John Kotkin [[202103031624 History never repeats itself. Man always does.]] ### Chapter 1: The Feudal Revival - Wealth concentrates into fewer hands, creating a type of closed aristocracy, and the benefits of economic growth go to the wealthiest. - Wealth buys influence in government and over culture, and thus emerge a powerful central state and oligarchy (institutions of media, academia, etc. as a kind of "clerisy"). - During feudalism, the society was highly rigid and stratified: - First estate: the clergy - Second estate: the nobles - Third estate: the peasants and laborers - Today's third estate is composed of two parts: the property owning class (the urban and suburban class) and the working class (the growing lower class that depends on government transfers and has little hope of upward mobility). - [[202103251848 Characteristics of feudalism|Under feudalism, "the ideal vision of society was static."]] - p. 12-13 - Feudalism is marked by stagnation and stasis. - These days societal pessimism is marked by a decline in birth rates — due to more women working and unaffordable housing. - Reversing the neo-feudal course requires a new political paradigm that rejects the idea of a powerful central government. However, "The current 'progressive' approach to 'social justice,' with its attachment to a powerful central government, will only strengthen the clerisy by vesting more authority in the 'expert' class." - p. 19 - Without addressing the oligarchic tendencies and wealth inequalities, at the expense of the middle and lower classes, brought about by liberal capitalism, capitalism and liberty are ultimately undermined as well. - [[202006041857 Central planning mistakes expertise for judgment.]] ### Chapter 2: The Enduring Allure of Feudalism - Marx's "proletarian alms bag" is money given to the populace to keep them from "destitution and rebellion." It's a form of the current-day concept of UBI. - p. 23 ### Chapter 3: The Rise and Decline of Liberal Capitalism - Entrepreneurs paved the way out of medieval feudalism through technological innovations, expanding trade routes, and building cities, which brought economic growth. - "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is capitalism plus authoritarianism — command and control. It's marked by stratified class structure, enforced ideology, large central government, censorship, surveillance. - "China's leaders crave a world that is safe for authoritarianism." - Hal Brands, "China's Master Plan: Exporting an Ideology" - Population decline and demographic shift will strain the welfare state and pensions, as there will be more retirees than workforce participants. Although wealthy countries make up for the labor shortfall by allowing immigration, the result is growing social conflict. - Technology can create even wider gaps as there are fewer people who have high skills versus the many who do not. It takes only a handful of coders, financiers, and marketers to create and maintain billion dollar companies now, bypassing blue collar workers and middle managers. - "We are turning into two races: Eloi who play video games and Morlocks who program them." – Richard Fernandez extrapolating H.G. Wells's *The Time Machine* - [[202103231419 Fewer people will do more work.]] - The intellectual class (the clerisy) are caught up in sustainability versus trying to spur overall economic growth. But it is ==economic stagnation== that causes poverty, social immobility, class conflict in the first place. The clerisy are dubious of innovation, entrepreneurship, and progress, and rather focus their attention to "redress social grievances and protect the environment, rather than seek ways to spread wealth and opportunity." - p. 30 - In this way, stasis (economics and social) will be a feature intermingled with the coming neo-feudalism, as it was in medieval feudalism. - [[202103251848 Characteristics of feudalism]] ### Chapter 4: High-Tech Feudalism - A "high-tech middle age" is the prediction of Japanese futurist Taichi Sakaiya, in *The Knowledge Value Revolution*. - Despite tech leaders (Silicon Valley) once being perceived as pioneering entrepreneurs, they are increasingly becoming "an exclusive ruling class" that controls a "few exceptionally powerful companies" and is "resistant to any dispersion of their power." - p. 32 - And as they conquer the "digital real estate" (cyberspace, cybereconomy), what is created is actually "a more stratified economic and social order, with widening class divisions" globally. - p. 32 - [[202103251849 Technology threatens to capture every industry, which thus makes tech oligarchy more insidious.]] ### Chapter 5: The Belief System of the New Oligarchy - The new group of oligarchs is "far less diverse" that that of the Industrial Revolution. The tech elites are "long on brilliance, but short on hardship" (words of Anne VanderMey). They are similar to Huxley's "scientific caste system" — paternalistic, educated, less diverse — and they never had "a part-time job in a pizza joint." - Because tech oligarchs employ fewer people as a proportion of their businesses' revenues, an "increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people" and "everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial 'gig work' and government aid." - Gregory Ferenstein, p. 40 - [[202103231419 Fewer people will do more work.]] - The current tech oligarchs "favor a guaranteed annual income, in part to allay fears of insurrection by a vulnerable and struggling workforce" in a model of =="oligarchical socialism"==, wherein "redistribution of resources would meet the material needs of the working class and the declining middle class, but it would not promote upward mobility or threaten the dominance of the oligarchs." Workers will have a "serflike future of rented apartment and frozen prospects" and increasingly "depend on subsidies to meet their basic needs." - p. 40 - Because tech oligarchs control a significant portion of the information pipelines (e.g. people get their new off Facebook), they have a massive hand in controlling the culture itself. They are not content to merely own the pipelines; they shape and curate the content itself. - "With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era," which "recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages." - p. 43 - That is, as it was constituted of literate people, the Church had a lot of control over information and knowledge dissemination, and leveraged their use of the printing press over the masses. - "[[202103251847 Personal data is the raw material of the digital age.|Personal data is the raw material of the digital age.]]" - p. 43 - Superplatforms, like Facebook, Google, etc., "control access to a considerable part of the overall economy. This position gives them enormous power to collect personal information on users." Thus, =="our behaviour is transformed into a product"== (words of Joe Miller, *BBC*), and we will have a "digital feudalism" (Gaspard Koenig, *Irish Examiner*) with mass surveillance. ### Chapter 6: Feudalism in California, Harbinger of the Future - California is "dominated by a small class of exceedingly wealthy and well-connected people, resembling the nobility of the Middle Ages or the elites of the Gilded Age," marked by lack of upward mobility and social stratification. - p. 45 - The top consists of venture capitalists and company founders. - Below them are skilled professionals who are "well paid but living ordinary middle-class lives" because of high cost of living and high taxes. - Below them are gig workers. - The bottom is the "untouchable class of homeless, drug addicts, and criminals." - p. 48 - California has one of the US's highest Gini ratios, which measures wealth inequality between the richest and the poorest segments of the population. - [[202103251846 Every aspect of human behavior will be monetized.]] - ==Resisting the hierarchical, socially stagnant, centrally programmed future that the oligarchs have in mind for us is the great imperative of our time.== - p. 49 ### Chapter 7: The New Legitimizers - [[202103301505 Future tyranny will be close to Huxley's prediction of gentle, rational executives.]] - [[202103301515 Characterizations of the new clerisy and new legitimizers]] ### Chapter 8: The Control Tower - Academia has slid further and further into "ideological conformism" wherein the university's role is not "to teach" but rather "to promote" certain values of prevailing orthodoxy. - Unfortunately universities also exist to provide credentials for the labor market, which engenders an environment in which students fall into line and conform so that they might more easily obtain higher paying jobs. - Rather than transmitters of past knowledge, universities are factories of credentials. This creates a threat of "mass amnesia" in which students and future generations forget the brutal past and might repeat mistakes. For example, championing socialism and communism, or championing more authoritarian state versus democracy. ### Chapter 9: New Religions - Environmentalism has emerged as a new religion. This is not to say we should not curtail resource waste or be better stewards of the planet, but that environmentalism today has a dogmatic, monolithic view that is not open to debate over solutions. - Transhumanism — immortality through technology — is another type of new religion. It is a kind of denial of human vulnerability and softness. It puts onto a pedestal a superhuman that will be perfected, molded, and wired by elite technologists and engineers. - In some ways the old religions brought different people of different backgrounds together under a guiding morality. Despite their flaws, old religions built communities and social bonds that helped instill a unifying cultural identity. The new religions, however, are "likely to divide people along political and cognitive lines" and "tend to be self-selecting for those who see themselves as both morally and intellectually superior." ### Chapter 10: The Rise and Decline of Upward Mobility - Before there can be upward mobility, which is evidence of a prosperous society, there must be commerce, economic growth, entrepreneurship. - "A comeback of democracy depended principally on a property-owning middle class and on a respect for commercial enterprise, which was widely viewed as ignoble in the Middle Ages." (p. 79) - Where middle classes are weak, in debt, and without property, democracy cannot take root and authoritarian politics can become pervasive, because wealth inequality and wealth concentration shape the socioeconomic structure. Upward mobility diminishes where entrepreneurship is suppressed. - Barrington Moore says, "No bourgeois, no democracy." What develops is a "proletarian mob." - The Roman res publica turned into a proletarian mob through the consequences of the following: - small farmers and artisans were displaced by slaves imported from distant reaches of the empire - social status and high occupations were determined by heredity - middle-class citizens were deep in debt - a growing lower class became unemployed and subsisted on the state's bread and circuses (p. 79). ### Chapter 11: A Lost Generation? - Millennials are at risk of being a "lost generation" when it comes to wealth accumulation. - Homeownership among millennials is low. A third of millennials will live in perpetual "rentership" and suffer from "less space, poorer conditions, often longer commutes, and more insecurity" (p. 83–84). - Not only are young people unable to own homes, they voluntarily and unknowingly give away their digital data for free services from a handful of tech companies that benefit. They are losing ownership of their personal data. - "In this way, the middle class will become digital serfs in what Gaspard Koenig calls 'digital feudalism.'" (p. 86) ### Chapter 12: Culture and Capitalism - #book #in-progress