must fund, design, make, and use apps, electronics, and the internet to solve our problems now. Fittingly, the best indicator of our progress is how happy we are with our lives.
II. Building the Life Star: This section explains the new political and economic truths we'll see in the Internet Age. New technologies like sensors, bio-monitors, and big data will become our "microscope" and "telescope." With these digital tools, we'll be enabled to see the effect of our predictions, and therefore create objective definitions of political and economic "right and wrong" as we play the game. In short, the Life Star will do for politics and economics what scientific instruments did for physics, chemistry, biology, etc. The troubling part is many people—especially phantom storytellers of old philosophies—won't accept what this new telescope shows us.
III. Starting Starfleet: Once we can see ourselves in the Life Star "telescope," we'll use it to design digital tools detached from the Industrial Age. As the Industrial Age's material abundance helped us live in so-called "perpetual peace," Internet Age products will make our lifestyle one of "perpetual profit." We'll send the massive savings to the protegees of Musk and Bezos and hence jumpstart the Space Exploration Age—or as I like to say, "Start Starfleet."
How to See the Matrix: To write Techvolution, I used Aristotle's Poetics to better understand Hegelian dialectics. Then I added some evolutionary biology because I think it and political philosophy are similar, if not the same, fields. Which basically means I used storytelling to decypher technological (and perhaps biological) evolution. If that bores you to pieces, that's cool, you don't need to read more about it. But just so you know, Techvolution is based on a full-blown philosophy that I explain in another book called How to See the Matrix.
Techvolution A New Philosophy has a very high goal. So, I want to be crystal clear about its purpose. We're in the new and wondrous Internet Age. But we're still using the philosophy of the Industrial Age to run our society. Conservatism (1791), and Progressivism (1859) philosophy cards were clicked many years ago. It's thus no longer good enough for the middle-class to watch infotainment news, donate to a social cause, march in a demonstration, go to a gun range, and think we're improving the world.
To have a better society, we need a new ruling philosophy. One that gives people the right and duty to evolve our culture to the Internet Age by funding, building, and owning content, apps, and electronics custom-designed to improve life on the frontline.
In line with that goal, our new philosophy must target today's most significant political enemy; antagonism. Like despotism, racism, and sexism, opposition to our technological evolution needs to be eliminated.
Antagonism is created when the "eight different bosses" of the Industrial Age choose to guard the gates of old technology. These antagonists reject the opportunity to build the Internet Age. Instead, they suppress new technology, to keep Industrial Age products, like TPS reports and broadcast TV, as society's levers of power.
The changing of the guard, from the Industrial Age to the Internet Age, is basically what this book is about. To liberate more people from the gatekeepers, we need a new philosophy that eliminates antagonism.
Antagonism is defeated when ordinary people have the right, duty, and protection to use the best tool to solve a problem in their home and work lives.
You can think of it this way. What's the point of all this excellent internet technology, if ordinary people aren't more free to use it in their home and work lives? The hardships of life apply equally to all lifeforms, that's why every lifeform is free to evolve to find food, shelter, water, friendship, and partners.
Should Industrial Age power brokers really be the ones deciding how we evolve?
Changing government regulations and laws to overcome antagonism would help. But to get the power to change the laws in the first place, the middle-class can't wait for the Internet Age to come to us. We must get our hands on new apps, electronics, and other levers of power.
And to do that, Main Street must evolve more than just new politics.