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Techvolution: A New Philosophy - Prologue
Goal-line
Techvolution gives us the political justification to upgrade our society. With this new philosophy, every person on Main Street has the moral right and duty to upgrade society with the almost magical possibilities of computers and the internet.
Yet, something essential is missing.
Techvolution is indeed the politics of the Internet Age. But politics doesn't open businesses, generate electricity, or grow food to eat. To live in the future, America, Canada, and the rest of the Western world must also upgrade our economics. Only with a modernized way to work and grow families will you and I be happy with our society again.
We change our economics by learning a familiar lesson. Your real economic power isn't being a consumer or an employee. Brand loyalty and employment contracts don't make a person powerful.
Like in politics, your choices give you real economic power.
And to increase your economic influence, Internet Age tools must let you control exactly who you work for, whose products you buy, and under what terms you make these deals. This new economy is an incredible place where individuals are as powerful as Big Business or Big Government.
That's why empowering Main Street with a new economy is the goal-line that Techvolution fights for.
Happily, we're already living in the economy of the future. And we have the modern-day protagonists to thank. They've been building it for years.
Economic Upgrade
Internet Age economics is centered on two simple facts: digital property doesn't expire and can be shared with anyone in the world for virtually free. These innovations mean everyone, forever, can continually add to a single source of truth instead of rewriting, remaking, and rebuying the same old stuff year after year.
If YouTube existed in Issac Newton's time, we'd all be learning about gravity from his videos.
If you take a second to imagine how cool that is, you'll appreciate why the future's economic policy is called digital mass-collaboration.
But before we can learn more about our new economy, we must understand the Industrial Age economy it's going to upgrade. As a fun bonus, we'll also get to see where antagonists come from too.
The Era of Mass-Production
The Industrial Age started in the late 1700s. If you time traveled and "looked down" on society back then, you'd see a much different world.
It was a time of mud roads, hand tools, and abacus calculators. Being sick, cold, and exhausted was a way of life because human perseverance and ingenuity had to fill in for minimal technology.
This world is where Left/Right ideologies shined. You see, Left/Right writers like Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill lived on the frontline like everyone else. They too never had running water, antibiotics, or fresh food in the winter.
Solving this hard life is what spawned Conservatives and Progressives. They were both invented to solve humanity's poverty. Left/Right ideologies brought prosperity by giving the serfs and peasants of the Medieval Age the political right to own private property in the Industrial Age.
By giving individuals the freedom to own land and businesses, Left/Right empowered more people to invent new technologies.
Main Street stepped up. The same way we often dream of "Space Age" technology, the people who clicked together inside the Left/Right player god imagined a new world. One filled with year-round food supply, hot bath water, and communications that didn't need a horse.
To get these technological wonders, player gods of the Industrial Age used the freedoms of Left/Right politics and upgraded their society with an economic policy called mass-production.
With the political rights to own property and run businesses, the people were expected to invent and adopt new tools to make their civilization prosper.
As fortune would have it, the technology needed to mass-produce new products, the piston steam engine (1712), had already been invented. As the now political free engineers, machinists, and other protagonists made piston engines more powerful, they created steam-powered lathes, drills, and presses. Businesses put these machines together like clockwork and orchestrated production lines to mass-produce clothes, newspapers, and trains. Industry answered the call of Left/Right politics and started to conquer poverty.
However, steam-powered production machines still needed a lot of manpower to work.
As industrialization out-produced hand-made products, millions of farmers, craftsmen, and other specialists left their professions in old-style medieval towns and found manufacturing jobs.
Decade after decade, more people left farms and their specialist jobs and operated huge machines on the production line.
Coordinating all this equipment and workers required a lot of oversight, and hence a lot of managers. There was no other way to be sure workers were organized to the strict rhythm of the production line. Ordinary people were thus politically free to own property and buy newer and better products. Ironically regular people had to sacrifice the self-employment many had in medieval Main Street economy.
The mass-production of the Industrial Age is when one-sided jobs with rigid oversight became embedded in our work culture. In early assembly lines, supervisors even inspected toilets to be sure workers weren't lying.
It sounds ridiculous, but it shows how vital coordination was. Workers were merely extensions of a great machine with strict orders from the player god to cure its poverty. Any kink in the chain was a delay in the production line that might cause the whole machine to stop and society to suffer.
Even with its apparent drawbacks, mass-production worked wonders. By concentrating production in a few factories, and only making a few standardized products, mass-production was much more efficient. With the profits of efficiency, society could keep upgrading its technology. As a result, roads got paved, mail was delivered in trucks, and fridges kept food fresh year-round.
Mass-production was so successful it quickly spread around the world.
Enter Big Government and Big Business. The former helped regulate the latter as companies installed colossal production lines and supply chains across America, Canada, Britain, France, and many other countries in the Western World.
The expansion of mass-production as a global economic policy is called globalization.
Globalization accelerated after World War II (1939-1945). When the genuinely evil fascism was defeated, Left and Right spread the mass-production policy to Western Europe and East Asia. These countries soon opened up their own factories and enjoyed enormous economic growth, often called a "Miracle". When the Soviet Union collapsed (1991), Left/Right spread mass-production and opened up many more factories from Africa to China.
Big Government and Big Business turned the world's economies into a single ecosystem, all geared towards mass-production.
The competition between corporations to be the "fittest" who survived in the new world economy was intense. As a result of this cut-through competition, mass-production chipped away at "Main Street" economics everywhere. Left and Right didn't mind. Both sides believed the welders, craftsmen, and other specialists on Main Street were obsolete in a globalized economy.
However, living an ordinary life on Main Street today makes it easy to realize something extremely important. But also quite obvious.
We don't ride horses anymore. Nor do we use steam power lathes to build our stuff. In fact, we live in the world our ancestors dreamed of making. We have high-speed internet, sanitation systems, fresh water, and most noteworthy, advanced robotics and automation.
We have many problems today. But too little food, too cold houses, too slow transportation aren't on the list. However, even though we've largely overcome poverty, we still follow the policy of mass-production.
All because of some people (guess who) like the economy of the past.
Holdovers
As a kid, I helped my family clean office buildings. My simple role was to pick up the garbage and recycling bins. Other than still hating the smell of old coffee, I really appreciate growing up doing honest work. Years later, when working at a big office, the cleaners were short-staffed for a few weeks. Management spent hours meeting about and discussing the "garbage problem" instead of just wrapping it up (pun intended) and moving on.
This little story helps explain an important point.
Most of us don't work on the assembly line, using bulky steam engines or massive presses. Much of industrial production is automated and quite a bit safer too. Most Westerners earn a living inside hospitals, retail stores, or in an office. Thus, many workers today don't work shoulder to shoulder in a clockwork of machines that need strict oversight.
Yet, our culture still values the micro-management of the production line.
In fact, to earn a better living today usually means to "move up" in management. Thus, although they're sometimes gatekeepers, most of the "eight different bosses" are ordinary people looking to better feed their families.
Even so, we're literally paying people to become antagonists.
Because since a manager's skill set is often to maneuver for higher "positions" in the hierarchy of a large company, their corporate management skills are not neccesarily transferable to the Internet Age. Thus, these people often try to keep the past alive as long as they can.
Even if it drives our economy to shit, and makes our jobs suck.
Upgrade
Left/Right and the economic policy of mass-production together made a player god that was custom-designed to defeat poverty.
It worked! We should all be thankful for how hard our ancestors worked in the Industrial Age. And this is all our predecessors, from every country, nationality, and religion in the world.
But now we all have new technology and a new list of problems.
Pick any problem today, from climate change to endless government regulations. How can a production line of products fundamentally solve these issues?
A mass production machine can put clothes on our backs, pencils in our hands, and maybe create enough green products to lower carbon emission. But making lots of stuff doesn't solve traffic, obesity, or BS jobs.
To overcome modern problems, we have to evolve our work culture to use advanced technology more productively. That's why, just as Left/Right gave regular people the freedom to invent, work, and buy things in the mass-production era. Techvolution gives you the freedom to work and live inside the economy of the Internet Age.
And here's why that new economy is called digital mass-collaboration.
Just like protagonists invented the steam engine before mass-production officially started. Internet Age protagonists seeded digital mass-collaboration a long time ago. Starting way back in 1843, inventors like Ada Lovelace, Vannevar Bush, and Alan Turing were already building the first experimental computers. At the same time, writers like H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Gene Roddenberry imagined what politics, economics, and life would be like when advanced computers powered the world.
These authors' stories, such as War of the Worlds, I, Robot, and Star Trek thought of a future so hard to grasp people called it science fiction.
Then came the 1970s; when microprocessors, personal computers, the internet, and other digital technology left the research labs and became actual products on store shelves.
Here started the Internet Age and digital mass-collaboration. And it transformed the world just as much as science fiction said it would.
It's easy to under-appreciate how different our world has become. With every purchase, renovation, and birthday gift since 1970, we've been filling our society with fundamentally different technology. A person who buys a single laptop can hold so many different machines: a typewriter, radio, book, television, photo album, calculator, draft table, voice recorder.
One modern person with just a few more pieces of hardware can be incredibly self-sufficient.
Digital devices thus enable a new economic policy, one that increases production by not fostering ceaseless competition like in the Industrial Age, but continual collaboration. With digital mass-collaboration, we can share and contribute to each other's work to our mutual benefit.
This is because, as already discussed, the digital property never spoils, and it can be accessed from anywhere. For example of the huge difference, you only get your mail at home. But email is yours where you are. With the internet, digital property is in a sense attached to you physically.
There's a good reason for everyone to collaborate. Working online together saves us from the redundant work of mechanical tools. For example, with Wikipedia, the world can use one website for its general knowledge, instead of reprinting, shipping, and buying millions of encyclopedia books every year.
With modern technology racing to mass-produce most anything like encyclopedias, text-books, or smartphone apps makes no sense. Instead, we can find topics with unwritten books, subjects with no Wikipedia page, problems with no apps, and contribute something new.
Scientists already do this. When a discovery is made, the scientific community moves on to something else. Likewise, with digital property, humanity can do the same thing with economics. We contribute to a single source of truth for car designs, educational courses, computer programs, and anything else you can design on a computer.
With each new tool we create, each modern person with a laptop and smartphone can become even more independent of the production lines of the Industrial Age.
Thus, instead of trying to make the world a single ecosystem, digital technology lets individuals adapt to whatever problems we have in our local ecosystem.
You can already see this new economy already forming. Several generations into the Internet Age, items like smartphones, laptops, and smartwatches are everywhere. That's why the collaboration websites like WikiHow, WhatsApp, and Quora integrate so easily into our lives.
Mass-collaboration is today's big picture, the basic principle of the Internet Age's economics. The people who understand this best are the open-source community.
The Open-Source Community
Open-source is a growing community of inventors, designers, and programmers. They are the successors of the first Internet Age protagonists. With honest hearts and genius minds, they're leading us all into the modern age. They live, breath, and promote collaboration at places like GitHub, Wikipedia, Discord, Dribbble, Udemy, Stack Overflow, and Discourse.
These modern-day Jedi have given Main Street the levers of power we need to upgrade ourselves to digital mass-collaboration. Even if not too many people don't realize it yet. Most people still think things like retail stores, manufacturing, and education are industries only for Big Governments or Big Business to control. However, because of the open-source community, there are countless new tools for ordinary people to take control of their work, education, identities, and lives.
Forget the bullshit jobs and eight different bosses. Cinderella can now stop praying her fairy godmother gets her past the palace gates because open-source has given everyone an invitation to the party of economic freedom.
For all intents and purposes, open-source has blown the gates wide-open.
Look around and note the comedians producing their own podcasts. The parents who are educating their kids on Khan Academy. The moms learning how to repair iPads thanks to YouTube videos. The artists selling their products on Shopify websites. By distributing society's levers of power, open-source has kickstarted the era of mass-collaboration and turned many Industrial Age companies, products, and professionals into middlemen.
The open-source community has super-charged Main Street. No longer are we bound to be extras in the Industrial Age, hoping for a better life. Now we can become player gods in the Internet Age, making a better life.
I know from experience. Open-source made me a player god (and later we'll see a protagonist too). I'm a politics, history, and philosophy geek who spends far too much time thinking about this stuff. Because of easy to use digital tools I can write, research, host my work. I can very easily find world-class writers and illustrators to add a professional touch. Heck, think of the connection between you and I. You're reading my ideas with no middlemen and for virtually free.
All because open-source heroes put new apps and electronics in both our hands.
The tech community calls this disruption. While disruption has thankfully torn down many gates. It mainly replaced low-hanging fruit like consumer goods. To keep ushering us into the Internet Age, we need to upgrade disruption with Techvolution and digital mass-collaboration.
Only a new breed of open-source apps custom-designed to solve real-life problems, and a society of player gods paying for them, will turn the fantastic world of science fiction into Main Street's new reality.
The Era of Digital Mass Collaboration
The digital mass-collaboration economy is already here and growing. It typically goes by the name share economy, crowd-sourcing, or Wikinomics. I call it the return of Main Street economics, and it's sweeping through our society.
During the Industrial Age, and even today, when we ask for the decision-maker at most hotels, taxi companies, or manufacturers, we get a corporate directory that never ends. Yet before industrialization, when you spoke with an innkeeper, taxi driver, blacksmith, there was rarely anybody "above" them except perhaps the owner or master craftsman. Although these people weren't politically free to vote or own property, they did control their own small businesses.
Digital mass-collaboration is a return to a more traditional way of working.
That's why Airbnb gives innkeepers, Uber gives coach drivers, and Etsy gives blacksmiths back the levers of power and lets them control their own business again. As modern technology gets better, it will continue to distribute new apps, electronics, and economic freedom to other frontline specialists like programmers, underwriters, and contractors.
Apps Airbnb and Uber are made possible because of the open-source community. The community comes together to create a core technology. Programmers help where their skills are best suited. Working together, this community of veterans and newbies makes an excellent piece of software no one would have if they worked alone.
The community then uses the core technology to create their own specialized products.
At its core, open-source is about collaboration. Whether it's version control, licenses, or issue trackers—everything exists to support people working with each other. Open source embodies a model for people to work together, building something greater than they can create on their own.
For example, a large open-source community creates MediaWiki software. Then different groups use MediaWiki to create Wikipedia, WikiHow, Fandom, and any other website you can think of. After all, MediaWiki is free for anyone to use; gatekeepers be damned! Not just for programmers, mass-collaboration is how writers, researchers, and editors wrote millions of Wikipedia articles in only a few years.
Some of the more famous open-source projects. If you can't program, it only takes hiring a few to get whatever product you can imagine.
There are hundreds of thousands of open-source programs free to download. Here are some download links to give you an idea what's out there:
- Download Chrome's code here
- The code for Andriod phones is here
- MediaWiki, which runs Wikipedia, is here
- Shopify, Twitch, Airbnb, Basecamp all use this code
- And of course Netflix
These internet websites let anyone see which individual contributed to what code, idea, or bug report. This is why mass-collaboration requires less management. Modern software makes accountability so much easier.
All this praise doesn't mean open-source communities are perfect and can run the world. It has problems. Mainly it's people can be rude, with no central ownership projects can quickly die off, and it's also easy too free-load off its contributors, discouraging growth.
That's why open-source is only a part of the ecosystem bringing the Internet Age and mass-collaboration to life. Big Business and Big Government both helped create the digital technology, and they're not going anywhere.
We will always need significant energy, manufacturing, and mining companies to mass-produce our essential products. Many business sectors need vast hierarchies, especially as we venture into the unknowns of space exploration. Likewise, the government will always install traffic lights, operate social programs, and fund research institutions.
Mass-collaboration doesn't tear down the past. It adds to it by letting individuals discover efficiencies big organizations can't find.
That's why open-source is vital.
Its immense value is that nobody owns its educational content, server software, operating systems, web apps, robot specifications, and other remarkable technologies. That means gatekeepers can't stop protagonists from empowering more player gods.
Open-source empowers everyone with a two-way radio. It's a voting booth for anyone to have their say. Whether it's with a simple rotating list of persons to take out the trash. An online encyclopedia with millions of helpful articles. Or software to give society internet streaming—as when a few hackers tore down "Darth Blockbuster's" gate when he tried to keep us buying and borrowing his DVDs.
The open-source community needs our support to continue opening gates, building the era of digital mass-collaboration, and ushering us into the Internet Age. We can't ask any more of them. The Jedi have done their job.
Main Street needs to step up and flock to the open-source banner and grab hold of the great levers of power they've made for us.
Our ancestors became player gods and supported the protagonists of the Industrial Age.
Now it's our turn to support open-source and become player gods of the Internet Age.
A Few Dollars to Buy the Internet Age
Open-source lets Main Street make its own content, apps, and electronics. We can today empower bakers and butchers over factory food. Tailors and sewists over sweatshops. Store owners and clerks over franchises. And, engineers and designers over executive bean-counters.
I mean, wouldn't having a few urban farms in your suburb make you feel a little more food secure right now?
Empowering frontline specialists will usher in the era of mass-collaboration. It's a happier, more productive life with fewer bullshit jobs and fewer layers of micro-managers.
The key to living in the era of mass-collaboration is for Main Street to start buying our content, apps, and electronics. It's sadly rare for ordinary people to purchase apps on the iOS AppStore, Google PlayStore, and elsewhere on the internet.
Thus, tech companies, even giants like Google and Facebook, have to earn their money by selling ads. Ordinary people not paying for modern tools is ridiculous.
We give thousands every year to Industrial Age companies like insurance companies, banks, and universities. We can all afford to pay open-source tech companies a few dollars. A few bucks are all it takes to control our content, apps, and lives.
Isn't that so funny? Open-source technology is so efficient, Main Street can become the player gods of the Internet Age, by paying a few dollars for our apps.
We have to pony up, because, only when regular people are the source of income, do we get to make sure a product serves our interest. Tax software, employment contracts, insurance claim systems... we're the ones paying the bills anyway. Why shouldn't we own the software and hardware puts ourselves in the driver's seat?
Simply put, the open-source community needs our money to make our Internet Age levers of power.
Buying a lever of power for a few dollars is a major bargain. When the middle-class steps up, we'll finally tear down the gates of the Industrial Age, become player gods, and live in the era of mass-collaboration.
Mass-collaboration won't be a utopia. Main Street will actually have to work harder. Just doing that work will be more comfortable because we'll be using modern tools.
Here's a small example of the incredible benefits to expect.
All for a few bucks.
Economic Levers of Power
Currently, when you phone a call center, everything is recorded. The company has access to the recording; you don't. Likewise, when the employee logs in and out of the office, that, too, is recorded. Management automatically has access to these timesheets; the employee doesn't.
Access to things like phone recordings and timesheets are levers of power because they control resources. Today managers put "gates" around the levers out of self-defense. Is there a good reason customers can't confirm what was agreed to during their last phone call? Why can employees be grilled for a long lunch when the same manager quickly forgets unpaid overtime.
This lopsided balance of power allows customers and employees to be taken advantage of, encouraging mistrust, lackluster products, and inefficient workplaces.
Uneven power makes mass-collaboration impossible.
The open-source community lets us fight back in three ways. First, it sets a great example because it entrusts everyone with all available information. Second, open-source wants more members, so the community loves to dismantle gates and distribute new tools to regular people. And third, since no one owns open-source technology, the people can empower ourselves with levers of power only big institutions used to control. Such as call recordings and timesheets.
Workplaces check your references (which is fair). So, isn't it okay if we know that employees work unpaid overtime, are getting harassed, or have "eight different bosses" before we apply to a job?
Distributing the levers of power moves us into the Internet Age. It treats people like adults and expects them to act like it. And if a person doesn't, well, it's not like they can complain about mistreatment. With digital technology, everyone's actions and contributions are recorded. This is good. Like in a small-town, with open records, people's reputations follow them around.
With transparent digital records, a disgruntled person has to reference facts instead of conjecture and emotion.
For example, I can't lie to you about starting this book in September 2019. It's all recorded by GitHub's "version control" system. Meaning, every day, I've uploaded the latest draft to a computer that timestamps everything. You can see all the versions if you want.
Open information makes lying to you, and myself, so much harder.
I love hearing that "people don't want to work." That's total BS. We have the same genes as our grandparents, who suffered through dirty and dangerous factories. Yes, many people aren't self-motivated. But these people need better leadership and a clear purpose to motivate them. BS jobs, micro-management of "eight different bosses," isn't the answer to poor motivation.
Of course, we'll always need management, guidelines, coordination. But, again, most workplaces simply have far too much of it. We have too many coaches, and not enough players, so to speak.
Moreover, most people aren't bad customers either. In my experience (and this is after processing 10,000 insurance claims), the vast majority of customers just want to go on with their lives. It's only when they're misled, disadvantaged, and left in the dark that makes customers lash out. Open information, with easy-to-follow rules, is reasonable and thus gets the most out of people. Particularly because it makes cheating (on both sides) too hard to bother with.
With open-source, we have the technology to create our own levers of power to understand and enforce our warranty contracts, tax-laws, education systems, employment agreements, and so on.
The benefits will be huge.
For example, since 2000, 500,000 Americans have overdosed on opioids. Watch The Pharmicist on Netflix. You'll see how a simple online database of prescriptions stopped the oxycontin pill mills that fueled the epidemic. But it took 10 years for Big Business and Big Government to step up. With open-source software, the public could have banded together and created a secure and straightforward prescription database in a few months.
With open-source software, we could have prevented the opioid, heroin, now fentanyl epidemic from ever taking off.
Open-source helps us make new tools to respond to frontline problems faster. Solving problems more quickly is why the era of mass-production started. It is also what the era of digital mass-collaboration is all about.
Right/Left were needed to get to mass-production. Likewise, to evolve our civilization to the Internet Age, we need to make a new player god of Techvolution plus digital mass-collaboration.
Here's how we grow the new player god.
When a modern-day institution, from school boards to a doctor's offices, says "fill in these forms," we need to start replaying with "No, I want to use my open-source app. With it, I control my own information. Don't worry, this app also lets us both see timelines, appointments, rules, and communication. If you don't want to use it, then I'll move my business. But if you do, I look forward to working with you."
Yes, it's perfectly okay for you to do that.
It fact, it's your job as a player god.
Setting Up Our Story
The world needed to change. We felt in the cold. We felt it in our hunger. We smelt it in our desperation.
After enough sacrifice was paid. When enough blood and sweat were spilled on the harsh factory floors of the Industrial Age, we, everyone in Western Civilization, rich and poor alike, got to the summit. Together we unlocked the computer technology needed to live a better life.
The Internet Age was going to be marvelous. A place of open education, simple regulations, and perhaps the best part, a place where ordinary people worked fulfilling jobs and enjoyed happy lives.
Yet this dream was not allowed to be.
Because the hearts of Men are easily corrupted. And the Industrial Age Lever of Power has a will of its own. Darth Blockbuster thus forged in secret, a vast rulebook to rule us all. In it, he poured his ego, his shortsightedness, and his will for the era of mass-production to dominate all life on Earth.
These rules concentrated the legal departments, HR reps, corporate lobbyists of the Industrial Age as a Death Star to evolution and change.
But there were some... who resisted.
An open-source alliance of coders and designers rallied against the forces of antagonism. On the streets of America, they fought for the freedom of the middle-class.
Free and easy to use websites, apps, and electronics enabled our evolution to a digital mass-collaboration economy. The people loved it. Apps and iPhones spread across the world.
Victory was near!
Yet, the powers of Lord Blockbuster could not be undone. The Industrial Age way of life, with its Left/Right political pettiness, consumerism of useless products, and worst of all, its bullshit jobs and useless meetings, were forced on society with the blasts of the mighty Death Star.
And thus, the climate started to change, economic growth began to stall, wealth disparity started to grow, and the people were so unhappy that drugs, depression, and despair covered the land.
It was in this moment. When all hope was lost, when the dreams of the Internet Age had faded, when the chance to evolve seemed gone, that something happened the antagonists did not intend.
You picked up this book.
In the hands of you, dear reader, is Techvolution. The philosophy you need to blow up the Death Star and evolve new tools to solve society's many problems.
For the time has come when ordinary people will shape the fortunes of all, in the never-ending game of civilization.
That's the a play on prologue from the movie Lord of the Rings. It might as well be called Lord of the Levers of Power. But like in every story, whoever controls society's most powerful tools, wins.
Cast of Ideas and Characters
Before we become player gods, here are a few terms that will put us all on the same page:
Player god: Imagine a person playing a computer "civilization building" game with our society. They would hold all the levers of power and thus decide where to put roads, what food to grow, and when houses get solar panels. Of course, there is no such deity. In reality, it's the choices of individuals that decide what the community does. We choose to emit too much CO2, eat healthy good, or use an InstaHealth medical app. It's only when a person uses tools and appreciates the importance of their actions, that we become player gods who "play the game" of civilization.
Philosophy: The largely unspoken ideals that tell individuals what's right and wrong, good and bad, in science, art, morals, politics, and economics. Philosophy is created inside books, declarations, and constitutions to unite individuals to see the big picture, that everyone's choices matter because everyone is a player god. Note, the player god is a community of people playing the game together because they're united by the same "ruling" philosophy.
Ruling philosophy: A civilization's chosen philosophy. One that "clicks" for all factions and ideologies. Examples include the "Divine Rights of Kings," derived from Christian theology and used in royalist Europe; "Marxist-Leninism" of the Soviet Union; and the combination of "Left/Right" philosophies of the Western world today. The ruling philosophy is supposed to organize society to help its economy harvest resources efficiently.
Economic Policy: The official work culture in a society. An economic policy decides how people get their resources. The policy of mass-production, with its expectations of life-long employment, heavy management, working 9-5 jobs, Monday to Friday, is an example of a society's economic policy.
Happiness: The test of how well the ruling philosophy and economic policy are doing their job. Spending quality time with family, improving one's skill set, feeling optimistic about the future are signs of genuine happiness.
Rulebook: The written and unwritten social, professional, and legal rules that govern everyday life. People write the rulebook by interpreting the ruling philosophy. Some examples are building by-laws, workplace seniority rules, and defining who can get married.
Technology: A catchall term for things we make tools from, like concrete, lumber, nails, shingles, insulation, and bricks.
Tool: A catchall term for things we create with technology to solve a problem, like guns to kill bad guys, books to record and pass on knowledge, and houses to shelter in. We use tools to evolve.
Levers of Power: The most powerful tools; the ones that control society. In Civilization games, these are the buttons, toggles, and sliders players use to play the game. In reality, levers of power are the tools that power, educate, inform, feed, and transport resources in our society. The more levers a person controls, the more self-sufficient they are, which gives them the freedom to become a player god.
Frontline: The point of contact between a tool and the problem. Nurses giving vaccines, cleaners cleaning a city bus, and soldiers on the battlefield are all examples of frontline settings. People on the frontline work jobs that solve specific problems with a tool and a proven skillset. Frontline workers physically hold the levers of power but don't always control them. They will, once the era of mass-collaboration starts.
Hierarchy: A power structure that manages every lever of power's use by society. Kings and queens with the keys to the castle, or the corporate ladder at Blockbuster controlling DVD rentals, are examples of hierarchies. As hierarchies grow, they get more detached from the frontline and start forming gates to protect their tool losing its importance. People in the regime give themselves titles like prince and executive, baron and supervisor to mark their position—and, in a sense, their territory and "rights" in the power structure.
The Game of Civilization: The invention of new technology, cultures, and philosophies to better overcome frontline problems. Civilization develops in ages as protagonists create new levers of power.
Protagonists: People who invent, spread, and use new technology for the greater good. Usually close to the problems on the frontline, they individually struggle. Still, their continued self-sacrifice slowly improves life on Earth. I call them this world's Jedi knights. We call their leaders trailblazers who relish skirting the rules. Galileo, Michael Faraday, Nikola Tesla, Jay Last, Grace Hopper, Michael S. Hart, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Salman Khan, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are among their number.
Antagonists: People who selfishly defend their wealth, power, and prestige atop a hierarchy. Antagonists manage companies or institutions based on dated technologies and think that working on the frontline is beneath them. They work to control society's rulebook, so they can prevent protagonists' new tools becoming new levers of power. We don't often individually identify them. I coined the term "Darth Blockbuster" so we can.
Extras: Everybody in the middle of a battle between antagonists and protagonists. Because they're unattached to either side, extras can pick winners and losers. Sadly, extras don't realize their power and often refuse to believe they're living inside an ongoing game of civilization. When they do, they become player gods. If they don't, the game of civilization turns into a story they merely watch.
The Death Star: The rulebook when it's controlled by Darth Blockbuster. Today it exists inside many regulations, agreements, manuals, contracts, and laws that prevent new levers of power from reaching Main Street. The Death Star is currently busy trying to keep the Industrial Age alive.
Antagonism: The impulse to reject new technology out of concern that change will disadvantage one's position. Antagonism is Darth Blockbuser's official ideology. It's told to Main Street inside the terminology and beliefs of an old ruling philosophy. For example, the (supposed) noble bloodlines of European royalty justifying their absolute power because the Holy Bible (supposedly) said they were divine. Today, antagonism is Main Street's biggest obstacle.
Techvolution: A new philosophy empowering seamless human technological evolution by ridding Darth Blockbuster of his power, by giving player gods the right and duty to decide when society should upgrade our culture and tools.
The Life Star: A rulebook based on Techvolution that promotes human technological adaption and natural selection. The Lift Star makes sure humanity never again lets antagonism stall our upgrade to the next technological age.
Plot: Getting extras to step up, grab hold of open-sources new levers of power, and become player gods who replace their ruling philosophy with Techvolution and thereby establish the era of mass-collaboration inside the Internet Age.