Redistribution. Communism. Social credit scores. Thought crimes. Compelled speech. Degrowth leading to stasis.

Techno-capital needs a Lisan Al-Gaib, and his Will to Power, to lead society towards one of these futures. More importantly, to win this battle of ideas. Society must follow the tech-tree down the path that leads to abundance.

Lisan Al-Gaib has a vision of the future, and can navigate the idea maze. He can see which paths are dead-ends. Which paths lead to stasis and stagnation. There are traps on every corner. And he must fight the same enemy over and over, often under the guise of a new name.

This decision tree reflecting our personal choices in life, and the potential futures laid out in front of us, is as true for society as it is for us personally. 

One of these paths leads to a future of techno-capital abundance. Where humanity travels the cosmos, harnessing the power of a thousand suns. Billions of humans on billions of worlds.

Many of these paths lead to what we already have. Stagnation and corruption. What are some of the choices that take us down the wrong path?

Regulating free speech. 

Without the ability to speak freely, you can’t think freely. When one can’t speak out, you destroy the means of error correction. We gain knowledge, and therefore advance society, by conjecture and criticism. A society that can’t think, can’t innovate. 

Regulating innovation.

Stringent regulations create high barriers to entry for new business. The approval process is slow and bureaucratic, pouring cold water on the fast paced iteration cycle that innovation often requires. Rigid requirements leave little room for experimentation or novel approaches. Regulations are also another method of control by the regime.

https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1783857762252001715

Confiscatory taxation

The regime needs income to pay for its forever wars. They’ve been the main mechanism to allow continued wealth transfers to the military industrial complex from tax paying citizens. The upfront costs are paid by borrowing, with the ongoing debt burden placed on the public. Instead of compounding gains you have compounding debt. Unless the regime is willing to completely devalue its currency, it must raise the tax burden.

It’s really hard to update the way current countries and societies are run. Any change that threatens the power of the regime is challenged. It will be much easier to start a new country from a blank slate than for the regime to relinquish its control of current nation states. But without new land, a frontier holding the opportunity for a fresh start, how can individuals in 2024 escape regime control?

A network state. 

From Balaji Srinivasan:

“A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.”

The future of unlimited energy & resources is a ways away, and this may seem like small beginnings. Yet the American revolution was mostly planned in pubs and popularised with pamphlets. The techno capital optimist message can start and grow one meme at a time.

Many games in life are winner take all. Yet our participation in them is virtually automatic. Society’s norms condition us to think a certain way, act a certain way. Go to school. Get a job. Work hard for that promotion, earning the privilege of longer hours. We’re all competing in the same way for the same thing. You don’t want to get caught up copying everyone else. Trying to win someone else’s game. It’s called the rat race because the rat is unaware it’s trapped in a maze it does not control. 

The paradox of competition: when everyone is trying to win, they all end up losing. When you’re so caught up in competition, it blinds you to other opportunities. 

Mimetic theory is built on the assumption that all our learned cultural behaviour, including language, is imitative. Monkey see, monkey do. When it goes right, imitation is a shortcut to learning. However, when two people desire the same scarce resource, conflict emerges. Competing over our sameness, climbing social hierarchies in zero sum games instead of playing positive sum games. It is both our greatest strength and weakness. We are under the influence of mimesis to a greater extent than we realise.

This imitation game extends to business. The most competitive, cut-throat industries tend to have participants broadcasting their uniqueness while in practice are undifferentiated copies of each other. “A boutique recruitment agency for the banking industry”. This description of a specialist business that operates in a small niche, belies the fact it is simply a recruitment agency, one of many. With no barriers to entry, no unique product, no proprietary technology or intellectual property, it’s a race to the bottom, with profit margins on an identical trajectory.

Happy companies are different. They enjoy healthy profits and no competition. They employ double-speak too, though to achieve the opposite aim. To avoid the attention of antitrust regulators, they camouflage their powerful monopoly status by broadcasting weakness, describing themselves as small fish in a big pond. They’ve identified a secret that no one else has noticed, and it’s guarded jealously. 

Identifying secrets requires a surprising amount of independent thinking. We are memetic by nature.

“A secret is something important yet unknown, hard but doable, and not impossible…. The big secret is that there are many secrets left to uncover. There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them.”

Great companies can be built by solving unsuspecting problems about how the world works. But it’s highly unlikely that you will stumble upon secrets without trying. 

Try inverting your thinking on a subject that is accepted conventionally. What is true, yet people have become oblivious to it? What is not being taught in schools? What sacred cows are people not allowed to talk about?

The best place to look for secrets is where no-one else is looking.

Think counterfactually - is this true, or is this just conventional thinking, what would it look like if it wasn’t true. Everyone’s views, including yours, are based on incomplete information, and their perception of the world. 

Jobs to be done - optimise your product for this. How do they want their life to be better? What obstacles stand in their way? Jobs to be done doesn’t describe what the product should do, it describes what the customer must do.

Spot disruptions - look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they could be done. This is why technology companies can grow fast, as the change they introduce can make new business models viable where it previously wasn’t.

Intentionally start small - start with something small and simple, then expand over time. If people call it a toy you’re onto something.

Find asymmetries - do things that incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economically or technically not feasible.

Find the outliers as early adopters - go after the customers that are working in the future, who haven’t lost their minds, and build what’s missing. If you ask them the right questions, they will write your marketing copy for you. Just listen.

Listen to customers - don’t always build exactly what they want, build what they need.

Focus on the user - keep consumer DNA at the heart of your product. It will always pay dividends.

Modularise, don’t customise - Every customer will want something a little bit different. Don’t make the product suffer for this.

Your product should sell itself - this does not mean you don’t need salespeople. Sales should be used to navigate customers and close deals, not a substitute for a bad product.

Think from First Principles, not from analogy.

Actively question every assumption you think you know about a given problem - boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. A first principle is a foundational, self-evident proposition that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.

That gets noticed. Thus, the best ideas spread just like successful genes. Ideas and genes both evolve by competitive means. Genes by mutation and natural selection, and ideas by conjecture and criticism.

The key difference between ideas and biological evolution is that ideas have infinite reach. They have unlimited power and scope to manifest change in the world.

Through conjecture and criticism, we have formed useful theories of gravity. Both Newton and Einstein have given us explanations for why an object falls to the ground, or why light bends around the sun. Our explanation also works with other planets, without ever having visited them.

Whenever biological evolution produces a solution for something, it’s always before natural selection has taken place. It is inherently limited in this way. It can’t look ahead and conjecture a solution. It has no foresight. Out of the many species that have ever existed on Earth, none has ever possessed the genetic trait to make a campfire, even though many species would benefit from it. The reason is there is no way to partially make fire, there are no intermediate steps.

If the adaptations that evolution produces are unsuccessful, the species dies. There is no creative leap. Unlike biological organisms that are constrained by geographical or ecological boundaries, ideas can propagate across space and time without limitation.

In order for humanity to colonise the galaxy, we need to generate ideas for how to get safely into space, to traverse the millions of miles between the stars, and how we build sustainable civilisations on alien worlds. This can all be accomplished with the right knowledge.

Humans are unique in our ability to use creativity to model and explain reality. We are the only species that we know of that can do this. And there is no upper limit to how far this can go. The only rules are the laws of physics. We must apply effort and persistence in doing the necessary work. And we must maintain our curiosity, of course.

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