New: The Orthogonal Bet gets its own podcast!
🚨 The Orthogonal Bet is now its own podcast with its own channel and you should subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other popular podcatchers.
This week marked a huge milestone for our Riskgaming podcast. For the past year, we’ve published an on-going series of episodes hosted by Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman called The Orthogonal Bet. Where Riskgaming always centers around the tradeoffs and strategies of the complex intersection of science, technology and policy, The Orthogonal Bet has directed its attention to the far-out, the sublime, the charming and the crazy. Or as Sam puts it, “the world is combinatorially weird and fractally interesting. And therefore, omnivorous curiosity is the only proper response.”
In the past year, Sam and guests have discussed worldbuilding in science fiction, the history of intelligence, the overlaps between human and AI cognition, the history of SimCity, the fundamental nature of biology and, well, magic itself.
Today, Sam launches his first independent episode with Niko McCarty, the publisher of Asimov Press. We’ve Lux Recommended many articles from Asimov since its launch, and today, Sam and Niko talk about the future of biology, why a rigorous science journal also publishes science fiction, and the critical relation between the frontiers of discovery and the imagination.
🔊 Listen to “Niko McCarty on Building Asimov Press and Writing for Ambitious Readers.”
Do the benefits of global connection outweigh their downsides?
Thanks to technology, the world has never been more culturally and economically unified. Yet each of us is more individually isolated than ever before. Out of this dichotomy arises deep frustration; our atomic agency is impotent in a world where distant events completely upend our best-laid plans. As C. Wright Mills put it in The Power Elite, “They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any."
Briefly in his work, Mills was grappling with the question of whether a power elite does in fact exist. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, his implication was that even the most powerful men may feel powerless against the will of the universe. But Mills saw a potential bridge between individual fate and collective destiny in the rise of American institutions. The individual may lack agency, he noted, but “the Power Elite” who surface across the leadership of companies, Congress, the courts and the military can and do collectively shape the future.
The Power Elite was written in 1956 at the height of “the Establishment,” Eisenhower Republicanism and on-going détente with the Soviet Union (Khrushchev’s historic tour of America would come three years later). Since then, the grip of these powerful institutions on our world has slipped. The Power Elite has become the power elite, making up for its loss of capital letters through extraordinary capital accumulation. Through the caravanserais of Davos, Art Basel, Munich Security and more, the power elite is more networked than ever, and yet, never has the group at the summit been so deeply submerged.
Robert D. Kaplan’s new book Waste Land pushes hard on this dichotomy of connectivity. His argument is that distances on Earth have dramatically shrunk through developments in transportation and technology, densifying the links between us. Yet the vitality of those connections have diffused our sense of self: we are overwhelmed by media and subsumed by distant events that make it feel as if no authority is in charge anywhere, ever. Even if we wanted a better world, we couldn’t have it: “Technology has made us both masters and victims to a previously unimaginable degree.”
He analogizes the current moment to postwar Weimar Germany, a synoptic era for the dangers of decadence and disorder at a time of great import. “The entire world is one big Weimar now,” he writes, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.” Order has given way to curated disorder — and worse. It’s like Hampton at the Cross-Roads, our Riskgaming scenario on how a fateful hurricane demolishes the Navy’s shipyards in Virginia, leading to intense negotiation and often disunity in its aftermath. Indeed, as he writes later, “This is because complexity leads to fragility, in which any of innumerable nodal points under attack can disrupt a system as a whole.”
Kaplan is deeply and intentionally pessimistic. Writing on the century following the Napoleonic Wars, “… too few were thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy. They didn’t realize that pessimism can be constructive and help states to avoid catastrophe.” He wants us to consider that our current trajectory is tragic and will not end well — and to do something about it. He lays much of the blame on Silicon Valley, writing that “the tech industry evangelizes about stretching the boundaries of human experience. But in the future the opposite may turn out to be the case,” proceeding to point out wide-scale digital surveillance in China.
Waste Land, which takes its name from the T.S. Eliot poem, leaves us with an open question: What should we do about the benefits and harms of connectivity? Unfortunately, Kaplan poses the question without addressing the various interests around such connectivity. This is not Riskgaming, of thinking through many actors and how they might laud or fight various changes to the international order. Instead, it’s doomscrolling in book format, page after page of problems shorn from any system that creates them.
Worse, the fragility that Kaplan points to in our systems is by no means a given. It’s not inevitable that the entire world should shut down due to a bug in a CrowdStrike-like outage, or that a badly-maneuvered ship in the Suez Canal should block global cargo. Business and political leaders have chosen a lack of redundancy, usually in the name of efficiency. Resiliency is always a checkbook away, but few see the value of such an investment.
The alternative appears to be isolation, the solution the United States is haphazardly pursuing today. Yet, as we saw with the stock market this week, isolation is extraordinarily expensive. It evaporates the scale advantages of global manufacturing that make a middle-class lifestyle accessible to more people, instantly pushing millions down the economic ladder. The specialization and complexity of economic life that creates fragility is also what creates the wealth we all share.
Kaplan intends to be pessimistic, but I contest his assertion that small events in distant parts of the globe are terrorizing everyone. “The key element in all of this will be closeness. We will all—Eurasia, Africa, North and South America—be exposed to each other’s crises as never before.”
Really? Take Sudan, where more than 150,000 people have been slaughtered and another 11 million displaced over the last two years according to recent estimates. Sudan is a critically important African nation, and also has one of the world’s minor but interesting monopolies over Gum arabic, which is used in drinks like Coca-Cola as well as in paints, lithography inks and shoe polish. Trade in the gum is now funding the rebel Rapid Support Forces in their efforts to overthrow Sudan’s national army.
Yes, Sudan and its groves of acacia trees are connected via trade into that most globalized of soft drinks. Outside the chemists at Coca-Cola, though, has this connection affected anyone? Have the citizens of America or the world bothered to grapple with the casualties and displacements of so many people? No, and why would they?
In fact, the world is filled with such economic chokepoints. For decades, the United States relied on Russia as the key source for its nuclear fuel, a dependency that became difficult to justify amid the war in Ukraine. Thanks to new legislation and concerted efforts by the nuclear industry, imports from Russia fell by half last year, and it looks like the United States and Europe will have a much more resilient supply chain exclusive of Russia in the years ahead. We secure resilience when necessity warrants it.
Kaplan emphasizes that media and particularly social media is increasingly forcing the world to come closer together. Yet, China’s Ne Zha 2, which smashed global records last month by surpassing $2 billion at the box office, has barely rippled the surface anywhere else. In America, Box Office Mojo estimates about $18 million in sales for the animation film. The world is bigger than Kaplan and many assume, and I can’t help but hear echoes of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat two decades later. Netflix now spends more than half of its $18 billion content budget on studios outside of North America, since most of the time, most people want to watch shows in their own language and cultural context.
Waste Land is a book I wanted to agree with, and yet I kept shaking my head in frustration at its argumentation and evidence. Loose analogies, hyperbolic dictums undermined by reality and a facile critique of technology don’t bring Kaplan’s thesis home. Pessimism is a useful tool, and reminding people that the future is contingent is always a worthy endeavor (our Riskgaming scenarios are rarely utopian!). Systems are self-healing though, particularly when profits and losses are involved. What looks like chaos is often protected by many interests who will ensure the system doesn’t fail.
Our connectivity has deepened, and there are obvious downsides to Earth’s growing claustrophobia. But is it setting the world on autopilot to ruin? Is the power elite powerless to change direction? No, of course not. Kaplan ends with a Camus-esque take on the Sisyphean task ahead, “… we have no choice but to fight on, as the outcome is not given to any of us in advance.” Sure, but fight on to where? The problem with a wasteland is no one wants to be there, but no one knows where to go either.
Podcast: “Every system can be gamed”
This week, Laurence Pevsner and I sat down with Gideon Lichfield, author of the Substack Futurepolis and the former editor-in-chief of Wired. We talk about the future of democracy, public AI, and tech governance. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
🔊 Listen to “‘Every system can be gamed’”
Gideon Lichfield: I don’t think citizens' assemblies taking over the running of the government is what we should expect. But I do think that in an ideal world, you’d have assemblies that are convened for very specific questions and with different sets of people, and then those inform the work of an elected full-time congress or parliament.
Laurence Pevsner: This is a podcast hosted by a venture capital firm, so it is only natural to inquire, is there a tech solution here? If it's a numbers problem, well, we do have technology solutions to be able to gather a lot of data and get a lot of people in a virtual room, even if we can't get them in a physical one.
Gideon Lichfield: I hesitate to use the words “tech solutions.” But there are some interesting uses here, and AI inevitably gets a shoutout.
One of the largest-scale participatory processes we have right now, certainly in this country, is open comment on rulemaking and on laws. And so thousands, perhaps millions of people will sometimes write in on a proposed piece of legislation and express their opinion. Now, this too is very prone to gaming. I think it was the net neutrality legislation that got something like 12 or 14 million comments, most of which turned out to be from bots.
But you at least have the potential for a large number of people to express an opinion, and technology tools can help with things like filtering out bots and spam, collating comments, finding common themes, identifying points of agreement or fault lines, and providing that information to lawmakers and to policymakers in a way that simply wasn't really available when someone just had to sit and read through everything.
Lux Recommends
- As I prepare to head to London, it’s always fun to read another doomer article on Britain, this time from Derek Thompson on "How the British Broke Their Own Economy.” “The comparison with France makes clear Britain’s policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France.”
- I enjoyed Jeannette Cooperman’s re-appraisal of Tom Wolfe, whose many works are currently being reissued by Picador. “The observing was his real genius. People exult in Wolfe’s flourishes of style, but they would have faded from view if they had not been accurate. He did the work. He read, he immersed himself, he hung out with whoever or whatever he was writing about for far longer than most reporters could bear.”
- On the subject of writers, Chris Heath of Smithsonian Magazine writes on “Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro,” the famed author of The Power Broker and the Lyndon B. Johnson biography series. “Caro’s will specifies that no one else may finish this book for him if he does not finish it. The example he wishes not to follow is William Manchester’s, whose third and concluding volume about Winston Churchill was completed by someone else with, in Caro’s view, lamentably lesser results. From much of the anxious outside commentary I have read concerning Caro’s plans, I think this may have left many people the impression that we face an all-or-nothing scenario—that if Caro doesn’t finish the book, we will see none of it. But when I ask him about this, he clarifies that whatever else happens, these 951 pages and counting will be available to see the light of day. ‘I polish as I go,’ he points out.”
- A Riskgaming reader sent in this piece from The New York Times on how “Drones Now Rule the Battlefield in the Ukraine-Russia War.” “Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a ‘robots first’ military strategy.”
- Finally — and perhaps some proof for Kaplan’s fragility thesis — Amanda Mull at Bloomberg covers the extraordinary spending of the richest Americans. “Rich people really are just firing a cash cannon into the consumer market. The wealthiest 10% of American households—those making more than $250,000 a year, roughly—are now responsible for half of all US consumer spending and at least a third of the country’s gross domestic product.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
