This is a story about systems – how they entrap us, become bigger than people in them or even at the top of them – and the idea of dreams – whether they can liberate us from those systems. Because as Schopenhauer said ‘life and dreams are of one and the same book.’
Picture this idle fantasy:
You get home from a meaningful four- or five-hour workday doing creative work you love. Repetitive chores are done. You spend an hour or two relaxing with people you love, reading a book, doing something your passionate about.
Then you log into the community portal(s).
It connects to several separate blockchains. No-one owns these blockchains. They are decentralised and are run democratically. That data is yours. One is similar to Facebook as it was – friends, family, events, photos. Another is a bit like X and Reddit – popular public posts. There’s one for work. Another hooks up to different layers of governance - local, county, national, international.
There are many different variations, depending on where you are. But all of the data is interoperable. It’s easy to switch between each and plug your existing history and connections and subscriptions in.
The traditional Facebooks and X’s and Instagrams still exist. But they’re a wild west of bots, trolls, AI, super-slop. People use them for some fun. But they’re mostly seen as eating sweets are seen – addictive, unhealthy, for children; ultimately, you don’t get much out of them.
The big difference with the Community Portal(s) is that its user verified. You have to authenticate that it’s really you. One account per person.
There had been a big debate about rights and digital ID and government surveillance. But it’s only Community Portal(s) that requires verification. Everything you do within is encrypted and decentralized and anonymised on the blockchain. And all sorts of reddits, forums, shadow sites are still used by protest groups or activists who would rather stay anonymous.
Some community portals are paid for by subscription, others by taxes, some still by advertising. The portal similar to Facebook still runs ads – it’s good for small businesses and new products in particular – but all of the ad revenue goes back into running the platform.
The political portals work on different layers depending on the location or the department. You can log into your local town or council and see which issues are voted to the top this week. Meetings can be joined in person, in VR, online, anyone registered in the area can vote, contribute to the agenda, and comment.
In many countries and areas, all the big industry is partially run by experts, a board, and democratically through the portal. The point is to democratize decision making between expertise and anyone effected by the industry.
All big industry data is plugged in to the portal. Data is collected from machinery, vehicles, global mining, logistics chains, costs, profits, issues – all updated in real time and transparent to those who are verified. This is required of companies who have over a certain number of employees or a certain turnover. It doesn’t affect small businesses or businesses still run by founders as that’s been found to be ineffective. Companies that meet the threshold are not unhappy with being democratised as it’s most efficient and connects the company to huge pools of data on the portals. Profits are slowly divested away from owners and management to a combination of workers and the community, who become community shareholders.
The ratio going to workers, locals, and nationals is calculated fairly by who is most involved and who is most effected. For example, the national energy grid is largely automated, connected to sophisticated smart meters and smart devices around the country – but workers get more votes and more of the profits, but everyone in the country gets a small dividend each quarter.
Citizen revenue is enough to justify the shorter work hours. It’s a small universal basic income. All land and natural resources are owned by everyone. It is managed on the principles of Georgism – a single land value tax based on how valuable that land or resources are. This discourages any speculation or hoarding of land or property. Anything taken out of the ground is done so on the principle that it is in part everyone’s.
There are many different portal blockchain variations. Some are experimental, some fail. Some have huge amounts of data, others different layers of voting or participation rules – the one’s that fail are discarded, the one’s that succeed adopted.
There are portals for local tourism – tourist taxes, national park visitor fees, national heritage – all managed in a similar way.
Local taxi cabs, takeaways, deliveries, Airbnbs, marketplaces, rentals all use the same principle. Taxis and Airbnb and a national marketplace like Amazon are owned by a combination of people who work on them and by the community. Profits are shared.
One of the surprising consequences of all of this is how AI is used to parse the huge amounts of data that was once siloed but is now connected. Universities use it to run studies and experiments, getting paid for effective research from the portal. LLM’s find solutions through strange combinations. For example, local marketplaces, community events, and heritage are all connected. The biggest benefits has come from how hospitals and medical research are now connected to portals. Health big data is revolutionary.
All of the billions per year that currently goes into Big Tech in California instead stays in local communities and countries and is paid out to citizens.
Speculation on land, rent-seeking, and capital flight is largely kept to a minimum by these mechanisms. Taxes are smaller because pre-distribution is focused on rather that redistribution. Politics is entirely transparent, democratic, and a combination of traditional and portal politics. Again, attached to local and national big data, funds are immediately directed where they’re most needed democratically.
Preface: Utopians and Dreamers.
Ok, there’s probably a lot of holes that could be poked in this utopian vision. It’s not a manifesto or a fully formed theory. I’m not even sure I believe in it. It’s a set of ideas fired off. You might have your own criticisms, some of it might strike you as utopian, some of it might seem mad, or you may even have your own vision. My real point is not really about the details but the disconnect. Why is it that we can fly to the moon, clone genes, theorise time-travel, create virtual realities but not get the trains to run on time.
More soberly, what is the relationship between utopia and reality? Plumbing would seem like a utopia to a medieval King. My shit gets flushed where?!
The French poet Anatole France reminded his 19th century contemporaries that ‘Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city … . Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.’
I’m interested here in the distinction between dreams – utopian fictions, ideal commonwealths, daydreams and images of minor improvements to the world - and realities. Like, what is this dream like feed on our phones – dream or reality? What are human rights to the ancient slave – dream or possible reality? What are flying cars to the engineer? There is something important in this question now because of the hyperreal fantasies we all live on our screens – what am I, for example, to you – dream or reality?
By nature, I am the sort of person that rolls their eyes at the kind of self-help Opera-fication world of manifestation. Sitting down with some beads and incense, cleansing the poisonous inner and outer demons, and visualising my intentions, and goals – actively self-creating the future you you want. I immediately reject this as the sort of woo-woo Katie Perry might preach from space.
But in my less cynical moments, I remember that there is maybe nothing more powerful known to man than the collective human imagination. And that we’ve lost our capacity to manifest any kind of ideal political vision. Dreams of utopia have dissipated into the drab assurances of new optimists like Steven Pinker that things will likely get slowly better (a humble downgrade from Blair’s things can only get better?).
And that’s the just the glass half full side. The other side of the ledger includes visions of AI, climate, and nuclear apocalypse, along with timeless beliefs about the fallen sinful condition of human nature. It’s not things can only can get better, nor maybe get better, but things can never get better. Be thankful for what you have.
Those are the visions. The reality includes crises of economics, inequality, mental health, meaning, media, trust, politics, tech – critiques of broken systems are everywhere.
But here’s the irony. The existing system, despite all of this, seems as robust as ever.
In the lacunae that has been left by the failures of utopian communism and utopian nationalism, there is a big question mark: what do we replace the future with? How do we get there? Is a better future even possible?
One: The Euclidean Machine
But the system is also more robust than ever. The majority deplore the excesses of capitalism but participate in it, we’re sick of social media but continue using it, we even often hate our own freely chosen routines, but continue to repeat them day in, day out, nonetheless.
We are all, very often, trapped in systems of our own making. Why? Well, the shortest definition of a system I could find is ‘a set of connected things or devices that operate together.’ And a system becomes powerful precisely by those network effects of it ‘operating together’.
I recently have had problems with two tech companies – Vodafone and Lenovo. They’re both huge systems, made up global networks of people, operations, logistics, truly embedded into the capitalist world. But when you try and talk to someone, raise a complaint, get money back, you run into a brick wall. No-one is accountable. No-one can do anything. It’s all body and no head.
These types of systems make up the world around us. I looked at the Deep State through this lens. It’s so ingrained, with so many layers, specialists with very specific knowledge and powers, made up of so many millions of people, that no-one person – not even a president or a united political party – can make much of a dent in it.
I would like to call these ‘deep algorithms.’
If you want a picture of how the modern world operators, read Manuel Castell’s The Network Society. He makes the case that post-Fordist world is defined less by, say industrial corporations or individual nations atomised, but by networks.
Since the emergence of a total network capitalist society in the 80s and 90s, the complexity and flexiblity of the globalised system is so connected, that if one ‘node’ refuses to do something, malfunctions, rebels, or is broken, it can simply by bypassed. Like a very efficient engine or organism, capitalism or the deep state can self-heal by rerouting through different parts of the networked organism.
Any pressure group, advocate for change, ethical node, or so on, no longer has to be neutralised – a totalitarian solution - but can simply be ignored. Nothing is effective.
Let me give you some examples. You raise minimum wages in one country, sweatshop move elsewhere, you criticise the intelligence services as Prime Minister, they withhold information crucial to your re-election; you ban slop from your social media platform, your competitor allows it and outcompetes you.
The most powerful example congressional aid Mike Lofgren uses in his attempt to take the Deep State seriously, is the power the intelligence services have over democratically elected officials. They choose when to reveal, downplay, or exaggerate intelligence, and so on some level can always pull some of the strings.
There’s quote after quote from politicians about this kind of thing.
The interesting thing for us today is that the deep algorithm has a lot of ways of pulling different strings. Lofgren writes that ‘The subsurface part of the iceberg operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.’
If you’re a Jeremy Corbyn of the world, the banking, media, capitalist, and political establishments all start acting, in their millions, with their millions, to kill you by a thousand tiny cuts.
Clinton reportedly once said that “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f*cking bond traders?”’
In response to David Cameron complaining that the civil service slows every down, Jeremy Haywood, a top civil servant, told a committee that ‘Part of our role is to give advice, as to whether something will work, whether something is contrary to the law. Occasionally that will come across as trying to slow things down or stop things happening – that is part of our job.’
You apply tariffs, the stock market crashes; you cut taxes, the bond market crashes; you promise nationalisation, Fleet Street kicks into gear.
Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. More than that, the opposite reaction negates the initial reaction.
This is why it’s a deep algorithm – it always has something to serve in response to a threat – and that response is based on Newtonian, Euclidean chains of reaction.
And I use algorithm carefully, because I think it’s the same kind of reasons we keep using social media platforms despite knowing they’re bad for us. We go in with some resistance, some hope that they might serve something good, something interesting – but the power of the attention economy to win through entertainment, addictive clickbait, short-term sugar – is overpowering in the same way the bond market can overpower the ethicist.
There are chains of compulsion in all of them. They react through bodies, lines, relationships, pools of cash, resources, and power – the reaction pulls a greater weight, exerts more gravity, that the liberating ethical action.
We have a system in which the cogs keep turning. The US Government employs 3 million. The UK 1% of the population. Chinese CCP 4%. ‘Each of those individuals make decisions based on their own small networks of information. How much do congress, for example, know about those three million people? There’s an interesting overlap, in the modern world, between information and data and intelligence.’
The deep algorithm, the Newtonian algorithm, the Euclidean algorithm is in a state of chronic global inertia – meaning it resists changes in its state of motion. Its cogs keep turning.
The Newtonian model suggests that resistance is not strong enough.
Two: Freedom in an algorithmic world
We are driven around by bits and bytes, margins on profit sheets, job markets, habits and desires – by deep algorithms all around us. What does freedom – what does utopia – mean in this modern deterministic Newtonian world? We’re hungry, we eat. We’re tired, we scroll. It’s an election, we vote. Life is often a continual Groundhog Day.
We usually think about freedom in the free from tyranny sense. But tyrannical compulsions are everywhere.
Many philosophers have pointed to the contradictions between a deterministic universe and our conception of freedom. How can anyone be free if we’re all made of atoms – marbles and dominoes tumbling through history.
The psychologist B.F. Skinner put it best when he said ‘A small part of the universe is contained within the skin of each of us. There is no reason why it should have any special physical status because it lies within this boundary.’
But I think freedom can be made compatible with this picture (this is literally called compatibilism, by the way). And a long list of wise philosophers from Socrates to Spinoza to Harry Frankfurt have pointed to how. Plus modern science now also back this up And I think understanding this is key to political progress.
Let’s start with Socrates.
If you look up at the Parthenon in Greece. There’s a relief that depicts a horse driven by impulse and its rider trying to controlling it. It dates back to almost exactly the time Socrates was discussing the same analogy.
In Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus, Socrates likened the soul to a chariot being pulled by two horses – the rational and the wild. In the mouth of Plato, the rational soul moves upward towards heaven. To be pulled down by, say, the urge to do something you know you shouldn’t, like doomscrolling, was called akrasia – a lack of willpower.
I think we all have this feeling of being pulled in different directions by competing drives. We are a torn species. And much of the time we feel pushed or pulled around as if controlled by something. In his confessions, for example Augustine wrote beautifully that “the madness of lust... took complete control of me, and I surrendered wholly to it”.
But – and this is a huge but - in another dialogue – Protagoras – Socrates points out that the person is really not divided at all – we are whole, we are one, ultimately we make singular decisions.
When we think of the world in this algorithmic way – where all of these compulsions, clickbait, political slogans, economic choices – are served to us to choose from – this makes complete sense.
What is really going on is this – the option that is more compelling, more affective, has more weight (language used in LLMs by the way) at any moment – is the path taken.
And Socrates trick was to make the better path more compelling by continually diminishing the thing we want to stop doing and adding better knowledge to the thing we want to start doing.
“No one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course.”
“No man voluntarily pursues evil, or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less.”
He says poor judgement is just a lack of knowledge. The key to making better choices is tipping the scales in favour of the choice we want to make.
I think this can be difficult to wrap our heads around so let’s expand on it with the wisest of all the great modern philosophers – Spinoza.
Now Spinoza is the philosopher of science, in that he saw that the entire universe was made of cause and effect – that we are bodies, lines, and planes knocked around. And as a scientist of looking through glass, Spinoza is the greatest mind we can draw on to think about the power of algorithms.
When it came to freedom, Spinoza asked ‘what reason can do against [these] affects.’ There’s an entire subdiscipline around this by the way called affect theory. I have a video on it here.
In his ethics he said, ‘the power of an effect has its limits set by the power of its cause.’
Spinoza is basically reformulating what Socrates said in more modern terms.
He says when something affects us, we have a corresponding evaluation of that affect as good or bad. We think ok sugar tastes good – so that’s 3 points to sugar. Doomscrolling feels good and distracts me – 2 points to doomscrolling. But then we know from science and how we feel after that sugar affects our bodies negatively, so we might go -4 points to sugar – and so we don’t want sugar anymore in that moment. We might say doomscrolling sometimes shows me something interesting so that’s a point, but it’s mostly useless so -5. We do what Jeremy Bentham called a kind of Hedonic Calculus.
The point Spinoza made was that for this to actually be effective, we have to know the truth; we have to have the correct ideas about things – otherwise we’re just being passively affected by everything around us.
He writes that ‘the more an affect is known to us the more control we have over it,’ Rather than being passive, we need ‘adequate ideas.’
Here’s a great passage from his Ethics:
‘we should take special care to know each affect clearly and distinctly (as far as possible), so that the affect will lead the mind have clear and distinct thoughts, ones with which it is fully satisfied, and so that the affect can be detached from the thought of an external cause and joined to true thoughts. The result will be not only that love, hate, etc. are destroyed, but also that the appetites (or desires) that usually arise from such an affect are stopped from being excessive’.
This is what Socrates was saying – better knowledge, better judgements, more rational.
This applies to political algorithms too. You go into government, or you start a pressure group, or you campaign, and you’re surrounded by all of these affects. The message is drowned out, there are a million bureaucratic processes, you’re against so much money.
Spinoza wrote ‘An affect is greater in proportion to how many causes collaborate in producing it.’
Finally, the American 20th century philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it like this.
We have first-order desires: I want to eat the cake. Then we have second-order desires: I don’t want to want to eat the cake. The key is to match the second-order desire to how you actually act. And Spinoza would say that it’s that second-order desire that should align with what’s rational – ie it’s good, it’s healthy, it’s beneficial, I’m content with it, others praise it – there’s a whole constellation of appraisals here.
And I’m not saying it’s always wrong to eat the cake or doomscroll. The point is it’s right if it aligns with what you reasonably, logically, rationally – all things considered, with reflection – want to do in that moment and with the future in mind.
Frankfurt had a wonderful way of phrasing it: it’s when you want what you want to want.
Three: Wanting What You Want to Want
So how do we want what you want to want? This is where I think there are huge consequences for deep algorithms everywhere.
I think the best new ideas come from a collision between subjects that have new commonalities. I’ve made videos for example on social media, addiction, free will, big capital, the attention economy – how all of these things create new cauldron of potential. I’ll list the relevant videos below.
Take this book on anxiety by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer. It’s really about how habits are changed. And he argues in exactly the same way Socrates, Spinoza, and Frankfurt did.
He says, for example, that we only ever really do what we think is the right thing to do.
Throughout the book there’s a repetition of a structure: trigger, behaviour, reward. Over and over. This is something we forget – that even anxiety, stress, crying, pain, shouting, eating shit – we do it because of some kind of reward – our brain things its right.
Brewer points out that the pre-frontal cortex – the rational decision-making part of the brain – is literally wired to pursue what it thinks is the most rewarding pathway. If it thinks it’s right it does it. So they key to changing anything is to really convince it that it’s not right – to give it what Brewer calls a ‘bigger, better offer.’
He says forget willpower – it has limited value – ‘‘The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value. That’s why it’s called reward-based learning.’
He continues ‘‘If you really pay careful and close attention—without making any assumptions or relying on past experience to guide you—and you see that a behaviour is not rewarding right now, I promise you that you will start to get less excited about doing it again.’
Finally, ‘‘The reward-based learning theory has been demonstrated to be the strongest learning mechanism known in science.”
I think this has huge political ramifications. We can say, for example, that if you want to not doomscroll you have to rewire your brain to find a more attractive alternative in that moment, fine.
But take how our political systems operate.
Liberal capitalism was superior to feudalism because it had greater affective power. It was built on sugar, freedom of choice, colourful silks – of course it was going to win.
And it’s almost like, the algorithm gives the same compared to what – your boring, monotonous, average lift – again, of course it’s going to win.
The real difficulty with dreams beyond the algorithm is that when you gamble on a new system that you cannot prove will be better or worse until it’s tried, you’re betting on something imagined, something dreamed up.
And I think this leads to some of the limitations in how someone like Marx saw progress. He, in many ways, thought like Socrates, Spinoza, and Frankfurt. That there was an affective power of capitalism that would diminish as inequality grew, wages shrunk, prices increased, firms centralised, and so on.
What I think he didn’t count on was how the bourgeoisie could raise the affective power just enough to placate workers – a few reforms here, a few minimum wage increases there, a few more days off.
How do you know if any alternative will be better? How do you know you won’t try and get a Stalin? How do you risk the unintended consequences?
Of course you could – and people did – make the same arguments about Slavery and Capitalism. Slavery’s the best system, Feudalism is God’s will, unregulated capitalism is self-balancing.
All of these systems were the best systems, until a bigger, better system, a bigger, better offer, came along. So how do you create the bigger, better offer?
Four: Dreams of Utopia
In his book on the importance of utopia, Ernst Bloch includes forms of wishful thinking, daydreaming, sexual fantasies, and so on – that they are all forms of what he describes as ‘‘anticipatory consciousness’’ – in other words, hope is foundational. We are all idealists, whose psychology revolves in some way around the ‘not yet.’
Call it utopia, ideology, call it a fantasy, call it a plan – I think we pay too little attention to the relationship between the images of the future in our heads, and the pragmatic steps we take to try and get there.
Utopia is an idealism. A mythology. It’s something conjured up here. Even the most grounded of scientists have to be, in some ways, utopian. Yet our thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries is still grounded, maybe hampered, by a kind of vulgar materialism. We think in terms of polls, statistics, measurements, GDP, scientific instruments, engineering, the politics of possible.
All the while, we spend our idle hours – and some less idle ones – being driven around by pixels on a screen. We think we’re materialists, but we live in a hyperreal dream world.
When I read the great German Idealists – Kant, Schopehauer, Hegel – they describe a psychology that to me holds up to this day. That all we really are are the pictures in our heads – that we all live by our own private algorithms. But that crucially, we all have the logical framework to organise those images, sounds, feelings, phantasms, ideas – in a way that is, to the best of our abilities, rational and true. That utopias – whether a daydream or a political system – always have a kernel of rationality within them.
Now, you might be thinking I’m crazy. That just because I can imagine it it doesn’t make it rational. But I would argue that the only gap is the yawning one between the now and the not-yet. That what makes something irrational is often only that its posited many steps ahead, has many conditions attached to it, it is in the not-yet-here space.
Even the unicorn, the Pegasus, immortality, teleportation might be rational one day. Is there anything you can think of that can now, with the strange knowledge we have about the quantum world, about technology, and genetics -be ruled out as absolutely impossible?
We need to better understand the relationship then between the now and the not-yet.
Because as Glenn Negley writes in the Quest for Utopia ‘What could be of more significance in the history of civilization than that man, since he first began to think and write, has continued ever to dream of a better world, to speculate as to its possible nature, and to communicate his longings to other men in the hope that the ideal might, at least in part, become reality?’
Utopian thinking is universal. It has taken a bewildering number of forms. The most obvious – utopian science fiction – and the most critical - dystopian Orwellian visions. They are present in gardens of Eden, Babylon, heaven, and Atlantis. In Plato’s Republic led by a wise philosopher King. Utopias are drawn out carefully - warts and all – in great fiction like Ursula Le Guin’s the Dispossessed. We forget that the Nazis were utopians too. And while Engels and Marx claimed not be, there was a vision of the world to be radically transformed. All of these before we get to movies and fairy tales, declarations of human rights, and innumerable theories of ideal commonwealths.
Despite the universality, the horrors of the twentieth century have not only destroyed our faith in utopia but made us entirely allergic to them. Conservatives are ideologically opposed, of course, but since Marx and Engels dismissed previous socialist programmes as utopian rather than scientific – as not unfolding by observable ‘scientific’ laws – the left has been equally suspicious. With liberals in the middle tinkering with a few levers here and there, and scientists working on small, isolated improvements in engineering or medicine, what are we left with? Utopia has been banished.
Of course, we fear utopian rhetoric for good reason. They’ve led to deathcamps, war, and oppression.
As far back as 1879 Mortiz Kaufman wrote ‘The cause of the general failure of Utopian systems, as a whole, and the partial acceptation of some truths they contain, is to be found in that wholesome tendency of average men to be guided by practical rather than ideal considerations, to prefer tentative measures to thoroughgoing schemes of social improvement’
But again, the fear has left a gap – a place we’re told we shouldn’t even imagine – and it’s yet to be proven that banishing utopia from the realm of reason is going to avoid dystopia. Pragmatic reason got us the Nuclear Bomb, after all.
I think Oscar Wilde put it best: ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’
Because for every failed utopia, there are great changes in history – politically, economically, technologically – that looked like a utopia to someone in the past
The metaphor of a map is a good. But here’s the big question – can you have progress – real progress – without a map that includes utopia?
I think there are a few answers to this. One is that without a map, you can keep plodding along, making small reforms and making small steps of progress in the sciences. Or – the dystopian answer – you can have a grand engineered map, but the map is wrong and so that leads you further away from the truth, maybe towards catastrophe.
But the third answer is more intriguing. That you are both making small steps of progress, but the progress is limited because the map is wrong.
How do you redraw a map that seems to us to be accurate? This is an important question for science, politics, relationships, our own psychology – that sometimes you can have a map that seems so convincing that you hesitate to redraw. The distinction between the Newtonian and the quantum world is, again, a good example here – the maps seem to work in places, but something doesn’t quite fit.
I think the same could be applied to, say, Smith’s description of supply, demand, and the neoclassical economic framework today. It seems to work most of the time, but then falls apart at the macro scale – it leads to crashes, depressions, depressed wages – but we don’t have a good alternative map.
I think a good theory for this is Thomas Kuhn’s concepts of normal and revolutionary science in his influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The kind of liberal map without utopia is like normal science – it works in a framework, plods along, fills in the gaps in the research, expands upon ideas before – all in a predictable rational line. It is, Kuhn says, cumulative.
In fact, Kuhn also uses ‘map’. He says ‘ The paradigm ‘provides a map whose details are elucidated by mature scientific research. And since nature is too complex and varied to be explored at random, that map is as essential as observation and experiment to science’s continuing development. Through the theories they embody, paradigms prove to be constitutive of the research activity.’[1]
But sometimes there are anomalies. Problems that don’t quite fit into the paradigm. That aren’t solvable with the tools, maps, frameworks we have.
Kuhn writes that ‘When, for these reasons or others like them, an anomaly comes to seem more than just another puzzle of normal science, the transition to crisis and to extraordinary science has begun. The anomaly itself now comes to be more generally recognized as such by the profession. More and more attention is devoted to it by more and more of the field’s most eminent men.’
Is an anomaly a symptom. Is an anomaly the root of a dream? A fantasy? A world where the problem, the desire, is solved? A utopia?
Sometimes, Kuhn points out, it is the passionate search through anomalies that leads to new paradigms being created – the Copernican Revolution, the discovery of bacteria or oxygen, of genetics, of gravity.
Importantly, the move between old and new paradigms is based on the creation or the discovery of a new logic – a dream logic that becomes a reality.
Take the French Revolutionaries. This was one of the greatest breaks in history. An old ancien regime of hierarchy, Catholicism, order, feudalism, and then a radical break, on the other side of which we have the rights of all men, then women, the freeing of slaves, the tearing down of feudal dues and privileges. A world turned upside down.
In fact, what the philosophes of the Enlightenment discussed in the century leading up to the revolution, looks a lot a utopia that they forced into reality.
The big question is how did the logic of that change unfold?
The most common frame to approach this is to ask whether futures are freely created in some way or determined. Take 1789; the old Marxist interpretation says that this event was largely determined by economic factors and the rise of the bourgeoise. That historical forces built up to an extent which like a motor suddenly whirring, propelled France into the future.
That there was a certain logic to it. From a different angle, whig historians agreed – there was a logic of progress, of increasing freedom.
Most historians now refute this view. In the 80s, innovative new cultural historians like Lynn Hunt argued that events like the revolution were created culturally through stories, symbols, costumes, language, theatre - culture - before the revolution took off.
These new cultures turned the world upside down in ways that seemed irrational but were actually creating a new logic – one that functioned better than the old. The idea that everyone had equal rights seemed absurd to the logic that maintained the ancien regime. There was a whole cultural, historical, economic, and philosophical logic that backed up hierarchy; a logic that was very convincing. It was based on Aristotle, that everything has a place, that a stone drops to the floor when you drop because that’s where it belongs. That a King is at the top because that’s God will. That a peasant was poor and subservient for the same reason – a great chain of being.
How do you counter this convincing view – how do you convince people that a utopia is possible?
You create a new logic – a new paradigm - that has more affective force than the existing one. You point to Newton overturning the Aristotelian view of the universe, you point to Locke’s arguments about rights, you point to proto-anthropologists describing all the different cultural possibilities across the globe and history. You describe the folly of Kings and the virtues of freedom of expressions. You work out a logic of freedom of trade and exchange on markets to replace regulations and feudal dues and the King’s selling of offices – you point to Smith’s hidden hand and the powers of supply and demand. You create – describe – a new logic, a new paradigm.
Hunt – a great cultural historian of the French Revolution and Human rights – talked about her book on the French Revolution like this:
“My aim was not to reduce revolutionary discourse to one stable system of meaning (the reflection of community, for example) but rather to show how political language could be used rhetorically to build a sense of community and at the same time to establish new fields of social, political, and cultural struggle—that is, make possible unity and difference at the same time.”
Unity and difference – how all of these cultural logics hung together in a unity in opposition to the existing logic.
These questions are similar across many great historical breaks. Take the Christian Revolution – that the first will be last and the last will be first – that the slave is of more worth than the emperor - in opposition to the Roman regime of power and domination. That is an alien logic in a Roman world.
This is how utopias are constructed – logically and carefully. And in many ways, I think this was the failure of Marxism – that it described the logic of capitalism – the existing order – but refused to try and work out the logic of what would come next.
The lesson in all of this is, once you create a system with a genuine logic, a unity, that hangs together and makes sense, that is better, it begins, like gravity, to have an affective force of its own – to have a culture built around it – to draw people in.
This book, for example, describes how again, before that French Revolution even happened, there was change in French theatre. Louis IV was the Sun King – the divine right logic – hierarchical at the top. But that across the Enlightenment, new plays displaced these older symbols, tore them down, created new forms of popular, individualist, entertainment – and the masses came.
Take that and imagine a new type of social media. It’s symbols against symbols, all the way down.
Five: The Logic of Dreams Beyond the Algorithm
In 1789, the French revolutionary Third Estate were locked out of their usual meeting place and instead gathered at the tennis court in Versailles, where they made an oath not to leave until a constitution was established, a scene immortalised by Jacque Louis David in this painting. They continued over the next week to meet where they could, deliberating, and calling themselves the National Assembly.
They drew - as many of them were lawyers – on a century and more of carefully thought-out modern ideas, ideas that, along with all of the hedonistic pleasures that freedom of trade and the import of sugar and spice and colourful silks bought them – were irresistible – they had a powerful Spinozian affect - a literal taste of freedom.
Many of these men, like their American counterparts, were scientists, traders, business owners, lawyers, and philosophers – they brought it together in a cultural symbolic language. They built upon a heritage of Enlightenment logic, and created an alternative space in that tennis court, a space that expanded across the globe.
In 2014, in Taiwan, hackers discontented about poorly performing government websites, scraped them and created better ‘forked’ versions. They became so popular that ministers merged them, adopting them as official.
vTaiwan has some experimental features. It’s for public deliberation about policy, and organises responses in clusters that show different groupings of consensus. It avoids the so-called ‘flame wars’ you get on platforms like X by not being able to reply to particular people but only bubbles of consensus. The point is to find ‘bridges’ between opposing views, rather the focusing on unbridgeable divisions.
There is a strong political culture surrounding vTaiwan -80% of the issues discussed led to legislation. Half the population has used it. Uber has been regulated through it, financial technology rules worked out, and even school times discussed. It has issues – including being skewed towards the digitally literate – buts its innovative.
If X is described as the ‘public square’, compare it to vTaiwan, which is designed for deliberation. Would anyone call X a platform for ‘deliberation.’ Unlikely
Taiwan is often ranked as one of the most transparent democracies in the world.
There are countless experiments in decentralised social media platforms, and while none have taken off, they seem to be closest thing to the kind of alternative logic I’m talking about. Open standards – owned by no-one – much like how the web operates, interoperability, biometric ownership, opensource, democratised.
IN Plurality, Glen Weyl and Audrey Tank point to David Kidd and Ariana Zetlin’s theory of reforming qualifications. Instead of single qualifications, they argue for the gradual achieving of different badges, across education, that add up into bigger badges that act as qualifications. Weyl and Tang argue this would work well as education becomes more decentralised – badges could be achieved across different institutions, logged on blockchains, added to other achievements in education, work, a CV of hobbies – a kind of all-in-one LinkedIn alterative that’s yours.
Spritely is a vision of self-governing groups online that can connect with one another in different ways.
Now, there are countless ideas like this, but none of them have worked, yet. And I think the philosophy laid out here accounts for why.
Deep algorithms are ingrained as habits in our social media, political systems, even our relationships. Creating new habits – as the science now shows – is about building a logic of alternative habits, ones that has have affective power to move people into a paradigm shift.
In fact, when Lewis Mumford wrote the Story of Utopia back in 1922, he pointed to the relationship between habits and utopia.
He wrote ‘What is entailed is ‘a new set of habits, a fresh scale of values, a different set of relationships and institutions, and possibly … an alteration of the physical and mental characteristics of the people.’[2]
When we stare at our algorithms, we are deeply compelled through engrained sets of habits, values, needs. What motivates the kinds of dreams served up by algorithms. Are they utopian dreams? Or are they pictures – fantasies- motivated by fatigue, despondency, unfulfilled desires, dreams of wealth, fame, celebrity, distraction.
I know they’re entertainment, and I’m not so naïve to think alternatives like vTaiwan can have an affective force as powerful as entertainment, but, but, nonetheless, politics is already deeply engrained in the logic of entertainment, in the power of these affective deep algorithms – I mean, have you see the most influential political figures recently? Does this set of ideas not explain this?
There is a strange but very important relationship here between the affective force of politics and the force of entertainment, the force of real improvements and the force of something that captivates for the poetry maybe – in the Obama sense – or the comedy – in the Trump.
I think wit and humour are affective political tools, as poetry or music or movies are, if they serve something bigger. And that something bigger has to be bringing it together into a coherent alternative vision that hangs logically together. Without which, it is the status quo or worse, the pageantry of authoritarianism that historically wins.
I point to blockchains and democratising through technology at the beginning because there are a lot of consistencies between the two and the history of emancipatory anarchist, democratic, and socialist thought. But those technologies been abandoned to libertarians by most leftists, I find that strange.
We need utopians who are like the founding fathers – Enlightenment thinkers who tried to combine the best of everything, who thought about technology and science and medicine and new libraries at the same time as political philosophy.
I don’t know the answers – but our role is only to find those consistencies, symmetries, those ideas that are coherent, while innovating with what is new history.
That is all we can do, history will do the rest.
[2] Concept