Emerging Nation State Decoupling: The Cultural Meme Finds a New Supporting Governance Apparatus

Contents

1. Bold Prediction Review
2. Introduction
3. The Roots of Nation State Decay
4. Dialectic Process Between Macro and Micro Scales
5. Nations, Currencies and Taxes
6. America the Meme as an Incorruptible Algorithm

Bold Prediction Review

In my original article I made some very specific macro predictions for this decade. This article provides my reasoning in support of these predictions, particularly with regard to #5. Because each of these predictions are interrelated, predictions #1, 2, 3 and 4 are also referenced. For convenience, I’ve again outlined the five predictions from the original article, here:

1. Political System ~2021 CCP collapse and China reunification

With regard to order and timing, my spidey sense tells me the above will happen in the order indicated. I do feel that before Bitcoin’s adoption as the GRC (first in some failing or developing nation like Venezuela or Pakistan, and then quickly to the rest of the world including the USA), that China will be reunified (before even Korea). However, rather than the mainland Chinese Communist Party (CCP) absorbing Taiwan and Hong Kong, it will be Taiwan and to some extent Hong Kong displacing the CCP — not through military means but from the economic collapse of the mainland due to an looming financial contagion.

2. Financial System ~2024 BTC adoption as GRC

Bitcoin as the global reserve currency removes the compromised political influence over central bank monetary policy. Central planning no longer has a place in monetary policy — a system that should otherwise be a market based system for market based economies. Market based monetary policy would mean no fractional reserve banking, quantitative easing or consumerism. DeFi together with Bitcoin provide enough flexibility to avoid the moral hazard of the monetary policy system.

3. Business Productivity ~2027 Mass Personalization at scale

A convergence of three primary acronyms: DLT + AI + IoT. The complementarity effect from the maturing of this converge will organically provide equal access to opportunity (and thus more even wealth distribution). AI needs greater data, ie, IoT to achieve new heights (the singularity). However, IoT first needs the automated security of DLT (a.k.a, blockchain, which is coming) before it can provide open access to AI’s powerful system distributed intelligent agents (IA). This convergence will allow automated organizations and smart contracts to deliver on mass personalization at scale, resulting in a huge leap in productivity (just like the first two three industrial revolutions before this one).

4. Human Consciousness ~2030 Collective Consciousness at scale

The third industrial revolution will quite naturally beget in a fully automated economy. Traditional manual intervention will be a friction point rather than a value add. So where does that leave the people, the masses, the next generation? We will have to find something more valuable to contribute than the labour of our bodies and our brains. They will be too weak and slow compared to AI software and robots. But what machines will not have over us is consciousness. Consciousness will become a tangible factor of economic production as our reconciliation journey matures. This collective consciousness will then be minable by neural links (something that’s already possible to some degree with Elon Musk’s Neuralink). Thus, consciousness as an economic good that only humans can contribute, will be the solution to the automation problem.

5. Political System II ~2030 USA de-unification

The USA doesn’t come out of this paradigm shift unscathed. There will be new victims and victors. Fractional reserve banking, quantitative easing, and consumerism are inter-related tools in the last leg of this current capitalistic era that have come to the end of their useful life. The current political system will be unable to make a change to dispose of these outdated tools. Every new administration simply maintains the status quo for the most part, each time punting the problem to the next administration. The change will come through revolution, yes, but not a societal revolution (despite what we are witnessing in streets of American metropolises currently) — rather, a technological revolution.

Introduction

Before we get going, allow me to get a few personal definitions out of the way:

• Nation: a group of individuals with shared something (ethos, ethnicity, religion, geography) that wish to promote their individual and group interests together.
• State: the apparatus that entrenches and promotes the nation’s interests.
• Nation Stating: the ongoing individual and collective decisions made through the state apparatus that allow the nation to thrive or falter as times change.

In traditional British-American liberal democracies, nation stating is about working for the nation (people) first, and then the state (apparatus). When that principle fundamentally flips, the nation state reaches an inflection point, serving as an indicator that the state apparatus is nearing an end of its useful life. This natural depreciation of the state apparatus is due to the evolution of long-term cycles of technological innovation. A new fundamental technological innovation will enable a new nation stating model and apparatus that may even change the essence of the nation and nation state itself.

With this in mind, we can foretell the future of nations states by understanding three underlying forces:

1. Dialectic Cycles of Change in Technology
2. Memes and Information Theory
3. Nation State Economics

In this article, I will close with a drive down history lane revealing how humanity’s current and dominant nation state meme and its mechanisms came about and were adopted. But I’ll begin with a closer look at the causes of a nation state’s state of decay.

The Roots of Nation State Decay

A nation is a collection of individuals making decisions. Those decisions over time result in two important consequences: 1. technology 2. Nationhood. Thus, understanding the nature of decisions is critical to understanding the future of nations. Two personal development authors that collectively through their writings can explain decision making quite well are Stephen Covey and Daniel Kahneman.

Covey talks about developing the gap between stimulus and response, in order to make decisions based on one’s mission. Kahneman reveals how our decisions originate from two modes of an individual’s mind, system 1 and system 2. The personal missions that Covey prescribed are typically a system 2 based, resulting from well marinated, non-linear, conscious, cerebral efforts by the individual. System 1 decisions are quick, linear, instinctive, impulsive and mostly subconscious.

Our senses are mostly designed to deal with the linear for the purposes of survival hence our over reliance on the system 1 mode. As complexity increases and more system 2 engagement is required we are required to retrain our brains for nonlinearity. Anyone undertaking such an endeavor will find that initially it will be at the expense of our current productivity based on our current linear skills. However with practice our intuition for nonlinearity grows and we begin to see it everywhere (including at a micro scale at which point we can apply it to our macro technology for revolutionary results).

System 2 is difficult to orient around because it’s not intuitive. Our senses are designed primarily to react based on immediate stimuli. That’s a system 1 type of reality. System 2 is more longer term and requires an understanding of second and third order consequences of our decisions particularly in modern times as our society is built on complex systems.

Our system 1 mode is prone to hacking by cultural memes. This is partly by design this shared meme gives us the ability to work together in ever larger social structures all based on trust that we all believe in the same core meme. In fact, this system 1 hijacking of the subconscious by a cultural meme is like a computer virus that exposes the security vulnerabilities of a nation’s statehood apparatus.

Memes are like a two side coin, with one side representing the short term immediate benefit of the meme, while the flip side is the long-term accumulating damage from the meme. In western capitalism, that system 1 high jacking meme, consumerism, was quite naturally an initial protagonist in the adoption and acceleration of capitalism. Consumerism was a necessary “evil” to help wrestle control over western Europe’s collective subconscious away from the church. Eventually though, it’s antithetical nature to humanity’s search for meaning, has made it an antagonist to capitalism — or in other words, it has overstayed its welcome now that capitalism has been long well established.

Thus, modern capitalism requires a new meme, one that balances hedonism (system 1) with longer term investment (system 2). This a more natural ethos for liberal democracy. But this new ethos requires also a new supporting governance apparatus (decentralized organization) in order to form a new nation state and ensure (that tips the balance towards greater system 2 based decision making).

Centralized Democratic Regimes

Centralized authoritarian regimes falter because of the cumulative effect of bad economic decisions made based on the authoritarian’s system 1 bias which favors short term pain relief over long-term pain avoidance.

Centralized democratic regimes falter because of the cumulative effect of bad economic decisions made based on the democratic government’s system 1 bias which favors short term pain relief over long-term pain avoidance.

Centralized democratic regimes take longer to reach a critical failure point because the democratic nature of the system makes it a bit more resilient. And its worst decisions have it monetizing debt, or in other words giving it de facto control over the central bank to print more money to finance its ever larger fiscal debts. Many times this act is couched in compassion. Regardless it is misplaced compassion when it has the fundamental system 1 bias in nature.

Source: Davinder Jawanda

A solution to this problem is seemingly taking the power over the central bank away from the government so that fiscal government debt monetization is no longer an option. However if this automation is managed by a single authority, that single authority has the power to change the automation algorithm even if that central authority is democratically elected, it is susceptible to system 1 bias of misplaced compassion (which is very convincing — think of convincing an addict can be when expressing how he or she has changed).

So the ultimate solution is decentralized automation of the central bank, i.e., a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) model for the central bank and its fiat currency. I’ll get more into the details of this technology later in this article. But if you’re looking for a deep dive on DAO technology, I encourage you to read through this earlier article.

The irony is that the capitalism that the Right has been trying to preserve is the original cause of the problem leading to the Left’s unprocessed guilt and misplaced compassion. The further irony is that the solution to capitalism’s core problems is more capitalism, but now infused with new organizational technology that will prevent the shortsighted memes to again penetrate what will hopefully be an integrated system 1 and system 2 mind of the people, collectively and individually.

Dialectic Process between Macro and Micro Scales

Max Tegmark defines life as a “process that can retain its complexity and replicate”, and classifies it into three interlocking eras, each defined by its ability or inability to redesign its default hardware (body) and software (mind) endowments. Life 1.0 can not rapidly change either its hardware or software (rather relying on the slow process of evolution and is thus called the bilogicial era). Life 2.0 can redesign only its software (cultural era), while life 3.0 can redesign both its hardware and software (technological era).

If we accept this model as the long arc of life, then other known sub-cycles need to be integrated into one big interrelated model (almost like Life’s theory of everything). Those sub-cycles include:

• Centralization and Decentralization Organizational Archetypes
• Productivity Leap based Economic Eras
• Geopolitical Blocks and their Economic Systems and Global Reserve Currencies
• Long and Short Term Debt Cycles
• Fourth Turning Model

Here’s how my version of integrated Life TOE renders visually:

Change in The Nature of Power

There is a tension between standalone short-term goals (system 1) and long-term (system 2) goals. Long-term goals tend to be more systematic in nature and can have a universal benefit (including all of the participants and the environment). While the intention of short-term goals when they are standalone (i.e., not incremental steps in long-term goals) tend to be exploitative.

If short term goals are connected to universally positive goals, then capitalism is the best system to enable that universal gain. The problem arises when the elites and the middle class are focused primarily on short term gains.

That’s because maintaining the long-term focus is quite difficult when capitalism’s main measuring system, the stock market is judging efforts on a quarterly basis, with incentives and hiring/firing decisions based on those quarterly results.

Also, growing wealth spent on mindless consumerism over a century calcifies the collective’s neuro plasticity due to an incremental accumulation of the negative impacts of laziness. The current polarization of western civilization is a painful yet necessary wake up call from consumerism’s lazy slumber.

Humanity’s ability to cooperate in large groups is both natural (story/meme oriented brain software) and unnatural (tribal oriented brain software) at the System 1 level, and that tension creates a progressive but uneven cyclical advance toward productivity leaps based on powerfully scalable centralizing technology.

Eventually this advance will beget productivity leap technology that will be decentralized in organizational architecture, more closely resembling the decentralized nature of Life’s self-redesigning model. This will alleviate the large-scale coordination vs small scale tribal coordination tension, and eliminate inferior meme domination (for instance, unnatural cultural memes (consumerism over meaning or outright lies as memes propagated by corrupt self-serving elites).

This decentralized organizational architecture, due to its natural repulsion to corruptible elitist foundation, will be biased towards a longer time horizon, just like life itself. DLT’s automatically executing agreements (a.k.a. smart contracts) will help ensure the balance between short and long term perspectives including the integration of short-term goals with long-term goals, and the security bent of tribalism (system 1) being balanced by the progressive nature of globalization inclusivity (system 2). It’s this integration (not ostracization) of our system 1 and system 2 modes based on decentralized organizational technology that will propel humanity forward to the next era of civilization.

Complexity is increasing and thus naturally the centralized era will become less productive because its advantage of robustness will become a liability in a decentralized era where small and modular (like life — see genes and information) and its adaptability become superior. Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in Antifragile the non-intuitive aspects of systems math:

I truly believe the operation I will discuss, based on some properties of optionaility is about as close as we can get to the Philosopher’s Stone. The following note will help us understand:

a. Severity of the problem of conflation — mistaking the price of oil for geopolitics, or mistaking a profitable bet or good forecasting, not convexity of payoff and optionality.

b. why anything with optionality has a longterm advantage and how to measure it.

c. the merger of the two points above — conflation and optionality.

Recall from our traffic example in chapter 18, that 90K cars for an hour and 110k cars for the next one, or an average of 100k and traffic will be horrendous. On the other hand, assume we have 100K for two hour [each hour], and traffic will be smooth and time in traffic short.

The number of cars is the ‘something’ — the variable. Traffic time is the function of something. The behavior of the function is such that it is as we said not the same thing. We can see here the function of something becomes different from the something under nonlinearities.

a. The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90k then 100K cars on the one hand or 100k cars on the other.

b. The more volatile the something, the more uncertainty, the more the function divorces itself from the something.

Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function, travel time depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is evenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100k cars for both time periods. 80k and then 120k would be even worse than 90k and 110k.

c. if the function is convex — antifragile, then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. This is the Philosopher’s Stone and the reverse when the function is concave — fragile.

As an example, assume that the function under question is the squaring function, multiply a number by itself. This is a convex function. Take a conventional die, six sides, and consider a payoff equal to the number it lands on. That is, you get paid a number equivalent to what the die shows. One if it lands on one, two if it lands on two, up to six if it lands on six.

The square of the expected average payoff is then the quantity of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6, divided by 6, squared, equals 3.5 squared, here 12.25. So the function of the average equals 12.25.

But the average of the function is as follows: take the square of every payoff, 1 squared + 2 squared + 3 squared + 4 squared + 5 squared + 6 squared, divided by 6, that is the average square payoff, and you can see the average of the function equals 15.67.

So since squaring is a convex function, the average of square payoff is higher than square of the average payoff. The difference 15.67 and 12.25 is what I call the hidden benefit of antifragility. Here, a 28% edge. This is the convexity bias — the Philosopher’s Stone. The conflation problem, mistaking a property of a function of something for the function of the property of something leads to severe misunderstanding of the process.

Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50% of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality. Your function of something is very convex. So you can be wrong and still do fine. The more uncertainty, the better.

This explains my statement that you can be dumb and antifragile and still do very well. This convexity bias comes from a mathematical property called Jensen’s Inequality. This is what the common discourse on innovation is missing. If you ignore the convexity bias, you are missing a chunk of what makes the nonlinear world go around, and it is a fact that such an idea is missing from the discourse. Sorry.

Decentralizing organizational technology is orientated to integrate System 1 (shorter-term, linear system thinking mode) and System 2 (longer-term, complex systems thinking mode, the result of which is a simultaneous increase in both scale and scope facilitating true sustainable development (the economic era of mass personalization — an otherwise impossible combination). On the other hand centralizing organizational technology is optimal for System 1 linear processes that require dissenting voices to be squashed in order to project power through sheer scale.

The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives. ~ George Gilder in Knowledge and Power

So when we put it all together, decentralizing organizational technology will fundamentally change the nature of power, organically distribute wealth more evenly, and allowing knowledge and data to flow rather then be hoarded. The lower transaction costs will make the small scale more profitable than the large, resulting in a massive productivity leap as more people will be able to contribute more value to the economy, with everyone earning a fair wage.

This is represented by a true long-term dialectic cycle of human organizational technology, which defines technology paradigms (particularly organizational technology). These paradigms are what define the productivity eras we are all familiar with:

• Tribal foraging (meta decentralized; verbal language era),
• Mass agriculture (meta centralized; written language era),
• Mass publishing (meta centralized; distributed knowledge via the centralized printing press),
• Mass industrialization (IR1 — meta centralized; steam power-analog output),
• Mass electrification and digitization (IR2 — meta centralized; electric power-digital output),
• Mass personalization (IR3 — meta decentralized; distributed knowledge via the distributed “printing press”)

The agricultural revolution could be seen as the initial power of the centralized model. The distributed hunter gatherer phase apparently was also able to produce impressive results as in Gobekli Tepe in Asia Minor, which predates the great first civilizations of Mesopotamian Rivers of Iraq, Indus Valley of India, Nile Valley of Egypt and the Yellow and Yangtze River Valleys of China.

The liberalization of information dissemination indirectly caused the first industrial revolution, allowing for a distribution of power away from the Vatican. The liberalization of information storage is directly causing the third industrial revolution, allowing for a distribution of power over means of production (data) away from Big Tech, which used the Internet to further consolidate power during the second half of the second industrial revolution.

This will also result in a disruption to consumerism and by extension a disruption to a now soulless and corrupted centralized nation state model. It served humanity well for many centuries, but now a purer form of democratic and meritocratic governance is emerging initially in decentralized finance.

The vested interests and their exploitive short-term goals, undermine the long-term viability of a centralized system. Near the end, the situation resembles one of corruption The debauchery of the world today is represented by almost every nation state’s debt levels. At the beginning of the century, due to a hot war and then mid way through the century via a cold war, the Gold Standard which represents an important check and balance to financial debauchery was abandoned. Now twenty years into the new millennium, the money printing machine has been in overdrive seemingly due to Covid 19.

Western governments are accommodating the fears of their populations who have become accustomed to a comfortable existence, financed through national debt. That debt has yet to produce a negative impact and thus the assumption is that the future will behave like the past. But eventually, the chicken does come home to roost. And so the long arc of the centralized organization model, from its apex just prior to World War I is about to come to its final conclusion just over a hundred years later in the 2020s.

Debt cycles can ruin nations if the debt is not in an investment that can produce a productivity leap that can pay off the accumulated debt from the debt cycle. It has worked well thus far in the western civilization arc. It should work out again if the current cultural meme doesn’t sabotage the bridge to the next leap.

The positive side of these debt cycles are really what the best of capitalism is all about. The key is managing elitism and its corruption. It’s unmanaged elitism that puts us in a perpetual cycle of Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning cyclical model. We are today in the fourth turn of the current 80 to 100 year cycle late stages. Unmanageable elitism is the result of our productivity leap generating technology that centralizes power by nature.

This particularly fourth turning happens to coincide with the conclusion of the end of the long-term technological era, Second Industrial Revolution era, giving way to the Third Industrial Revolution. The second industrial revolution may appear to be about electricity and digitization, However, it was really an amplification of scaling power of the centralization architecture and its technologies. In Sapiens, Noah Yuval Harari writes:

Understanding human history and the millennia following the agricultural revolution boils down to a single question: How did humans organize themselves in mass cooperation networks when they lacked the necessary instincts to sustain such networks?

The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.

However, the appearance of these networks was for many a dubious blessing. The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression.

This next productivity leap will have at its core decentralizing power architecture, to match the decentralized and substrate independent nature of information and intelligence, giving humanity access to ‘emergence’ innovation. The distributed governance of Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a.k.a. DAOs (based on blockchain’s distributed data storage technology) are a model on which the new nation state will be based.

Once we have enough distance from the 2020s, we’ll look back at the last four thousand years as one giant centralization arc, which gave way finally to the decentralized arc which carries us forward into the next four millennia. And with enough perspective, we’ll see that centralization and decentralization are two sides of the same coin, each requiring each other like opponent processing effects represented by the Yin Yang symbol.

Financial System Paradigm Shift

There is also a long dialectic cycle between pegged reserve currency and free floating reserve currency. The driver of this cycle is also commoditization or in other words an entropic value destruction through a loss of fidelity in the supporting institutions, as insiders with asymmetric access to critical information little by little abuse their position to gain an accumulative advantage over the majority, eventually reaching a tipping point where the wealth disparity becomes untenable resulting revolution.

Free floating reserved currency to pegged transitions are typically as a result of a financial crisis. The switch from pegged to free floating is usually to fund geopolitical war. Moving to free floating leads to asymmetries in information access and a growing wealth gap and at some point a climactic financial crisis that triggers the switch to a pegged reserve currency again.

Our current long-term debt cycle is in its late stages, i.e., the fourth turning or the final leg. This fourth turning has some completely new reserve options available to the people, specifically decentralized digital currency, and even more specifically Bitcoin (BTC).

Bitcoin’s pure decentralized nature has some very important pros but also some inescapable trade-offs. Its decentralized nature by way of its proof of stake protocol makes it an excellent store of value but not an ideal medium of exchange. That’s because proof of stake requires a lot of computing power to facilitate a transaction. Those transaction costs limit the size of transactions (Coase’s Law) which reduce the size of the possible network of users.

Source: www.SystemsInnovation.io

A previous article details this decentralized organization technology including its currencies Bitcoin, Ethereum and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Nations, Currencies, Taxes, Debt and War

Information Theory is at the heart of innovation and life itself, explaining it’s probabilistic nature, where physics, chemistry, biology are limited to materialism. Information Theory explains why the information age is different in its laws of success.

Information Theory shows that information is not order but surprise. Whereas the study of physics, chemistry and biology are all hard coded to order — hence why they can not explain the probabilistic nature of reality.

George Gilder in his excellent book Knowledge and Power uses information theory as a guide for nation state success. It’s an apt comparison due to the paradoxical nature of information theory, as he explains:

Qualcomm’s system-called code division multiple access, or CDMA-was completely different. Rather than speaking more loudly to make themselves clear over longer distances, all communicators would speak more quietly. Jacobs likened Qualcomm’s scheme to a cocktail party in which each pair of communicators spoke its own language. They would differentiate their calls not through time slots or narrow frequency bands but through codes. Spread across the available spectrum, these codes would resemble white noise to anyone without a decoder.

In An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise, John R. Pierce, Shannon’s close colleague at Bell Labs (and coiner of the word “transistor”), puts numbers on this multilingual cocktail party. Engineers have a choice between two strategies to maximize channel capacity: they can increase the bandwidth of the signal or they can increase its power-to-noise ratio. Most of the industry was seeking to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio, speaking more loudly to be heard more clearly. As James Gleick commented in his definitive history, The Information, “Every engineer, when asked to push more information through a channel, knew what to do: boost the power.” But as Pierce showed in 1980, doubling the bandwidth of the signal from four megahertz to eight megahertz allows for a more than thirty-three-fold drop in the power-to-noise ratio. Reducing the power and expanding the bandwidth was over sixteen times more efficient in the example than increasing the signal power at the same bandwidth. There was a paradox of loudness. One person could be heard better by speaking at higher volume, but if everyone did it, communication would drown in the ambient noise.

Pierce concluded, “If we wish to approach Shannon’s limit for a chosen bandwidth we must use as elements of the code long, complicated signal waves that resemble gaussian noise.»4 This was Viterbi’s insight behind the success of spread-spectrum CDMA.

Shrouded in an extended code that seemed like low-level background noise, the spread-spectrum message could get through while only slightly interfering with other messages. Noise would build up incrementally in the cell as more users made calls. Allowing all the calls to use all the frequencies in the cell all the time without the wasteful rigidity of TDMA time slots or the noisy chaos of high-power analog transmissions, CDMA maximized capacity. To accommodate more users during traffic jams on the freeway, coded calls could even move into less crowded neighboring cells, because all calls and cells used the same frequencies.

With a future of wireless Internet on my mind, the Qualcomm advance excited me. I could see that CDMA would be far superior for busy data communications that might overflow time slots or narrow frequency bands. The CDMA cocktail party would maximize communication if everyone spoke as quietly as possible in his chosen language, or code. To everyone else in the cell, the conversation would be indistinguishable from background noise. These “quasi-noise” codes would be readily translated by ever more powerful microchips in the cell phones that Qualcomm would supply or license for a reasonable fee. It was evident that, other things being equal, the Qualcomm strategy would prevail.

But the real news was better than that. For other things were not equal. In a Moore’s Law world, with the cost of computing capacity falling by half every two years, the economics of silicon favored technologies that wasted computer power but conserved “physical” resources such as wireless spectrum. This was the true meaning of an “information economy” that Peter Drucker and others had merely glimpsed.

In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation — it has weight and occupies space.

The power of any science is limited by its information potential. We tend to overestimate the technological usefulness of physics and its laws precisely because its limited information potential makes it seem so rational and predictable. But as Shannon showed, predictability and information operate in opposition.

Transcending the laws of physics by the laws of information is not a pie-in-the-sky idea. It has been happening in the most dynamic sectors of the economy since the last century. This same step-by-step transcendence of the physical by the informational, of matter by idea, has powered all economic development through all of history and before. In previous eras, this process was less obvious because the power of information was manifested in harnessing the laws of physics rather than in transcending them. From the wheel to the Roman arch to the fragile wings lifting off the sand at Kitty Hawk, man used physics to ease the burdens of matter, to control, guide, or support more with less, to enliven matter with mind. In the information age, it is physics itself that is subdued. In the early 1990s, Qualcomm was the center of that effort.

Jacobs’s cocktail-party analogy quelled my objections for the moment. But at the time I still didn’t comprehend what Viterbi was telling me. I returned to the Forbes ASAP offices determined to plow through Shannon’s information theory papers to get to the bottom of this apparent enigma of “white” or random noise and maximum information transmittal. That pursuit made me an enthusiastic supporter of Qualcomm, the best major-market American stock of the 1990s, rising in value twenty-five-fold in ten years. It also impelled me toward an information theory of capitalism that is as much a departure from standard economics as CDMA was from the prevailing protocols in the phone industry. From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.

This Qualcomm CDMA vs everyone else’s TDMA competition is a near classic disruption theory case study, where the good-enough CDMA strategy beat the more high fidelity TDMA technology, because the market favored good-enough plus superior price savings over absolute precision. The good-enough strategy is superior as it provides a core requirement or mission critical value at a lower cost. CDMA’s technology leverage’s noise vs fighting noise, in order to maximize the limited bandwidth (i.e. physical constraints). The CDMA provides core value to more users — its like each user cooperating to limit their share of the commons to a minimum (vs taking a majority). This sharing strategy provides more utility to more users which lowers the marginal costs of its provision.

Gilder used this intriguing relationship between the signal, noise, bandwidth and carrier to illuminate the relationship between government and entrepreneurs. Gilder rightly reveals that innovation is generated from entrepreneurial activity (the source of economically superior good-enough yet disruptive innovations versus large corporations or entities that typically just improve marginally on an established product architecture without any compelling price savings).

This entrepreneurial activity as Gilder explains is the equivalent of entropy or noise in information theory. It’s the source of surprise. In fact, he defines information as surprise. Thus information and innovation are synonymous. Creative leveraging of noise is what gave Qualcomm a paradigm shifting edge over its wireless chip competitors. Gilder equates government in his information theory analogy, as the carrier of both the noise and signal, and forcibly suggests, the carrier must be the antithesis of the entrepreneurial force of surprise. Government he says needs to be devoid of surprise, and instead be a reliable low-entropy entity — something he posits only possible through actively managed order:

Things that are growing and changing are by definition high in entropy. Moving from a settled past into an undetermined future, they are always defined by their information, their news, their surprises. Spontaneous order is self-contradictory. Spontaneity connotes the ebullition of surprises. It is highly entropic and disorderly. It is entrepreneurial and complex. Order connotes predictability and equilibrium. It is what is not spontaneous. It includes moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers. Order requires political guidance, sovereignty, and leadership. It normally entails religious beliefs. The entire saga of history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies.

A key principle of information theory is that it takes a low-entropy carrier to bear high-entropy creations. All the surprising singularities of creative capitalism depend on the boring regularities of political order. Maintenance of the low-entropy carrier cannot be left to some imaginary spontaneous order.

Despite best efforts to actively manage the incumbent order, the incrementally accumulating damage to the system eventually reaches a tipping point where disintegration of the order is inevitable, and a new order emerges. This is the fourth turn in Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning Model. Actively managing the transition is the key to a nation surviving if not thriving. More on that later.

The accumulating damage is typically the result of corruption of those in power or those with access to those in power, i.e., the elites. Gilder explains:

Even though the universe displays a providential pattern, the spontaneous trend of low-entropy carriers on earth is to deteriorate, as the second law would ordain. Politicians and regulators make high-entropy interventions for the interest of their cronies. Lawyers exploit the law for the advantage of the bar. Incumbent legislators punish those who fund their challengers. Tax rates creep up, stultifying learning curves and destroying the information fabric of entrepreneurship. Mobs rise up in envy and indignation to attack successful ethnic or religious groups, like Jews or Mormons, as well as “the rich.

Governments and elites are eventually corrupted by power where it is corralled and controlled at the expense of market efficiency, resulting in unreliable price signals and mounting national debt. The eroding prosperity and mounting debt and tax obligations reverse the original virtuous circle turning it into a vicious circle — as visualized below:

That national virtuous cycle is originally generated by:

1. maintaining a monopoly over the issuance of a national currency via the central bank, and
2. 2. ensuring that currency’s circulation by requiring the nation’s people to pay taxes in that currency.

These are system closing and path dependence mechanisms that create a feedback loop between national government, fiat currency and national taxation. These mechanisms at their core are identical to those used by Apple to create the virtuous feedback loop between iPod sales and iTunes downloads. Originally, dollar downloads from iTunes were songs that could only be played on the iPod (system closing, path dependence).

This system works beautifully in the beginning for nation states. Corporate magnates work hand in hand with their nation state, enriching the treasuries of both the government and the company through taxation and profits respectively. Markets expand continuously, with the only downside being periodic short and longer term credit bubbles.

As political corruption and political pandering to special interest reaches a critical point, staggering national debt levels lead to increased taxation. When taxation levels reach their limits, the only remaining option to service the national debt is the central bank money printer going into overdrive (debt monetization). This eventually leads to out-of-control inflation, which has a negative impact on business activity, leading to business closures, job losses and a severe decline in GDP. In the case of the US, this process takes longer to play out due to the US dollars current status as Global Reserve Currency. That global demand in dollars keeps inflation artificially low. But eventually that demand for US dollars will be satiated and a tipping point will be reached where inflation kills the golden goose.

When you boil it down, it’s a natural organizational cycle of rise and decline due to built-in system 1 biases that compel holders of power to sell critical access to asymmetric information at the expense of the majority.

Fortunately for the USA, the nation does not need to be lost among the deterioration of the central government system. New decentralized governance technology will be able to remove the corrupting system 1 bias and replace it with the fidelity of system 2 principles.

And missing this possibility is what Gilder gets wrong in Knowledge and Power:

These low entropy carriers do not emerge spontaneously. They are the effects of political leadership and sacrifice, prudence and forbearance, wisdom and courage. Sometimes they must be defended by military force. They originated historically in a religious faith in the transcendent order of the universe. They embody a hierarchic principle.

The hierarchic principle is not a permanent requirement. It is technology dependent. As our technology improves, hierarchy no longer needs to be a critical aspect of governmental design. In fact, Gilder himself explains why its best it not be:

Each of these strategies can work for a while. With inspired leadership, large corporations and government bodies can function effectively for a limited period. In wartime, with clear objectives for the entire economy, large companies can mobilize and deliver complex military goods. Most new systems, however, depend on technology from startups. Like all analog transmissions, large corporations are ultimately corruptible by the centripetal pull of power, of interference, and of agency conflicts. Only the white-noised strategy allows the correction of redundancy and error among the multitude of creative signals. It ends with a more robust economy, more innovation and more jobs.

Like the old saying goes, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Gilder knows this but tries to reconcile the double edged sword of hierarchy (centralized power) here:

Spontaneous order is an oxymoron that violates the fundamentals of any information system. This error of economics precedes economic theory. Hayek struggled with its implications throughout his career. On some occasions he spoke of spontaneous and self organizing cultures and legal systems, evolving from the bottom up without hierarchical guidance.

At other times he was an earnest exponent of the need for deliberate constitutions and moral mandates. Addressing the issue he wrote The Constitution of Liberty. But America’s libertarian tradition has embraced chiefly the spontaneity of order. It’s origins in an evolutionary bottom up process; and it’s resistance to top down cultural controls or influences such as religion, family structure, and legal constraints.

Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.

Nations states are by nature also data centralization superpowers. And that centralization under a democratic model does help ensure a low entropy governance carrier to enable innovation’s high entropy signal. But when decentralizing organizational technology matures enough to serve as the architecture for a nation, the compromise of centralization and its eventual corruption (even under a democratic model) will no longer need to be made.

Knowledge and Power was released in 2013. Since then Gilder is starting to see how hierarchy isn’t a permanent requirement for low entropy governance. Geopolitical central governments will deteriorate. However, nation-fiat-taxation feedback loop template will persist, except this time in a very different primary medium, namely online.

DAO Nations

In his 2018 book, Life After Google, George Gilder was bold enough to predict the eventual demise of Big Tech, the superpowers of data centralization. He understood the missing link was decentralizing organizational technology, otherwise known as DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology or more simply blockchain).

This technology powers DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), which rely on software to automate the transparent execution of all agreements, preventing behind the scenes manipulation by those in power. Thus, I anticipate a book from Gilder anytime now, perhaps called, Life After The Fed.

The emerging third industrial revolution will also include a decentralized paradigm for national governance. In fact, DAOs in decentralized finance (DeFI) could be an early example for the use of smart contracts, smart tokens, and smart agents, leading to a productivity and fidelity leap in governance.

Automated agreements or smart contracts can be used to power national DAO in all three critical functions:

1. Executive
2. Legislative
3. Judicial

“National” DAOs will emerge from the interoperability layer of other DAOs and non-DAO entities. People and organizations will have dotted line associations to multiple DAO governmental authorities, which compete with one another with regard to productivity and effectiveness, using pre-programmed and balanced system 1 (short-term) and system 2 (longterm) perspectives.

Currently nation states are a simple representation of singular tribes. Future nations will look like a series of ecosystems with individual connections in the form of a hypergraph. Here is “an order-4 Venn diagram, which can be interpreted as a subdivision drawing of a hypergraph with 15 vertices (the 15 colored regions) and 4 hyperedges (the 4 ellipses)”:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph

Here’s a how a hypergraph differs from a simple graph:

Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3178876.3186064

Citizens will be like these multi-linked nodes in a network, somewhat analogous to how they are today with their Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn profiles, except that all of these profiles will be one profile, owned by the citizen. In Life After Google, Gilder went out on a limb predicting Blockstack would displace Ethereum as the eventual primarily blockchain due to the former’s smaller attack vector. That seems unlikely now as Ethereum based DeFi (where digital wallets are a user’s online ID) has taken off since that book’s publication.

Perhaps Blockstack (now called Hiro) will find itself become a killer app in the new world of geopolitics and governance. Hiro produces a decentralized online profile protocol allowing users to own their own data versus Big Tech owning and monetizing their data. Perhaps Hiro will be a key to decentralized citizenry. However, due to a nation, even an online nation, requiring its own currency (not necessarily a Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC), the digital wallet could remain king in the world of online ID platforms.

Citizens of online nations still have to live in the real world. So online nations will have a geographic component. Geography still influences culture, cultural influences identity, and identity influences how people fulfil their need to belong. And so it could be that online nations and networks of city states will emerge in some sort of yet to be dreamt of crossover ecosystem.

One DAO entity may administer a particular geography, another administer the culture of that specific geography, another the culture across different geographies, and yet another decentralized networked entity will look after security (perhaps one for local and another for regional and a third for global).

Nevertheless, this distributed ecosystem approach as diverse as it will be, will bring the world closer together, perhaps even as one. Diversity begetting oneness seems like a contradiction on the surface. Often though the truth lies in paradoxes — things that seemingly at first glance can’t be true but are. It speaks to the opponent-processing nature of existence.

The Facebook Nation State

Speaking of Facebook, it seemingly has the potential to create the first online nation with its own fiat currency with its forthcoming Diem cryptocurrency (formerly Libra). The path dependence it could create is requiring ecommerce and ad payments on their walled-garden platform in their native currency, Diem.

Though Facebook seemingly has component pieces to form an online nation state, the platform lacks long term the automation apparatus (decentralized organizational technology). Without it future DAOs will disrupt Facebook despite its seemingly entrenched state due to superior economics, not to mention superior balanced and shared, system 2 leaning ethos and privacy.

Thus, success for a Facebook nation state would be a short-term proposition. The proprietary, closed nature of Facebook will eventually give way to a more ideal technology innovation for value creation, open platforms and currencies with lower transaction costs and higher security via the DAO model. There is a second option for Facebook though — eventually adopting a DAO architecture. That would be a difficult pivot to make for a company with such vested interests in maintaining the system 1 company culture and operating mode.

Here’s more on the Facebook via an excerpt from a previous article:

Ethereum 2.0 and Layer 2 Solutions will result in a classic disruption pattern in their battle with traditional cloud platforms. This includes decentralized applications (DApps) versus centralized applications (TCP Apps). Some of the most entrenched cloud applications, though they are unlikely to maintain their current market dominance, still have time to pivot to ensure survival. This includes Facebook, which is hedging its bets by introducing Libra.

Because Libra is to be a private consensus blockchain with a small number of nodes represented by large companies, the consensus burden is lower than for Ethereum. And because traditional Facebook already monetizes through advertising, the costs of blockchain computation and storage are subsidized. The consensus nodes are large entities staking millions of dollars to be part of the network. Their return on this investment will be in validation fees as well as influence within the ecosystem.

Facebook will make up the cost of subsidizing computation and storage not just through the likely dominant position of its Calibra wallet (now rebranded Novi by Facebook), but on controlling the reserve currency that they hope will power an international ecommerce economy that could one day rival Amazon, and perhaps become a critical player in global trade (including as an IOT, payments and settlement platform).

Though Facebook is a walled garden platform, Facebook APIs allow third parties to integrate their services providing users the opportunity to receive a more personalized experience. For example, Facebook partnered with Shopify to power a small business focused ecommerce storefront platform called Facebook Shops for its Facebook for Business Marketplace.

Currently Facebook does not collect commissions on purchases by users from vendors on Facebook Shops. However, not only will that eventually change, but Facebook will likely use the platform to drive adoption of Libra (piggyback strategy) perhaps by incenting buyers through subsidies to purchase in Libra versus fiat (seeding strategy). Facebook also has the opportunity to sell ads to vendors competing with other vendors for users for buyer eyeballs, which Facebook can discount if the ads are paid for in Libra.

Facebook’s Instagram and eventually WhatsApp divisions will also factor into an integrated ecommerce and advertising offering denominated in Libra cryptocurrency. Facebook can deploy their crypto wallet Novi, formerly known as Calibra, not only on Facebook and Instagram but also on WhatsApp, serving as a mobile bank account that can be used to pay for products and services within Facebook and outside of its walled garden.

Facebook Shops with Libra (and Novi) have the potential to be a supercharged version of the SecondLife virtual economy. That’s particularly compelling when the platform begins to facilitate Facebook vendors and users to collaborate in producing more personalized offerings. This subgroup networks (SGN) functionality is already a foundation of Facebook with almost two billion Facebook Groups on the platform today. Adding commercial collaboration possibilities to Facebook Group and integrating it with Facebook Shops underwritten by Libra, has the potential to position Facebook as a global supply chain mediator.

The first step is allowing Facebook users to collaborate ad hoc via automated smart contracts, and being paid for their contributions in Libra. Will Libra have smart contracts? The answer is yes according to the Libra white paper:

“The Association is committed to implementing appropriate review and risk controls for smart contracts. At first, only Association-approved and -published smart contracts will be able to interact directly with the Libra payment system. Over time, the Association will explore appropriate controls to allow third-party publishing of smart contracts.”

When smart contract-enabled Facebook subgroups begin to demonstrate an ability to deliver a certain level of personalization in goods sold through Facebook Shops, the organizational economics (lower costs and better offerings) will become superior to traditional organizational economics. This will produce demand for non-Facebook entities that are better positioned to produce subcomponents at a superior cost than can be produced by a proprietary Facebook tool or by Facebook user groups.

This is where open source blockchains like Ethereum and its DApps begin to contribute to the Facebook economy by producing superior subcomponents at lower costs. This will be the beginning of the crossover — where a proprietary blockchain shows its limits and an open source blockchains begins to disrupt the Libra economy replacing it with a new open source blockchain economy.

The Ethereum DeFi space will be the first to provide subcomponents or subservices to the Facebook Libra subnetwork personalization economy. For instance, Metamask digital wallet maker has already launched a widget “allowing Twitter users to trade on Uniswap without leaving the social platform.” They hope to expand the service to Facebook.

In the future, it would make sense for a DeFi project to enable users with the ability to swap cryptocurrencies to facilitate greater Facebook Shop transactions. Buyers may need Libra to buy in Facebook Shops and sellers will need to exchange Libra for a CBDC to pay their taxes in their home countries.

America the Meme as an Incorruptible Algorithm

Nations are a real thing. They are an agglomeration of tribes, sometimes similar, and sometimes different (the former joining more by choice, the latter typically by force). And the USA has had the optimal system for the current era. It’s evident in its growth over the last 120 years.

America is also an ideal, a story, which has a lot of pull as a meme in our minds. The American Dream is a great narrative of anyone having a fair shot at making something of him or herself, from any background, through hard work and ingenuity. This meme has powered the entrepreneurial spirit — the true innovation engine in the USA. The American Dream is one of the best stories of nationhood ever told.

The chassis for this entrepreneurial engine is the liberal democracy model, which made it as difficult as possible for elites and factions to gain material control of the economic engine of the nation.

There was a co-meme, one less idealistic, but just as powerful short-term to drive the entrepreneurial economic engine. That co-meme was consumerism — and it has at this point essentially drowned out the noble American liberty meme. Consumerism has corrupted the current liberal democracy apparatus, something entirely possible for a short-term focused goal to do within a centralized hierarchy inherently susceptible to the corruption by elites due to asymmetries of information available in such architectures.

Consumerism was utilized originally in western Europe to help loosen the dogmatic grip of religion which promoted its own virtues-of-poverty meme. A pro-poverty populace is incompatible with capitalism and innovation. Religion did evolve over time, dropping the poverty leanings, and sharing its power over the peoples’ minds, eventually gaining partnership status with its liberal democracy political parties. Religion served as the meaning meme to balance the coercive aspect of the meaningless consumerism meme.

Unfortunately for religion, it has more or less lost its position of the meaning meme within American academia. The roaring 1920s was the beginning of the end for the religion-consumerism balancing combo and then after the counterculture movement of the 1960s, and now the socialism leanings of the millennials in the 2000s particularly among metropolitan academia and students, religion is done as the balancing meme. Religion is a deal while meaning or spirituality is a journey.

Some call this socialist movement postmodernism which favors a new meme of compassionate oppression. This position makes sense when you consider socialism on a large scale can only be sustained through oppression. The natural human instinct leans towards self empowerment and one’s kin. To counter this deep seated human instinct, socialism is required to deploy strong sometimes brutal oppressive tactics. Hence, socialism is not an ideal meme for an emerging great decentralized future.

Thus, America’s liberal democracy ideals need to remain relevant as humanity makes the leap to a new apparatus for nations. That can only happen if these ideals are decoupled from the centralized hierarchy nation state apparatus and embedded in the forthcoming decentralized organizing technology model for nationhood.

This new technology enables DAOs, with perhaps the nation state version coming to be known eventually as a DAN (Decentralized Autonomous Nation). Maintaining the status quote risks the American ideal altogether, as pressures are mounting among academia in favour of socialism.

In addition, historian Noah Harari Sapiens in his book Sapiens makes the point that the liberal ideals of free will are also under siege due to scientific discoveries that favour determinism. He also understands the power of stories in organizing humans in large numbers. In the same book he talks about the nations, corporations and god being stories of power. Harari also understands that algorithms or automated software (DANs) will have the legal rights to have property rights.

Successful DANs will need the support of the people, and they will gain that support by deploying compelling national memes. Memes work at mobilizing people. Our brains were designed for cultural memes. The American Dream has a place in this new world, but it needs to be partners with a co-meme that is more empowering than consumerism for a more sophisticated populace.

I say more sophisticated intentionally. The expansion of successful capitalism creates an ever larger market of the middle class. That middle class becomes a larger audience for a sophisticated message. Intellectuals have a direct line to the youth of that larger sophisticated audience. And what the intellectuals are selling is not consumerism. In fact, the message is anti-consumerism but verbalized as anti-capitalism packaged in strong feelings of resentment, guilt and anger. That’s a dangerous candidate for the new cultural meme as the tendency is to offer up socialism as the replacement model for capitalism.

The reality is that the solution for suboptimal consumerism meme is more capitalism, but just coupled with a more meaningful co-meme powered by the forthcoming DAN technology.

A New Meme of Meaning

As the successful rise of America and western Europe has shown, a culture requires balanced narratives as memes for their minds. This US used the meaning meme of modified religion to balance the meaningless meme of consumerism, all packaged up in the ideal of the American Dream available to anyone. At the point of diminishing returns, typically at the apex of the long-term debt cycle and the availability of new organizing technology these cultural memes require renewal. This happened at the dawn of western capitalism and it will happen again now at the dawn of decentralized capitalism.

A candidate for a new balancing meme is yoga, both its physical exercise component and its mindfulness meditation component. Yoga is an ancient science and art originally from the Indian subcontinent. It’s already seen dramatic growth in the west particularly America over the last sixty years. In its purest form, it is non-religious, yet it facilitates profound meaning in the minds of human beings.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had this to say about the Upanishads, yogic philosophy was originally codified:

In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life. It will be the solace of my death.

Schopenhauer introduced the Upanishads to Erwin Schrödinger, a founding father of quantum physics and famous for his Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, which is about the peculiar relationship between the observer and observation; in our underlying quantum, seemingly the act of measurement is required for the observed object to appear. Schrödinger posited this fact then would require billions of worlds, one for each of us. To avoid such a many worlds conclusion, Schrödinger had this to say in his 1944 book What is Life?:

There is obviously only one alternative … namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads.

The westernized or Americanized yoga is actually more ideal for the modern world than the original Indian form because it does not require strict obedience to a yoga master. Mastery in America can be a more personal path, whereas in India, a prerequisite is devotion to a guru. This guru-centric approach often plays into the hands of an elitist system of hierarchy and centralization.

More independent discovery of the self through yoga is certainly possible without a guru devotion. In my opinion, the self realization process makes for better system 2 perspectives, since one has to think deeply for oneself, fully tapping into and developing our system 2 endowment.

Devotion is used as a tool for pushing through the inertia, laziness, self-importance of the system 1 ego. However, it is not a requirement for a person committed to developing his or her system 2 endowments, including enforce real consequences on him or herself for not meeting expectations.

Americanized yoga is also quite naturally pre-infused with the American story or the American Dream. It has a natural balance. In fact, one could look at it as a perfect balance between east and west considering from where each meme arrived. And that brings me to today’s polarizing meaning meme candidates competing for the minds of the populace: the nationalist meme vs the globalist meme.

Each side has valid points and is the reason why close to half the population find themselves at each pole when debating which way to vote on election day. To help bring some balanced perspective, lets first define each term:

• Globalist — Noun: a person who advocates the interpretation or planning of economic and foreign policy in relation to events and developments throughout the world. Adjective: relating to or advocating the operation or planning of economic and foreign policy on a global basis.
• Nationalist: Noun: a person who strongly identifies with their own nation and vigorously supports its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. Adjective: relating to nationalists or nationalism.

As you can see, there is nothing threatening on the surface of either position. It’s the extremism and lack of balance wielded by elites that powermongers that provides the demonizing context projected at those considering the opposite pole. Ideally, a balanced integrated approach that considers the benefits and negatives of both poles is the healthy way forward.

Americanized yoga is a potentially balanced integrated path forward. And it seems to be finding acceptance already. Over the last 60 years, yoga has seen impressive growth. Yoga and/or meditation practitioners include everyone from Ray Dalio (the most successful hedge fund manager in history) to Joe Rogan (the most successful podcaster in history). And they are not alone. Rogan has recently moved to Texas from California, or in other words, from the America’s Yoga Heartland to America’s Heartland, thus contributing to yoga’s ascension in middle America:

Source: YogaAlliance.com/Ipsos Public Affairs

The following yoga numbers can be found on Statista:

• Number of yoga participants in the U.S.: 36.7m
• Number of participants in Pilates training in the U.S.: 9.08m
• Share of consumers who are very likely to start doing yoga in the next 12 months: 18%

Yoga combines the best of the globalist perspective with the nationalist mindset. Its forthcoming decentralized architecture (to more fully replace the suboptimal guru-devotion approach) will quite possible allow it to ascend as the next cultural meme in the west (at the same time capitalism is finding laying a solid foundation in the east). Both bring the right balance of system 1 and system 2 perspectives preparing both populaces for the coming decentralized technology powered industrial revolution.

As I wrote in a previous article, the AI era requires us to develop new skills that will be in demand. AI currently lacks intuition and consciousness. Those are endowments that humans have in spades relatively speaking. The key is developing those to make them a salable good. Yoga and meditation help develop intuition, consciousness, and a system 2 perspective. Thus, there will be an economic driver for Americanized yoga as a complementary meme for the decentralized capitalism era. In fact, the economics of yoga in the U.S. are impressive (courtesy Statista):

• Market size of the global health club industry: 96.7bn USD
• Revenue of the yoga industry in the U.S.: 9.09bn USD
• Market share of yoga classes in U.S. yoga and Pilates industry: 51.3%

Consumerism was a good fit for the centralized hierarchical capitalism because it produced large inventories of standardized goods. Those inventories needed to be moved and moved quickly because another aspect of consumerism is fashion. And inventories of goods that are out of style are very costly. So consumerism worked wonders on moving large inventories of even cheap crap.

Fortunately, decentralized capitalism will produce mass personalization, i.e., no large inventories, but instead just-in-time custom goods and services for everyone, including those precisely calibrated for optimal self-awareness, self-improvement, social empowerment, community service, sustainable development. Or in other words, services of that give meaning to life. Thus, you can say, meaning and capitalism are finally quite compatible through a revitalized American Dream, now new and improved with a global angle through the lens of yoga, and an apparatus of decentralized technology.

“Who sees all beings in their own self and their own self in all beings, loses all hatred and fear.” ~Isha Upanishad

This will make sense to many of you because your intuition tells you it seems right. However, some parts of you will find it objectionable because it offends some polarized aspect of your identity. But you won’t be able to quite dismiss it because some of the positions also agree with that same identity. The reason you’ll have to rely on your intuition here is because that’s where you as a human being synthesize much of your waking learnings to make sense of the world. Sometimes those synthesized learnings come out in your sleep in the form of dreams or right when you wake up or as you’re going to bed, when your neocortex takes a break and your subconscious rules your airwaves.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. — Martin Luther King paraphrasing Theodore Parker

American capitalism has its roots in the scientific revolution of Europe, which has its scientific roots in the older Islamic science tradition, which in turn was fundamentally influenced by the ancient Indian mathematical innovations (including the invention of the number zero likely by Brahmagupta, perhaps even while in meditation). So in a sense, an Americanized yoga meme is the world coming full circle.

This is why the American miracle is really a miracle for the entire world. And the American ideal of liberation is a universal ideal. And so from that perspective, the meme must not remain tied to the so-called source, the signal tied to the carrier, or the idea assumed to be isolated to the vocalizer. And so the nation state as the carrier of today and the last couple millennia is itself in evolution, and will give way to a new carrier of innovation and liberty.

Innovation is thus not owned by any one nation or nation state. Innovation is the cumulative and ingenuous efforts figuratively owned by all of humanity, actually, all of life when you take into consideration Max Tegmark’s life 3.0 model. It’s the “life’s” work of life itself, that first begot the first divisible cell.

Cultures are changing and do not move forward or back in tandem; some peoples are collectively at a different point in their development than another group. And cultural cycles reveal that either a culture changes with the times or it disintegrates slowly and then dies off permanently. And so is the threat to the top culture of our times. To avoid death, the American ideal must evolve and the collective American nation must embrace the decentralized technologies, rather than try to resist and suppress them. And because of vested interests of the elites, this adoption of the new technology naturally starts at the fringes and makes its way inward.