The Future is Illegible

The DTR talks will happen until predictability improves

Anyone in my generation

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who has been in a romantic relationship has probably had, or at least heard of, a conversation that sounds like this:

“We need to talk. What are we? Where are we going? We need to define our relationship.”

This kind of talked has a name, the “Define the relationship”, or “DTR” talk.

To some people, this talk is the death of fun and spontaneity. To others, it’s the necessary start of something real and enduring.

To a lot of our ancestors, however, this talk would be totally unnecessary.

Most civilizations prior to the 20th century had well defined courtship rituals. We don’t have one today

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, hence relationships often begin in an illegible state where two parties don’t exactly agree on what they are doing or where they are going.

The cultural values that told our ancestors how to behave also served the purpose of making the world more legible, that is, readable. Predictable. Shared values give the world a more predictable shape and structure.

I expect the future to be increasingly illegible because there is no globally shared set of values, and I think legible relationships, and thus predictable human behavior, ultimately require shared values.

An example works wonders here.

Alice and Bob: a Totally Realistic, Practical Example

Perhaps Alice is just looking to have some fun.

Let’s say Alice sees Bob as someone to go out to fancy dinners, talk with, and occasionally dress up like characters from Rugrats, while engaging in erotic conversation that borders on, but never actually touches, physical intimacy of an ambiguously sexual nature.

Meanwhile, perhaps Bob wants something totally different. Perhaps Bob is also looking to have some fun. Bob sees Alice as someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to learn together with, and someone with whom to sometimes smuggle small amounts of mostly harmless drugs across, you know, just some lines in the sand, not for the money, of course, but because who are we to say where one country ends and another begins?

I swear this is the first image that came up in a Wikimedia search for “Rugrats”

You can see why the two of them would likely conflict.

The only way to resolve their conflicts is for them to either go their separate ways, or for them to both get their expectations about the future on the same page. Expectations about the future of us require expectations about my behavior and your behavior, for the future.

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When people want different things from the same situation, they expect different things from each other, and thus they conflict.

Relationships that aren’t well defined will inevitably lead to conflict, unless the two people involved have precisely the same values.

So now let’s talk about computer stuff, and in particular, the fact that the number of relationships increases as the square of the number of people. If two people, uprooted from traditional culture, can get into conflicts about whether or not Chuckie should be carrying a small baggie of opioids in that diaper, just think of all the conflicts that a nation of 300 million people can get into, even if we rule out toddler cosplay and narcotics smuggling.

One mechanism for resolving such conflicts is legibility: clearly delineated relationships, where everyone involved understands and agrees on the same set of rules going in.

For example, if I get down on one knee, open a box with a ring in it, look into your eyes, and ask, “Sally, anyone can create more bitcoin just by forking the chain, so doesn’t that mean there isn’t any real scarcity involved?” Sally will likely be offended because of a differing set of values in play.

If we’ve all been telling ourselves the same story for decades, though, this is unlikely to happen. By getting down on one knee and opening a box, I’m clearly “popping the question.”

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If we have the same values, our expectations are both aligned and reduced. Beliefs can constrain anticipation both by ruling out likely outcomes and by steering our behavior. If I know you have a set of values, I know how you’re likely to behave. If I have the same values, it’s easier and cheaper for me to compute your likely behavior.

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By allowing for large scale narrative competition, the internet is fracturing once-shared belief systems, breaking the legibility of the world, and undoing a kind of artificial conformity produced by the printing press and amplified

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by broadcast media.

Hold on to your butts.

Flags No Longer Needed

There’s a great Eddie Izzard bit where he says, “we stole countries with flags.” If you don’t have a flag”, he jokes “you can’t have a country.” He describes British colonizers claiming India for Britain, and saying, “this is our now, you can’t have a country if you don’t have a flag.”

I think Eddie was onto something there, but he was describing an historical era that no longer exists, just like the era of “gentleman callers”, “going steady”, and “heavy petting” no longer exists.

What purpose does a flag serve? Here’s a hint: why is the flag backwards in this photo?

Photo From Wikimedia

It’s not that I’ve reversed the photo, that really is how the patches look. But why?

The patches look this way because this is how a flag looks if you are holding the flagpole and advancing on the field of battle.

Eddie Izzard was right. You can’t have a country if you don’t have a flag, because you can’t have a country if you don’t have an army, and you can’t have an army if you don’t have a flag.

Why do armies need flags? Flags are coordination mechanisms. Flags serve a similar role as shared songs, shared stories, and shared values: they help us move together, as one. Why do countries need armies? Because a country can’t exist without a shared story about who is in change, and military dominance acts as a consensus protocol.

But Eddie Izzard is now wrong, in a sense, due to technological changes that occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries. Sure, you can’t have a country without a flag. But why have a country when you can have an amorphous transnational network of wealthy people who coordinate their actions to steer governments?

A gun to a forehead and a boot on the face are legible. They also turn people off. There’s a reason CCP officials decided to ban images of Tiananmen square, rather than try to tell everyone that tank guy was actually the bad guy. Britain’s colonization of India was legible, because it had to be in order to work. If everyone is convinced you are the top dog, they won’t rebel violently against you. For much of history, you could violently subdue large people who didn’t want you there. Sailing ships made it possible to extract their wealth en masse. Technology first made colonization possible, and now I think it’s making it much, much harder to pull off.

I think new technology breaks the capabilities needed by dictatorships and colonizers, because new technology makes the ugliness of tyranny more legible, and makes asymmetric resistance less risky and more profitable.

If everyone agrees that you are in charge, many people will likely hate you. In the past, before the internet and the anarchists’ cookbook, before 3d printers and drones and home-made thermite and IED’s, this hatred of the masses for the outside force wasn’t such a big deal.

What are you going to do, defeat the mightiest army in the world with a bunch of hunting rifles?

But in an area when explosives and drones are cheap, an era of asymmetric warfare, I suspect the only kind of tyranny that works is illegible tyranny.

You can totally build concentration camps today, they have mass support

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. You just have to call them something different. Mask mandates wouldn't have worked if they said you need to shave your beard and can only wear an N-95 mask from an approved vendor. Well, I mean, they would have actually worked to stop the spread of COVID, unlike the ‘theatrical release’ that said you must wear a mask but it’s cool if it’s totally ineffective, just so long as you give a visible symbol of compliance it’s fine if it’s totally ineffective. They didn’t make us follow working practices because telling everyone to shave their beards and not eat or drink in public would have been too legible as tyranny.

Vaccine mandates involving jail time would have been too legible as tyranny. But vaccine mandates enforced through private companies? If you don’t like it, just be retired or start your own business or work remotely or get a religious exemption or use any one of almost million outs available to you.

The west is so bad at everything but whining, we can’t even build ourselves a proper tyrannical panopticon! The stories they try to censor just blow up because they tried to censor them. Technology is destroying the ability of elites to govern because it’s too easy to point out that look, the emperor is obviously naked.

The only way to hold power in the west is to therefore to convince your base of supporters that actually, you’re the underdog here, and the other party is run by nefarious wealthy people who’ve duped a mass of credulous people into believing their lies.

This is the myth of both the red tribe and the blue tribe in America: each one sees themselves as the plebeians, fighting against the patricians. Each one is convinced that the the wealthy people on the other side are really pulling the strings. The democrats and republicans need each other to maintain support. They need the other side behaving awfully, too - otherwise, more voters would say, look, I don’t have much in common with Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnel.

Who is really in Charge Here?

Big corporations? Their shareholders? The private equity firms that hold tens of trillions of dollars in assets under management? Media corporations? The New York Times? The Communist Party? Ancient-aliens enthusiast podcast hosts?

I think the most freighting reality is that nobody is in charge.

Nobody.

The modern world is an unfathomably complex organism made from transistors and mitochondria, capacitors and proteins, silicon wafers and phospholipid barriers, fiber-optic cables and nerve cells, server racks and skeletons, concrete and cellulose, steel-toed boots and pit crews, briefcases and hippocampi, org charts and extension cords, mothers and root nodes, fathers and directional antennas, handcuffs and RSU’s, sacred beliefs and scatological stories, laws and incentives, hopes and fears, trillions and trillions of rows of machine learning data, batch processing systems and REM cycles, ballots and lottery tickets, bullets and dildos, bulletins and blogs and tweets and bullhorns and …

Nobody is in charge.

The earth is a cybernetic organism, simultaneously making love to and at war with itself.

Nobody is in charge. At best, some people have more leverage over certain machines. At best, some people have root access over certain domains. At best, some people have cryptographic keys or passwords, others have passphrases and social security numbers, twitter accounts, followers, well trained intuition and millions of rows in databases with just the right identifier in the ‘following’ column.

Everyone, at best, can push buttons or pull levers on a planet scale, organic/mechanic/electric, recursively improving system with 7 billion heads that none of us understands or has understood for the past few centuries, if ever.

What looks like unity, from the outside, is conflict from within. There is no man behind the curtain; the curtain itself goes on forever, it is a fractal border of infinite length, because the curtain is that which separates the images on our retinas from the unknowable world outside, seen only via the 3d goggles of our belief systems, weakly synchronized to reality through our senses.

Cooperation and control, dominance and subservience, power and resistance - these are no longer as legible as they once were. Because of the buildup of technology and the breakdown of shared narratives, these dichotomies are increasingly only legible at the edges and in extreme cases.

Who has more power: the employee or the manager? Well, obviously, the manager.

Right?

But what if the manager is an intensely motivated, anxious manager of fifteen people and the employee is calm, level headed and charismatic, with rare, in demand skills, and knows they can easily get a new job elsewhere?

And what if they are involved in a pseudo-sexual extra-occupational relationship involving cosplay and narcotics? What if they are a mixed race couple both walking together through a deeply conservative place, each holding the controls for electroshock buttplugs, wadded behind packs of fentanyl in the other party’s diaper?

Who has more power then?

Perhaps the more important question to each of them - and maybe, to we, the scrollers, pulling on the feeds for another hit of certainty and contempt is, what happens next?

We have no shared values. This is becoming increasingly obvious to more people. We certainly aren’t rallying around a flag, or a myth about what makes us great. We aren’t rallying together behind anything that we are aware of.

Absent shared values, we won’t have shared stories about what matters. Absent shared stories, we won’t have shared perspectives. Values tell us what is important and what is irrelevant. We use our values to filter down the absurd of amount of information available to us. We use our values to decide not only which Rugrats character to cosplay as, but whether or not to cosplay as an animated cartoon character from a mid-90’s nickelodeon series at all.

I’ve always been more of a Mandark Man, myself

The only shared value holding America together right now, the only concrete, specific thing republicans and democrats agree on is, I think, the dollar. If the dollar goes, a unified America will, too. Good thing that system is stable!

The tower of babel has already collapsed. Its bricks are raining in slow motion. Do not lament its fall. Instead, organize the contents of your own mind, build your pack, your tribe, your gang, love your neighbor and yourself, and you will be fine.

We’re all going to die eventually.

The more important question, to me, isn’t “Where and when will I die?”, but “What will I do and how will I feel along the way?”

1. The hated millennials.

2. I was once at breakfast with a young woman that I’d been spending a lot of time around, and she introduced me to both the concept of a DTR talk, as well as some gradated series of relationship statuses, including “hanging out” ,”dating”, &c. I now suspect that she was maybe trying to encourage us to have the DTR talk, but I was too dense to pick up on this and just wanted to talk about the concepts involved. Oh well.

3. Note that my expectations of my own behavior in the future are more or less the same thing as values.

4. The question is, “Will you hold one of the keys for my multisig wallet"?

5. My wife is Chinese and I’m “mixed northern european”, which has lead to a number of interesting cultural clashes, especially because i’m part German and Scottish; about the only thing these two parts of me agree on is that we don’t like the part of me that’s English

6. Hah! But really, check out Marshall McLuhan here. Mass printing of books lead to standardization of grammar and culture.

7. Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. [Source]. Meanwhile, Republicans backed ‘border containment facilities’.