I want a radically better future. I believe that technology, in coordination with institutions, can deliver it. Beyond philosophy, what follows is a plan that we can begin executing immediately.

Technology is the set of tools we use to do new things, and old things better. Technology is how we shape our world and build the future. The moral compass metaphor is instructive: technology is the ship, we're the crew; you still need a compass to get where you're going. And, for that matter, you need to know where you're going. Our values imply our vision for the future. Values tell us what technology to strive for, and how to use it. Technology is a scalar, and values make it a vector. Technology is inextricably linked to our values.

Technological progress is accelerating. “Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), 15,000 years ago (no agriculture),” writes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel.” Humanity is propelled by technological progress; on a long enough time scale, the exponential appears to be inevitable. Leaps are made by individuals, but humanity always finds a way.

Today, we see inflection points in artificial intelligence, energy, and biotech.

AI is working – products like ChatGPT and Midjourney create labor efficiency by helping us do tasks faster, and gesture at a structural cost reduction in knowledge work. The ultimate promise of artificial intelligence is limitless knowledge, and its application.

In energy, nuclear fusion – which offers virtually limitless, clean energy – is beginning to work in the lab. Private companies are commercializing early, signing contracts with future customers e.g. Microsoft. The consequences of fusion are profound: material cost reduction in the operation of data centers (compute / AI), manufacturing, transportation, and much else; energy is 13% of global GDP. Unlimited energy, in combination with the secrets of the universe learned from superintelligence, unlock an infinite frontier.

Biotech is having a moment as well. Brain-computer interfaces are beginning human clinical trials, and perhaps LLMs or DeepMind's AlphaFold will become a lever in drug discovery and personalized medicine. Healthcare is ~18% of US GDP; further, it is a low-productivity-growth sector, so the 18% is closer to a cost than an investment. The promise of biotech is BCI fusion with superintelligence, and the holy grail: eternal life.

These technologies are interrelated. AI is extremely energy-intensive (e.g. a query on ChatGPT uses about 10x the compute as the same search on Google). Energy is the core input to AI; biotech is a core output.

If exponential technological progress continues, we have an opportunity to live through the most exciting time in human history. We can choose to enter an age of exploration and enlightenment. We can travel to the far reaches of the universe, learn the secrets of reality, and live forever. The exponential unlocks this possibility, and more than we can possibly imagine. But to realize a possible future, we must choose it.

Ideas about how we should live take the form of religions, philosophies, and ideologies; they are spread by the memes we call culture; these memes compel a suprapersonal commitment to a cultural form; and this cultural form, projected through time, is our vision for the future. 

 are sets of norms and rules that we use to coordinate disparate humans. They guide us towards our vision for the future codified in our values. The Catholic Church, the law, marriage, the SEC, Harvard, and the New York Times are all institutions. Institutions have a duty to protect the spiritual core of society.

The most powerful and important institution in our society is Government. Governments serve as a final backstop, enforcing adherence to the most fundamental rules and norms. Humans are social and need institutions to coordinate; their persistence is inevitable.

There is a natural antagonism between technology and institutions. Institutions provide stability. Technology causes change.

Governments view technology skeptically, and technology views governments skeptically. As the custodians of our values and way of life, governments reasonably seek to ensure that tech-driven change furthers a vision for the future that is consistent with their values. Technologists give us the ability to improve our lives, and reasonably seek to avoid governments preventing progress. Governments view economic volatility (especially job automation) as dangerous; technology views economic stagnation as dangerous.

Exponential technological progress will worsen the tension between technology and government. The world will change faster. This will be startling to staid institutions. Threats to our way of life posed by the aimless or destructive application of technology will be met by draconian regulation, which will startle even the most DC-active technologists. The US is already doing this in crypto; nuclear and biotech regulations are onerous as well. The EU regulates benign software.

Regulation can slow technological progress locally, but not globally. Governments can use the lever of the law within their jurisdiction, and effectively in other jurisdictions where they have material influence. Fear of technology is ancient. Plato criticized the invention of writing. While concerns are not always unfounded, technology has always prevailed. Competitive dynamics create an opportunity for adversaries to speed up when you slow down. The costs of going slow include:

 Talented people will move to places with greater economic opportunity driven by technology. As we’ve seen over the last century, brains drain to technologically progressive societies. This trend will accelerate.

 Governments that clamp down on technology will not persist over the long term. Adversaries will beat them with more advanced weapons tech.

 Countries that import e.g. energy, compute, and semiconductors are vulnerable to supply chain issues and geopolitical instability.

Going slow locally is unwise because going slow globally is impossible.

Technological progress is inevitable, and so are institutions. A dynamic compromise of mutual improvement can be reached by leaning into the exponential curve of technological progress, while aiming at a clear vision for the future. This is the story of the Manhattan Project and Apollo 11, Singapore and Shenzhen.

National Accelerationism is the alignment of technology and government, where technology serves the national interest: directly, through the attraction of technologists and technology companies that drive economic growth, shaping technological development with cultural and economic incentives, and by reducing external dependencies e.g. in energy, compute, semiconductors, and defense tech; and indirectly, through the reinvestment of proceeds into social goods and infrastructure. Institutions can shape incentive structures to determine which technologies get developed through social movements and resource allocation decisions. A nation of explorers can fund their journey to Mars with the proceeds of advanced energy; art can be funded with the cash thrown off by personalized medicine; education paid for by AI dividends.

 might consist of revamping the manufacturing ecosystem through upskilling and automation, reshoring the medical supply chain, onshoring the electronics supply chain, a state acquisition of TSMC, eliminating zoning, 

, eliminating many social welfare programs (lean into the rugged individualism ethos), creating a neo-art-deco, banning TikTok, building a merit-based immigration system at the macro level, and the micro level (college admissions, job applications), and investing heavily in space exploration. America is a nation of explorers. 100 years into American Accelerationism, I imagine a crew of pioneers boldly voyaging into the solar system, building industry on asteroids, pushing the horizons of humanity further.

 broadly, represents greater clarity of vision than perhaps any other project does for any nation in the world today. Arabian Accelerationism should extend the line out to 2100 – what does the Kingdom look like then?

 is also happening – Israel became a world leader in technological progress in two generations.

; could a futuristic megacity be built off the coast of Mullaghmore?

; one can imagine quasi-stateless crypto nomads developing further communal sensibilities, formalizing their rules and norms, developing institutions. This is aligned with 

Governments begin a plan of National Accelerationism by doing the following:

: in terms of your vision for the future, grounded on firm moral foundations; and questions of vital strategic importance. This will inform the incentive structures you create to influence the development of technology.

: map the existing industrial base, labor pool, geography, markets, and natural resources to begin identifying opportunities for industry growth.

: in target and non-target industries to understand what regulatory changes and economic incentives they would need to establish operations in your country. Identify potential actions and the FDI amount, jobs, and other key milestones they unlock.

 to make the institutional changes that unlock their nation’s future.

 (AZs) are a new type of Special Economic Zone that accelerate technological progress in service of national priorities. Acceleration Zones do this by attracting technologists and developing an institutional structure that guides technological development and the reinvestment of proceeds. The key features of Acceleration Zones are:

Permissionless innovation as an operating principle; new technologies will not be preemptively regulated.

Specific regulatory changes and incentives tailored to attract companies in regulated industries, and guide technological progress.

: AZB is authorized to make regulatory changes on an ongoing basis to meet the changing needs of companies and upon identifying new opportunities for the nation. The board sets measurable, quantifiable goals.

: a company or foundation dedicated to the aggregation of residential and commercial demand, and the ongoing development and operation of the AZ. This is supplementary 

Optional: Acceleration Zone Fund, to invest in businesses that establish operations within the Zone, with strategic local, corporate, and bilateral LPs.

Acceleration Zones are designed to be attractive to Government, Companies, Capital, and Residents.

 (especially elected officials): AZs are simple to implement (generally passing one law is sufficient), and offer an immediate winning popular narrative:

$10-100B Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) package from the companies that set up operations.

Concrete solutions to pressing issues in the country (e.g. public transportation, energy, unemployment), direct or indirect.

Direct: Create jobs, reverse brain drain.

Indirect: Proceeds invested in infrastructure and social goods.

Big name companies, founders, and cultural figures moving elicits a sense of national pride.

Visually attractive: Successful AZs will become beautiful, green, culturally dynamic cities, monuments to their nation’s culture and future.

Competitive strategic positioning, e.g. internal production of energy, semiconductors, etc.

: AZs unlock technological progress and economic opportunity via regulatory change, economic incentives, and new infrastructure. Further, successful AZs will have top talent and offer Silicon Valley business norms in new markets.

: AZs will make money on golden visas for residents, land value appreciation / monetization (the companies are clustered on a single site), and corporate and income tax revenue. Investors will include the governments, corporate strategics, bilateral strategics, partner developers, and residents.

 will move to Acceleration Zones because they offer an opportunity to build the future. Some residents will be returning to their homeland with a feeling of patriotic duty; others exploring a new frontier. AZs are an opportunity to found a new company, found a new culture, and found a new city with the most talented, ambitious, optimistic people in the world.

Opportunities unlocked by Acceleration Zones generally take the shape of new technologies with significant regulatory burden. Examples include:

; blockers AZs can remove include land acquisition, zoning, energy cost, lower cost of capital from local and bi-lateral strategic investment, and economic incentives.

: blockers AZs can remove include land acquisition, zoning, energy cost, talent, lower cost of capital from local and bi-lateral strategic investment, and economic incentives.

10x’ing energy production with nuclear:

 blockers AZs can remove include regulation, accelerated licensing, land acquisition, zoning, energy cost, capital cost, and revenue risk.

 blockers AZs can remove include regulation (Right-to-Try laws), revenue risk (regional licenses), capital cost, and talent.

There are a ton of companies that could help build AZs, and benefit from them. They include:

 can develop therapies that will extend our lives

 can accelerate human studies and trials timelines

 can operate cars autonomously in engineered environments

 will take off in the past and land in an AZ: the future

These companies are building the future in a diffuse sense; people should be able to visit the future. Acceleration Zones unlock that possibility.

How to Implement a Program of Techno-Optimism Now

National Accelerationism

Crypto is threatened by decentralization. Decentralization is the transfer of power from Direct Leaders to Opinion Leaders; Opinion Leaders inform the voting preferences of Token Holders. There are fewer Opinion Leaders than Direct Leaders, as Opinion Leaders have cross-project influence. As such, when projects decentralize governance, they centralize power across the industry. This makes crypto more vulnerable to capture and attack, because a smaller number of people need to be captured, and their distribution can be boosted or constrained by the owners of the social platforms they use. We can mitigate the risks of decentralization if we understand them. Finally, we should develop a regulatory environment that promotes the longevity and growth of the industry.

Crypto projects always start with centralized governance. Projects begin with a vision and an attempt at realizing this vision, carried out by an individual or team led by a Direct Leader. The Direct Leader makes decisions about strategy and resource allocation.

Often an element of the strategy or product design involves issuing a token. A token is usually a liquid, tradable claim on a share of the value created by a project. Decentralization is the process by which the Direct Leader transfers the right to make decisions (power) from themselves to the holders of their token. Token Holders vote on what the project should do: strategy and resource allocation.

Why do Direct Leaders decentralize when they issue a token? Decentralization imposes costs on an organization — decisions are made more slowly by lower context people who are not held accountable for bad decisions — this is why companies don’t operate this way. These costs are being felt across the industry. Kevin Owocki, who left as Direct Leader of Gitcoin to later return, 

 a broader trend of “founders boomeranging” back into leadership to solve the organizational dysfunction caused by decentralization. As the impetus for governance changes, 

 of MakerDAO in 2022, “The governance processes and political dynamics… fundamentally aren’t compatible with the reality of effectively processing complicated real-world financial deals.”

Projects decentralize because this is usually a regulatory requirement to issue tokens, implicitly mandated by the Howey Test. Howey deems (most) tokens that claim value from a project led by a “common enterprise” (Direct Leader and team) securities. If a token is judged a security, it imposes a massive regulatory headache and expense on the Direct Leader and team. Beyond the functional product possibilities unlocked by tokens, the following benefits inform the calculus around decentralization:

; less market and regulatory scrutiny than equities markets; cheaper than IPOing

Increased financing availability and project value

 by unlocking new demand for ownership via liquid capital markets; less market and regulatory scrutiny than tradfi equities markets; cheaper than IPOing

 — give tokens to customers, vendors, etc.; tokens as a CAC/retention lever for users and teams building on top of the protocol; cheaper than IPOing; fewer restrictions

These benefits are material. The industry is not totally cynical about this, because a final rationale for decentralization blinds them: Cargo culting Bitcoin leads to brand value accrual that cashes out in 

. Ceding power is perceived as noble; actually, it is often a pretense for an economically-motivated abdication of responsibility. Leadership is noble.

Projects decentralize because there is a powerful economic incentive to do so in light of US regulations, and because it conveys upon them legitimacy; but they do so at the project-level cost of decreased organizational effectiveness, and at the industry-level cost of the centralization of power.

When projects decentralize, Direct Leaders are nominally ceding power to the Token Holders — but is this actually the case? No – decentralization is the transfer of power from Direct Leaders to Opinion Leaders.

Voting fails to express the preferences of the voters because in democratic systems, voters prefer to delegate power to Opinion Leaders. Opinion Leaders are people who inform voters’ views on a project, because they are perceived as being higher context than them, perhaps wiser, and certainly more legitimate. Opinion Leaders are often a former Direct Leader, but sometimes they are the former or current Direct Leader of another project. Using the power bestowed upon them as a function of Token Holders’ trust, Opinion Leaders come to control the information flows that inform the preferences of voters. By controlling information, Opinion Leaders dictate voting outcomes; sometimes Opinion Leaders have explicit power via a formal delegate system. Often L1s like Ethereum have robust off-chain governance systems (e.g. EIP) that precede votes, but votes formally decide the fate of a proposed change.

This dynamic was most famously described in Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent. They argue that mass media is the propaganda arm of the US government – mass media controls the flow of information, so it dictates voting outcomes. Today, there is a broader network of independent Opinion Leaders who come to prominence on social media, but still they feel the weight of the power of politics. Further, independent Opinion Leaders are subject to the whims of the Direct Leaders who control the social media platforms they use to disseminate their ideas. If social media platforms were to decentralize, this problem would be compounded further. Elon demonstrates the potential of Direct Leadership, as someone capable of breaking with Opinion Leader influence.

Adversarial actors seeking to harm a project or the industry will be operating outside the bounds of the internal logic of a project (

) – they won’t be attempting to steal money, or tokens, but rather to sow discord to create a meta-problem: industry dysfunction and potentially collapse. If crypto is taking zero-sum political power from an actor, this response is rational.

The lesson is: if an adversarial actor (perhaps a hostile government, or other misaligned interest groups) wanted to control crypto, they would:

Incentivize project decentralization (with financial or social capital)

Encourage Opinion Leadership centralization (potentially using social platforms as a lever)

Co-opt Opinion Leaders with the reach to influence the important projects

This would be much easier than co-opting the teams of those projects, because Opinion Leaders have cross-project influence. The result of decentralization is a more fragile industry, with a clear Achilles’ heel.

Ethereum is formally decentralized, but its a 

 project: it is actively led by a group of high-legitimacy Opinion Leaders including its founder, Vitalik. There is little-to-no cross project influence present, because there is no power vacuum left by a checked-out core developer team. It’s hard to find a single non-Ethereum Opinion Leader that Ethereum people seriously listen to. Within the broader Ethereum ecosystem, L2s are deeply influenced by core Ethereum devs; given that their decentralization largely comes from a tight coupling to the underlying L1, this seems necessary – which highlights a vector of attack for L2s – a Dead Player L1. 

Dead Player projects are projects that have decentralized, and instead of graduating from Direct Leader to Opinion Leader, the founder has meaningfully retired – leaving a power vacuum, opening the project up to external influence.

Dead Player projects are hard to resuscitate, and Opinion Leader led projects are hard to pivot. There’s little incentive to execute on the pivots required to have a major second or third act, because as a new would-be Live Player leader, it’s an uphill battle for social capital within the project, and there is no clear mechanism for attaining an economic incentive i.e. tokens commensurate with CEO-level work. It’s much easier to simply start a new project.

Many projects have a vision for an end state like Bitcoin’s: an autonomous, immutable system running itself on the internet forever. It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the cyberpunk elegance and historical achievement of such systems. But, it takes leadership to steward a project to a lofty perch – if the history of technology has taught us anything, it is that new projects using new technologies will displace older ones, particularly if there is not a high-legitimacy Direct Leader in place to navigate through Christensensian disruption. Premature decentralization is not the path to immortality – it’s the path to a quicker death.

Opinion Leader-led projects have a limited ability to have strong second or third acts, creating a greater opportunity for new entrants. Imagine if Facebook had decentralized to Facebook Protocol upon achieving PMF (or hitting 1B DAUs): META wouldn’t be a $800B company because Opinion Leaders would not have guided Token Holders to vote for the “overpriced” Instagram acquisition, and certainly not the investment in metaverse technology. Only a Direct Leader with Mark Zuckerberg’s legitimacy can make contrarian calls. In Facebook Protocol world, Instagram would’ve taken eyeballs from the Facebook core product, and Oculus might be doing significant R&D on metaverse tech – building their own empires. And Facebook Protocol would be dying. This is not bad in its own right, but it does suggest that premature decentralization stunts projects’ growth. An unfufilled destiny is a sad sight to behold, but more practically, smaller outcomes means a higher cost of capital for the industry. VCs are willing to underwrite “expensive” deals in spaces with megaoutcomes.

Recruiting is harder for decentralized projects. With less confidence that they can make bold strategic decisions, would-be recruits become founders. Rare are projects with such insane legitimacy that the social capital they convey outweighs the obvious economic incentive to build a new project using new technology. The Ethereum Foundation recruits extremely well – their researchers could make more money launching new L1s a la Avalanche or Solana – but the EF is an exception.

Premature decentralization leads to more projects (which is good), but smaller outcomes and a higher cost of capital for the industry (which is bad).

Contemplate the costs the decentralization imposes both on your project and to the industry. 

, “small things being centralized is great, extremely large things being centralized is terrifying.” The biggest thing in crypto is the entire industry. We should not shepard crypto to a place where power could potentially be centralized and controlled by adversarial Opinion Leaders, under the pretense of the noble ideals on which the industry was founded.

We need to be able to create tokens without removing Direct Leaders. Great things get built over long periods of time by great leaders with the legitimacy to take bold action. To realize the benefits of tokenization without misguided decentralization, we need to create a regulatory environment that enables this. In doing so, we will enable bigger outcomes, which lowers the cost of capital for crypto, enabling further growth. But more importantly, we will reduce the fragility of the industry, closing off an avenue of attack that we are largely blind to – the potential for malicious actors to leverage decentralization against crypto.

I will explore a new regulatory model for crypto and a token-based implementation approach in a follow-up essay.

The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy

Rationality is Self-Defeating in Permissionless Systems

Thanks to Vitalik Buterin, Tarun Chitra, Sreeram Kannan, Arthaud Mesnard, Maxwell Tabarrok, and Robert Drost for feedback

Manufacturing Consensus

At the opening of the twentieth century, sponge divers plunged into the crystalline water off the coast of Greece. They brought up with them a strange object: a box that housed a sophisticated system of gears. This device, known as the Antikythera mechanism, would baffle scholars for decades. An astronomical tool, the mechanism is the first known machine that automated scientific predictions. A recent 

 suggests, “it could have automated many of the calculations needed for its own design—the first steps to the mechanization of mathematics and science.”

The complexity of its gears bespeaks an engineering prowess, specialized knowledge, and divisions of labor we prescribe not to the ancient, but to ourselves. “It challenges all our preconceptions about the technological capabilities of the ancient Greeks,” continues the 

 paper. Indeed, the Antikythera mechanism makes us rethink the uniqueness of modernity, history, and our own relationship with the past.


Who can define modernity? Whigs say it means the asymptotic alleviation of suffering closely coupled to the expansion of rights and trade; reactionaries describe it as the erosion of all tradition, the purgation of deep ties, and the hyper-rationalization of all human relations. What they share is the assumption that modernity breaks with what came before it, and revised core assumptions about human life. More specifically, it permanently altered our ability to inherit what were foundational convictions about the nature of human history. When did this break with the past take place?

In 1528, Duke William IV of Bavaria commissioned a series of historical paintings. Albrecht Altdorfer’s 

 stands as the most famous. Consider its grandeur, its accuracy.

The battle, which took place in 333 BC, inaugurated the Hellenistic era. Altdorfer’s painting captures the chaos and intimacy of the conflict between the Greeks, the Macedonians, and the Persians—a web of men on foot and horseback knitted together by the blades of their swords and the tips of their spears.

Altdorfer went so far as to enumerate the number of combatants, the dead, the injured, and listed them on the battle standards of their armies. Yet as specific and historical as this painting is, it was also meant to convey something about the era in which he painted it. In 1529, Maximilian’s serf-army met the Turks on the field of battle, a doomed siege of Vienna. In Altdorfer’s painting, the Persians wear turbans, mirroring Maximilian’s foes. Implicitly, the painting assumes a unity between past and present.

“The event that Altdorfer captured was for him at once historical and contemporary,” writes philosopher Reinhart Kosselleck. “Alexander and Maximilian, for whom Altdorfer had prepared the drawings, merge in an exemplary manner; the space of historical experience enjoys the profundity of generational unity.” No doubt, Koselleck mentions, the absence of gunpowder and rifles makes the assumption of this unity easier. Though Altdorfer painted this epic with an ancient assumption about the nature of history, he did so at the beginning of modernity right when those ancient assumptions about history were about to change.

The ancients had every reason to believe in the unity of history. For millennia, human life was constrained by limited access to productive energy. Respect for natural limits and the search for the natural standards that course through the political philosophical work of the Ancients can be read as a response to the very real concern of resource scarcity—what could be more injurious for a regime than the depletion of its stores?

The urban polities that produced the intellectuals who struggled to puzzle out these problems had the most to worry about when it came to sustaining their energy supply. The size of traditional cities depended on two things: fuel wood and charcoal, each source constrained by low power density of phytomass production. Classical “cities had to draw on nearby areas at least 30 times their size for fuel supply,” writes energy expert Vaclav Smil. “This reality restricted their growth even where other resources, such as food and water, were adequate.”

Such constraints are the story of most of human history. As the British agriculturalist Arthur Standish put it in 1611: “And so may it be conceived, no wood, no kingdom.” And yet ten years after Standish wrote these words, the early coal economy would begin to outpace the ancient reliance on wood.

In this light, we can approach the “natural standard” that so occupied the ancient philosophers as an attempt to harmonize political life with the slim margins of energy that bound their world. And we can see their assumption of the continuity between past and present as a justified understanding of the similarity of energy-sourcing technologies. Perhaps this is one reason why the essential virtue of the ancients was moderation. Once we began to exit the traditional ancient energy economy, the entire philosophical edifice of our ancient forebears appeared up for debate. The exit from ancient commitments accelerated as the coal economy deepened. Intellectual, social, and economic developments co-emerged with our thermodynamic refinements. Energy was not the only prime mover, but it was one of the most potent, insofar as every domain of human life demands its use.

But this origin story is not the usual account. The most popular account of modernity in the public consciousness belongs to the nineteenth century and flies under the banner of the Industrial Revolution. The nature of this so-called revolution has been greatly distorted by received accounts that post-date its arrival. From the propaganda of the Industrial Revolution come our most durable myths about modernity.

II. The Propaganda of the Industrial Revolution

The story of the Industrial Revolution goes like this: from around 1750 onwards, a steady increase in income began. And after 1900, the increase accelerated rapidly. The period between the early and late nineteenth century, the story goes, proved critical. As Angus Maddison has pointed out in a study of global GDP between 1AD and 2003, "Since 1820 the total product of the countries considered has increased seventy-fold, population nearly five-fold, per capita product fourteen-fold and real per capita consumption by almost tenfold. Annual working hours are down by half and life expectancy has doubled." None of this wealth could have been possible without a radical expansion of human facility with harnessing and exploiting greater and greater amounts of energy.

The term for this apparent discontinuity in energy abundance is the Industrial Revolution. And while many European economies expanded their industrial capabilities, no place was more pivotal than England, which had been in the process of replacing its wood-based economy with coal thanks to the advent of Devonshire ironmonger Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine in the early 1700s. To put this growth in perspective, by 1820, coal provided the equivalent power as that of a woodland area roughly the size of Britain’s entire surface area. Twenty years later, coal’s energy provision doubled, then doubled again in 1860, only to double once more by 1890.

The diffusion of coal power radically reshaped society. City-size was no longer limited by access to woodfuel and thus urban areas grew denser. Class dynamics shifted as the insurgent bourgeoisie rose to prominence on the back of the new energy-intensive industries. The workforce flocked from farms to cities with grievances, desires, and demands of their own. Coal also brought us the most consequential of modern achievements: electricity. We take electricity for granted now, but when it first arrived people could scarcely believe it was real. A local Indiana newspaper reporting on the first ever arclight demonstration in its townsquare in the late 19th century, writes that the light caused men to fall to their knees in astonishment.

Before electricity, buildings could only stand so high--who wants to walk up all those stairs? Elevators changed that. Children could now study at night, which increased the use of libraries. Cities no longer stank of horse manure and urine; sewage systems removed human contributions to the stench. Women could more safely walk home at night and, confined as they were to the domestic sphere in that era, housework took less of a toll on their bodies—no more scalding their hands on irons hot from the stove.

But there are at least two problems with the typical account of the Industrial Revolution. The first has to do with this so-called rate of energy increase. If we compare world gross domestic product from 1 AD to the beginning of this millennium, we’ll see a hockey stick that begins its curve upward around the early 19th century. Likewise, as scholar John Constable 

, if we graph 5% compound interest on a single US dollar, we see a similar pattern. I’m not arguing that no rate increase of energy occurred, but that, as Constable points out, “there doesn’t have to be a revolution, a major discontinuity at the foot of the curve,” to explain the second graph. If rate increase isn't necessary to account for the ramp up in energy abundance, then perhaps what we call the Industrial Revolution did not span decades, but hundreds of years—small refinements in agriculture, sail, and tools compounding until taking off exponentially. That would hardly qualify as a revolution.

But surely those who lived through the 19th century knew what they were talking about. Especially in England, the Promethean epicenter of the Industrial Revolution. No doubt, late 18th and early 19th century British philosophy, literature, and economics must appear festooned with the phrase. Who could live through a revolution and not know it? But surveying the literature, Constable writes:

"The field of modern economics was founded in the English language by Adam Smith, T. R. Malthus, and David Ricardo during exactly this period, 1750 to 1820. Not one of them uses the term Industrial Revolution or anything like it. Robert Owen, the idealist social thinker and factory owner, wrote extensively about the changes in the manufacturing system but never used the term…[Thomas] Carlyle came close, in Sartor Resartus (1834, but written in 1830/31), when he spoke of steam engines “rapidly enough overturning the whole old system of Society” in favor of “Industrialism,”...Given Carlyle’s knowledge of the French Revolution that is surely significant. John Stuart Mill…did use the term once in his Principles of Political Economy of 1848, but he wasn’t referring to England and he didn’t use capitals. Neither Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), nor Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) use the term…It doesn’t even appear in mid-century standard textbooks like Fawcett’s Manual of Political Economy (1863). Perhaps most striking of all, W. S. Jevons, one of the greatest mid-century economists, wrote an entire book on The Coal Question, published in 1865, arguing vigorously that coal lay at the root of modern British wealth, and used the term “industrial revolution” only once, and though in reference to England it is not capitalized."

If the Brits didn’t recognize what was happening as a revolution, then where did this phrase come from? Constable locates its first usage in France in the late 1820s. Though J.B. Say, Professor of Economics at the College de France, described the effects of cotton spinning in England as economically “revolutionary,” in 1837 his student Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui expressed his surprise that moderate, unrevolutionary Britain was seeing quicksilver economic modernization. Blanqui wrote in his History of the Political Economy of Europe:

"While the French Revolution was making its great social experiments over a volcano, England was beginning hers on the solid ground of the industries. […] The conditions of labor underwent the greatest modification they have experienced since the origin of society. Two machines, henceforth immortal, the steam-engine and the spinning-machine, overturned the old commercial system and gave birth almost simultaneously to material products and social questions unknown to our fathers…However, hardly was the industrial revolution born from the brain of those two men of genius, Watt and Arkwright, when it took possession of England."

Frederich Engels then borrowed the term from Blanqui and his closest friend, Karl Marx, took it from him. Blanqui is French, Marx and Engels German. The phrase wouldn’t appear in English again until the late 1880s when two American translators brought Blanqui’s work to the attention of Arnold Toynbee, a tutor in political economy at Balliol College in Oxford. He died three years later, but soon after that his influential Lectures on the English Industrial Revolution were published. Four years after that, in 1887, the phrase made its first appearance in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

As the diffusion of the meme of the Industrial Revolution deepened, so did our perception of modernity as the great solvent of our forebears’ lifeworld. Rather than radical continuity, a new lexicon of radical departures began to permeate Western thought. The idea of historical progress—in both utopian and pragmatic modes—began to overtake tradition. With the advent of the electrified oil economies came consumer society, which held that the world could be endlessly revised through novel technology and consumer goods. After the so-called Industrial Revolution nothing would or could be the same.

This misperception of the historical timeline has not come without consequences.

I refuse to downplay the benefits of modernity—the general uplift in material quality of life cannot be overstated. Nor is material improvement the only metric of success. But to describe modernity as an unalloyed good is also a mistake.

Progressives like to delude themselves into believing that engineering novelty will arrive like an angel of history, supplying mankind with the necessary technical fixes to all problems. This tendency can cater to a politics of “bare life,” where the point of society is to alleviate suffering through third-party management. It also promotes a pernicious twist of mind that treats the past as little more than the manure of ignorance out of which our newer, truer virtues flower. This devolves into relativism and then to a sticky nihilism that pervades politics and culture. What is our present moment other than another meaningless step towards moral improvements that, in hindsight, will make us look like monsters to any who remember us? And what is our present moment other than the triumph of our current preferences and sentiments over the barbaric mongoloids dragging their knuckles across the pages of our history books? It’s an untenable stance.

The conservative position reduces itself to nostalgia for an Arcadia that never quite existed. Often progressives point this out, failing to understand that the tendency towards nostalgia is a misguided attempt to recover what they condemn: memory, some kind of tie to what has come before that we can receive, maintain, and pass down. Yet the nostalgia deadlock entraps conservatives into a reactive position in which they defend fantasies they mistake for tradition. From this cage they cannot synthesize a way forward informed by those who have come before us.

Regardless, what both camps share is territory: they agree that we live after a radical and sudden break with the past. Whereas progressives cheer the endless revision of life, conservatives lament it. Yet progressives flail in a sense of meaninglessness while conservatives cower in impotence. Perhaps this is why most of civic life in the West is defined by a single word: crisis. How can the current state of affairs continue? Surely, collapse must come, whether from eco-pocalypse or decadence. There persists a secret hope that the ending will settle the score. What appears as a durable state of panic about various catastrophes discloses the secret fear held left and right: they can scarcely imagine a future at all. The real crisis of modernity is not crisis itself, but the fear of ongoingness.

But as the Antikythera mechanism suggests, modernity was neither sudden and thus not as radical as we are often led to believe. Our received wisdom about modernity blocks us from asking a vital question that helps resolve the tensions held by the left and the right, evidenced everywhere in the magisterial relics of the ancient world: what can we build today that will redound for generations, for millennia?


Several years ago, when Notre Dame caught fire, I wondered if we still had the ability to build something so durable. Could grandparents pass professions onto the children and then grandchildren and so on to create common goods so fantastic in this day and age? To begin to answer, I had to start with what we had already built. A surprising answer arrived: nuclear power plants.

Unlike other power plants, nuclear can be refurbished. Reactors can last, at this point, 80 years, though that is nowhere near a hard expiration date. It is possible to simply keep reworking and repairing them, like so many ships of Theseus, for as long as our progeny desires safe, clean, affordable energy. And it is likely that they will. In fact, they will likely need more of it. They may even outlast our current political regimes, our current paradigms. Fission produces so much energy with so little fuel, we cannot even say the atomic age has really begun. Rather, we’re in the first rustlings of what would be a world that onboards uranium the way mankind did coal.

No doubt, building more nuclear reactors does not solve our various predicaments. There is no “one weird trick.” But it does provide us with a practical societal project that gives us the chance to fundamentally reframe how we approach the modern experience. We could be laying the groundwork for what will become Ancient Earth Nuclear—industrial cathedrals that outlive all of our aspirations save that we have bequeathed the coming generations with the equipment they need to take up the task of living in much the same way that we have. Could there be a more ancient, a more human impulse than that?

What can we build today that will redound for generations, for millennia?

The Industrial Revolution Never Happened

“Digital man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” So we have been told by a wide array of Jeremiahs as Web 2.0’s manifold discontents have become impossible to ignore. Accounts of the exact nature and cause of this fall from grace vary, but they share a grounding assumption that the assemblage of technologies known as “the internet” once embodied (or at least had the potential to) certain fundamental political values—free expression, privacy, individuality—and at some point ceased to do so.

This prelapsarian vision was influentially inscribed in a founding text of the tech canon, composed in 1996: John Perry Barlow’s cyber-libertarian “

Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

.” Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist exemplary of the ideological migration historian Fred Turner has 

 “from counterculture to cyberculture,” declared to the world’s governments that “the global social space we are building [is] naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” As recently as ten years ago, when the success of a number of insurrections against tyrannical governments were being credited to Facebook and Twitter, this proclamation still resonated. Now, its optimism is barely recognizable.

It turned out, of course, that Barlow and like-minded cyber-utopians had a great deal to fear, and tech observers of all stripes have found cause for disillusionment over the past half-decade and some. It is hard to listen to the political right for long these days without hearing denunciations of Democratic-aligned Silicon Valley oligarchs and their employees, and the censorship to which they have subjected their political enemies. For its part, the liberal establishment, which during Barack Obama’s presidency had eagerly promoted the internet as a tool of global democratization, abandoned this view after Donald Trump’s victory and the rise of an international right-populist insurgency, and concluded instead that digital technology was a vehicle for dangerous authoritarianism.

In the end, the mainstream liberal narrative of digitally facilitated authoritarianism became self-fulfilling, but in reverse: the fear of fascist takeover legitimated the escalation of online censorship as well as the extensive clandestine collusion between state and corporate actors, as recently revealed in the Twitter files. The result has been the escalation of the right’s rhetorical backlash against digital liberal tyranny. From either side, the internet no longer looks like a space of freedom and democracy, but of oppression and persecution—whether by fascist troll armies or blue-haired moderators.

These strains of dystopianism tend to fall back to the terrors of the twentieth century, with MAGA digital fascism and woke digital communism figuring as twin menaces. Another strand of analysis reaches farther into the past to make sense of our tech impasses—surprisingly enough, back to the European Middle Ages, that era of relative technological stasis. I refer to the “technofeudalism thesis,” which as Malcolm Harris 

, “holds that 21st-century capitalism has been superseded by a new economic system overseen by Big Tech.” This new order is “feudal,” according to this view, because it elevates a handful of grandees (Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al) to ownership status while consigning the rest of us to digital serfdom. Like peasants who toiled on the land only to be forced to contribute much of the harvest to the great lords to whom it belonged, we reap only intangible rewards from the digital platforms on which we spend so much of our lives, while actual wealth accrues only to the platform’s owners.

The technofeudalism thesis has adherents across the political spectrum, as Evgeny Morozov notes in his 

 of the relevant literature. The basic question at stake in debates around technofeudalism, per Morozov, is: “Are Google and Amazon capitalists? [Or] are they rentiers?” In other words, does Big Tech’s burgeoning wealth come from continuously expanding production to generate value, or does it come from monopolizing certain assets and thereby deriving passive income streams? To put it another way, is the position of a tech oligarch more analogous to that of a factory owner who must constantly reinvest profits to remain competitive, or a large landowner, who by virtue of his position can simply wait around for a new round of checks to arrive?

Subscribers to the techofeudalism thesis hold that the latter is a more illuminating analogy, even if they concede it doesn’t capture all the complexities of the digital business model. As Morozov observes, one can even find support for this view in the statements of some of the tech oligarchs themselves: Peter Thiel infamously argues on behalf of anti-competitive monopolies; moreover, Thiel’s associates include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who openly advocates for a variety of hi-tech feudalism.

But this new aristocracy is not the only crucial element in the technofeudalist class configuration. The geographer Joel Kotkin has argued that alongside the increasing monopolization of assets and income streams by a new aristocracy, there has also emerged what he calls a new “clerisy”: his term for the “journalists, entertainers, credentialed professionals, and teachers [who] provide the images, narratives, arguments, and artworks that reinforce the binding outlook, and they police dissenters as vigilantly as did the Inquisitors of old (though fortunately, so far, less ­lethally).” The recent rigidification of ideological orthodoxy, policing of dissent, and escalation of censorship, in Kotkin’s account, all function as an ideological legitimation layer for the monopolization of assets by the few. In this sense, he attempts to show, it is technofeudal material conditions that have given rise to a new digital authoritarianism.

Was all of this inevitable? Or could some halcyon era of the freewheeling internet have been preserved were it not subverted by a combination of state and corporate interference? Barlow has plenty of intellectual heirs today who share his premises when it comes to the original internet, but these suffer from factual and categorical errors.

One of these is a failure to recognize the role of the American state in building the infrastructural foundations of the internet. Speaking from “cyberspace,” presented as a “home of Mind,” Barlow told governments: “Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.” This is a remarkable claim. After all, ARPANET—without which the internet could not have come to exist in its current form —was, in effect, a “public construction project.” The implications of this fact deal a further blow to narratives of a fall from grace. As Yasha Levine argues in 

, state surveillance was not an imposition on the internet from the outside: it was central to the military intelligence aims that informed the original development of ARPANET. The internet is a panopticon today at least in part because it was designed to be one.

Another error common to Barlow and his intellectual successors is perhaps more fatal. This is the mind-matter dichotomy implicit in assertions such as: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” This view takes the historical denial of cyberspace’s origins in a “public construction project” and expands it into a philosophical credo in which the internet is seen to exist outside of all economic and political reality—a framework dubbed “digital dualism” by sociologist Nathan Jurgenson, which inflects common usage in such idioms as “IRL” and “meatspace.” No less than the transportation and communications networks that preceded it and to which it is often analogized, the cluster of technologies that generate cyberspace were and are, at bottom, a material infrastructure. This infrastructure is inescapably caught up in the broader political economy that has given rise to it, and which it increasingly shapes.

Barlow’s exclusion of the question of property from cyberspace turned out to be particularly fateful: it legitimated the emergence of a digital landscape in which users have no ownership stake in the technologies they use. Barlow’s countercultural formation no doubt informed his guiding assumption that, in John Lennon’s terms, to “imagine no possessions” was the aspiration of all utopians. Looking back from an era in which assets continue to be concentrated in the hands of the few, and the World Economic Forum, a clearinghouse for the schemes of oligarchic monopolists, cheerily assures us we will “own nothing, and be happy,” Lennon’s injunction is easier to obey—and the result seems patently dystopian to most of us.

Digital communism now looks like an ideological smokescreen for digital serfdom. One of the first observers to recognize this was the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who in 

 (2014) argued that the “free” availability of the services of monopoly platforms was a disempowering illusion for the average user. By offering “free” access, these “siren servers” induce us to surrender our data to them, and thereby derive profits. As an alternative, Lanier proposes a conceptually provocative if impractical-seeing system in which we receive “micropayments” for contributions that contribute to the profitability of digital enterprises. In the end, this amounts not to a radical overthrow of the current system but a trickle-down-style reform of it.

Barlow’s Jeffersonian framing of cyberspace independence, evident in his title and certain passages of his manifesto, hints unintentionally at a more radical alternative. Thomas Jefferson’s influential vision of American democracy was not at all one where citizens were to be liberated from the “legal concepts” Barlow dismisses as obsolete and oppressive. On the contrary, Jefferson’s idealized political subject was the “yeoman”—the smallholding farmer whose liberty and autonomy was made possible by his ownership of a parcel of land. Although the yeoman is often associated with an ethos of rugged individualism and hostility to government, the US government played an interventionist role in making yeoman status possible, from Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase to the Homestead Act, which opened up vast new territories to smallholders.

The American state’s role in the development of the internet has more closely resembled its earlier role in the development of the railroads. Having made a massive public investment in the development of the railroad network in the form of land grants, it enabled the emergence of powerful monopolies that, in turn, were able to use their concentrated wealth and power to influence politics. Something analogous occurred when a communications network constructed by the state was turned over to private entities that quickly gained monopoly positions and became some of the most politically influential entities in the nation—as well as willing partners to state surveillance. Obscuring the question of property by presenting the new digital realm as a space of “mind” where immaterial rewards accrued was a useful smokescreen for this process.

On this basis, Morozov’s skepticism toward the technofeudalism thesis seems warranted, even if its descriptions of the present political order as a reversion to medieval hierarchies are appealing. “Capitalism,” Morozov writes, “is moving in the same direction it always has been, leveraging whatever resources it can mobilize—the cheaper, the better.” This was true of the monopoly system that, in the era of the railroads, forged the Gilded Age in the late 19th century, and it is true today.

Part of what ultimately curtailed the power of the Gilded Age oligarchy was the emergence of popular mass movements that challenged monopoly power. The rise of the labor movement was one well-known instance, but the more relevant precedent today is agrarian populism, which was essentially an alliance of the Jeffersonian yeomanry against large corporate interests. Contrary to the Jeffersonian vision of smallholding, however, a vast number were sharecroppers or tenant farmers who owned little and were massively indebted to landowners and merchants. The parallels with the present are not exact, but they may have more relevance than the feudal era for making sense of the class configuration of hi-tech monopoly capitalism. For Joel Kotkin, it is precisely the “yeomen”—small property-holders—who have faced declining prospects and rising debt in the dispensation he calls technofeudalist.

Others have made related arguments. In his recent book 

, the sociologist Dan Evans argues that the crucial class formation for understanding the present is not a so-called digital serf or peasant class or a “precariat,” but what Marx called the petty bourgeoisie. This intermediary class, contrary to Marx’s prediction that its members would ultimately end up proletarianized wage laborers, has continued to grow over the past century and a half. Digital technologies have accelerated that process. For instance, the gig economy has converted various subsets of what once was or might have been wage labor into new forms of “self-employment.”

The rideshare driver, in theory, is a small proprietor, but not unlike the 19th-century tenant farmer, he may in fact own very little given his dependence on and indebtedness to far more powerful entities. One response to this situation has been to demand gig economy workers’ recategorization as wage laborers rather than independent contractors, which might in turn enable them to organize unions. Another agenda, more difficult to formulate, might seek to make the aspirations to small proprietorship of those who toil in the gig economy real rather than illusory. This is the type of project that the American state has, at certain points in its history, and however imperfectly, taken on.

There have been hints of the emergence of a class-conscious digital petty bourgeoisie. Whatever the disappointments of the blockchain, the appeal of crypto to those disillusioned with the legacy banking system is clearly linked to the promise of a new tech landscape in which asset ownership is more widely distributed. A project like Urbit articulates a similar aspiration, as I have argued 

. We might even view the GameStop phenomenon as a glimpse of digital yeomanry’s inchoate class-consciousness. But history suggest that mere “exit” from existing systems and institutions, as many in the spheres just alluded to tend to advocate for, is not enough: the channeling of these discontents into an effective political project also requires a political “voice” that may demand state intervention on behalf of the neo-yeomanry.

If the last few years have made anything clear, it is that the formal rights we took for granted amount to little if not grounded in ownership—a point the Jeffersonians of old insisted on. Anytime tech platforms censor, de-platform, and banish users, we are reminded that the First Amendment is of little help: the corporate owners of the enclosed town squares of our age, have every right to dispose of our property as they wish, and all we have are the Terms of Service we didn’t read when we signed up. Now, the same censorious regime of state and corporate power is threatening access to our other assets on similar grounds, as the 

 born free, and the technologies we now depend on will continue to make us less so, if not challenged. Perhaps we are finally waking up to that fact.

Digital man was not born free, and the technologies we now depend on will continue to make us less so, if not challenged.

The Digital Yeoman's Plight

The physical layout of the environment in which someone is raised impacts their cognitive abilities as an adult. 

 based on video game data from 397,162 people across 38 countries found that “people who grew up outside cities are better at navigation.” More specifically, “growing up in cities with low Street Network Entropy (e.g. Chicago) led to better results at video game levels with a regular layout, while growing up outside cities or in cities with higher Street Network Entropy (e.g. Prague) led to better results at more entropic video game levels.”

In plain English: if you grow up in a grid-like environment, you will be worse at navigating less grid-like environments.

Association between Environment and Video Game (Sea Hero Quest) Wayfinding Performance stratified by age, gender, and education. The SHQ Wayfinding Performance is computed from the trajectory length and has been averaged within 5-years windows.

Two examples of cities with low (Chicago) and high (Prague) SNE. Right: Distribution of the street bearings across 36 bins of 10 degrees.

This finding is perhaps not wholly surprising, and at first blush might not seem all that significant. The vast majority of us hardly ever need to truly wayfind IRL anymore. Technology has made our navigational skills all but obsolete. So what does it matter whether certain environments are better or worse at preserving them?

It matters a great deal. To understand why, we will first need to take a little detour.

, complexity scientist David Krakauer makes a distinction between complementary cognitive artifacts—technologies that make us more intelligent after using them—and competitive cognitive artifacts (if you can’t guess what these do then maybe you’ve been using them too much). The canonical example of a competitive artifact is a calculator: repeated usage leaves you worse at mental arithmetic than you were before. Contrast this with an abacus, which can have quite the opposite effect: expert users can eventually develop such a high-fidelity model in their mind that they no longer even need to use the physical abacus, and are able to maintain their enhanced arithmetic skills without it.

Typus arithmeticae tratta da Margarita Philosophica (1503)

The brain is a complex system, full of interconnected representational systems. This is why an abacus doesn't just help you with math—it helps you with everything. Dr. Krakuer explains, "[the mind] doesn’t have a firewall around it such that the abacus’ functional advantages are confined to arithmetic…it actually has really interesting indirect effects on linguistic competence and geometric reasoning.” Positive global effects, that reach beyond the intended use, are a characteristic of all complementary cognitive artifacts.

 cognitive artifacts are also not limited to one domain or skill. Dr. Krakauer goes on to discuss how replacing primitive wayfinding technologies like maps, astrolabes, and sextants with automated wayfinding technologies has had exactly this effect:

“Your familiarity with mapmaking and topographical, topological, and geometric reasoning is generally valuable in your life, not just in navigating across the city. So taking away a map doesn’t just make you worse at getting from one door to another, it makes you worse in many ways… A good example of this, which both Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright depended upon, was wooden cubes. Early in their youth, they both became very enamored of these cubes and would construct worlds out of cubes, like Minecraft. And both of them claimed—Frank Lloyd Wright in the case of architecture, and Einstein in the case of the geometry of the universe—that the intuitions they built up playing with these cubes were instrumental in their later lives. I would claim the same is true for maps. If you know how to navigate through a true space, like a Euclidean space or a curved space on the surface of the earth, that allows you to think about different kinds of spaces, relationship spaces, idea spaces. The notion of a path from one idea to another, as a metaphor, actually has an immediate and natural implementation in terms of a path in real space.”

That our cognition (reasoning, memory, creativity, etc.) is akin to a kind of mental navigation is betrayed by our 

: “a field of knowledge,” a subject that is “unexplored,” “a train of thought,” “a trip down memory lane,” “jogging your memory,” “a flight of fancy.”

This is also why the ancient memory enhancement technique, the 

—also known as the memory palace technique—is still used by memory champions today. According to The Art of Memory, “The method of Loci involves memorizing information by placing a mnemonic image for each item to be remembered at a point along an imaginary journey. The information can then be recalled in a specific order by mentally walking the same route through the imaginary journey and converting the mnemonic images back into the facts that they represent.” The connection between

, is also of note here—it is as if movement through the physical landscape primes one for greater ease of movement in the more abstract landscapes of ideas (see the wider literature on

“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete — for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

We also use spatial metaphors to talk about the socio-economic landscape, or life itself: “life’s journey,” “broadening your horizons,” “finding myself” or “soul-searching,” “career paths,” “walks of life,” and so on. This makes sense when we consider our deep evolutionary history: many of the most important things we had to know for survival were spatial in nature—the wildebeest migrate through this valley, we can gather berries in this patch of forest, someone was killed by a saber tooth tiger over there, etc. We sometimes even conceptualize knowledge with an arboreal metaphor (“branches of knowledge”)—a vestige, perhaps, of our ancestral tree-dwelling lifestyle.

Our lack of wayfinding ability is present also in our physical, cultural, and metaphysical landscape, which has also become regular and grid-like. The consequence, which I believe we are now witnessing, is a lack of resilience and resourcefulness, an unwillingness to “blaze trails”, an inability to produce “path-breaking” innovations, and numerous other deficiencies which are leaving us altogether worse off than we were when the world was a little more chaotic and idiosyncratic. The social and intellectual “technologies” (e.g. the educational system, norms around child-rearing) that we’ve put in place have increasingly become competitive cognitive artifacts rather than cooperative.

The excessive “gridification” of the world can be seen most clearly in the physical domain. For a variety of reasons (economic, environmental, changing aesthetic preferences), newer cities tend to have simpler layouts.

Two of the oldest American cities in the figure, Boston and Charlotte, are the most irregular. Source for both figures: 

The same is true of architecture. More ornate and culturally distinct forms have been replaced the world over by drab monoliths. The result is an oppressive standardization and homogenization, a loss of the quirks and eccentricities that give places their unique character.

Essays

National Accelerationism

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