Global Paradox 2023

Communication Overhead and its Consequences are a Disaster for Humanity

Reading With Fresh Eyes

I dusted off an old book recently and got some choice quotes from it. Most of these were in bold, so you know the author wanted you to read them. Here are some quotes on economics and politics:

As the world integrates economically, the component parts are becoming more numerous and smaller and more important. At once, the global economy is growing while the size of the parts are shrinking.[1]

The idea that the central government – one huge mainframe – is the most important part of governance is obsolete.

With the number of NGO’s, international bodies like the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, gigantic media organizations with worldwide reach like CNN, Al-Jazeera, or the BBC, multinational corporations too numerous and varied to provide examples, and think tanks in the public consciousness greatly increasing, I can agree that government is no longer a matter of politics and elections. Many of these non-government organizations[2] have great influence on the workings of government through public channels, and we can only imagine how much influence they may have in private. Think tanks put forth their case on how things should be run. Large corporations use their expertise and finances to exert influence. Seen this way, the process of government is far more dispersed than ever.

This dispersal of power, influence, and productive activity means that, paradoxically, smaller units can have critical advantages useful to larger ones. Influencer marketing as a trend has taken off, showing that even the individual can capture an audience that sellers can simply pay for. Brand names are also bought and sold, with automotive examples such as the Chinese-owned Morris Garages, the notoriously French Nissan with its cross-ownership by Renault and its infamous and very Japanese former CEO, Carlos Ghosn, or the Peugeot S.A. Group, operating traditionally French brands like Peugeot, Citroen, DS, Opel, Vauxhall, Fiat, and Chrysler[3].

It’s much easier now to simply buy something than to start a true competitor.

On technology:

E-mail is a tribe-maker. Electronics makes us more tribal at the same time it globalizes us.

As the power and reach of the communications infrastructure expands, the tools needed to harness that capability shrinks.

While these predictions seem dated, they are only so in degree and detail (E-mail is so 1990’s). A functionally infinite number of online communities have popped up, starting with older single-purpose websites like Blogspot for blogs, Something Awful for forums, or MySpace for personal pages. Then we have the “all-purpose” social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr, who offer standardized pages where people live online, allowing people to post at length, show off media and links, chat, and basically anything you can think of[4]. Then, when that space became too cluttered, very focused websites returned, with photo/video sharing sites like Instagram or TikTok, chat-only apps like Viber or Telegram, and blogging sites like Substack rushed in and tried their luck. Each of these networks creates its own “tribe”, be it your e-mail list, your friends list, or your chat.

All this is only possible, however, because computing and telecommunications have become almost costless compared to their previous incarnations. More powerful technology now comes in smaller and cheaper packages than ever before – your smartphone is in many ways the equivalent of a computer anywhere from 5-15 years ago, fitting in the palm of your hand. Laptops are now powerful machines capable of performing tasks once restricted to desktops on the go. Consumer desktops now sport massive motherboards with multiple extensions and the ability to support multiple displays, with modern office workstations now resembling CCTV rooms – a wall of screens facing a single chair.

This massive increase in the availability and decrease in the cost of information cannot fail to have consequences.

On culture:

The more universal we become, the more tribal we act… As English becomes everyone’s second language, their first language, their mother tongue, becomes more important and more passionately held.

We are, all over the Western world, in a “political crisis” because political leaders have ceased to be very important.

Many of our older institutions have not adapted to the paradigm. Previous trends pushed us towards centralization, as coordinating forces like governments and organizations were the scarce resources in an energy-rich and growing industrial world. Now, though, with the advent of commonplace digital technology offering pre-built organization, it is the reverse. Centralized coordinating bodies are now lumbering giants, unable to respond with the dexterity and finesse of smaller bodies, communicating with the powerful of information. Local government is beginning to respond in lieu of the national governments, as they are the ones both directly in the line of fire and closest to the source of the problem.

Not only does this show itself in the preference for equity ownership over physical ownership as seen above, but also in the general distrust of national governments and institutions. With the blizzard of problems that we now all see thanks to ubiquitous information technology, calling upon the national government is like using a chainsaw to cut meat – it’ll cut, but it’ll be messy. Local governments and institutions are forced to step up, having a better understanding of local conditions and attitudes.

Real estate prices are reckoned per square meter (or square foot), and always seem to go up. The complexity of issues has done the same thing, forcing them to be devolved more and more to those with intimate knowledge of the matter.

But the most important one of all, I find, are these two:

The point is that as companies become more global, with factories, sales, marketing, and back-office operations in far-flung places, convincing socially conscious customers that they are not exploiting the disadvantaged, disturbing the environment, or destroying a country’s cultural heritage, will become critical to the success of their product.

When the onus is on the individual, individuals will reach decisions based on the same ethical standards they live by.

These are things we would today call virtue signaling, and its natural consequence, cancel culture. Institutions of all stripes now adopt “good causes” extraneous to their primary goals – the push for Net Zero carbon emissions, Pride Month, or affirmative action against “underrepresentation”, all to convince us we are fighting for a good cause, tugging the heartstrings and opening the purse strings. Accusations of slacktivism and greenwashing are lobbed at institutions using these tactics by other institutions using the same tactics. Moral stances are now commodities, not reasoned beliefs. This commoditization of ethics and morals is just as literal as it is figurative – carbon offsets and public, tax-deductible donations to NGO’s serve that purpose well.

It doesn’t matter what they actually do, only what marketing and PR lead you to believe about them.

People have in fact caught on to Pride pandering.

Global Paradox 1994

The old book I dusted off is John Naisbitt’s Global Paradox. Published in 1994, this old book still talks about E-mail and eco-tourism as newfangled things, the growth of cruise lines as a way to go nowhere fast and have a lot of fun doing it, and how people deal with the information now being effortlessly accessible, compared to the pre-digital world. The book talks about the ease of cross-border communications and payment systems and the ease of data transmission causing huge changes – one of which is a retreat into local and tribal concerns. New tribes of peer thinkers will form around E-mail lists, and in the real world, there is a re-establishment of local languages and customs and the growth of separatist movements, as technology makes it easier for local areas to coordinate action.

What a beautiful future we were promised.

Global Paradox is permeated by a sense of optimism for the future, belief in things getting better and better woven into the text. Now, my parents weren’t even married in 1994, but this is the same era that created The End of History and its descendant, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. From what I read and hear, it was a time of euphoria, with the end of the Cold War and the opening up of markets untouched, when people believed in the end of geopolitics and the new economic world of interconnected nodes of free trade. I quote below:

The last great Communist country [China] becomes the world’s biggest market economy.

The global economy is not a zero-sum game, but an expanding universe.

Technology is developing at an ever-accelerating rate of speed, with each new technology compounding the speed and capabilities of those that came before.

What a difference a mere 29 years makes.

As I’ve written before, it seems that ennui, not optimism, is the dominant feeling today. As we converge towards the eternal present, afraid of ourselves, we act as though we are lost at sea, searching for an island of meaning in the hectic traffic of the modern information superhighway that we are ill-equipped to understand. We are, on the whole, a ship without a captain, quite unlike the rose-tinted forecasts of 1994 said we would be. Birthrates, growth rates, debt, popular engagement, trust in institutions, everything is moving in the wrong direction, a retrograde from the world imagined in those optimistic years. Wars have increased once again in scale and scope – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, and the world appears to be dividing once again into regional and economic blocs, with Russia and China on one end and the United States on the other.

Where did everything go wrong?

Too Much of a Good Thing

I find this passage from Global Paradox most instructive.

Political parties are dead. Haven’t their leaders noticed?

No one joins a political party anymore (at least in a tribal sense). Tribal affiliations – cultural and professional – are much more important.

The world today is about the individual, not the state. It is about self-organization, just as business has experienced the shift to self-management. Bill Gates is the leadership model today, Bill Gates and the millions of entrepreneurs we haven’t heard of. The world is being run by the collective judgments and actions of individuals.

Countries don’t decide the value of their currency anymore. Individuals do. Sovereign states decided the value of their money and often printed as much as they liked. Now the approximately 22,000 currency traders with their computer screens make individual judgments about the relative value of a country’s currency, and buy or sell millions of dollars with their clients’ money and their money. These decisions are made largely on the basis of judgments about the economic viability of each country involved. And because they are backed up by very large bets and not just casual opinions, they constitute a pretty good index of economic health. That is, the constantly shifting collective judgments of 22,000 individuals, with a large stake in the outcome, about the value of a country’s currency against other currencies can probably be trusted more than most other judgments.

Politicians seem oblivious to change. They understand neither globalization nor the triumph of the individual.

It has to do with the deployment of power and that is shifting from the state to the individual. From vertical to horizontal. From hierarchy to networking.

Politics are less and less important in people’s lives as they get more and more control over their lives.

Power is flowing in all directions – unpredictable, a little chaotic, certainly messy – not well-ordered like hierarchical, top-down arrangements.

In post-representative democracy, people represent themselves, and ultimately, everyone becomes a politician.

Most of this passage has come to pass. As we covered earlier, power, influence, and productive activity are dispersing, no longer vertically integrated in a single institution, but distributed through many subsidiaries. The tech sector, especially the startup scene, has embraced self-organization and self-management by putting products under teams of entrepreneurial individuals and having them compete both in the market and for venture capital funding. It is the privatized, capitalistic, distributed version of Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, complete with the eventual bankruptcy/execution of those that do not make the grade. So far, everything seems to be right.

What I take most issue with is the individual’s ability to manage and control their lives in the face of this incredibly complex and interconnected world. Historically, power flowing in all directions in unpredictable ways is an aberration. Power flowed from nobility, from armies, from religions, and from money, and this relatively uncomplicated lifestyle is what we were designed for. The costs of travel and data transmission made it so that fewer things reached fewer people, meaning that information was both more local and less frequent. Anything you heard about, you were likely to have both heard about before, and you had more time to figure it out.

A subsequent issue is how independent the judgments of those 22,000 currency traders really are. As anyone in a difficult or rare occupation knows, the job includes a social club of the few people who share your occupation. Particularly in demanding jobs, people spend so much time on the job that they become more similar to their colleagues than anyone else, shaped by their jobs into jobaholics, whose easiest topic of conversation is to talk shop.

Nobody cared about me until I joined McKinsey and got my MBA.

It used to be that it takes a village to raise a child. Today, the Internet raises all the children. YouTube videos, Twitch streamers, Twitter threads, Instagram influencers, Reddit threads, Kik or Telegram chat groups, playmates in MOBA’s like Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends or Mobile Legends – kids with the Internet have all of these things now. Guildmates in cooperative games like Clash of Clans. Waifu-collecting gacha games like Genshin Impact, Arknights or Fate/Grand Order and their communities also provide another vector of influence on the young, on top of all the other traditional vectors of power. Even if a child doesn’t have Internet access, many other children will, causing them to learn many things by osmosis from their peers. The power of mass culture is difficult to overstate.

Without being taught how to deal with it, we are subjected to a deluge of information without context, data without analysis, and ideas without justification. Without the ability to process the massive amount of information they receive, we learn to shut up and repeat what we are told. Without truly understanding, we repeat the words and ideas we have heard, and appear for all intents and purposes to be erudite philosophers to whom the future can be entrusted.

We are all ChatGPT now.

Global Paradox 2023

Global Paradox 1994 dealt mostly with the potential unleashed by the advance of the information superhighway straight into the home. The key factor was the increasing primacy of individuals – the individual now has a measure of the powers that used to be reserved for governments, corporations, academia, media, and non-government organizations. I would summarize Global Paradox 1994 like so:

The questions of today have become so complex and interdisciplinary that we have to break them into smaller problems and farm them out. This makes individuals and small groups, not gigantic institutions, the most critical and necessary elements of society, as it is these individuals and small institutions that can best serve increasingly unique needs.

At this point, I would like to add an amendment to Global Paradox 1994. In hindsight, it is brought into stark relief that people do not act in the way that Global Paradox 1994 requires. Global Paradox 1994 requires independent persons that make decisions based on local knowledge and context, adapting best practices and outside methods to local circumstances. In contrast, we see people deferring to what is called common knowledge or the “right” opinion, provided to us by experts. The modern emphasis on technical expertise, the rising cost of acquiring this expertise, and the ever-increasing demands of work, all come together to paralyze the individual, threatening the promises of Global Paradox 1994. To summarize, I propose an amendment, Global Paradox 2023, below:

The chaotic communication of today is so overwhelming to the mind that more individuals than ever before have neither the brainpower nor the organizing principles to understand them. Individuals react by simply repeating common knowledge provided to them by authorities and experts. This converts communication from the all-to-all network of GP1994 into a small proportion of genuine communicators signal-boosted by a vast majority of followers. Some would call this Mass Formation - an abdication by the individual of their agency and independent thought.

Put simply, Global Paradox 1994 was killed by Communication Overhead, on a global scale.

The individual’s power of participation is sealed away by their own hand, believing that they are unworthy of it. They keep only a modicum for themselves, focusing on only the places where they believe they can contribute. Many are content to simply stay in their lane and adopt the mass media or government position on affairs outside their expertise, rather than come up with a reasoned opinion. This strategy, however, has consequences.

Behold, the consequences.

Staying In Our Lane

Democracy is the predominant form of government today and is quickly summarized as “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This works well as long as people show up to make decisions and vote. Based on our earlier critique, an obvious question presents itself.

What if they called a vote and nobody came?

Individuals, feeling disenfranchised by their perception of neither understanding nor being able to contribute to issues, no longer participate in public life as a counterweight to large institutions. Those large institutions, seeing no opposition to their actions, must now chart the path themselves, and often simply follow the course already set. Having lost access to individual feedback as a source of information, they begin substituting best practices and management consultants for contextual knowledge. This means their interventions become inefficient and ineffectual. Individuals, further disillusioned by the failure of these interventions, will now withdraw even further from public life.

What I describe is a complete breakdown of communication - being crushed by communication overhead. The check imposed by individual participation in dispersed governance is removed, allowing the current power holders to set themselves up as an oligarchy of think tanks, non-government organization, bureaucrats, and elected officials, an entrenched network of institutions that promote “proper” thought, evocatively called The Blob. This amorphous grouping of nepotistic networks is the reduced version of the overall franchise that fills the halls of our upper strata today.

Individuals abandon responsibility.

Irresponsibility creates apathy.

Apathy allows oligarchy.

Oligarchy assumes responsibility.

Rinse and repeat.

Conclusion

There’s no two ways about it. It is unlikely to impossible that you, as an individual, will change anything. Global Paradox 1994 relies on individuals living individual lives with individual opinions, ensconced in the loving embrace of their local communities. Only such like-minded associations can create the conditions of mutual support and alliance that allow individuals to stand against the raging storm of information we live in. The promise of Global Paradox 1994 was incorrect - but not entirely so.

Find or create a community of like-minded people. Get to know your local area. Start a local business, or, if you already have a job, start a local hobby club or association. Join a church or find a set of principles or mentors you like, to give you perspective on how things develop. Teach people the things you know that they don’t, and learn what you don’t know from them. Get involved in your local area, politics, business, social life and all. Only engage with the rest of the world, particularly the information space, on your own terms and with your own frame of mind. Without this strong foundation, being swept away in the torrent of trending information is inevitable.

Don’t live adrift.

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[1] Quote reproduced as printed. Size is a singular noun, so the “are” should be “is”.

[2] More rightly Quasi-Government Organizations (quangos) or Wannabe Government Organizations who use their “impartial” status as a way to provide “objective” feedback.

[3] To keep going with this, the Romanian Dacia is French, owned by Renault, and the Czechian Skoda is owned by Volkswagen.

[4] YouTube being the exception – that website is very much single-purpose.