The Post-Information Era

The defining feature of the modern era is the general systematization of everything. Mass Production, standardized medicine, packaged food, various digital systems. The failures of modernity have resulted in world wars, as over-systematized governments have failed to co-exist.

Since the "Modern Era", if we go by Civilization game eras, we have entered the Atomic Era and then the information era. However "information era" feels like an appropriate description of 2010, but it does not feel like an appropriate description of 2020. If we simply go by the sequential titles, the era we have began this year should be rightfully called the "The Post-Information" era, where most of what we see that used to called 'information' is mis-information.

The Post-Modern, Post-Information world is also defined by systems, just like the modern world, however it is also defined by a legitimate push back against these systems. Now, anti-systemic push back is nothing new, but in previous times the demands of war, economics and political legibility have pushed away Luddites in favor of mass production, centralized banking, mass transit, medical systematization.

However, what has happened in all systems today is that the preservation of the system itself has taken precedence over the achievement of the goals that it was originally designed for. This is once again not new information, and has been happening in bureaucracies ever since they existed. However, this current manifestation of this problem has been so total and pervasive that the idea that *any* system actually serves it's purpose is the exception, not the rule.

Moreover, the achievement of the preservation of systems outside of their goals have been accomplished through more and more believable and pervasive propaganda emanating from every corner of information channels. That's not to say that "nothing works," sometimes due to particular constraints, the systems have to help people as they should. However knowing when that happens requires unusual discernment.

We live in the world where many things claim to be reliable, yet nothing actually is reliable.

Un-reliability of systems has many facets.

1. The least common situation, yet the one that springs to mind the most is the unreliability of simply stopping working. If a major web site has an outage, that is an example of something just not working at all.

2. Another common situation present in non-tech circles is that the system kind of works if one pushes the right buttons, but the usability is crap. Think fighting with medical insurance on "is this covered or not".

3. The most common problem of systems is that it begins to over-optimize on a metric that has become de-coupled from reality. All of social media is an egregious example. Medicine is frequently suspect as well.

There are many examples of this. Housing used to be a decent investment. There were of course problems of housing that were problems "within the system of investment". Such problems were: not understanding supply and demand, over-valuing future growth, becoming over-leveraged, etc.

However, in addition to those problems, house investment now also has an "outside of the system problem" that you have a high chance of not being able to enforce your actual property rights. Your renters might stop paying as a result of COVID, a political group might occupy your house, you simply might not be able to get through the hoops of eviction even without the pandemic or the fear of these things simply tanks your property value.

There exists somewhere "out there" the idea that the foundation of capital is property rights in so far as creating an ability for people to actually save money and invest instead of doing wasteful spending. It might "in theory" be good for the nation that home and hotel owners don't have massive fears of unanswered property theft and destruction. However nobody's job it is to really care about the preservation of this right. So eventually the system of "property" will fail and it's not a question of if but when. It is certainly not a great idea to bank on housing remaining in one's possession in politically contentious areas like large west coast cities.

Another example is medical "science". A doctor tried to prescribe me statins for "high cholesterol". I stopped going to the doctor. Yes, it's a highly prescribed drug. Yes, in all likelihood it does a lot more hard than good. Again, "in theory" this fact would be studied carefully and people who are concerned about health of the nation would evaluate the efficacy of drugs and roll back problematic advice. People "fucking loving science" believe that's how "science" works. However, as the pandemic shows, there is no real way for even well-meaning doctors to get their ideas into the meme-stream without hard censorship. Now, not every single things doctors do is negative, but the strong mistrust is certainly justified.

Another example is "social" media. In a pandemic lockdown, it is of course vital to have some interaction and having online interaction can be a good substitute for offline. However this comes at a cost of being sucked in to "doomscrolling" as well as needing to abide by the orwellian "community standards," which means important questions, such as "can i get information from my friend about whether they trust this system" cannot be discussed.

The list goes on.

There are several responses that one can undertake when faced with deep universal un-reliability of all systems around themselves.

a) The second worst response is to simply ignore all unreliability and to treat all systems, or at least all "official" systems as working the way they were supposed to. This used to be known as "normality," however it is certainly not the response of most people. This seems at first glance the least dangerous socially, but it isn't. The mental contradictions of needing to keep track of the ever-changing propaganda will tear one's mind apart. One could of course try to course correct the ever-creeping insanity with medicine, therapy and expensive vacations, but the assumption of "total normality" is barely affordable at very high salaries.

b) What the most common response is likely reverting to tribal dynamics and trying to segregate systems into "our" and "theirs". Given how politics has become to dominate life in the US, it's not hard to imagine the different designations people attribute to systems. College is "left" and trade school is "right", for example. As of this writing "the Constitution" as a systematic document is "right," but "courts" as a system are "leftish". I say as of this writing because these kinds of designations change quite rapidly at times. A series of tweets or posts can move a particular company from one to another and there is a number of systems that are "unaffiliated." Yet, applying tribal dynamics to systems is a somewhat sub-optimal guide to life, yet I suspect this produces a few "archtypes" of life that can try to be somewhat self consistent, if not readily parodied in meme form.

c) System replacement is a strategy which generally views "new is better than old" and we can build it! Techno-optimism of all flavors is the name of the game here. Crypto is a good example of outsourcing what is viewed as "unreliable" human institutions into more "reliable" algorithms. Of course, a lot of human institutions are not unreliable in a sense of "not working because they have broken moving pieces, rather they are unreliable because the incentives are quite wrong." In that sense, the algorithms of either crypto or AI are seen as just a fresh slate of starting from scratch. However those systems of course need to actually be useful and be based on a fairly deep understanding of reality. This is, of course, lacking because even the people building these systems have still fundamentally bought into the wrong cultural assumption of money, social life, etc.

Creating new systems or, as they say, "disrupting" existing ones is both easy and hard. Easy in a sense that it is easy to imagine something reliable and good, but hard in that one needs to build on top of "something" usually and that something is frequently unreliable in itself.

This is, of course a viable option provided that one takes great care to not let the new system be taken over by the it's operators for the sake it's own propagation just like everything else has done. Pure AI still has this problem, which is not fully solved theoretically.

d) Hard exit is the strategy of having or executing a backup plan of leaving the majority of systemic life in order to create an environment one can seem to control or is somehow marginally more sane. This includes moving to another country, starting a farm in the middle of nowhere. Ambitious projects of this type can combine with system replacement and create ideas like seasteading and startup societies. The problem with hard exit is the general difficulty of re-creating much of the goodness of industrial civilization elsewhere.

Doomsday prepping is a form of preparing for the eventual collapse of all systems and not relying on any of it ever working. The question of 'how fragile the whole thing is" is interesting and we could experience a hard collapse soon.

e) Outsourcing trust is not really a complete idea of how to deal with unreliable systems, but rather a common strategy of people picking a number of media personalities and online thinkers to guide them through what is true and what isn't. This, of course, begs the question of how to decide how is trustworthy and for what particular subject areas.

f) Religion or it's substitutes are, of course, a very traditional way of organizing one's life. However, the kind of religions we have today still bear the exact same mark of an "unreliable" system, where the original teachings gets left out to make room for something more popular. Religion is, of course, an important provider of community in one's life and likely a positive influence. Personally, I have been fond of a number of ideas from Buddhism and vipassana retreat practice. However there are of course a lot of issues with over-modernization of religion. One would of course expect this a lot in the post-modern world, as even the theoretical understanding of *what* religion was trying to achieve has been lost.

g) The worst response is variants on a ("soft exit") where people use some sort of drugs to quell the pain of feeling like "the system" or "society" doesn't love them. In reality, for most people this feeling is somewhat justified in that the "systems" have not been optimized for human life, even if it is unjustified in that individuals do still care about each other.

So given the situation two main question arise: how long will this last in the west until it is either collapses or is replaced and what is the best strategy for surviving in this situation?

The best strategy is a tough question, since there is generally an anti-inductive problem. After all, if everyone was able to correctly resist overfit and uncaring systems or to have some sort of "fully general strategy" to evaluate information, we would not be in this situation.

The question of what to do and how to "be" is something I am still figuring out and I am also figuring out how to write about it in a way that is actually helpful. However a couple things are clear: we are most definitely entering a type of environment and a new reality that demands a more careful understanding of life and the flow of "information."