An Introduction

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

- Antonio Gramsci

These writings are an attempt to organize my thoughts on - for lack of a better phrase - the state of things. Where are are, how we got here, and where this train might be taking us as it scrapes along its tracks. As such it’s an inherently vain and presumptuous exercise, vulnerable to charges of bias, ignorance, specious inference, and incomplete thoughts derailed by passion or exhaustion. Some of these charges will no doubt have merit, and others will not. Such is the way of trying to find one's way through the fog. And my, how thick that fog has become.

Allow me a brief detour that I promise will wind back to the main road. (There will be many of these, so consider this an endurance test.)

There is a theory called the Dark Forest Theory, which is posed as a response to the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox ponders the following question; if the math presented in formulas such as the Drake Equation suggests there must be many alien civilizations out there in the cosmos, why haven’t we heard from any of them yet? One of the more common answers to the Fermi Paradox is known as the Great Filter, wherein the vast majority (or even all) of civilizations that become technologically advanced end up destroying themselves before they can expand their galactic footprint. This makes some morbid sense, but presumably some of those civilizations in the throes of their self-immolation would have thrown out some last signal before they faded forever into the dark.

The Dark Forest Theory, on the other hand, posits that intelligent life may be playing a giant game of risk management, a galactic Prisoner’s Dilemma in which the safest play given the uncertainly of intentions and vast array of variables is to destroy any civilization you encounter before they can destroy you. But the Dark Forest Theory also presupposes an awareness amongst the players of this game. They know the game exists, and that others may be farther along in the game than they are, and so there exists a heavy incentive on radio silence. We are not alone, how beautiful! But in that dense galactic forest, the incentive structure keeps everyone mute. They take silent steps amidst the proverbial trees, terrified of what might happen if they step on a stick. Only the boldest, the most insane - the most dangerous - dare make noise in the Dark Forest. They may be destroyed, and given the risk, they likely will be. But through misjudgment of either the game or their strength as players, they shout into the fog, and if there are enough of them, they can break the game. The Dark Forest gains light, and in that light made by destroyers and lunatics, the bloodbath begins.

The discourse in the United States has always been a messy affair, prone to bouts of insanity and sometimes too easily taken in by charlatans and demagogues. But the new paradigm taking shape seems of a different sort than we’ve seen before. It’s born of a moment in history burdened by enormous strain from without and within, on a runaway train of technological advances in communication and a globalized ping-ponging of perverse incentives that far outpaces the evolution of the decrepit and corrupt institutions (news media, publishing, academia) that used to work to filter and mollify the more impulsive and dangerous shouting, institutions that have at the same time been overtaken by ideologies that have no desire to slow the pace or foster the discourse in ways once understood to be productive (more on that later). And so the temperature of the discourse rises, and as it rises the ability of the formless racing mass to descend upon its heretics grows, and that mass gains confidence in both its mission and its tactics without understanding the trends and forces upon which it is buttressed.

It’s a very unfortunately time for discourse to break down. Historians centuries from now, if such people still exist, are likely to look back on our era as a sort of Great Transition. From what exactly we are transitioning we are still debating, and to what we are transitioning we can only guess. But it’s clear to me that the people leading the haphazard charge through the fog of transition in their pursuit of some brave new world will not be the best of us. They will be our most deluded and our most vain, our least measured and our least merciful. And they will be met with increasingly fierce resistance. This resistance will lose early, adjust its tactics, and counterattack. And this is where the Dark Forest can turn into a frightful place.

Antonio Gramsci wrote the above quoted line during the last Great Transition (1914-1945), and he would not survive to see the new world left in its wake, like so many millions of others left in the rubble of that era's wars and plagues and famines. He was a dedicated communist in no small part responsible for the intellectual acid that has dissolved our civilization in recent decades - the man who coined and helped plan the “long march through the institutions” - but he was pretty clear-eyed about the dangerous tear in the fabric of history into which he wandered. The historical churn that followed the collapse of the Old Order produced the bloodiest decades humanity has ever endured, populated by merchants of transformative death like Stalin and Hitler and Mao.

I find myself, like many of you, standing in the breeze of this brewing storm, my mind overwhelmed by observations and perceptions that struggle to form a coherent patchwork that may function as something like a worldview. I’m in conversation perhaps with no one but myself, but those can be the most important conversations you ever have.

I’m trying. That’s all I can promise going forward.