The Refragmentation

How are those solutions feasible when the system is captured by the wealthy?

I don't think any solution that involves politics can work. We have to solve it outside of politics by making it too difficult to use money to influence politics. We have the technology to do this without winning any votes in Congress. Instead, we need to build tools and educate people.

http://meritcapitalism.com

I'm old too, and I think the issue is quite a bit simpler than this rather sprawling essay makes out. The "two forces" (WWII and large corporations) that are now receding in memory, that supposedly used to push us all together, were actually both manifestations of a single force, which is the "growth phase" of fossil-fuel energy production. This has been a boon to economies the world over for the past 100, 150 years or so.

When the world is a place where an ever-increasing amount of energy is available to drive an economy, the best way to exploit resources (energy, labor, materials) is by doing it "at scale" i.e. big corporations. And the best way for Hitler to create Lebensraum and accomplish all his other now-familiar goals is by using that selfsame large-scale industrial infrastructure. And the best way for the Allies to fight against it, was more of the same. It's all the same thing.

But economic activity grows and shrinks hand-in-hand with energy availability. And when your energy source goes through a growth phase, hits a peak and stops growing, the "large-scale" strategy slowly starts to become unviable. So a given corporation, suddenly finds itself resource-constrained, and has to find some way to reorganize itself and reconcile itself to the new paradigm, or face becoming less and less profitable.

PG correctly pegs the timing of when the "disintegration" and "fragmentation" starts to make itself evident in the US - the 1970s. By no coincidence that is also the time when America reached and passed its domestic petroeum-production peak. Then came all the economic stagnation, hyperinflation, factories closing (offshoring), etc. And on the social side there was pervasive unease... the "ennui" of the like-named Carter speech. Many subcultures came out of the woodwork then, because it becomes less desirable to fit into and conform to a system that seems to be faltering and becoming unstable, no longer gives you any upward mobility, and might even be rigged against you.

In fact, for the people against whom it truly is rigged, why not outwardly display symbols proudly showing just how thoroughly "outside the system" one is? Hence the baggy pants of the prison parolee (who upon release gets back the same pants he was arrested in, but finds he's lost 30 lbs eating prison food) that became the stylistic signature of gangsters. Hence all the tattoos, formerly the symbol of exotic and unseemly characters, now sort of the neutered and ubiquitous symbol of wannabe unseemly characters.

Anyway it took a great pretender to hide the obvious, and that guy's name was Reagan. Luckily for him, people were all-too-willing to get on-board and believe a pleasant lie, rather than face a bunch of hard work.

Computers were a great invention but it's no coincidence that anything that "gets done" and any wealth that gets created in the US today is by doing "more with less" in the digital realm, and not by doing "more with more" in the physical. All the physical stuff has been offshored to take advantage of labor arbitrage and, ironically enough, cheaper energy. (Because of course there are still countries that export energy.)

Anyone looking for why "we once were cohesive and now we're not" should be looking at this, as the transition is a crisis-level problem. But PG seems to have a persistent blind spot about it. The same blind spot is common among optimistic tech-minded people because they're used to thinking "anything is possible," and I imagine "startup people" all the more so.

I hope that can-do spirit is able to make renewables replace the orgy, the buffet, the glut of energy we use and deploy today. An honest look at the problem might be a prerequisite to tackling it though. Look at the numbers (something measured in joules or watts) and it may give you pause. And given that the initiative depends so heavily on the continued existence of the current interconnected and fossil-fuel-powered industrial infrastructure, I would say, better get a move on.

Tangent/epilogue: And obviously, fucking autonomous cars are not going to fix anything, nor is any kind of car. Who fantasizes about autonomous cars when ordinary passenger rail has so much room for improvement? Californians, that's who. Hyperloop is closer to the mark, but suffers from Musk's attention-whoring narcissism and is likely to be egregiously energy-inefficient. (Since speed, not efficiency, seems to be the main design criterion.) That's enough for you to think about, I know I'm not making any friends but that's not what challenging ideas (an endangered species) are for.

Another angle is that the label "startup" is being applied retoractively to companies that, at their beginnings, were in no way similar to contemporary startups. I can't picture the founders of Google, Apple or Microsoft frequenting "startup events" of their time, spending time on figuring out valuations, or "growth hacking" strategies, or drinking beer together and dreaming out loud of the world domination they're going to achieve. From what I remember reading, the founders of those companies simply did the work and were focused on it. They didn't dream of taking the world until they already found themselves in the groove, being half-way into orbit and already after first stage separation.

Contrast that with what we call startups today - companies that deliberately attempt to be that "evergreen book", trying out every trick in the book to force themselves onto growth path. They live within an ecosystem, a big part of which is a mutual adoration society, with additional large layers of parasitic actors trying to suck out some money and status by just hanging around. And surely a good strategy was found - hence contemporary standard business plan of bullshiting customers with half-made shell of a product to quickly reach the point of getting acquired. It seems to work better than "just" starting a company, at least for the founders. Not necessarily for the world at large.

In a way, I think that early Apple and Google had more in common with a pizza place than with a contemporary Instagram clone.

> ... thousands of policy changes ...

I'm all for reducing the size and complexity of govt, including the frequency of policy changes. A progressive tax can be a small-govt solution.

> ... Progressive taxes simply point a bigger gun at the heads of those who perform better in the economy.

A progressive tax certainly takes more from those who have performed better in the past. I'm concerned about creating jobs and encouraging situations where people can succeed in the future. The people who will create the jobs of tomorrow are not the ones who created past jobs. It's small companies who create jobs, so don't tax them as much; it's the struggling entrepreneur who will create jobs, so don't tax them as much. Instead, tax those who have already succeeded and who are not creating as much relative economic output.

VC-funded companies, almost 100%.