We live in a centralizing society. Our words, actions, wealth, and thoughts are organized by power. It’s time to understand how we can govern it. PALLADIUM 05: Centralizing Society is out now. Subscribe today to receive your copy of the new print edition.

We find ourselves in a centralizing society that we can only imagine as a dystopia. With newfound material and logistical power, we can’t even remember what it was all for. Our ideologies have become reactive in response. Each new agenda begins with the promise of breaking this trend: the Internet, the market, charter cities, or revolutionary reform.

One by one, they all get folded back into the pull of centralization. This contradiction between centralizing reality and decentralizing ideology demands fresh examination. How can we make the centralizing society a force for humanity and civilization?

PALLADIUM 05 is the latest edition of our quarterly print magazine, rendered with beautiful custom art on the finest materials. It assembles an anthology of our key observations on the Centralizing Society and the challenges to governing it. PALLADIUM 05 is available now and arriving on the doorsteps of members around the world.

Our print editions are luxurious icons optimized for focused thought on the most important and overlooked topics in future governance. Display it on your coffee table or your bookshelf. This is an item for your long-term collection.

We offer PALLADIUM 05 exclusively for our members; it is not for sale and never will be. Become a member now to receive PALLADIUM 05 and support our work.

*All members also receive benefits of lower tiers. New subscribers will receive upcoming quarterly print editions. PALLADIUM 05: Centralizing Society ships until June 21st, 2022. Our print publication is a quarterly newsletter that informs members about our public interest research, reporting, and analysis.

Featuring

The Centralized Internet Is Inevitable by Samo Burja. Digital centralization is increasing, and social media networks are now engaging in direct censorship. This is not a violation of the internet’s original spirit, but a necessary feature of its logic.

The Second Death of Jiao Yulu by Dylan Levi King. The party cadre Jiao Yulu embodied a Chinese political culture with room for experiments and risk-taking. Xi’s turn to digital technocracy may threaten its survival.

How Capitalist Giants Use Socialist Cybernetic Planning by Nicolas Villarreal. Socialist Chile’s Project Cybersyn prefigured the cybernetic economic planning now used by capitalist giants like Amazon and Walmart. But the future of cybernetic planning can either empower workers or enslave them.

Why Charter Cities Won’t Lead to Decentralized Government by Ash Milton. Advocates of decentralized government view charter cities as a way to route around slow, legacy governments, and usher in political and market liberalism. Reality tells a different story.

De Gaulle’s State of Tomorrow by Mathis Bitton. In postwar France, Charles de Gaulle unified executive power with a technocratic state and a national story. His model still endures around the world.

The Myth of Panic by Tanner Greer. The threat of mass panic lurks behind our mechanisms of political control. What if we were allowed to fear?

America’s New Post-Literate Epistemology by Michael Cuenco. They came from the internet in their war-memes and none could stand against them.

Confronting Modernity Means Overcoming Humanism by Charlie Smith. Humanism believed that we could conquer the world. In reality, modernity has escaped our control. Only a posthumanist framework can see us through.

Benjamin H. Bratton on Terraforming the World Order by Marko Bauer. Sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H Bratton discusses how our ongoing technologically-driven terraforming will remake the world order, and how technology reveals and creates human destiny as much as enabling it.