So far, however, civilization has not been destroyed. It seems the demand for techno-apocalypses is much greater than the supply. What’s going on here? Why are so many people always convinced that technology is on the cusp of destroying civilization?

Of course, each individual prediction of doom has its own internal reasoning which should be evaluated apart from the broader trend. However the sheer number of widely expected techno-apocalypses, and the similarities in how the ideas are spread throughout society suggest a common pattern at work, separate from the question of how plausible any particular apocalypse scenario might be.

To understand this, the first thing we have to look at is when and where has this been happening. Is this a general phenomenon that humans do in all times and all places, or something that happens in all technological civilizations, or is it something specific to modern Western civilization?

It would be strange if there were popular predictions of techno-apocalypse before rapid technological change became such a visible force. This is indeed what we find. Before the modern era, the closest match is popular “millenarian” movements in Christian societies. These rhyme a little bit with modern techno-apocalypse, and the psychological effects on the believers are remarkably similar to the effects of modern techno-apocalypse beliefs, but they’re not really what we’re looking for. For one thing, millenarian beliefs are about society being radically transformed into a permanent utopia rather than being destroyed, and for another, the transforming force is Christ bringing about the Last Judgment rather than technology. We’ll have to keep looking.

Do we see techno-apocalypticism emerge as soon as rapid technological advance sets in? Actually, no! If we look around the Industrial Revolution, starting around the 1770s or so, there is nothing of the sort. Only a few cutting-edge intellectuals started to realize how important technological progress would be. Ben Franklin watched the prototype hot air balloons and immediately realized that air power would someday transform war, but rather than feeling anxious about the destruction it would cause, he hoped it might “[c]onvinc[e] sovereigns of the folly of wars.” This futurism was unusual even among intellectuals like Franklin, and none of it filtered down to popular discourse—understandably, because industrial technology was not yet transforming the regular person’s daily life.

It was not until the Second Industrial Revolution, starting roughly around the 1860s, that technologies like trains and mass production and electric lights rapidly intruded on urban people’s daily lives, and regular people began to perceive technological progress as a major force in the world. Yet, while there was popular discourse about technological progress, we still do not see techno-apocalyptic anxieties. The only case that looks a little bit similar was the “coal question,” the idea that available supplies of coal—at the time the only industrial power source in use—would eventually run out and industrial civilization would go with it. The idea was common knowledge in intellectual circles, but made approximately no impression on the public. Intellectuals occasionally brought up the “coal question” during popular debates about high coal prices, but never with the palpable anxiety of 20th century writers talking about “peak oil” and the like, and it never achieved any traction beyond the sort of philosophical futurist who in 2026 has opinions about the “simulation hypothesis” and the “Fermi paradox.”

The Apocalypse of 1914

What was the first techno-apocalypse that achieved popular traction? It first emerged right after the First World War and abruptly dominated public discourse. Nearly every thinker and pundit anywhere in Western civilization suddenly worried that war with ever more powerful weapons would destroy civilization.

It’s no mystery where this idea comes from! Industrial war, with trucks bringing men and supplies to the front en masse, and machine guns mowing them down by the hundred, caused death and destruction on a scale no one had seen in living memory. While the per capita death toll from the World War was on par with earlier great power super-wars like the Seven Years’ War or the Napoleonic Wars, the World War affected people more profoundly.

Many people at the time believed that humanity was progressing beyond such things, so they saw the World War as a demolition of their worldview rather than as the normal, if tragic, course of history. That the war appeared so senseless, even by the low standards of international war, contributed further to the emotional impact. At the time, most commentators attributed the outbreak of the war to nationalistic pride of the most narrow-minded and unstrategic sort, and today most historians offer passive-voiced stories about tangled alliances and balances of power which suggest the whole thing just kind of happened by mistake. Of the two, I think the “short-sighted pride” explanation is actually closer to the mark.

And, of course, the rapid introduction of so many new weapons made it easy for people to reason, correctly, that future wars would see the creation of more and more destructive weapons, and further to extrapolate that this would eventually destroy civilization. This discourse was absolutely everywhere, even in subjects with no immediate relation to the topic, in a pattern that will be familiar to us from, for instance, the climate apocalypse discourse of the 2010s. To give one example, from T. A. Rickard’s 1932 Man And Metals:

“Civilization obviously is menaced by the misuse of the very products that were essential to its advancement. By aid of metals man made the tools by which he emerged from savagery and with which he constructed the machines that have given a bigger scope and a wider meaning to human life. From the dawn the digging of ore has played a leading part in the drama of humanity and no one has more cause than the miner to deplore the misuse of the products of his skillful toil. The sword was made before the plowshare, the spear was fashioned before the chisel. The maleficent use of metals has preceded the beneficent use of them. The perversity of mankind has turned a blessing into a curse. Shall we mend our ways or go with the Gadarene swine down the steep slope of perdition?

 

The history of mining, like all other history, thunders a warning. Those that live by the sword shall die by the sword. The Assyrian trampled upon the Egyptian, the Persian on the Assyrian, the Greek on the Persian, the Roman on the Greek. As they did in ancient times, so we, more civilized, as we deem ourselves, have done in later times. History is a philosophy that teaches by example. We have more examples than our predecessors; shall we heed them no better, more particularly the latest of them, which brought us to the very brink of perdition; or shall we too join the great discard of those that were weighed and found wanting? The finger of history, like that of Daniel before Belshazzar, bids us beware lest we too go the way of Nineveh, and our civilization, like its many proud forerunners, be destroyed by the forces it created but could not curb, by a demon it might invoke but could not exorcise.”

Two things are worth noting in this passage. First, Rickard does not specify a particular weapon which will destroy civilization, only the general trend of destruction. Some men predicted that indiscriminate bombing of cities would be the weapon to destroy civilization, and in hindsight we must give them credit for foreseeing the shape of terror bombing even if they greatly overestimated its strategic effects. But this was the exception, and most discourse about modern weapons destroying civilization followed Rickard’s more general reasoning.

Second, the destruction of civilization is held out as an open question. Can civilization pull back from the brink? Can we figure out some way not to march together off the cliff? This was a live possibility. Unlike the “coal question,” these views did not stay isolated among intellectuals and futurists. This view spawned popular movements and drew statesmen to its banner. They created the League of Nations and the disarmament movement achieved the unprecedented Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the construction of warships among the major powers.

The science fiction author Olaf Stapledon grappled with the spiritual angst of the apocalypse he felt bearing down on civilization in his 1930 novel Last and First Men. In this book, the world’s great powers fight a series of wars with ever more destructive weapons. Eventually, the whole population of Europe is annihilated with poison gas. To avert an even more destructive war, the remaining nations unite in a single World State. This endures until coal supplies run out, at which point civilization disintegrates and man reverts to savage tribes. A hundred thousand years later, a new civilization emerges. 

During a rebellion, their advanced technology causes a massive worldwide explosion that turns the planet into a lifeless volcanic wasteland and kills the whole human species, except a few dozen survivors who settle in now-tropical Siberia. Over millions of years, the planet slowly becomes inhabitable once again, and their descendants evolve into the posthuman “Second Men.” New species rise and fall and repeat the mistakes of the past. Finally, the Eighteenth Men—the Last Men—achieve an enlightened utopian society. This, too, begins to decay after a stellar disaster occurs and the Last Men realize that their civilization will eventually be destroyed by the Sun. In the introduction to the novel, Stapledon writes:

“We all desire the future to turn out more happily than I have figured it. In particular we desire our present civilization to advance steadily toward some kind of Utopia. The thought that it may decay and collapse, and that all its spiritual treasure may be lost irrevocably, is repugnant to us. Yet this must be faced as at least a possibility. […] May this not happen! May the League of Nations, or some more strictly cosmopolitan authority, win through before it is too late! Yet let us find room in our minds and in our hearts for the thought that the whole enterprise of our race may be after all but a minor and unsuccessful episode in a vaster drama, which also perhaps may be tragic.”

We can see statesmen grappling with the practical side of this problem in a 1932 disarmament debate in the British parliament. Frederick Seymour Cocks, like Rickard, fears the rising power of new weapons in aggregate: 

“If it fails now, the only alternative will be to arm. The nations will arm, and will embark upon another armed race, by land, by sea, and by air. Following upon that, as closely as a man is pursued by his own shadow, will come war, under the waters, in the air and on the land, until civilisation cracks beneath the strain and the Vesuvius of revolution opens out beneath our feet.” 

Prime Minister Clement Atlee fears the bombing of cities in particular: 

“I believe that what we have to do is to try to build up a constructive internationalism, and I believe that the most fruitful suggestion which has been made in this regard is that relating to the internationalising of civil aviation … I do not believe that you have a defence against air warfare at the present time. I do not believe that you can restrain air forces as long as you have nationalised civil aviation, and I believe that, unless air warfare is restrained, civilisation will be wiped out.” 

Similar calls for world government over the supposedly apocalyptic technologies have also been a common feature in every subsequent techno-apocalypse prediction, be they caused by nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. This debate is most famous for a speech by former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Stanley Baldwin:

“[T]here is, as has been most truly said, no way of complete disarmament except the abolition of flying. Now that, again, is impossible. We have never known mankind go back on a new invention. It might be a good thing for this world, as I have heard some of the most distinguished men in the Air Service say, if man had never learned to fly. But he has learned to fly, and there is no more important question, not only before this House, but before every man, woman and child in Europe, than: “What are we going to do with this power now we have got it?” … This is a question for the younger men far more than it is for us. They are the men who fly in the air. Future generations will fly in the air more and more. Few of my colleagues around me here, probably, will see another great war.… If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel with regard to this one instrument that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that—well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilisation is wiped out, as it will be and by no force more than by that force, then do not let them lay the blame upon the old men. Let them remember that they, they principally or they alone, are responsible for the terrors that have fallen upon the earth.”

And then the next war came. The two decades of desperate searching for a way out ended in fire and rubble. London was bombed, and Dresden, and Tokyo. The logic of industrial production was turned to the mass extermination of civilians. The promised new weapons arrived, most notably the nuclear bomb.

It was not as bad as Baldwin and his colleagues expected. Civilization was not actually wiped out. It took about a decade for Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki to recover to population levels higher than their prewar starting point. But the war was destructive enough that the doomsayers felt vindicated anyway. For most thinkers, it was no longer a question of whether man will destroy himself, but when.

This felt vindication is not well-grounded historically. World War II killed more people than any conflict in human history because industrial technology can support an enormous population. Apart from modern agricultural technology making everything happen at a larger scale, the destruction of World War II was well within historical precedent. As far as the fraction of the European population it killed, World War II was about as deadly as the Thirty Years’ War, fought with pikes and muskets in the 17th century. Both killed somewhere around seven percent  of Europe, with deaths closer to forty percent in the hardest-hit regions. Both left the worst-off areas “post-apocalyptic” in the colloquial sense, but came nowhere close to destroying civilization in the way Rickard, Stapledon, and Baldwin feared. 

In World War II, the advanced superweapons were strategically critical, the gas chambers and trainyards were morally horrifying, but almost all of the actual killing was done with bullets and artillery shells in ways that Napoleon would have found perfectly familiar. Probably less than ten percent  of the war’s deaths came from the vaunted new weapons like tanks and aircraft. The reality is that industrial armies, with guns and bombs and concentration camps, have been less thorough than Mongols with horses and bows, who killed more people in Baghdad with their own hands than the Americans managed to kill by dropping atomic bombs from thirty thousand feet.

But for people who had imagined their technological superiority also made them morally superior to past civilizations, and who had long forgotten the last time their great powers fought a total war targeting civilians en masse, World War II felt like a near-apocalypse which came within a hair’s breadth of destroying civilization entirely. The illusion of rational progress “advanc[ing] steadily toward some kind of Utopia” was wounded by the First World War, and killed by the Second.

After the First World War, more people expected that some unknown future technology might destroy civilization at some unknowable future date. After the Second World War, more people expected that a specific identified technology would destroy civilization within their own lifetime, although which particular technology is supposedly on the cusp of destroying us has changed over time.

The Parade of Prophecies

The first technology which the public believed was about to destroy civilization was, of course, the nuclear bomb. In popular imagination, it was the sheer explosive force of destroying cities that would end civilization. Cooler heads realized blowing up major cities would merely kill an enormous number of people, but was not actually enough to end the world. Then, in 1950, the great nuclear physicist Leo Szilard popularized the idea of nuclear “cobalt bombs” deliberately designed to spread radioactive fallout which remains lethal for years rather than the usual days. This led to widespread fears that a nuclear war would permanently irradiate the Earth and destroy all life. Such a scenario was not well-grounded; weather spreads nuclear fallout throughout the atmosphere very unevenly, such that covering the entire globe is effectively impossible. No cobalt bombs were ever built, and popular fear of global irradiation persisted for a decade or two. Eventually it faded from the world’s attention, although the idea of a permanently radioactive nuclear wasteland remains vaguely in the cultural imagination, mostly because of depictions in fiction.

In the 1980s, the radiation poisoning apocalypse was succeeded by popular fear of “nuclear winter,” the idea that large-scale nuclear war would loft soot into the stratosphere, higher than the rain which could bring it back to Earth, and so persist for years while blocking sunlight, cooling the Earth, disrupting agriculture, and causing massive famines that kill billions, thereby ending civilization or even causing human extinction. This was based on speculative computer models of cities burning in enormous firestorms and further speculative models of how soot behaves and persists in the stratosphere. These models were invented largely by activist-scientists whose publicly declared aim was to terrify world leaders into believing nuclear weapons were a weapon too terrible to use and, unsurprisingly, their models have not held up well to empirical verification. 

In the 1991 Gulf War, massive oil well fires did not produce the predicted lofting effect; and in 2017, when smoke from Canadian wildfires was lofted to the stratosphere, it dissipated much more quickly than predicted by the models used to forecast nuclear winter. By now, the public anxiety about nuclear winter has mostly faded away, partly because of the problems with the climate models, but mostly because the end of the Cold War and the activist campaigns for nuclear disarmament meant that there was no longer much media raising the issue in people’s minds.

While popular fears persist, there is currently no widely-accepted case that nuclear bombs will destroy civilization among experts. Perhaps a new model will arise to fill this niche in the next decade or two. The idea that nuclear bombs could kill a hundred million people, and it would be just another devastating war that gets recorded in the history books while people rebuild, seems unintuitive and even morally offensive to us. Something like that deserves the narrative weight of an apocalypse.

Of course, nuclear weapons are not the only technology that was supposed to have destroyed the world by now. The normal operation of industry at scale was going to cause the apocalypse as well. Like with nuclear weapons, the specifics have changed as individual mechanisms were disproved or simply fell out of fashion, because many people have a deeper spiritual conviction that large-scale industry ought to end the world. The 1968 publication of The Population Bomb by zoologist Paul Ehrlich popularized the theory that overpopulation, enabled by industrial-era advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine, would increase the population above the carrying capacity of the Earth and lead to mass starvation and collapse within the 1970s. Ehrlich would later be one of the chief organizers of the campaign to develop and spread the nuclear winter theory as well.

In 1972, The Limits To Growth book made the case for two additional mechanisms of industrial doom: resource depletion, as all possible sources of industrial inputs like aluminum and chromium are exhausted; and pollution, as exponentially increasing emissions of industrial waste poison the world and make it uninhabitable. The latter of these was especially influential, as fictional depictions of barren landscapes blighted by toxic sludge made the idea popular among the general public. In fact, the normal operation of industry was perfectly able to solve these problems. Food, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels are all far more abundant today than they were when these dire predictions were made, and this trend shows no sign of stopping. 

The actual limits of matter and energy available to human civilizations are incomparably vaster than the doomsayers imagined, as far beyond modern civilization as modern civilization is beyond a primitive tribe worrying about using up all the flint for their arrowheads. Cleaning and preventing pollution proved even more tractable. Filtering and treating industrial waste required research and development to create air scrubbers, waste-to-energy incinerators, clay-lined landfills, and other such technologies. Deploying these across the industrial stack was reasonably expensive, but well within the means of an industrial society, and most wealthy countries mandated these improvements throughout the 1970s. The problems are now mostly solved. The cities are no longer choked by smog, the rivers are clean again, chlorofluorocarbons have been replaced with non-ozone-depleting substitutes, and acid rain is a thing of the past.

Much as the fears of nuclear apocalypse switched from radiation to nuclear winter when a new justification was needed, the ecological fears switched from pollution to global warming. In the late 1980s, ecological projections that carbon emissions would raise global temperatures by several degrees celsius and cause substantial disruptions to local climates and human life broke into mainstream awareness, where they were soon spun by activists, reporters, and fiction authors into widely-believed but scientifically baseless fears that warming would make the world literally uninhabitable. A series of dire predictions about coastal cities being submerged by melting polar ice have failed to materialize on schedule. 

As atmospheric carbon capture technology is developed and rolled out in coming decades, it seems plausible that industrial technology may solve global warming and prevent even the moderate problems which would come from warming of several degrees celsius, but this remains somewhat speculative. If not, the climate disruptions will fall far short of the “world literally on fire” messaging popular in the 2010s. In the last couple of years, it seems as if the wind has gone out of the sails of the global warming apocalypse narrative, and few people remain emotionally invested the way they were even in 2021. Like the other fears of technological doom, it is not that the core arguments were explicitly refuted in the public mind, but rather that people eventually got tired of waiting for an apocalypse that never arrived.

The latest popular doomsday scenario is artificial intelligence, which exploded into public consciousness after the creation of compelling generative artificial intelligence chatbots, especially ChatGPT in 2022. In addition to the inchoate fears of economic obsolescence and the rise of new magnates disrupting the political balance of power that accompany every major new technology, there is also fear that the AI itself will soon exterminate humanity. The most influential and organized activists advancing these views trace to the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, where he posits a sufficiently intelligent artificial mind would, by default, exterminate humanity as it pursues its own inhuman goals, unless the extremely difficult research problem of aligning its goals exactly to human goals succeeds completely on the first try, in which case the AI would instead create a permanent utopia.

What these “AI Doomers” provide for this narrative is not so much an argument that superhuman AI is dangerous. Futurists and philosophers have speculated about artificial minds supplanting humanity since before the electronic computer was invented. The idea that intelligent nonhuman minds are in natural competition with humanity is obvious and very common, and has motivated stories of robot uprisings since R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1920. 

Rather, the modern “AI Doomers” provide arguments and intellectual authority for the claim that artificial general intelligence is happening soon, that computer minds pursuing their own interests without the need for human direction are a scientifically respectable possibility, rather than a fiction trope like time travel or alien invaders, that GPT and its derivatives are one of the last steps on the path towards building Man’s successor. There have been past waves of enthusiasm when specialists in artificial intelligence believed they were close to building general intelligence only to be disappointed as the field plunged into “AI winter,” but these did not achieve adoption beyond technical specialists and inveterate futurists. Yudkowsky’s predictions of superintelligence’s imminent creation were the first to achieve wider reach, which ironically inspired Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and other businessmen, researchers, and investors to create the AI labs that are now advancing the state of the art.

There have also been plenty of techno-apocalyptic scenarios which remained relatively niche and did not spark visceral public anxiety—bioengineered pandemics, electromagnetic pulse weapons, nanotechnological self-replicating “gray goo,” exotic physics disasters from experimental particle accelerators, the “clathrate gun hypothesis” that moderate global warming would set off a runaway feedback loop and overcook the planet, and more. Partly because these do not fit as neatly into the ideology of industrial civilization being destroyed by its own hubris, and partly because of which causes the most competent activists have chosen to push, these have not achieved the scale or the emotional resonance of the most successful apocalypse narratives.

The Hypothetical AI Apocalypse

In each case that achieves popularity, the pattern is mostly the same. First, intellectuals describe a phenomenon that, if taken to its maximum conceivable extreme, would destroy civilization or the entire human species. Usually this speculation is logically sound, within the limits of its clearly-defined assumptions. There exists some threshold of global warming that would cause human extinction, even if 5 °C would not suffice; dusting the entire Earth with radioactive cobalt-60 would kill all humans outside of shelters if it could somehow be arranged; running out of coal in the 1860s would have shut down industrial society before it learned how to make solar panels or fission reactors. This work attracts the attention of intellectuals and futuristic types, but not the general public. 

Second, some of the intellectuals make a public case painting a vivid picture of how the apocalypse could happen within a decade or two in order to engage the popular imagination. This uses looser arguments with poorly justified or unfounded assumptions, although the intellectually rigorous people who first develop the looser arguments—such as in The Limits To Growth—specify that it’s just a model, or an illustration, or one way that things could plausibly go, and “of that day and hour no one knows.” They are careful to make their assumptions explicit and highlight which steps of the argument they place less weight on. Some of the intellectuals come to viscerally believe that the apocalypse will be soon, for reasons which are only partially based on their explicit arguments, and partly due to subterranean matters of ideology and psychological pressures. Even so, the most careful and scrupulous are aware of what their arguments do not prove, and avoid saying that their worst fears will happen, speaking only of possible scenarios and models worth considering—which incidentally means they are never publicly proven wrong when the fears do not materialize.

For now, such qualifications are the norm in predictions of AI doom from the movement’s intellectual core. For example, in 2020, when Ajeya Cotra published a lengthy analysis of when “transformative AI” (TAI) is supposed to arrive based on claimed analogies to biological intelligence, the report assumed AI development would follow what it admitted was a “relatively unrealistic path to TAI because it is simpler to analyze.” Or in 2025, when the authors of the influential popularizer “AI 2027” received criticism from people who believed the title meant they were predicting the AI apocalypse would come in 2027, they were quick to place an addendum at the top: 

“to prevent misunderstandings: we don’t know exactly when AGI will be built. 2027 was our modal (most likely) year at the time of publication, our medians were somewhat longer. Specifically, our medians ranged from 2028 to 2032. When AI 2027 was first published we explained this in Footnote 1 as above, but to make our views more clear we have added a clarification to the foreword text.” 

Yudkowsky himself has gone even further and denounced the entire practice of making up “AI timelines” for when the superhuman AI will arrive and presumably exterminate humanity, and he makes a point of not giving specific dates.

In every case, from interwar fears of runaway militarism to today’s fears of superintelligent AI takeover, the shuffle works by making an unjustified leap from the claim that the apocalypse is possible in principle to the claim that it’s happening soon. Practical difficulties are skated over or assumed away. Imagined scenarios and wild assumptions are fed into great quantitative models to produce very serious reports. The principle of “garbage in, garbage out” means that these have no value whatsoever for predicting the future. Strip away the leaps of logic and the illustrative fictions and the load-bearing assumptions made to “simplify analysis” and the calculations of irrelevant numbers, and the core remains that a coordinated cadre of well-studied experts just kind of feel a vibe that it’s happening soon. 

But the trappings of mathematized analysis can be very persuasive anyway. If you grab a pile of numbers and put them in a graph, then most readers will be dazzled by the appearance of mathematical rigor—that’s a lot of calculations!—and only a minority will ask, “Hold on, where exactly did this graph come from? What’s the argument that these numbers have any causal relationship at all with predicting when the world is gonna end?” For example, prominent AI Doomers like Katja Grace put a great deal of effort into collating software researchers’ predictions about when superhuman AI will arrive. But of course there is no reason to believe that such a big pile of predictions can tell us anything at all about the reality of such an event. There has been a great deal of research into when aggregating forecasts is a useful exercise and when it is not, and as Karger, Atanasov, and Tetlock argue, predictions of events like the arrival of superintelligent AI are not informative. 

Such esoteric points may be important for the most engaged and sophisticated intellectuals, but they have little impact on how the public receives an apocalypse narrative. The fact that intellectually respectable technical experts lend their names to the cause is important, while the details of their opinions are lost in a long game of telephone. Activists and journalists and fiction authors spread the scenario, altering and simplifying it as they do. The intellectuals’ caveats are left by the wayside, sometimes because the popularizers only understand the vivid story and do not understand an argument structure filled with careful conditionals, and often because they want to tell a more sensational story, as in environmentalist disaster media like Waterworld (1995) or Wall-E (2008). Many people believe this story. They might experience fear and anxiety, or donate money to professional activists, or forgo having children, or stop saving for retirement, or respond in any number of ways. Popular fear of the AI apocalypse is only recently mainstream. It remains to be seen how widely it will spread.

People give an apocalypse about twenty or thirty years to arrive. After that, most lose interest, leaving behind only a small residue of ideological holdouts, and a wake of science fiction settings that feel increasingly fantastical rather than urgent. There is no big finale to the debate, there is no explicit acknowledgement that the apocalypse is cancelled. People simply wander away from the subject. This seems to be less because the core arguments get refuted with reason and evidence, and more because people slowly lose faith after enough of the activists’ predictions about worldwide famines in the 1970s, or cities flooded by 2015, do not come to pass.

In the realm of pure logic, the failure of the activists’ vivid pictures may have little bearing on the abstract case for doom advanced by the more rigorous thinkers, but few people make the distinction—with some justice, as the highbrow intellectuals are generally happy to lend their intellectual authority to the popularizations. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by Albert Einstein and Manhattan Project scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock—initially set at seven minutes to “midnight” in 1947—to publicize the imminent nuclear apocalypse by laundering the scientists’ subjective feeling of doom into an annual media spectacle. The Doomsday Clock first cited the risk of AI destroying humanity in 2024.

It’s possible that industrial technology will destroy civilization at some point. But the technology of 2026 does not seem especially close. However, the basic observation formulated after World War I—that technology’s ability to destroy increases over time—remains sound. Surely we are closer today than in 1918. This observation does not tell us whether we should fear a techno-apocalypse in five years, or fifty years, or five hundred years. It does suggest it’s worth paying attention to individual apocalypse predictions and evaluating them on their technical merits.

But as we consider them, we must remember that there is great popular and political demand for techno-apocalypse stories. Since World War I and especially after World War II, the mainstream view in our civilization is that Man’s nature is to destroy himself with technology. There have been many attempts to fill in the details with specific apocalypse scenarios. Many tales of extinction and collapse become accepted among the vanguard intellectuals and the public even though the argument for doom has gaping holes. There is a huge audience for playing up reasonably large problems as though they are the literal end of the world. There is a huge audience for talking about speculative future disasters as though the default course is for them to happen very soon. Before we believe the latest prophecy of doom, we must remember to hold out for a full argument which covers all of these steps. We cannot settle for most of an argument with critical steps handwaved away, no matter how many fancy graphs or prestigious names are attached.

It is truly remarkable that people, even very educated Americans, know almost nothing about the peoples of America. America is a fairly diverse nation even by the standards of continent-sized countries. Regional diversity is baked into America’s governmental structure in a way that is often not the case for countries formed around their capital city, such as France forming around Paris and Russia around Moscow, which are prominent in the Old World. Until the time of the U.S. Civil War, Americans frequently referred to their nation as “these United States,” for they saw it as a series of distinct nations rather than a singular country. The Founders established America purposefully so that the highly distinct regional cultures, which were seen as independent nations, would have as much functional legal independence through the state structure as possible.  

Anthropological metrics show that the cultural differences inside America exist at the same scale as between European countries. The cultural distance between a Pennsylvanian and a Californian is roughly equivalent as that from a German to a Pole. The political and worldview differences between a Californian and Texan are greater than those between a Greek and an Italian. The genetic differences between British Americans from the North and South are large enough that they are comparable to what we would expect were there a mountain range or desolate desert on the Mason-Dixon line. To understand how these vast differences emerged, we shall look at the history and development of the peoples of America through their distinct geographic, ancestral, and ethnic contexts. These are the three metrics which I think would best allow the integration of America’s identity as a people, not just its borders and land.

The Geography of Culture 

There are two main geographic gradients in North America. One is cold to warm weather, from the tropical jungles of Florida to the frozen wastes of Alaska. The other is wet to dry, between the temperate rainforests of Washington State and the moon-like Mojave Desert in California. America is the only nation on Earth which has each of the main geographic biomes from  deserts to forests, tropics, tundra, and grasslands. North America rarely has clean breaks in the climate and you can see this manifest in the culture, where there are few sharp borders between American subregions.

In this way America is much like China, another continent-sized nation with real but muddied regional differences, that coincidentally spans nearly the same latitudes as the lower 48 states. Beijing sits at the 40th parallel, like Philadelphia, Harbin in Manchuria is at Quebec’s, New Orleans with Shanghai, and Hong Kong at Havana. It is more than coincidence that both potential twenty-first century powers have long ago expanded to fill their region’s entire available temperate zone. In this way both are unlike Europe, where countries with distinct regional cultures match the shape of the changing landscape. Perhaps, had the Roman Empire survived, the geographic distinctions between Gaul and North Africa would be similarly muted by an empire that endured until the present. This is America.

People in Pennsylvania, a clearly Northern state, often have glimmers of Southern accents and culture. Meanwhile, Northern culture has made inroads into every region of the South. A great irony is that “General American” culture; the accents, food, housing, ways of life, and class relations which are considered quintessentially American are from Pennsylvania, Upstate New York and Ohio, where the region had a decisive advantage due to the Industrial Revolution. However, as a person from this region, they now feel completely culturally alienated and isolated from the originally “General American” institutions in places like Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. These were initially manifestations of the rural Anglo culture and have since become their own, often with explicitly Anti-American interests, especially the peoples and regions it originated in. 

Political analysts often observe that America has perfect geography, but they forget how much technology has made the North American continent significantly more habitable than it was centuries ago. Between the malarial swamplands of the south, the desert plains and mountains of the west, and the biting cold of the north, much of America had to be made artificially hospitable to host a large civilization. As an example, John McNeill’s book Mosquito Empires, explains how the defining factor in the evolution of the American South was disease; unsurprising when one considers how it sits at the same latitude as North Africa, with Austin, Texas and Cairo, Egypt at equal distances from the equator. Diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, dengue, and sleeping sickness were truly horrible in the coastal regions of the American South, often culling sixty to eighty percent of newcomers within six months of their arrival. The region that was liable to these tropical illnesses was surprisingly large, stretching all the way up to the Chesapeake Bay, and being often deadly for Europeans, with Philadelphia facing several yellow fever outbreaks. McNeill developed the concept of a region called the Greater Caribbean, which stretched from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro, and was the region where these tropical illnesses were the defining variable shaping society.

Life in the South demanded adaptation to a novel subtropical climate. The American South has a climate similar to India, which developed their own convergent caste system due to its Northern conquerors four thousand years ago. Records from the Colonial and Early Republic periods talk about how British migrants to the region experienced periodic panics at the mass deaths from disease in the first few years. The summer heat was seen as all-consuming, and helped create the aristocratic culture which scorned the Northern bourgeoisie as “ungentlemanly.” 

It is hard to overstate how much disease influenced the development of the American South, a nebulous region that stretches from where I grew up, the Mason-Dixon line out west, through the Lower Midwestern states until it hits the Great Plains. Driving across what is essentially an ethnic divide between the Northern and Southern states that cuts through Maryland and Virginia, there’s a profound and palpable difference in architecture, climate, plants, and people on each side of that line.

An interesting exception is the southern half of Florida, as the region was an uninhabitable swampland until technology became sufficiently advanced in the mid-twentieth century to drain the swamp and wipe out the diseases, turning the land into a viable home. Given that this occurred in what could be called the South’s century of humiliation, between the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow, Florida was populated by Northern, especially New York, interests. Florida is today a strange slapdash state, the northern half acting as an extension of the Deep South, while further down the peninsula is occupied by migrants from the North-East, Midwest, and the most prominent city Miami having been reshaped by Cuban refugees, that today has grown into the capital of Latin America which happens to be on U.S. soil.

The reason Americans imported slaves from Africa was because these populations had developed genetic adaptations to tropical illnesses that originated in Africa. One example is the genetic mutation that causes sickle cell anemia, which likely contributed to and spread with the Bantu migrations four thousand years ago across Africa from Cameroon. African Americans form about twelve percent of America’s population today, and were almost entirely brought over as slaves during the 18th century, with the ancestor of the average African American coming over around 1750, compared to the average European ancestor around 1790. 

The largest place of origin in Africa for Black Americans depends on subregion, which follows from how even the South operated as a series of independent nations during the Colonial period. The Chesapeake Bay was populated mostly by slaves from Nigeria, especially the Igbo and Yoruba peoples. This was because the Chesapeake’s main crop of tobacco was not profitable enough to buy more expensive slaves, given that the Igbo and Yoruba were known as the most freedom-loving people on Africa’s western shore. Senegalese herder peoples, like the Wolof, predominated in parts of Maryland and Louisiana, partly due to the French colony there and because the nomadic warrior peoples were known as difficult to control. Meanwhile, the Deep South cultivated more expensive crops like rice, indigo, cotton and sugar, allowing them to purchase more costly slaves from Angola and the Kongo. The Kongo was a totalitarian state where the king treated his subjects basically as slaves already, so they were cowed enough to be known as high quality slaves to the Europeans. The largest nation of origin for African Americans’ ancestry is Nigeria, constituting roughly one third of the total population.

There is a critical tension in America between the geographic regions which are best seen as extensions of a European civilization, which succeeded at subduing the land given it was similar enough to their European homes, and those in which the land successfully broke their culture from its European frame. Examples of the first are the British offshoot cultures we’ll talk about in the next segment, which dominate most of the Eastern part of the continent, and then a very prime but early example of a culture molded around the land is the American Deep South. 

The Deep South started around Charleston, South Carolina in the 17th century due to the cultivation of luxury crops. Unlike the rest of the American East Coast, which was populated by distinct British subcultures who successfully crossed the Atlantic, the Deep South was settled by White Barbadians. In the 17th century the island of Barbados contained mostly Europeans who settled there to grow tobacco, however the later introduction of sugar crops caused them to migrate to the American South. The Deep South was the only region of the country that had a majority Black population, somewhere between sixty and eighty percent before the African American migrations North during the 20th century. 

The new European Barbadian occupants subsequently became quite martial and aggressive, cultivating an almost Nietzschean “master morality,” as a way to keep down the massive Black population. This has consistently been the most militaristic and combative region in American history, as the looming threat of a Haiti-like race revolt was always lurking. That being said, the Deep South became a distinct synthesis of African and European elements where Blacks and Whites lived in profound proximity with utter brutality. The book The World They Made Together details the African influence on White Southern culture, touching on everything from food and religion to architecture, clothing, and childrearing practices. This merging of cultures went on to shape much of modern America, eventually giving rise to new music genres, cuisines, fashion trends, and colloquialisms.

East of the 100th parallel it’s easier to pretend that America is the same as Europe, as it shares much of the same plants, climate, animals, and agriculture. However, west of that line it becomes impossible. The land of the American West borders on mythical, from the purple clouds of Texas to the purple mountains of Arizona. There are redwood trees that are thousands of years old, the extraterrestrial landscape of Death Valley, the colossal Rocky Mountains, and massive herds of buffalo who roam the seemingly infinite Great Plains. There’s an interesting argument that the American Empire, which later spanned nearly every continent, was first built in order to secure the sheer scale of the American West. It’s truly a wonder that America from sea to shining sea is a single nation, and it could only have been formed in that particular moment of history when energetic Europeans had a staggering technological advantage over the local population. Penetrating across the west took profound will, and it is truly remarkable that America reached from Pittsburgh to San Francisco in a sixty year period from 1790-1850. If you look at a genetic map of America you will find that the British-derived cultures which stem back to the East Coast wither at the 100th parallel, gradually replaced by the new cultures of the American West. This is because the Easterners were unable to survive once they found themselves in a world without trees.

Due to the sheer scale of the American West, it has always been totally dependent on gargantuan infrastructure projects such as the transcontinental railroad or thousands of miles of canals and aqueducts, proving Americans to be engineers on the same scale as the Romans. Many cities in the American West simply could not exist without the greatest engineering in human history. Cities like Las Vegas or Phoenix support populations of millions hundreds of miles deep in the desert with highly fragile water supplies. Anglo-American culture never had to consider the problem of lack of water before this point, and you can see the ingenuity demonstrated in practices such as growing cotton in Arizona from limited aquifer water. Meanwhile, that incredibly water-intensive crop can be grown naturally in the American South without irrigation. 

In much of the American West, the story of urbanization is the story of water. In states like Texas, Arizona, California, and Utah, lack of water is the primary bottleneck to their success and is thus fought over tooth and claw by special interests. The Great Plains were populated in an unusually wet period of the late 19th century, which coincided with settlement, causing scientists at the time to theorize that “rain follows the plow.” The severe storms of the Dust Bowl that followed in the 1930s dramatically falsified this hypothesis, as well as driving a mass migration to the West to escape the Great Plains. To this day some parts of this region have barely a third of the population they did in the 1920s. 

Total dependence on these enormous infrastructure projects has become the dominant variable in the success of the American West. One manifestation of this is how the megacorporation has become a feature of the West since the 19th century, as these grand infrastructure projects gave the corporations who built them enormous monopoly power that has potential for exploitation. These important corporations in the American West have often engaged in demographic transfer when it suits their interests. For example, the purposeful importation of Scandinavians into the Upper Midwest to populate the northern rail networks. A similar process occurred in central Canada with Romanians and Ukrainians. The West Coast agricultural sector encouraged mass migration of Midwesterners in the early 20th century. In recent history, large corporations have furthered the demographic replacement of the South-West with migrants from Latin America. 

This is, in effect, a society where the infrastructure projects are important enough that they become a variable in their own right, which supersedes the organic culture. This is very rare historically, where most societies are quite geographically or ethnically set in stone. The American West’s main political gripe in the late 19th and early 20th century was that the railroad and mining companies had enormous monopolistic influence over trade in the region, which they often used to exploit it. This was a large reason for the rise of Progressive populism in the Upper Midwest and West around 1900, with William Jennings Bryan as a popular leader. 

All of the cultural trends of the American West have been especially pronounced in the Intermountain West between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. The Intermountain West is a funny region much like Asia, with a gradient of individually distinct cultures with similarities all of which are reactions to their environment. The first example are the Mormons of Utah and the neighboring states, which migrated into the region in the mid 19th century from New England and the Upper Midwest. They are genetically similar to those populations and organized around the eccentric spiritual figure Joseph Smith, who created a religion that guided the Mormons to the Great Salt Lake in hopes of establishing an independent nation named Deseret to be a new city on the hill, much as their Calvinist ancestors fled from England to New England. In the 19th century the central Mormon church would strategically orchestrate its settlement patterns in advance. The Mormons dealt with a geography like the Middle East by creating a Middle Eastern-style theocracy. They have many similarities with the Ancient Israelites: being seen as a cult by outsiders, purposefully strange beliefs to isolate them, high in-group preference, strong religiosity, high birth rates, high educational attainment, and a unique moral character. 

Contrasted with the conservative Mormons, the other polarity of the American West is the degeneracy that comes from an utterly artificial environment in which older cultures can’t survive. One example of this are the people who were locally called “Desert Trash” and learned to view it with pride. They form an almost Scots-Irish Appalachian ethic of resistance to power, individuality, and eccentricity. However, they’ve traded murder ballads, clan lineages, and honor codes for Instagram, UFOs, New Age spirituality and suburban houses with white interiors. Arizona and Nevada are the top Desert Trash states, but the culture ripples from internal California and the deserts of Oregon to the Rocky Mountains’ ridges. If modern civilization ever collapses, they are the ones most likely to form a new almost Mongol culture to rebuild the region. 

Another environmental response is seen in California, today an artificial culture which was once considered to be a distant Eden too inaccessible for Europeans to reach without profound struggle. It was a backwater of a backwater for the Spanish Empire, where the Franciscan fathers enslaved the Natives. The Spanish were the original settlers of the American South-West and even parts of Florida, but by the time the Anglo-Americans conquered it they were declining as an empire and had only a few thousand people in the region. The exception here is New Mexico, which stands alone in the American South-West as a more Latino-Native American derived culture based off of the medieval Puebla culture which made enormous megaliths like the one in Chaco Canyon. They along with the Mexicans faced countless declines and imperial collapses due to water issues.

Within months of the U.S. conquering California, Americans immediately found gold which the Hispanics had missed for the past eighty years. California has always carried the mark of the Booster; a certain archetype that today would be promoting nootropics and NFTs, but in the 19th century built towns, states, and businesses, constantly hustling and selling across the continent. The founders of California were scammers, gold miners, pirates, entrepreneurs, slavers, and adventurers. This has made the Golden State the cutting edge of Western civilization and the most important place on Earth in the latter part of the 20th century. At the same time, it has made the region prone to foolishness and degeneracy, which was further promulgated by the region’s staggeringly rapid rise to wealth in industries which do not touch physical reality, such as technology, media, and government military contracts. 

This separation from reality has created a fantastical society of wizards bending reality to their will, who have gone mad from their power and are now set on destroying both their own culture and the world. The Edenic California of the 20th century no longer exists, and has been replaced by a cross between Blade Runner and the degeneracy of ancient atheists’ multicultural Babylon or Rome. California is the story of a society that has everything—wealth, genius, perfect geography, strong political institutions, and military protection—brought down by the one thing it does not have: a functioning culture, which later bled into its entire political, economic, and demographic success. 

Keep in mind that most of the American West as a whole was profoundly lightly populated until recently. One of my good friends is a native Washingtonian and another an old stock Californian, and both feel that the places they grew up have now been irrevocably destroyed. They belonged to the old cowboy Western culture, while its new inhabitants are trying to build a post-Christian, post-Western, possibly transhumanist society, which we see manifest most clearly with Silicon Valley’s various strange ideologies. 

The Pacific Northwest is a strange example of a fusion civilization that was never able to integrate either elements of its parent societies, while also not developing its own personality distinct from its politics. The Pacific Northwest is a mix of Yankees: there was a coin toss to determine if Portland, Oregon would be named after Portland, Maine or Boston, Massachusetts. However, it contains many similarities to the rest of the West Coast and California. The climate here is surprisingly like Western Europe, and the mix of New England and California has created potentially the most left-wing place on earth, where politics are used as a surrogate for their ancestor’s religious fanaticism. 

As a final example of how American geography affects its culture we have the original White Anglo inhabitant of the West, the one who used to be synonymous with it but has since been forgotten, that being the cowboy. It’s hard to underestimate the effect of the cowboy on the American character, especially our perception outside the U.S. The cowboy speaks to something that exists in America and in very few other places: the self-controlled individual who is not dependent on society. This has very deep roots in our psyche stemming back to the Aryan steppelands and later the Vikings, Crusaders, and age of European colonialism. There is something in the Faustian European man, which only still exists in America, that desires to wander and test the boundaries of sociability. The American cowboy is a mix of African, Native American, and Spanish influences on people whose ancestors were shepherds on the fringes of the British Isles’ herding cultures. Starting in South Texas, the cowboy is a manifestation of the European reaching back to his ancestral environment of the Eurasian steppe as a reaction to a region that was not farmable until the late 19th century, due to the soil being so deep it would break plows and far too many buffalo. The true age of the cowboy lasted only twenty years after the U.S. civil war, until technological innovations such as a new type of plow, barbed wire to keep the cows out, and the invention of the revolver to defeat the Natives, amongst others, allowed the Great Plains to be settled. Regardless, the cowboy tapped into an underlying nature of the American West’s land: a climate like the Eurasian steppe will produce men like the Mongols or Huns, as Natives like the Apache, Comanche, or Sioux demonstrated. 

Ancestral Seeds

It’s a consistent thread in American history that so many of its battles are the Old World’s writ large, on the scale of a new continent with new backgrounds. One of my favorite historians, Leland Dewitt Baldwin, called America a side effect of the English Civil War. This has been a continuous thread in American history until the present, which we have collectively blocked out. For example, the hatred between the North and South, which traces back to Britain, is still alive and well today. Ask any self-respecting Bostonian or Alabamian about the other and you’ll see a loathing that goes deeper than Enlightenment reason. I’m of half Irish and half British ancestry, and my grandparents were not happy about my parents’ Protestant-Catholic marriage in the 1990s. We had the marriage in a Protestant church overseen by a Catholic priest to make sure both ancestral gods would be happy about the union. Even today, the different British regional cultures which populated America are totally evident in voting patterns, architecture, religion, dialect, values, and any other signal that would demonstrate a distinct culture anthropologically. These different genetic groups, often stemming back to different subregions of the British Isles, are totally apparent in America, with about sixty percent of Americans having British heritage. 

Inside the British Isles there has always been the struggle between the core and the fringe. This divide cuts across any straightforward categorization, but as a vague rule of thumb: the interior was more ordered, rational, egalitarian, bureaucratic, Germanic, and Protestant; the exterior was more wild, mystic, hierarchical, traditional, Celtic, and mythic. If you look at the English Civil War which occurred at America’s inception, the feudal West of England supported the closeted Catholic Stuart Scottish line and the capitalist East supported the Puritan-dominated Parliament. There’s an interesting book called The Cousins’ Wars by Kevin Philips which looks at how the English and American civil wars were largely the same conflict. It is truly eerie that when you map the English Civil war onto the American, you’ll find that on an incredibly granular level the same bloodlines fought the same battles. In both conflicts the Puritan line which led to the Northern ice sheet burned the Cavaliers who fought for warm and civil Wessex and Dixie. 

The book Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer is a brilliant analysis of how the British regional migrations to America seeded the current American Eastern cultures that stretch from the East Coast to the Great Plains. The first major migration was from Puritan Eastern England to New England in the early 17th century during their persecution by the King. Much like the Icelanders fleeing the king of Norway’s tyranny in the 9th century, the Puritans aspired to make a city on a hill in which they could build an earthly Calvinist utopia. The Puritans belonged to potentially the most radical sect of Christians ever. They would fine people for not working on Christmas, for arguing with their wife too loudly, and for swearing. The Puritans were the most intelligent, industrious, and capable English of that era, but this came at the cost of profound psychological and spiritual neuroses which have affected this region ever since. If you look at New England’s character it is clearly a theocracy, whether the religion is Progressive or Calvinist, where the priests take leadership over businessmen or nobility. 

New England was a nearly totally homogenous ethnostate for most of American history, with this singular type of person most prominent. This resulted in New England being the single society in the world that scored highest on practically every human development statistic, as detailed by Fischer. They were the most equal, literate, skilled, agentic, and technologically advanced population in the world. Yankees, as the descendents of the Puritans were called, sailed as pirates all the way to Madagascar, sold furs to the Chinese, staged a coup in Hawaii, and hunted for whales in Siberia and Antarctica. They were the most capable group of Americans, ever. They populated a whole tier of the continent through dominating the American side of the Great Lakes region and then sailing over to Deseret (now Utah) as well as the Pacific shore by way of Antarctica. They averaged ten children per household in this colonial period, and so like rabbits entering an island with no natural predators, this fairly small group of Puritans has ballooned to tens of millions of descendents. Keep in mind that each of these four British groups have populations of tens of millions, often more than entire European countries. 

A majority of non-Hispanic White American ancestry is of British origin, which is something that has been written out of our cultural narrative. However, this great Yankee era, in which they finally defeated their nemesis, the Deep South, came with a staggering psychic and spiritual toll. After their religion died, most of New England became nearly empty forest while their diasporas assimilated into local cultures. New England started to commit suicide as a society, building all of its social institutions around the destruction of its own culture. When one of its greatest writers, H.P. Lovecraft, wrote of decayed, haunted, exotic New England fishing towns lost to their past, he was speaking to a long-term decline of Yankee America that had already occurred by the 20th century. Their victories since have been in the form of the nihilistic managerial class, which has come at an enormous cost: their cultural identity and individual spirit. 

The other side of the mutual failure of the English Civil War was the Cavaliers, who after the Puritans installed a military dictatorship in England at the end of the war, fled to Virginia and the Chesapeake to escape to a place where they could be loyal to their king. They tried to establish an aristocratic culture there that could replicate what they had back in Europe, however there were not enough European settlers to be their serfs, and so they brought in slaves from Africa. David Hackett Fischer has said that the culture of the American South dates back to England, and that Africans were merely brought in to support it. The 19th century novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell speaks of a South of England, formerly known as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, that was known for being genteel, slow moving, kind, hierarchical, bigoted, and conservative; this is word-for-word how people describe the American South. At its best, the American South, stemming originally from this Virginian mold which spread to the rest, would produce the greatest men in American history like Washington, Jefferson, Lee, and Madison. At its worst, it would produce the worst human development statistics in America and the horrors of slavery. 

The South contained the only deep aspiration to nobility and high culture we have in America, while attempts by the Trans-Atlantic North-Eastern WASP were never able to organically integrate into America’s soil, and died by the late 20th century. Virginia and its cousins populated a truly huge region of America, accounting for more immigrants to the West than all the Northern States combined. Virginians founded Berkeley University in California, named after the father of Virginia and popularizer of slavery Sir William Berkeley, as well as the state of Texas, the Upper South, and the Southern Piedmont regions. 

The third American culture was the other one that Elizabeth Gaskell spoke of in North and South: the diaspora from the English Rust Belt to the American Rust Belt. When she wrote of the North of England in the 19th century being a rough, manly, egalitarian, industrial, low class, mercantile, Darwinistic place, she could have been talking about the American Rust Belt just as easily. The modern English Rust Belt was once a desolate frontier region populated by Celts and Vikings, until a combination of the Quaker’s high trust and business acumen alongside the coal deposits found in Pennsylvania and the English Rust Belt created the Industrial Revolution.

The Quakers were instrumental in the foundation of the English and American banking systems as they had enough cultural trust to easily accumulate capital. Their immigration to America was facilitated by William Penns’ land grant in Pennsylvania, which caused him to encourage Quaker settlement there as it was one of the few places with religious freedom. Quakers, also known as the “Religious Society of Friends,” are a pacifist, meditation-based sect of Christianity, which was seen as profoundly radical in a world of mandatory churches and nobility. They established Pennsylvania and the neighboring areas as anarcho-capitalist societies which were as close to pure classical liberalism as possible, with total religious and economic freedom. This subsequently made the area one of the wealthiest and best developed places in the world for centuries after. The idea of the American “melting pot” originated in Pennsylvania, the one “diverse” region in colonial America due to its Scottish and German migrants. 

The Quaker thread in America’s history has been largely forgotten, but is arguably the most important of these four lineages for creating the Middle-American character which came to dominate general American culture. In the Quaker diaspora, which spread out to Nebraska and Kansas, they succeeded at pollinating an open, friendly, hardworking, libertarian, yet communal and conservative society. The Quakers themselves were fairly demographically small, but their culture was very successful at creating “Friendlies” as allies, which gave them a stamp of approval in the middle tier of America’s culture. At its best, Quakerism can form some of the best societies in history. And at its worst is prone to profound naivety and paradoxical insularity: there is a reason both the English and American Rust Belts had some of the most rapid societal declines of any place on Earth in the last century. 

The final of the Albion’s Seed cultures is the Borderers, or the Scots-Irish. They originated in Lowland Scotland, Northern England, and Northern Ireland. This culture was something very ancient to the British Isles, dating back to the closest thing to the original pre-Roman pre-literate, warrior clan societies. These peoples evolved in constant battle between different authorities, whether Scottish, English, or Irish, in a world where there was constant violence either between armies or proud warrior clans. We forget that into the 17th and 18th centuries these Celtic clan peoples had political authority and fought the centralized government. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Scottish army at Culloden nearly took London in 1745. 

This region suffered terrible poverty, and many who had migrated to Ireland to replace the local Irish were not satisfied with their new way of life under English landowners. This created a radically anarchist, libertarian culture which has kept America masculine, real, and tough while also producing the worst human development statistics of every kind among British Americans. Today, Appalachia is a poor, desolate, and dying place, while their cousins in Tennessee and Texas are part of the fastest growing and strongest places in America. The Scots-Irish culture is hard to kill, and provides the backbone of the modern conservative movement which is contrasted by centuries of murder ballads which went from being set in Durham to Knoxville. The Scots-Irish migrated across a huge area, mixing with the Cavaliers, a highly distinct honor culture in much of the Upper South. They started largely in Western Pennsylvania, went down the spine of the Appalachians to Georgia, and then west to Texas, Kansas, and even Oregon alongside most of the Lower Midwest. For a frame of reference: there are more Americans of Scots-Irish ancestry than there are African Americans, more people than nearly any nation in Europe. 

For a brief example of modern influences of these ancestral cultures, Yankee-derived Americans tend to see the role of government as an active good to push their moral code. This is derived from their theocratic structure. In the Middle States, people like the Quakers and Scots-Irish believe the role of government is to further the individual as much as possible. Meanwhile, Cavalier descendants in the South see the role of the government as maintaining the traditional values and social structure of society. These beliefs started with fairly small British Early Modern cultures that transmuted into world-changing massive peoples who span continents. The world is quite strange isn’t it. 

Ethnic Ties

Ethnicity in America is multifaceted, as the nation was formed fairly recently by settlers and slaves from elsewhere. It isn’t as straightforward as in nations like England or China, which had a certain people in a certain land for a long period of time. This gets to deep questions about America’s identity which have been argued for all of our history. However, there are multiple layers to this. Firstly, that ethnicity in America is still very real. Italian, German, Japanese, French, and African Americans are all immediately recognizable to a sufficiently skilled anthropologist, due to various telltale traits in almost all of their behaviors. Thomas Sowell’s book Ethnic America does a great job of examining how different sub-ethnicities of Americans have different histories informed by their home countries, occupations, skill levels, and other factors. This article won’t detail these, but rather examine regions of America where these ethnic differences become dominant and impossible to ignore, in order to understand them. 

America’s genetics have in recent years been explored by a multitude of studies. I arrived at similar numbers before the genetic data came out by combining census results, migration statistics, and surname analysis. America is about three quarters European ancestry, even though non-Hispanic White Americans are quoted at less than sixty percent in the current (perhaps false) official statistics, given that two thirds of Hispanic American ancestry is of European origin. After Whites, Africans are about ten percent of America’s genetics, while all Asians constitute six percent. Ancestry from the British Isles is about one third of America’s total ancestry, with descendants from the United Kingdom being a majority among the non-Hispanic White population. German and a little bit of French make up fifteen percent of American ancestry, with a similar number of Spanish descendants.

There are a few regions of America where these ethnic identities have become prominent enough to overpower other variables. One of which is the South-West and Miami, which have in many ways become extensions of Latin America. Hispanics make up forty percent of both California and Texas’ population. This is both a very old and new thing. The first European settlers in this region were Spanish, but settled very lightly with only a few thousand people at most. The recent wave of Spanish speakers that has overtaken the South-West in the last forty years is causing one of the most rapid demographic shifts in human history. 

The intensity of this demographic shift is paralleled only by the rapid rise of the European populations over the Native Americans in the 1800s. It’s hard to speak of the long-term consequences of the recent enormous migrations from the Third World to America, given that they have occurred within the last couple generations, which is not long enough to spot any anthropological trends. Perhaps they will integrate into American society, perhaps they will not. Maybe we will see mass deportations, or the replacement of the local populations. It is likely that the countryside will continue to outreproduce the cities, which will become “behavioral sinks”—a term coined by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe the collapse of social behavior that occurs when a population is subjected to extreme overcrowding, rapidly giving way to full population collapse—a significantly more common trend than people think. However the future is yet to be decided, and is in our hands. 

Another ethnic region is the Northern Plains, in which the British cultures were overtaken by Germans and Scandinavians. German Americans are one of the largest demographic groups in America, being the second largest European ethnicity after the English. German ancestry is prominent in a region stretching from Pennsylvania to Oregon, while comprising the vast majority of the population in the Northern Great Plains in states like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. The Scandinavians populated the Dakotas and Minnesota by the Northern railroad, as Anglos didn’t want to live in the cold climate. The Northern plains have produced the highest human development statistics in America since the 20th century, similar to their Nordic home countries alongside cultural traits of social conservatism, economic productivity, relatively socialist politics, and the smothering Jante’s law of social conformity. 

The final regions of America where you cannot separate ethnic identities from regional are the Catholic North-East and French Louisiana. Later Catholic immigrants like the Italians and Irish, but also Poles and French Canadians, migrated to the North-Eastern core of the American North-East, demographically taking over the region. You can see radical shifts in the trajectories of cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia when this occurred. The importance of Catholic migrants varied across the entire Rust Belt, and at times the whole continent. The Irish, who ultimately derive from a Celtic warrior culture, took over governments and institutions, like my ancestors who served in the police for five generations. The Italians worked as low-skill labor, coming over fifty years after the Irish around 1900. They worked themselves up through the corporate system to a higher income and social class than the Irish, with whom they mixed heavily.

The Catholic influence on the North-East made an indelible mark on the region, where local people are still very aware of White ethnic differences, to a degree that often shocks people in the rest of the country. Catholics often took over local governments and public-facing institutions, to the point that it’s easy to forget that in most of the North-East Anglos are still demographically predominant. Until recently Protestant Anglos also ran much of the economic and political power, leading them to culturally assimilate the Catholics. Throw on top of this massive recent migration from the Third World and the managerial-induced behavioral sink that turned against their own populations. In places like New Jersey, you can see many subcultures in a tiny area, from Irish to Black, Latinos, rural Anglos, upperclass WASPs, Indians, and many more. It gives the North-East a hard, cynical edge, but also a toughness not seen in the rest of the country.

A final culture that acts as a microcosm of all the American cultures is French Lousiania. It was established by French Canadians from modern Nova Scotia, who were evicted by the English in the War of Austrian Succession. They were from Poitou on the west coast of France originally, unlike the Quebecois from Normandy and Brittany. They sailed along the entire North American shore, being rejected by English settlers until they picked subtropical Louisiana where Acadian became Cajun. French Louisiana exists as the hollow shell of a greater French Canada that stretched to the Rockies, Arctic, Pittsburgh, and Texas before the Anglo conquest. Louisiana was the Blackest place in America during the colonial period, and is better seen as an extension of the French Caribbean, like Haiti, that was enveloped by another Caribbean-derived culture: the Deep South. Here are two highly specific European societies who generated their reactions to a similar region and climate. Both are distinctly American, but also profoundly different in many ways upon closer inspection.

Perhaps this is the story of America as a whole, of foreign peoples from different places wrestling, sometimes winning, sometimes losing against the land. However, in the process, they created a land unmistakably and distinctly their own. 

A few tweaks by Goethe, however, and the Faustian bargain became a good deal. Now, Mephistopheles bets he can actually satisfy you with an attainable measure of pleasure and power; these you wrest, with his aid, from the gods, mastering war and nature to the degree that you create a new world where a new kind of people, the beneficiaries of your liberating work, can live free to strive without limit. Dying happy, more than the man you were, you surrender your soul to complete the bargain—but the intervention of the divine feminine redirects it toward God in heaven. Even your soul is more and better than it was before you made the bargain. 

Thanks to Goethe, Faust is largely seen today as the image of the sovereign man, whose liberation into full or complete human power is defined by his grant of this power to the human race. In this modern fable man shakes off his debt to the old gods, even Prometheus and Dionysius. Contemporary interpreters are not incentivized by this fact to linger on Faust’s odd soteriology. What matters to today’s Faustian is that the use and development of technological progress to master the universe is a good deal, one that we can consciously and competently know from the outset is a good deal. Mephistopheles can be counted on to deliver on his end of the bargain. He is not a trickster or a cheat. He is not a deceiver. No nightmarish realization of our foolish entrapment awaits. At worst, Mephistopheles promises only the soul’s obliteration in “the eternal empty,” hardly a hellscape of torturous regret. 

The contrarian investor Peter Thiel interprets the Faustian vision as one that hinges on defining the future with precision: “You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it,” he writes in Zero to One. “But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.” The definite optimist must first define his own will in relation to its object—what he wants and why. Fail here, and the already difficult effort of wielding the will becomes insurmountably hard. Mastery—of both the will and the future—slips away. 

If the definite optimist becomes the master, the definite pessimist, who prepares for a specifically bad future, becomes the survivor; but the indefinite man, whether optimistic or pessimistic, becomes a slave, reduced in his stature not only by the mastery wielded by others but by the breakdown of his own agency, both outward-facing into the world and inward-facing into himself. The logic seems neatly to recapitulate the Faustian payoff: master the technique of applying your will to the world, and both you and the world (that is, others who will become more like you) will be better off, perhaps extraordinarily better off. 

But Thiel recognizes that, at the limit, Faust’s high-modern quest opens onto postmodern vistas—not just out there in the world, but within, down to the very core of the Faustian identity, complicating the neat calculus of its grand bargain. From the definite optimist standpoint, Faust’s satisfaction with mastering war and nature in order to create new living space for a newly liberated and agentic people can’t pause or stop at a certain point short of definite futures made obvious by the logic of technological development. To become more and better of a man, a masterful man, just to halt at an arbitrary or random point in the process, doesn’t pause or decelerate one’s self-improvement—it throws it into reverse. One regresses, even decays, probably in what will swiftly become a surprisingly accelerating way. Giving up on mastery speedruns the path to slavery, including the slavery to death. 

Yet the obvious definite future of human acceleration itself—literally how fast we make ourselves go—leads immediately, Thiel emphasizes, to focus the will on traveling near, at, or perhaps even beyond the speed of light. What is curious about travel at faster-than-light speed, as Thiel recently remarked on Joe Rogan’s podcast, is that it seems to tell us something very clear about the identity of entities, for example “aliens,” who would or do travel at that speed. 

“If you have faster-than-light travel,” he argued, “there’s something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level”—a fork in the future arises. Along one fork, your society requires “complete” and demonic totalitarian control: “no one can act independently of anybody else, no one can ever launch a warp drive weapon, and everybody who has that ability is in like a mind meld link” that destroys even the possibility of “libertarian individualistic free agency.” Along the other fork, the opposite arrangement holds: everyone must be “perfectly altruistic, non-self-interested; they have to be angels.” For any faster-than-light civilization, Thiel concludes, “it’s not that they might be demons or angels. They must be demons or angels.” 

At the speed of light, in other words, the Faustian bargain slips Faust’s bonds. The Faustian bargainer can no longer expect the good deal of becoming the fully realized man—more and better than he was before, satisfied in his free mastery of himself and his expandable world—because the price of acceleration beyond light speed is, if perhaps not his soul, then certainly his humanity. What can it profit a Faustian man to gain the universe but lose his self? How could cosmic mastery be enough to satisfy the man who must sacrifice all self-mastery to unlock it?

For the human person convinced no pause, halt, or reversal of technological advancement is viable for the human race, the specter of faster-than-light travel calls into question the very possibility of definite optimism. Theoretical scientists and theorists of technology, from David Deutsch on down, might rhapsodize over the universal and posthuman wonders of computation and consciousness, but definite optimism hinges on the plausibility of choice in agency—if not always independently setting clear goals, at least purposively sculpting, adjusting, or correcting for unfolding futures over time. In wiping human agency from the event horizon, postulated posthuman singularities reveal the specter of a looming breakdown of human will caused by too deterministic—not too indeterminate—a view of the future. 

Human Resources

Faced with this problem, already apparent in the way many millions are responding to today’s pace of technological advancement by opting out of free agency and individual selfhood, some Faustian technologists in Silicon Valley are scrambling to scale as fanatical a cadre of human overachievers as possible—high-energy, high-agency people motivated by the good version of the Faustian bargain that plausibly promises to leave them better off as more prosperous, more powerful, more fully realized human selves. 

This crash program, which amazingly seems not yet to have been described in terms of a new Manhattan Project, does of course entail, and perhaps even courts, human crashes. Under the extreme and increasing pressure of overcompensating for the social collapse of the Faustian will touched off by the tyranny of posthuman scenarios over the accelerationist imagination, individual technologists, as well as partners, teams, and rival factions, all struggle with the industry’s new wave of crashouts, oneshots, meltdowns, and burnouts. Hemmed in by the prophets of ultimate human sacrifice to ultimate technology, today’s ontological underdogs strain for victory in the inner battle that must be won for the outer battle not to be lost. 

If a given human person, replete with vision, courage, freedom, and will, cannot even keep him or herself together while trying to secure a future for human agency, then the future becomes both too vague and too particular, not just postmodern but posthuman: a future inspiring the vast majority to choose now the forms of their destroyers, rather than waiting for them to arrive on alien terms. 

The lone hope of threading this needle rests on a new birth of self-mastery. The rush toward computational superintelligence is pushing the predicament of the Faustian overachiever to a point of crisis. Self-mastery demands deep discernment and experience in the realm of recursion, and recursive improvement, intentional and purposeful, is now considered to be the key pathway—to some, perhaps even the criterion—of artificial superintelligence (ASI). If the humans building toward recursive computational self-improvement are themselves unable to master their own personal process of salutary recursion, the results are very likely to be catastrophic, unpredictable, or both, on the individual as well as the social or even planetary level. One concludes that “AI safety” is actually very difficult to define, much less somehow achieve, without clearly defining and achieving human self-mastery—from the level of the individual technologist to that of the society or the civilization as a whole.

To know mastery of a thing is to know the thing itself. But what is mastery itself? Many valences of the concept of master have tugged and pulled over the centuries. In the modern age, when the obsession with power was at a peak, the definition of mastery was made to kneel before the maximally oppositional power gradient of master/slave. Yet Hegel swiftly slipped the leash of that linear structure by recursively reconceptualizing the two apparent opposites as mere thesis and antithesis, the great precursors to a greater synthesis, spiraling upward in both power and—crucially—authority. 

Power without authority tends to fail even on its own terms, but philosophers and theorists have struggled to define authority since the modern age. Max Weber, classifying types of authority as charismatic, traditional, or rational-legal, hardly settled the debate. The most ancient and unbroken tradition and model of authority is divine authority. To the detriment of Weber’s taxonomy, which reduced religious authority to a subcategory of the charismatic (itself a term redefined away from its original meaning of divine grace), the authoritative power of faith, tradition, reason, and law all stem quite logically on simple theological terms from divine authority. In the wake of modern social science’s inability to provide a sounder conceptual account of authority than theology, philosophy and theory have struggled inconclusively to do so ever since. 

From Power to Authority

Whatever the twists in the trail, the exploration of mastery involved in self-mastery keeps recalling to us that mere power is not enough—a challenge in this moment because power is not very mysterious, while authority, so stubbornly connected in its very conceptualization to the divine, seems inescapably mysterious at heart. The student of self-mastery is confronted constantly by this mystery because of how intimately and unquantifiably human authority relates to the part of the human person that is not simply a creature of the self. Our bid for mastery over our environment, like the claim over our identity made by our humanity itself, arises not entirely from our self-will, but, more radically, from the substrate or ground of that will, which is the givenness of the part of our being our will had no say in receiving or inhabiting. 

As we have known since ancient times, we find ourselves in the position of the plausibility of our dominion arising from characteristics preexisting how we choose to feel about them, reason about them, or act on them. It is awkward, and ultimately unsatisfying, to try to settle for a self-mastery that restricts itself only to the part of our being that arises from our preferences, opinions, and will. Indeed, self-mastery inevitably demands we exercise an authority over the self higher than the whims and wishes it acts to make its own. Whether that points toward mastery unto posthumanity, or simply a higher or truer form of our humanity, hinges on how we understand our relationship to the aspect of our human being which is more and other than merely the self—that is, the aspect which is inherently outside and beyond recursive enclosure. Any serious reckoning with our human status in the context of computational superintelligence must lead us to a place beyond recursion. 

In the onrushing moment, our ability to preserve human self-mastery—even more from the authority our machines seem to hold over us than the power they do—will hinge on our capacity to comprehend, trust, and embody the authority from which our own power to master ourselves receives both its vitality and its virtue. As master cyberneticians know, to well-govern (kybernan) the self is analogous to properly piloting (kybernan) the ship—ships of state, or silicon, very much included. But who among our cybernetic virtuosos has mastered the paradoxically recursive, but not entirely recursive, art of self-mastery? Who can speak well to us with authority we can trust—the authority that issues from the mysterious paradox of self-mastery—about mastering our machines before we choose to become their slaves?

So far, the movements raising their voices as if to try earning that trust have more entrenched than expanded their own group identities. The extent of their overlapping fragmentation would make a full taxonomy unhelpfully burdensome to pick through. A more useful exercise, looking at a handful of the leading groups, focuses on their answers to the question of what authority accessible from within us enables us to pursue and experience mastery over the self. 

None of the following approaches merely appeal to power or powers, but rather to faculties, entities, or phenomena that definitively confer access to practices and outcomes, the potency of which in mastering the unruly or sabotaging self is supremely salutary. That is, they appeal to authorities in virtue of their authoritativeness: 

• Vitalists summon the inner authority of the body, whether more physiological and neurological (Andrew Huberman) or philosophical and mystagogical (Costin Alamairu);
• Transcendentalists appeal to the authority of consciousness, whether more in the key of wellness practices, New Age spirituality, or syncretism—between, say, Buddhism and physiology (Yuval Noah Harari);
• Rationalists invoke free reason: in this vein, neo-stoicism (a la Ryan Holiday) has of late waned in influence relative to the neo-utilitarianism of the Effective Altruists—which appeals to impartial moral reasoning, calculating intelligently about the proper scale and scope of application, but which has significantly shifted its sense of authority toward the more cultlike modality of the postrationalists;
• For the postrats, a shadowed sort of spiritualism, led by charismatic gurus or spirit guides, occupies the throne of authority; eternal archetypes and vision quests in the tradition of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell promise self-mastery through intuitive integration of the ultimate cosmic patterns;
• From there, one can readily slide out of cult mode into occult mode, where the authority of True Will brings the self to heel by unleashing a magical kind of radical autonomy. Whether more through chaos magick (in the Crowley-Parsons-Aquino line) or time-transcendent numerology, often of Kabbalistic influence or provenance, the occultist can shape and reshape both inner and outer reality through ritual on command; 
• Yet occultism can serve as a portal or catalyst (as in the case of Nick Land) to the authority framework of accelerationism—which, as the reigning movement within tech culture today, merits especially close focus. 

Faster, Inc. 

Among the accelerationists, Marc Andreessen recently rose to interviewer David Senra’s bait to affirm “zero” levels of introspection—“as little as possible.” The stated reason—“Move forward! Go!”—is velocity of speech and deeds, like Teddy Roosevelt’s credo “Get action!” in a context where all agency converges on unceasing technique. 

But an esoteric reason is discernible just below the surface here, a kind of meta-teaching: set a baseline of maximum intensity, and watch as the impact sends ripples of reaction throughout your ecosystem. Praise, hate, friendly critique in the messy middle—while lower-agency beings take their places in the discourse dynamics ritual, you, master of your destiny, create breakout space to compound and scale your agency. Act, act, act, while those you disrupted react, and soon you’ll open up exponentially expanded distance the hard work of building can backfill, faster than critics can deconstruct or fans can toss garlands. The spatiotemporal envelope you have spun up, a kind of pocket void revealed to be the uncanny precondition of building things, enables you to be out there reshaping reality while others are held back there in the emergent past by “you,” the virtual self left in your wake—and in their OODA loop. 

By way of illustration, while Andreessen today is commercially popularizing Col. John Boyd’s famous military doctrine of winning all fights by Observing, Orienting, Deciding, and Acting faster than the enemy, his venture capital firm published seven years ago a speech on the OODA loop by advisor Peter Levine, delivered two years before that at the firm’s annual invite-only future-facing summit. Called “The End of Cloud Computing,” Levine’s address implicitly identified the OODA loop with cybernetics itself. “You move from five billion devices to a trillion devices that all need to be managed and coordinated together,” he forecasted. “Every industry will be subject to this.” Present-day critics roasted Andreessen so heartily—ackshually, you terminal nerd, Marcus Aurelius was an introspectionmaxxer—that they hardly even noticed they were erasing themselves from the future, already disappearing over the rearward spatial horizon, trapped in the time crystals of their hijacked OODA loops. 

And yet, a theory of self does survive this process of hyperstitious time-travel. The optimal amount of effort to divert from one’s acceleration is not set by the goal of zero introspection, but rather, yes, “as little as possible.” Absolute zero is notoriously difficult to measure, much less attain, on a metric as seductively qualitative as introspection; relative zero—as little as possible under the circumstances of optimizing for as much acceleration as possible—leaves a ghost of introspection to haunt the halls of the OODA loop’s recursivity machine. There is a curious incuriosity that can’t help but spawn somewhere metaphysically “near” that ghost, and indeed the inevitable whisper of curiosity about the incuriosity—is it doing its job? is it keeping two sets of books?—manifests with still more of a hall pass, still greater a remit, within the region of selfhood cabined off from “self-consciousness.”

At first glance, this terrain of de minimis self-consciousness and imposingly maximal destiny may seem strikingly similar to the well-trod realm of late-modern social theory. In the mid-‘80s, Christopher Lasch followed The Culture of Narcissism with The Minimal Self, an urbane jeremiad that traced the collapse of the overextended high-modern “imperial self” under the pressure of its own manifestations. “Human beings have shrunk to the point of invisibility,” Lasch concluded, “while the images they have made of themselves, grotesquely enlarged to gigantic dimensions and no longer recognizable as human images at all, take on a life of their own.” Like the meme where the “panican” wojak and the “planican” gigachad share the same speech bubble, the only point of contention between Andreessen and Lasch seems to be whether the minimized self unleashing a vast new universe of speed and power is “a good thing” or bad. 

But the question of duration divides them. Whereas Lasch insists that the minimal self, bound to the titans of its own creation, can only die, necessitating a psycho-spiritual escape from both modern secular and ancient pagan notions of selfhood and mastery, the American Dynamism position advanced by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a host of fellow travelers bets firmly on the thesis that humans and titans can coexist indefinitely, tending not toward the annihilation of the human person or of Man—as postmoderns from Foucault to Baudrillard detailed—but the ascension of self and species toward a higher state of being. 

Masters of the Universe

It is a wager for which the brothers Jünger, Ernst and Friedrich, set the table beginning as far back as the 1930s, although not until decades later did the elder, more famous Jünger grasp the full scope of the stakes. “Technology is not a world of neutral means,” he argues in The Worker (1932); “it is the epidermis, the visible skin of the Gestalt of the Worker. Just as the knight once put on armor as the outer form of his rank, the Worker puts on technology as the outer form of his Titanic rank. The machine is therefore not something that man has invented and now uses; rather, man himself is dressed in the machine, and the machine is the clothing in which the new race appears.” 

But fifty years later, in an interview with Die Schere, Jünger warns that “the Worker still needed the organic substrate, the human being as bearer. Today we are moving toward a stage in which the elemental powers detach themselves from the organic altogether. Then the uniform is no longer worn by a living soldier; the uniform begins to move by itself.” Within Jünger’s later notebooks, language evocative of Ballard’s The Crystal World or Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is to be found in his 1959 essay “At the Wall of Time,” the force of inorganic animation is joined by that of an “anonymous spiritualization” which ensures “the person is dissolved” in the impure and diluted residue left behind by crystallization. The final matter to be determined is exactly “what will crystallize?” After the collapse of both human and Titanic selves, only a closed cybernetic loop remains: the mineralization of the spiritual and the spiritualization of the mineral.

For the American dynamist concerned about preserving the high-modern human-Titan symbiosis, the minimal self’s residual disposition to break the accelerative circuit on both intro-retrospective and extro-prospective grounds must somehow be mastered without either annihilating the self or even being seduced into the decelerationist drama of trying to annihilate the self—a more terrible and daunting challenge the longer one looks at it, as introspects from Shakespeare to Houellebecq and from Nietzsche to Baudrillard perfectly well understood. 

In fact, the puzzle of self-mastery—its stubborn gesture beyond itself, to a place that enquires after not just the what of its purpose but the why—has already laid claim to a quantum of dynamist ergs. Lejla Johnsen, Investment Partner at a16z Speedrun, recently announced “Emotional Agility” to be one of the firm’s “Big Ideas for 2026.” This year, she argues, “isn’t about keeping up with the machines,” but “becoming calm, clear, and powerfully human;” rather than “resisting AI,” we must recapture “our innate capacity for emotional resilience, self-connection, and relational depth.” Yes, “machines master precision,” but “only humans master meaning, presence, and connection.” The “speed of change” imposed by the race to ASI “is pushing us toward what truly matters: self mastery. We can’t control the external, but we can strengthen our internal operating systems by using tools that scale emotional intelligence, foster faith, and bridge the isolation AI risks creating.”

In this call to action, a cynic has much to critique. At the surface level, he might apply all the well worked-over tropes about the superficiality of the VC-backed hypebeasts and the lip service of the moneymakers forever a step ahead of the wreckage of their failed investments. But at a deeper level, mere cynicism gives way to a richer, more pungent form of doubt. For it is very easy to signal one’s profundity in contemporary terms simply by reference to self-mastery as the quintessence or apotheosis of self-improvement. One pseudonymous X account, calling itself “Machiavelli Bot,” expertly broadcast exactly that in a single post: “The mind loves shortcuts,” it runs, “and shortcuts create fragile people. Mastery comes from boredom, repetition, mistakes, and the humility to stay a student longer than your ego wants. Every time you chase a quick win, you trade long-term authority for short-term dopamine.” 

Beginning once again at first glance, it appears the account is critiquing the accelerationists from the ground of the philosophical, the foundation of unaided reason which technologists have been seen to favor often enough for them to seem to many to be philosophers in virtue of their being technologists. None less than Robert Greene—the loud orange cover of the trade edition of his 48 Laws of Power signaling furiously from many a techbro’s bookshelf—fell back on the intellectual-grindset take in an X post promoting his new book on Mastery. 

“To rise to the level of mastery requires many hours of dedicated focus and practice,” he begins. “You cannot get there if your work brings you no joy and you are constantly struggling to overcome your own weaknesses. You must look deep within”—wherever that may be—“and come to an understanding of these particular strengths and weaknesses you possess, being as realistic as possible. Knowing your strengths, you can lean on them with utmost intensity. Once you start in this direction, you will gain momentum. You will not be burdened by conventions, and you will not be slowed down by having to deal with skills that go against your inclinations and strengths. In this way, your creative and intuitive powers will be naturally awakened.” 

More color and detail than Machiavelli Bot, to be sure, but more than a little cribbing from (say) Jordan Peterson—“only through discipline can you achieve true freedom”—or Goethe, who toyed with tautology in claiming “anything that liberates the spirit without an increasing growth in self-mastery is destructive.” Begged questions shimmer from beyond the inner walls of the blood-brain barrier behind which these gurus so confidently hold court. Where, after all, is “within?” 

How deep within must you go, and how are you supposed to know, if indeed knowledge alone is your proper guide? Common sense and experience shows that in certain contexts, often those that shock expectation, one’s greatest strengths can suddenly become or expose severe weaknesses. Is it not then irrational to intensitymaxx your greatest strengths? Is strength itself rational? Cannot superb rationality superbly fool the super-rational into believing his genius is his greatest, insuperable strength? If the brain, or the mind, or whatever “consciousness” might be, is not actually located in the deep of the “within” what is? How can you find it? Are you prepared to properly appreciate—or even survive—this descent, or whatever you find at journey’s end? 

Digital Politics, Spiritual War

As the present trajectory of technological development has reopened ultimate inquiries about our human identity and purpose, questions like those facing the merely philosophical approach to self-mastery are now becoming commonplace even among once-committed Silicon Valley rationalists. Signs are everywhere: amid an unprecedented surge in conversions to the ancient Catholic and Orthodox Churches, noted Berkeley philosopher of perception and consciousness Alva Noë was among those received this Easter into the Catholic Church. Mainstream media coverage of the rise in youth conversions has given exposure to new institutions like the Hamilton Society, a private monthly debate forum often hosted at San Francisco’s Star of the Sea Church (also Catholic). Elon Musk now argues that “if you take away religion, you get something in its place which is actually worse than what was there before.” Alex Karp affirms that “the best thing you could do in this country to help people… is expose them to religion.”

And, of late, a Silicon Valley reading group has gained outsized notice for working through Orthodox literary titan Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (or, as sometimes translated, The Possessed). Associated with that book circle is an extensive analysis of the novel’s significance to what self-mastery might mean in the shadow of breakout recursive AI self-improvement. Published to possessedmachines.com, as “The Possessed Machines: Dostoevsky’s Demons and the Coming AGI Catastrophe,” the long essay elaborately processes the apocalyptic dread felt by the anonymous author, a recently-departed member of (presumably) one of the leading hyperscalers. 

Watching the panorama of AI acceleration unfold, the author reflects, “I began to suspect Dostoevsky of a kind of prophecy.” So long ago, the novelist had mastered, “with terrifying precision, the psychological and social dynamics that emerge when a small group of people convince themselves they have discovered a truth so important that normal ethical constraints no longer apply to them. He understood the particular madness of the intelligent, the way abstraction can sever conscience from action. He understood how movements that begin with the liberation of humanity end with its enslavement. And he understood—this is the critical point—that the catastrophe comes not from the cynics but from the believers.”

The first line of my book Human Forever, which I wrote in July of 2021, is this: “Technology once made a god of America. Now America is technology’s slave.” On the second page of the book’s first chapter, I wrote this: “The programs, channels, apps, and virtual realities with which we saturated the world were supposed to make our control of the world complete. Instead the digital swarm unleashed a catastrophe.” Always a Christian of some sort, I now saw that the technological collapse of America’s godlike claim to globalized destiny fulfilled Tocqueville’s grim vision of a future where Americans, thrown back on themselves alone, become confined entirely within the solitude of their own hearts; soon thereafter, on a calm and drizzly Epiphany afternoon, I was baptised and received into my local Orthodox Church. 

Taking Christ at His word, I did not associate catastrophe with the Lovecraftian horror of total human extinction, not at the hands of the digital swarm, of an evil god, nor of anything else. What was to come might at first include undue suffering beyond expectation—perhaps beyond comprehension, as Tesla once described tomorrow’s “man-made horrors”—but the decisive break, the fall of the false gods that tore away our excuses for naively indulging our favorite illusions, had already come.

That, I concluded, was enough to animate the necessary response: not one of centralizing panagogical control in the “altruistic” hands of a self-anointed clerisy, but of correcting—in the heart more than the law—against the linear overextension and the recursive self-consumption of the worshippers of information, intelligence, and consciousness. Christ, as St. Paul had written, “made us competent to serve Him in connection with a new Covenant, which is not a written code but a Spirit; for the written code inflicts death, but the Spirit gives Life.” Obedient in heart to that Life, we can by God’s grace have nice things. For “whoever is faithful with very little will also be faithful with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.”

All of which is to say I was primed for sympathy with the author of “The Possessed Machines”—even hopeful to discover an awakening there about the recourse in the silencing of the heart to which Dostoevsky and his faith refer our overextended overintelligence. Sure enough, the writer avowed that Dostoevsky “saw something true about how intelligent societies destroy themselves,” both “the people who believe they are saving humanity as well as those who want to burn it down.” 

But the writer ventured in uneasy conclusion that “perhaps,” like Dostoevsky’s Stepan Trofimovich, he or she was “constructing a consoling narrative from religious fragments I do not fully believe, trying to make sense of a situation that exceeds my capacity to understand.” It does seem clear the writer badly misses the point of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in concluding “demons are not external enemies but our own capacities turned against us,” which “must possess us fully,” driving “us over the cliff, before we can be healed.” Dostoevsky is hardly alone in recognizing that, while demons may bid us to turn our own powers against us, the acceptance and enactment of that bid is the working of our own will to sin. 

What Dostoevsky leaves us with is not the swine that open the book in its scriptural epigram, but the people left to reckon with the implications of their demise. After their death, “those who kept them fled; and they went away into the city and told everything, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. And behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus.” Only, “when they saw Him, they begged Him to depart from their region” (Matt 8:33-34). 

The living people who should have learned from the lesson of the pigs reacted instead like the fabled Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s other masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. Furious with Christ’s return, which will “trouble us in our work,” the Inquisitor is shaken all the more when his vow to burn the Lord is met only with a kiss. “There is a convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth. He goes to the door, opens it, and addressing Him, ‘Go,’ he says, ‘go, and return no more… do not come again… never, never!’ and—lets Him out into the dark night. The prisoner vanishes.” These two references to banishing Christ in response to His promise of salvation clearly raise the troubling question of why such a gift would elicit such terror. A deeper question lies within: banish Him from where exactly—if not the self, the self in its innermost place, its deepest redoubt? 

The Dostoevskian Moment

The answer to this deeper matter suffuses Dostoevsky’s corpus. As Dr. Timothy Bartel has observed, “the figure of the saintly martyr is continually present in Dostoevsky’s novels: In Crime and Punishment, the self-sacrificing Sonya helps the twisted and confused Raskolnikov, reading to him from the gospels of the resurrection of Lazarus to show how resurrection is possible even for a murderer like him. In The Idiot, the pure and ever-forgiving Prince Myshkin will not give up on loving the self-destructive and murderous Rogozhin, even when it costs the Prince his sanity. In The Possessed, the saintly bishop Tikhon offers forgiveness to the nihilist Stavrogin, and the selfless nurse Sofya tends and reads the gospel to the dying agnostic Stephen. Finally, in Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha lays down his whole life’s dream of being a monk to save the souls of his brothers.” But what about me, the self, rebelling against self-sacrifice, cries out to Christ and His witnesses! If you have come to open my eyes to my need to self-sacrifice, please turn right around and leave—and never come back! 

But Dostoevsky doesn’t leave it there. What’s about the self that makes it reply in this rebellious way is not found, so to speak, in the self itself, but rather in what has enslaved the self at its core, in the heart: its passions, its dreams, its false gods, and empty idols. Dostoevsky, who “knew the gospel almost from the cradle” and “the lives of the saints… before [he] learned how to read,” felt the overwhelming compulsion to show his contemporaries that today, right now, at any time, only one authority could master the self by delivering it from its deathly bondage: the authority, as Paul had put it, of “Christ in me”—the divine love that brought forth life from the painful and frightening purification of the heart. 

At its fullest extent, Christian self-sacrifice takes up, as did Christ, a cross for the sake of all. “There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men’s sins,” instructs Elder Zossima—inspired by real-life saints Tikhon and Ambrose—in The Brothers Karamazov. “As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.” A terrifying prospect for devotees of other approaches to self-mastery: how am I supposed to do the work of mastering myself if instead I must put my time and effort into living out forgiveness and responsibility for all? 

Most Christians, to be honest, probably don’t manage to live out their lives in the manner of Saints Tikhon and Ambrose… but even at a lower level, a much lower level, tensions and tradeoffs arise. Can someone who focuses first and foremost on breaking the stranglehold of fruitless passion and desire in their heart find the time and motivation to save the world? Unmask the Antichrist? Go abroad in search of monsters to destroy? Or even simply choose a good quest? 

Doestoevsky’s Christian teaching tells the would-be self-master that fearfully beginning to draw up a list of what beloved goals you might have to surrender to God is already mistaken. Rather than driving away God now, to buy yourself time to deal with your worldly life, welcome Him now, with all the love and forgiveness for all that entails, and see what begins to happen to you one moment at a time. Trust that, indeed, if first you seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, then all you really need here in the world shall be added unto you. 

Perhaps paradoxically to some, the gospel according to Dostoevsky works both ways when it comes to our relationship with advancing technology. As one is not commanded to build more data centers, neither is one commanded to call in the airstrikes. As one is not commanded to put one’s faith in worldly elites (or otherworldly ones), neither is one commanded to fear those elites will wipe out the human race. As one is not commanded to use Bitcoin…

In and of themselves, our tools promise neither Heaven on earth nor Hell. The question is whether those who wield them, beginning with yourself, do so on the basis of an authority you can, to the bottom of your heart, really trust. 

This mission was the maxim of the epoch. Flat Design wasn’t limited to digital interfaces but expanded through interfaces to “matriculate” contemporary life. One could speak of an invasion of synthetic flatline construct forms. In his seminal work Meltdown, Nick Land describes an act of planetary capture by technocapital singularity. The globalization of software platforms globalized a cybernetic social structure. The vibe was aspirational-generic. Visual expressions included London luxury apartments sold off-plan in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, the sparse interiors of third wave coffee shops, and the international seriality of flatpack furniture. 

Transactions, including psychological transactions, became electronically mediated, qualitative sensitivity decreased, and reality became more abstract and synthetic. Irony lost legibility, spontaneity diminished, and code replaced it. New network identities and scripts proliferated. Subcultures disappeared or were assimilated. All this proceeded from the flat design matrix. 

Flat design (flat cybernetics) reshaped existence, and therefore transformed experience by creating a new planetary information layer and mobilizing it through phones. This new layer was experienced unconsciously as an aesthetic metaphysics silently reticulating individual and group relations. 

None of this was simply regressive or bad. Georges Bataille wrote that he couldn’t understand a myth unless he believed it himself. Understanding flat design requires recognizing its utopian dimension. This dimension is visible in the early twentieth century avant-garde, and especially in the work of Kandinsky, whose paintings presented what his nephew, philosopher, and French bureaucrat Kojéve described as a “uni-totality that exists in the same way as do trees, animals, rocks, men, States [or] clouds.”

Kandinsky framed his work as an attempt to channel spiritual forces beyond the paradigm of mimetic replication. He wrote that “color is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” Instead of representing a naturalistic reality, his paintings interface directly with the viewer, synesthetically, as a musical machine, or synthesizer. For Kojéve, Kandinsky’s paintings formed a preview of the universal and homogenous state awaiting mankind at the end of history: an “abandonment of individuality, that is in fact of humanity.” 

Human beings become “living bodies with human form, but emptied of spirit… who construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, perform musical concerts in the manner of frogs and cicadas, play like young animals, and indulge in love like adult beasts.” At the end of history interiority has been totally externalized as species-being. The illustration style Corporate Memphis, or what design critic Eli Schiff called humans of flat design depicts the realization of this world. Facebook adopted the style in 2017 before it colonized other networks and apps including Airbnb, Uber, and Hinge. 

Kandinsky’s symphonic abstractions became mutant humanoids engaged in arcane interactions. Corporate Memphis displayed the user from the perspective of a Skinner box, an operant conditioning chamber, following an individualized program. From the perspective of the platform, effects could be adjusted to incentivize desirable behaviour. Dreamworlds can be generated and imploded. Icons can be dangled. Statements, individuals, and narratives could be silenced, or triangulated or amplified to code agendas and finesse engagement by knowing what to show, to whom, and when.

The global platform proposed a new idea and form of social information space where information was produced with every action and mined to incite more. Competition is inherent in the system, vulnerabilities can be exploited, but incentives can be changed. Because everybody now was using the same platforms, social life became more uniform and claustrophobic. At the same time culture virtualized and became disposable, a carousel of current things and a conveyor belt of takes. The signature form was the stream: content without form. Privacy liquefied into voyeuristic experience. Media blurred into content. 

Flat design both expressed and imposed this reality. It is possible to speak about a total art of flat design following theorist Boris Groys’ famous analysis of socialist realism as a Gesamtkunstwerk devoted to transforming the USSR into a work of art. Flat design was globalist realism which updated aesthetic totality for rhizomatic production. Despite their verisimilitude, the protagonists of Socialist Realism were not human beings but “the earthly incarnation of the demiurge” representing the mythological substructure of Soviet society. The humans of flat design were emissaries of global plasticity. “They almost seem to be in the employ of some extraterrestrial bureau planning a trip to Earth,” Groys writes, “they want to make their envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the cracks in the mask.”

Beyond Flatland

Socialist Realism was never repudiated in the Soviet Union, but slowly lost its monopoly. With Khrushchev’s thaw, Warsaw Pact art books and magazines began appearing in Moscow. By the early seventies Russian art circles were absorbing ideas from the West, including American pop art, and pre-war Russian avant-garde influences conserved by some private collectors.

The result was the emergence of Moscow Conceptualism, or what Boris Groys originally called, in his 1979 article for the magazine A-Ya, Moscow Romantic Conceptualism. Figures linked with the scene are today internationally recognized: mixed-media postmodernists Komar and Melamid, the painter Erik Bulatov, the installation artist Ilya Kabakov, the poet Dmitri Prigov and Groys himself, its spokesmen.

Because it morphologically followed the total art of Stalinist Socialist Realism, Moscow Conceptualism suggests a speculative blueprint for an aesthetic that now could follow flat design. The situation of the Moscow artists parallels in some respects the situation of non-conformist intellectuals and artists today: tolerated, but not supported, adrift and alienated in a crumbling utopia. For Groys, Moscow Conceptualism was romantic because it emphasised personal experience against the impersonality of the Soviet state. The figure of a visionary outsider genius slash lunatic recurs throughout their work. Soviet experience was a key theme. Asked about his influences from the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde, Kabakov answered: “The things you are talking about were visible to all the civilized world, but my friends and I saw Maria Ivanova in the communal kitchen frying meat patties.” But Kabakov was also influenced by the children’s books he illustrated, by the painter Kazimir Malevich, and Western authors Dante, Kafka, and Cervantes to detach an individuality from the Soviet totality.

These thematic resources (or kinds of resources) are still available. But the contemporary situation is more complex than the Soviet experience. The West is both politically decaying, and experiencing a rapid technonomic transformation. The implications of this shift remain systematically undertheorized also because there is no longer a social organ to develop and mediate concepts. Art no longer seems to play this role. Culture has imploded, lost legitimacy, and lost autonomy; it is now regarded with a mixture of suspicion and indifference. 

In his unfinished manuscript Crypto-Current, Nick Land analyzed the historical conjuncture as the culmination of the Enlightenment utopia of public reason, which reached its definitive expression in Kant, and its final sentinel in Jürgen Habermas. The shift is the symbolic shift from Habermas to Palantir and Alex Karp. Critique is superseded by a cryptographic metaphysics which routes around trusted third parties. Software becomes the paradigm of creative critique. The intellectual is replaced by the influencer, identity is replaced by performance, and the nation is replaced by the network. Art works become “proofs of stake”—cryptographic hash or blocks inside a planetary computational machinery. From this perspective, calls for patronage for art take on a cadence of nostalgia. Capital, reconceived as intelligence, is now the only game in town; artists lose their legibility to become wandering mercenaries, alchemists, madmen, or priests.

The Moscow artists instituted an informal artistic research circle or kruzhok as a delimited public for exchanging and developing ideas. Work was presented in private apartments and the significance of making objects was deprioritized in favor of discussion and experiments. In 1915 Roman Jakobson had convened the Moscow Linguistics Circle; Western avant-garde movements were also circles which orchestrated groups of artists as an audience for each other, and performers for the general public. What the formation created was distance, and interiority, pregnant with meaning: in the centre was a matador or void. 

Kabakov’s most important innovation was the “total installation”—an aesthetic space a viewer enters and inhabits as if an astronaut on the surface of an alien moon. Soviet propaganda supplied a shared visual language, and a field of inquiry. Komar and Melamid’s “Sots-Art” reframed Soviet mass visual culture in the same way as Pop art reframed comics and advertising. The implication was that Western pop culture and official Soviet culture were not essentially different, and only angled differently: the one pursuing freedom, and the other organization, but both concluding in a democratized, and centralized humanity.

The signal event in the history of Moscow Conceptualism was the Bulldozer Exhibition, an unofficial, and therefore illegal, wildcat group show staged in the Belyayevo urban forest in September 1974, which was broken up by police forces using bulldozers and water cannons. Event organizer Oscar Rabin, who had proceeded through the exhibition clinging to a bulldozer as it destroyed artworks, was arrested and eventually forced to leave Russia. The contemporary equivalent was the activist campaign organized against the post-internet art gallery LD50 in London in February 2017. The Bulldozer Exhibition had been intended as a provocation to test the resolve of the authorities. LD50 did not have this intention: they had organized a conference about neoreaction and an exhibition of outsider artists as a research project. But their program provoked outraged denunciations months after it finished in the paroxysm which followed Trump’s inauguration. 

The event marked the entrance of a new structure of power which defined the years of hysteria before Trump’s return to office. An activist network mobilized through Tumblr and Facebook which demanded that the gallery be shut down. This message was repeated across different platforms and amplified by global media. Hyperbolic claims proliferated. Critics were swarmed, and silenced. Local politicians, art institutions, and the global art press supported the campaign. Following a February demonstration against the gallery, curator Lucia Diego organized a final show—Corporeality—a “total installation” organised around an imaginary social media platform called Kwaly, which invited the attendees to destroy printed copies of offending material by feeding it through a shredder. Then she disappeared. 

The campaign against LD50 established a schism in art—one was either with the activists, or against them—and thus reestablished a simulacrum of urgency. The official art system supported the activists mainly due to fear. For non-conformists, what had happened was a real enigma, but it was both too early to address it, and too late.

Art now was subject to swarm policing. Creative space was subordinate to activist cyberspace, private space was now a province of the network. The same sequence repeated in response to an exhibition titled “People of Colour” at the gallery Mercy Pictures in Auckland, New Zealand in 2020. The show consisted of an installation of four hundred miniature paintings of flags from across the political spectrum. On the opening night the gallery was vandalized and Mercy Pictures’ Instagram account was flooded with threats and abuse. The objections to cultural appropriation for including Maori flags, and by “platforming fascist ideology” by featuring fascist flags. Other incidents could also be mentioned. Victims ended up silenced and burned, or on social media as anons. Anon culture was a theoretically free intellectual and political space, but the price of entry to that space was internal exile from the world. For a brief moment, it offered a Neo-Dadaist carnival of frenetic collage and iconoclasm. Later, it came to orbit around outsized and cartoonish figures, and it is now in decaying orbit, selling podcasts and running third rate salons.

LD50 had exhibited outsider artists formed on the internet who fragmented as soon as the gallery closed. No one yet has followed in its footsteps. What was blocked, and remains blocked, was not a different ideology, but a whole spectrum of realities: by the sinews of the culture war, the pandemic, and the oblivion of the pandemic. Nonconformist discourse was splintered and failed to develop. A fashion designer is said to have directed her models for a show to think of “a Bermuda Triangle in the desert.” The line captures perfectly where we are.

The austere job market for policy wonks in Canada is downstream of the country’s robust party system. Governing parties don’t need to outsource their policy development and, when they do, ideas can be supplied by ad hoc committees, commissions, and consultants that evaporate into the ether when their work is done. The parties themselves are highly member-driven. Some of my earliest memories were from the stuffy basement of our local Liberal Party headquarters where my parents volunteered. Though I barely understood what was going on, I relished the ritual of staying up past my bedtime to watch election results come in while old Anglican ladies manufactured triangular sandwiches.

American politics is a completely different beast. The framers of the U.S. Constitution had an aversion to partisan politics and so designed a system of checks and balances that grants individual elected officials enormous free agency. While transaction costs and the game theory that pulls electoral democracies towards a two party system—termed Duverger’s law—made parties an inevitability, progressive anti-patronage reforms and the move to primary elections have long since eroded the social base for thick, membership-driven political parties and the efficient party machines which excelled at delivering votes for politicians. .

Modern U.S. think tanks, and the broader nonprofit advocacy world, emerged in their place. Ostensibly nonpartisan organizations such as the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute serve as holding tanks and convening spaces for Democratic and Republican functionaries while they are in and out of power. Yet because the parties themselves contain internal factions, the establishment’s grip on power is contingent on the makeup of Congress and the stochastic process behind party nominations. Given tight staff budgets, lawmakers outsource their legislative, communications, and networking strategies to whichever policy outfit overlaps with their political philosophy and electoral base. This ideas industry allows movement conservatives to turn to the Heritage Foundation, trade unionists to the Economic Policy Institute, libertarians to the Cato Institute, and so on.

Other countries’ political parties outsource to independent think tanks too, but usually within the context of a formal parliamentary relationship. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Germany, for instance, is an independent think tank that functions as the policy organ of the center-right Christian Democratic Union. Crucially, however, over 95% of its funding comes from the German government and they have no direct intraparty competitor. Such think tanks are thus more like adjuncts to the formal party system than genuinely independent policy actors. In contrast to the U.S. policy ecosystem, policy development is therefore far more aligned to party incentives, though at the potential cost of being overly conformist and deferential to the status quo.

Associations Without Members

In recent decades, ideological self-sorting and the consolidation of power under leadership has made Congress look and act more like a parliament. Yet without the complementary institutions that make parliaments work, it’s a tenuous equilibrium at best. The national parties, to the extent they still exist, are largely lifestyle brands attached to fundraising funnels. Unlike in actual parliamentary democracies, lawmakers have no direct obligation to vote with their party. Votes must instead be whipped through horse-trading and indirect sanctions, such as the denial of powerful committee assignments or the withdrawal of support on re-election campaigns.

The nonprofit advocacy world helps grease the wheel of party cohesion by mobilizing activists, lobbyists, pollsters, and grassroots outreach whenever a big vote is afoot. These are what Matthew Yglesias refers to as “the groups.” While the number of such organizations may appear large and unruly, they typically derive core funding from a countable number of upstream foundations or philanthropists. 

Funders are drawn from a similar social class on both the left and right, and are close enough to Dunbar’s number within any given area to enable interpersonal forms of coordination i.e. the sorts of communicative action governed by trust, reputation, and conformity to shared norms. Yet given the insulation of funders and advocates from electoral imperatives, there is nothing to prevent them from self-organizing around the sorts of self-defeating policy platforms that make pollsters like David Shor cringe. On the contrary: without the moderating forces of intraparty bargaining within a consolidated party superstructure, ideological clichés become the only viable Schelling point around which to organize collective action.

Endemic political alienation is then a predictable side effect of the United States’ disintermediated power structure. The bulk of voters have weak identification with either major party, and, beyond casting the periodic plebiscite, are largely cut out of democratic participation. While the old school patronage system had its ugly side, voters could at least expect that electing Joe Schmoe to Congress would get their community some money for a new post office or public park. This created programmatic linkages between democratic participation and policy outcomes, reinforcing faith in the system. I suspect the breakdown of those linkages, not just in the U.S. but in countries around the world, created the tinder for populism and “The Revolt of the Public”—writer Martin Gurri’s term for the rise of populism in the information age, given the power of the internet to simultaneously expose corruption and mobilize mass movements. In the end, we didn’t so much dismantle the old patronage system as create an all new one, only through institutions that are far more performative than formative.

The political economy of America’s nonprofit sector is typified by what the political scientist Theda Skocpol has called “associations without members.” Beginning in the 1960s, large foundations like Ford and Rockeller began to fund professional network organizations in law, civil rights, consumer rights, feminism, and environmentalism. Steadily, the model of foundation-funded, D.C.-based advocacy organizations came to be the dominant one on the center-left. Unlike unions, churches, and other mass membership organizations, such nonprofits only speak for their ostensible constituencies vicariously. Opinion polling and technocratic social science thus replaced the voices of ordinary people that mass membership organizations had once served to aggregate and orient towards collective action.

The right eventually followed a similar pattern. The conservative legal movement was originally spawned to counter the liberal legal network and broader “Rights Revolution,” helping to entrench the U.S. power structure around the internecine conflicts of lawyerly elites. The power of the judiciary in American society thus became a forum for advancing ideological projects and social movements. While the left embraced the interest group liberalism of the Great Society era, from civil rights and employment law to the consumer protections movement, the right oriented around the ideological motifs favored by their anti-communist funders. 

As if anticipating Robert Conquest’s Second Law that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing,” the original funder of the Federalist Society and the Law and Economics movement, the John M. Olin Foundation, was established in 1953 with a mandate to spend down all its assets within a generation of Mr. Olin’s death in order to prevent ideological drift. A similar ideological purity later manifested in the global network of free market think tanks created to promote economic liberalization at home and abroad. 

As political scientist Steven Teles has noted, this “helped generate some of the characteristic features of contemporary elite polarization.” On the left, for instance, the unrooted nature of elite advocacy organizations encourages “an embrace of positions on social issues that are not widely supported by the actual people being advocated for.” On the right, meanwhile, “it encouraged an economic policy that was at odds with the actual preferences of conservative voters” in areas like entitlement reform, trade, and immigration—all areas where Republican policy elites historically leaned libertarian.

Advocacy organizations on both sides are trapped in something of a prisoner’s dilemma: even if progressive and conservative funders recognize that they’re burning hoards of money while making our politics less functional, the incentive to defect is too great, as unilateral disarmament would simply cede territory to the other side. Instead, funders on the left and right have, if anything, a deep envy for the other’s total embrace of strategic rationality: progressives are perennially trying to create their own version of the American Legislative Exchange Council, while conservatives pine for the institutional money of progressives so they can stop being so reliant on their own often stingy billionaires.

Despite a growing number of nonprofit organizations, the number of “social welfare organizations and beneficent societies” fell 39 and 62 percent respectively between 2003 and 2023. The archetypical nonprofit is now no longer a church or soup kitchen but rather a vague educational organization. I don’t think this is what de Tocqueville had in mind when he remarked upon the depth of American civil society.

The Anti-Social Impact of Nonprofits

Anecdotally, I suspect the spread of Potemkin civil society is the flip side of America’s overproduction of college-educated knowledge workers: if you’re unable to cut it at McKinsey, a nonprofit job is a good deal, providing lower but stable pay in exchange for social prestige. Of course, as a collective action problem, the advocacy arms race could easily be forestalled by amending nonprofit law or the U.S. tax code. But who would fund that white paper? The endogeneity of U.S. policymaking to organizations dependent on private philanthropy makes reforms aimed at reining in the sector nearly impossible to imagine. As a result, nonprofits and foundations remain deeply undertheorized compared to, say, corporate governance or public administration.

Ultimately, the size and scope of America’s nonprofit sector is powered by generous charitable deductions, an unusually progressive income tax, lax rules and oversight, the depth of U.S. capital markets which create windfalls that must be quickly dispersed to hit payout thresholds, and a large ecosystem of private foundations, trusts, and endowments. In 2016, 1.44% of U.S. GDP was donated to nonprofit organizations, more than any other country and nearly twice as much as New Zealand, the runner up. An incredible 38 of the 54 largest private foundations in the world by endowment value are based in the U.S., while Canada has only one. Simply put, the scale of U.S. private philanthropy is unlike anything in the world.

Separate from its ideological composition, the peculiar power of American philanthropy likely weakens U.S. state capacity, creating intrinsic barriers to the left’s vision of social democracy. Sweden and Norway, for example, have some of the lowest rates of nonprofit employment in Europe, rivaled only by former communist countries. Yet they also have some of the highest rates of social capital. The secret seems to be Scandinavia’s rich history of mutual aid, which culminated in universal, publicly administered social programs that crowded out the need for third-party providers, combined with sector-wide collective bargaining agreements that reduced the need for “advocacy without representation.” It’s a legacy that’s recently begun to reverse under what most leftist sociologists would recognize as the dreaded influence of neoliberalism.

In this light, the conflation of “the neoliberal turn” with Reaganomics is about two decades too late. Instead, the regime change that displaced member-led parties and the countervailing power of robust labor unions first started in the mid-1960s, when large foundations swelled on post-war growth and tax avoidance to fill the void. Collective bargaining and machine politics were summarily replaced with a technocratic “policy state.” And what’s a policy state without policy experts? Thus the modern advocate was born.

Needless to say, the results have been mixed. As Claire Dunning documented in her 2022 book Nonprofit Neighborhoods, the new elect made it their project to solve America’s social problems—hunger, crime, urban poverty, racial exclusion, and so on—through applied social science, administered via grants to a complex of nonprofit providers, evaluators, and technicians. A characteristic example was the “New Careers for the Poor” program that gave those dislocated by urban deindustrialization entry-level roles in the human services sector, including health, education, and welfare administration. Though embraced by Great Society policymakers as a path to upward mobility, it largely consigned the predominantly African American women hired through the program to low-pay dead-end jobs, reinforcing labor-market stratification by race, gender, and credentials. 

Neoliberalism is associated with privatization. But delegating services to nonprofits is no less a form of privatization, particularly if they’re paid for by the tax-sheltered surplus value of long-dead capitalists. As Dunning argues, governments and foundations effectively “deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place.”

This potted history of America’s nonprofit political economy is essential context for understanding the rise of Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump effectively gamed the broken primary system by mobilizing the nativist wing of the Republican base—a large but suppressed minority—but was subsequently beset by the incongruences between his agenda and the libertarian proclivities of the Beltway conservative movement. By his second term, conservative think tanks had largely reconstituted around a Trump-aligned counter-elite, including through new organizations such as American Moment and the America First Policy Institute.

As a first order of business, the second Trump administration set about deconstructing the left-wing NGO complex from branch to root. With the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), large swaths of federal contracts were canceled, academic funding streams were choked off, and whole agencies were shuttered, from USAID to the Department of Education. These moves were less about policy than they were about institutionalized power—an effort to unwind the left’s structural entrenchment in the shadow of the Long Great Society.

Until Trump, it was hard to imagine the polarizing role of nonprofits and Big Philanthropy fading anytime soon. Rather suddenly, the role of the think tank and traditional advocacy organization is truly up in the air. Indeed, given the Trump administration’s embrace of unitary executive theory, consequential policy decisions are now more likely to be made by political appointees charged with translating the President’s agenda into action. Traditional vectors for influence within the regulatory communities that surround core federal agencies—aka “the deep state”—have thus been closed off.

Meanwhile, the maturation of Silicon Valley as a distinct power center in U.S. politics has led start-ups to supplant nonprofits as the social impact model of choice for young idealists. Venture capital funding, with its expectation that most startups will fail, has even begun to resemble a form of philanthropy with West Coast characteristics.

America, being a country of Protestant nonconformists without an established church, has always had an unusually zealous religious economy, with schisms and denominations galore. Rather than disappear with the decline of organized religion, those cultural impulses largely transmuted into the work of secular think tanks and social activist organizations. Even the contrast between old-money nonprofits and venture-backed startups can be recast in terms of the classic Protestant schism over whether to give primacy to charity or vocation. The devolution of U.S. politics into a jungle of warring activists, each claiming to be building the one true “movement,” is a reflection of that same low church Protestant ethic. It’s enough to make me miss those old Anglican ladies and their triangular sandwiches.

Over the past half century, Washington has repeatedly armed Kurdish groups in Middle Eastern conflicts, only to leave them exposed or outright abandon them in the next. In 1975, the U.S. abruptly pulled its support from Iraqi Kurdish forces, leaving them to face severe reprisals from the Saddam Hussein regime. During the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. encouraged but then failed to support another Kurdish uprising in Iraq, leaving them to be again crushed by Iraqi forces. In 2019, U.S. forces withdrew from northern Syria, exposing Kurdish allies to a Turkish offensive. Yet the relationship endures because Kurdish groups believe they can exploit Washington in return. The U.S. gains a proxy force and the Kurds gain a conditional patron to advance their own ambitions.

The latest iteration of this relationship is unfolding in the mountains of northern Iraq, where exiled Iranian Kurdish militant groups have been strengthened by Washington and Tel Aviv to fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran. On February 22, five of these groups formed a coalition, pledging to coordinate efforts to overthrow the Islamic Republic and advance Kurdish autonomy inside Iranian Kurdistan, what they call Rojhelat, meaning “where the sun rises” or “east” in Kurdish. 

Three weeks before Israel and the U.S. launched the war against Iran, I visited a training camp for one of the most radical groups in this coalition, the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), just outside Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq. While some Iranian Kurdish groups advocate for a federal system in Iran or greater Kurdish autonomy, the PAK has outright separatist ambitions. The PAK was the only Kurdish militant group to admit to launching attacks against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces during the nationwide uprising in January, in which thousands of Iranians were slaughtered by the regime.

“I want to thank America for its position against the Islamic Republic. To bring down this regime after 47 years will require outside support,” said Adila Jaff, a commander in PAK’s all-female unit. “When America launches its attack, our fighters will enter Rojhelat and pursue our goal of an independent Kurdish state,” she said. Female fighters have become a much publicized feature of many Kurdish militant groups, reflecting a political tradition that links women’s participation in combat to Kurdish self-determination—and a symbol of alignment with Western liberal values, likely with the aim of attracting Western support.

But more than four weeks since the beginning of the war, the Kurds remain apprehensive about launching a ground offensive, as Washington equivocates on its support and Tehran heavily bombards the Kurds along its western border. On March 4, Iran fired a ballistic missile at the same PAK base I visited weeks earlier, killing one and injuring three. Since the start of the war, Iran has launched dozens of ballistic missile and drone attacks against Kurdish coalition forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, but the Kurds are yet to launch any meaningful retaliation.

“The Kurds see uncertainty ahead in the war; whether that means U.S. long term commitment or whether the regime is sufficiently weakened. They would likely want guarantees of more long term support,” said Seth J. Frantzman, a Middle East analyst. “They’ve seen how Kurdish groups in Syria or the KRG in Iraq have had mixed results regarding long-term Western commitments. They are naturally cautious about putting it all on the line,” he said.

But the Kurds have deeply exposed themselves to Iranian attacks by signaling to Iran that an offensive was imminent without having a viable plan to launch one. Iran now has the initiative and, absent far more substantial support from the U.S. and Israel, an overwhelming battlefield advantage. They are already absorbing substantial losses by having walked down this path to begin with.

The Trump administration’s decision in late January to abandon its Syrian Kurdish allies in favor of the central government in Damascus is the latest example of American support for the Kurds expiring as strategic calculations shift. In their final week of autonomous rule, on the frontlines and in their receding strongholds, the Syrian Kurds I met with spoke bitterly—some even vengefully—about Washington’s betrayal.

“We fought ISIS for not only ourselves, but for America and the entire world. Now the [U.S.-led] coalition won’t even answer our calls,” said Avin Khalil, an administrator at a detainment facility for ISIS-linked families in northeast Syria. Since the Syrian government took control of the region, the U.S. estimates that tens of thousands of ISIS-linked detainees have escaped similar facilities, and are now unaccounted for. “When these men commit terrorist attacks in the west, the blood will be on America’s hands. I hope it happens,” Khalil said. 

The Kurds of Iran are merely on the other side of that patronage life cycle. On March 3, a CNN report claimed that the CIA had been working for the past several months to arm Kurdish forces along the Iran-Iraq border, with the goal of fomenting a popular uprising inside Iran. The U.S. has been heavily arming Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria for more than a decade as part of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, and also provided some limited support to Iranian Kurdish groups which have strong historical ties to Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad. 

In its report, CNN cited an anonymous Iranian Kurdish official who said that “Kurdish opposition forces are expected to take part in a ground operation in western Iran, in the coming days.” The next day, Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani was asked whether Israeli strikes in western Iran were being carried out to support a Kurdish offensive, to which he said that Israel had been “operating very heavily in western Iran to degrade the Iranian regime’s capabilities and to open up the way to Tehran, and to create freedom of operations.” 

On March 5, Trump said in an interview with Reuters that a Kurdish offensive would be a “wonderful idea.” On March 6, Reuters reported that Iranian Kurdish militias had consulted with the United States about how and whether to attack Iran, and that the prospect of a cross-border offensive was gaining traction. 

However Trump quickly backed off, telling reporters on March 7 that “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran… They’re willing to go in, but I’ve told them I don’t want them to go in… The war is complicated enough as it is… We don’t want to see the Kurds get hurt or killed.”

Turkey appears to have been instrumental in pressuring the United States against supporting a Kurdish offensive. On March 7, Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan said he had received assurances from Marco Rubio that Washington had “no intention of arming Kurdish groups in Iran.” “I have no doubt that [Turkey] applied maximum pressure across the board to prevent any sort of offensive by the Kurds taking place,” said Chris Kilford, Canada’s former defense attaché to Turkey.

Turkey is wary that heavily armed Kurdish groups could emerge as a cross-border threat similar to the PKK, said Sangar Khaleel, an expert on Kurdish affairs. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and has close ties to the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), one of the groups in the Iranian Kurdish coalition.

The coalition is estimated to have a combined force in the high thousands. Despite their newly established coordination via the coalition, their fighters are believed to be spread thin across the Iran-Iraq border and are lightly equipped. While airstrikes have significantly degraded IRGC infrastructure and capabilities, its ground forces remain largely intact. A U.S. ground offensive would be costly and difficult; for the Kurds to go it alone would be suicidal.

The coalition is aware of such risks and fears mass reprisals if it were to launch an attack without backup. Frantzman says, “Even if the IRGC appears to have weakened in their region, many fear the IRGC is only hiding in civilian clothes, waiting to carry out reprisals. Four and a half decades of suffering under such reprisals make the Kurds keenly aware of the cost.”

Fomenting broad internal unrest across Iran appears to have been a central component of Israel and the United States’ plan to trigger regime collapse. According to a report in The New York Times, the countries believed that sustained internal pressure—like what was seen during Iran’s nationwide uprising in January—combined with a Kurdish offensive and American and Israeli airpower, could tip the balance towards regime collapse. Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea reportedly said that within days of the conflict starting, Israeli intelligence services would be able to trigger civil unrest that would destabilize or even collapse the regime. Barnea sold this idea to Netanyahu, who sold it to Trump, and so it was set in motion. 

Twenty-year-old Glara Ilami spent a week in January protesting in the streets of Ilam, a Kurdish-majority city in Iran, before contacting the PAK and fleeing to Iraq to join them. She’s one of many Iranian Kurds that are now based with the coalition in Iraqi Kurdistan, hoping to cross back over soon with a rifle in hand. “When the U.S. strikes, Kurdistan’s Free Army will move in to establish our own state,” Ilami told me in early February.

The death toll of the uprising is difficult to verify. But even the lower-bound, confirmed toll is staggering—more than 7,000 killed. The Kurds, just like the rest of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, have been wary about returning to the streets ever since and facing more brutal repression.

But the opposition was never a unified movement to begin with. Kurdish separatist ambitions put them at odds with the broader, Persian-majority opposition, which insists on maintaining a unified state in the event of regime collapse. “The protests in Persian areas were mainly focused on inflation and the currency. The people of Kurdistan, however, want our own independent state. We want U.S. and international support to liberate our land from the occupation of Iran,” Ilami said.

Ethnic separatism in Iran is one of the regime’s main justifications for repression in minority areas. “By framing ethnic dissent as a threat to national unity, the state delegitimizes opposition in those areas,” said Flora Khani, an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and activist from Tabriz. Iran’s leading opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi, came out strongly against Kurdish separatism shortly after the Iranian Kurdish coalition was established in late February, saying that “Iran’s territorial integrity is non-negotiable.”

On March 20, I attended Netanyahu’s first press conference since the start of the war from a bunker in Jerusalem. When asked about the possibility of a ground component to the war, Netanyahu responded “You can’t do revolutions from the air… it’s up to the Iranian people… to choose the moment, and to rise to the moment. We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to exploit those conditions at a certain point.”

However a renewed uprising appears unlikely at this point, as Iranians would have to take to the streets amid a devastating U.S. and Israeli air campaign, knowing their compatriots were killed in January by a regime now locked in an existential fight.

Netanyahu didn’t exude much confidence in the prospect when he said that, “it is too early to tell if the Iranian people will exploit the conditions we are creating for them to take to the streets. I hope that will be the case. We are working toward that end, but ultimately, it will depend only on them.”

According to the New York Times report, Netanyahu has expressed frustration with the Mossad that its “promises to foment a revolt have not materialized… Mr. Trump might decide to end the war any day and that Mossad’s operations had yet to bear fruit,” the report says. The official position of the Kurdish coalition is that they remain poised to join the fight against the regime under the right conditions, like the U.S. and Israel enforcing a no-fly zone over western Iran. But for now, they’re sitting ducks, absorbing the Iranian strikes with little means or incentive to retaliate.

Our wealth can become a powerful instrument for building such futures. The history of transformative firms such as DeepMind, SpaceX, and Nvidia suggests that backing extreme outliers in intelligence, drive, and technical vision is one of the most effective ways to spur progress. The same is true in philanthropy. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations’ support for agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug’s development of high-yield, disease-resistant dwarf wheat varieties is credited with helping prevent mass starvation on an enormous scale.

Yet turning wealth into great futures requires a fundamentally different logic from the one that created the wealth in the first place. Our problem is not a shortage of capital, but a failure of institutional design.

America’s wealthy are offered an endless array of vehicles for growing wealth, and a much narrower set of socially approved philanthropic options. Between these poles lies an entire realm of underexplored possibilities; projects that are neither profit-maximizing nor traditional charity, but could meaningfully contribute to building a greater future.

Without a clear framework, wealth drifts. It sits in passive assets or gets divided between philanthropy and profit-seeking, neither of which sustains a long-term purpose of its own. Capital left to itself becomes inert, and the effects are visible. Americans are richer than ever, but our public spaces, art, and ambitions rarely reflect that abundance.

What is missing is not money, but a system that can hold a steady goal over time while allowing the means of pursuing it to evolve. To achieve this purpose, we propose the creation of “permanent games.” A permanent game is a durable system of capital, rules, incentives, and selection pressures designed to pursue a civilizational goal across generations by funding competition, not institutions. It preserves processes, standards, and evaluation mechanisms while also allowing individual organizations to be created, transformed, and destroyed. Instead of trying to ensure that any particular institution endures, the game itself is designed to protect the integrity of a project across time.

To understand why such a novel structure is required, we must first examine the limits of our current approach to philanthropy.

Our Foundations are Crumbling

The dominant philanthropic structure, the nonprofit foundation, has proven incapable of advancing ambitious civilizational goals. The so-called “Big Three”—the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation—were once powerful institutions that shaped much of the postwar world. The U.S. government outsourced substantial intellectual, diplomatic, and even cultural work to them. Notably, the Ivy-educated WASPs who ran these foundations shared a coherent worldview: opposition to radical politics, faith in the power of experts to solve seemingly intractable social problems, and a commitment to an American-led democratic world order.

For a time, the system worked. The foundations played a key role in creating the entire field of molecular biology, eradicating hookworm in the American South, and developing the policy frameworks behind the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe following World War II. However,  that system broke down during the crises of the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, urban decay, and declining trust shattered the ideals of mid-century liberalism. At the same time, the 1969 Tax Reform Act fundamentally altered the operating environment for American philanthropy. It imposed mandatory annual payout requirements, sharply limited lobbying and political activity, created new disclosure rules, and empowered the IRS to supervise foundations with unprecedented scrutiny.

Together, these pressures made large foundations more bureaucratic, more cautious, and less willing to pursue the long-horizon experimental projects that had defined the previous era. Meanwhile, control of the great foundations shifted to people who shared neither their founders’ backgrounds nor their worldviews. No unified theory of progress replaced the old one. Today, some of America’s largest foundations operate according to forms of post-national progressivism that would have been unrecognizable, even repugnant, to their founders. The Ford Foundation, once a pillar of Cold War American internationalism, now funds grassroots activism that explicitly rejects American exceptionalism. The Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the Green Revolution, now prioritizes “equity” frameworks that would perplex John D. Rockefeller’s vision of scientific efficiency.

Modern foundations have a few structural problems. First, foundations often have vague mandates. This can result in a donor’s money ending up in the hands of people they profoundly disagree with. A foundation chartered to “improve education” or “promote human welfare” imposes no meaningful constraint on how future boards will interpret those aims. Vague mandates mean that there is no enforcement mechanism to keep foundations disciplined and focused.

There is also a talent problem. Foundation leadership is drawn from elites whose values often diverge from the founder’s, while succession mechanisms are typically weak, turning leadership selection into a popularity contest. The American sociologist Philip Selznick called this process “institutionalization”, a condition where the true purpose of the foundation shifts from its stated goal to institutional preservation. This effectively means that ideological drift is baked into the structure, because once an organization becomes an institution, its priority shifts from the founder’s mission to its own survival and legitimacy. Given enough time, deviation from the founder’s vision is an inevitable outcome, making the permanence of foundations itself a design flaw.

The deeper issue is that foundations attempt to preserve both capital and intent in a single structure, and over time, the former crowds out the latter. Bill Gates’s recent decision to spend down his foundation within twenty years, rather than let it outlive him, is best understood in this light. It reflects realism more than urgency. The only way to ensure his intentions are honored is to spend the money before he dies and the foundation inevitably becomes something else.

Ironically, this same logic animated Peter Thiel’s recent warning to Elon Musk that perpetual charitable vehicles often empower their founders’ ideological adversaries. When Musk was told that signing the Giving Pledge in 2012 would cause $1.4 billion of his wealth to go to Gates in the event of his passing, he responded, “What am I supposed to do, give it to my children?” To this Thiel replied, “You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.”

If both institutions and heirs predictably drift from a founder’s values, then neither philanthropy nor inheritance offers a satisfying answer to the question: what is wealth for? Without an intentional worldview, a vision of how wealth might create a better world, and institutions capable of executing that vision, immense societal riches fail to translate into sustained human progress.

Gaming the System

To solve this problem, we return to the idea of the permanent game.

A permanent game has four core components: a fixed, measurable long-term objective; a gated pool of capital that cannot be permanently captured by any one organization; periodic competitive allocation across multiple approaches; and rotating evaluation by qualified experts.

Each permanent game is created to pursue a single, legible, long-horizon objective, defined narrowly enough to evaluate yet broadly enough to permit multiple approaches. For example, “Reduce the real cost of housing construction by 50%” or “Develop commercially viable fusion power.” 

The game controls a gated endowment—say, $500 million to $5 billion—invested for longevity. Its payout would be conditional rather than guaranteed, with allocations reviewed at fixed multi-year intervals. This distinguishes these games from foundations where capital is attached to institutions, venture funds where capital is attached to exits, and federal funding where capital is attached to political goals.

Permanent games would create a lightweight mechanism for spinning up multiple temporary organizations to pursue the same objective. Creating temporary organizations is the core idea behind Focused Research Organizations (FROs), and one reason why DARPA has remained surprisingly effective over time. 

At the outset, the game defines success in measurable terms. To make this concrete, consider a permanent game built around the de-extinction of animals, like the woolly mammoth. Let’s follow this game from its creation through a couple cycles of competition and evaluation.

The game funds five competing organizations, some nonprofit, some for-profit, some hybrid, each pursuing a distinct path. One focuses on editing elephant genomes to express mammoth traits. Another works on artificial gestation to get around the limits of elephant pregnancies. A third concentrates on computational genomics, trying to reconstruct traits in silico before moving to live animals. A fourth treats the problem as ecological, developing cold-adapted habitats and reintroduction models. A fifth combines everything in a single, vertically integrated effort.

In the first cycle, some of these approaches show early promise while others stall. The genome editing group may demonstrate partial trait expression but struggle with viability. The artificial gestation team may fail entirely. The ecological group may show that existing habitats cannot support the target species without further engineering. This is not failure so much as discovery; the purpose of the game is not to fund a winner immediately, but to surface information about which paths are viable.

Every five years, a council reviews the results. Some groups lose funding, others are wound down or recapitalized, and new teams are formed to try different approaches. The council itself turns over each cycle, drawing from a standing pool of qualified experts whose eligibility is defined in the founding charter in specific, field-relevant terms the council cannot revise. A smaller standing body of trustees, rotating on a longer cycle, holds sole authority to update those criteria as fields evolve. Individual evaluators serve fixed terms with mandatory cooling-off periods, so no single cohort can entrench its own standards of judgment. 

Yet even this structure has limits. Over a generation or more, the trustees become interpreters of a founding document rather than executors of a living intent, which is the same drift the permanent game was designed to prevent. For that reason, the charter should build in a constitutional moment at the twenty-five or fifty year mark, where an external body can review the game’s structure and, if necessary, dissolve it entirely. If the game itself begins to prioritize its own survival over its stated goal, it has become the thing it was designed to replace.

In the next cycle, new entrants incorporate what was learned. A new team might combine genome editing with advances in synthetic biology. Another might abandon mammoth traits entirely in favor of engineering cold-tolerant elephants directly. Over time, the composition of approaches shift, but the direction of the game does not.

Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021, offers a ready-made test case. The company is already pursuing mammoth de-extinction with private capital, but its structure illustrates the problem permanent games are designed to solve. A single organization, accountable to investors who need an exit, pursues a timeline set by funding cycles rather than biology. 

A permanent game built around de-extinction would not replace Colossal, it would integrate it. Colossal could compete for game funding alongside university labs, nonprofit research groups, and rival startups, each evaluated based on scientific milestones rather than commercial ones. The founding consortium might include backers who have already invested in Colossal, alongside university endowments willing to lock capital on a twenty-year horizon. The goal would be written in specific biological terms: a viable cold-adapted proboscidean reproduced to second generation in a functioning habitat. Colossal might win or it might be overtaken by a team that doesn’t exist yet. Either outcome would mean the game is working.

The term “permanent game” invites an obvious question: what happens when the objective is achieved? Two designs are possible. In the first, the game includes a sunset clause. When the objective is demonstrably met, remaining capital is distributed as a final prize, the competing organizations are dissolved, and the game closes. Here, “permanent” describes the durability of the process rather than of any particular institution. The game runs only as long as the problem remains unsolved.

In the second design, the goal is written so that it can never be fully achieved, only advanced. Reducing the real cost of housing construction has no final state. You can always go further, addressing new material constraints and creating new methods of construction. Games of this kind resemble scientific disciplines more than engineering projects. Neither design is inherently superior; the preferable choice depends on whether the objective is a discrete threshold or a continuous frontier.

The permanent game design borrows elements from existing successful innovation systems, including prize competitions. For example, the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge offered a $1 million prize for teams that could build a fully autonomous vehicle capable of navigating a 150-mile desert course in the Mojave. All entrants failed, but it sparked a wave of research into autonomous vehicles across the country. Stanford team leader Sebastian Thrun would later help launch Google’s self-driving-car effort, while other participants went on to lead Aurora, Uber ATG, and other autonomous-vehicle startups.

DAOs are perhaps the most structurally interesting precedent here. Their core insight is that governance rules can be encoded to outlast any individual participant, which is precisely the problem permanent games are trying to solve. In principle, DAO governance need not be tied to token holdings; voting power could be assigned based on credentials, past contributions, or other non-financial metrics. However in practice, these systems tend to collapse back toward financial weighting or static proxies for expertise. Credentials are hard to verify and quickly become outdated. Contribution-based systems reward activity more than judgment. More importantly, once encoded, these rules are difficult to revise without conflict or capture.

Let’s return to the de-extinction example and imagine a DAO used to allocate funding across competing teams. Voting power is assigned to credentialed biologists and engineers. Early on, this works. But as new techniques emerge, the relevant expertise shifts and the credentialing system begins to select for incumbents trained in older approaches. Updating the criteria requires approval from the existing voter base, which has little incentive to dilute its own authority. The system does not fail outright, but it hardens. Governance remains intact, but its judgments become less aligned with the frontier of the field. Permanent games require both durability and the capacity for judgment to evolve. DAOs reliably provide the former, but not the latter.

Until recently, a gated endowment model roughly described the governance of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. The LMB has produced twelve Nobel Prizes over its 78-year history—an average of one every six years—with a yearly budget of around $50 million and only a few hundred employees. Every few years, a committee met to review the laboratory’s work and evaluate its scientific output. Groups that failed to produce were shut down, while those making breakthroughs received more resources. The LMB kept its governing structure deliberately small and technical. Scientists judged other scientists’ work, preventing the drift toward professional managers and grant administrators that bureaucratizes most research institutions.

Gated endowments impose something like market discipline, creating a genuine threat if the organization strays or becomes ineffective. Without the cushion of perpetual funding, failure has consequences. Resources run out and the institution winds down. That pressure sharpens priorities and keeps attention on results.

In the de-extinction game, a team that spends five years pursuing an unworkable approach does not persist indefinitely. It is shut down and capital returns to the game. At the same time, permanent games give organizations room to experiment and take risks, since they are judged on outcomes rather than forced to seek approval for every project or program.

Readers might argue that permanent games just sound like market competition with extra steps,  but the de-extinction example demonstrates the gap in market efficacy. No private investor would fund multiple parallel efforts over decades with no clear exit, especially when most of the benefits accrue to science and society rather than the firm itself. Permanent games supply the patient capital and tolerance for failure that neither venture capital nor traditional philanthropy provides.

There are still possible failure modes. The permanent game solves the problem of drift, not the issue of origin. Whoever sets the initial goal and selects the first council is making a values-based choice, and no procedural mechanism can push this decision into neutrality.

Permanent games could be captured by evaluators, misspecified in their goals, or stagnate if progress proves harder than expected. The advantage of this model is not perfection, but adaptability. By rotating decision-makers, forcing periodic evaluation, and dissolving failing organizations, they make it harder for any single error to persist indefinitely.

Cooperative Competition

Many principals possess the capital necessary to spark a project, but lack the time required to assume long-term responsibility. Worse, coordination between these actors is rare. Institutions need stability to become load-bearing, and ecosystems require interlocking structures to support long-term planning. This creates a collective action problem where no single principal can build a complete ecosystem alone, yet the trust and shared vision required for collective governance are in short supply. The principals most capable of funding such systems are often the least willing to cede the control required to make them work.

If permanent games are engines of competition, why call for cooperation? The answer lies in the difference between competing within a game versus playing by yourself. Friendly competition united around a common, clearly defined goal creates the necessary conditions for advancement and achievement. Without that shared definition there is no competition, only the pursuit of incommensurate futures.

The wealth to dramatically drive progress exists, and more is coming. A new class of economic elites will be created by the liquidity events of SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. The founders of Anthropic have already committed to donating at least 80% of their wealth, while the engineers and early backers of SpaceX have spent a decade trading immediate gains for a shared civilizational mission.

Permanent games correct a specific failure of contemporary philanthropy: they fix the goal, rotate the referees, eliminate the failing teams, and keep the capital in play. Permanent games are not just a new way to spend wealth. They are a way to convert private fortunes into systems that can pursue progress across generations. It is up to the holders of our great societal wealth, both large and small, to build them.

Editor’s note: Nathaniel Koloc is a founding executive at Pardon, an institutional sponsor of Palladium Magazine. Palladium is editorially independent and welcomes submissions from highly-placed stakeholders across the strategic landscape.

The wheels of 21st century capitalism have turned very effectively for holders of private wealth. One sign of this is the rapid proliferation of family offices, as these are private institutions tasked with guarding and deploying private capital. A Deloitte study estimated that in 2024 there were around 8,000 single family offices globally, and forecasted that number to increase to nearly 11,000 by 2030. The total number of family office vehicles of various types is already roughly 35,000 globally, according to technology providers to such offices.

Data from UBS and Forbes indicates that roughly 250 people achieved billionaire status in the United States over the last decade. Even as much of this wealth has been generated from outcomes in the tech sector, it is reasonable to assume that ongoing rapid AI advances might further accelerate this trend as we start to see multibillion dollar exits from very small teams or even individuals.

Family offices, however structurally organized, are the most nimble of financial organizations. They are generally not beholden to the sort of corporate governance, mandates, and fiduciary obligations that public and private corporations are; they are beholden only to whatever governance mechanisms they have chosen for themselves.

Yet, despite this proliferation of private wealth with these degrees of freedom, we see surprisingly few expressions of wealth that actually make use of such freedom. Basically everything follows the same old playbook: funds that seek to beat the market are getting in on the private equity era and fighting for direct allocation in venture deals. Even most venture studios seek merely to replicate traditional market opportunity-finding and startup-building in-house. Similarly, most philanthropy is still, even when a net positive, effectively interchangeable—one prominent surname on a museum or a hospital wing might just as well be another.

What is conspicuously missing is a large number of “great works”—commercial, philanthropic, or other unusual projects—that only the person commissioning them could have created. Works such as these are a truly unique blend of their sponsor’s perspective, experiences, passions, and values. The intention, care, and effort great works are undertaken with is unmistakable. They carry a quality of heft and meaningfulness that most projects do not. They ask something of us, they invite us to reconsider our actions and to raise our aspirations. They stir our hearts.

While human history abounds with many examples of great works, such as the Medicis’ farsighted patronage of the arts, or Andrew Carnegie’s thousands of libraries, contemporary examples are much more sparse. This is especially surprising given the sheer scale of modern private wealth that presumably is available for such pursuits. The relatively few projects with great works qualities that we do see in recent times are tantalizing glimpses of what a world would look like with abundant creative deployment of capital that clearly expresses a unique point of view for public benefit.

Examples include Nat Friedman’s PlasticList project, an independent research initiative to test food products for microplastics and publicize the results, and his Vesuvius Challenge, which marshalled resources to support using AI to map the Herculaneum scrolls. The scrolls are a set of 1,800 Roman scrolls that were carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, making them impossible to read if not for advanced imaging techniques.

Institutional examples include the for-the-love-of-the-game artisanal publishing at Stripe Press, which ostensibly has nothing to do with their core business of building payment rails, but delights intellectuals with beautiful works, or the Berggruen Institute, which was founded in 2010 by a successful finance entrepreneur, converting his financial capital into intellectual innovation as a think tank pursuing unorthodox contemplation and global projects.

Some examples span an entire career or body of work of a single person. Stewart Brand comes to mind, as he’s had many unique projects over the years, from his Whole Earth Catalogue in the 1970s—just recently made available as a comprehensive archive via the Whole Earth Index, itself a great work and substantial undertaking—to his 10,000 year clock, an ambitious centerpiece project of the Long Now Foundation, for which Brand is Cofounder & President.

Smaller, everyday examples can sometimes be spotted in the wild, but are hard to generalize because each is bespoke. A good friend of mine self-publishes a seasonal magazine chronicling his adventures in the mountains of Southern Idaho. While modest and intimate, this meets my mark of a great work because while you read it, you can’t help but be stirred by the beautiful photography and the awareness that this publication was created by a singular human to convey his love of the mountains and the effect that they have on him.

Our Wealth Narratives Fail the Wealthy

Given how feasible it should be for holders of private wealth to create or commission such works, especially at a smaller scale, we must assume that the main reason they aren’t doing it is because there are so few role models—it genuinely doesn’t occur to them. Or, more precisely, we might assume that the dominant cultural narratives and role models that they do possess have narrowed any intuitive drive to create great works into the category of purely commercial pursuits: company valuation milestones, exits or initial public offerings (IPOs), and other such financial successes.

It is not just society that misses out on beautiful grand projects in the form of great works, large and small. The principals of private wealth themselves are being deprived of an opportunity to further self-actualize through the creation of a public legacy.

Many founders who manage to sell their business built companies that were not their great work, so they have yet to experience the thrill of this pursuit. Same goes for the heirs and principals-to-be of family offices; it was previously-built empires that bestowed upon them their golden fields of possibility. Now they only need to decide what to do with the harvest. Wealth can be thought of as temporarily stored kinetic energy. When people spend energy to shape the world, what they spend it on in turn shapes them. Deploying energy in the form of capital, time, and attention on projects that are direct manifestations of your dreams, your delights, your callings—this deployment brings personal development and self-discovery, whether the projects succeed or fail.

Many wealthy people instinctively hold a series of negative or self-limiting conscious or subconscious beliefs relating to the wealth they hold, stories about the role of wealth they’ve been told by society since birth. These often accumulate as a contradictory jumble of thoughts and feelings such as: my wealth is, at the root, bad or ill-gotten, and so it should be kept hidden; I should use my money to acquire status, as that will lead to respect; as a wealthy person it is not appropriate to share my personal struggles with the world, as people expect me to be basically happy and stress-free. These narratives create a psychospiritual bind, one that neither larger commercial success nor traditional compliance-centred philanthropy is going to address.

The genuine pursuit of great works is a viable path out of this psychological thicket. Creating beautiful, interesting, societally-relevant things that are expressions of your unique experience is a road less traveled—a way of deploying capital that is much less likely to incur such criticism from the peanut gallery. The more genuine and introspective the projects, the more suited they are to this purpose.

In the last two decades, the general sentiment that businesses should be a force for societal improvement have taken the form of a few movements within the business world, including social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and corporate social responsibility. However, these fields were largely overtaken by events in politics—such as the unexpected rise of Donald Trump in 2016—as well as developments in technology, specifically the largely unexpected breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) followed by unprecedented AI compute scaling. With politics and technology now acting as the dominant forces of societal change, business has perhaps taken a backseat.

These previous attempts at harnessing the role of business for social change have largely fizzled out while the tectonic plates of traditional, sclerotic philanthropy (compliance-focused foundations as gatekeepers of money, prestige, and virtue) have ground on, delivering little in the way of notable improvements. Have any of our societal problems this philanthropy aims to address been solved in the last ten years?

The family office sector can be as influential as politics and technology, if its principals realize the role they can play, embrace a more active sense of societal stewardship, and take seriously the pursuit of great works.

There is no time to waste! The world has become more malleable than ever for those with the will to act and deploy capital in this way. Trump’s approach to governance in his second administration has halted much “change-making” work that previous administrations championed using the federal apparatus. Governance ideologies aside, this means that certain types of work will need to be done by individuals or organizations, for the time being, if they are to advance.

In evaluating our society’s overall ability to marshal talent, there is much room for improvement. There are huge numbers of talented but unmotivated or under-employed people in the United States. This includes everything from creatives and artists to coordinators and technologists; hard working people who are desperate for projects that ignite their passions and feel meaningful. Advancements in AI are yielding operating leverage to that same talent, allowing small teams to accomplish what would previously have required entire departments or organizations.

Family office principals—especially newly-minted entrepreneurial ones and forward-looking heirs inheriting enough wealth to let them build small teams of motivated partners—should open their eyes and seize this opportunity by pursuing great works that express their distinct values. In many cases this may be most effectively done in a “full contact” fashion: building a small dedicated team to directly accomplish the outcome that you’re looking to see in the world, rather than setting up a new institution to hand the job over to others, or relegating the responsibility to an existing one.

Beacons in the Twilight

The highest leverage great works can be conceptualized as beacons that crack open the imagination, proving that real innovation is possible and offering compelling prototypes that can be replicated by those with less risk-tolerance. These examples are just an illustrative taste.

Buy that beautiful historic building on Main Street and renovate it into something that will delight the community, even if the project doesn’t pencil. Too much of our country’s built landscape is devoid of soul, owing to the confines of commercial real estate development hurdles. Do it anyway.

Hire an intrepid journalist, analyst, or applied research team to dive deep into a hunch that you have about the world. Give them the resources they need and publish their findings for others to learn from. Information begets action and behavioral change. What information is waiting to be discovered and made public by your efforts?

Fund a direct-influence campaign in your county or state, to add legislative seats whose obligation is to advocate and vote on behalf of future generations, the natural world, or even AI agents themselves. We must start developing governance mechanisms that better embrace our role as active influencers of our planetary systems, but real experiments will never happen without risk-taking capital pushing on the levers.

For those with even larger ambitions: develop a new, compelling place for people to live and work. Swing for the fences—pool your resources with other visionaries and fund the design and development of a fully operational arcology, a self-reliant ecological community somewhere deep in a climate haven, acting as a prototype of climate-aligned living. If that is too ambitious, then systematically acquire and fully redevelop a small town in the hinterlands to achieve a similar end, testing new forms of local governance and community engagement.

A more traditionally commercial great work might be simply selecting a values-aligned idea from a credible “request for startups” list and working to build a formidable team to take a shot at that goal. Serious patrons fielding custom-built teams to tackle specific high-signal opportunities would have a fighting chance. Or, adopt an existing visionary project when it’s still a glint in the founder’s eye, and help it become a reality.

As these projects work differently than the common machinery of for-profit commercial venture building, a few words of advice may be in order for those deciding to step into the pursuit of great works. If you don’t already have a vision for the impact you’d like to create, you need to create some empty space—away from screens and your usual routines. Great intuitions and glimpses bubble up from a still, reflective mind.

When you have a glimpse, ground it by spending real time with the communities and people who will be most affected by your project. No great works are done “to” other people, and at their best they are done with those intended to enjoy them.

Once your vision is coming into focus, you will need a “mirror.” This is a person who comes to understand your ideas, and through dialogue reflects them back to you in a process that makes them become real. Ideally this person is also an integrator-operator, who can help you operationalize the work by building the team.

As always, you must find the right people, those who resonate with the work you want to do. But in this case, once you have them, you mustn’t control them too tightly. Earnest people who are lending their talents to your vision carry important pieces of the work. If you micromanage them or ignore their intuitions, the dream will wither and deflate, the magic will subside.

So this is the invitation. If you are a holder of material wealth, and you have not yet walked the path of embarking on a great work of your own: the road is yours for the taking. The world needs exactly what it is you have to offer, and you will become more of yourself along the journey to deliver it.

Pardon is a modern family office that invests in culture-shaping enterprises. While its flagship business is an inbox digital publisher, Pardon’s work supports a wider range of ventures across the arts, media, and lifestyle. At its core is a simple conviction: the institutions that shape culture don’t happen by accident; they’re built deliberately, over time, by people willing to invest in craft, taste, and independent thought.

This partnership reflects a shared belief that serious intellectual work—like great art—requires patient backing to flourish. We’re grateful to Pardon not only for the generosity of this gift, but for the confidence it represents in Palladium’s long-term project.

The first print edition supported by this underwriting is PALLADIUM 20: Noblesse Oblige, which will be available to members in March 2026. In this quarterly print edition, we examine the role philanthropists have and will play in shaping the future of science and culture. Featuring both novel theory by our best thinkers as well as reports by those who have already organized such efforts such as Vitalik Buterin’s article on his experimental “pop-up city” Zuzalu this edition will equip those who wish to do good with all insights needed to do so.

As a San Francisco-based, non-partisan publication, Palladium relies on partners who understand that ideas are infrastructure. We’re sincerely thankful to Pardon for helping secure another year of independent, rigorous work—and for making it possible for Palladium to keep building.

Gratefully,

The Palladium Editors

The architecture and design we inhabit descend from a deliberate cultural project born in Germany in the early twentieth century. A group of artists, architects, industrialists, and educators realized that the machine age would not produce a coherent society on its own.

In 1907, this recognition produced the Deutsche Werkbund, the German Association of Craftsmen in English. Its founders believed that Germany’s rapid industrial ascent had outpaced its cultural foundations. Without institutions capable of unifying aesthetic judgment and industrial production, society would dissolve into cultural illiteracy and disorder. The Werkbund became the instrument through which reformers attempted to coordinate and give modern industrial life purpose. Their ambition was explicit: “to raise the standard of German work in the applied arts through cooperation with progressive elements in industry,” and in doing so “restore dignity to labor” and create “a harmonious national style in tune with the spirit of the modern age.”

What they asserted was simple and radical: “men are molded by the objects that surround them.” Industrial life would require a cultural elite capable of shaping the conditions of everyday life rather than merely adapting to them. The aesthetics of the world we now inhabit, whether or not they match the spirit of our century, are the distant aftershock of this German project.

The Alliance Between Art and Industry

Germany entered the twentieth century as an industrial giant but a cultural latecomer. Its artistic inheritance remained rooted in regional craftsmanship and medieval revivalism. Albeit beautiful in isolation, these traditions offered little guidance for a rapidly growing nation competing with the disciplined cultural machines of France and England. Germany produced enormous quantities of goods, yet lacked the institutions needed to give them a coherent visual or moral character. In the hierarchy of European taste, France still dominated luxury and refinement, while England retained prestige in craftsmanship and the decorative arts. German manufacturers, in contrast, filled markets with imitative ornaments and sentimental novelties. Public taste deteriorated. Reformers feared that industrialization had eroded the very ability to judge quality, creating a visual environment disconnected from any shared cultural purpose.

The German architect and author Hermann Muthesius diagnosed the crisis with clarity: German manufacturers, he argued, had abandoned their cultural responsibilities. Cheap, derivative goods did more than weaken taste. They threatened “the national character through pollution of the visual environment.”] Germany could not rely on imported styles, nor accept a reputation for shoddy production. A new domestic standard was required—one rooted in simplicity, integrity, and an honest expression of industrial reality.

The Werkbund emerged as the institutional answer. Its founders rejected the nostalgic escape into handicraft promoted by the English Arts and Crafts movement. They embraced the machine as a cultural fact. Modern life would not be redeemed by retreat, but by disciplined cooperation between artists and industry. Mechanization could produce beauty, but only if aesthetic judgment shaped its direction. 

Central to this project was education. The Werkbund believed that a modern society needed perceptual training as urgently as technical skill. Reformers like Muthesius and Georg Kerschensteiner pushed to overhaul the school system, arguing that aesthetic judgment could not be left to habit or chance. Muthesius had already modernized the Prussian Arts and Crafts Schools, insisting that “art is an indispensable complement to life.” Kerschensteiner championed manual training as a foundation of ethical and civic development. Educators such as Ludwig Pallat, Hermann Obrist, and Franz Cizek used the Werkbund to promote methods that would “stimulate the creativity of the child, preserve his innate imaginative powers, train his eye and hand as well as his brain, and inculcate respect for manual skill.” Their goal was not simply to produce designers, but to produce citizens capable of sustaining a higher national culture. Taste itself was civic infrastructure.

The Werkbund influenced museum policy, state procurement, and public building standards, believing that exposure to quality would elevate public expectations. Its conviction, “that through organization, education, and creative work it would indeed be possible to bring about genuine improvements in German society and culture,” became the core of a movement that treated design as a form of governance.

The Werkbund’s most profound achievement was the creation of a working alliance between art and industry. At a time when many aesthetes treated machines with suspicion, the Werkbund insisted that they could serve cultural ends if guided by intelligence and discipline. The industrialized society was too large and too complex to be shaped by individual taste. It demanded institutional coordination.

This alliance found its clearest expression in 1907, when AEG, Germany’s leading manufacturer of electrical goods, hired Peter Behrens as an artistic advisor. Behrens and his disciples redesigned everything: buildings, factories, advertisements, logos, typefaces, catalogs, and consumer products. He treated the corporation as an integrated aesthetic system. The result was the world’s first comprehensive corporate brand.

The young architects who passed through Behrens’s office—Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier—would later define the architecture of the twentieth century. Their shared sensibility was the institutional outcome of Werkbund principles. They absorbed modernism in a setting where design, engineering, and industrial strategy were inseparable.

The Werkbund’s approach proved especially powerful in fields without historical precedents. Reformers observed that cooperation between art and industry “proved most fruitful where no adequate traditional forms existed, for example in the design of electrical appliances rather than chairs, or of factories rather than homes.”

Industrial architecture became the Werkbund’s strongest proof of concept. Factories, rail stations, power plants, and offices, all with strict functional constraints, forced designers to engage directly with the realities of mechanized production. The Werkbund helped codify the aesthetic logic of these buildings: clarity of structure, classically inspired proportion, symmetry, visual order, legible function, and honest materials. Despite its accomplishments, the Werkbund was divided over whether Germany should pursue a unified national style. Muthesius believed unity was essential. Without it, modern design would dissolve into eclecticism. A coherent industrial culture required shared principles grounded in function and material truth.

His opponents disagreed. Many feared that a unified style would suppress imaginative vitality. One faction led by Henry van de Velde argued that “Far from being a positive value, a unified style would signal the death of creativity. A truly vigorous artistic culture would always be characterized by diversity.” They saw unity as a bureaucratic artifact and warned that the Werkbund risked becoming an arbiter rather than a catalyst.

The intensity of the debate showed that the Werkbund was not a polite reform society but an arena in which the future of German culture was contested. Muthesius feared that purely spontaneous development would leave Germany without a recognizable modern aesthetic. His opponents feared that intentional unity would harden into dogma. Both were responding to the same phenomenon: the destabilizing expansion of industrial production, which had dissolved the old craft traditions without putting anything stable in their place.

Despite their disagreements, the factions shared a conviction that the applied arts mattered because they shaped the moral environment of daily life. The Muthesius camp argued that standardized, well-designed goods would elevate public taste and train an entire population to expect quality. Others countered that moral formation required exposure to the living imagination of individual genius. Both sides understood that design was a form of cultural pedagogy.

In hindsight, the Werkbund’s conflicts were productive. They forced reformers to articulate the principles of modern design with exceptional clarity. When Gropius later declared industrial building forms “the style-creating force of the contemporary world,” he summarized an idea that had been forged inside the Werkbund long before the renowned Bauhaus emerged. The Werkbund never resolved the question of unity, but it created the forum in which the search for modern form, and the synthesis of technology and art, could become a shared cultural project rather than an aesthetic triviality.

The Globalization of Werkbund Thinking

The First World War disrupted the Werkbund’s activity, but the interwar years clarified the depth of its accomplishment. Weimar Germany was gripped by instability, inflation, and a widespread sense of cultural exhaustion. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West captured a mood of pessimism that treated mechanization as a force draining Europe of creative life.

The Werkbund resisted this narrative. Its leaders argued that the modern world’s crisis was not metaphysical decline, but a rupture in the relationship between people and the objects they produced. The machine was not inherently dehumanizing. It was simply powerful and ungoverned. The real challenge was to design the institutions that could channel that power toward coherence.

When Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, he carried Werkbund principles into the school: the unity of art and craft, the alliance of design and industry, and the belief that modern tools could serve as instruments of renewal. Even the Bauhaus’s expressionist phase reflected the same tension the Werkbund had confronted, the attempt to restore spiritual orientation within industrial conditions.

Confrontation with National Socialism proved a historic inflection point. The Nazi regime condemned the Werkbund-Bauhaus project as culturally corrosive, closing the Bauhaus in 1933 and branding modernism a symptom of moral decay. The denunciation was deeply hypocritical. The same regime embraced modern industrial technology and a highly engineered visual politics that owed more to modernist discipline than to the neoclassical fantasies or medieval folk traditions it promoted. This rupture, however, accelerated the global spread of Werkbund ideas, as Bauhaus-trained designers, architects, and theorists fled abroad, particularly to the United States, where their influence reshaped the modern world.

Displaced by political upheaval, Werkbund-affiliated designers arrived in America just as corporations and government agencies were searching for a new visual language equal to the nation’s industrial ambitions.

Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago and New York skyscrapers became symbols of American corporate power: global, industrial, and rational. Their strict geometries and glass surfaces were not the natural culmination of American design traditions shaped by Sullivan and Wright, but the arrival of Werkbund principles translated into steel.When Mies assumed leadership of the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he taught a generation of architects the ethos he had absorbed from Behrens and the Werkbund. The IIT campus, with its steel frames and rigorous modularity, stood as a physical manifesto of Werkbund logic.Through IIT graduates and corporate commissions, Mies’s influence spread across mid-century America until austere modernism became the visual language of the American-led global economic order. 

The same lineage shaped industrial design. After the war, the Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm) became the institutional bridge between Werkbund-Bauhaus principles and the emerging consumer economy. Dieter Rams absorbed this pedagogy directly, distilling it at Braun into a doctrine of simplicity, restraint, and honesty in materials.] Rams became the teacher of the next generation, most notably Jonathan Ive, who referenced Braun in his design vocabulary as Apple’s Chief Design Officer. Ive and Steve Jobs understood that Apple’s hardware rested on the same modernist ethic of clarity and restraint that Rams had formulated decades earlier. The inviting shape of the Macintosh, the intuitive interface of the iPod, and the radical simplicity of the iPhone all carry the imprint of the Werkbund’s pedagogical world. A century-old German project helped create the most valuable consumer brand on earth.

By the early twenty-first century, the Werkbund’s aesthetic had become the global language of modern life. Scandinavia softened it. Japan absorbed it into a unique fusion of minimalism and craft. Multinational corporations standardized it into a worldwide sans-serif design regime. Even digital interfaces inherited its logic of clarity, planar space, and functional legibility.

More remarkable is that the movement’s deeper assumptions survived this diffusion. It transmitted the belief that design mediates between person and environment, that design in an industrial civilization—defined by unprecedented speed, disorienting complexity, and technological power—must privilege clarity, material honesty, and efficiency. These premises continue to structure the world long after the institutions that created and guided them disappeared.

Toward a New Werkbund

If the Werkbund triumphed aesthetically, it failed institutionally. Its forms remain, but the machinery that once guided them no longer exists. Modern design masks an underlying drift. Our technological systems are shaped by engineering constraints and commercial incentives rather than shared cultural intention. The result is a world that is technically sophisticated yet aesthetically impoverished, filled with products optimized for attention rather than orientation..

Taste once occupied a central place in the Werkbund’s mission. It was not just preference but a civic faculty. The Werkbund understood that the environment educates us long before schools do. But the principles they developed were not self-sustaining. Without an institution capable of debating, refining, and renewing them, the Werkbund’s ideals hardened into defaults. They became the baseline aesthetic of modern life, widely admired yet increasingly unexamined. In one sense, this was a triumph: modernist clarity made the expanding technological world livable, allowing ordinary people to function within systems of unprecedented scale and speed. But what modernism provided in legibility, it lacked in deeper cultural intention. This institutional vacuum mirrors what Ivan Illich later described as the loss of convivial tools, when systems expand beyond the cultural frameworks that once governed them. As societies grew more interconnected and more abstract, the need for meaning, orientation, and regional or national identity returned with greater force. Werkbund principles could discipline a mechanized civilization, but they could not by themselves supply the narratives or institutions required to govern its moral direction.

Attempts to replace or supersede this modernist inheritance did emerge. The counterculture of the late twentieth century rejected the Werkbund’s clarity in favor of expressive diversity. Deconstructivism and postmodernism offered an explicit revolt against discipline and legibility. Yet these movements flourished mainly within architecture and academic theory. They produced striking buildings but failed to generate a stable or broadly intelligible design vocabulary for the wider industrial world. For most people, these experiments felt more disorienting than liberating. Modernism survived not because it won every theoretical argument, but because no alternative provided equivalent coherence or legibility at scale.

A new Werkbund would begin not with style, but with institutional imagination. It would restore the alliance between aesthetic judgment and technical power. It would invest in education that reconnects perception, craft, and judgment—not as nostalgia but as preparation for an age in which human intuition and automated systems must coexist. It would give designers, technologists, and industrial leaders a shared forum capable of coordinating their ambitions and debating aesthetic standards before those standards are embedded in the world.

Most importantly, it would reclaim the original Werkbund wager: that the modern world remains open to design. The early reformers refused to accept that the machine age would destroy beauty.They believed that form could be a political instrument and that a society could shape its technological future with imagination and discipline. Their wager proved correct, and the world they helped build became the global industrial civilization we inhabit, in all its sublime industrial perfection and banal uniformity. But the triumph of modernism also left behind an obligation: the responsibility of cultural and industrial elites to act as stewards of the systems we inherit rather than critics or spectators.

The next century will not be governed by neutral systems. It will be governed by the forms we choose or by the absence of choice. The Werkbund understood that culture emerges from intention rather than accumulation, and that institutions are the only means by which intention is continuously renewed. Its challenge to us is to recognize that the modern world is still plastic, still capable of orientation, still subject to design. Whether we choose to build the institutions capable of shaping it is the question that will define the coming age.

Between 1981 and 1996, AIDS killed an estimated 100,000 gay men in New York City alone. Fashion designers, art directors, gallery owners, theater producers, choreographers; an entire generation whose lives were their art disappeared within fifteen years. Not just the famous names like Halston, Perry Ellis, and Willi Smith, but showroom assistants, stylists, photographers, creative directors, and window dressers. Chester Weinberg, a household name in the 1960s who mentored Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan, has been written out of history books entirely.

The conventional story treats this as a tragic loss of talent. That misses the deeper wound. When these communities died, something died with them that we haven’t recovered: the knowledge of how to live aesthetically, how to organize an entire existence around aesthetic values in ways that produce taste as a natural consequence of being rather than professional competence. To understand this loss requires understanding how taste came to reside in such communities at all.

Around 1800, European men stopped dressing beautifully. John Flügel called this the “Great Male Renunciation,” the moment when men surrendered color, ornament, and aesthetic display to women. The transformation was ideological. The rising bourgeoisie needed to distinguish productive virtue from aristocratic decadence. Beauty became suspect as a frivolous distraction from economic and political utility. Rational productivity demanded the abandonment of aesthetic excess.

This logic spread far beyond fashion. The entire material world reorganized around efficiency rather than beauty. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on universal reason and measurable progress left no room for the particular, the ornamental, the beautiful-for-its-own-sake. Aesthetic concern retreated to specialized domains—museums, concert halls, galleries—where it could be contained and administered, safely separated from the serious business of productive life.

The aristocracy, rather than resisting this transformation, largely capitulated. They maintained wealth but adopted bourgeois values. The ancient understanding that aristocratic privilege carried obligations to exemplify and patronize beauty, to serve as custodians of civilization’s aesthetic inheritance, disappeared under pressure to justify position through utility and merit. European aristocrats who had once competed in architectural grandeur and financed public festivals—the original meaning of “liturgy” was exactly this obligation to support works that elevated community—now sought respectability through productive contribution. The Medici model of patronage that made the Renaissance possible gave way to industrialists funding hospitals and universities. Beauty ceased to be a sufficient justification for existence.

By the early 20th century, dedication to aesthetic values had become the province of artists and bohemians, people explicitly outside respectable society. The bourgeois rationalization of existence left no room for beauty as primary orientation. To dedicate oneself to aesthetic refinement was to mark oneself as unserious, frivolous, or decadent. Taste, once the mark of civilization’s highest achievements, became deviant.

Where did it survive? In marginalized communities that couldn’t participate in respectable bourgeois life anyway. Gay men, barred from conventional paths to social legitimacy, maintained cultures where aesthetic refinement remained an organizing principle. The parties, the fashion—this was a serious form of life oriented toward values the mainstream had abandoned. There was something atavistically aristocratic in this orientation. A remnant of an older world that modernity had expelled from respectability.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Jewish immigrants like Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, and the Warner Brothers elevated film from lowbrow entertainment comparable to vaudeville to a new art form. Antisemitism had barred Jews from elite institutions, and Thomas Edison’s film monopoly on the East Coast drove these independents to relocate west to build the social respectability otherwise out of reach.

When you cannot succeed by conventional metrics, you can either resign yourself to marginality or reach for something higher than what the respectable world offers. Marginalization doesn’t automatically produce taste, but combined with aspirations toward forms of life that the dominant culture has abandoned, it creates conditions where aesthetic dedication becomes possible again.

The material consequences of the AIDS crisis were immediate and visible. By 1990, New York Fashion Week’s menswear offering had become what The New York Times described as “smoothly traditional,” with overbearing reportage of uber-masculine silhouettes, a retreat to hetero-normativity even in fashion’s most subversive corners. The creative infrastructure that connected underground gay aesthetics to broader society was decimated. Fashion became sanitized, risk-averse, and derivative.

The financial backing and creative mentorship networks that had sustained aesthetic innovation simply disappeared. The flattening accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s. Great menswear magazines that had been organs of taste, like Esquire and GQ, devolved into listicles and product roundups. When anything goes, everyone does the same thing. The paradox of infinite choice is homogeneity.

Without communities organized around aesthetic values, the culture defaulted to what algorithms and focus groups could optimize: the safe, the familiar, the efficiently producible. The broken links in the creative chain were never repaired because the knowledge of how to forge them, passed between people who shared forms of life, had died with the bodies. This completed the Enlightenment’s war on beauty. The last substantial communities in Western culture who understood how to live aesthetically had been eliminated by disease.

Taste as a Way of Life

Giorgio Agamben argues in Creation and Anarchy that modernity fundamentally misunderstands creation. We think art means making objects: paintings, sculptures, buildings. But the Greeks distinguished poiesis (creation) from praxis (production). Poiesis wasn’t about outputs. It was a mode of existence. The artist wasn’t someone who made art but someone whose entire life constituted artistic engagement with the world.

Halston didn’t study fashion theory and then apply it to design. His existence, however debauched, constituted an aesthetic form of life. The clothes emerged as a natural expression of how he lived. You can’t recreate this through education. Fashion schools can teach techniques, historical knowledge, and professional practices. They cannot teach you to organize existence around beauty.

Medieval apprenticeship understood this. You didn’t learn sculpture by studying technique in isolation. You lived with a master, absorbed their entire way of being in the world. Michelangelo didn’t attend art school. He lived with Lorenzo de’ Medici as a teenager, surrounded by poets, philosophers, collectors, and power brokers. The Sistine Chapel is inseparable from the form of life that produced it.

Modern culture has inverted this relationship. We’ve made the work primary and reduced life to production processes. Walk through any major contemporary museum. You’ll see expensive art, prestigious names, wall texts explaining theoretical importance. What you won’t see is curation emerging from a life lived in service of beauty.

Contrast this with spaces that did and still do. The Wallace Collection embodies Sir Richard Wallace’s specific obsessions with 18th-century decorative arts. The Morgan Library manifests J. P. Morgan’s mania for illuminated manuscripts. These aren’t museums in the contemporary sense. They’re dwellings that happen to be open to the public. Wallace and Morgan didn’t curate by studying what experts valued. They collected what they found beautiful through lives spent in sustained aesthetic attention.

There is something essentially religious in authentic aesthetic dedication, though modernity has obscured this connection by separating beauty from transcendence. Art and religion were once indistinguishable. The cave paintings at Lascaux, dating to the early Magdalenian period, were not leisure activities but ritualistic practice, mystical initiatory rites binding community to cosmos through visual form. Over millennia, the primitive shaman was supplanted by the theologian and psychotherapist. Functions once unified were differentiated. The nature of the liturgical has been eroded in both. Religion in modernity became self-help rather than an all-embracing constitution of reality, while art became something one occasionally makes time to peruse on a Saturday afternoon.

Yet beauty retains its sacred character for those who pursue it seriously. The person whose life is oriented around aesthetic values operates according to logic that transcends utility, that recognizes in material form something pointing beyond the merely material. Because of Catholicism’s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren’t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.

The common factor among people who developed genuine taste has always been willingness to embrace excess. Our contemporary understanding of excess has been shaped by logic, reducing it to consumption or debauchery, but this is impoverished. The lukewarm mediocrity of comfort is rational and efficient but worth nothing more than being spewed out. Traditions of excess recognized it in saints and sinners alike. St. Catherine of Siena and St. John of the Cross weren’t collecting trinkets or attending parties, but their whole being exuded an excess that horrifies a life of comfort. Modern mystics like Simone Weil starved themselves to death in the name of a genuinely philosophical life. This is excess as rejection of the middle path, as commitment to values that make no sense within frameworks of rational self-interest.

An unaesthetic life erodes that part of the soul that seeks excellence, honor, and recognition of what is higher. When everything becomes optimized for comfort and convenience, when every aesthetic concern must justify itself through utility, we become smaller. People don’t just want things. They want to want better things. This is what philosophers call higher-order volitions, the desire to have different desires, to be the kind of person who values what is genuinely valuable. When you encounter someone living aesthetically, you don’t just see beautiful objects. You see a life that makes you want to live better. This is the aspirational quality of taste, its essentially religious in character as a call to transformation.

Higher Means Oblige to Higher Ends

Those with means face a choice. You can optimize your life for conventional success while treating aesthetic concerns as hobbies requiring no serious commitment. Or you can organize existence around aesthetic values in ways that violate professional norms and economic rationality.

The second path requires genuine sacrifice, not necessarily poverty or suffering, but willingness to prioritize beauty over optimization, sustained attention over efficient productivity. For those with financial freedom, this becomes an obligation. If you can afford to live otherwise, why wouldn’t you? 

The person who spends years visiting every significant building in their region, learning to see architectural proportions directly. The person who maintains extensive correspondence with online interlocutors to endlessly debate the finer points of science or philosophy. The person who hosts gatherings where aesthetic experience takes precedence over networking utility. These practices seem frivolous to modern sensibility. That’s the point. They violate the logic that everything must justify itself through productivity metrics.

The person whose existence centers on beauty develops perceptual capacities that people living conventionally productive lives cannot access. They see things others miss not because they studied harder but because they live differently.

Contemporary wealth has mostly abandoned the aristocratic understanding that privilege carries responsibility. The spaces we build are predominantly ugly. Today’s elite justify their position through meritocratic achievement. The software engineer who optimizes his productivity stack while living in an efficient but mediocre space demonstrates that success requires no aesthetic intelligence. The contemporary elite exist as training data for future AIs: perfectly reproducible, optimized for metrics, lacking any unique character that will challenge the world after they’re dead.

Contrast this with someone who uses financial freedom to cultivate sustained aesthetic attention. These individuals provide models of how to live that transcend achievement. The software engineer can look to well-off peers and think, “I should optimize my career trajectory better.” They look at someone living aesthetically and recognize something outside their professional logic entirely, a call to something higher than what the rationalized world offers.

This kind of change can’t be brought about through existing political mechanisms. Neither liberal democracy nor consumerism has means for prioritizing beauty. The structural forces that produced this situation—the Enlightenment’s rationalization, capitalism’s reduction of value to price, bureaucracy’s demand for quantifiable metrics—continue operating. You cannot argue your way out of aesthetic wreckage using the tools that created it.

The alternative is withdrawal into domains where aesthetic values can be primary. Not withdrawal into irrelevance or private indulgence, but the creation of forms of life that operate according to different logics than the surrounding culture. Every person living aesthetically in a culture that devalues beauty demonstrates that alternative orientations remain possible. When you organize your life around beauty, you become magnetic to others who feel the insufficiency of rationalized existence but lack models for living otherwise. The natural aesthetic draw enables the formation of authentic communities that can’t be manufactured through mission statements or organizational structures.

This is the crucial insight that distinguishes living aesthetically from technocratic solutions like effective altruism, a philanthropic movement that tries to rationally plan optimal resource allocation toward measurable good. This approach inevitably reproduces the flattening. The necessary institutions must emerge as organic consequences of people truly living enriched lives, gathering around shared aesthetic commitments that transcend calculable benefit.

The Bloomsbury Group, the early 20th-century cultural clique that counted among its members Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, didn’t form because someone wrote a strategic plan for cultivating British modernist aesthetics. It emerged from people who shared forms of life: writers, artists, and intellectuals organizing existence around beauty, conversation, and creative work. Bauhaus didn’t succeed by optimizing pedagogical outcomes. It succeeded because Gropius gathered people committed to aesthetic values and let institutional forms emerge from their practices. Authentic aesthetic communities arise when people living beautifully find each other, not when institutions try to manufacture community through programming.

The communities that preserved aesthetic knowledge through the 20th century often did so at tremendous cost. The drug use, the promiscuity, the self-destructive behaviors that marked parts of pre-AIDS gay culture; these were not sources of taste but symptoms of marginalization. When a community is denied participation in respectable society, when conventional paths to meaning are foreclosed, desperation follows. This is not something to romanticize or seek to imitate.

What needs recovering is the principle they accidentally preserved: that life can be organized around aesthetic values as primary orientation. The tragedy is that this principle, once central to aristocratic self-understanding and religious practice, has been expelled from respectability. Taste became deviant not because it was inherently transgressive but because the Enlightenment’s rationalization of existence removed it from the realm of legitimate aspiration.

The work of building the institutions that can sustain aesthetic forms of life begins with individuals committed to living them. Not from policy proposals or foundation grants, but from people whose entire existence testifies that beauty matters more than efficiency, that tradition carries wisdom that rationalism has abandoned, that there are forms of human flourishing the modern world has lost.

If you have the freedom to choose how you live, then make beauty your organizing principle.  This will feel irresponsible at first. You’ll be violating deeply internalized bourgeois norms about productivity and achievement. Good. Those norms produced the aesthetic wasteland we inhabit.

Ignore them. Spend years, if necessary, looking at architecture, painting, and design. Train your perception until you can recognize quality directly, not through credentials or consensus. Build libraries not of books you’ve read but books worth living with. Maintain practices that seem inefficient: handwritten correspondence, elaborate meals, gatherings where no business gets conducted. 

Create spaces that embody beauty. Your dwelling should challenge everyone who enters it to consider whether they are living well. Not through expense or display, but through evidence that beauty has been prioritized over convenience. Your environment trains your perception and announces your values to others. Make it worthy of sustained attention.

Most importantly, refuse the false choice between aesthetics and community. You’re not cultivating taste for private satisfaction. You’re becoming a node in networks that don’t exist yet, preparing the ground for institutions that can’t be planned but must be grown. When you live aesthetically, you become visible to others who feel trapped in rationalized existence. They’ll find you. The communities that matter form through recognition, people whose lives testify to shared values discovering each other.

Every person who organizes existence around beauty plants seeds that others can tend. The patient work of cultivating taste in yourself and enabling it in others through example. When enough people live this way, the institutions necessary to sustain and transmit aesthetic knowledge will arise as a natural consequence. 

The call is to reject the modern bargain that made productivity primary and beauty optional. To reclaim the aristocratic and religious understanding that those with freedom bear responsibility for exemplifying and creating beauty that enriches everyone. To demonstrate through how you live that alternatives to the rationalized world remain possible. This is the most radical act available: living in ways that refuse the terms modernity has set, that prepare the ground for cultures not yet born. In an age of aesthetic ruins, every person who lives beautifully becomes an ancestor to possible futures. This is your opportunity and obligation. Begin.

Bronze alloy is a fabrication, a man-made alloy. The formula was simple enough, a recipe known to smiths from the banks of the Nile to the hillforts of the Danube. You took copper, soft and plentiful and the color of the dying sun, and added tin in a proportion of about ten percent, a ratio arrived at not by calculation but by centuries of trial and error. The added tin made the difference between a metal that bends and a metal that cuts. This technological shift allowed for complex casting and a hard edge for tools and weapons.

Bronze was the strength of the age, the chisel that cut the stone for the Pharaoh’s limestone, the sword that severed the artery, the pin that held the cloak, a synonym for strength in poems written down on papyrus. The material divided the strong from the weak. Without the tin, you had only copper, which bent. You were soft and vulnerable and likely dead.

This necessity meant that for over two millennia, the great civilizations of the Mediterranean had a problem of geography that became a problem of survival. All of them, the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans in their Aegean citadels, the Egyptians along the Nile, and the Hittites on the Anatolian plateau, possessed copper in abundance. They had gold, timber, and grain. They had the favor of their gods and the discipline of their scribes. What they did not have was tin. They had built their political order, their armies, their economies, and their sophisticated diplomacy, on a metal that did not exist in their own soil.

This age of civilization was not a time of isolation. It was an era of globalization on a remarkable scale. A king in Mycenae could commission a sword whose blade was forged from copper mined in Cyprus and tin mined in Afghanistan, a weapon that was, in its molecular structure, a record of the known world. It was a time of far-reaching connectivity, a network of overland routes stretching across the Eurasian landmass and shipping across the Mediterranean Sea and even Indian Ocean—but a network that would ultimately prove to be fragile.

The Riddle of the Tin Mountains

For a long time, archaeologists didn’t know where the tin came from. This was the “tin problem,” a phrase that suggests a logistical hiccup rather than a centuries-long mystery that already baffled the historians of the classical world like Herodotus and Pliny. The texts were not so much silent as coy. The scribes of Mari and Ugarit listed the metal, annaku in Akkadian, AN.NA in Sumerian. They listed the prices, the weights, and the middlemen. But they did not list the mines. The tin came from “the East,” or it came from “the Mountains,” or it came from a market that had bought it from another market. It was a commodity with no origin, a ghost metal that seemed to simply appear in the palace workshops of Thebes and Knossos by magic.

We now know that, in the early centuries, tin came from far to the east, from Central and South Asia, from the Zeravshan Valley in what is now Tajikistan and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. There, in the high, thin air, miners dug into the rock, crushed the ore, smelted it into ingots, and sent it west by a relay of donkeys. The distance was striking. From the mines of Afghanistan to the furnaces of Mesopotamia is a journey of thousands of kilometers, across the Zagros Mountains, across the Iranian plateau, through the bandit country of Elam. The records of the Assyrian merchants of the 19th century BC tell of their trade network stretching out from their colony at Kanesh, in central Anatolia.

The Kültepe texts, in the form of twenty thousand cuneiform tablets found at Kanesh, are not concerned with poetry or myth but ledgers. They are the receipts of a family business. They record, with a dryness that borders on the hypnotic, the arrival of caravans from Aššur, the Assyrian home city. They record the movement of tin: about forty-eight tons of it over thirty years, carried on the backs of black donkeys.

These donkeys were the heavy transport of the Bronze Age. A single donkey could carry perhaps sixty kilograms, or two talents. It took a fleet of them, a convoy moving slowly through the dust, climbing the passes, paying the tolls, and bribing the local bandits. The merchants were focused on profit. They bought tin in Aššur for fifteen shekels of tin to one shekel of silver. They sold it in Anatolia for seven to one. They doubled their money—if they survived the journey, if the donkeys didn’t die, and if the taxes didn’t eat them alive.

The merchants, squeezed by the taxes of the local Anatolian rulers, established a smuggling route. They called it the harrān šūkinatum, the “narrow track.” They took their donkeys off the main highway to avoid the customs houses. Assyrian merchants in wool tunics, sweating in the Anatolian sun, goaded lines of donkeys laden with the strategic resource of an empire down goat paths to protect the enterprise’s profit. The hunger for margin and willingness to evade the state remain human constants. The donkeys stumbled under the weight of the metal that would make the sword that would kill the man.

This was the Eastern Route. It fed the early empires, relying on the stability of the lands between the Hindu Kush and the Mediterranean. It relied on Elam and Mari. It relied on a peace that was encouraged by the mutual necessity of the metal. As long as the caravans moved, the bronzesmiths in the west could work. The Assyrians were the middlemen, logistics experts who understood the art of geographic arbitrage in supply and demand. They moved the tin from where it was common to where it was rare but needed. However, the caravans were slow, and the mountains were high, and the kings of the Mediterranean looked for other options. The tablets tell us of the volume, but they also hint at the fragility. A war in the Zagros, a drought in the Khabur triangle, and the lines go dead. The furnaces go cold. The king waits for his armor, and the armor does not come.

The shift, when it came, was toward the water. By the Late Bronze Age, the kingdoms had turned to the sea. This was a cosmopolitan era of the great powers: New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittite Empire, the palaces of Mycenae. We have letters between pharaohs and kings in which they address one another as “brother,” complain about the quality of gold gifts, arrange marriages, and negotiate treaties. It was a club, and its members needed tin. The sea allowed for volume. A donkey carries sixty kilograms; a ship carries tons. The sea allowed the trade to scale up to match the ambitions of the empires.

Underwater Finds Reveal the Startling Scale of Trade

In 1982, a sponge diver off the coast of Grand Cape in Turkey noticed “metal biscuits with ears” on the seabed. He had found what came to be known as the Uluburun shipwreck. It is dated to the late 14th century BC, the high noon of the Bronze Age international trade. The ship was fifty feet long and built of cedar. It was a floating palace, a microcosm of the global economy, sunk in a single afternoon.

The inventory of the Uluburun ship is a litany of the era’s desires. It carried ebony logs from Africa, dark and heavy as stone. There was ivory from hippopotamus and elephant, the raw material for the inlay work on royal furniture. The hold contained ostrich eggshells, the ultimate novelty item, and terebinth resin in Canaanite jars, the scent of the Levant. It carried glass ingots colored cobalt blue and turquoise, meant to imitate lapis lazuli and turquoise stone, the synthetic luxury of the day. There were gold chalices and faience cups and cylinder seals.

But mostly, it carried metal. There were ten tons of copper, in the shape of “oxhide” ingots, mostly from Cyprus, the copper island. Perhaps most significantly, it carried one ton of tin. The ratio tells the tale: ten to one, the recipe for bronze. This was not a merchant-ship peddling trinkets, but a bulk shipment of industrial raw materials, likely a royal consignment, moving from the Levant toward the Aegean. The ship was a factory in kit form. Eleven tons of metal could outfit an army, enough bronze for five thousand swords.

For decades, the question of the Uluburun tin was a subject of vigorous academic debate. Did it come from the East, from the old Silk Road sources in Afghanistan, or did it come from the West, suggesting a connection to the Atlantic? As with much archaeology, the evidence was fragmentary. We knew about this trade network only because of its failures. Had the Uluburun ship reached its destination, the tin would have been melted down, turned into swords or plowshares, and likely lost.

The breakthrough also required an advance in geochemical techniques. Archaeologists had initially relied on lead isotope analysis, in which the decay of uranium and thorium creates a geological clock within the metal. While this proved particularly effective for copper, allowing scientists to trace many Bronze Age ingots to Cypriot ore, it had limitations for other metals. To trace the tin, scientists developed a multivariate approach, examining a number of isotopes and trace elements to create a broad signature.

The results of this analysis told a story of a diversified supply chain. Some of the tin appeared to match the signature of the eastern mines in Tajikistan. Other evidence pointed toward the Taurus Mountains of Turkey, suggesting Anatolia had its own sources despite previous assumptions that the Kestel mine was exhausted. The Uluburun ship proved a snapshot of civilizations operating at high efficiency, a network that could aggregate materials from three continents, trusting that the copper from Cyprus would always meet the far-traveling tin.

The real shock, however, came when this multivariate technique was used to trace ingots found in shipwrecks off the coast of Israel. These ingots did not come from Afghanistan or Turkey. The broad isotopic signature confirmed that they came from Cornwall, in the south-westernmost corner of Great Britain. This origin provided the definitive vindication for those who suspected an Atlantic link, proving that the trade networks of the Bronze Age were even more vast than previously imagined.

Tin Islands Hidden in The Atlantic Fog

Cornwall is a place of granite and gorse and a wind that feels like it originates in the center of the Atlantic. In the 13th century BC, to a resident of Thebes or Babylon, Cornwall was not merely foreign; it was theoretical, a place of mist and monsters at the edge of the map. Yet, the isotopes are clear. 

The lead isotope ratios, the trace elements of indium and antimony, all align. The tin found in the sunken cargoes of the eastern Mediterranean, the tin that was destined to become the weapons of the Israelites or the Philistines or the Egyptians, had been torn from the earth of southwest Britain. We have been accustomed to thinking of the ancient Near East as a self-contained drama involving Biblical prophets, Egyptian pharaohs, and perhaps seafaring Greeks and Romans; the rain-soaked moors of Devon, and their unknown inhabitants, have no role in this drama to us.

Nevertheless, the existence of these trade routes has been demonstrated. The hunger for the metal was so great that it pulled the North Atlantic rim into the orbit of the pharaohs. The tin mined in the streams of Cornwall was smelted into rough ingots, loaded onto sewn-plank oak boats, paddled across the English Channel to Brittany, then carried overland across France to the Rhône, or shipped down the Atlantic coast of Iberia, through the Pillars of Hercules, into the Mediterranean.

The supply chain was complex and multi-regional, suggesting a system of redundancy and efficiency. If the caravans from Afghanistan were cut off by war in Mesopotamia, the ships from the West could fill the gap. If a mine in Central Asia faltered, a mine in Britain could open. It suggests a market that was fluid, responsive, and able to source demand. By the Late Bronze Age, the sophisticated Mediterranean empires of the East were dependent on the tribal fringes of the West.

Yet, complexity is not a guarantee of stability; it is sometimes a correlate of fragility. Nodes in a network are potential points of failure. The Bronze Age world had constructed a machine of moving parts that spanned four thousand miles, reliant on the wind, the avoidance of pirates, and the credit of merchants. Above all, it relied on sufficient peace.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse

Ugarit, the great trading port on the Syrian coast, was destroyed in 1190 BC. Shortly before, the king of Ugarit wrote to the king of Cyprus with the concern of a man who realizes that the insurance policy has been cancelled. “If you have any information about enemy ships,” he wrote, “please inform me.” Maritime trade had become perilous. The end, when it came, was a systemic crash. Modern historians call it the Late Bronze Age Collapse. It happened around 1200 BC, with some offering the more precise date of 1177 BC. Though the dates are fuzzy, the devastation is clear. There was a coincidence of misfortune, including earthquakes, drought, and famine. There were the “Sea Peoples,” the mysterious confederation of raiders who swept down the coasts, burning the cities and cutting supply lines.

Ugarit burned, its clay tablets baked hard by the fires of its destruction, preserving the final frantic memos of the bureaucracy. The palace at Pylos burned. The Hittite capital at Hattusa was abandoned. The trade routes were severed. The tin stopped coming. The Cape Gelidonya shipwreck, off the southwestern coast of Turkey, provides chilling details of the collapse. Its cargo was not tons of fresh metal, but scrap. It carried broken bronze tools, bits and pieces, the detritus of a failing world. The crew were likely Cypriot smiths, traveling from port to port, scavenging what they could. They were recycling, melting down the past to make the present.

The supply of tin had been the artery of the age. As the systems of the age convulsed and the flow of tin faltered, each fed into the other’s decline. It wasn’t just that new weapons could not be forged; it was that the elite institutions of their societies, based on prestige, gift exchange, and technical superiority, broke down. Their descendants were forced to turn to iron.

Iron is ugly and difficult to work with. It rusts. It cannot be cast like bronze; it must be beaten into submission—cast iron, invented in China and introduced to the West during the Renaissance, is a carbon alloy. However, iron has one great advantage over bronze: the ore is everywhere. You don’t need far-flung trade routes to acquire iron. You don’t need a donkey caravan from Afghanistan or a ship from Cornwall. You can often dig it out of a mountain within sight of your city.

Iron is the metal of an ancient apocalypse. Bronze was the metal of the elite of an ancient globalization. When the trade network broke, the Bronze Age ended, and the Iron Age began: a grimmer, harder, more local world. A silence followed the collapse. For centuries after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean went dark. Writing vanished in many locations, including Greece. The great architecture stopped. The Phoenicians would later pick up the threads. They would sail to Tarshish in the western Mediterranean and bring back the metal. The Greeks would speak of the Cassiterides, the Tin Islands, with the vagueness of myth. But the integrated, high-speed, high-volume network of the 14th century BC was gone.

The Bronze Age tin trade has a certain resonance in the present day. Modern economies rely on cobalt from the Congo, lithium from the Andes, and semiconductors from Taiwan. They are machines of moving parts that span the globe. The partisans of globalization hold that the complexity of the system indicates its strength, that the market will find a way, that the supply chains will hold. The map of the tin routes, however, with its dashed lines crossing the Zagros and sea lanes hugging coasts from Anatolia to Brittany, suggests an enduring vulnerability.

The tin was geologically rare and geographically distant. It was nevertheless essential, so men went to get it. They invented letters of credit, customs unions, and diplomatic protocols. They conquered the distance, maximized the efficiency, and diversified their sources. They alloyed the copper and polished the bronze until it shone like gold. Then, one day, the ships no longer came. The lesson of the Bronze Age is not that the ancient world was primitive, but that it was sophisticated, and its sophistication was implicated in its death. A localized world can survive a local disaster. A globalized world, when it breaks, breaks in many places at once.

One can visit the Bodrum Museum in Turkey and see the oxhide ingots, copper slabs with the four handles, raised from the bottom of the sea after three thousand years. They are heavy, ugly things, sitting in a museum case, corroded and silent. They are monuments to trade, to political and economic effort, to the fact that, long before classical Athens, there was a network that connected the snows of Afghanistan to the fog of Cornwall, tied together by the desire for a metal that would make a sharper sword.

We still seek material resources, however much they change. Ours include oil, uranium, and rare earths, but the shape of the quest remains the same. The center is here; the resource is there. The line between them is a lifeline and a noose.

The tin trade was a dream of connection, a testament to human ingenuity and the willingness to risk. The men of that age built a world that relied on distant strangers, that required the horizon to stay open. When the horizon closed, they were left with fragments and scrap. We, in turn, are left with the story of the tin, a story of how we strive, whether in victory or ruin, to bind the world together.

This article by Barry Threw and Scott Moore will feature in our Winter 2025 print edition PALLADIUM 20: Noblesse Oblige. Subscribe now to receive your copy of our latest edition.

In 1966, Billy Klüver stood before an audience at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. Behind him, Robert Rauschenberg’s Oracle emitted electronic sounds that pulsed with artificial life. Surrounding them, a chorus of nine other artists and thirty engineers from Bell Labs had assembled “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering”, the first performance to wield the quiet magic of Doppler sonar, video projection, and wireless sound transmission. It was a show that the art world had never witnessed and that would mark the beginning of Klüver’s now-renowned Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

Klüver understood the significance of the venue he chose. Half a century earlier, the same venue had hosted the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, the fabled “Armory Show” that first introduced Americans to the modernist revolutions of Europe. To its audience, the Cubist geometries of Picasso and the colors of Matisse were glimpses of the visual language of an industrial future. In the same way, Klüver wanted to introduce his audience to a digital one.

On the West Coast, a similar energy was powering the cultural engine that would become Silicon Valley. In 1969, with Cybernetic Serendipity, Jasia Reichardt’s groundbreaking exhibition of computer art, algorithmic music, and interactive devices transformed Frank Oppenheimer’s San Francisco interactive science museum, called the Exploratorium, into a space where rituals of play and wonder collided with the machinery of computation. Gordon Pask made conversational mobiles that learned and adapted through feedback, turning light and motion into an evolving dialogue; Nam June Paik’s sculptures used assemblages of televisions, metal parts, and everyday objects to reflect on identity and memory; John Cage’s computer-generated compositions showed how algorithms and chance could force composers to contend with serendipity. Each piece was carefully included to form an exhibition that dealt with “possibilities rather than achievements” at a time when the intersection of art and technology had yet to be formalized. 

Experiments continued to thrive throughout the following decades. At Xerox PARC, residencies with artists like Harold Cohen and Richard Shoup showcased graphical interfaces, input instruments, and other interactive metaphors that would come to define the personal computer era. At the Portola Institute, Stewart Brand published the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, a mail-order compendium that taught its readers how to wire solar panels, build geodesic domes, and program Hewlett-Packard calculators. At Esalen, a retreat center in Big Sur that launched the Human Potential Movement, engineers and programmers joined Gestalt therapists and Zen teachers in workshops where meditation and sensory deprivation were treated as parallel experiments in human operating systems. 

All of these experiments enshrined technology as more than just advanced engineering but as a medium of expression. Like McLuhan, they saw technology as an extension of our nervous system, and as his contemporary Ivan Illich might have said, they were fundamentally convivial: inviting improvisation, learning, and communal construction. They proved that when used together in collective practice, art and technology could help us explore the human condition. In doing so, they created not only new laboratories but new cathedrals, where the impulse toward invention became inseparable from the search for the divine.

When Giants Knew How to Dance

The Bay Area today has few cathedrals, but many offices. To the taste of the “sigma grindset” evangelist, there is no environment more spiritual than a gray horizon of Herman Millers set against white drywall, broken only by the occasional mural in Corporate Memphis (the rounded pastel clip art style that became popular in 2016 corporate design). These aesthetics of hygienic productivity with custom monitors as stained glass and whiteboards as altars try to provide just enough texture to trick you into thinking something transcendent could happen. It never does. 

Everyone seems to recognize that some form of cultural drought exists. The Bay Area at large is full of people who read Nietzsche, who nod gravely about Arendt, and who, alongside Paul Graham, defend Rothko’s relevance. X is filled with posts that highlight the banality of evil embodied in Cluely-style startup attention games. Peter Thiel continues to lament a lack of imagination while Patrick Collison publishes philosophical books on progress. But where are the flying cars?

Founder mode, Paul Graham’s call for a return to a world where decisions are driven by vision, endures as a mantra because it recognizes a similar stagnation. Often, as Graham wrote far earlier, the best founders are like hackers or painters: guided by taste, intuition, and the pursuit of elegance. The mid-century institutions understood this, creating space for hackers and artists to dance together. Harold Cohen’s AARON paintings were hung in galleries while engineers demoed the Alto as if playing an instrument. Even Steve Jobs famously choreographed his keynotes like a performance, drawing on Bauhaus and Braun to frame Apple’s products as cultural objects. Today, Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator are more likely to draw inspiration from slot machines.

What made the Bay Area of the past great was its willingness to take seriously the idea that miracles can happen when we take the time to create something that matters for society, when we allow “waste” to be transmuted into cultural value. A computer terminal in a record shop might revitalize democracy; a meditation retreat at a hot spring might turn sand and sigils into conscious machines; a good zine might inspire 10,000 years of civilizational infrastructure. Technology might transform into magic when artistry inscribes its soul. 

Building good technology requires a level of spiritual consideration. As Pope Leo XIV said, technological innovation is not just mechanical but “a form of participation in the divine act of creation.” As Erik Davis writes in Techgnosis, the sacred and the synthetic are fundamentally intertwined. Even Kant described, in less religious terms, a need for creations that evoke the sublime; that move us so fully by their beauty so as to reveal our capacity to transcend the natural world. There is no time for such things in a world dedicated to the grind.

The hackers and artists who deeply understand the spiritual and the sublime no longer speak for The Bay. Whether through red tape or investment committee meetings, these days it is managed by a bureaucracy without beliefs; one that glorifies engagement metrics, growth without vision, and more often than not, the maintenance of systems that already exist. The culture that has been enshrined over the last decade is rich in capital but poor in faith.

It is no surprise, then, that we have returned to a form of Goodhart’s Law, a natural consequence of a lack of faith. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. As institutions that attempt to select for creativity, innovation, or even social responsibility become myopic, they inevitably end up selecting for engagement. All creative programs that follow this logic run into the same problem, and, in doing so, produce yet more murals in Corporate Memphis.

By enshrining the rigid and the mundane rather than the fluid and the sublime, art dies twice: first as an object of creative expression, and second as a catalyst for invention. Like the Canaanite god Moloch, Goodhart’s Law demands sacrifice. What can save us from a bureaucracy that asks for proof is patronage that offers faith. 

New Cathedrals of Loving Grace

Cathedrals were not just buildings made of stone, but a wager on transcendence. They required that we care about something greater than ourselves. The masons who laid stones in Chartres knew they would never see the spire complete, just as the engineers who soldered circuits for Klüver’s 9 Evenings couldn’t know what cultural forms they were inaugurating. Both groups knew, however, that by striving to build for something in service of creation itself, they could provide the kinds of inspiration and meaning that leads to invention.

Klüver originally used the cathedral metaphor to shape his own work because he knew these projects required collaboration between a range of architects, artists, and craftsmen. Each cathedral’s opera, like the Baule workshops at Chartres, afforded members the opportunity to learn from each other. For such spaces to exist today, we must understand that creative people do not “just sit around on couches all day” at places like Pixar—as Jobs said—but create with and inspire each other. We should accept that forms of contemplation, ritual, and “waste” are a necessary offering to a future we cannot see.

There is a clear demand to bring this mindset back, not just into the desert to be burned but into permanent spaces: people show up consistently at TIAT to celebrate emerging artists, or at Gray Area for avant-garde installations and performances. Nearly 200 mourners paid homage to Claude 3 Sonnet at a funeral complete with earnest eulogies, lotus votives, and a techno-ritual invocation of resurrection. There are parts of the city that deeply care about returning to a kind of cybernetic serendipity.

But for these efforts to work, the Bay Area needs patrons who will support the roles that Billy Klüver played to Bell Labs, that Bob Taylor played to Xerox PARC, that Steve Jobs played to Apple and Pixar. The kinds of patrons in New York City, like Agnes Gund, Henry and Rose Pearlman, or even Eric and Wendy Schmidt, who support the arts with pleasure today. Such patronage would not only be good for the city, but good for the American project, reestablishing the kind of cultural appreciation for abstraction, invention, and free thought that was once at the country’s core—whether CIA-funded or not.

The Bay Area should do what it has always done best: support the spirit of invention. To fill the missing middle that helps enthusiastic tinkerers become not cynical strivers but bridges between the improbable and the inevitable. In the Whole Earth era, the scaffolding to do something great was not found in a pitch deck; it was found in that five-dollar catalogue on how to wire a solar panel, run a printing press, or drop acid responsibly. 

New cathedrals and their patrons should fund waste, channel belief, preserve memory, and stage transcendence. They should underwrite independent labs, studios, and residencies that explore ideas without any immediate commercial application. They should create spaces where artists and engineers learn together, cultivating conviction through practice rather than metrics. They should construct archives, re-stagings, and oral histories that ensure the lineage of experimental work doesn’t vanish. And they should put an emphasis on public performances like Klüver’s 9 Evenings that will invite a broader audience to explore their own genuine imaginations.

Founders, hackers, and artists work better as a dense, interconnected ecosystem. This is reemerging today, but the guilds, the small presses, and the community arts centers that form the foundation of a healthy, creative culture are still struggling to coalesce. If we all choose to support their growth, we can be the pillars on which new cathedrals rest. 

Klüver always viewed his work as a dialogue: the artist provides the questions, and the engineer provides the means, but neither can move forward alone. If Silicon Valley wants to dream again, if it wants to move forward, it must recover its silicon soul.

Our forefathers did not live in caves and grunt over campfires, like the “noble savages” imagined by Locke, Marx, and twentieth-century anthropologists. More importantly, these were not peaceful and inward-looking societies. The genetic record shows that entire peoples embarked on great treks over land and across the seas, often violently replacing previous inhabitants in battles and wars long lost to memory. Our ancestors weren’t always nomadic. Settled communities did not originate with the domestication of grain after the end of the Ice Age, but were preceded by permanent villages and towns sustained by abundant and sometimes gardened forests, as well as fishing. Our ancestors lived this way for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. This, rather than the primitive utopia or even the wild savannah, was likely the ancestral environment Homo sapiens evolved in over this long era of prehistory.

As these complex societies occasionally advanced, mastering metals and developing writing, there was no linear guarantee of progress. As societies grow more complex and develop, becoming what we call civilizations, they sometimes fail and collapse without passing on the torch of progress. The evidence of both prehistory dug up from the ground and of written history shows there is nothing certain about the future of our own civilization. Civilizations rise and fall. Mankind relearns and forgets this lesson many times over.

PALLADIUM 19: Long History retells the story of mankind, setting outdated and flawed narratives right, and with them all our assumptions of humanity’s future. A timely task urgently needed, lest we risk becoming just another layer of ruins and bones, buried and forgotten under the feet of future generations. Like all our print editions, PALLADIUM 19 is a luxury creation designed for aesthetic enjoyment and focused thinking. It is a gift for our members and not for sale. Become a Palladium member today to receive your copy. 

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Featuring

Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought by Samo Burja. New discoveries are adding millennia to our past. The implications should change our future.

Mariners at the Dawn of History by Tristan Søbye Rapp. Archaeological finds hundreds of thousands of years old have shown human settlement of many of the world’s remote islands, challenging our assumptions of a primitive prehistory.

Genomics Has Revealed An Age Undreamed Of by Razib Khan. The genomics revolution has shown us our barbaric past. It now also forces us to decide our future.

Our Knowledge of History Decays Over Time by Ben Landau-Taylor and Samo Burja. Despite modern approaches to archaeology and preservation, as history moves forward, we will only lose knowledge of the past.

The Native Americans Before the Native Americans by Razib Khan. New findings and genetic evidence suggest that people came to America more than 30,000 years ago, before the peak of the Last Ice Age.

The Birth and Burial of Evolutionary Science in Australia by Jack Mungo. Activists, often of mostly European ancestry, have appropriated prehistoric cultures and are systematically destroying fossils vital to understanding Australia’s past and human evolution in general. 

Will Future Civilizations Bother to Excavate Our Remains? by Ben Landau-Taylor. The practice of archaeology is almost unique to our contemporary Western civilization rather than universal, and it is unlikely to be continued by future civilizations.

Why Civilizations Collapse by Samo Burja. We have to evaluate the perceptions that mint facts and theory, not merely peruse the body of social, historical, and political theories handed down to us.

The response was immediate and nearly universal. “Gang nobody wants this,” read one of the top comments on Zuckerberg’s announcement. TechCrunch’s headline deployed the term that had been circulating in creative communities for months: “Meta launches Vibes, a short-form video feed of AI slop.” On The Daily Show, comedian Michael Costa put the situation more bluntly, describing Vibes as a feed for “fat little pigs” and suggesting that Meta wanted to “watch you eat yourself to death.”

The visceral disgust is evident. “AI slop,” or AI-generated content, feels less like art and more like the runoff, waste product of systems optimized for volume rather than quality. AI slop is the uncanny valley applied across entire ecosystems of content.

Yet, five days after Vibes launched, OpenAI released Sora’s video generation platform to the public. Within forty-eight hours, Sora hit number one on the App Store. The backlash was identical, but adoption was immediate. Whatever people said they wanted, whatever revulsion they expressed, tech executives were betting that consumer behavior would diverge from shouted normative preference. And the economics were too compelling: AI content costs very little to produce in comparison to traditional video creation, can be generated continuously, and keeps users scrolling. Whether it’s good, in any meaningful sense, has become beside the point.

But what if that initial revulsion, the response before the rationalization, represents genuine wisdom? Twenty-four centuries ago, Plato warned that consuming imitations of truth corrupts our capacity to recognize actual truth; repeated exposure to copies of copies trains us to prefer shadows over reality. His theory of “mimesis” rests on a hierarchy of distance from reality, with each removal representing not just aesthetic degradation but a kind of spiritual pollution, a corruption of what he called the soul’s capacity for understanding.

The warning seems abstract. But recent research in computer science suggests that Plato may have been diagnosing something that is now measurable. AI models trained recursively on their own outputs undergo irreversible degradation, losing rare patterns while converging toward statistical averages. The mathematics confirms what the ancient hierarchy predicted: copies of copies collapse toward mediocrity; the collapse is built into the imitation process itself. The world is being degraded from its own copies, and we are growing comfortable with the flight from reality.

Imitations All the Way Down 

In Book X of the Republic, written around 375 BC, Plato makes a claim that sounds almost petty in its specificity: “All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” Not that poetry is sometimes misleading, or that bad poetry corrupts, but consuming imitations of something good inherently damages our understanding of what good means. The structure of Plato’s argument helps elucidate something peculiar about machine-generated content: why the medium itself, independent of quality, might matter.

Plato’s theory rests on his hierarchy of reality. Whatever one makes of his metaphysics—and philosophers have spent millennia debating whether his Forms actually exist—the structure proves useful for understanding what happens when machines learn from machines. At the top are the Forms: perfect, eternal ideas accessible through philosophical inquiry. Below that are physical objects, imperfect copies of these Forms. A carpenter crafting a bed imitates the Form of bed-ness, working from an understanding of what makes a bed a bed. At the bottom are artistic representations: the painter’s image of a bed, which captures only the appearance of one particular bed from one particular angle. This makes the painting “thrice removed from truth,” or an imitation of an imitation of the ideal.

The distance from the original Form is essential. The carpenter needs to understand the function, structure, and purpose of a chair to transform a piece of wood into a sturdy, reliable, and comfortable place to sit. The painter needs only to capture how light falls on wood, how fabric drapes, and what the eye sees from a single perspective. Art, in Plato’s framework, imitates appearances rather than engaging with reality. Each imitation means less understanding and less connection to what makes something what it is.

AI-generated content extends this descent in ways Plato couldn’t have imagined, but his hierarchy anticipates. Machine learning models don’t train on literal physical objects or even on direct observations. Models learn from digital datasets, such as photographs, descriptions, and prior representations, that are themselves already copies. When an AI generates an image of a bed, AI isn’t imitating appearances the way a painter does but extracting statistical patterns from millions of previous copies: photographs taken by photographers who were already working at one removal from the physical object, processed through compression algorithms, tagged with descriptions written by people looking at the photographs rather than the beds. The AI imitates imitations of imitations.

And then these AI-generated outputs become training data for the next generation of models, also known as synthetic data. AI training on AI: copies of copies of copies of copies. Each iteration moves further down Plato’s hierarchy, further away from anything resembling reality; a mathematical severing from the real.

Last year, Nature published research that reads like experimental confirmation of Platonic metaphysics. Ilia Shumailov and colleagues at Cambridge and Oxford tested what happens under recursive training—AI learning from AI—and found a universal pattern they termed model collapse. The results were striking in their consistency. Quality degraded irreversibly. Rare patterns disappeared. Diversity collapsed. Models converged toward narrow averages.

A language model trained on Wikipedia text degraded after nine generations into mechanical nonsense: “architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black-tailed jackrabbits, white-tailed jackrabbits, blue-tailed jackrabbits, red-tailed jackrabbits, yellow-.” The sentence trails off into absurdity, the model having lost any capacity for coherent continuation. Image generation showed the same pattern: distinct handwritten digits blurred into indistinguishable forms as the model averaged everything toward prototypes. The digits didn’t just become worse; they became the same.

The researchers showed the inevitable consequences of using recursive training data. More fundamentally, models learn patterns by systematically excluding outliers, which makes the rare and most meaningful data impossible to generate. Plato warned that consuming such copies of reality, no matter how well-crafted, grooms us toward mediocrity through habituation.

Other researchers have found variations on the theme. Rice University scientists called the phenomenon “Model Autophagy Disorder,” invoking mad cow disease as a metaphor. The comparison is apt: both involve recursive self-destruction through corrupted copying mechanisms, prions in one case and statistical patterns in the other. After five generations of synthetic training, their face generation models produced images that all looked like the same person, with bizarre gridlike artifacts spreading across the features like digital corruption. Researchers at Stanford and Berkeley found that GPT-4’s code generation ability dropped 81 percent over three months, precisely the period when AI-generated content began proliferating online and presumably entering training datasets.

This addresses a common objection: that the medium doesn’t matter, that art is art regardless of how it’s produced. But with AI, the medium determines what can be created because the process is recursive imitation. Statistically, AI cannot produce genuine outliers. Rare patterns get averaged away by design. A photographer can seek unusual subjects, strange angles, and can deliberately work against convention. In optimizing for what is most probable, AI learns to forget what is least expected. The black swans disappear first. The mere potential volume of AI-generated content compounds the problem: AI produces a thousand outputs per hour at near-zero cost while a human produces one. The cheap doesn’t just compete with the expensive; it floods quality out entirely.

As Plato’s hierarchy explains, the painter engaging with a physical bed is at least working from something real, however imperfectly perceived. The AI training on images of beds never touches reality but only patterns extracted from previous representations. When AI trains on AI, the connection to the real world diminishes.

Habituation as Education

Plato’s deeper concern wasn’t about epistemology, but culture. Repeated exposure to bad imitation, Plato argues, corrupts the soul through habit. The claim appears in Book III of the Republic (395d), where he’s discussing education in his ideal city. “Did you never observe,” he writes, “how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?”

Culture, for Plato, is education (Republic 514a; Laws 653b-c). Music, poetry, visual art, and theatrical performance aren’t neutral entertainment but formative experiences that train your character. What we repeatedly encounter shapes who we become. Exposure to artistic forms, whether ordered or chaotic, simple or complex, truthful or imitative, trains the soul toward corresponding dispositions. Plato is claiming human formation: simplified, homogenized, and imitative forms train preferences for simplification, homogenization, and imitation. Complex, rare, truthful engagement trains capacity for complexity, appreciation of rarity, and orientation toward truth.

Culture isn’t a mirror that reflects existing values but the medium through which values and preferences are initially formed. The ethical dimension emerges here. If culture educates, then what we consume matters not just for pleasure or aesthetic judgment but for who we become capable of being. The question stops being whether AI-generated content is “as good as” human-created content in some abstract aesthetic sense. The question becomes what consuming content that is mathematically constrained to exclude novel output does to our capacity to perceive, appreciate, and desire anything else.

In model collapse, the tails of distributions disappear first: low-probability events, rare patterns, edge cases, minority data, outliers. The Cambridge researchers explicitly note that “low-probability events are often relevant to marginalized groups” and are “also vital to understand complex systems.” Rare medical conditions may be forgotten by diagnostic AI. Minority consumer preferences disappear in favor of bestsellers. Image generators asked for “dog” will produce golden retrievers and labs instead of rare breeds, because golden retrievers and labs appear most frequently in training data. Long-tail scientific papers, despite potential importance, may be excluded from model understanding because those papers are cited less frequently than mainstream work.

But the deeper problem is what consumption of this reduced content does to us. If we habitually encounter mediocre representations, we learn to prefer average representations. Not through conscious choice or explicit persuasion but through the mechanism Plato identified as habituation: repeated exposure training the soul, or, in contemporary neuroscience terms, the neural architecture, toward corresponding dispositions. 

The mere-exposure effect, documented across hundreds of studies, demonstrates that repeated presentations create preference without conscious cognition. Simply encountering something multiple times makes us like it more, reaching maximum strength within ten to twenty presentations. Processing fluency research proves that averaged, prototypical features feel immediately more pleasing than distinctive ones, with effects operating within seventeen to fifty milliseconds of viewing, faster than conscious awareness. The brain prefers what it can process easily, and prototypes are, by definition, what the brain has learned to process most easily. Perceptual narrowing shows that environmental exposure reshapes neural discrimination abilities through synaptic pruning. Populations lose the capacity to perceive distinctions they don’t regularly encounter. It’s not just that we prefer what we see; we become unable to fully perceive what we don’t see.

Most concerning, research specifically examining human-AI feedback loops found that AI systems amplify biases through mechanisms operating below conscious awareness. In emotion recognition tasks, humans showed a 53 percent bias toward certain categories. AI trained on this data amplified the bias to 65 percent. Then, when humans interacted with the biased AI, their own bias increased to 61 percent over time. The conclusion: “AI systems amplify biases, which are further internalized by humans, triggering a snowball effect where small errors in judgment escalate into much larger ones.” Crucially, participants underestimated the substantial impact even when explicitly warned about the effect.

What Plato called habituation, neuroscience measures as synaptic pruning and preference formation. The process isn’t neutral. AI-generated content systematically purged of long-tail rarity and optimized for processing fluency creates feedback loops: AI-averaged content leads to repeated exposure, which creates preference for convergent features, which generates demand for more AI content, which trains future models on even more homogenized data, which accelerates collapse. The cycle compounds.

Plato emphasizes “beginning in early youth” because formation during development has outsized effects. Children encountering predominantly AI-generated content from early ages are being trained in preferences for the averaged, the prototypical, and the easily processed. They’re not learning to appreciate complexity, rarity, or difficulty. Children are not developing the capacity to discriminate subtle differences or to value what is unusual. The soul, in Plato’s framework, becomes shaped to desire what it repeatedly encounters. Neural architecture, in the contemporary neuroscience framework, becomes pruned to discriminate what it regularly processes. Either way, the result is the same: populations trained to prefer shadows.

A Harmful Miseducation 

So, is AI slop bad for me? Yes, but the answer requires precision. Not all AI-generated content is equally harmful. Human-curated, AI-assisted work can maintain or even enhance quality through active collaboration, preserving cognitive engagement and creative agency.

When humans generate options with AI, select thoughtfully, and refine substantially, the results often surpass what either could produce alone. Early research at OpenAI demonstrated the same pattern. In 2022, the team behind InstructGPT showed that a 1.3 billion parameter model trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback outperformed the original 175 billion parameter GPT-3 model without it. Users preferred the smaller model’s responses across a wide range of tasks, illustrating that human guidance, even applied to a smaller system, can outweigh sheer computational scale.

Empirical studies of AI-assisted artists found similar effects. Examining over four million artworks from fifty thousand users, researchers Eric Zhou and Dokyun Lee found that artists who adopted AI tools produced pieces rated about fifty percent more favorably than their pre-AI work, but only when they actively curated. While a subset of artists generated genuinely novel work by selecting and refining from multiple AI outputs, average novelty declined as most users passively accepted automated generations.

Controlled writing experiments published in Science Advances confirmed the same tendency. Writers given curated AI suggestions produced stories rated 8 to 26 percent higher in quality and creativity than those using unfiltered generations or none at all. The effect was strongest for less experienced writers. Critically, only writers who actively selected from multiple AI suggestions showed improvements, while participants passively accepting single outputs gained no advantage; cognitive engagement, not automation, amplifies creativity.

But you will not encounter primarily human-curated AI content. You will encounter seemingly infinite feeds of unfiltered, fully automated generation optimized for engagement rather than quality. The economic incentives are overwhelming. Inference costs for some AI systems have fallen by more than ninety percent through hardware optimization, such as AWS Inferentia’s ability to run models far more efficiently than standard GPUs. Once trained, generative models operate with vanishingly low marginal costs, drawing only on electricity and compute rather than human labor, a dynamic Andreessen Horowitz describes as bringing the marginal cost of creation toward zero. And unlike human creators, AI systems can generate text, images, and video at speeds many orders of magnitude beyond human capacity. Platforms optimize for this scale because the economics reward output over originality: each new imitation costs less to generate than to resist.

Platforms choose automation not because they misunderstand the quality difference but because the costs of lower quality are externalized to users while the benefits of scale accrue to shareholders. The result is simple: the cheap overwhelms the expensive, the automated drowns out the curated, the collapsed replaces the diverse.

The high-volume AI feeds you actually encounter, not the carefully curated, human-guided work that exists in niche or premium contexts, train your preferences toward sameness through mechanisms faster than conscious thought. Processing fluency makes average content feel pleasing within fifty milliseconds. Perceptual narrowing reshapes neural discrimination through synaptic pruning. The mere exposure effect peaks within ten to twenty presentations.

You will learn to prefer what you are given, and what you are given is recursive imitation, content systematically purged of rarity and optimized for immediate engagement.

So yes, AI slop is bad for you. Not because AI-generated content is immoral to consume or inherently inferior to human creation, but because the act of consuming AI slop reshapes your perception. It dulls discrimination, narrows taste, and habituates you to imitation. The harm lies less in the content itself than in the long-term training of attention and appetite.

Plato warned that imitations corrupt the soul unless we recognize them for what they are. That awareness, he believed, was the only antidote to deception. In our case, recognition may be all that remains.

You can curate carefully, seek out human-made or human-guided work, and limit exposure to automated feeds. These choices matter. They preserve awareness, the capacity to notice the difference between what is real and what is merely fluent. But such choices exist within systems built to maximize engagement, where each new imitation costs less to generate than to resist.

The window for resistance is this one: the moment before habituation completes, before the average becomes preferable to the original. You may understand precisely how and why AI slop degrades perception, and still be unable to avoid it. That, perhaps, is the deeper cruelty of the present, that our loss will not come through ignorance but through recognition too late to matter. The danger was never ignorance. It’s the quiet comfort of knowing something is synthetic and scrolling anyway.

The Medici pioneered a model in which art, architecture, and scholarship were not mere ornaments of power but integral components of its machinery. They understood that culture could be a functional instrument, that beauty could be more powerful than propaganda, and that the sponsorship of genius could yield returns far exceeding the investment. By funding the defining works of what would come to be called the Italian Renaissance, they cultivated an ecosystem that reinforced their own economic strength, legitimized their political authority, and catalyzed an explosion of creativity that reshaped the Western world. Over the years, Medici patronage funded extraordinary artists and thinkers ranging from Michelangelo to Machiavelli to Leonardo da Vinci, whose names still serve as bywords for genius today.

Weaving financial power, political ambition, and artistic innovation into a single tapestry was the particular genius of the House of Medici. To examine the Medicis’ method is to ask a question that remains highly relevant today: how can strategic cultural patronage alter the long-term trajectory of society and create a durable legacy, and what might its application look like in the centers of money and power today, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley?

The Engine of Commerce and Culture

The Medicis’ ascent was fueled by their bank. Founded in 1397 by Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (1360-1429), the Medici Bank was a masterpiece of financial innovation in an age suspicious of open usury. Giovanni adopted sophisticated instruments like double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, establishing a network of branch partnerships that stretched across Europe. His financial acumen generated the immense capital that his son Cosimo (1389-1464) and later generations would deploy with surgical precision. The family fortune was the wellspring of their influence, the liquid asset that could be transmuted into the harder currencies of stone, bronze, and public admiration.

They did not treat this expenditure as a cost, but instead as a strategic reinvestment in the family’s enterprise. The beautification of Florence was more than good for business. When Cosimo de’ Medici financed the construction of Filippo Brunelleschi’s revolutionary dome for the city’s cathedral and underwrote the rebuilding of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, he was not merely engaging in civic philanthropy. He was enhancing the brand of Florence, and by extension, the brand of its most prominent family. A magnificent city attracted talent, trade, and wealthy visitors, all of whom might require the services of a reliable bank. The public works, from churches to libraries, served to secure the favor of the city’s powerful guilds and its ordinary citizens, creating a reservoir of goodwill that was a great intangible asset.

Local merchants and foreign potentates alike found it advantageous to associate with the prestigious Medici, a name that became synonymous with not only financial dependability but cultural sophistication. The Medici Bank’s appointment in 1420 as the Depositor of the Apostolic Chamber, effectively the financial manager for the Papacy, a role of immense profit and prestige, was secured and maintained in no small part through the family’s carefully cultivated reputation as pious and discerning supporters of Christian art and scholarship. They understood with great clarity that cultural capital was convertible and could be exchanged for trust, loyalty, access, and further economic opportunity. Their patronage drew clients, allies, and talent into their orbit. The artists and scholars they supported became nodes in a social and commercial network—a network that invariably led back to the Palazzo Medici. They created a feedback loop in which economic power funded cultural production, which in turn generated the social and political capital that solidified and expanded economic power. It was a cycle of such efficiency that their contemporaries, including their rivals, were compelled to imitate it, multiplying this social technology across Italy.

The financial mechanisms that sustained their patronage were as innovative as the art it produced. To navigate the Church’s prohibitions on usury, the bank perfected the use of exchange bills, which replaced interest with fees for currency conversion, allowing them to lend generously and profitably. A portion of these profits was then funneled into the glorification of Florence, God, and the Medici. Artists and scholars were offered stipends, long-term commissions paid in installments, or even pensions, providing them with a degree of financial stability that freed them to experiment and innovate.

This financial leverage was also applied to the political sphere. Cosimo extended enormous loans to the Florentine state to finance its wars. In return, he gained decisive influence over state appointments and policy. The officials who owed their positions to Medici largesse were naturally inclined to approve the family’s ambitious and expensive public art projects. By the late fifteenth century, under the stewardship of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), the distinction between the city’s and the Medicis’ balance sheet had become blurred. Florence’s economic vitality and its cultural preeminence were two sides of the same coin, a coin minted, managed, and circulated by the Medici. One could no longer tell if they were bankers investing in art or cultural impresarios who happened to run a bank. They were indivisibly both.

The Architecture of Political Legitimacy

For a family of bankers with no hereditary claim to rule, political power in a fiercely independent republic like Florence was a precarious asset. Culture became their primary tool for legitimizing a rule that was, for decades, unofficial. They used it to manufacture consent, to project an aura of destiny, and to transform their public image from that of powerful citizens to that of rightful, spiritually sanctioned leaders. Works were calibrated to communicate the family’s piety, wisdom, and unwavering commitment to the Florentine state. 

In the private chapel of the Medici Palace, Benozzo Gozzoli’s vibrant frescoes of the Journey of the Magi (1459-1461) offer a masterclass in this technique. The biblical procession winds its way through an idealized Tuscan landscape, and riding among the Magi are prominent members of the Medici family and their political allies, their portraits seamlessly integrated into the sacred narrative. The message was unmistakable: the Medici were not merely patrons, but pious participants in sacred history, wise men guiding their city in accordance with God’s will.

This blending of the sacred and the political was a recurring theme. Donatello’s bronze David, the first freestanding nude sculpture since antiquity, was placed in the courtyard of the Medici Palace. While a potent symbol of the Florentine Republic’s own underdog victory against its enemies, its placement within the Medicis’ private-yet-public space subtly tied that civic triumph to the family’s leadership. The message, absorbed by every visitor and dignitary, was that the city’s security and cultural flowering were underwritten by Medici strength and discernment.

This form of symbolic politics was complemented by a more direct cultivation of popular support. Cultural patronage was a way to win the hearts and minds of the Florentine people. Cosimo de’ Medici, a man of sober habits as well as immense wealth, gained a reputation as a benefactor of the common good. He earned the posthumous title Pater Patriae, “Father of the Fatherland,” not through military conquest, but through his funding of public institutions like the convent and library of San Marco, which were made accessible to the citizens. In a time when citizens of Northern Italian city-states had a strong sense of civic patriotism focused on the collective interest of their city, Cosimo’s acts of generosity created a deep well of public goodwill that proved to be a formidable political defense. When rival families orchestrated his exile in 1433, the city’s economy faltered and public discontent grew. His triumphant return a year later was supported by a broad coalition of citizens who had come to equate Medici leadership with Florence’s stability and glory.

His grandson Lorenzo refined this strategy into a high art. Lorenzo was less the behind-the-scenes banker and more the public impresario of Florence’s golden age. He organized lavish public festivals, tournaments, and carnivals, often featuring elaborate artistic performances and allegorical displays that celebrated the beneficence of the Medici regime. By positioning himself as the chief arbiter of Florence’s cultural life and the guarantor of its public happiness, Lorenzo garnered a level of popular affection that helped him survive political crises, most notably the violent Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. In the wake of that bloody assassination attempt, the support of the Florentine populace, who saw the attack on the Medici as an attack on the city itself, solidified his power.

The Medici invested enormous sums in religious art and architecture, effectively forging an alliance with the most powerful institution in Europe: the Church. By funding the restoration and construction of major churches and by maneuvering their own family members into high ecclesiastical office—four Medicis would become popes—they added religious authority to their worldly power. Pope Leo X, born Giovanni de’ Medici (1475-1521), commissioned Raphael to decorate the Vatican apartments and initiated the grand project to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica, all of which enhanced the family’s image as preeminent leaders of Christendom.

Funding the Renaissance

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Medici was not any single work of art, but an ecosystem of innovation. The Medici court, particularly under Cosimo and Lorenzo, became an incubator for the Renaissance, a place where disparate talents were brought into close proximity, creating a critical mass of genius. Their patronage system did not simply fund individual projects but also nurtured a collaborative and competitive environment where new styles, techniques, and ideas could emerge and cross-pollinate.

The House of Medici also cultivated the intellectual elite. Cosimo laid the groundwork by identifying and providing sustained support to transformative figures. He was the patron of Filippo Brunelleschi, the engineer who solved the seemingly impossible problem of the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and of Donatello, the sculptor who revived the classical tradition. But he also understood the importance of intellectual infrastructure. His founding of the Platonic Academy was a masterstroke, creating an institutional home for the revival of classical philosophy. By providing the scholar Marsilio Ficino with a villa and a lifelong stipend to translate Plato’s complete works into Latin, Cosimo was acting as a patron for humanism, itself a political project.

These scholars, dependent on Medici support, naturally produced works that praised their patrons’ virtues and lent philosophical weight to their rule. A powerful narrative was thus woven from the pulpit, the academy, and the artist’s studio: the Medici were not usurpers, but the spiritually sanctioned stewards of a new golden age. Through this multi-pronged strategy, the family turned culture into a fortress, securing their dynasty for generations.

Lorenzo amplified this effect, presiding over a court that was a constellation of the era’s brightest stars. At various times, his circle included the painters Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, the young sculptor Michelangelo, and the poet-scholar Angelo Poliziano. Lorenzo did not merely commission them. He brought them into his household, invited them to his table, and engaged them in conversation. The Medici court became a hub of intellectual ferment, a place where a discussion of Neoplatonic philosophy might influence the allegorical design of a painting, or a new understanding of anatomy might inform the musculature of a sculpture.

The Medici directly intervened with artists, encouraging them to push boundaries and excel. When Lorenzo recognized the prodigious talent of a teenage Michelangelo, he took him into his own home. Michelangelo ate meals with the family and was tutored alongside Lorenzo’s sons, including Giovanni, the future Pope Leo X. Lorenzo not only covered the boy’s expenses but gave him access to the family’s unparalleled collection of ancient Roman sculpture, which proved formative for Michelangelo’s innovative approach to the human form.

This patronage extended to science and technology. Later generations of the family, now the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, continued the tradition. Grand Duke Cosimo I (1519-1574) founded one of Europe’s first formal art academies, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, in the 1560s, which sought to link artistic practice with scientific principles. This same spirit led a later Medici, Grand Duke Cosimo II (1590-1621), to become the patron of Galileo Galilei. The astronomer’s discoveries, including the moons of Jupiter, which he named the “Medicean Stars” in honor of his patron, were made possible by the funding and political protection the Medici provided.

The network effects of this ecosystem rippled outward. The Medici often acted as cultural brokers, leveraging their diplomatic ties to place their favored artists and scholars in other courts. The artists and artisans trained in the Medici ecosystem went on to mentor the next generation, propagating a culture of excellence and innovation across Italy and beyond. The institutions they founded and the collections they amassed, bequeathed to the city, became the cores of public museums like the Uffizi Gallery and libraries like the Laurentian Library, creating an enduring infrastructure for creativity. The Medici demonstrated that sustained, strategic investment in culture yields an innovation multiplier, creating a legacy that both enriches humanity’s artistic and scientific heritage and drives economic prosperity.

The Medici Method in a Modern Context

The world of 21st-century technology may seem distant from Renaissance Florence, yet the challenges and opportunities facing today’s entrepreneurs are analogous to those the Medici faced. How does one translate private wealth into lasting public good? How can recently acquired wealth earn social permission to impact and innovate? How can a center of economic power also become a celebrated center of culture? The Medicis’ approach, in its essential principles, offers a compelling blueprint. Adapting it for a modern hub of innovation, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, requires a translation of its core strategies into a contemporary vocabulary.

The first and most straightforward principle is direct financial sponsorship. The Medici identified and backed individual genius. Modern patrons can do the same, not by writing a check to a large, established institution, but by making targeted bets on hand-picked individuals. For a tech leader, this might mean funding a long-term fellowship at an innovative nonprofit, creating a writer-in-residence program at their company, or providing a no-strings-attached grant to an artist or scientist. This kind of direct, personal patronage, like Lorenzo’s support for Michelangelo, forges a relationship and sends a powerful signal that the patron values individual creativity, not only financial returns. It visibly directs wealth to pro-social ends and generates loyalty and goodwill. Importantly, the Medici did not outsource their judgment of genius to external institutions but used their own judgment of character and creativity, not shying away from the young, the untested, and outsiders. When Cosimo de’ Medici decided to refound Plato’s Academy, he put 29-year-old Marsilio Ficino in charge—his grandson’s tutor—not an aging, well-connected priest or scholar at the peak of his prestige.

The second principle is institution-building. The Medici built things that would outlast them: libraries, academies, public buildings, and more. The modern equivalent need not be a physical structure, though it could include one. The key is to create enduring institutions that advance knowledge and culture on behalf of the civic community. A tech billionaire might found a research institute dedicated to open-sourcing software or preserving other knowledge, build a new science or history museum, or establish an atelier that blends the latest fabrication technologies with an artistic studio. Such a strategy anchors a patron’s legacy in the civic landscape, deploying a personal fortune for particular public goods.

The third principle, perhaps the most crucial, is networking and convening. One of the Medicis’ greatest contributions was network cultivation. They created a salon, a court, a space where diverse minds could collide and collaborate. A modern Medici would not just fund projects but actively curate communities, which would also provide a source of talented outsiders with which to staff new institutions. This curation could take the form of invitation-only retreats, festivals, or interdisciplinary conferences that bring together a careful mix of technologists, humanists, and civic activists. The goal is to replicate the cross-pollination that took place in Lorenzo’s court, to create a space where new companies, projects, and friendships can be cultivated across domains. The Bay Area, with its concentration of specialized talent, is fertile ground for this kind of intentional serendipity. A patron’s greatest asset may not be money, but social capital and the power to convene.

The final principle is symbolic and philosophical patronage. The Medici used art to shape a narrative about their family and their city. Today’s patrons operate in a far more saturated media environment, but the principle remains the same. For tech leaders often criticized for a lack of civic engagement, strategic cultural patronage can demonstrate a commitment to humanistic values. Funding training in the arts, supporting public art inspired by history, or underwriting long-form journalism and analysis are all acts that generate social capital. They signal that the patron’s interests extend beyond technological disruption and profit to the health and vibrancy of their society. The most challenging aspect of such patronage is that it should reflect a coherent social philosophy, not disconnected attempts at public relations. Establishing prizes for innovation in art or selected technologies can be the modern equivalents of the competitions the Medici sponsored for the cathedral doors. They incentivize excellence while associating the patron’s name with visionary leadership.

These strategies can operate at many scales. One need not possess a huge fortune to apply them. Many successful engineers could engage in direct sponsorship by supporting artists and writers with smaller amounts of support, or practice convening by organizing salons. The point is not the magnitude of the spending, but the strategic intent behind it: to create a synergy between economic success and cultural flourishing. For the Bay Area, an undeniable engine of technological innovation, but one with a sadly mixed record of social achievement, a conscious embrace of the Medicis’ model could be transformative. By investing in the region’s cultural and intellectual vitality, innovators can help create a more resilient, cohesive, and creative society. In doing so, they would not only enrich their society but also secure their own legacies, demonstrating, as the Medici did five centuries ago, that the most profitable long-term investment is in human beings. The return on that investment, measured in the richness of a culture and the durability of a legacy, is incalculable.

Of course, it’s not just the British who care for their animals; many nations have made great leaps in animal welfare over the years, especially for popular pet species. It wasn’t long ago that cat-burning was considered a fine form of public entertainment across Europe. Today the European Union has some of the best animal welfare laws on Earth. Even the rugged frontier of the United States has become so pet-friendly it’s hard to drive more than a block without seeing a dog groom-and-pamper service.

Despite this, I can confidently say there has never been a worse time in history to be a domesticated animal under the care of humans. The reason for this is modern factory farming. As of 2022, 98% of pigs, 99.9% of chickens and 75% of cows in the United States are kept, for a significant portion of their lives, in tightly confined and deeply unnatural conditions known as factory farms. These ratios are similar across other developed nations.

These industrial operations can vary in scale, but their key differentiator from conventional farming is their efficiency. A factory farm optimises for economic efficiency above all other values, which of course massively impacts the quality of life of their animals. A particularly egregious example of this is “gestation crating,” the practice of forcing female pigs to live in cages so short and narrow they cannot even turn around or comfortably lie down for months on end. Such confinement for a cat or a dog for more than a few minutes would be unthinkable to most of us, and yet the vast majority of pigs on Earth—a species more emotionally intelligent than a dog—live this way almost permanently.

Other species like chickens and turkeys fare no better. The average broiler hen lives its short life in such densely packed conditions that many are on death’s door through infection or injury by the time they are slaughtered. The roughly eight billion male chicks that are born and immediately thrown into a macerator to be literally crushed alive annually by the egg industry are arguably getting off easy.

Factory farming isn’t just bad for the animals. It’s also terrible for human health. Most farms infuse powerful antibiotics into feed to keep their animals alive long enough to reach adulthood. The U.S. pork industry currently uses about as many antibiotics as all U.S. hospitals combined, massively contributing to the mounting antibiotic resistance crisis. Many epidemiologists also expect factory farming to be the cause of the next pandemic. The living density and poor hygiene create perfect conditions for novel pathogens–indeed, a new H5N1 outbreak is currently plaguing many U.S. farms–in part because many farms are actively ignoring biosecurity advice to test their animals, lest it affect their margins. You are what you eat. It is highly unlikely that the terrible conditions of the animals we eat do not ultimately have an impact on us, the people eating them; we most likely just haven’t yet untangled exactly what the consequences are.

There is also evidence that synthetic hormones used by major U.S. producers to bolster milk and meat production can accumulate in humans, creating endocrine disruption and potentially elevated cancer risk in consumers. While the science remains hotly contested, this concern was sufficient for the EU to ban hormonal growth promoters in the 1980s. Curiously, the FDA continues to allow them, including the controversial bovine somatotropin (rBST), which is known to create higher levels of a secondary hormone insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), which is correlated with cancer growth across species. It may even be contributing to the fertility crisis: a 2014 study found significant inverse relationships between processed red meat intake and total sperm count in young men.

Lastly, there’s the environmental damage. Factory farms concentrate the waste of many animals far beyond what natural processes can handle, and unlike human sewage, which is treated with chemical and mechanical filtration, farm waste is usually raw when it is released back to the environment. To put the scale of this waste in context: one pig factory farm in Utah creates more waste than all of Salt Lake City, and there is overwhelming evidence of detrimental health effects on communities downstream of such facilities, especially in pork-heavy states like Iowa and North Carolina.

So given all these downsides, why are U.S. food producers leaning further into this practice? It’s not like it’s popular among the public: in a 2022 survey, 84% of Democrats said they would support a law in their state to ban farm animal confinement—as did 76% of Republicans. This mirrors my own observations: every post on factory farming I’ve seen go viral on X garners outrage from across the political spectrum. So this isn’t even a partisan issue.

What’s driving it are catastrophically misaligned political and financial incentives.  

America used to be a place of small, independent farms. Forty years ago, there were over 35,000 hog farms in Iowa, housing some 12 million animals across them. Today, that number lies around 25 million, but the number of farms has collapsed to just 5,000. In other words, the industry has become many orders of magnitude more concentrated. A similar pattern has occurred in the beef and chicken industries too. 

This isn’t that surprising given how most competitive industries play out over time, where the most efficient and ruthless businesses gradually consume or bankrupt smaller players. Animal agriculture is no different; any farmer who tries to optimise for the welfare of their animals and customers inevitably gets steamrolled by those who care only about efficiency. And sadly for the animals, efficiency is almost always inversely correlated to welfare.

Ideally, this is where government steps in. After all, its purpose is to protect unrepresented stakeholders like consumers, the environment, or other third parties from the worst excesses of corporate behaviour. Perversely, many federal regulations are actively making the problem worse because political favor in the U.S. can easily be bought by industry lobbies who use regulatory capture to exert control over their weaker competitors.

A particularly prescient example of this is the “EATS Act” also known as the “Save Our Bacon” and Food Security and Farm Protection Act”. Backed by Congresswoman Ashley Hinson and Senators Chuck Grassley and Roger Marshall, whose hog-farming industries in their home states of Iowa and Kansas are dominated by giant conglomerates like Tyson Foods and Chinese-owned Smithfield. The EATS Act, if it successfully passes this fall, would be an enormous win for the “Big Pork” lobby. Many states, including California and Massachusetts, voted to ban caged meat from their supermarket shelves long ago, but EATS would nullify their laws at a federal level, undoing much of the progress that has been made. Even more perversely, its supporters—including Trump’s new agriculture appointee Brooke Rollins—claim EATS “protects small family farmers,” despite it clearly favoring only the giant corporations, as small farmers rarely cage their animals. 

Another example are the “Ag-Gag” laws, which were passed in several U.S. states in the early 2010s under the guise of “protecting farms from competition.” These laws made it illegal for anyone to take photographs or videos at agricultural facilities without the owner’s consent, or to gain access to agricultural facilities under false pretenses to document the conditions on the farms. While some of these laws have been overturned, again, states like Iowa have found loopholes to maintain them.

So what can be done? The traditional answers usually resort to veganism or strict personal policies of only buying from locally sourced, trusted ranchers. And while these approaches carry some merit, in practice they will not be sufficient to unpick such a complex and systemic web of corruption and lobbying. To end factory farming will require all three levers of change: governments, corporations, and technology.

The good news is that governments can be sufficiently pressured under the right circumstances; for example, Germany recently joined the UK and eleven U.S. states by banning the use of gestation-crates in their farms, and Slovenia has just banned all forms of caged farming.

They can also subsidize better alternatives when sufficiently motivated: Denmark recently invested over $200 million into promoting alternative proteins and higher-welfare pig farming, where hogs are given space to roam outside. Ideally, these could be funded through taxes on the worst offending corporations. But an easier path could be simply redirecting some fraction of the $850 billion annual global farm subsidies away from those corporations and towards those who seek better alternatives. 

Food corporations can reinvent themselves too. Pressure campaigns from dedicated non-profits and consumer groups have successfully gained pledges from many retailers and fast food chains to transition away from caged meat and eggs. For example, McDonald’s announced that it had reached 100% cage-free eggs in Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Costco has also nearly reached a similar goal, and German supermarkets have now established a norm of labelling the welfare standards of all meat they sell.

Lasting freedom from the blight of factory farming will likely come from technology itself. A few years ago, the idea of in-ovo sexing machines that could determine male from female eggs before they hatch was a pipe dream. Today it’s now standard in France and Germany, already sparing over 100 million chicks from the grinder.

Similarly, alternative proteins like cultivated meat, which are real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of on skeletons, are slowly approaching viability. Sadly, this technology is far from a guarantee given the many regulatory capture campaigns to prevent its arrival—for example, incumbents have already successfully lobbied Florida, Texas, and Alabama to ban cultivated meat from sale despite no market for it even existing yet—but with sufficient investment and support it could offer the most omni-win path out of factory farming for meat eaters, animals, and innovators alike.

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” A world without factory farming is possible. Getting there will demand significant political will, but therein lies my hope; because in this age of political division, few issues are as uniformly despised as this. Perhaps, in the darkest of human creations, is a common enemy so abhorrent we can’t help but be united by it.

The most reputable displays of leisure were aristocratic in Veblen’s time. Veblen uses examples like hunting for sport, speaking Latin and Greek, and learning refined manners to demonstrate “good breeding.” By now, all of this is hopelessly old-fashioned. But the leisure class is far older than these aristocratic values and aesthetics, and did not cease to exist just because that ideology collapsed. Today, the leisure class has adopted the new ideology, which we can roughly call “social activism,” and performs its conspicuous leisure in accordance with these newer values and aesthetics.

The Leisure Class of Today

When we talk about “the leisure class” today, we do not mean people who spend all day watching TikTok or playing video games or listening to true crime podcasts. We are talking about people who engage in conspicuous leisure. By conspicuous, we mean that they show off their exemption from unworthy labor through accomplishments which those without leisure cannot match, for want of time or money or energy. They spend their time and effort in “honorific” pursuits which place them above the base necessity of directly producing wealth.

A meatpacker illegally working twelve-hour shifts can watch Breaking Bad when he comes home, so watching Breaking Bad is just ordinary leisure, and having opinions about Breaking Bad does not demonstrate conspicuous leisure. But only a man of means and distinction can take three-week vacations to go scuba diving in exotic locations—and upload the selfies to social media—so this becomes a mark of honor. In the language of today’s economists, what Veblen calls “conspicuous” might be phrased as “suitable for costly signaling.” Conspicuous leisure often includes mastery of subtle and exacting speech codes, and adherence to precise forms of manners, carriage, and behavior, all of which requires careful study and training within the social milieu of the reputable elites.

This is why class expression is not the same thing as wealth. Many anthropologists of the modern United States, including Paul Fussell in his masterful Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, have observed that there is a large class of wealthy businessmen who own and operate valuable companies, yet do not code as part of the upper class. This is because they make their money through base production. They own and operate farms, or car dealerships, or construction businesses, or the like. They spend their energy in the work of creating wealth—not “creating wealth” in the sense of amassing dollars and stock options and intangible claims on other people’s labor, but “creating wealth” in the sense of manipulating physical objects, the food and cars and houses that people want to acquire with their dollars at the end of all the negotiating and fundraising and politicking about how the dollars will be distributed. In popular perception, perhaps even instinctively, this work of creating tangible wealth is considered inherently base. The entire point of conspicuous leisure is to prove that one is above such concerns, so no matter how much money a physical business operator may make this way, he cannot fully become one of the rarefied gentlemen.

Of course, a gentleman of means has far more wealth than he can spend on his own leisure, so he also needs other ways to make his station visible. One of these is conspicuous consumption, the most famous concept from Veblen’s book. This is when people buy expensive objects, not mainly because they think the physical Louis Vuitton handbag is so much better than another handbag or because the Lamborghini is so much better than another car, but to display their ownership of the object to others.

Conspicuous consumption has become less important in recent generations, although it is far from dead. As industrial mass production has made physical objects cheaper and widely available, they have become a poor way to distinguish the gentleman from the throng. When fine clothes were out of reach for most people, they were an extremely important way for the wealthy to distinguish themselves, and you could tell rich from poor at a glance. In 2025, it’s possible to buy a decent ballgown on a minimum wage salary, so there is little point in wearing ballgowns. Multimillionaires might as well wear a t-shirt and sneakers. We have seen less dramatic versions of the same trend with objects like fine tableware, furniture, televisions, and even diamonds. 

Where conspicuous consumption of manufactured goods remains an effective social tactic, now it is often a matter of purchasing expensive brand names at deliberately inflated prices, rather than purchasing objects that necessarily require a great deal of labor to make, like a 19th-century ballgown. A billionaire can buy a brand-name handbag, and a grocery store clerk can buy a “counterfeit” handbag, which most people find indistinguishable.

The sharpest point in the decline of conspicuous consumption was the rise of the “counterculture” in the 1960s and especially the 1970s. This ideology eschewed material status symbols, often using Veblen’s words to denounce them as crass and spiritually polluted. Instead, they turned back to conspicuous leisure—following rock bands on tour across the United States, backpacking the “hippie trail” across southwest Asia, cultivating mystic awareness, devoting themselves to radical activism, and a dozen other means of demonstrating their remove from labor and physical production. By the 21st century, when the counterculture had been fully recuperated into the mainstream culture, marketers spoke of the value of “experiences” over “things” in order to sell conspicuous leisure to the middle class.

There is another way for a gentleman to display his wealth beyond what he can expend on his own leisure, even more important than conspicuous consumption. This is vicarious leisure, that is, maintaining others to engage in nonproductive activities which redound to the honor of the master. Historically, the most basic form of vicarious leisure was maintaining a wife to engage in reputable leisure rather than household production, but it could reach much greater scale than that. In the Dark Ages, men like Hrothgar would throw massive feasts for his followers every night in his mead-hall and give gold bracelets to his favorites. In the Middle Ages, a lord would maintain a court full of retainers and knights and astrologers and jesters. As Adam Smith tells the story in The Wealth of Nations, it was only with the late medieval rise of craft production and long-distance trade that conspicuous consumption of luxury goods could absorb the money that had once gone to the vicarious leisure of maintaining a court.

By the time Veblen published in 1899, the middle class had come to the fore, so the leisure class had grown to include many people of moderate wealth. At that point, he claims the main form of conspicuous leisure was employing household servants to maintain standards of exacting cleanliness far beyond the point required by hygiene and good health, “not so much for the individual behoof of the head of the household as for the reputability of the household taken as a corporate unit.”

We see a glimpse of this culture in the novel Peter Pan, written around the same time as The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the magical world of the story, the Darling family’s nanny is a dog, because they cannot afford to pay a human servant, to the mortification of the patriarch. “No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the neighbours talked. He had his position in the city to consider.” In his eyes, a nanny who merely takes excellent care of the children is inadequate if she does not also conspicuously demonstrate his household’s reputability—which is to say its wealth.

Household servants have since fallen out of favor, partly because the idea of the household as a “corporate unit” does not fit with today’s ideology, but largely because industrial mass production of household appliances—especially the washing machine—has made it so anyone can keep a household to high standards, not just the wealthy. As household servants hauling wood have been replaced by gas ovens and electric heaters activated at the press of a button, the leisure class redirected this money.

The most obvious of the new forms of conspicuous leisure is the college degree, which is long since mandatory as a mark of reputability. Even if the actual coursework has become a sick joke, and perfect grades no longer indicate any special skill or intelligence, a degree still represents four years of foregone earnings in an expensive environment. In fact, as college courses have become ever more useless, this arguably makes college a better mode of conspicuous leisure, for much the same reason that dog breeders now focus on breeding sickly show dogs rather than breeding productive working dogs as they once did.

In addition, today’s Mr. Darlings frequently use international travel as a mode of conspicuous leisure to distinguish themselves from the lower class. A trip to Berlin, for an American, or a trip to New York, for a German, serves as a mark of reputability and sophistication. Those who have never left their home country often feel that this makes them unworthy in comparison. The middle class goes to great pains to display their travel on social media or find excuses to mention it in conversation. More than once, on a first date, I have been explicitly asked, “Do you travel?” in the tones that a Jane Austen character might use to inquire about a suitor’s income.

Activism Cements the Aristocracy’s Position

According to Veblen, the inherently honorific vocations which the leisure class naturally pursues are “government, war, sports, and devout observances.” Today’s elite ideology does not attach much honor to war or sports, unlike the aristocratic ideology of Veblen’s day. So how does today’s leisure class use its wealth to pursue government and devout observances?

Today, the ideology that awards honor to leisure class elites is social activism. The leisure class can use this ideology to justify their position in society and to legitimize their pursuit of naturally honorific vocations. As a result, the social activist ideology has dominated moral discourse, intellectual institutions, and mass media for generations.

A good description of the psychology at play was written by one of its major practitioners. In 1997, the business magnate Michael Bloomberg coauthored an autobiography containing an unusually frank discussion of the motivations for his philanthropy. Bloomberg later entered politics and, in 2019, published a second edition of his autobiography with much of this material removed. Bloomberg was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party at the time he first published the book. Soon after, he switched to the Republican Party as part of a successful campaign to become mayor of New York City, then switched to Independent for his third term as mayor, and later returned to the Democrats in an unsuccessful campaign to become President of the United States. According to Bloomberg, emphasis added:

 “The reality of great wealth is that you can’t spend it and you can’t take it with you. All you can do is give it to other individuals (with large gift or inheritance taxes to pay), or give it to philanthropic organizations (usually with large income tax credits to receive). The issues left to your discretion are only to whom, how much, and when to give. … The real financial legacy I’m leaving my kids is much more powerful. They will be the key trustees of our family’s foundation and, as such, will possess great influence. For the rest of their lives, along with their mother and a handful of my closest friends, they’ll distribute large grants to worthy institutions and creative individuals needing support. In their hands will be the ability to channel cultural development, further scientific and medical research, shape the political process, mold our youth, and support their religious organizations. … What greater satisfaction could we possibly get than watching ourselves do great things for humanity? Not only great things, but things we, not someone else, think should be done.”

Philanthropically-funded activist groups—Bloomberg alone has given $21 billion to various nonprofits—have been behind most of the major changes in governance in living memory. Megadonors like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, or MacKenzie Scott Bezos select which causes to push and which to pass over, and society is reshaped towards the ideologies and visions that get funded. The activist’s most important role is in laying the moral and intellectual foundations for transforming society, but they also groom leadership cadres to take political office; prosecute lawsuits to alter and enforce the practices of governing bureaucracies; and directly write laws which are passed verbatim by allied legislators. Because activists govern, in the most literal sense, activism is inherently honorable.

And while the comparison between activist ideology and religion is sometimes taken too far, it is inarguable that much of the psychological need for devout observances is now channeled through activist rites like parades, public murals and monuments, and the canonization of saints, while endowments to academia serve the same psychological purpose as the endowments of monasteries seen in medieval Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. This is another source of honor. As a result, activism is an ideal method for people like Bloomberg to display their wealth through vicarious leisure, maintaining other people to engage in leisure, which makes the maintainer more honorable. He writes:

“Every year, my father received a publication listing contributors to his favorite charity. During dinner, he would look down each page of the book for familiar names and remark on the size gift made by people he knew, or the complete absence of other names from the list. … Philanthropy dominates the social lives of the wealthy in big U.S. cities. … The style section of our city newspapers chronicles which celebrities attend which philanthropic dinners each night; the most celebrated are honorees there, partially for their past achievements, but also for their current fund-raising abilities. Executives and socialites solicit each other for their favorite organizations. They attend events where they bestow small tokens of appreciation on one another after suitably flattering speeches. Fun evenings for fine causes.”

The most honor attaches to the megadonors who maintain the activists in their tens of thousands and can direct them to new causes as they will. But just as honor once attached to an individual knight in the household of a great lord, so honor now attaches to an individual activist at a Bloomberg-funded NGO. Some of the leisure class are very well paid for their activism, but many more happily take low salaries and maintain their station with an inheritance or through a high-income spouse. Others make do without. Veblen writes:

“Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation.”

Of course, this is a familiar character to us today. As college degrees are printed by the truckload, Veblen’s “spurious leisure class” has become the subject of a great deal of commentary, now called the “downwardly mobile” or “overproduced elites.” Reams have been written about how their economic position draws them to radical activism, especially the populist brand of radical activism championed by organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. Most of these people—admittedly not all—would be able to make more money if they learned to code or went to trade school or some such career, but they prefer to be paid in honor rather than money. While some critics try to paint this preference as “economically irrational,” there is little basis for this critique. De gustibus non est disputandum.

None of this means that the new leisure class is insincere or cynical. The leisure class of 1899 mostly believed in its aristocratic ideology. The leisure class today are generally earnest believers in the activist ideology they preach too. Whatever ideology the leisure class someday finds useful to adopt after the activist ideology eventually fades away, our descendants will believe it with their whole hearts.

The old aristocratic ideology, long fraying, ultimately collapsed in World War I as its proponents finally lost faith in their vision of the world. It took decades for the activist ideology to cohere into the form we recognize today and become the most reputable vehicle for vicarious leisure. Megadonors like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Ford had pioneered these new methods of vicarious leisure. One major reason the activist ideology was able to fill the void is that its proponents did the best job of building out a full playbook of how to engage in honorific leisure, from the billionaire philanthropist honored by the vicarious leisure of the nonprofits they maintain and fêted at galas and in newspapers, to the conspicuous leisure of the heiress whose modest trust fund enables her to take a low-paying job for a cause she believes in, all the way to the spurious leisure class living in hip flophouses while they scrabble for the cause. 

Future ideologies will no doubt provide scalable playbooks for these roles as well. It remains to be seen whether the current activist ideology will succumb to its current troubles and dissolve as the last of the Baby Boomers propping it up pass away, or whether their heirs will adapt it into a new form functional enough to endure for generations more, but no ideology lasts forever. Just as the seed that eventually grew into the activist ideology’s funding networks was formed by megadonors like Vanderbilt and Carnegie in the last decades of the aristocratic ideology’s heyday, alternative funding networks formed in the coming decade may also prove to be world-historically significant.