Technology doesn’t disrupt society. Society adopts technology through a process of social re-engineering. This can’t happen without functional institutions.

We locked down society to buy us time to contain COVID-19. Instead of contact tracing, our decayed institutions delivered economic calamity and no remedy. Now, we must live with the virus.

Futurists have imagined a conflicted spectrum of cosmic visions with intriguing convergence. Those visions impact us today and determine where we will be in years to come.

It’s time to build. But building is intensely political, our industrial capacity has been demobilized, and we no longer have a positive vision for America that actually inspires us.

America has lost sight of the basic difference between wants and needs. Public needs, rather than private wants, should drive our allocation of capital.

The current American antitrust regime lacks the will and the doctrine to deal with big tech monopolies. Even when monopolies benefit the consumer, their governance becomes a matter of state interest.

Successful decentralization today is not deployed against power centers, but is rather used by power centers to accelerate experimentation and growth. America should look to East Asian models and its own history to rebuild a dynamic state.

Jen Wei Ting writes of her personal experience with Singapore’s effective but minimally invasive response to the pandemic. And yet, its approach to personal freedoms and privacy would be considered too draconian in the West.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, American discourse has shifted to how the country was unprepared for pandemic. But this is often a hedge for parasitic interests seeking bigger budgets. What America lacked, and what East Asian responses had, was competence.

You’ve heard of the Dyson Sphere. It’s time to talk about the only vision that can pull America out of this crisis of complacency: the Bison Sphere.

Modernist and pre-modernist unexamined “objectivity” isn’t coming back, but meaning need not be a casualty. Rigorous post-modernism grounds social meaning in the radically interconnected experience of our shared society.

Hierarchy is necessary to functional society. But we are haunted by the memory of past injustices, so we’ve clung to unrealistic ideals of equality. It’s time to start rebuilding the positive case for just and useful hierarchies.

The sexual revolution, individualism, and technology have all been blamed for our social pathologies, especially widespread loneliness. But the underlying problem is an economy which cannot sustain deep social fabric.

Faith in democracy has been shaken by populist upheavals over the last decade. This has opened the door for theorists like Garett Jones to explore how the state could be improved with a little less democracy.

Henry George foresaw San Francisco’s housing crisis. His solution is still the way forward: a bold developmentalist orientation, starting with a land value tax to incentivize denser building.

Since the Cultural Revolution, China has feared and suppressed mass mobilization. The theories of French thinker Gustave Le Bon influence both the party and its critics in their evaluation of the mob.

South Korea’s bold story of state-led development is how every wealthy country on Earth has industrialized. State capacity is necessary to coordinate long-term industrial investments.

Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong, accused of acting as the Party’s black hand in Hong Kong, has been quietly building a vision for a new world order that appears tolerant of difference—but with Chinese power at its center.