Avoiding Scylla and Charybdis

Albert Henry Payne, The Strait of Messina. Wikimedia Commons

In recent essays I’ve been making an affirmative case for an “economic independence” movement — that is, a concerted effort to empower families and communities to be less dependent on market and state provision. I’ve argued that a move toward greater independence would help to promote social inclusion, that it has important advantages over other proposals for achieving a more inclusive society, and that it could also play an important role in spurring dynamism and innovation.

Here I’ll shift my perspective: instead of looking at the upsides that an economic independence movement could make possible, I’ll look at the downsides it could help us to avoid. The downsides I have in mind mark the two poles of failure in social organization: tyranny on the one hand, and chaos on the other.

Both loom as serious risks as we make our way through this crisis-plagued century. The digitization of life in a world where cameras are now ubiquitous means that our comings and goings, our preferences and aversions, what we do and whom we do it with are now potentially much more “legible” to central authorities. As legibility is generally a prerequisite for control, the upshot is that the government’s capacity to manipulate and coerce us is growing by leaps and bounds; the temptation to exercise that capacity will be ever-present. Meanwhile, we’ve just emerged from a global pandemic that has killed 20 million people, war is raging in Europe with a nontrivial possibility of nuclear escalation, and virtually every day brings stunning new developments in artificial intelligence along with handwringing about the associated existential risk. Oh, and climate change is serving up a steady drumbeat of heat waves and extreme weather events — with worse almost certainly to come. Under these circumstances, it’s simply obtuse to deny the possibility that real catastrophe could strike sometime in the coming decades — and with it huge death tolls, economic devastation, and social breakdowns.

A successful economic independence movement could help to defuse both of these threats. A more decentralized society with large cohorts of people enjoying substantial local self-sufficiency is simultaneously less vulnerable to despotic interference and chaos-inducing shocks. Pockets of local independence within larger structures of large-scale interdependence can serve to make the whole hybrid combination more resilient and stable.

If you’re old enough to remember the PC revolution and the dawn of the internet, you’ll recall the widespread belief that widely distributed computing power was inherently anti-authoritarian. Flash back to the “1984” ad for Macintosh, or John Perry Barlow’s grandiose “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

Alas, we forgot that there is no such thing as a tool that can be used only for doing good. When any powerful new tool is created, the ends to which that power will be deployed depend on the intentions of the user. And while indeed the early days of the internet saw “an army of Davids” rise up to challenge the world’s established Goliaths, eventually some of the Goliaths figured out how to turn the tables.

China now leads the way in employing information technology to repress dissent and coerce conformity. The government has made extensive use of surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, location tracking, and monitoring of cell phone usage to crack down on dissent in Xinjiang and Hong Kong; during the three years of its “zero covid” policy, it employed such techniques on a national scale to maintain compliance with its often draconian restrictions on movement. The extreme vulnerability of citizens to government coercion when so much of life occurs online was made apparent during covid, when protesters hung banners from a Beijing bridge denouncing Chinese leader Xi Jinping and people started sharing photographs of the banners on social media. Just hours later, many people who’d shared images discovered that their WeChat accounts — for an extremely popular app used for messaging, social media, and making payments — had been suspended. Deprived of their usual method of keeping in touch with each other as well as buying food, calling a taxi, or getting a train ticket, some subject to the sanction complained that it amounted to “digital death.” China also uses public shaming to discourage disapproved behavior, putting images of jaywalkers or people out shopping in their pajamas on public digital billboards.

But it’s not just authoritarian governments that are rushing to exploit the possibilities of digital technology for social control. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States dramatically ramped up mass surveillance programs both domestically and internationally. CCTV surveillance cameras are going up in cities all over the world: London now trails only two Chinese cities for the dubious distinction of most surveillance cameras per capita. Of course these technologies have legitimate uses for protecting the citizenry from crime and terrorism, but the possibilities for abuse are obvious.

And things are only going to get creepier. Noninvasive brain reading technology is now coming online, allowing observers to scan electrical activity in the brain and determine if you’re tired or upset, or even read the words you’re thinking and see the images you’re picturing. The Chinese government is apparently already putting such technology to use, monitoring workers in factories, the military, and trains for fatigue and stress – and checking the loyalty of Communist Party members by gauging their reaction to party propaganda. China may well be exaggerating its current capabilities, but it’s virtually inevitable that those capabilities will continue to improve.

In an especially unhappy convergence, governments’ ability to monitor and control us is growing at the same time that developments within the capitalist system are making people increasingly dependent on government for their material welfare. As I’ve discussed repeatedly on this blog, the declining importance of ordinary workers’ contributions under postindustrial, information-age capitalism has been the critical factor in opening up a new class divide along educational lines. This decline in ordinary workers’ relative contributions has now translated into large disparities in relative income and wealth, not to mention status and overall wellbeing. It is possible that some technological deus ex machina — maybe generative AI — can reverse what are now decades-long trends, empowering ordinary workers to account for a bigger share of the economic pie and claim a bigger share for themselves as employers bid up their wages. It is possible, as I say, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s my expectation that huge differences in relative productivity, and therefore relative market rewards, will be a defining feature of the capitalist system for the foreseeable future. Which means that, for the capitalist system to narrow the class divide and achieve a more inclusive society, redistribution on a significantly expanded scale will be necessary. I’ve discussed various options along those lines — guaranteed jobs, wage subsidies, a universal basic income — but their common denominator is to increase the extent to which most people’s material circumstances depend on government policy.

The way I see it, this convergence of an increasingly powerful state and an increasingly dependent populace poses a serious threat to humanity’s prospects for freedom and wellbeing. In my own understanding of freedom, what it entails, and how to preserve it, I’ve grown more and more attracted to the classical republican conception of freedom as non-domination. In one of a series of essays on republicanism that I commissioned for the Niskanen Center, political philosopher Robert Taylor describes non-domination as “immunity from arbitrary power, which can be distinguished from the weaker, liberal commitment to freedom as mere non-interference. A slave, for example, may not be interfered with by a benevolent master, but he is still vulnerable to such interference and is therefore unfree in the republican sense.”

In that essay series, both Taylor and political philosopher Matt Zwolinski make republican arguments for a universal basic income, claiming that a UBI would reduce domination in the workplace by giving workers the resources to hold out for better job offers. That’s true as far as it goes, and that may be as far as it goes in a stable liberal democracy, but the argument ignores the fact that increased independence from the labor market is being purchased at the cost of increased dependence on the government. Again, if we have confidence that robust protections of individual liberty are in place, we may be justified in seeing government as our powerful and well-resourced servant. But shake that confidence even a little, and a UBI changes government into a “benevolent master” of all who rely on it. Perhaps it is not interfering with our freedoms today, but we remain vulnerable to such interference and that makes us unfree.

I remain reasonably confident that the United States will succeed in maintaining liberal democratic institutions even in the face of the current populist authoritarian challenge. But I am no longer especially confident about the triumph of liberal democracy globally. At present, more than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries designated as either “partially free” or “unfree.” I hope to live to see those numbers improve, but I have come to regard authoritarianism as a perennial menace that we are unlikely to ever outgrow completely. Accordingly, any moves to dramatically increase people’s economic dependence on the central government strike me as putting humanity’s overall prospects for widespread flourishing at significant risk.

A successful economic independence movement, by contrast, offers a path to a more inclusive society in a way that reduces exposure to domination from all sources. Greater self-sufficiency at the household and local levels creates a measure of freedom from the system as a whole — that is, from both the market and the state. And I would argue that, for any society with a sizeable percentage of the population enjoying such material independence, the prospects for maintaining freedom for everyone in that society would be brightened considerably. Independent sources of income and wealth translate into independent social power, and therefore political power with which to check the expansion of government control.

In trying to envision the next level of social development, surely a fundamental element of “living wisely and agreeably and well” is designing social institutions that minimize vulnerabilities to terrible outcomes. In addition to avoiding conditions that create openings for an intrusive and suffocating despotism, we must also strive to ensure that our social institutions are resilient in the face of external shocks. We need institutions that can simultaneously fend off tendencies toward excess centralized control and susceptibility to acute breakdowns of order.

As to the latter, we’ve got plenty to worry about. Holden Karnofsky, the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell, has argued that the 21st century may well be the most important century in the history of humanity. His case rests on the assumption that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner: if we manage that transition well, we could be on our way to unimaginable wealth and the spread of humanity throughout the cosmos; but if we bungle things badly enough, the rise of AGI could spell the extinction of our species.

One needn’t buy into the philosophical premises underlying “longtermism,” or believe that the AGI millennium/apocalypse is imminent, to see that the stakes of the coming decades are unnervingly high. As I’ve discussed several times on this blog, we face a number of existential or at least civilizational risks apart from artificial intelligence: severe disruptions caused by worse-than-expected climate change, nuclear war, genetically engineered bioweapons, asteroid strikes, coronal mass ejections from the Sun that cause global blackouts, supervolcanoes. Some of these risks are under human control, some are not, but what is indisputably under our control is whether we take steps to mitigate our exposure to them.

The master strategy for making any system more resilient is the one-two punch of decentralization and redundancy. All large-scale complex systems are vulnerable to collapse; maintaining such systems is highly energy-intensive, so reversion to a simpler, lower-energy state is always an implicit possibility. But what really magnifies that vulnerability is the existence of single points of failure: elements within the system whose failure will cause the entire system to stop working. Just as, all things being equal, low, squat buildings hold up better in earthquakes than slender towers, smaller-scale social structures are likewise more durable. And a social system with lots of redundant elements can more easily route around damage and keep functioning.

These basic principles help to explain the remarkable resilience of market economies. Consider the massive disruptions to global and domestic supply lines caused by the covid pandemic: yes, there were price spikes, and temporary shortages of toilet paper and other items, but widely distributed adaptation — switching suppliers, retooling factories — kept the economy functioning to a remarkable degree. Or look at how Russia’s cutoff of gas supplies to Europe following its invasion of Ukraine failed to be the economic superweapon that Russia imagined it would be: rapid price hikes simultaneously restrained consumption and encouraged the shift to new sources of supply. There were difficulties, yes, but the lights stayed on.

All this granted, those existential/civilizational risks I’ve mentioned could overwhelm even capitalism’s enormous capacity for adaptation — at least to the extent that global and national divisions of labor in key areas break down for considerable stretches of time. As interdependent as we have become under globalized capitalism, the reversion to shorter supply lines and simpler divisions of labor could mean death tolls in the billions.

Under those dire circumstances, the scale of the loss could cause irreparable harm. If Taiwan’s semiconductor industry were wiped out, would we retain the engineering competence to replace what had been lost? If national electrical grids were knocked out for months, or years, would we ever figure out how to turn the lights back on?

The present configuration of the global division of labor heightens the risk that single points of failure could trigger nationwide or global breakdowns. Economic incentives drive firms and governments to seek out short-term efficiencies from interdependence — at the possible cost of heightened fragility in the event of a crisis. But imagine a global economic independence movement that has been underway for decades: think of the immense, potentially civilization-rescuing value in having a large number of largely self-sufficient communities with advanced technological capabilities and know-how, widely distributed around the planet, with many located far from major population centers. The added decentralization and redundancy created by the proliferation of pioneer communities could be decisive in helping humanity to recover from otherwise debilitating shocks.  

In the wake of covid and a possible new Cold War with China, we are now in the process of reevaluating the tradeoffs between short-term efficiency and long-term resilience. Contemplation of even graver risks — tyranny on the one hand, chaos on the other — should motivate us to think even more deeply about those tradeoffs. To build a truly progressive society, we don’t just need institutions that facilitate human flourishing. We need institutions that are durable — and that put backstops in place to guard against regression. I fear that our present global monoculture system, with highly atomized populations that are heavily dependent on powerful states, is worrisomely vulnerable to both tyranny and collapse. This system, and the worldwide division of labor it coordinates and regulates, remains vitally important to human welfare, and it’s foolish to imagine that we can do without it for the foreseeable future. But we can alleviate some of the burdens that the system now carries, and create an independent counterweight to centralized authority, by balancing the system with counter-institutions that promote decentralization and redundancy. A successful economic independence movement would not only put us on the road to social progress; it would help to ensure that the road stays open and passable.