How To Live in the 2020s

I am convinced — in spite of everything — that we may well be on the cusp of living in a very different, and beautiful, way. Why do I think that? Well, a few obvious structural reasons. The internet really does remove the middleman in terms of connecting with one another, so there really are far fewer barriers than there were before to exchanging creative work between creators and audiences. The abilities to communicate over long-distance really do produce workplace efficiencies — namely making remote work possible and creating more leisure time, which means more time to really create in the way you want to create. Then the internet does have an inherently equalizing tendency — people enter into it somewhat stripped of their usual social roles (you don’t really know who’s rich, who’s poor, who’s good-looking, who’s friends with each other in real life) so that there is an opportunity for a society based in the mutual recognition of equals, which as Hegel taught is the greatest possible human good. And then the disparate space of the internet allows people to build connections based on affinities rather than the accident of location, which was the way it always was.

So what do we have instead? Profound isolation and ever-escalating hierarchies. Platforms that are the richest entities in human history. Instant hierarchies — subscriber counts, verification marks or the lack thereof — that let you know where you stand the moment you log on. Social networks that are a weirdly amped-up, weirdly glamorized mirror to irl dynamics — where, for instance, the internet becomes equivalent to what celebrity boxing was like in the 2000s, the place where mildly famous people go to never, ever die. Dating apps and giant are-you-hot-or-not sites (aka Instagram) that are like something out of the most extreme Social Darwinian theories.

So, what is to be done?

My thinking on this has been sharpened by Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism. Varoufakis puts together an economic world history that, I think, is basically accurate. Essentially, it’s that there are three different world economic systems producing entirely different social structures. The first is feudalism, the second is capitalism, and the third is being shaped as we speak.

It’s easy enough, actually, to differentiate the three systems — it’s what the source of wealth is. In feudalism, it’s the land — the agricultural products off the land as well as various rent-seeking behaviors to extort the resources of those living on land. In capitalism, it’s the commodity. Capitalism emerges out of long-distance trading, producing significant profit margins in swapping goods produced off the land in different feudal systems, but the essence of capitalism is the machine, the ability to rapidly produce physical copies of the same good, which can then be sold for huge profit margins by whoever owns the machine and who can then reinvest the profit into the next enterprise. With this third system what is of value is digital space, which is a different system of values altogether.

If we think about what the internet is, it’s cyberspace that’s produced by servers, or those with the equipment and know-how to produce it, that then functions very much like land does in the feudal model. Within that space — whether an Amazon subsidiary or an app or a webpage — the user tills the digital land and produces something that they can pass outward to a consumer, whether that’s monetizable tokens within an app or transactions by a third party that are largely handled by Amazon or just an Instagram or Facebook post that is meant to attract attention.

The question that Varoufakis wrestles with is whether all of this is just an iteration of capitalism. Any website or post or online space is, essentially, a copy — every one of you reading this post on your own phone or laptop is reading a copy of my original post that is digitally replicated — but Varoufakis’ argument, and I agree with him, is that this functions differently from a capitalist commodity. The point is that it’s very difficult to put a price on a digital copy, which means that the currency of the digital era isn’t so much the widget but the eyeball — a large number of eyeballs don’t convert to cash but they convert to attention, which can be sold in bulk to advertisers. This is a familiar story, but the point is that the essential economy is different and operates in what Varoufakis would call a more feudalistic way — the digital serfs (which is just about everybody) tills the digital commons while the lord of the manor (the platforms) manages the space and extracts rents.

Follow that logic and we are very much at an inflection point. It’s clear that a new economic system is emergent — really a new structure to society as a whole — and it’s volatile enough that it’s still not clear how it will shake out. The internet itself has gone through at least three distinct stages. There was the ARPANET, which was the Internet 0.5 that was military and that almost nobody knows anything about. There was the World Wide Web, the Internet 1.0, of which Varoufakis writes, “Internet One was an unlucky child, like a newborn whose mother dies during its birth.” Then there was the Internet 2.0, which figured out how to generate profits for platforms and which is what we are currently stuck with. The hope is to have an internet 3.0, which uses some of the technological resources of the platform era but is more fundamentally egalitarian. There are little glimpses of what this might look like — the federated structure of this platform is by far the most exciting. I’ve been watching Silicon Valley where the main character Richard Hendricks tries to develop something like this. “The way we win is by creating a new, decentralized internet … one where it is the users not the kings who have sovereign control over their data,” he tells Congress.

But right now we seem to be going in the other direction. The establishment ‘restoration’ is upon us. The Big Tech companies have gone from being companies of a recognizable sort to something different — harbingers of a new economy in which mercantile interests touch aspects of our life that they were never able to reach before. This, by the way, is why I’m so opposed to AI. It’s not so much the technology itself — which I find to be only mildly impressive — but who wields it. For the foreseeable future it will be dominated by large tech companies that, no longer content with orchestrating commerce and social relations in ways that companies have never done before, are moving into interiority, engaging directly, and in highly exploitative ways, with the spaces in which we formulate our beliefs and our identity, in which we figure out who we are.

In short, what is happening is that we are at the threshold of two very different ways of being. In one, we are pushed to being essentially passive consumers dependent on the whims of the companies throwing products at us. In the other, we take the tools at our disposal and craft a world we want to live in that is in line with our values. I don’t exactly know what that looks like — I have intuitions, but maybe the real point is that it will look different for everyone. For me, the North Star is generating creativity and building communities that can foster and encourage creativity. I really believe that we are at a moment when we can live in a very different, and much more fulfilling, way, but it will take commitment and a lot of work.